“I’m beginning to believe,” I went on, “that the oral history doesn’t exist.” This remark came from my unconscious, and I was barely aware of the meaning of what I was saying … but the next moment, glancing at Gould’s face, I knew as well as I knew anything that I had blundered upon the truth about the oral history.
Mitchell came to believe that Gould had been lying for decades about the state of his magnum opus in order to convince friends to keep supporting him. The composition books he had been able to inspect contained not oral history but variations on a handful of autobiographical topics. “[Gould] must have found out long ago,” Mitchell speculates, “that he didn’t have the genius or the talent, or maybe the self-confidence or the industry or the determination, to bring off a work as huge and grand as he had envisioned”; his constant scribbling in fact amounted to a desperate avoidance of the project he had set for himself.
Gould failed to write the history of the shirt-sleeved multitude, but he did, via Mitchell, manage to leave a literary legacy of a sort. Although initially disgusted by Gould’s deceptions, Mitchell comes to identify with him all the more strongly, in part because he himself has long been procrastinating writing an autobiographical novel, modeled on James Joyce’s Ulysses, which never comes to fruition. He even comes to have a sort of respect for Gould’s charade: “The Eccentric Author of a Great, Mysterious, Unpublished Book—that was his mask,” Mitchell marvels. “And hiding behind it, he had created a character a good deal more complicated, it seemed to me, than most of the characters created by the novelists and playwrights of his time.” Somehow, even in exposing Gould, Mitchell manages to glorify him. We’re back to the great man, ambitious and influential even in his failure.
【Hold court?】相关文章:
★ 英语音标分类详解
最新
2020-09-15
2020-08-28
2020-08-21
2020-08-19
2020-08-14
2020-08-12