Sam Clemens, John Gardner, Marshall Mathers, and the Artistic Impulse to Polemical Speech

When you’re hot enough to melt hell, and burn Satan, too, it’s tempting to play with fire all the time. Sometimes pyromaniacs set a brushfire that clears the artistic wilderness—and sometimes they get burned.

“It seems to me,” Mark Twain wrote, “that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on [James Fenimore] Cooper’s literature without having read some of it.”

Thus begins Samuel Clemens’s incendiary essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” From the moment he opens, a reader can hear Twain’s implied author cackling as he systematically and mercilessly burns Cooper to the ground. He makes short work of it. The attack is no dismissal, despite the bitter and condescending tone: Twain wades deep into the texts of Cooper’s novels and carves out their hearts. When the bloodbath is over, Twain delivers his coup de grâce: “Now I feel sure, deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English in Deerslayer is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote.”

As Jane Smiley observes in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Clemens “killed” his literary ancestor outright. The essay crippled Cooper’s popular legacy.

Is this assessment too dramatic? Consider the following: Although The Last of the Mohicans is still in print, and although some academics have since rallied to protect Cooper’s reputation, a quick Google search for “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Defenses”—the name of an article by Lance Schachterle and Kent Ljungquist defending the romanticist—prompts a did you mean? listing the title of Twain’s 1894 polemic. Even when you only type “Fenimore Cooper” into the search box, Mark Twain’s essay is the third hit.

But haters sometimes burn themselves in the process of crusading. Some, in fact, have burned themselves so badly that their reputations never recovered, and instead of making extra room in the canon—as Mark Twain did when he reduced Fenimore Cooper to ashes—these firebrands have consumed their own inheritance. So why, if the danger is so great, do artists lash out at their fellows? Surely a quick glance at the history books would show the risks outweigh the benefits?

A case study: John Gardner was no intellectual lightweight. A talented writer, he published several novels to popular acclaim, including Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, and October Light, which won the National Book Award. He was beloved by his students, and respected, for the most part, by his peers. Gardner never let himself be confined by genre, and he worked widely in the fields of translation, criticism, and even opera.

He also published three books of nonfiction. This is when the trouble began. In his The Art of Fiction and in On Becoming a Novelist, Gardner advocates fiercely for fiction that tests society's deepest convictions. He also touches, briefly, on what it is that infuriates writers when they see poppy fiction on the bestseller lists. It isn't jealousy, he wrote. Feelings of rage regarding these fakers has only partly to do with professional envy. The majority of a writer's anger, Gardner says, is aimed at the devaluing process that popular fiction inflicts on true, moral fiction. If a writer writes well, and people love it, that's wonderful... But if another writer writes badly, and people love that, too, then what's the point? If a reader can't tell trash from treasure, why try to find treasure when you can knock off trash and get rich? This is a sort of interesting argument, but to many people, including to some very intelligent people, it sounds like an excuse for snobbery. Despite the danger, in On Moral Fiction, John Gardner unleashed his rage (and his contempt).

“His own publisher, Knopf, would not touch the book,” Liz Rosenberg, his second wife, wrote of On Moral Fiction in the Boston Globe. “The book was wildly misunderstood on every side… Fellow writers attacked him on the cover of The New York Times as a hatchet man out to get them. Right-wing spokespeople welcomed him, and he was invited to join the American Nazi Party, which so enraged him that he instantly sent back a telegram with expletives he somehow convinced the operator to include.”

As David Stanton recounts in The Washington Post, the literary world retaliated with good reason. “[In On Moral Fiction, Gardner] calls Philip Roth ‘creepy’ and dismisses Saul Bellow as ‘an essayist disguised as a writer of fiction,’” Stanton wrote. “Mailer, Albee, Vonnegut and many others come in for similar drubbings. Their work was not just bad, in Gardner’s view, but dangerous. Is it any wonder that some in the publishing world came to want Gardner’s blood?”

Other authors Gardner attacked by name included John Updike, John Barth, and Norman Mailer. And On Moral Fiction was not a one-off. Gardner had a history of polemical speech in public and private. He once told The Paris Review that he was writing the best fiction being written in his time. His hubris and erratic behavior are now the stuff of writerly legend (for one of the only complete biographies on Gardner, see Barry Silesky's John Gardner: Literary Outlaw).

In her article, Liz Rosenberg wrote that she believes Gardner wanted to do the right thing regardless of the backlash. He named names in On Moral Fiction because he needed to prove to himself that he was not afraid of retaliation.“Perhaps he should have been,” she wrote. “Even now, his reputation as a writer is overcast by resentment, and it may take twenty or thirty years to get the grudge-bearers off his back.”

