Wallace Stevens and Jim Harrison
Prize Bitch Alexander Theroux
In his real compact essayistic Arthur Rimbaud-enamoured fabulation Splendide-Hôtel, Gilbert Sorrentino espies and retains a surprising archnemesis in the form of…poet and lawyer Wallace Stevens. Sorrentino’s blindsiding excoriations are mostly amusing. He laments Stevens' prodigious level of the wrong kind of cultural immersion along with his evidently lavish and well-appointed personage, all ersatz style and no Zeus thunder. Sorrentino laments what he calls the man's lack of personal style, suggesting Stevens to be a kind of mendaciously gifted copycat or fake. What he most laments, however, is that Stevens fails to hear "the bell of rose-colored fire tolling in the clouds." Lol. My verdict: Wallace Stevens was the best American poet of the first half of the 20th century, and that includes William Carlos Williams and all them others too. Alexander Theroux—one initial away from being the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms—is the writer I often think of the way Alfred Hitchcock thought of actor James Stewart, which is to say he's the literary craftsman I wouldn’t want to be but nonetheless am, I suppose, and he lays into everybody as a matter of course just like his cutthroat brother Paul. Alexander Theroux sees something that interests him and all of a sudden he’s helplessly dragging some entrenched cult of personality through miles of mud and then just as much mud or double on the way back to where they done begun. It’s true. And y'all heard it here first. Alexander Theroux drags his kill across the landscape. His first novel, Three Wogs, beat the shit out of the whole garbled and racist nation of England. In the 779 page Einstein’s Beets: An Examination of Food Phobias, Theroux comes at hundreds of real historical personages, some still living, like a punch-drunk pugilist on a mission from the Old Testament God, occasionally getting disgruntled because this or that centuries-old eminence enjoyed eating copious quantities of something Theroux himself finds outright disgusting. I love this asshole and read him avidly, but even I myself was not prepared for how derogatory and mean he gets respective of poet, man’s man, and Legends of the Fall author Jim Harrison. Looking at the index in the backend of Einstein’s Beets, I see they’ve left Harrison, Jim out of the postoperative equation altogether. Believe me when I say that the offending passage or passages is/are unrelentingly venomous. My verdict: Jim Harrison was, like Wallace Stevens, an excellent poet…and a fuck-ton better than Bukowski.
Thank you,
This has been Chessboxin' with J 😺
This has been Chessboxin' with J 😺
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