Some literary heroes, starting with Christopher Isherwood

Gore Vidal has amusing bits in his long consideration; he prefers the diaries to the fiction.

I don't have "heroes," per se, but Wallace Stevens and James Merrill had lives which honored their verse.

Here is another bit he writes that, I think, demonstrates his precision and acuity with regard to human subjects:

Pat was still dark eyed and handsome, in a mincing way,
despite his large middle-aged stomach. He moved with the assured, skipping freedom of an artless little girl. He sold books, giving all the proceeds to charity, and was a religious counselor at UCLA, advising students on their problems. One of his recent cases was a homosexual who had become a chronic masturbator. Pat told the boy, "Imagine yourself doing it to your best friend." This didn't work. The boy masturbated more frantically than ever. "Tonight, said Pat, "I want you to try something else. Try doing it with Jesus Christ." The boy nearly fainted with horror: "Jesus Christ?!" "Yes," Pat told him, "go ahead." Next day the boy came back and reported "Last night I did––what you said. I fell asleep in his arms."

Pat was the kind of character who would send the average novelist into paroxysms of scorn and hate at this hypocritical, sublimated satyr, whose jaws dripped with honey. But if you were a little less queasy, and could dig down through layers of spiritual marshmallow, you would find someone very different––quite austere, genuinely kind, fearless and deeply understanding. Pat was probably one of the very few Quakers woh really had spiritual discernment coupled with absolutely disinterested goodness. He was still capable of an entirely unselfish heroic act.

some poets: early-middle vintage robert frost, wallace stephens, w.h. auden, and heaney.

it sometimes bothers me that my favorite writers tend to be of a very specific type: precocious talents, realist-modernist with tendencies toward mystical pan-asian philosophy, frequently homosexual, travel-oriented, with deeply-held pacifist principles writing in times of war

I'm attracted to writers whose polite distance from the world often masks generosity of all kinds.

and why does this bother you?

forester, coward, isherwood, auden, delaney, waugh (yeah, i know this is a controversial one), delaney ... is a good list, but it is a little limited, i think?

pre-tuburculoid katherine mansfield was cute?

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~pell/im/katherine.gif

<I>with deeply-held pacifist principles writing in times of war</I>

How many years did you go to Quaker school? was it just the four? ;)

bah. bbcode.

in any event, literary heroes? All pretty obvious: Dick, McCarthy, Joyce, Calvino, Carer, Brautigan.

CarVer, that ought to be.

i was at quaker school for seven years, but my dad is a minister and sorta converted us to quakerism a few years before that

I was totally in the dark about the film adaptation of A Single Man.

Anyway, got Down There on a Visit and Christopher and His Kind. Any remarks?

I just read A Single Man (my username is a definition from it of "the vitality of middle age"). -- I guess Goodbye to Berlin next.

So much of 'A Single Man' (which I loved) seems to be going on in the main character's head--not expecting this to be satisfactorily filmed, tbh

Yes, the "externalizing" is the worst thing about the film -- George is planning to commit suicide at the end of the day, that's Tom Ford's "solution." Colin Firth is good tho.

I haven't read either of these for 20 years approximately, but for what's it worth:

The last of the four sections of Down There on a Visit, which includes a portrait of Gerald Heard as Augustus Parr, is an excellent sustained piece of writing.

I didn't like the flat non-descriptive writing style of Christopher and His Kind.

My one true hero is less so for his writings( which I ain't read, anyway) than for his action in getting Ulysses published and distributed in the U.S.A.
Bennett Cerf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennett_Cerf

*I prefer to know nothing about the writers I like to read. I think that Thomas Pynchon has taken the proper, reclusive route.

I finished Down There on a Visit a few days ago: the last third, in which he takes the piss out of meditation and his affection for an addled lover without getting snarky, is totally moving

Rent Chris and Don , a pretty decent documentary on Isherwood and Don Bachardy's relationsihp. Bachardy became an excellent portraitist.