KEMPTON

Great literature seems somehow bottomed on the artist’s sense of his own moral unworthiness. How otherwise are we to explain why the novels that most lastingly claim us are not about what the novelist is but about what he most painfully feels he has failed to be?

Proust had an investor’s share in a male brothel in wartime Paris; and naturally he transferred both the sin and its proprietorship to Charlus. Tietjens is the stoic incarnate, while Ford Madox Ford’s comrades in arms remembered him as often whining and sometimes cowering. In time we outgrow Stephen Dedalus because he is so much like Joyce as he was; yet Bloom is eternally our contemporary because he is so much like Joyce as he wished he was. We ought to suppose that not Circumspection but Shame dictates these disguises.

MK

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Murray Kempton

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Great literature seems somehow bottomed on the artist’s sense of his own moral unworthiness. How otherwise are we to explain why the novels that most lastingly claim us are not about what the novelist is but about what he most painfully feels he has failed to be?

Proust had an investor’s share in a male brothel in wartime Paris; and naturally he transferred both the sin and its proprietorship to Charlus. Tietjens is the stoic incarnate, while Ford Madox Ford’s comrades in arms remembered him as often whining and sometimes cowering. In time we outgrow Stephen Dedalus because he is so much like Joyce as he was; yet Bloom is eternally our contemporary because he is so much like Joyce as he wished he was. We ought to suppose that not Circumspection but Shame dictates these disguises.