Book Notes: Writers on Writing

Writers on Writing

Essay collections allow writers to demonstrate a breadth of interest (not to mention claiming their favorite fellow writers and flaunting their quirks) not always found in longer, sustained works. Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the award-winning The Lost (about the Holocaust) as well as perceptive reviews of modern productions of the Greek classics, shows his range in How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (Harper, $26.95). Discussing the take-no-prisoners literary criticism of Dale Peck in a piece on Peck's collection, Hatchet Jobs, Mendelsohn makes this point about savage reviews: "As I made my way through Peck's lengthy excoriations . . ., it occurred to me that perhaps it might be wasteful to expend many thousands of words on the complete annihilation of writers who are, when all is said and done, not of the first tier."

In Havanas in Camelot (Random House, $23), William Styron graciously pays tribute to a fellow Southerner of about the same vintage, Truman Capote. Styron confesses that as an aspiring young writer (long before he wrote The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice), he felt weighed down by an "appalling chagrin . . . when I read some of Truman's earliest work. . . . Here was . . . a full-fledged master of the language before he was old enough to vote." The two eventually met and stayed friends until Capote's death.

Speaking of friends, English novelist Kingsley Amis was best buds with alcohol, a union celebrated in Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis (Bloomsbury, $19.99). Amis knew enough about booze to frame lengthy quizzes about it. Question: "In what important way does the chemical composition of a mature whiskey, aged in cask for ten or fifteen years, differ from that of a whiskey at the end of manufacture but before casking?" Answer: "None. There may be a little more or a little less water, but everything else is there in the same proportions as before. Nobody really knows what happens in the cask." Amis's discerning mind led him to express these reservations about bubbly: "Champagne is only half a drink. The rest is a name on a label, an inflated price tag, a bit of tradition and a good deal of showing off."

"Ever since I knew I would be an author, I knew I would write about the Holocaust," explains Israeli writer David Grossman in Writing in the Dark (Farrar Straus Giroux, $18). Grossman, whose novels include See Under: Love and whose nonfiction books include The Yellow Wind, notes his fear of having to "pollute" his 3-year-old son when the inevitable day came and the boy asked such questions as "Dad, what are Nazis?" And Grossman sums up the effect of the horror on members of his generation (he was born in 1954): "In my home . . ., as in so many Israeli homes, a thread of deep anxiety was stretched out, and with almost every move you made, you touched it. Even if you were very careful, even if you hardly made any unnecessary movements, you still felt that constant quiver of a profound lack of confidence in the possibility of existence. A suspicion toward man and what might erupt from him at any moment."

-- Dennis Drabelle