Tongues of Fallen Angels: Conversations with Writers

by Selden Rodman

Selden Rodman’s  Tongues of Fallen Angels  is a collection of conversations with twelve ranking authors, leading men of letters in the Western Hemisphere, with accompanying informal photographs. From Spanish Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, the late Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz. From Vinicius de Moraes and Joan Cabral de Melo Neto. From the poet-playwright Derek Walcott. From the United Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg. Ernest Hemingway, Stanley Kunitz, and Norman Mailer. An impressive list, and all the more so given Rodman’s remarkable power to give human substance to figures whose everyday words have been generally ignored in favor of their writings and other public pronouncements. When Rodman’s  Conversations With Artists  appeared in 1957, it aroused a storm of controversy, intentionally polemical, it became a storm center in the battles then raging in the art world. Rodman’s journals also contained records of fiery bouts with novelists and poets of stature. He was urged at the time to publish them, but refrained, preferring to wait for a book of a different, more empathic intent, in putting together  Tongues of Fallen Angels , Rodman––the editor of such seminal anthologies as  One Hundred British Poets  and  One Hundred American Poems ––forcefully asserts the essential social role of the creator. ’’The minor poet,” he declares, ’’is primarily concerned with form or innovation; the major one uses these tools almost unconsciously to say something he feels he has to say––and which the world will be better for hearing.”

Genres: Art

271 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1974

About the author

Cary Selden Rodman (February 19, 1909 – November 2, 2002) was a prolific American writer of poetry, plays and prose, political commentary, art criticism, Latin American and Caribbean history, biography and travel writing—publishing a book almost every year of his adult life, he also co-edited Common Sense magazine.

Reviews

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/4 stars

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alan Ginsberg: What has man accomplished that the blue whale has not?
Selden Rodman: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
Alan: Alright, but what is Beethoven saying in the Ninth except "respect the blue whale"?

The one great redemption for a failed writer, an angel who never took flight, is to get great writers to go on record in conversations with him. Selden Rodman spent years in North and South America interviewing the greats of poetry and prose, eliciting scintillating conversation and anecdotes for fans and future biographers. From a chat with Ernest Hemingway in Havana: "I'm just trying to write about some of the worst times humanity has suffered since the Dark Ages". Mixing it up with Robert Frost: Selden: "I thought you might like to pay your disrespects to Wallace Stevens. Tell him he should write only about the insurance business". Frost: "Worse than that. I told him he wrote bric-a-brac, not poetry". Another bout of poet re poet, Alan Ginsberg on Ezra Pound: "Have you read Pound's latest Canto, 'The scientists are in terror/and the European mind stops'?. The poets are not in terror". Flying down South America way Selden brings out the worst from Jorge Luis Borges, not that that was very hard to do. Selden: "I have just come here to Argentina from Brazil". Borges: "Brazil is just an extension of Africa. Do the Brazilians even have a literature?" And in Chile, a brighter note from Pablo Neruda: "I love the lyrics of the Beatles, especially 'Eleanor Rigby', and want to be the first to translate them into Spanish". This is literary conversation at the Samuel Johnson and Vladimir Nabokov level. Not to be missed.

[Troy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Until a few months ago, I had never heard of Selden Rodman, but now I think he may be my favorite interviewer ever, even more than Oriana Fallaci. Mr. Feldman is smart, perceptive, fearless, and funny. I like his candor, his enthusiasm, and his insight into writing, poetry, and novels.

As in Selden's Conversations with Artists , the author seems to know most of the writers he interviews on a personal level, and he deeply loves (with reservations) the work of every author he interviews. And he has no problem calling out Jorge Luis Borges on his hermeticism, or telling Norman Mailer that he agrees with the feminist critiques of Mailer's books by Kate Millet and Germaine Greere. He tells Hemingway that he should down play, or at least parody, his macho image, and calls Pablo Neruda out on his prior stance for Stalin. He has a great and fearless conversation with Derek Walcott about race, and chides everyone for not reading A Hundred Years of Solitude. On top of all of that, his book is filled with poetry; usually poetry that Selden has translated himself, and he LOVES poetry. His love is infectious, and after reading this, I guarantee you'll want to read every author mentioned in this book (and although there are only a handful of interviews, hundreds of writers are mentioned).