Re: House of Glass

    '....I'd like to think he would try to get away from the trap
    of writing things down as they happened to him ....'

    It is interesting, isn't it? When it comes down to it, all a writer
    has in the way of raw materials, the substances of his craft,
    are the memory traces from his own life. Yet the most vivid
    writers - those who give the strongest impression of writing
    'autobiographically' - have often been those who, working
    on the reports of others were able with their imagination to
    adapt their own experiences & assemble them into an even
    more 'real-feeling' reality than was available to those participating
    in the 'original' events.

    I'm thinking, of course, of my old obsession Ernie H. who,
    having spent only a day or two at the actual front reconstructed
    one of his great masterpieces, the retreat from Caporetto,
    by borrowing the second-hand accounts of those who had
    actually been there, plus news reports, plus geographical studies
    of the terrain, plus his own memories of lying in an ambulance
    with a macerated knee. So that people who - unlike him -
    HAD been there were, after reading his stuff, compelled to say:
    'THAT's the way it was....'

    Scottie B.

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Received on Wed Aug 21 14:33:31 2002