“DEAR Mr. Algren,” a young woman writes from Wheaton (Ill.) College, “I am a freshman and am standing on the threshold of a literary career. What is my next move?”
“Your next move, honey,” I had to caution her, “is to take two careful steps backward, turn and run like hell. That isn’t a threshold. It’s a precipice.”
The girl appears to feel that she is about to be welcomed through the gates of that enchanted land named “The Smiling Side of American Life” by William Dean Howells; later to be packaged by Richard Nixon as “Our Free Civilization”; then telecast as Marlboro Country.
A smiling image yet sustained, in air-conditioned stillnesses, when summer is the season. Then Creative Writers’ Workshops, poetry seminars and Festivals of the Arts will materialize midst campus greenery. The Failure of Hemingway The Failure of Faulkner The Failure of Whitman The Failure of Melville The Failure of Crane The Failure of Twain The Failure of London and The Failure of Wolfe will be revealed by one-book novelists embittered by the failure of David Susskind to invite them to a party where they might have met George Plimpton or even Allen Funt. Just anybody.
Perpetual panelists will clobber perpetually rejected novelists with symbolisms concealed in the work of other perpetual panelists. Manuscripts will be returned bearing the instruction: Insert more symbols. This can happen anywhere but chances are better in Vermont.
There a kind of Sing-Along-With-Mitch picnic-king who can sing For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow, impersonate Dylan Thomas and denounce Jacqueline Susann for commercialism while counting his own house, will welcome cash-customers to his lonely-hearts literary supermart in the hills of Vermont, DEPOSIT REQUIRED ON ALL CARTS.
The mock-up poet will himself assure Miss Wheaton that nothing stands between her unreadable novel and its publication except consultation with a publisher’s representative; whose identity will remain undisclosed until she’s coughed up tuition for a season of creative picnicking (including a pass to the company store). At so much per diem.
The company-store pass won’t get her into Faculty Cottage because the Sing-Along Supervisor draws a sharp caste line between published and unpublished writers. Miss Wheaton won’t make this elitist group because not only is she unpublished but she’s not well-groomed enough to make up for it.
Well-groomed women, seeking sanctuary while a divorce-mill is grinding, will wheel up in Caddies. A Junior Editor, grown middle-aged in search of a self he’d loved and lost, will arrive by Mohawk Air bearing an initialed attaché case containing only a pinch-bottle of Haig & Haig and a signed copy of Atlas Shrugged. Poor girls from the Village will arrive in sandals, seeking a piece of the Establishment and higher heels. Pursued by studs, barefoot or finely shod; on the prowl for a piece of anything.
The authoress of one nonbook will explain how she made it in a man’s world. The editor of Seminal, a quarterly financed by his mother-in-law, will not reveal how he made it in a woman’s world. Then virgins budding between hard-covers, and paperback editors mildewing between soft, poor girls afoot and old girls a-wheeling, Discover-Me-And-I’H-Discover-You Faculty Wonders, a subscriber to The Famous Writers School who claims he wants Max Shulman’s autograph (that must be a put-on), one-bookers, non-bookers, publishers’ representatives, pinch-bottle vets, Miss Wheaton Supermart Dante and all, will spring hand-in-hand through the greenery and up and down the hall.
For one week or two or ten.
But after the grabstand clown has checked his holdings and counted all the carts in Vermont, Miss Wheaton will be left standing within the very door where she’d come in—to marvel at the emptiness of her own cart.
At so much per diem per diem.
Where had that “Publisher’s Representative” gone? Could that quickie in the greenery have been with nothing more than one more unpublished poet? If Breadloaf hadn’t been exactly a precipice it sure as hell hadn’t been a threshold.
“Good writing thrives like corn in Iowa City,” Miss Wheaton, still perplexed, reads in the N.Y. Times, “where 125 of the nation’s most promising writing students just signed up for another semester of agony and ecstasy at what is generally considered the best author’s course in the United States—the Iowa University Writing Workshop.”
A six-month deferment from the armed services or the chance to have a steady boyfriend free from parental supervision provides the ecstasy; the agony belongs to the parents footing the bills. For what is offered at Iowa is cover, concealment and sanctuary. Their parents’ whole purpose having been to protect their young, out of their playpens and into their teens, from winds of economic weather, the kids who come to the Iowa Workshop have never even been rained on, poor things. Their strongest passion is watching Batman and their greatest hope that they will never get wet.
“The mere fact that the younger American literary generation has come to the schools instead of running away from them,” Prof. Wallace Stegner of Stanford assures us, “is an indication of a soberer and less coltish spirit.”