Gardner later repented, admitting he had written some of On Moral Fiction in jealousy, that he had gotten some things wrong, especially about Updike. But it was too late—the damage was done.

Why did Gardner’s polemic backfire? After all, Leo Tolstoy wrote a similar book (What is Art?) and Mark Twain survived his own destruction of Fenimore Cooper. He survived, in fact, despite a systematic campaign of vicious speech. Is it because John Gardner wasn’t as good a writer as these two men? At first it’s a compelling argument, and works well with the mystification of these other writers, but on closer inspection this seems unlikely. A quick glance at a novel like Mickelsson’s Ghosts reveals Gardner’s talent. To point to his bitterness doesn’t explain it either. No one is more bitter than Twain in his old age. But Twain, at least, is funny. Tolstoy and Twain (and Hemingway for that matter) have survived their outbursts and continue to be read.

Some artists, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, have survived attacks and held their place in the canon. John Updike also survives, and not just from Gardner’s attack (see David Foster Wallace’s “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One: Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?”).

In an effort to see how far this kind of behavior can go—that is, to find the limits of an artist’s polemical sensibilities—it’s interesting to close this article with a look at someone outside the realm of literature. Feuds do not confine themselves to the world of prose, and maybe no industry is more riddled with hurt feelings than pop music. For that matter, hip-hop specializes in feuds, and in the rap game, no one has perfected the polemical tirade more thoroughly than Marshall Mathers, aka Eminem, aka Fire Marshall, aka Slim Shady.

“I’m sick of you little girl and boy groups,” Mathers spewed at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards. “All you do is annoy me, so I have been sent here to destroy you.” He’s hardly slowed down since. The hit list (no pun intended) encompasses too many celebrities to count, but some notables include Michael Jackson, Michael J. Fox, and Christopher Reeve. Gems from his albums include “By the way, N’Sync, why do they sing—am I the only one who realizes they stink?” and “Damn, I think Kim Kardashian’s a man.”

Many of his assaults are as merciless as he claims. Like Twain, they usually stay funny, despite their obvious venom. They are also enmeshed in detailed, complicated, and admittedly dazzling lyrics. Almost all of these tirades aren’t fit to repeat to your grandmother. But even rap’s most feared MC has limits.

On his album Recovery, Mathers confesses he almost went too far, which is remarkable for a man who made it his specialty to blast pop icons. When he details his hiatus from hip-hop, Mathers writes of his drug-fuelled depression, his intense jealousy, and his self-destructive behavior. “On the verge of goin’ insane,” he admits, “I almost made a song dissin’ Lil Wayne… Are you stupid? You gon’ start dissin’ people for no reason? ‘Specially when you can’t even write a decent punchline even?”

Mathers may be glad he spared Lil Wayne and Kanye West, two other popular rappers, but it’s hard to imagine him turning down his caustic wit in the future: “Shady ease up! Man chill!” a voice calls to him on the first track of Recovery. “No I can’t, goddamnit,” he snaps. “Rap is a landfill.”

The world of artistic feuds is much wider and deeper than this short article can explore correctly. For example, many of the artists mentioned above are writers, specifically novelists, since that is the art I am most familiar with. And although they are very different, they are all white men, even Tolstoy and Updike and Hemingway, who are only mentioned briefly. Whole books could be written—and some have been—on the wrath and polemics of, say, Ayn Rand. The question of polemical speech in artistic situations, which might include composers or painters, is a tricky one. I would invite anyone who wishes to further explore this subject to comment on this article with their own observations.

What does seem clear from the limited examples above is that a polemic can backfire on an artist. So it’s safe to say, if you’re going to be a hater, watch your back, because if you play with fire you might get burned.

Or, as Eminem might put it, “Instead of gettin’ crowned you’re gettin’ capped.”

As the author of more than ten novels, Stewart knows what he's talking about. He holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Cornell. You can read about his tenth novel in The New York Times profile of him and his book, Last Night at the Lobster, by clicking here.

Stewart pressed that he didn't mean publishing was unimportant. But I think he's right that the writing is more important (maybe that's self-aggrandizing or naive, but I really don't feel like it is). It is better to worry about the story for yourself. Don't think about focus groups and marketing. Embrace the vivid and continuous dream and see if the writing you're doing creates that dream for you. Go deeper into the dream, use it to make the story stronger. If you write something good enough, you will eventually get it published. One of the mistakes writers make, I think, is trying to get their books out too soon.

In short, it's better to enjoy the private side of reading and writing. Publishing is important, but it is not the point. Writing is a job, but it's a job you do for yourself and hopefully in the end you make some money.

