Authors Electric

Who doesn’t love a good brawl between writers…from the safety of the stands? Though the bad boy glory days are gone in our cancel ’em corporate culture, not long ago bad press and scandal were generally tickets to ride.              Ernest Hemingway knocked the stuffing out of the twenty-years-older Wallace Stevens and went on to boast about it. He hit Max Eastman on the head with a heavy tome after  Max claimed in a review that Hem wore glued-on chest hair. And he got good press, though he lost, from his boxing match with Morley Callahan.             Norman Mailer, Hem’s disciple, headbutted Gore Vidal in a TV interview. Norm went on to stab his wife and pound for fifteen minutes on Thomas Pynchon’s door, enraged by a bad review–only to learn that Pynchon had fled down the back fire escape.             Hunter...

Long ago (it must be 25 years – help!), when I was writing my PhD thesis, one of my supervisors gave me a piece of advice I will never forget. Not because it was full of timeless wisdom (it may have been, but if so it passed me by) but because I didn’t understand it and it gave me the heebie-jeebies. She advised me to ‘Rewrite Chapter 3 from the inside out’. As though writing Chapter 3 hadn’t been difficult enough, in the conventional ‘start-at-the-beginning-define-your-terms-adduce-your-evidence-express-your-arguments-draw-your-conclusions’ kind of way. But no, apparently that wasn’t good enough, and my much-sweated-over chapter now had to be turned inside out like a grimy t-shirt having to be worn a second day because you lost your luggage. Partly, I feared that the turning inside out would expose all the messy loose ends I hadn’t tied off quite as neatly as I should have. Perhaps that was the idea? Or maybe my supervisor simply thought my chapter needed some restructuring and ...