Breakfast in the Ruins by Barry N. Malzberg

Author:Barry N. Malzberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 1416521178
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2007-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

—November 2005

Rage, Pain, Alienation and Other Aspects of the Writing of Science Fiction

The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America, by Richard Kostelanetz. Sheed & Ward, $12.95; New York, 1974; 434 pp. plus bibliography and index.

Kostelanetz's basic theory, articulated over several chapters and with an occasional awesome specificity, is that a small cabal of (mostly Jewish) intellectuals now in their fifties and sixties seized control of the major publishing/critical/review outlets shortly after World War II, exert something approaching complete control over those who would have a major career in American letters and won't let anyone new in. Most specifically, Kostelanetz (himself now thirty-six) claims that almost no American writer under forty has been able to achieve a wide audience for serious work much less critical acknowledgement; with the exceptions of Renata Adler, Joyce Carol Gates and Thomas Pynchon (two women and an enigma) the youngest American writers of high reputation are Phillip Roth and Susan Sontag, both over forty.

The cabal, Kostelanetz states, has erased almost all competing schools—the southern agrarian, the old New England Protestant—by taking over the careers of a few of its more noted members and ignoring or suppressing the work of others. The most devastating weapon available to this cabal—which stretches from the offices of Random House to those of the Partisan Review to the editorships of many of the mass magazines like Harper's to the offices of certain literary agents to the New York Review of Books and the Sunday Times Book Review—is not to attack but to ignore, and its hold upon the small, tempestuous world which controls access to the observable literary media is so complete that it can virtually create, suspend or deny reputations as effortlessly as it can convene a cocktail party . . . at which most of the real business is contracted anyway.

The book was rather guiltily and prominently reviewed in most of the media which Kostelanetz attacks in a kind of unanimity of two-pronged response: 1) Mr. Kostelanetz is just jealous and envious of those who have succeeded; there is no cabal, just a bunch of nice, mutually helpful people some with common roots who are always looking for good new writers and good new work, just can't find enough of it but we're so fair-minded that we're reviewing this book right here, and 2) anyway, all those mostly unknown writers who Kostelanetz cites as being starved out of the markets aren't any good anyway, judging from the excerpts of their work he quotes. He just wants to promote his coterie which is less talented than those coteries which have made it, not that there are any coteries at all, of course. We're all just good friends here.

The book then disappeared into the basements of libraries (which is where I picked up my copy a year after publication) and to the remainder tables; it has never been paperbacked to my knowledge and has had no visible influence upon the course of the markets to say nothing of the

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