Wood & Henry James (critic)

[Michael Bailey]

> know whut i mean, Vern?  but rebelling against the young rebels of the
> (19)50s and 60s with deeply subjective and timebound notions and
> admittedly spurious insights (like Kerouac, "you can't fall off a
> mountain" in Desolation Angels I think) -- one might well find James's
> well-considered considerations considerably refreshing
>

or Norman Mailer with his "psychology of machines" or Ginsberg's Howl,
and so forth...
Roth himself with his Greatest Hit, Portnoy - it's hard - hard like
adamantine hard - to imagine anything like that coming out of
James...but he seems to have adopted HJ as a sort of mentor and with
impressive results...

- random thought - is it slightly true to say the purpose of academic
writing is to settle something, while the purpose of fiction is to
stir something up?