The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Going to See the Elephant: Pieces of a Writing Life by George Garrett Ed. Jeb LivingoodNicholas Birns
George Garrett. Going to See the Elephant: Pieces of a Writing Life. Ed. Jeb Livingood. Texas Review Press, 2002. 195 pp. Paper: $18.95.
George Garrett has made important contributions to American literature, both prominent (his memorable three novels on the Elizabethan period) and inconspicuous (his jaunty and fearless overviews of American fiction over the years for the annual Dictionary of Literary Biography). In this essay collection, Garrett is merciless about that world’s pretensions, yet idealistic about the writer’s vocation. Punches are not pulled. New York is censured for literary parochialism, and also, more subtly, for its editors promoting second-rate books as “palliatives” for their own metropolitan isolation. The grim self-interest that characterizes far too much of a writer’s “mission” is fully revealed. An acute introduction by Jeb Livingood foreshadows Garrett’s own point that his was the second generation of American modernists, which sought to emulate the work of Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner while living an academic life completely different from theirs. Garrett takes a bus from Vermont to Rhode Island to attend what he thinks is an elephant festival, desperately works up elephant jokes in preparation, only to find a beaming Ralph Ellison greeting him upon disembarkation—it was an Ellison festival! In “The Good Ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald” Garrett comes to grips with the mystery still surrounding Fitzgerald’s “impeccable and inimitable craft,” and remembers how parlously his canonicity was achieved. And for other deserving writers canonicity may still be in the balance, as in the position of Fred Chappell, Madison Jones, and James Dickey, writers about whom Garrett writes affectionately, and hilariously. These pieces, though, are not ceremonial éloges; they are honest, candid, and comprehending of the whimsicality of literary endeavor. Humor is also the manifest chord of two mock-essays by alter-ego “John Towne” whose undersong is a profound commitment to high standards. [Nicholas Birns]