Morning reading

Arts & Letters Daily

The following teaser -- "Many of our best novelists may well be narcissists, or even, God forbid, pundits. So what? Let’s judge books by their contents, says Stephen Elliott" -- reminded me of last week's virtual discussion about narcissistic personality disorder.

From Elliott's essay, "Focus on the words - not on the writer":

It left me uneasy. What does it matter if a novelist is also a pundit or a performer or a narcissist? If Johnson were a narcissist, would "Jesus' Son" have less value; would it cease to be one of the greatest works of fiction of the past century? I wouldn't care if Johnson had his own show on Fox News, I would still want to read everything he ever wrote (for the record, there are no great Republican novelists working today, but that's another issue).

Later, he writes:

The problem is not with the author's personality (or appearance), it's with the readers and critics who pay too much attention to it. Focusing on a writer for not "humping his ego" has the same effect as focusing on writers who are outspoken, or attractive; they're two sides of the same coin. What matters is the book, and the book has to stand on its own merit. [Emphasis added.]What the author accomplishes, or doesn't, outside of the book is fine for the gossip pages, but it doesn't merit mentioning in a book review.

Of course, I agree with that boldfaced bit wholeheartedly.

From the archives, this entry, in which I maintain:

The text should stand alone. [Emphasis added.] All of the observations about Oscar Wilde's character, while compelling (and exquisitely rendered in, for example, Richard Ellman's biography), do not alter the message of the text itself.

Perhaps I should say, the text can stand alone. If only we let it.

I do love stitching together the bits of my reading-thinking-learning-writing-doing life, this thought to that article, these observations to those experiences.