Sumner Locke Elliott (1917–1991)
Auteur van Careful, He Might Hear You
Over de Auteur
Werken van Sumner Locke Elliott
Silenzio, potrebbe sentirci...: romanzo 1 exemplaar
Careful, he might hear you, etc 1 exemplaar
Silenzio, potrebbe sentirci ... 1 exemplaar
Interval : a play in three acts 1 exemplaar
Bajo tutela 1 exemplaar
Gerelateerde werken
Tagged
Algemene kennis
- Officiële naam
- Elliott, Sumner Locke
- Geboortedatum
- 1917-10-17
- Overlijdensdatum
- 1991-06-24
- Graflocatie
- North Lyme Cemetery, Lyme, Connecticut, USA
- Geslacht
- male
- Nationaliteit
- USA
Australia (birth) - Geboorteplaats
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Plaats van overlijden
- New York, New York, USA
- Opleiding
- Cranbrook School, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Beroepen
- novelist
playwright - Relaties
- Locke, Sumner (mother)
- Prijzen en onderscheidingen
- Patrick White Award (1977)
Leden
Besprekingen
Lijsten
Prijzen
Misschien vindt je deze ook leuk
Gerelateerde auteurs
Statistieken
- Werken
- 19
- Ook door
- 2
- Leden
- 364
- Populariteit
- #66,014
- Waardering
- 3.7
- Besprekingen
- 13
- ISBNs
- 58
- Talen
- 5
Perhaps herein lie the clues to the fatal flaw of his second novel, 1966's Some Doves and Pythons. The novel focuses on Tabitha Wane, a talent agent who - when we open in medias res - is organising a house party that will prove crucial to retaining and obtaining key clients, while also stabilising her many personal relationships, which are equally as manipulated and driven by Tabitha's ego as her private ones.
Elliott's talent as a writer is evident from the first page. He writes polyphonically, with a chorus of voices interrupting each other, reflecting in flashbacks, with some sections in free indirect discourse, other sections lengthy conversation pieces. The expanding and contracting timescale is (somewhat) modernist and the structure, with Tabitha's rise and fall and rise, is expertly thought out.
Some Doves and Pythons doesn't fail, exactly, but it is ultimately unremarkable for two key reasons, both of which I believe relate to Elliott's lengthy experience in television and radio dramas. First of all, the subject matter is simply inconsequential. A scheming talent producer who realises, over the course of a country house weekend, that the people in her life must be valued as friends more than as means to an end, well that's just dandy. It would've made a great Sunday night drama in the era of live television, when audiences expected to see everything from Ibsen to Coward appear on their screens regularly. As the subject for a full-length novel the reader grows weary of the sheer emptiness.
Second, and more importantly, is the dialogue. Now, don't get me wrong, the dialogue is vibrant enough, if not quite sparkling. But it struck me, midway through the novel, that I was reading a play. Truly. During his decades as a popular scriptwriter, Elliott had also written a play which appeared (very briefly) on Broadway in the 1950s. I wouldn't be surprised if this novel began as an idea for a stage piece. Elliott is stage-managing a production, and nowhere is that more in evidence than the endless use of italicising of individual words in a sentence or often of individual syllables! Yes, he is prone to informing the reader of exactly how a line should be spoken, because he doesn't trust his dialogue to do its work without an actor speaking the words. (A problem Elliott must have worked through, as his later novels like Fairyland attest.) Anyone who is familiar with writing will see the script-based nature of the dialogue in sections such as this:
"Marvelous," Tabitha said to Barney. "Both Flora and Harry are marvelous people. Good people. Of the earth, earthy." She was moving a green glass to replace the pewter on the mantel. "But they don't understand charm."
In essence, the novel is appealingly written at times but can't overcome these qualms. Where Elliott succeeds more is in the moments of individual character analysis, which had made his first novel so appealing and would earn him justified acclaim for some of his later works. The sequence where Tabitha finally asks her longtime confidante Barney about his sexuality (in a very roundabout way) feels poignant and sensitive. And the most well-drawn character is Tabitha's housebound mother, who tolerates the house parties while being unable to see her daughter as anything other than the troubled but determined child she had once been. Edith:
"disdained the trappings of the past, however. She was, by nature, unsentimental. She would not pick and pry through old boxes of mementoes, faded pictures of the dead. She avoided the obituary columns, preferring not to know that another of her friends was dead, relying on the distillation of her mind to summon them at will to her, and so the slow-motion figures revolved around her, untouched by age, bright-eyed and brown-haired, immortal. The past and present merged."
As far as I can tell, the novel has not been reprinted in several decades. When I went to my local library to request their archived copy, the librarian wasn't even sure if it still existed, as they had lost some books in a flood several years ago. The copy had survived but, even then, I had to create the Goodreads entry! Perhaps I will be the only person who reads this novel in the 21st century, and I don't think it will be a great loss if that is so. But still, for the sake of the thoughtful and sensitive Mr Elliott, I'm glad someone did.… (meer)