Philip Larkin wrote the following letter to his friend Norman Iles, who he had met when they were students together at Oxford, on Feb. 26, 1967:

Dear Norman,

Thank you for your two letters: I received them with pleasure & read them with delight, & put them neatly together on one side — answering the buggers is another matter, though. My busy lazy life seems to have no time for letter writing. I liked the first letter a lot. You seem to have got your life taped, & not red-taped either. Don’t know how you do it.

As regards the second one, & your request for help in getting published, well, nothing I can say will make any publisher accept work he doesn’t think worth it. A year or so ago a woman whose six novels I much admire had her seventh rejected by her publisher: I charged in like a mixture of Sir Bedivere & Lloyd George to try to persuade Faber’s to take the seventh — played on the old-boy network like a harp. Nothing happened. So there you are. I’d be happy to read the poems, & give what advice I can, but in the end you’ve got to please the publisher, unless you’ve got money in the firm or are screwing his wife or something.

In a way you are lucky — you like your poems, & write a lot of them: perhaps you should produce them yourself, like Blake. I’m sure if Blake had sent me The Book of Ahania I’d have told him very much what I told you. Anyway, shoot them along. Don’t tell anybody else to do so, though. I get an increasing amount of such correspondence & haven’t really time to deal with much of it. [. . .]

I hope to get some new hifi stuff soon. Bachelors are always very keen on hifi — care more about the reproduction of their records than the reproduction of their species, haw haw. Not that I’ve many classical records — I keep putting it off until the evening of my days. Was that the 6 o’clock pips I heard just now?

Kind regards
Philip

Jonathan Franzen recently suggested that David Foster Wallace made things up in some of his most famous nonfiction pieces, including “Shipping Out,” about his time on a luxury cruise. He didn’t specify what or how much was made up. Michelle Dean covers the story here. This has led, unsurprisingly, to people expressing strong opinions about Franzen online. It has also led to (more) discussions about truth-telling in nonfiction. Wallace was interviewed by Tom Scocca for the Boston Phoenix in 1998, and last year Scocca put the full transcript of their talk up at Slate (in five parts that start here). Some of it concerns the issues that confront an obsessively imaginative fiction writer who writes nonfiction. (Wallace told Scocca at some length that he considered himself a fiction writer above all else. This is not shocking, but I’ve argued — and I’m not alone — that nonfiction was his better form.)

Since there have been approximately 5,000 debates about nonfiction in the James Frey/JT Leroy/Everyone Else Era, and since I’m unlikely to conduct an effective one all by my lonesome at the moment, I just wanted to highlight a funny excerpt from Wallace’s conversation with Scocca, this about one of the subjects in “Shipping Out”:

Q: Also when you’re writing about real events, there are other people who are at the same events. Have you heard back from the people that you’re writing about? Trudy especially comes to mind—

DFW: [Groans]

Q: —who you described as looking like—

DFW: That, that was a very bad scene, because they were really nice to me on the cruise. And actually sent me a couple cards, and were looking forward to the thing coming out. And then it came out, and, you know, I never heard from them again. I feel — I’m worried that it hurt their feelings.

The. Thing. Is. Is, you know, saying that somebody looks like Jackie Gleason in drag, it might not be very nice, but if you just, if you could have seen her, it was true. It was just absolutely true. And so it’s one reason why I don’t do a lot of these, is there’s a real delicate balance between fucking somebody over and telling the truth to the reader. [. . .]

One reason why I might have put in some not particularly kind stuff on the cruise is that I felt like I’d kind of learned my lesson. I wasn’t going to hurt anybody or, you know, talk about anybody having sex with a White House intern or something. But I was going to tell the truth. And I couldn’t just so worry about Trudy’s feelings that I couldn’t say the truth. Which is, you know, a terrific, really nice, and not unattractive lady who did happen to look just like Jackie Gleason in drag.

Q: Maybe if you’d emphasized that it was not in an unattractive way. Which is sort of a hard thing to picture.

DFW: Actually the first draft of that did have that, and the editor pointed out that not only did this waste words, but it looked like I was trying to have my cake and eat it too. That I was trying to tell an unkind truth but somehow give her a neck rub at the same time. So it got cut.

Q: But you actually did want to have your cake and eat it too. Not in a bad way.

DFW: I’m unabashed, I think, in wanting to have my cake and eat it too.

Almost two years ago, I dedicated a week on the blog to writers’ correspondence. That was to coincide with my review of Thomas Mallon’s book about letters through the centuries. You can find those blog posts, which featured letters from Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, and Kafka, among others, here. By the end of this week, I’m hoping to have a piece up on the Backlist about the correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. So, I thought I would share more letters. The first will immediately follow this post.

Cultural critic and Second Pass contributor Lisa Levy has launched the site Dead Critics, which will be devoted to her writing about “dead critics, a few live critics, and the nature of critical inquiry.” And so far, the site lives up to that description in almost exact proportions. There are dead critics (a piece on Dwight Macdonald’s crankiness in the 1950s) and living ones (a review of Wayne Koestenbaum’s new treatise on humiliation), and plenty about the nature of criticism, as in this excerpt from a piece about Lester Bangs:

Bangs was an important tastemaker, championing the Velvet Underground, garage rock, the Stones, all blues-based, noisy rock. The gist of this school is “let me tell you why this music moves me;” implied is “and why it should move you too. Unless you have rocks in your head, in which case, I can’t help you.” This type of rock criticism is a blunt, not a fine, art: it cajoles, bullies, provokes, and personalizes the music. Every piece is a mini-memoir spurred by a song: either the writer is telling you about himself and, incidentally, he is telling you about the music, or vice versa.

The site launches alongside Levy’s piece in the new issue of The Believer — partially available online — about the critic and scholar Richard Poirier, who died in 2009. If you haven’t bookmarked Dead Critics already, please do so now.

Emma Brockes’ visit with famed children’s author Maurice Sendak for the Guardian is making the rounds, partly for the 83-year-old Sendak’s firm opinions about Salman Rushdie, Roald Dahl, e-books (”I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.”), and Stephen King, among many other subjects. He also shares stories about his upbringing and his family:

The term “children’s illustrator” annoys him, since it seems to belittle his talent. “I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can’t do that. I’m in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person.” He and [his longtime partner] Eugene never considered bringing up children themselves, he says. He’s sure he would have messed it up. His brother felt the same way: after their childhood, they were too dysfunctional. “They led desperate lives,” he says of his parents. “They should have been crazy. And we — making fun of them. I remember when my brother was dying, he looked at me and his eyes were all teary. And he said, ‘Why were we so unkind to Mama?’ And I said, ‘Don’t do that. We were kids, we didn’t understand. We didn’t know she was crazy.’”