Prof. Stegner says that exactly right. The younger literary generation has come on the run because it’s cold out there. The sobriety, and lack of coltishness, constitute their qualifications for reporting fashions or sports; or teaching “Creative Writing” on another campus. They bespeak a readiness to be cowed in return for a stall in the Establishment barn; at whatever cost in originality. They will not buck. They will not roar. At times they may whimper a bit, softly and just to themselves; but even that they will do quietly. For what it lacks in creativity, the Iowa Creative Workshop makes up in quietivity.
“Are you one of the quiet ones who should be a writer?” The Famous Writers School asks the same question that the founder of the Iowa Workshop—himself a “Famous Writer”—is asking: “If you are reserved in a crowd you may be bottling up a talent that could change your life. If you’ve been keeping quiet about your talent, here’s a wonderful chance to do something about it. The first step is to mail the coupon below for the free Writing Aptitude Test.”
The second step is to unbottle your money and send us some.
The University of Iowa is a good place to go if you want to become a journalist, a linguist, a zoologist, a jurist or a purist. Its Creative Writers Workshop is a good place to go to become a tourist. For it provides sanctuary from those very pressures in which creativity is forged. If you want to create something of your own, stay away.
For if the proper study of mankind is man, it follows that to report man one must himself first become one. How is one to create something who has not, himself, been created? How is one to make something without first having been made into something himself?
The style is the man: the personality that is unformed cannot create form; the young man or woman who is unintegrated himself cannot integrate wood, stone or language. Nobody can become anybody until life has pressured him into becoming somebody.
And as becoming somebody is a solitary process, not a group-venture, so art is a solitary process—not a field-trip in pleasant company.
Why has the Iowa Writers Workshop, in its thirty-five years of existence, not produced a single novel, poem or short story worth rereading? Because its offer of painless creativity is based on a self-deception. The student provides the deception and the school provides the group.
“Writers in groups are with few exceptions the most impotent and pernicious of tribes to infest the planet,” the playwright Ed Bullins assures a N.Y. Times interviewer, “it would be healthier for a writer to socialize with drug addicts than with a claque of hacks.”
Had the Times man gone to the kids, instead of playing patsy to the brass, he would have learned what they taught me:
“It’s a respectable way of dropping out.” “The longer I hang on here the longer I stay out of Vietnam.” “I had to find a school where I wouldn’t get kicked out for bad grades—either that or go to work for my old man.” “It may lead to teaching creative writing somewhere else.” “Too many squares around my home turf. I was getting conspicuous.” “There isn’t anything I really want to do—but hanging on here makes it look to my folks like I do.” “My parents keep pushing me to get married but I want to have fun and games first.” “I heard they were going to reevaluate the impact of literary naturalism on American writing and I want to get in on the ground floor.”
“Iowa City,” the Times man reveals the workshop’s advantages to poets who teach there, “is the place where a poet can relax in the knowledge that a regular paycheck will come in no matter how badly the book goes.” That it can go badly enough to embarrass readers, without stopping a paycheck, is demonstrated by the founder-poet’s own odes to fried rice.
Of the eighty-odd students whose work I read at Iowa at least thirty were too disturbed, emotionally, to write coherently in any language. Only two used English lucidly; and neither of these was native-born.
This is not to put down summer extension courses in photo-journalism, science-fiction, writing whodunits, juveniles, or how to train your chihuahua to be an attack dog. Such workshops can prove commercially worthwhile as well as being fun; and campus rates are usually more reasonable than those prevailing at Fire Island or Aspen.
Therefore pay no heed, Miss Wheaton, to Festivals of the Arts in spring, poetry seminars in summer nor “Creative Workshops” in the fall. Avoid hootenanies in Vermont unless you’re paid to appear or own a piece of the maypole. What “poet” would be peddling rides on a wooden carousel in the hills if he could bring a horse-and-rider alive on paper?
Nor pay any heed to the professional critic. He is not a man who has succeeded in literature but one who has been defeated by it. He knows everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
The relationship of the writer to the critic is comparable to that of the jockey to the chartwriter. After the horse has been ridden, and the risk taken, the chartwriter will analyze, for tomorrow’s bettors, a race that, for the rider, is forever done. What the rider has yet to learn cannot be gained from anyone who has not had the living animal under him.
If God can’t help him, both jockey and writer know, neither chartwriter nor critic can. For it is the imminence of the actual experience, whether riding a thoroughbred or enduring the shock of reality directly, at first-hand, that make the findings of the critic or chartwriter remote to the rider or the writer.
