Subject: Re: Three Questions
From: Eric Simpson (JamzSimp@AOL.COM)
Date: Tue Jun 08 1999 - 14:12:17 EDT
In a message dated 6/8/99 8:22:10 AM Pacific Daylight Time, nikkibar@wild.net
writes:
> One might ask the fair question whether it is proper to do what Gardner
> did in savaging the book as a result of the fairly gentle though
> un-sunny dialogue repartee that Walker started. I recall that Walker had
> thought the Sunlight Dialogues was not up to the standard set by JG in
> his earlier work and all of us in the book group who had read GRENDEL
> and had a fly at SD felt very much the same. In taking cannons to T2ndC
> as Gardner did, we were all pretty shocked at the time -- particularly
> since he did it in the New York Times Book Section and without telling
> why. It was rather as though there had been a tennis game going on which
> had suddenly been resolved with a sten gun broadside. These are not
> Wimbleton rules in my view.
>
> Nikki
I'm not convinced that Gardner's harsh remarks regarding Lancelot were
entirely motivated as a reaction to Percy's criticisms of Dialogues. Looking
at the body of JG's reviews that are published in "On Writer's and Writing",
if the Lancelot review was the exception, there would be a better case for
this conjecture. In my opinion, JG's review of Lancelot may be a bit harsher
than other reviews ("stop sniveling and go for answers or else shut up"), but
his rhetoric doesn't really change much as he strongly criticizes others as
well, sometimes for the same sorts of reasons. His range of targets sweep
from aesthetic arch-enemies (like Knowles and Barth) to luminaries such as
Styron , Updike, Bellow... Melville, whom he loves, is sometimes
"cartoonish". William Gass, whom he often lauds and celebrates, at one point
is "a snore". In the case of Percy, I doubt it was personal, or at least not
as personal as we might imagine. All of which merely begs the question, I
guess. Gardner found Percy's resolution morally vacuous, others think the
novel failed for being too didactic. Is it all a matter of perspective?
Eric Simpson
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Thu Jan 11 2001 - 12:52:12 EST