in the words and thoughts of his characters is looking in the wrong direction. Seeking out a writer's "thoughts" violates the richness of the mixture that is the very hallmark of the novel. The thought of the novelist that matters most is the thought that makes him a novelist.

The thought of a novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters, in the juxtaposition of those characters, and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make--their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.

The thought of the writer lies in his choice of an aspect of reality previously unexamined in the waythat he conducts an examination. The thought of the writer is embedded everywhere in the course of the novel's action. The thought of the writer is figured invisibly in the elaborate pattern--in the newly emerging constellation of imagined things--that is the architecture of the book: what Aristotle called simply "the arrangement of the parts," the "matter of size and order." The thought of the novel is embodied in the moral focus of the novel. The tool with which the novelist thinks is the scrupulosity of his style. Here, in all this, lies whatever magnitude his thought may have.

Monday, March 17, 2014

from Marc Robinson's review of The Long Voyage: Selected letters of Malcolm Cowley, 1915 - 1987, edited by Hans Bak:

After reading Malcolm Cowley's first collection of verse, Blue