Quotes About Literature

Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm.

One thing about American liberality, obscenity, etc. Just saw a book of Hemingway's—short stories—Winner Takes Nothing. He says out most anything and everything. For "fuck" they print "f---

Para un escritor, un personaje es un ser con quien no se siente ligado por el sentimiento. El verdadero amor destruye la «literatura». Por eso, también, Henry no puede escribir sobre mí, y quizá nunca escriba sobre mí —por lo menos, hasta que nuestro amor se acabe y, entonces, yo me convierta en un «personaje», es decir, en una personalidad alejada, no fundida con él.

I want to give you an idea. . . . "Ask some rector for a copy of the Apocrypha". . .. "Read Rabelais in old French." "Reread Cervantes" .

Make the Last Book the first of a series—a life job, like Proust's.

And oh, someday, what a treat you will have when you read Thiess . . . Frank Thiess.

You know I just dispatched copies to Aldous Huxley & Ezra Pound—finally heard from them. And to Blaise Cendrars.‡ Also wrote a good letter to Emma Goldman.

The Lawrence book excited me too.

And another reason why I could not live with Dostoevsky alone, and had to find something else, is that in Lawrence the "darkness" was mostly sexual—and there is not quite enough sexuality in Dostoevsky.

P.S. The excerpts will follow in the next mail. Just read Unamuno! My Unamuno! Where is that tragic sense of life? I want it. I may write on Gide's Dostoevsky tomorrow. Everything is stirring in me—Fraenkel, Proust, Unamuno, Osborn, Lawrence

It doesn't matter whether one is for or against—the writing it is all that counts.

My mother won't live any longer in the house of a person capable of writing such a "dirty" book as my study of Lawrence.

we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I said, almost indignantly, "That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments.

I remember your phrase: "Only whores appreciate me." I wanted to say: you can only have blood-consciousness with whores, there is too much mind between us, too much literature, too much illusion—but then you denied there had been only mind. . . .

Les Frontières Humaines[by Ribemont-Dessaigne] came and I looked at the jacket and I do not read it. It looks too good. I am saving it for a rainy day, a day of despair, when one wants to eat his fellow man. I love the looks of it. I believe in it before reading a page.

But listen, I must finish Lawrence, Joyce & Proust. It's driving me nuts. I feel like a slacker. I'll spit them out alive, if necessary. I'm screwed up to a frenzy. Vino, vino . . . I wish I had the taste for it. Vino isn't strong enough. It's blood I want. Henry

Had a cordial note from Dos Passos, in Key West, Fla., saying he would be delighted to receive a copy—but I'm not sending him one, for the reason given.)

I retract what I said about [Louis-Ferdinand Céline's] Voyage au Bout de la Nuit. You will have to read it in June. There are affinities there with your earlier work. It's another form of absolute, and therefore valuable.

Miller is a far more distinguished mind than Céline.

Reading Albertine Disparue

I feel that if I sit down now I will do some bad thinking about Lawrence. Remember Gide on Dostoevsky—"When he began to explain himself he showed himself a bad thinker.

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

Ante ciertos libros, uno se pregunta: ¿quién los leerá? Y ante ciertas personas uno se pregunta: ¿qué leerán? Y al fin, libros y personas se encuentran.

No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart; then, finding sufficient sustenance in their rhythm and reveling in them at leisure, I closed the book and remained, trembling, more alive than I had thought possible, my mind numb with happiness.