save us from relevance
At TEV, Mark Sarvas interviews Jonathan Lethem about Daniel Fuchs. (There's a fun game there - substituting randomly generated names in place of these three. You could use the Wikipedia random article search. Stewie Griffin interviews Thomas Edison about Catherine the Great. Aleister Crowley interviews Dolly Parton about Vladimir Putin. Anyway...)
Daniel Fuchs is most well-known to me for his early portrait of hipsterville, Summer in Williamsburg, which is included in this recent collection of Fuch's novels with an introduction by Lethem. Like many writers from the '30s, he also has Hollywood Stories.
TEV: Fuchs headed to Hollywood but unlike Fitzgerald and Faulkner (with whom he collaborated), he neither imploded nor became embittered. Rather, he seemed to thrive in the vanilla sunshine and wrote without disdain about being a writer for the studios. (I love his "A Hollywood Diary" from last year's collection The Golden West; it's a wonderful bit of freeze-frame of a bygone era when screenwriters were contract workers.) Do you think his unwillingness to at least bite the hand that fed him contributed in any way to his marginalization by East Coast Literary Types?
JL: Yes, he's refreshingly clear-eyed and good-humored about the advantages and disadvantages of writing for the movies in the great era of the studio system, and provides a much less hysterical window into the fate of a studio writer than the pervasive Barton Fink images suggests. And I don't doubt (as a writer who's flitted from West Coast to East in my own subject matter, and is now about to flit back again) that there can be a self-reinforcing fascination in New York intellectual circles with local topics -- a leaning that may sometimes overrate certain dullish books that happen to be P.C. (provincially consonant) and either overlooks or patronizes books from elsewhere -- and which, even more specifically, might fail to disguise disappointment when one of its 'own' violates Eastcentricity (I remember some memoirist of NY in the '50's, though I can't remember whom, saying that a certain segment of the New York scene had never forgiven Bellow for fleeing to Chicago). But then again, how can we blame the marginalization of Fuchs-as-novelist on anyone but himself? I mean, given that he A: basically quit, and B: persistently, for decades, whenever anyone asked, downgraded his own accomplishment, claimed he'd used up what little he had to say and hence was no particular loss to the reader?
