Charles Thomas Samuels (1936–1974)

There's something especially demoralizing about postwar American letters. Whether it's Gore Vidal in his dickey shrieking about the philistinism of all his contemporaries, or a rare light like Nabokov apparently dropping his many cloaks and shawls of irony to implore you to understand that he really is an American writer, which I can only interpret as a kissing of the ring, or this. Preppy puke Charles Thomas Samuels ("Charles Thomas! Oh Charles Thomas, come rub Mumsy's thighs") interviews preppy puke John Updike, who waxes nostalgic about his good ol' school days at the ol' alma mater--oh, fuck the fuck off. I'm peaking too soon; I wanna keep on mocking this but it's too nauseating. He's good on his novels, which give a someways blinkered but still more balanced picture of that world; but there's something about the conversation that keeps leading them back to shit like the Harvard Lampoon (I've read Bored of the Rings, guys, and in its light being a Harvard Lampoon alumnus is rather a badge of shame than pride) and how all his neighbours feel sorry for John for trying to make a living doing something as unprofitable as writing. And making fun of the hippies for not trusting anyone over thirty, as if the youth cult didn't come straight out of the brains of the admen who were their friends and neighbours. And okay, so he's Southeastern Pennsylvania, not the Hamptons, and to a real cognoscento my lumping him in as a preppy probably just exposes the depth of my ignorance, but in said depths, all I can go on is the way Updike presents, and in that realm: yuck.… (més)