Magic Hours (11 page)

It would be easy to assume that Wenclas is doing a lot of alienated socio-economic posturing here. I think it would be far too easy to assume this. The piece's early publication date and simpler, less hysterical tone suggests a writer whose voice has not yet been calcified by rejection and outside indifference, a writer who still had faith that the power of his human outrage, stated well, might allow him a way out of his desperation, that might make others
awake
. And yet, in his title, Wenclas has one thing wrong. The “real” America is not poor and desperate, just as the real America is not young and wealthy and hip. They are both America, and both can be written about in revelatory ways. Wenclas is living in Wenclas's America. It is his duty as a writer to convey that America to his reader, and here, at least,
he does so well. I wonder how much work Wenclas has in this voice, and if it's as good. I wonder also if it would even matter, knowing too well the likely fate of even a superbly conceived piece of work dealing with the realities of our American underclass: regretful rejection and cheerful good wishes, followed, of course, by a completely understandable authorial despair. I then find myself thinking about the ULA's arguments even more, and I wonder if the fact that I am so surprised by how riled their arguments make me might not suggest that many of them have, in fact, an unpleasant tincture of truth.

 

 

Several people told me that any remotely personal dealings with members of the ULA uncovers not some secret cabal of literary anarchists but folk who are basically polite and, indeed, almost shy. One on one, I was told, ULA members come off less as fearless statue-topplers than maladjusted adolescents who have decided that the best way to get a pretty girl's attention is to snap her bra. It is when they gather that the problems begin (also like adolescents). The
Open City
poet (and lead singer and songwriter for the Silver Jews) David Berman learned as much when he sent a lacerating letter to Wenclas challenging the ULA to a “relevance read-off.” Upon receiving Wenclas's sharp though polite reply, Berman shot back, “Look King, if you're going to be so civil about this then disregard my first letter. I thought you were hot-headed assholes looking for a fight.... Obviously I'm talking to the wrong guy. Who's the head asshole over there? Tell him to call me.”

During an interview conducted over e-mail, I asked Michael Jackman about this occasional severance between the ULA's spiteful tactics and the personalities of its individual members. He responded, “I think I know what you're getting at with this
question. I can probably sit down and have a civil conversation with you. I can pass. I can even make my voice sound just like those voices on NPR.... In any event, sure, we're caring and decent people. I'd say that the most caring and decent people are belligerent when faced with injustice.”

Although I can hardly claim to know him, I like Jackman. Possibly this is because I have a high tolerance for people who regard things that offend them as “injustice.” I posed a series of fairly pointed questions and Jackman answered them quickly, intelligently, and well. When I asked if the ULA can appreciate how blatantly jealous it appears by attacking the writers it does, Jackman said my question reminded him of high school, in particular the timeless propensity of popular kids to look upon the actions of unpopular kids, no matter how innocuous, as an attempt to get the popular kids' attention. “How self-satisfied does somebody have to be to look at the opposition and simply see envy!” Jackman fired back. “What blind arrogance!” That his mind instantly retreated to the bivouacs of Phys. Ed. and prom is probably more revealing than he intended to be, but his point stands that fiercely opposing another person does not necessarily mean that all opposition is birthed in envy. “The ‘big brainy writer's club' simply presents us with an appropriate target,” Jackman went on. “They do an excellent job of representing everything we regard as foul. They are a smarmy, backslapping network of people who have very little experience out there in the world.” When I asked which writers Jackman admires, he mentioned Charles Bukowski. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Bukowski's initial experience with the world was largely consigned to seeing it through the bottom of a shot glass when he was not delivering people's mail. While this does not make him a bad writer, it certainly does not make him a good writer either.

I realized about here that Jackman was not actually criticizing these big-brained writers themselves, as writers. My secret suspicion is that he has probably read the writers he professes to loathe carefully and, somewhere within him, found at least something to admire. Otherwise they would not make him so angry. He was criticizing, instead, the image of these writers. In Jackman's mind, these writers have “very little experience out there in the world”—a ridiculous position in itself;
everyone
has experience out there in the world, seeing that everyone actually
lives
in the world—because, for him, these writers are only images. Images do not have experience. They are
images
.And this is the problem. It is an old problem, but it is still a problem.

If serious reading is in peril, and I believe it is—though I also believe that
in peril
may well be the default condition of serious reading—maybe it is because, for many, serious reading is increasingly revolving around nothing but image. Writers become brands or poses rather than individuals trying to communicate something human to their readers. What is particularly horrifying about all this is the fact that the writers themselves are rarely to blame for their images. To talk about books with many in the publishing industry and God knows I have been as guilty of this as anyone, becomes less an occasion to discuss books than to conjure up some unreal quasi-world of byzantine intrigue and thrillingly naked literary Darwinism: Who is up. Who is down. Whose book sold. Whose book did not. How success has ruined A. How B is no longer in. How C never wrote anything good after the divorce. It is little wonder that the manner in which this gossipy system publishes many writers' work appalls those it excludes. I often find it appalling myself, and I used to do it for a living and might well, someday do it again.

Literature is sacred. It is as sacred to me as anything I know. I suspect that most editors and agents feel the same way, if only
during the quiet hours of the night. But there is always the issue of how one goes about selling the sacred without defiling it. There is the issue of how one goes about superintending the sacred when ten of thousands of fellow brethren, some of them abundantly insane but many of the truest sort of heart, want to add to its flame. What does one tell them? That they are not holy enough? However one personally and professionally elects to handle these troubling issues, a tiny piece of the sacred is ruined. For me, at least, all of this inevitably leads to a small, quiet grief. We would all like for our worlds to be bigger.

