“Perhaps the trouble with literature in our time,” [Maxwell Perkins] wrote [Malcom] Cowley, “is that there aren’t as many rascals as there used to be.” [Max Perkins, Editor of Genius. Berg.]
This was the 1940’s. Makes me wish I’d held onto The Brooklyn Follies a bit longer to read Auster’s encomium on rascals again… The original meaning of rascal is “rabble.” A rascal to me, I suppose, is a person who gets into scrapes. Feel like Auster thought of a rascal similarly — a scrapper.
