An Impossible Situation

There's a short story by the late William Styron in this week's New Yorker. It's called "Rat Beach," and it's the story of a young academic who enlists in the Marine Corps during World War II. I don't know how others read this story, but I read it as a metaphor for depression.

The narrator is a seventeen year old student, and he enlists for reasons of "bravado mingled with what must have been a death wish." He hasn't actually confronted the reality of the combat; everything about it is romanticized. He's too young to fight at Iwo Jima, but he sees what's ahead for him in the near future in the fates of the men coming back: either a gruesome death, or living with the physical and emotional repercussions of survival. Neither outcome is a possibility the narrator has the bravery or emotional resources to deal with. He respects those who do have those emotional resources and realizes he will never have them himself. He is stuck in an impossible situation.

I don't want to give away too much more of the story, but it's a vivid, hallucinogenic piece of writing that's subverts several conventions of the short story, and is effective on every level. I've never read Styron before, so I'm glad I came across this story. I plan on picking up one of his books soon.

Books of the Times

It's funny: the last post I wrote ended with the declaration that I would write the next day on the difference between writing on a computer, writing on a typewriter and writing by hand. That was over a week ago. What happened? Where did I go?

The truth is I had a crisis of conscience over the worth of blogging. What's the point of talking to oneself in cyberspace? I'm not a news blogger, exposing coverups that the New York Times orchestrated; I'm not a well-known blogger associated with a traditional old-media publication, and I'm not writing about some arcane, niche topic - there are plenty of literary blogs out there. I'm just another writer out here in the void trying to feel my way through this changing media environment, experimenting with it, and playing with the form. I'd rather be focusing on my fiction.

And yet, here I am again. So what brought me back?

To answer that, let me begin by picking up where I left off.

When I was young, like most people who grew up when I did, (early 80's) I did all my writing by hand. I still have notebooks filled with stories I wrote as a child. Writing by hand is a slow process, and even up through the early 2000's I insisted on doing all my first drafts by hand. Other writers I knew couldn't understand that; they thought more quickly than they could write by hand, they would argue. Well, that's true. Thoughts do travel faster than one writes, but there's a filtering process that happens when you write by hand that doesn't exist when you type. The writing is also more sparse; for some reason it seems like it takes me less words to say the same thing when I write by hand. This still surprises me when I write letters to my friend in jail; they never seem to be as long as they would be if I'd typed them. I wonder why that is?

I learned to type on a typewriter. I remember I used to dream of the day when I'd be able to afford those old electronic typewriters that let you edit a line first electronically before printing the line on the page. It was always such an arduous, slow-going process writing on the typewriter. Every typo was a minor tragedy. A first draft on a typewriter was almost unthinkable. So, I'm not sure what the writing would have been like if I had. I'd be interested to hear what others have to say.

Writing on a computer is an entirely different game altogether. You can almost fall into a trance doing it, the way pianists seem to fall into a trance at the keyboard. This can be great, but it can also lead to a lot of sloppy writing. Sloppy writing can easily be edited and cleaned up later, but the damage is done; and if you're not the best editor of your own work, then the computer has a lot of pitfalls for the writer. Sometimes it's not such a good thing to write as quickly as you think. Writing requires the filtering and arranging of thoughts.

New media has brought a proliferation of amateur writers and bloggers (what's the difference between the two, I wonder?) to the scene. News media sources now seriously compete with new media writers. In all the noise it's hard to know what sources we should pay attention to, and which ones we shouldn't. The music business has changed radically in the last ten years because of new media, and it looks like publishing is next. The idea of the literary superstar, championed mostly by the increasingly myopic hit minded publishers, is being challenged. It's an unsustainable model, and they know it. They're biding their time, watching to see what happens, trying to make the most money as possible in the process, and trying to stay relevant at the same time.

In an age where we're more conscious of the environment, and where 200,000 books are published a year and most of the copies of those books end up being destroyed because the book only hit the mid-list, I don't think the day is long off when print on demand will become the norm. How publishers will integrate their businesses into this model is still unclear. Chances are they'll just wait to see which print on demand books make it big, and then go about getting in touch with those authors. But what will they be able to offer these authors, who have already proved successful on their own? It's unclear.

What is clear is that writers have to manage their own careers these days. So, I'm looking at this blog as a portfolio of sorts; it's also good writing practice, while I'm inbetween books. Which is why I'm back. And while I may not post something every day, I do plan to post here on a fairly regular basis.

