Karl Shapiro's novel Edsel is a case in point. And finally, I can't resist mentioning short fiction by someone closely related to a poet. Before her final breakdown, Vivien Haigh-Wood Eliot produced some incisive sketches that appeared in her husband's The Criterion. She also wrote a few even better stories that still languish in the Bodleian Library. I've been struggling for quite a while to persuade someone to get these pieces into print.
Volcano is many a writer's secret place of repair.
Never mind the occasional creak of the turning plot wheel, and forget a certain thinness about Yvonne, Laruelle and Hugh, the novel's three subsidiary players. What is unforgettable is the lyric woundedness of the consul and his epochal collapse in Mexico. The whole process feels like a loss of innocence but an arrival, too. Dread and beauty-every iridescent sentence is shot through with both. Nothing like it has ever been written anywhere, with its weird mock seventeenth-century prose, its setting in a slave ship off the Guinea coast, and its fantastic allegory of women's oppression as the intimate result of the triangular trade.