Welcome To Iconocast |
How to add a URL link from your web site to the Iconocast web sites |
|
|
|
|
Kurt Vonnegut, who died a year ago at 84, once wrote, "I trust my writing most and others seem to trust it most when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am."
William Styron, who died in 2006 at 81, was influenced by Indianapolis in a different way. In 1951, he sold his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, a Southern Gothic exploration of a suicide, to an Indianapolis publisher. Executives were uneasy with a few "dirty words, as they were then called," Styron later wrote, "and several erotic situations that by present-day standards would seem amusingly tame." Styron's New York editor relayed the suggestions by telegram: "Indianapolis will accept big boobs but will you still revise bit about the open fly." In an essay, "I'll Have to Ask Indianapolis…," Styron says he "mostly managed to knuckle under for Indianapolis without complaint." Vonnegut and Styron both struggled with depression but had little else in common other than being rare blends of commercial and critical success. Coincidentally this month, posthumous collections of their work serve as reminders of their enduring talents. Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect is drenched in irony and satire. The 12 previously unpublished short stories and essays mostly are about the senselessness of war, some more so than others. Much of it, like Vonnegut's 1969 best seller, Slaughterhouse Five, is inspired by his experiences as a POW who survived the "blasphemous" Allied destruction of Dresden in 1945. One glaring omission is the failure to note when the pieces were written, but lovely artistic touches are Vonnegut's sketches and hand-written notes. His son, Mark Vonnegut, a pediatrician and writer, contributes an introduction his dad would be proud of. The most powerful piece is a simple, three-page, typed letter Pvt. Vonnegut sent to his parents in Indianapolis in 1945. The letter announces he no longer is "missing in action" and foreshadows what he was to write. He explains that U.S. and British bombers killed 250,000 people in one day and destroyed Dresden. "But not me." Styron's Havanas in Camelot collects 14 previously published essays. In contrast to Vonnegut, it's more stylish, less raw. The essays should delight fans of Styron's best novel, Sophie's Choice (1979), or his elegant and revealing memoir of depression, Darkness Visible (1990). He reminisces about New York in the 1940s, Paris in the '50s and his friend James Baldwin, the grandson of slaves, who'd talk late into the night about race with Styron, the grandson of slave owners. The title essay evokes the summer of 1963 when Styron went sailing with President Kennedy, who gave him a Havana-made Partagas cigar. "I was aware," he writes, "that this was a contraband item under the embargo against Cuban goods … promulgated by the very man who had just pressed the cigar into my hand." A few months later when Kennedy was killed, Styron smoked the Partagas in his memory. I hope someone did the same for Styron.
|
|||||||||||||||||
|
|||
| Continue News With: News8 ; News9 ; News9A | |||
Iconocast Home PageContact Iconocast |
| © 2003-07. ICONOCAST is a trademark of iconocast.com. |
