Writers: April 2008 Archives

Just off Harvard Square, we found an underground bookshop with a Russian poster in the window. I can't remember the name and I have lost the receipt. Inside the stacks were lined with piles of dusty books. This is where I bought The Gentleman From San Francisco & Other Stories by Ivan Bunin. That was two weeks ago.

I had no free moments to crack the spine and read a little. School and other projects have kept me busy since I returned from Boston. I was reading Anton Chekhov's short stories first and writing (or grading) papers. But this weekend I finally found time to open the little red book and read the introduction.

Ivan Bunin was a friend of Anton Chekhov. The two became friends when Bunin wrote to the famous writer and asked his opinion on some drafts. In this way, Bunin became the last in a long tradition of Russian literature. His literary influences include Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, and Gorky. What struck me most about the introduction (to the 1963 edition) is that the author, Thompson Bradley, makes an intricate study of Ivan Bunin's unique and innovative style.

Bunin was trained as a poet. His prose is laconic, concise to the point of mystery, and steeped in what Bradley calls a physical lyricism. The stories are object-based. Bunin possessed an almost "pagan" delight in the physical, especially as concerned with erotic love. Almost all of the emotions in his stories are invoked directly as a sensory experience. "In successive clauses he will experiment with various aspects of a color, for example, as if he were sharpening the focus on a projector lens, until he achieves the desired clarity and exactness."

The obsession for correct words reminds me of Michael Chabon, who has been called "a young American Nabokov." Mr. Nabokov would certainly have  been aware of Ivan Bunin and the rest of the Russian literary traditions (Nabokov himself often translated classic works from the original Russian, such as Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time). The physical lyricism, the focus on objects and their impacts, reminds me very much of Cormac McCarthy's later novels (No Country for Old Men and The Road in particular).

None of Mr. Bunin's stories are longer than a novella. The man himself died in exile in 1953. He lived in Paris and strongly apposed Lenin's 1918 revolution. Despite this, Bradley writes, Bunin is largely unpublished outside the former Soviet Republics. He was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Still, he has been "apparently doomed to oblivion in the West."

Writers will feature stories of writers that you may or may not have heard of. Short, to-the-point articles and biographical information. Sometimes the articles will feature interviews and links to an author's books or official sites.

In 1971, Jim Whitehead released his first and last novel: Joiner. The New York Times praised the novel and Mr. Whitehead himself as one of the Top 10 Southern Novels after Faulkner. Mr. Whitehead was a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and his editor was Bob Gottlieb. He founded the MFA workshop program at the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville).


Although he was a fantastic writer and poet, Jim Whitehead's drafting process was laborious, and he often completed poems much easier than prose. He seems to be both a poet and a novelist, although his novels remain in unfinished draft form in Missouri State's Special Collections (in Meyer Library). The notepads are in pencil; Mr. Whitehead never used a typewriter if he could help it. Eric Sentell, who studied draft after draft of Mr. Whitehead's Coldstream (Joiner's sequel) with Kevin Luebbering, and who transcribed a draft of the first chapter of the book for The Moon City Review, has speculated that the intense drafting process is what kept Mr. Whitehead from ever publishing a second novel. In addition, Mr. Whitehead seems to have been bent on committing his novels to memory, as he often stressed young writers to do with famous works of literature.

Mr. Whitehead confessed in an interview that he would re-write 2,000 words just to fix a single paragraph.

Jim Whitehead was also a fairly heavy drinker, which is common in Southern culture, and some other scholars who helped to sort through his papers have suggested the heavy drinking also played a part in Mr. Whitehead never finishing any of Joiner's sequels. Mr. Whitehead did publish many books of poetry throughout his life.

Mr. Whitehead was a conscientious (and beloved) professor of Creative Writing. He took great care with his students and often helped to turn out award-winning writers from the University of Arkansas. He took great time to prepare for classes, to comment on student work, and to appear professional and helpful to those who came to him for help with their writing. This care may also have cut deeply into his time as a writer. He also raised a large family with his wife, and was very busy with all the responsibilities that implies.

Whatever the reason, this lovable professor, scholar, and poet never did publish another novel. He died in 2003. The papers he left behind fill 13 acid-free cardboard boxes. Most of the writing is on lined paper, white and yellow, covered with concentric coffee-stain circles and some of it illegible.

Those who wish to learn more about Jim Whitehead may do so here.