The dream life of metabooks

[imomus]

As a student of literature, something you find yourself doing a lot is reading books about books -- narratives which tear through the plot outlines, critical receptions and choicest quotes of other books, giving you some kind of rapid gist or taste of hundreds of titles you'll probably never read. What I've always liked about these books-about-books (opening my newly-arrived boxes from New York, I've already pulled out a couple of juicy ones, Modernism by Malcolm Bradbury and Surrealisme et Sexualité by Xaviere Gauthier) is that they leave you free to fantasize about the books they're describing and actually construct them -- with all their peculiarities heightened and exaggerated -- in your head.

In a weird, inverted way, some of the books which must be most hellish to read in real life, in real time, turn out, in these metabook accounts, to be the most entertaining to read about. The worse they sound, and the more negatively they were received, the better the story of them becomes. Let's take one I've been intrigued by descriptions of recently -- The Dream Life of Balso Snell by Nathanael West. This "anti-kunstleroman" sounds so bad it's bloody great!

Plot: Balso Snell is a lyric poet who finds the Trojan Horse abandoned in tall grass near Troy. “The mouth was beyond his reach, the navel provided a cul-de-sac," so Balso climbs in through the anus. Deep in the entrails of the beast he meets a series of failed and frustrated writers who merely convince him of the futility of writing. That's the whole story. He meets these delusional writers one by one and listens to them ranting. It's like Dante's rings of hell and Pope's Dunciad set inside the digestive tract of a horse.

The book, written during West's nightshifts at New York's Kenmore Hotel, appeared in 1931. The critics hated it, responding to its spirit of snotty, punky, nihilist rejection with snotty, punky, nihilist rejection-of-the-rejection. I loved the bad reviews so much I printed them on the back of the dummy copy of The Book of Jokes. Here they are:

"Formless, chaotic, a juvenile pastiche of bathroom jokes, college magazine parody, and borrowings from contemporary avant-garde authors." Deborah Wyrick

"Squalid and dreadful." Harold Bloom

"A hysterical, obscure, disgusted shriek against the intellect.” James F. Light

"A protest against the writing of books." Nathanael West

"A privately printed little exercise that never should have been printed at all." Daniel Aaron

"A sneer in the bathroom mirror at Art.” Alan Ross

"All it says is 'stink, stink, stink.'" Anna Weinstein, West's own mother

I don't know what it must be like as a book, but as a nutshell gloss in a metabook, The Dream Life of Balso Snell is fantastic.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

You're absolutely right. It isn't Miss Lonelyhearts.

bowler