For Jackman and the ULA, however, it leads somewhere else. When I asked why the ULA does not attempt to call attention to the numerous published novels that disappear from public view so completely it is as though they were never published, he replied that the ULA is “not on a level playing field. We are engaged in a kind of cultural warfare here, and we're a small bunch of guerillas taking on a large opponent with vast resources.... If you're small and your opponent is large, attack—then the opponent has to devote resources to its defenses.” He went on, “It's shocking to me how the ULA apparently believes in writers and believes in literature more than the people who control the industry” I countered that the people who control the industry know horrendously well how poorly most books sell—even those that are “hyped.” “I can't think of any other business that operates with that catastrophic lack of vision!” Jackman responded. “Every business in this country tries to court success aggressively, it would seem, with the exception of literature.”

It is sentiment such as this that makes me admire Jackman, even as I recognize that he does not always know what he is talking about, even as I suspect that, if
The Corridor
is any indication, he could not write his way out of an issue of
Ranger Rick,
and even as I believe his literary judgment to be basically not so good. He is
a nobly unreasonable person leading an unreasonable group seeking to unreasonably alter the terms of a fundamentally unreasonable debate. Not only that of commerce versus art but art as it is enriched by ethics and ethics as they are challenged by social injustice. He is far from the only writer concerned with such matters, but he clearly believes he is. This strange, bug-eyed moral certainty is what is interesting about the ULA and what is repellent about the ULA. But it is usually more interesting than repellent. It is also more moving, especially when the ULA sucks the venom from its voice and speaks more to its very human concerns.

I wrote earlier of the sacred. Indeed, literary movements have a typical development not unlike that of religion. They begin in revelation, grow in consolidation, mature in strength, decay into complacent necrosis, suffer schism and partial inner destruction, and then are born anew. If the ULA follows this traditional arc, one of two things will happen. They will either grow frustrated, stop writing, surrender their faith, and disappear; or one of them, or two of them, possibly three of them, but no more, will publish or self—publish something that finds an audience large enough to move the traditional publishing houses and larger magazines to swing their censer before the ULA's eyes. Any such success will, no doubt, be a moment of some philosophical difficulty. The money will in all likelihood be convincing enough to allow these lucky ULA writers to swallow their rancor toward the system that shunned them, and with weighty hearts they will step into the bloody crossroads where art and commerce meet. Perhaps, then, the ULA will become the literary equivalent of, say, Episcopalianism. Suddenly,
they
will be the ones turning away expectant apostles.
Theirs
will be the door to which many will nail their bad-tempered theses. I personally hope for the latter, both because I believe that the ULA's movement is fundamentally one of hope and because I suspect that only success will
convince the ULA that art, like death, is life's great leveler. We all grieve of it equally, and at no point can any of us expect to be treated fairly.

 

—2003

—Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction”

 

T
o linger around the bookstore alcove dedicated to how-to-write books is to grow quickly acquainted with the many species of human expectation. One after another the aspirants come—the good-sport retiree who has decided to tell her life story, the young specter of manhood with scores to settle and truths to tell, the Cussler- and Patterson-overdosed executive aiming to blockbust his way to lakefront property and setting his alarm for ten—and shyly pull books off the packed shelves, level upon level of volumes promising to atomize the frustratingly numerous barriers between them and their dreams. Yet most of the people who frequent the how-to-write section will never become writers. It gives me no pleasure to make that observation, just as it gives me no pleasure to admit that I will never play swingman for the Indiana Pacers.

The question is whether these people will never become writers because they are not talented or because the books that congest the shelves of the how-to-write section are mostly useless. This sounds much sharper than I intend. Look around the how-to section. To your left: books on how to garden. To your right: computer programming. Down the way a bit more:
How to Play Five-String Banjo.
Most of the people who buy
these
books will not become professional gardeners or computer programmers or banjoists either. Would a successful computer programmer sneer at a person seeking to explore the pleasures of writing a few lines of code? Somehow one doubts it. Dreams, after all, are many, often mundane, and their private pursuit is the luxury of every dreamer.

But an even dustier (and probably unanswerable) question must first be posed: Can writing be taught? Both congratulation and flagellation tend to accrue upon the answers this question receives. Those who maintain that writing cannot be taught are in effect promoting the Priesthood Theory of Writing. In short, a few are called, most are not, and nothing anyone does can alter this fated process. Those who maintain that writing can be taught are, on the other hand, in grave danger of overestimating their ultimate value as teachers, though most of the writing teachers I know are squarely agnostic on the issue. My own view, if it matters: Of course writing can be taught. Every writer on the planet was taught, via some means, to write. Even those lacking the guildlike background of an MFA program or the master-apprentice experience of studying beneath an attentive teacher taught themselves to write—most likely by reading a lot of literature. To think about this question for more than a few moments quickly reduces it to the absurd.
All
human activity is taught. The only thing any human being is born to do is survive, and even in this we all need several years of initial guidance.

Harder to judge is the possibility of teaching a beginning writer how to be receptive to the very real emotional demands of creating literature. To write serious work is to reflexively grasp abstruse matters such as moral gravity, spiritual generosity, and the ability to know when one is boring the reader senseless, all of which are founded upon a distinct type of aptitude that has little apparent relation to more measurable forms of intelligence. Plenty of incredibly smart people cannot write to save their lives. Obviously, writerly intelligence is closely moored to the mature notion of
intellect
(unlike math or music, the adolescent prodigy is virtually unknown to literature) because writing is based on a gradual development of psychological perception, which takes time and experience. Writing can be taught, then, yes—but only to those who are teachable. Strong writers, especially, can be made, with sensitive guidance, even stronger. This is, in part, the service professional book editors provide. The problem is, truly fine writers have emerged from every cultural, sociological, and educational milieu imaginable. An even bigger problem is, at least for those who teach beginning writers, no one can predict who is teachable. Perhaps it is best, then, to teach them all.