6# William S Burroughs: ''Cities of the Red Night''

A few years ago, while I finishing my own treatise – badly written and rushed – on Burroughs, I started seeing a new wave of serious Burroughs scholars and admirers taking a stand. They were refreshingly dismissive of the Burroughs' myth. Timothy Murphy, Oliver Harris and even the ubiquitous Will Self seemed to bring Burroughs in from the cold cult frontiers to a warmer, welcoming foreground of criticism. It suddenly seemed possible to write about Burroughs and leave out all the anecdotes about heroin, Tangiers, boy love and murder – it finally seemed ok to just read Naked Lunch as a book devoid of its author’s overpowering identity.

But since then about five years have passed and very little has changed. If anything he seems to have become less popular. Now grunge has been phased out there doesn’t seem to be any current cultural waves to shore Burroughs up and claim him their own. Nor does the stream of serious criticism and appraisal appear to have carried on into anything more substantial.

But aside from all that the books remain as brilliant, as enviably unlike anything else written before or since, and quietly people are realising how incredibly well written books like Cities of the Red Night really are. Because when you take away the image of the man the words remain and we realise it is in the words we are captivated, not the man. In books like the Red night trilogy – Cities of the Red Night, Place of Dead Roads and Western Lands – you can’t deny that Burroughs was first and foremost a writer. And it wasn’t just at the end of his career that he fine-tuned this relatively (relative to the cut-ups I mean) straight prose, in Junky and the earlier works we read a writer whose voice is fully formed, undeniably powerful, incisive and confident. I think Burroughs is at a crossroads in terms of his path into the literary firmament. He could either go the way of the cult hero or the way of the original genius with something important to say about the 20th Century. Let’s hope that the façade of his image falls away and the books remain intact.

7# Somerset Maugham ''The Razor's Edge''

By Aley Martin


There is something rather special about W Somerset Maugham. Maugham's works offer a detail into the life of a man who struggled with his sexuality and his choice of career. Utilizing both, one can find his misogynist tendencies in the characterizations of men and women in his tales, from "Razors Edge" to one of his best works "Of Human Bondage". One can also find astute understanding of the foibles inherent in human living in some of his lesser known works, including "Christmas Holiday" and "Mrs. Craddock".

Delving into the works of Maugham carries the reader to another time and another state of mind, one in which the reader acknowledges how difficult life can be. Maugham lays out the most complex characters and asks us to forgive them for their frailties. Often, we can see the direct correlation to his own life in his dramatic imagery. For instance, it is said he used his landlady as a model for the character of Mrs. Craddock and he indicates her glorified idea of romance and marriage in his depictions. His "Christmas Holiday" characters, a rich young man who visits Paris during Christmas, and the lady of the evening who holds a sad secret, come across like a mystery unfolding before ours and the characters eyes. Maugham sets the scene of intrigue, and sexual tension and does the unlikely thing, he leaves it smoldering.

The writer offers us a more spiritual journey in "The Razors Edge", a more metaphysical experience that leads the character into strange and new, wondrous places and spaces. Using his experiences as an ambulance driver in this novel, we find the character living that life for a period of time. And as he was also an undercover agent for British intelligence, we can see he knows how and what to reveal and what to keep hidden in his characters minds.

Maugham also offers some of his fascinating thoughts in his "Writer's Notebook" which he explains are fodder for possible works and things he just felt necessary to jot down just in case one day he might use them in something he writes. As a writer, I can attest this is the most interesting piece of work he left behind. Looking deeply into the thought and ideas Maugham dictates to himself offers the reader a fresh new look at the writer to who I am gratefully indebted.

There are many works still on the shelves awaiting my bleary eyes. There is something comforting knowing that, and also relishing the idea that taking time to read the words of such a great writer makes the journey well worth the bumps in the road.

6# Gogol: ''The Nose''

To try and estimate how brilliant, how overwhelmingly influential on all 19th and 20th century literature was Gogol is near impossible. It would be very interesting to see a sort of scatter chart, demonstrating which authors read Gogol and subsequently which authors read them, and down to today - and I am confident we would find Gogol bearing on the majority of writer's ideas, style, comedy - all the things that characterise modern fiction.

Gogol is a mystery himself, and that he wrote short stories so incredibly ahead of their time gives Gogol the air of a cosmonaught, someone stranded on earth and condemned to writing parables, fables, farces and something unnameable - a precursor to the absurd, existentialism and surrealism (among other things). He can be found almost everywhere in modern literature having made branches from these formidable schools of thought.

He stands alone, as much as he has been branded (ironically) with realism, magic realism, surrealism, black comedy, the absurd - none of these catchphrases figured in his writing, none of them existed in the 1800s. He was without the framework that so many writers, who cited him as their style's progenitor, depended on. He acted freely within nothing but the restraints of his imagination. And there are few author's who could claim to imagine with such depth, humour and at times with such feverish, hallucinatory power which Gogol pulled off with apparent ease. Even of the early stories, the majority of which used Ukrainian folk tales and customs as their launching pad (Little Russia was a fashionable export at the time)were imbued with something otherworldly, unliterary in some senses, crude, elegant - defying all the rules of literature at the time.

