Ad - Wednesday, July 4, 1984 - North Shore News

} had the good fortune to
stay there for a couple of
nights last winter, just long
enough to fali into a good
literary conversation. |!
should say that Can/Lit
didn’t figure prominently in
the discussion.

But | did have a few of my
worst fears about writing
confirmed. I’m not the onlI¥
one, it turns out, who thinks
we're well into a literary
‘“*Sunset Effect’? in the
English language and that
Marshall McLuhan, for all
the apparent evidence to the
contrary, was right.

The Audio-Visual Age
cometh.

The Algonquin, by the way,
is not only a perfect place to
muse aloud over the death of
literature, it 1s the place in
New York, and hence
presumably North America,
if not the world, to discuss
such matters.

Oh yes, it’s quite true.
When you get into the middle
of New York you quickly
realize why everybody there
thinks it’s the centre of the
universe. It is.

Back as early as the 1920s
and on into feceént years, the
Algonquin was the hangout
for the East Coast American
literati. It had something to
do, everybody assumes, with
the proximity of the offices
of the New Yorker, a gratis
copy of which is waiting in
your room when you check
in.

lt ts an old hotel, with a
cage elevator, attended by an
aging bell hop. In the dining

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Strictly personal

by Bob Hunter

A literate death

N NEW YORK there is a hotel called the

Algonquin, just across the street from the place
where they put out the New Yorker.

room it is all dark oak panell-
ing. The corridors are narrow
but decorated with prints of
James Thurber cartoons.

The rooms are. small,
brightly-lit, with turn-of-the-
century lithographs, oval
mirrors, at least seven
original paintings, a_ brass
bed and a deep old-style
bathtub with a chain to start
the water in motion. The
television set is tucked away
in a chest of drawers, where
you can’t see it.

‘“‘Lowry tried to
beat people up
right here in

the bar’’

EE

Downstairs, in the famous
Blue Bar, | get into a conver-
sation with a_ white-haired
gentleman who introduced
himself as David Diamond,
whom I actually remember
reading about in the various
Jack Kerouac biographies,
the guy who gave the nod to
have Kerouac’s first novel,
The Town and The Country,
published.

Diamond recalls drinking
in this very bar with the likes
of Thurber, Ernest Hem-
ingway, Edna Ferber and
Malcolm Lowry. He passes
along the gossip quickly.
Thurber was a ‘*bad drinker"’
who beat his wife. Lowry
tried to beat people up right

$4. 38%

here in the bar — see the
marks on the wall?

Today? The waiter, an ex-
marine who once lived in , of
all places, Port Coquitlam,
cheerfully shows off the club
he keeps under the bar. But,
alas, it is hardly ever used on
literary skulls any longer.
There aren’t any.

In Diamond’s view, it’s not
just that the great writers
have stopped coming to the
Algonquin. It’s just that
there aren't any great writers,
.in the old sense, period. *‘All
whe current’ great creative
writers are all regional! writers
who are scattered here and
there and don’t want to
belong to any group,
anyway.”’

He notes that writers aren’t
the celebrities they used to
be. For one thing, there are
too many of them. -The
‘Sunset Effect’? means a
phenomenon flares to its
most incandescent just before
the end. There are more
books published every day
now than used to be the case
in a century.

And then there’s that darn
old TY set. It just won’t stay
in the chest of drawers.
Novelists don’t count
nowadays until they translate
onto the screen. And so
novels aren’t written any
more. It is as simple as that.
Screenplays are written.
Nothing else.

‘Leaving the bar, I noticed
that the elevator in the
Algonquin squeaked and
clicked and creaked as
though it was just about at
the absolute point of metal
fatigue.

But it felt so good, for a
moment, not to be in the
future.

Ow
for the P

IVED —
exercise equ

while you
rice of t.

_ NEWS photo Stuart Davis
VANCOUVER MAY be getting a bus service as a company called Transit 177 hits the
road this week, but North Shore commuters still have to battle the line-ups with all but
West Vancouver’s blue buses off the roads.

4

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