Rereading

Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason by Anne Roiphe


This memoir really captures the change in literary culture in the last half of the 20th century. Worth a second reading.

The culture, of course, has mirrored the shift in my mother’s thinking, her retreat from the bewildering and seductive idol of the artist himself. The novelist most revered these days is the one who sells his novel as a screenplay to Hollywood for a lot of money.

I began my career at the tail end of the "writer worship" cycle, when the serious writer was like a priest, following a calling, when literary novels were published by publishers hoping to break even at best, published because they were GOOD, not commercial (it was the profits from commercial pap that made this honorable charge possible), when the literary culture was driven by men, drinking, promiscuity, sexism, abusive and self-indulgent behavior. Artists were forgiven for having rotten personal lives if their work was good. What is astounding is the focus of this book: the bright women who became the groupies for these male writers

Now, of course, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, where the once valued "literary novel" is used as a pejorative description, where the writer as priest has become the writer as entrepreneur, where marketing matters more than content.

I vote for the writer as hermit. I vote for Norman Brown: "Doing nothing, if properly understood, is the supreme action." Of course, I'm an alien.