Literary Fraternity

In my first semester of graduate school, I took a class called Forms of Fiction with the man who would eventually become my thesis director, Lee K. Abbott. Lee’s a brilliant teacher—I’ve been thinking about that fact recently, because he’s in his last year of teaching before retirement—and I steal from him for my own classes all the time. This past week I used a reading he assigned me in that class eight years ago: the introduction to an anthology of fiction, The Secret Life of Our Times, published in Esquire back in 1973, when Gordon Lish was editor. This intro, written by Tom Wolfe, is a pretty entertaining document, and I feel moved to share a couple of quotes from it:

“The rules of the game in modern fiction changed decisively during the 1960s. In that brief interval the American short story moved from the vulgar stage to the poetic stage, in terms of cultural evolution, and the abruptness of the transition all but cost it its life….The upshot has been a type of short story that exhibits all the daring—and all the difficulties—of formalism. By the very nature of his task, the formalist is no longer writing for a vague ‘public.’ He is not out to entertain or arrest attention in the usual way. He is writing for a fraternity not merely of other writers but also of those readers who are sophisticated enough to appreciate form, technique, and the state of the art, who are able to read new work against the background of what has already been tried” (xx–xxii).

Stephen King talked about this same issue more recently in the introduction he wrote to Best American Short Stories 2007. You can read the intro in its entirety here if you missed the first time around, but he basically discusses the problem of writers writing for other writers, and reading not for the thrill of a story but for the sake of sizing up the marketplace, figuring out what sells. King calls it “copping-a-feel reading.”

You know, I’d like to write for a “vague ‘public’” rather than a fraternity, and I’d like to “entertain or arrest attention in the usual way.” The simple response to that is, of course, “Well, do it,” and I’ve tried. I tried it with my story collection, which seemed for the most part to only reach other writers, aspiring writers, and academics, and I guess I should just be happy that the fraternity ensures even that much of an audience. I’ve tried it again with my first novel, and maybe it stands a better chance, since (for now) general readers will still pick up a novel for entertainment’s sake. But who knows?

Wolfe’s Esquire introduction ends this way:

“Nihilism and Cosmic Anxiety are, after all, accepted literary conventions today, and conventions in literature are like conventions anywhere else: they are marks of grace and propriety, not wounds of the soul. Between the lines of this book, I am happy to report, I do not detect the slightest shred of real despair. I detect something buoyant and fun-loving, instead. I detect a group of fairly young writers, in good animal health, with high ambitions and cheery dispositions, people who have kept up their credit ratings and who buy their pillow shams at main-stem department stores and head for the French wine rack in the back of the liquor store and maintain god spirits and faith in the future, and who vote even in the primary….bringing, as ever, the rich and traditional glow of culture to those readers who are truly literate and sophisticated enough to belong to the noble fraternity” (xxviii). 

You can just feel the scorn radiating off of that quote, can’t you? I read it and think, “Guilty.” Almost forty years after the essay’s publication, here I am, me and my cohort: fairly young, healthy, ambitious, cheery (oh, basically—I understand it’s required of me, and I more or less deliver). The rest of the description fits in a general way, too. I don’t think that Wolfe, of all people, was trying to argue that only old, tormented, human wrecks can write good fiction, or have the agency to deal with subjects like despair, but I do think he’s pointing out an absurdity that occasionally troubles me—that troubles me more as I get older. Why’s a nice gal like me writing such dark, sad stories? Why do any of us? Most of the young writers I know are nice, and they have nice husbands and wives, and they toil very earnestly in university positions that they know they’re damned lucky to have. They have nice houses, and they drive Subarus and the like. Of course, I don’t know the private sadnesses of their lives, any more than they know the private sadnesses of mine. But it makes me groan a little to think of us—our hardened rural characters and wild landscapes and acts of sudden violence—snug in various versions of the middle class, going to AWP to pontificate on panels with topics such as “Writing Acts of Violence.” 

Or maybe I’m just dreading AWP. I generally do.