Missing Modernists

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2775

Try this recent thread for Bellow: Saul Bellow RIP

Malcolm Lowry is hard work. Under the Volcano is the best, but it's rather depressing and all about being drunk in Mexico (which Lowry was for a long time).

i don't get this part of your post, ann. nightwood came out in 1936. i think she started writing it in 1931. eliot's famous introduction to nightwood sure is glowing, i don't know why i never feel like picking it up and reading it.

In my case it was the suspicion that if a book got that much of a puff from one of the most celebrated and anthologised critics of the century, and yet all but disappeared into obscurity within a generation, the likeliest explanation was that it wasn't much good.

Barnes is poor, I think.

Bellow and Roth are not modernists save in a very, maybe excessively, expanded sense.

Dos Passos's Manhattan book is kind of good as I have elsewhere said.

Of the two more contemporary writers, I feel much more unambiguous about Roth than Bellow. An American Pastoral is particularly good, my favourite novel written in the last 10 years.

Her earlier stories (just released by Sun and Moon) are easier, though more slight, but they have a sort of mid-tempo, easygoing lyricism. She also write the Ladies Almanack (?) which appears to be written in middle english.

> In my case it was the suspicion that if a book got that much of a
> puff from one of the most celebrated and anthologised critics of the > century, and yet all but disappeared into obscurity within a
> generation, the likeliest explanation was that it wasn't much good.

Well her obscurity probably has to do with her not having written much else (and not done much in the way of PR) and because Nightwood is slow and difficult. Maybe other "hard" modernists produced large bodies of work, first wrote in more accessible styles (James, Joyce), wrote in genres where difficulties were expected, were great self-publicists (Eliot, Pound), or had an industry behind them. There's an essay by Edmund White where he explains Djuna Barnes's obscurity by saying that early 20th century writing shifted away from Barnes's Jamesian style and towards the silly, anti-lyricism of Hemingway.

Also, this happens to a lot of good writers: Joyce and Dylan Thomas thought Flann O'Brien was one of the best writers of his generation (Thomas though Barnes was one of the top 3 women writers of hers!), but he's pretty obscure--a commercial failure.

Has anyone read the version of Nightwood published by Dalkey? It's a 'restored' version:

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show/197

If so, how does it compare with the version published by faber.

Haven't read it but planning to get a copy.

I hope for all our sakes it's better than the Faber edition. Maybe with some different words, in a different order?

I've not read Nightwood although its the kind of thing I think I'd like.

Wow, that's an ugly hack job of a cover.

um, i thought the ending to the good soldier was way too melodramatic and it marred the whole book for me...i did unwittingly SPOIL it for myself though

That cover might be a tad obvious but it didn't strike as terrible.