Patrick Kurp, host of the matchless blog Anecdotal Evidence, doesn’t write reviews often. Why? Because he has posted on his blog daily, literally daily, for many years now. How does he do it? (We at the Book Haven wish we could say the same about our own humble efforts!) So when he does write a review in addition, it something of an event.
On the website On the Seawall, hosted by Ron Slate, Patrick Kurp considers Arthur Krystal’s A Word or Two Before I Go: Essays Then and Now & Some Unfinished Business: The Lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald by Arthur Krystal.
An excerpt:
A Word or Two Before I Go is his [Krystal’s] fifth collection of essays and in it he returns to several of his abiding hobbyhorses, including Jacques Barzun, boxing and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Some Unfinished Chaos is Krystal’s first book devoted to a single subject and it often reads like a set of linked essays. No one is likely to read his Fitzgerald biography for the day-to-day details of the novelist’s life, which are thoroughly documented elsewhere. Krystal was drawn to him by The Great Gatsby and the rest of the fiction, but he stuck around for Fitzgerald’s intriguingly complicated and very American character.
One of the epigraphs to the biography, borrowed from the novelist himself, succinctly poses Krystal’s approach: “There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He’s too many people if he’s any good.” Krystal resists reducing Fitzgerald to a tidy thesis and defies the tendency to romanticize his alcoholism and the Jazz Age. He lauds the novelist’s professionalism: “[H]e could barely function without a drink, so when he sat down to write, he exercised a control absent elsewhere in his life.” In Fitzgerald he has found his ideal subject, a writer whose life mingled self-destructiveness, immaturity and a literary gift almost unmatched among American writers of fiction:
“One minute you want to hug Fitzgerald, the next you want to wring his neck, not because he was a moralist who behaved like a swine, or a romantic who behaved like a vulgarian — one can chalk that up to booze and false bravado — but because it’s difficult to know when to trust him.”
Since Montaigne, essays have served as literature’s formless form. Almost anything goes. Krystal, typically, is uneasy with the designation “essayist.” It is, he writes, “too grand and too definitive and yet at the same time restrictive.” Krystal is a storyteller even in his essays. He’s an anecdotalist and, the reader suspects, a novelist manqué (he wrote several as a young man, never published).
Read the whole thing here. It’s short. Meanwhile, you might also enjoy today’s post on Anecdotal Evidence. It begins:
On Thursday I gently slipped my brother some Montaigne without him knowing the source. It wasn’t plagiarism, exactly, and it was paraphrased. It’s a well-known passage from the essay “That to philosophize is to learn to die,” one that always reminds me of Spinoza:
“It is uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. He who has learned to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.” Read the rest here.
Tags: Arthur Krystal, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Patrick Kurp, Ron Slate