Some notes on Belles Lettres Papers

 

 

https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-belles-lettres-papers-by-charles.html

 

Hard reviewer John Simon or soft Anthony Burgess link

Burgess is good at real masterpieces but not fake ones – he does not say they’re fake, he just uses his fake voice then they decide to have him review Norman Mailer’s massive Eguptian oeuvre and Margin says get a wire off to Tony soonest, he calls them by first name

Who the twenty five best writers in America are in response to Tool wanting Blles Lettres to award the Nobel prize… Mrs Tooling

Frank Page narrator had the idea but he was jesting, being ironic

Paul Bowles and Alice Walker the only two I know on one list

Most familiar on another James Baldwin John Cheever, Alison Lurie, William Maxwell, Joan Didion, Kerouac, Robert Penn Warren, Salinger, Thornton Wilder

Another, Chuckle, named himself as one of the 25

Frank and Margin decide they will come up with the list, they struggle over Donald Bartheleme, Thomas Pynchon and John Barth

Then they argue a bit with the staff over missing names

Margin says as I understand it, an experimental writer is a writer whose experiment has failed

She has a degree from William and Harry

Copy boy Art Folio made 30k from selling review copies, answered phone with ‘for whom does the bell toll?’

He also sells places on the bestseller list for five grand

Newbold Press new editor after Margin disagreeable, awful

He wants to put Irving and Bellow in the ring

He has a well known writer in closet with drink in one hand penis in the other urinating on Press’s coat then in room

Was Shakespeare gay? Nine newly discovered sonnets say he was – but then Noel Coward Rimbaud Verlaine are discovered within -Margin has the idea to claim it was all a joke

Husband said who the fuck is Harold Brodkey and where the fuck is Herman Wouk?

 

It’s impossible. Who is better Bellow or Updike? Mailer or Roth?

So they just mixed them

 

Boticelli look – combination of beauty and stupidity

Claire’s review like mine –no clue

 

Updike Vonnegut Eudora Welty John Irving, Wouk Mailer Woody Allen Malamud Michener Barthelme Arthur Miller Bellow Thomas Berger Roth de Vries Doctorow Anne Tyler

Most powerful literary magazine in the English language

Jonathan Margin, the present editor, is in trouble

His affair with his secretary, Claire Tippin, has become common knowledge

Margin’s wife – at dinner parties she sometimes set a separate table for him, telling guests he was too young to eat with them

 

Ed Princeps never met a book he did not like

Phil Flush the personnel drector who has an ethnic type for every job

 

Norman Mailer’s Egyptian novel

 

Ed had a disconcerting way of refering to well-known people by their first name. When it was ‘Pauline’, ‘Mordecai’, ‘Gore’ you knew whom he meant, but occasionally it would be ‘John’ or ‘Bill’, and you had to ask John who, Bill who.

John was Updike and he told them that Ed’s full first name was Editio, and then said ‘he is an original, isn’t he?’

Mailer’s novel is called Ancient Evenings and Ed says I’ll tell you what it’s like

 

It’s the Old Testaemnt written by Mel Brooks, ‘The Book of The Dead’ by Henry Miller, The Illiad by Woody Allen

They talk reviewer and then

 

I think Joyce Carol would know what to make of it         link to Carol

‘she has a high shit threshold, but not high enough’  said Barry, who had read from page 70 something and then 1200 or more and nothing came of it

 

Joyce Carol Oates does not have a high enough shit threshold to review Norman Mailer’s new novel, he repeats when this woman does not hear

 

Flaccid they say of some name to review it

Turned as if watching a tennis match at meeting

 

Who