Literary Reputations Won and Lost

Also: Matthew B. Crawford on submitting to authority, Rowan Williams on Charles Taylor, in praise of Bud Powell, and more.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Good morning! First, my thanks to many of you for the kind notes wishing my wife and I (and our daughter) a safe and useful trip to Asheville to help our son and his church. We were able to help one family move and another clear out a basement. We got our son’s basement cleared out and cleaned, too.

We only visited a suburb of Asheville, but the destruction seemed both universal and selective. There were still trees down everywhere. Some people were still waiting for water and power. All city water still had to be boiled. A few houses were completely destroyed; otherws were untouched. Most people in the mountains don’t have flood insurance, and mud slides are not covered by most policies. The financial hit will be heavy for some.

If you would like to give to a local church where all of the money donated will be used to help those in need, one option is to give to Arden Presbyterian (where our son works).    

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I have been thinking about literary reputations lately. Why is one writer forgotten and another not? The poet Andrew Young was all the rage shortly after his death. He was praised by Philip Larkin and various Beats—quite an accomplishment for a Presbyterian (later Anglican) minister who wrote nature poems and verse dramas. His work is now almost entirely out of print.

One obvious answer to that question is that a writer who is initially praised may not be all that good after all. His work may reflect the obsessions of the day but offer little else.

This seems to be the case with Ta-Nehisi Coates. In The New Yorker, Parul Sehgal writes about Coates’s precipitous rise fame and takes stock of his latest book, The Message: “The Message . . . is addressed to his students. It is shaped like an extended craft talk on the uses and abuses of narrative, stretched over trips to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine—but, at its heart, it is a mea culpa. In The Case for Reparations, Coates invoked German reparations to Israel after the Holocaust as a model, disregarding what those reparations enabled. He now acknowledges that they allowed Zionists to displace some seven hundred thousand Palestinians, forbidding them to return to their land and property.”

But the book isn’t very good: “The Message is stitched together with haphazard reporting, and it suppurates with such self-regard that it feels composed by the very enemy of a writer who has so strenuously scorned carelessness and vague pronouncement. It is a public offering seemingly designed for private ends, an artifact of deep shame and surprising vanity which reads as if it had been conjured to settle its author’s soul. The precepts on craft and narrative gather underfoot, tangled and unheeded.”