Imminence of death or prison also makes sharper the outcast sharpie’s eye. His freedom being dependent upon distinguishing between fox and hare, he becomes both hare and fox. Fear of the pursuer and compassion for the pursued become quickened in him; as they become dulled in those who are neither hunter nor prey.
“Why shouldn’t a cheat speak well sometimes,” one of Gorki’s thieves wants to know, “when decent people speak like cheats?”
Between the year that James Haggerty assured us that the moral of the U-2 incident was “Don’t get caught,” and the year the Pentagon Papers were leaked, we became increasingly aware that people in government must sometimes choose between losing their positions or speaking like cheats. It should come as no particular shock, therefore, that those whose hands control levers in the American literary establishment may become most outspoken for respectability when their own operations become disreputable.
“What this novelist wants to say,” one lever-puller becomes suspicious of a novel wherein respectability does not depend upon private proprietorship, “is that we live in a society whose bums are better men and women than preachers and politicians and otherwise respectables (sic). This startling proposition . . .”
What’s really so startling about preachers and politicians lying as fast as a dog can trot? Or of “bums” being better men and women than these same “otherwise respectables”? The designation of itself, by the American middle-class, as “decent,” and of the unpropertied as “bums,” is demonstrated by this critic’s aptitude for concealing that class’s corruption while proclaiming its morality.
Why was it that nobody laughed when Malcolm X spoke; while multitudes chuckled when Hubert Humphrey wept on TV? Could it have been because, in racing his public-relations image from coast to coast, crying “You belong to us!” while clutching Lester Maddox’s sleeve and, a week later, weeping stage-business tears over Martin Luther King’s casket, that all Humphrey achieved was a demonstration of how weak and joyless a politician can appear while preaching strength through joy? Wasn’t his failure to reach people due, at least in part, to the recollection of Malcolm X achieving strength through anguish?
“The strength of any nation lies in the children of its street-corners, its poolrooms and prisons and its alleys,” Malcolm X had already forewarned us, “not in the power of its technology.”
The direction Mr. Bullins points to young writers, out of the establishment and onto the street-corners, is therefore sounder than Prof. Stegner’s confidence in campus sanctuaries.
Prof. Stegner is laboring under the illusion, common to academics, that a knowledge of the best that has been thought and said has a compassionating impact upon the human spirit: a premise of American criticism since the days of the Transcendentalists; who came up with their best ideas under a campus moon.
That a dedication to the printed word may conceal an indifference toward cruelty; and that understanding of justice and human dignity becomes enfeebled in proportion to one’s sophistication should be obvious by now. Unless we’ve forgotten that it was scholars well-disciplined in Shakespeare, Hegel, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Dante and Darwin, who yet devised the cultural programs at Auschwitz.
For the most dangerous societies are not those whose tribesmen sacrifice a bear to appease their gods; nor whose gurus distinguish themselves by caking their skins with ocher-colored mud. More ominous are those foregatherings of begoggled PhD’s, their skins caked by sun-dried erudition, most of them earless, who perform linguistics so magical that that which is unreal is made to seem real; that which is empty to appear full: that which is false to seem true. Sacrifices endured at such ancestral rituals prove bloodier, ultimately, than that of one stupid bear.
The secret of linguistic magic lies in forcing matter to fit the form; rather than permitting form to be shaped by the matter. Dr. S.I. Hayakawa’s miraculous vision of the Chicago Police riot of 1968, as an unprovoked assault upon the just and well-restrained forces of law and order, is a classic example of a man editing reality to fit a personal ambition.
Dr. Jacques Barzun, pleading for retention of the death penalty upon the premise that Joan of Arc, given a choice of life imprisonment or of death by fire, would have chosen the fire, is thereby enabled to demonstrate that fire would have been his choice also. Which goes to show you how dependent intellectual integrity is upon who is handling the matches.
That a sane respect among men, one for another, has been preserved at all in this country is not owing to the Bomb-Em-Back-to-the Stone Age, Send-in-the-Marines Eye-For-An-Eye Otherwise Respectables, but by people speaking behind bars: Gene Debs, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Phil and Dan Berrigan.
Jailbirds all.
That it has been Earth’s dispossessed who have given Man his most abiding truths, from a conspiracy trial on the outskirts of Rome to the anguish of Solzhenitsyn, is an ancestral paradox now commonly accepted by writers, readers and critics alike. That outcasts may speak truth, however, still comes as disturbing news to the critic quoted above: one perpetually embattled in defense of mediocrity so long as it stays respectable.
