Obituary: Vance Bourjaily, novelist

Published on Friday 3 September 2010 19:40

Vance Bourjaily, novelist. Born: 17 September, 1922, in Cleveland, Ohio. Died: 31 August, 2010, in Greenbrae, California, aged 87.

Vance Bourjaily was a novelist whose literary career, like those of Norman Mailer and James Jones, emerged out of the Second World War and whose ambitious novels explored American themes for decades afterwards. He died after slipping into a coma after a fall several days earlier, said his wife, Yasmin Mogul.

Bourjaily never achieved the top rank of recognition that was predicted for him after publication of his first novel, The End of My Life, in 1947, and he figured prominently when critics made lists of writers who were under-appreciated or whose promise had gone unfulfilled. But he had a long and substantial career in letters of the sort that was far more prevalent 50 years ago than it is today. Bourjaily was also a teacher who spent more than two decades at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and five years at the University of Arizona before becoming the first director of the Master of Fine Arts programme in creative writing at Louisiana State University. He worked as a journalist and an editor. He wrote short stories, essays and reviews. He was also a serious literary socialite.

"Everyone came to Bourjaily's parties in the early 1950s," Esquire magazine said about him in the 1980s, naming Mailer, Jones, William Styron and others as attendees.

At one party Bourjaily introduced Jones to the actor Montgomery Clift, a pairing that would lead to one of Clift's signature roles, the brooding bugler Prewitt in the film version of Jones's novel From Here to Eternity.

His novels often explored what it meant to be an American at a particular historical moment. His second book, The Hound of Earth (1955), grounded in the Cold War, is about an army scientist who has gone Awol in guilt-ridden flight after contributing to the development of the atomic bomb.

His third, The Violated (1958), a psychologically astute profile of four characters over 25 years - a period with the Second World War at its centre - prompted the critic Irving Howe to write that Bourjaily was "one of the few serious young novelists who has tried to go directly toward the center of postwar experience".

His other books include Confessions of a Spent Youth, an autobiographical tale largely about the war and sex; The Man Who Knew Kennedy, which tells of the decline into suicide of a young man who seemingly has everything, and which reflects Bourjaily's view that the nation's golden post-war years were curtailed by the assassination of the president in 1963; and Brill Among the Ruins, a Vietnam-era parable focusing on a middle-age Midwestern lawyer.As generally well reviewed as these and other books of his were, Bourjaily seemed always to be measured against his first, The End of My Life, which was commissioned by the editor Maxwell Perkins while Bourjaily was still in the army.

The novel, about a young man coping with his war experiences, was lavishly praised by the critic John W Aldridge in his influential book After the Lost Generation. Aldridge drew comparisons to Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

"No book since This Side of Paradise has caught so well the flavor of youth in wartime," Aldridge wrote, "and no book since A Farewell to Arms has contained so complete a record of the loss of that youth in war". Vance Nye Bourjaily was born in Cleveland in 1922. His father, Monte Ferris Bourjaily, a Lebanese immigrant, was a journalist. His mother, Barbara Webb, wrote features and romance novels.

After his parents divorced when he was 12, Bourjaily split his time between them in New York and Virginia.

He went to college in Maine, but interrupted his studies to serve in the war, first as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service in Syria, Egypt and Italy and later as an army infantryman in Japan.

He completed his degree after the war, but as he said in a 1987 radio interview, for a lot of college students of the era "our education was the Second World War".

Bourjaily lived for a while in San Francisco, where he was a feature writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, and then moved to New York, site of the memorable parties. He was a founder of Discovery, a short-lived literary journal of some cachet, and wrote reviews of Broadway shows for a new publication, The Village Voice. He left the city for Iowa and the writers' workshop in 1957.

Bourjaily was an avid outdoors man, a jazz aficionado and an amateur cornet player. His novel The Great Fake Book (1987) has an amateur jazz cornetist as a protagonist, and at Iowa he was known for organising jam sessions (and parties and pig roasts) at his farm.

"Vance was a key member of the workshop," said Marvin Bell, a poet who was Bourjaily's longtime colleague at the writers' workshop. "Not only for his teaching. For his socialising. There was a lot of socialising."

Bourjaily's first marriage, to Bettina Yensen, ended in divorce. Two of their children survive him: a daughter, Robin, and a son, Philip.

In addition to his wife, a former student whom he married in 1985, he is survived by their son, Omar; a brother, Paul Webb; a stepdaughter, Raissa Williams; four grandchildren; and a step-granddaughter.