Greatly enhanced by Pushkin's endorsements and praise Gogol went on the write full time and created the greatest body of short stories and one novel, Dead Souls. The story that has garnered the most attention has been Diary of a Madman. Approaching the story for the first time readers are forgiven for thinking this would be a standard unravelling of a mind got awry. But in Gogol the pace, the slow development of the narrators madness is both extremely, very, very funny and artful to the point that Gogol disappears from the story. When I read it first I kept expecting to run into clichés, but on each new date (which in themselves are ingenious indicators of the narrators state of mind, with things such as 'There is no date today' written as the header) Gogol manages to notch the level up a little higher, until the story reaches its exhaustion point. In the first post on D Barthelme I mentioned the formula used to diagram the short story format, rising tension, resolution etcetera ... It seems that Gogol was the one that both created this formula and simultaneously dismantled it.
He could also be a traditional tall tale teller, in stories like The Portrait, which are told in a very standard form. But even in these more conventional stories the content is where Gogol expresses Gogol, where we find the Gogolisms.
The Nose is one of my favourite stories. It seems to reach the heights of the absurd that would only re-emerges decades, even over a century later in its matured form - in writers such as Bulgakov, Kafka, Beckett - even today Pelevin can be seen as a linear successor to the Russian Absurdist seat.
For all his thousands of (often unwittingly) of followers none can exactly match the impact of The Nose or Diary of a Madman, simply because it was so utterly, unconventionally new and unheard of and original.
In The Nose, a baker wakes up to find a nose in his morning bread. Across the city another man, someone of very minor officialdom, find his nose missing. It is revealed, after the baker fails to dispose of the nose on a bridge, that the nose has gone off and tried to pass itself off as a titular Councillor, and is actually quite successful.
It ends with the reunion of nose and face. Some say it is symbolic, some find political indications in the story - others just enjoy it for what it is and are happy not to define it (Surreal, Absurd etcetera, etcetera), myself being one.
Gogol's other well known story is The Overcoat. Rightly it takes its place among Gogol's most masterful and mature works, but at the same time it is equally absurd, funny and original. I will not go into the plot, in the hope that you will read it if you have not already. But to say that its protagonist (poor, poor man) can be viewed as the archetype for decades, coming onto centuries of anti-heroes and the classic Bartleby type character, unfortunates and geeks would not be going too far.
It was not with any sort of high minded nepotism that Nabokov said Gogol was the greatest prose writer in Russian, with Tolstoy following behind. Many would agree, and Nabokov made the statement with authority - few understood the art of Russian prose better than he. So much of what Gogol wrote is without a doubt the blueprint for so much of what followed, and is still to come. And we have to wonder, if we go further, if that world dominion of all online search engines took its name from the world’s greatest short story writer. Someone should look into that.

5# Delmore Schwartz: ''In Dreams Begin Responsibility''

Regardless or the era, the social climate or other cultural ephemera there are those authors that remain obscure but highly esteemed simultaneously. I mentioned Donald Barthelme in a previous post, he is an example, very popular but elusive. Another author, who since publishing his two great works - one a collection of poems - Summer Knowledge - and one celebrated collection of short stories - In Dreams Begin Responsibility, Delmore Schwartz seems never to have exceeded a cult following of readers while at the same time being anthologised in both short story and poetry collections of American Greats. It is a problem of output in Schwartz's case I think. Following the praise he got from both collections very little emerged after that, the odd story or poem but nothing matching the magnitude of either of those famous works. A couple of avid fans and friends have gone a long way in consolidating Schwartz's place in literary history. First there was Saul Bellow's fictional portrayal in Humboldt’s Gift, and later Lou Reed was mentored by Delmore and later immortalised their relationship in his song on Blue Mask - The Ghost of Delmore Schwartz. I'm sure that Lou Reed's presence in Delmore Schwartz's legend has lent him a rock and roll layer that did not really exist, but for all Delmore was and wasn't he has been gradually pieced together by legend.

But if we have anything besides the legend we have the work. The title story, In Dreams Begin Responsibility has become a classic American short story. Although it is not often cited in lists of American greats, it has been consecrated by a plethora of author's and scholars as being one of the most original examples of at the tail end of Modernism. Of them probably Vladimir Nabokov was the story’s greatest endorser – saying it was the greatest short story written in English. Schwartz plays with form in the story. There is no direct protagonist in a sense, as the focus of attention is the protagonist's reaction to watching his parent’s first courtship on a cinema screen, and the more he watches the more despairing he appears to grow.

Masterly in its minimalism at time, that the story barely reaches ten pages and he was able to say so much is a true example of the short story art, the condensed and sculpted work that could not have one word less or one word more without destroying the effect.

Its famous last lines, the infamous ''lip of snow'' brings our protagonist back onto the street where he has been dreaming. This is by no means the ''and he woke up, was all a dream'' ending. It is unsure, it is speculative - we are not sure if he's really been asleep. Other stories in the collection equal the ice-pick language and evoke New York, the people, the familial torments and intellectual conflicts with unwavering precision. But in the title story an extra layer lets us into something else, something less intellectual and more humanist, something more painful and beautiful, pitiful and brilliant than the others - it is more honest but loses not of its artifice.

If I were ever given the opportunity to reprint a book and distribute it using my own marketing plan and design, this would be the book. It should be on the free time syllabus of any short story reader or writer and it's a story likely to turn many readers into writers, as it shows how with so few words and with such imagination a near perfect work of art can emerge.