Near the end of his life the famous French novelist Gustave Flaubert, said that he had lived for decades in an ivory tower, writing his books, but,
…..a sea of shit has been beating at the base of the tower and I’m afraid it has worn down its foundation..
That’s the quote as best I can do from memory. I can’t find it today, so my apologies to Flaubert and his many followers for any error.
Though I haven’t written about it before, I tried to get into an ivory tower too.
During my years in university studying literature in the 1970s, I was hoping to get into grad school, to leave behind the investigation work I’d been doing for the past ten years and make a living in the world of books. A university professorship is one way to get published without being part of the commercial book world.
I was hoping to spend the second half of my life in one of those ivory towers too.
Though I won a couple of awards, I was told, apologetically, that with the first one, money normally accompanied it, but the university’s financial status that year prevented it. The second award did have money, but I could only receive it if I signed up for grad school. Behind the eight ball with debt myself, instead I returned to the investigation of accident/personal injury claims, hoping that in few years I might pay off my loans and come back.
It never happened. Instead of life in an ivory tower, I spent most of my working life in a small boat out on that turbulent, heartless sea Flaubert talked about.
But I never lost my love of books. When I left university, I continued writing, not only fiction, but also what is commonly known as ‘literary criticism’.
Some of this is already on this site (click the category ‘Rescuing Fiction’ to see a list). The unexpected new interest in this website recently has included these essays.
Because I’ve been held up publishing my new book Autism Dreaming, I’ve decided to respond to this new interest by adding more of what I’ve written over the years. I’m working on that.
But to start with, I’ve decided to draw some attention to the very first one I put online, about twenty years ago on my previous website Shy Highway.
This was For Madmen Only, which I wrote for readers who are dismayed by the nebulous enigmatic ending of Herman Hesse’s 1920s novel, Steppenwolf. I showed that the ending of the story is not where everyone thinks it is.
For years For Madmen Only drew more visitors to Shy Highway than everything else on the site put together.
When I was forced to move from Yahoo to WordPress, for reasons I won’t get into, I lost those readers. But I still hope to get them back.
Steppenwolf is still a besteller. There are many Herman Hesse readers. If you’re one of them, you should read For Madmen Only. Here it is, as a free PDF:
Alan Conrad 