Nostalgic, My Dear, For Thee

Now that we’ve launched full speed into the world of digital communication, there seems to be a resurgence of nostalgia for the good old fashioned personal letter. The recent publication of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop’s correspondence, “Words in Air,” inspired a rush of gushing reviews from the New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, the Nation and the New York Review of Books, to name a few of the more well-known publications. There was also a recent release of Samuel Beckett’s early letters, supposedly to be followed my more; last autumn Farrar published the Letters of Ted Hughes; and Susan Sontag’s early notebooks have just been released, to mixed, but breathless reviews.

I wonder why this is. The July/August issue of Poetry Magazine has some of Yvor Winters’ letters to a young poet – a student who showed a lot of promise. The tone is these letters is startling. Winters is straight-forward with his opinions, no mincing words:

“This note is to inform you—unofficially—that you will receive a fellowship in poetry. You will receive your official notification some time after April 1. Meantime you are not supposed to know. Stegner said that you were among the first nine or ten in fiction, but not among the best three.”

The candid tone is refreshing at first, but overbearing after a while. In a second letter addressed to the poet’s father, Winters sounds like a pompous ass, too sure of himself, too much of a product of his time and philosophy for poetry:

“If I may speak frankly and without seeming to boast, I would like to say that I can teach more about the art of writing in verse and about the history of this art than anyone in the country save perhaps Cunningham. But I would like to add that my department is certainly of the half dozen best in the country as regards scholarly achievement and may well be the best of the half dozen in general critical intelligence. It is, in any event, an extremely fine department, and I know its virtues and limitations very thoroughly. This department is one of my principal tools in training my poets: I superintend their use of the department with some care, and they invariably get a great deal from the department, and what they get I utilize in my training. I do not know what you think of departments of English, but the good ones are not random collections of tedious pedants, but are rather carefully selected groups of historical scholars who work in fairly close collaboration with each other. Such a group, in two or three years of instruction, can save a student like Cal (no matter what his genius) fifteen years of labor, simply by giving him a succinct outline of their own work in background materials and in historical outlines. And without these background materials and historical outlines, he will misunderstand at least in some measure, and often in a large measure, almost anything he may read; and if he is a poet, his development may be irremediably retarded. A great poet is a sport of nature, but he is not merely that: he is a thoroughly intelligent man, and intelligence is not easily come by; any man is a fool who does not pick up as much as he can get, wherever he can get it, and as rapidly as possible. The best place to pick up the elements is a good graduate school.”

Winters does go on. It’s a way of writing we almost never see anymore. It’s strange how staged it feels, how formally addressed. It wasn’t all that long ago when we still wrote friends and family and lovers letters by hand. I did it all the way through college; even now, I have a friend who’s locked up that I write back and forth with by hand. But the sending of letters is more or less a dead practice; who wouldn’t rather email?

The method of communication changes, and so the results are different. Winters could write an email like the letter above today, but it would probably receive a quick return email that either slavishly agreed, deconstructed the email point by point or just said fuck off.

Winters’ letter is stagey; it’s a performance. Well, so are our more modern means of communication. In fact, they take the performance aspect of all writing (communication in general, really) to its logical extreme. So if we’re nostalgic for the art of letter writing, it seems we’re nostalgic for an older form of performance art. Why don’t we have the time or patience for this kind of writing – hell, thinking, to judge by Winters’ letter – anymore? I’m not sure. Tomorrow I want to consider the differences between writing by hand, writing on a typewriter and writing on a computer.

The Opportunities of History

It's an off phrase. What opportunity does history afford writers, other than the specifics of the time and place in which they live? Several of the previous posts on this blog have been influenced by my reading of "Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick. Much of this book is concerned with the responsibility of both writer and reader: the writer's responsibility: being intellectually and morally faithful to history, even if not factually faithful; the reader's: not to distort an author's work in interpretation, so that the original manuscript loses its force. The dangers of misinterpretation are fully fleshed out in "Who Owns Anne Frank" - a daring and interesting article, as provocative as it is readable.

Then we have Hans Fallada. Fallada's concerns as a writer were mostly personal - it seems marriage, personal struggle and the hustle were his preoccupations. The trap Fallada falls into is that his hustle comes before his writing, instead of the other way around. Benjamin Lytal writes in the Nation:

"But the story about the kid living in the rubble sounds so much better suited to Fallada's interests and talents--not resistance but a little hustling, a struggle to put together a life. It's a pity he had to hustle so much to live his own."