A yearning for respectability, so tenacious as to be achieved only at the cost of sensibility, is revealed in a handbook for other churchmice working the Establishment while ostensibly preoccupied with the arts.*
“What then are the reasons for the connection between the study of literature and the contempt for success?” this critic inquires and answers himself: “The noblest of them is undoubtedly that the study of literature encourages a great respect for activity which is its own reward (whereas the ethos of success encourages activity for the sake of extrinsic reward) and a great respect for the thing-in-itself (as opposed to the ethos of success which encourages a nihilistically reproductive preoccupation with the ‘cash value’ of all things). To acquire even a small measure of independent judgment is to understand that ‘successful’ does not necessarily mean ‘good’ and that ‘good’ does not necessarily mean ‘successful’. From there it is but a short step in the world to the ardent conclusion that the two can never go together, particularly in America and particularly in the arts.”
Well, what would you do, given a choice of a nihilistically reproductive preoccupation of the ethos of success encouraging activity for the sake of extrinsic reward, or the thing-in-itself leading to an ardent conclusion? Wouldn’t you rather watch Kukla, Fran and Ollie?
Laying out a dollar and a quarter for 262 pages done by a man who earns his living by the written word, then discovering that he has no stronger control of the English language than Richard Daley, is dismaying.
What, in God’s name, is the man trying to tell us by splintering prose into such uneven planks? Simply that writers often pretend that the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to themselves as rigidly as to businessmen. That’s all.
While gentile kids were watching the Three Stooges, he reminds us, he himself was a Jewish boy who owned only one suit. Yet he made up his mind early that he was going to travel with the Fast Mensa Set, Jewish or not! And rode the subway all by himself to Manhattan. And walked right into the goy registrar’s office and told him right out he was Jewish and had only one suit. And that after he made it he was still going to go home over weekends! Then he got right in there and practiced talking to gentiles until he got to meet George Plimpton, too.
And he still goes home over weekends!
Yet, how dreary to explain one’s life in terms of the distance between names on mailboxes. Never giving us a glimmer of the faces and forms of the home of his youth: how soundless, odorless and colorless a life it appears: like watching TV on a night when the reception makes ghosts of the players.
And all merely to achieve the editorship of a magazine with less impact than Women’s Wear Daily! Isn’t the life of any precinct captain who succeeds, after years of struggle, in becoming Ward Committeeman, more meaningful? At least his life has had an impact upon the living.
The philosopher who thinks only for other philosophers has got to be lying. When he loses concern for those unconcerned with philosophy he is no longer a philosopher: he is an occupant with tenure.
The poet understood only by other poets is practicing a kind of pharmaceutics without a pestle: merely devising a certain distinction for himself by filling prescriptions and calling them cantos.
The revolutionary who revolutionizes his life-style but not his life has no closer connection with revolution than Tennessee Ernie Ford, singing I Believe, has with heaven.
Those who believe true change can be effected by meeting force with force may as well be riding with Hell’s Angels. Changes will come from those most reluctant to straddle a bike: those willing to sacrifice power they already possess. Changing from a Harley to a Honda won’t get it.
The artist who paints with one eye on the approval of those with the leisure to judge, the hands to applaud and the funds to buy, and no eye at all for those who’d rather go bowling than own a Van Gogh, may well gain approval. Then the light from the street strikes his masterpiece and all his colors wash out. He’d forgotten that Van Gogh didn’t seek approval.
The literary critic, devising his thought from other thinkers, yet never consulting those who never think, may feel strangely uneasy about some clamor, coming to him faintly from beyond his shutters. He senses that a coherent literature, emerging from that clamor, would diminish him.
Are you still hanging around the edge of that precipice, Miss Wheaton? Still not convinced that it’s not a threshold? Still bemused about what your next move ought to be?
One move you might make, I’d suggest, is to avoid sleeping with people whose troubles are worse than your own.
Another is to avoid drinking when you’re feeling sorry for yourself. If you do you’ll be finding yourself in need of a double-shot every time you consider what the world is doing to a nice person like yourself. And, since the world begins working on you early in the day, you’ll have to get stoned to the bricks just in order to get out of bed.
Then you’ll realize there’s no longer any point in brooding about what your next move is going to be. Because you will already have made it.
Given a choice, never do anything anyone tells you you ought to do: unless you yourself want to do it. Given a choice, always do what you yourself want to do: even though everyone else tells you you ought not, you should not, you better not—and God won’t like it if you do.
Watch out for what people tell you God wants you to do. Given a choice between your God and your life, save your life.
If your God is a God that tells you He comes first, he isn’t any God.
If He’s the kind of God who tells you to save your life, you’ll never get another; pay attention.
If you can, believe in Him. If you wish, pray to Him. But bear in mind that your God is not mine.
Save your life. God can wait.
*Making It, by Norman Podhoretz, Bantam Books, 1969.