Writers No One Reads

Vincent James O’Sullivan (1868-1940) was an American-born writer of macabre stories and Decadent poetry. Oscar Wilde, after having read O’Sullivan’s poems, commented: “In what a midnight his soul seems to walk! and what maladies he draws from the moon!”, and such a remark aptly characterizes most of O’Sullivan’s oeuvre.

It was in Montague Summers’ The Supernatural Omnibus (1931) that I first noticed O’Sullivan’s artistry. His stories—even in a collection that includes such figures as J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Vernon Lee, and, one of Crowley’s cronies, William Seabrook—immediately stood out for their delivery, if not their content. O’Sullivan’s prose is vivid, flowing, and capable of deathly sudden twists. His most widely anthologized story, “When I Was Dead”, was described by Robert Aickman as a “spasm of guilt”, “sudden and shattering”; Aickman included it in The Fourth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1967), a long-running series he edited. However, that story is quite mild in comparison to some of O’Sullivan’s others. A few of my favourites are “Hugo Raven’s Hand”, “My Enemy and Myself”, “The Bars of the Pit”, and the novella-length “Verschoyle’s House”.

For more about Vincent O’Sullivan, see:

• Jessica Amanda Salmonson’s essay, “A Fallen Master of the Macabre”; it is from the introduction to Master of Fallen Years: The Complete Supernatural Stories of Vincent O’Sullivan (London: The Ghost Story Press, 1995). (Note: the book is very hard to come by, only 400 were printed, has a creepy cover, and it contains his rarest story, “The Monkey & Basil Holderness”, which I am desperate to read.)
• “Vincent O’Sullivan: Unstrung Second Fiddle”, an essay that compares him to other Decadent poets, and discusses in detail his story collection A Dissertation Upon Second Fiddles, which is said to read like an English Léon Bloy.
• Archive.org has the story collection Human Affairs, and the Decadent “prosetry” of The Green Window. Unfortunately, their scan of Sentiment, his second of two novels, is the edition without the stories, and they don’t have his first novel, my favourite, The Good Girl. (I hope to add some of his other works to Archive.org.)
• Horror Masters is a good resource for stories of the supernatural, of Vincent’s, it has: “Will”, “The Business of Madame Jahn”, “The Interval”, “Master of Fallen Years”, “When I Was Dead”, and “The Burned House”.

(Image: the frontispiece was done by the talented Aubrey Beardsley; the drawing does not look to be his most inspired work (see Stanley Weintraub’s Beardsley for why =]), but do take a look at this collection.)

It’s refreshing to find a writer embracing the fact that nobody reads him:

My books are better thought about than read. They’re insanely dull and unreadable; I mean, do you really want to sit down and read a year’s worth of weather reports or a transcription of the 1010 WINS traffic reports “on the ones” (every ten minutes) over the course of a twenty-four-hour period? I don’t.

I love the end too: “The rest of culture has moved so far beyond such simplistic notions of originality, yet here we are in literature, still fifty years behind the rest of the world. It’s so tiresome.”

Kenneth Goldsmith interviewed by Dave Mandl in The Believer

image: Adrian Piper, Untitled 1968 work via

New book by Goldsmith: Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age

No one reads Rudolph Wurlitzer (b. 1937, Texas), that is, if Barthelme and Pynchon—advocates of Wurlitzer’s Nog—don’t count, and if I don’t include the small cult following that the book has had since its debut in 1969. Still, by my esoteric calculations, Wurlitzer could use some more exposure, especially for his later works, e.g., Flats and Quake.

Fans of Beckett, Denis Johnson, and Bukowski—just to name a few kindred spirits—should definitely give Wurlitzer a read.

For more about Rudy, see:

• “Wurlitzer’s Wiles”, Gary Indiana’s survey of Wurlitzer’s books
• Jeremy Hatch’s short, and perceptive, essay on Nog at the Quarterly Conversation
• The official Rudolph Wurlitzer website
• The IMDB listing of Wurlitzer’s filmography

(Image: the 1970 Pocket Books edition; I couldn’t find any artist credit in the paperback—contacted the publisher, still waiting for a reply)

I wish more people read Stanley Crawford, whose novel The Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine is best summed up by Ben Marcus in his preface to the Dalkey Archive edition of the book:

Architectural dreamwork, end-times seascapes so barren they seem cut from the pages of the Bible, coolly-rendered Rube Goldberg apparati, and the crushing sadness that results when you tie your emotional fortunes to a person whose tongue is so fat in his mouth he can barely speak, mark this little masterpiece of a novel. Cast as a soliloquy in the form of a ship’s log, a grief report from someone who has no good insurance she will ever be heard, the novel moves fluidly between its major forms: love song, a treatise on gardening at sea, an argument against the company of others, and a dark science expo for exquisite inventions like a hybrid lichen that makes things invisible. Published by Alfred A. Knopf under the editorial guidance of Gordon Lish, the fiction world’s singular Quixote—a champion of innovative styles and formal ambition—there may have been no better year [1972] in which to tuck such an odd, exquisite book. Instead of rushing for relevance and breaking the news, Crawford was taking the oldest news of all—it is strange and alone here, even when we are surrounded by people, and there is a great degree of pain to be felt—and reporting it as nautical confessional. The result, now thirty-six years later, seems to prove that interior news, the news of what it feels like to want too much from another person, will not readily smother under archival dust.

No one reads Marguerite Young, though my god! we all should. From her obituary in the New York Times:

Afterward she became a legend: the woman with the pageboy haircut who looked like W. H. Auden, wrote like James Joyce, strode through the Village in her signature serapes, had breakfast at Bigelow’s with Richard Wright, got drunk at the White Horse Tavern with Dylan Thomas, palled around with Truman Capote and Carson McCullers, kept a vast collection of dolls in her Bleecker Street apartment and regaled intimates with tales of her romantic conquests

(photograph via)

No one reads Thomas Beer, including me, though I’m using him to highlight Robert Nedelkoff’s list on Neglected Books. Nedelkoff writes: 

In the 1950s, during his first lectures at the University of Virginia, Faulkner mentioned that in the days when he read the Saturday Evening Post at his Oxford postmaster’s job instead of delivering the magazine, he had admired Thomas Beer’s (1889-1940) stories and had learned something of characterization and plot from them. He asked if any of the students had read Beer; there was silence. He asked if any had heard of him. One student had heard of Beer’s biography of Stephen Crane and of his bestseller of ’26, The Mauve Decade. Others who’ve admired Beer’s work include Lewis Mumford, historian Frank Friedel and Carl Van Vechten (with whom Beer had some aspects of style and sensibility in common). The Fair Rewards is a portrait in novel form of the American theater from 1890 to 1920, and well illustrates Beer’s gift for delineating pre-World War I America in a somewhat melancholy, elliptical fashion. Long out of print.

No one reads Tom Whalen. (Cover by Matthew Feyld for Whalen’s Dolls)