JOSEPH HELLER CITES ENDLESS SLAUGHTER & INJUSTICE & DON’T EVEN ASK ABOUT MY AMAZON RANK

Ivan Goldman is both a novelist as well as an accomplished blogger for the past 10 years with Digging Deeper (www.ivangoldman.blogspot.com). He’s also a very inventive novelist and we’ve been privileged to publish three of his novels: The Barfighter (2009), Isaac: A Modern Fable (2012), and The Debtor Class (2016). His blogging often reflects political concerns he has about the state of the world and America in particular.

In this blog he manages to combine the two. With that I introduce you to Ivan G. Goldman.

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“Although it’s not what this column is about exactly, allow me to point out that the state of our nation is not so hot. The economy deals cards from a stacked deck, we’ve got more folks rotting behind bars than reside in Houston, the infrastructure crumbles, the ecology’s screwed, and we remain entangled in crazy wars. In Washington a hideous array of corrupt, deranged, ignorant manipulators seems to call the shots.    As Leonard Cohen lamented in a song,

There’s torture and there’s killing

And there’s all my bad reviews

“But enough about my problems. The point is, all this crap hitting the fan makes it an excellent time to look back at Picture This, a novel by Joseph Heller that came out in 1988. By virtue of being a Heller title, it received salutary attention at the time but then faded into the netherworld of barely remembered art. Its Amazon sales rank has fallen to 903,130, almost as embarrassing as my last novel, give or take a few hundred thousand. But who’s counting? Me, that’s who’s counting.

“Anyway, Picture This is a brilliant, meditative, enchanting work teeming with ideas that very much relate to the world right now. The story bounces around even more than Heller’s masterwork Catch 22, stopping at times and places that include Socrates’s jail cell in Athens, Rembrandt’s studio in Amsterdam, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. What ties it together are the stories, thoughts, and humor the novelist weaves out of one Rembrandt masterpiece: Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.

"When we think of ancient Greece we tend to see it as the birthplace of democracy, but Heller, taking a hard look at its principal city-state of Athens, can’t help noticing that its society was based on two pillars: war and slavery. The place was run by phonies who espoused generosity and other high ideals as they put the fix in to pile up more wealth for themselves and screwed everyone else. That included the exploited youngsters they periodically sent off to fight in grim, wacky wars. Sound familiar?

“Heller juxtaposes this abysmal stream of hypocrisy, greed, and violence against the saving power of art, and as he does it he reminds us of the value of humor in our everyday lives. While Big Media chase after Kardashians and such, Picture This, like this passage in Ecclesiastes, reminds us none of this is new:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

                                                                       

“It’s simultaneously depressing and comforting to know that if it’s not getting much better, maybe it’s not getting much worse either. Except neither Heller nor the author of Ecclesiastes had to dwell among a vast population of zombies staring into little hand-held gadgets. If that last sentence describes you, please take it personally.

“In any case, folks who keep fighting the good fight to save us from the worst of the worst within our maimed political structure deserve our respect. Meanwhile, it doesn’t hurt to follow Heller’s lead and enjoy the art that’s all around us.

“If that fails to appeal to you though, here’s what’s trending now on the Sites that Really Count: ‘Reddit Users Share Photos of Babies Who Look like Old People’.”

To which Ivan adds this: “His 5th novel The Debtor Class is a ‘gripping ... triumphant read,’ says Publishers Weekly. A future cult classic with ‘howlingly funny dialogue,’ says Booklist. But who cares?”

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COMING NEXT WEEK: A blog posting from Larry Duberstein, a highly regarded novelist who decided to try publishing, on his own, his 10^th novel. The title? Confessions of a (Self-Published) Fool.

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KURT VONNEGUT, BERRY FLEMING, AND THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS

Twenty-seven years ago Judy and I discovered Berry Fleming (or, more exactly, he discovered us). He was about to turn 88, and under his own imprint, Cotton Lane Press in Augusta, Georgia, was reprinting some of his earlier novels. Before I had ever read Berry, I should mention that the four writers who had the greatest influence on me were William Faulkner, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnegut, all of whom were members of  The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Faulkner was inducted in 1939, Mailer in 1967, Vonnegut in 1973, and Vidal in 1999.

Over the next two years we went on to republish 10 of Berry’s earlier books and two new ones. We also filmed him, producing a DVD of one of the giants of American Literature. At the time, driving a green Porsche convertible, he still zipped around to his office, writing daily on his typewriter with one finger in a hunt and peck manner.  But Berry wanted us to bring these books out in relatively rapid order, as who was to say how long this vital and creative guy would keep going. So we released four books at a time from 1988 midway through 1989, all of which are listed in our catalog. And we discovered that some of his lauded masterpieces, Colonel Effingham’s Raid, The Make Believers, Siesta, and Lucinderella gained the same accolades all over again . And the new ones, Captain Bennett’s Folly and Who Dwelt by a Churchyard, were also gaining followers from reviewers on NPR and from dozens of major newspapers and journals.

On June 18, 1973, Jimmy Carter signed a Resolution passed by the Georgia State Senate proclaiming that “His works have been hailed by critics with comparisons to those of Welty, O’Hara, and Faulkner. He is one of America’s greatest authors,” With this new resurgence, Professor William Doxy at UNC Chapel Hill in March 25, 1989, nominated Fleming for the Nobel Prize for Literature given by the Swedish Academy. This possibility never came about because Berry died less than 6 months later, thereby becoming ineligible.

Before his death I had the idea that Fleming deserved to be a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and that could come about only if he were nominated by an existing member of the Academy. At the time I was in contact with Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer and I wrote to them both about this. Mailer said “my backing wouldn’t help since Hortense Calisher is now the President of the Academy of Arts and Letters and she and I are not compatible, so it would do Berry Fleming’s cause no good if I were to propose him for anything.”

And then I received the following letter from Vonnegut, a neighbor of mine here in the Hamptons when not in the city. It’s quintessential Vonnegut, spoken from the heart of a man who attempted to resign from the Academy on two occasions, and who surely knows his way around it.

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                                      228 E   48   10017   Aug   8   89

Dear Marty –

     I congratulate you on your efforts to get deserved recognition for the novelist Berry Fleming, who is, I’m sure, as good as you say. So you and he are surely on my conscience. At the same time I feel helpless, since the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters is much like an Exxon Tanker with the skipper dead drunk in the lavatory off the engine room. It doesn’t act the way it’s supposed to.

     I myself no longer attend meetings because of its lack of maneuverability. Too many good writers  (and no doubt painters and composers and historians and architects and so on)  have gone to their graves believing that that they lacked that indefinable certain something which kept them from joining the cream of the cream. Irwin Shaw and James Jones and Richard Yates have failed to get in for a couple of maddening reasons at least:  first, poets campaign for each other like politicians, so that most of the writers honored are poets now, and second, painters and musicians and so on get to vote on writers, too, and have never heard of Yates and Fleming, and are often log-rollers, too. “If you’ll vote for an artist you never heard of in my field, I’ll vote for one I never heard of in yours,” and so on.

     When Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win a Nobel Prize, the Academy and Institute asked him if he wouldn’t please become a member. To his discredit, he accepted.

     I now say, and am not alone, that the Academy and Institute should not exist, since its main achievement is broken hearts.  Please give Berry Fleming my love.  

                                            
                                          Cheers –

                                          Kurt Vonnegut

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COMING NEXT WEEK: a blog from Ivan Goldman, author of The Debtor Class. Be sure to read this iconic, and ironic, writer’s political take on events.

Marty