Topical Guide 867
Mark Dorset
I’m going to remind you of a couple of the epigraphs to At Home with the Glynns:
It is very good to copy what one sees; it is much better to draw what you can’t see any more but in your memory. . . . That way, your memories and your fantasy are freed from the tyranny of nature. — Edgar Degas to Georges Jeanniot (quoted by Otto Friedrich in Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet)
All good and true draughtsmen draw from the image imprinted on their brains, and not from nature. . . . When a true artist has come to the point of the final execution of his work, the model would be more of an embarrassment than a help to him. — Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (translated by Jonathan Mayne)
And also this:
Show me an epigraph and I’ll show you a novel which has too good an idea of what it’s about. — Stanley Elkin, “The Graduate Seminar”
Here is Zenta Sato’s “Theme for the Glynns” with his notes for it:
“The aging Peter, in his room in Small’s Hotel, brings to mind this scene from his past: On Main Street at night, a gentle breeze is blowing, as in chapters 25, 26, and 27. There he sees the Glynn twins and . . . himself, young Peter! The three of them are walking . . . no, no, they are waltzing, three pure souls dancing in the night air. He watches the three of them walking, and waltzing, and feels the bittersweet pain of nostalgia, and hears, in the distance, ringing bells: a new day has begun for him.”
Zenta Sato
Tokyo, Japan
October 1996
At Home with the Glynns is now available, free, at Apple Books. (Makes a great gift.)
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here.
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, Where Do You Stop?, What a Piece of Work I Am, and At Home with the Glynns.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.