Archives for March 12, 2008

While the Ted Hughes moment is afoot, now is maybe a good time to publicly wish that his book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being be brought back into print. It’s such an eccentric and dazzling piece of criticism, it seems terrible that it’s fallen out of print in both the United States and England.* Especially since Hughes claimed writing it gave him cancer — the least we could do is keep the book circulating a while longer.
Faber & Faber? NYRB? Anyone?
* Currently, the cheapest copy on Abebooks is $88; a used copy on Amazon.uk is 80 pounds. Every time I check out the local library’s copy, I worry that I’m going to misplace it somewhere and have to wash dishes in the library kitchen forever.
RELATED: A nice piece about Hughes and myth from the Journal of Mythic Arts.

“Usually his wit was austerely pure, but sometimes he could jolt the more cynical. Once we were looking at a furnished apartment that one of our friends had just rented. It was overbearingly eccentric. Life-size clay lamps like flowerpots remodeled into Matisse nudes by a spastic child. Paintings made from a palette of mud by a blind painter. About the paintings Randall said, ‘Ectoplasm sprinkled with zinc.’ About the apartment, ‘All that’s missing are Mrs. X’s illegitimate children in bottles of formaldehyde.'”
Robert Lowell, “Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965: An Appreciation”

“The sense of doing good, the satisfaction of being right, the joy of looking favorably upon oneself, dear sir, are powerful levers for keeping us upright and making us progress. On the other hand, if men are deprived of that feeling, they are changed into rabid dogs.”
Albert Camus, The Fall