Ann Beattie – Reading Markson Reading

Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson is out today from powerHouse. Pick up a copy if you have any interest in the best writer of the last 50 years. (Bonus: This blog and myself are both mentioned on pg. 77)

BUY IT NOW!

Also, be on the lookout for my interview with poet Laura Sims (the one to whom all the letters in this book were written). It should be going up on Full Stop sometime soon.

For now, here’s a mini excerpt from our interview:

One thing I always wanted to chat with another Markson-obsessed person about was what to call those final novels when grouped together? On Reading Markson Reading, I’ve been calling them The Notecard Quartet, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts on whether they should even be grouped together and, if so, what they should be called?

That’s a really nice name for them, I like that. The Notecard Quartet. And yes, I really do think they belong together. It’s undeniable that their shared form and concerns connect them—they’re like one big book he was working out over time. I always think of them as a “tetralogy,” but I like your name for them much better.

The words “Fare Forward” are from a T. S. Eliot line which Markson quoted as a kind of “bon voyage” to you when you moved from New York to Wisconsin. Can you tell me why and how that title was chosen?

Originally I came up with five possible titles:

Don’t Leave Flowers, Telephone: Letters from David Markson
I’ll Tell You the Truth: Letters from David Markson
The Sound of My Own Voice: Letters from David Markson
I Almost Prefer the Silence: Letters from David Markson
Fare Forward, Voyagers: Letters from David Markson

Wes (of powerHouse) made the very good point that we didn’t want to choose a title that, like the first four on the list, emphasized Markson as a hermetically sealed literary figure. If the book were to introduce new readers to his work, as we hoped it would, we would have to choose something more open-ended and optimistic. We both liked the last one for that reason, and then Wes thought it would be better without the “Voyagers.” I think he was right.

I like that the title is positive, forward-looking, and optimistic in a way, because I think that there’s actually an optimism in his writing that is often buried, but is sort of always there, a strange optimism that I can’t quite describe.

It is. It’s what keeps the books from being completely bleak and depressing. They’re really not. I know that some people find them so, but I don’t think of them that way. There is a thread of hope running through them that keeps them buoyant, joyful even.

Pg. 73 of David Markson’s copy of Picturing Will by Ann Beattie:

On which Markson placed a check in the margins next to the first mention of a character who shares his last name:
“History was personified in the form of Luther, a.k.a. Jake Markson from Brooklyn, an overweight overachiever from the Queens College art program whose talent Haveabud knew he could market.”

—

     Ann Beattie wrote:
     “No one but Beckett can be quite as sad and funny at the same time as Markson can.”
     Only here she is not referring to her character in Picturing Will, but actually to David Markson.

They were close.

In fact, she was one of the first people to read Wittgenstein’s Mistress before it was published, as it was being rejected left and right.

In an interview on The Leonard Lopate Show, Beattie was asked about her falling in love Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and she responded:
“Falling in love is a perfectly okay way to talk about it because in a way the book is an enormous seduction. You know as another writer occasionally you read something that just comes so much from somewhere else that it really just blows you away. You think, you know, this isn’t even any standard to aspire to—I mean this really has nothing to do with what I’ve been reading for most of my life. I think more than just falling in love with it, or whatever, though—and I don’t mean to say this kept me removed from the book—but there was a kind of writerly awe that anybody would dare to be so uncompromising.”