Then James Wood brings up the old argument in the New Yorker that opposition makes for the best literature:

"Sometimes, the soft literary citizens of liberal democracy long for prohibition. Coming up with anything to write about can be difficult when you are allowed to write about anything. A day in which the most arduous choice has been between “grande” and “tall” does not conduce to literary strenuousness. And what do we know about life? Our grand tour was only through the gently borderless continent of Google. Nothing constrains us. Perhaps we look enviously at those who have the misfortune to live in countries where literature is taken seriously enough to be censored, and writers venerated with imprisonment. What if writing were made a bit more exigent for us? What if we had less of everything? It might make our literary culture more “serious,” certainly more creatively ingenious. Instead of drowning in choice, we would have to be inventive around our thirst. Tyranny is the mother of metaphor, and all that."

It's just a device Wood uses to launch an article about Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel "Censoring an Iranian Love Story," but it's a familiar enough argument that it might deserve our attention.

And Cary Tennis in Salon remarks on the irony of living in some of the most interesting times in history, and having nothing to say about it:

"And then, with the irony that cloaks us against utter nihilism, we think, if only we were living in more interesting times! And that is the confounding thing about it, isn't it? That we stand on the nodal point of a great, creaking, crunching change in historical direction, at the beginning of cataclysmic planetary collapse, at the dying of civilization, at the rising of new empires, at our own meltdown, as a million stories bloom out of the earth like wildflowers in the spring and we think, gee, uh, if only there were some good stories to tell. "

The novel itself is a history in its way. A novel is about a self-contained world, which has to operate according to its own logic - and because of this, it is by its nature a historical, political narrative, even if the writer is trying to write apolitically or ahistorically. After all, to echo Orwell, these themselves are political and historical choices.

This is a problem black writers, Jewish writers, writers of many ethnic minorities face, when fearing being pigeonholed as a particular type of ethnic-champion writer. Writing a non-ethnic book is a political statement in itself. History affords writers opportunities, and it takes them away.

Two Writers

There's an interesting article in this week's Nation about the German writer Hans Fallada.

"Hans Fallada is the romantic nom de plume invented by a man who lived through some of the most difficult episodes in his country's history and came out indifferently, neither a hero nor a villain. "Hans" recalls the Grimms' Lucky Hans, a fairy-tale fool who smiles even as he is cheated; and "Falada" is the talking horse in another Grimm tale who, though slaughtered by his mistress's treacherous chambermaid, continues to speak truth to power as a taxidermied trophy. Fallada the man avoided the fate of Falada the horse. "I do not like grand gestures," he said, "being slaughtered before the tyrant's throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one and to the detriment of my children, that is not my way." He made this excuse, rather grand itself, in 1938, after accepting edits of his latest novel, Iron Gustav. The book was part of a Nazi film project, and Joseph Goebbels wielded the blue pencil. Iron Gustav tells the story of a coachman whose authoritarian parenting ruins most of his children but who becomes a national hero after he refuses to relinquish his horse and carriage for an automotive taxi. Taking up his editor's suggestions, Fallada extended his narrative's endpoint from 1928 to 1933, twisted Gustav's one decent son into becoming a Nazi storm trooper and made the other, criminal son a member of the Communist Party."

Fallada, born in 1893, is quick to use the rise of the Nazis for his own professional promotion, even though he " hated the strutting arrogance of the Third Reich." All the while he complains about how his work is being butchered and misused; and yet he never does anything about it, but complain. He remains, in his way, the consummate Romantic writer, all ego and contradiction, even as he - a common peril for Romantics - becomes more hustler than writer.

Two generations later, born in 1944 of all years, we have W.G. Sebald. I've been reading Cynthia Ozick lately, and I'm finding it interesting comparing the two writers, and their relative feelings towards the opportunities of history:

"So, in language sublime, Sebald is haunted by Jewish ghosts - Europe's phantoms: the absent Jews, the deported, the gassed, the suffering, the hidden, the fled. There is a not-to-be-overlooked irony (a fossilized irony, my professor-critic might call it) in Sebald's having been awarded the Berlin Literature Prize - Berlin, the native city of Gershom (né Gerhardt) Scholem, who wrote definitively about the one-sided infatuation of Jews in love with high German culture and with the Vaterland itself. The Jewish passion for Germany was never reciprocated - until now. Sebald returns that Jewish attachment, although tragically: he is too late for reciprocity. The Jews he searches for are either stricken escapees or smoke. Like all ghosts, they need to be conjured."

More on this tomorrow.