Carl Rollyson

A MARVELOUS LIFE: THE AMAZING STORY OF STAN LEE by DANNY FINGEROTH (St. Martin's Press/Macmillan) offers a behind-the-scenes look at how Stan Lee became known as the voice and face of comics. As editor, publisher and co-creator of Marvel, he was the glue that held the industry together. With creative partners including Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko--with whom he had tempestuous relationships that rivaled any superhero battle--Lee created world-famous characters including Spider-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, and the Hulk.

But Lee's career was haunted by conflict and controversy. Was he the most innovative creator in the comic book industry? Was he a lucky no-talent whose only skill was taking credit for others' work? Or was he something else altogether? In A MARVELOUS LIFE, Fingeroth attempts to answer these questions while offering his unique insider's view of Stan Lee, delving into his invention of Marvel Comics, how he redefined the word hero, and reconstructed the world's idea of how a story should be told.

"There's more about Stan Lee in this roller coaster of a book than I thought I'd ever want to know. But I couldnt stop reading it. Danny Fingeroth gives us, page after page, rapid and cogent insights into the Marvel world, the comics universe, and Stan Lee as innovator, ring master, high-stakes gambler, con man, and an indefatigable charmer. And visionary, as well. Of course, Stan would want to take the book apart, and put it together again."

--JULES FEIFFER (assisted Will Eisner on The Spirit, and authored The Great Comic Book Heroes)

In Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl, The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West, and Rebecca West and the God that Failed: Essays, I've done my best to revive her reputation. From time to time the revival seems underway but then stalls.  Here is my take on why: 

The Rebecca West Mystery

 
I admire Sylvia Plath's concern with politics, with understanding how her own life is connected to the polity. She shares this conviction with Rebecca West, and almost every day I think about what an opportunity was missed because Plath did not know or understand Rebecca West. Plath watched West testify at the pornography trial of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. In her journal Plath called her "Lady Rebecca West," revealing she really had no idea who West was.

How could this be?  Plath had been well educated at Smith College and Cambridge University. She had read through the canon of Western philosophy and literature. She had worked as a journalist while still at Smith but seemed not to know about West's own groundbreaking journalism in The New Yorker, one of Plath's favorite magazines and the one she wanted publish in. She was taught by a generation of women who would certainly have read West and perhaps even taught her.  But, with the exception of the Chatterley trial, there is no sign of West on any Plath syllabus, letter, or journal entry. 

It would be easier to understand if Plath had simply rejected West, an ardent anti-Communist that could well have put off Plath, a pacifist who decried anti-Communist hysteria and the execution of the Rosenbergs. A generation of women had been put off by West. So Doris Lessing told me, saying West's politics had delayed by decades Lessing's own understanding of West's importance. Only when Lessing's own leftist politics changed to a critique of Communism did Lessing begin to take West's measure and realize what she had denied herself.

In Plath's case, I suspect the example of Virginia Woolf obliterated any alternative—as it still does today for many scholars who ignore West or just treat her as a difficult case. Even rehabilitations of West, like Jane Marcus's Young Rebecca, rhapsodize about her early feminism and attacks on the Conservative establishment. West's marriage to a banker and her country estate did not sit well with her earlier nonconformity. Woolf's novels and essays, coupled with her suicide and the sense of loss that self-annihilation instilled in her readers robbed West of an audience. West was simply too robust, too extroverted, too much a part of the established world. Woolf herself recoiled in her meetings with West and yet could not get enough of a West so attuned to the world OUT THERE.  

Virginia Woolf, if I may start an argument, fits very well into English departments. You can teach her novel after novel. West wrote novels too, of course, but they have been crowded out by her journalism and the verdict that she is not modernist enough, alienated enough, and did not suffer in quite the right way to serve as a role model or a canonical figure. West herself referred to the interstices in her body of work, and the canvas of her achievement is too much for most English professors to cover, since they would have to encompass history, journalism, art history, biography, esthetics, philosophy, politics and much more. Far more convenient to reside in Woolf's compact novels and essays and avoid the brilliant sprawl of Rebecca West's work. 

West would seem less untidy if, as in the case of Isaiah Berlin, her essays were collected. They would fill several volumes. But she opposed such repackaging, telling Berlin to his face that she did not see why he came out with essay collections so often. She collected herself once, in Ending in Earnest: A Literary Log. Her other essay-driven collections, like The Meaning of Treason and A Train of Powder, were rewritten and augmented as book-length narratives. She did not publish volumes of literary logs, as have writers like John Updike and Gore Vidal.  She seems to have treated work once published as just that—a one off—not to be served again like leftovers. Yet her remains are brilliant and survive in her astringent prose, whatever you think of her opinions. No one reads Vidal, I hope, because they agree with all that he says. But to West such essay-mongering seemed stale. New work engaged her. She wanted to know what was next. 

I don't know if a collected edition of West's essays would revive her reputation, but they deserve that treatment for both their historical and literary importance—to show how much of her writing defined an age but also what we still need to know about how literature, history, politics, art, and so much more, come into the purview of a great writer.