Not Texas, 1966-80

NASHVILLE

I was thinking about going to graduate school so read some classics.

Beowulf

Don Quixote. The way a picaresque comic novel should be, without the cloying irony of Barth.

The Odyssey. A true foundation.

OAKLAND

Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov. Probably the most important novel to me of all. Have read it 2 or 3 times since. I like the headlong pace, the dramatic structure, and the morals. Most important, tho, may be fatalism built into the characters, and the fact that hope comes from something other than man made systems.

Lots of science fiction: Asimov, Heinlein.

DENVER

Chandler, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely as seminal as Tropic Moon. Not possible to identify stronger with a narrator than I did with Marlowe in those two novels.

Hammett, The Big Knockover. I think I liked Lillian Hellman’s intro more than the stories.

Thin Man. Movies may be better than book.

Maltese Falcon. Liked this, but not blown away by as with Chandler.

MacDonald, John D.

MacDonald, Ross. Early stuff is second rate Chandler. Later is dull psychobabble.

Simenon, Tropic Moon. A seminal book for me, for better or worse. Talk about nailing the older woman fantasy, all wrapped up in the travel to exotic country fantasy. K recently gave me a new translation, NYRB, which I’ve yet to read.

Another favorite non-Maigret is The Old Man Dies. Read a collection 4 Maigret’s in Oakland and immediately knew I’d made a major discovery.

Van Gulik “translations” of Chinese Judge (read on Regency Dr.);

Mr. Moto;

Buchan, Thirty Nine Steps, also Regency Drive.

Box. Three By. Dull, which surprised me since I like Burr and like Vidal’s essays.

English Mysteries: John Dickson Carr; Milne, The Red House Mystery;

Spy:

LeCarre: All. Best are Spy Who Came in from the Cold and the Smiley trilogy.

Ambler, Eric. Probably overrated, though I hate to say so. Perhaps not fair, though, to compare him to Greene. Still, one misses the moral urgency, and it’s often hard to find anything in Ambler that substitutes for it. It’s all political, and safely so. Who doesn’t hate arms dealers?

Science Fiction: Heinlein; Asimov; Bradbury.

Greene’s Entertainments. The best by far is Ministry of Fear, although Our Man in Havana has its points. It’s too simple, I think, to take Greene’s separation of his entertainments from serious novels without question. All of his work has something to do with crime, which after all is, or can be, sin by another name, and sin is a Greene preoccupation because it separates us from God, ie, from happiness, and I think Greene spent of his life trying to figure out why he wasn’t happy. And of course M of F deals with that directly. The only way to be happy is to separate ourselves from the baggage of our past. Or not have one, somehow.

. : All. Especially, Power and Glory, Travels with my Aunt,

Ministry of Fear.

Our Man in Havana.

James Jones: From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, Go to the Widowmaker,

James Clavell: Tai-Pan, King Rat, Sho-Gun. On re-reading recently, Tai-Pan not as good as I thought earlier.

Mailer, Deer Park and some essays.

CORPUS CHRISTI

Mathiesson, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. At the time fit right in with my return to the natives fantasy.

Beatty, Ann, stories seemed pretty hip to me at the time.

Shakespeare Tragedies Course:

Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Romeo and Juliet,

Mann. Death in Venice and other short novels. Loved short stuff; never could wade through the longer ones.

Magic Mountain. Never finished.

Stendhal. The Red and the Black

1967-1982, Nashville, California, Texas, Denver