NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Sanguine words from QD Leavis to those who have written an unpublishable novel: “A bad novel is ultimately seen to fail not because of its method but owing to a fatal inferiority of the author’s make-up;” and, from Henry James: “No good novel ever proceeded from a superficial mind.”

On a more helpful note: read the canon.

"Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?" George Eliot

John Keats in a letter to his publisher John Taylor, April 27, 1818 (The Letters of John Keats, ed. Maurice Buxton Forman O.U.P. 1948):

" I was purposing to travel over the north this Summer – there is but one thing to prevent me – I know nothing I have read nothing and I mean to follow Solomon’s directions of ‘ get Wisdom – get understanding’ – I find cavalier days are gone by. I find that I can have no enjoyment in the World but continual drinking of knowledge – I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world – some do it with their society – some with their wit – some with their benevolence – some with a sort of power of conferring pleasure and good humour on all they meet and in a thousand ways all equally dutiful to the command of Great Nature – there is but one way for me- the road lies th[r]ough application study and thought. I will pursue it and to that end purpose retiring for some years. I have been hovering some time between an exquisite sense of the luxurious and a love for Philosophy – were I calculated for the former I should be glad – but as I am not I shall turn all my soul to the latter."

"This simple sense if wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense. Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjuction may seem) are the two supreme syblolic assertions of the turhtu that to draw out the souls of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook. The well-meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of things, has decided "faith is nonsense," does not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back to him in the form that nonsense is faith."

G.K. Chesterton’s ‘A Defence of Nonsense’ in Essays of Today and Yesterday, from "The Defendant."

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer Kraus

Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition Emerson

In a good play, everyone is in the right. Hebbel

He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none. Shaw

To improve one’s style means to improve one’s thoughts and nothing else. Nietzsche

To write simply is as difficult as to be good. Maugham

Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before but in saying exactly what you think yourself. Stephen

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. Thoreau

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. Saki

Devon, mid-1990s

Stendhal once wrote: I have found consolation in a beautiful view of the sea

Much talk on the Internet of Updike’s graphic sexual depictions, but little evidence. So this, from Rabbit is Rich:

…To think, all along that Lotty was sitting there itching to be fucked. It wasn’t just him. She was holding a dirty yearning between her legs just like the lavatory walls said, those drawings and words put there by the same kids who magnified the ants to death, that little sticky pop they died with, you could hear it, did girls too make a little sticky noise when they opened up? The thought of her knowing when she raised her hand that her blouse was tugged into wrinkles all pointing to the tip of her tit and that an edge of bra peeped out through  the cotton armhole with those little curly virgin hairs and that he was watching for it all to happen does make blood gather. In the fumbly worried dark, with Ma Springer sleeping off her sulk a thickness of plaster away, Harry as if casually presents his stiffened prick to Janice’s hand. Hot stuuuuff.

But wanderings within her own brain have blunted her ardor and her touch conveys this, it is too heavy, so in a desperate mood of self-rescue he hisses "Suck" in her ear, "Suck."

Can’t say that curly virgin armhole hairs make my blood gather…but the sticky pop business is pretty good.