My theory is that he wrote the books "one piece at a time," the same way Johnny Cash got his Cadillac in the song of the same name. A sentence here, then another, and another. One chapter at a time, maybe; the first chapter of For Whom the Bell Tolls is only 17 pages, which is maybe, I think, 2 short stories worth of writing. Not much happens except the young man (Robert Jordan) and the old man (Anselmo) inspect the mill-house. Then they climb on and meet Pablo, who becomes one of the novel's more troubling characters. There is also a 4 page flashback (!) where Robert Jordan remembers his conversation with the Russian, Golz, who has sent him on this mission. That's pretty much it. The setting is detailed; the people are detailed. The central conflict of the novel (blowing up the bridge) is pretty well established.

For me, when working on a novel, the sheer vastness of it can be daunting, this goal of putting a hundred thousand words in a cunning order. A hundred thousand words! But if you take, say, 3,000 words, then, by God, maybe you can get something done. In the example I've given above, think how much longer For Whom the Bell Tolls is than its first 17 pages, and how much more complex. If you're a novelist, and you're struggling with the vastness, the emptiness of those pages you need to fill, then slow down, be calm, and remember to write one word at a time, one piece at a time, or, as Anne Lamott suggests in her book on writing, bird by bird.

The Hemingway Solution:

• Wake up early and work hard once you're up. Don't read anything but the paper, because you don't want to work with all the giants of literature looking over your shoulder. Just write or work until you wear out mentally. This should be a little after lunch, maybe 1:30 or 2 pm.

• Always stop writing when you know what will happen next. If you do that, and let your mind work on the story while you sleep, you will never be stuck.

• Eat lunch, something healthy.

• Physical exercise is next. Wear out your body and make yourself so exhausted that you can't think about your writing. Hemingway would fish and box, among other things. Anything will do.

• Read literature and catch up on your correspondence. Wait to check your e-mail until late in the day, just before or just after dinner. Find a good book and read it slowly.

• Don't think about the writing when you're not writing. This may be the hardest step. But endless plotting, dissecting, musing, and especially talking (to friends, to lovers, to family) will kill a book. It will shrivel up and die on you. This is not a joke.

• Spend time with that special someone who matters to you. As Hemingway once wrote, "I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead."

• Go to sleep. Repeat Hemingway's Solution in the morning.

Thursday, April 22

7PM @ The Raven

Grant Jenkins poetry
Cheryl Pallant poetry
Nate Barbarick fiction

...

Grant Matthew Jenkins, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program, teaches contemporary literature and creative writing at the University of Tulsa. He has published two books of poetry, Joy of God and Other Series (Blackbird, 2003) and the most recent in collaboration with Cheryl Pallant, Morphs (Cracked Slab 2009). His poems appear in Birddog, Cannibal, Sugar Mule, Syntax, Action Yes, and Big Bridge. Other creative projects include work with digital flash poetry, image, and sound and can be found online at Turbulence.org and YouTube

...

Cheryl Pallant is a writer and dancer with three poetry books, three chapbooks, and a book on dance. Her highly acclaimed books include Uncommon Grammar Cloth, Into Stillness, and Contact Improvisation. Her recently released work is the poetry collection Morphs, collaboratively written with Tulsan Grant Jenkins. Although Pallant calls Richmond, VA home, this year she holds the Lubell Visiting Assistant Professorship and teaches creative writing in the English Department at the University of Tulsa. See her website for more information http://cherylpallant.com/

...

Nathan Clay Barbarick (pictured right) is a name I use in literary situations because it takes up the right amount of space. I study and teach writing at the university of the 2008 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Champions. Am also seeking summer 2010 employment. Not that I am desperate to work; I am only desperate to stay living. The human contains only so much fluid that can be sold, and if you wear a disguise or use a fake ID they will notice you anyways and turn you away. At the Raven I will read small pieces of (non)fiction, that is, fictions that shouldn’t be nor should have ever been, but somehow are.

Last week I attended the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) 2010 Conference in Denver, Colorado. Just under 10,000 writers descended on the Mile High City to talk, to meet each other, and to listen to discussions about all manner of things literary: Writing, editing, and publishing, to name a few. Everyone had a booth, including the KU-MFA program and the Kansas Bathtub Writers Collective.

Among other things, I bought this issue of The Paris Review, #18, Spring 1958, which contains an interview with Ernest Hemingway (The Art of Fiction) and a story by Philip Roth. This is not a reprinting; it's the original issue. The managing editor, Caitlin Roper, said she often brings extras to sell at events like AWP. Later that night I saw her give a talk at Denver's famous bookstore, the Tattered Cover.

I was lucky enough to spend some time with my friends, including Abayomi Animashaun, whose book The Giving of Pears recently won the Hudson Prize for Poetry.

Afterward, he took questions for the better
part of forty minutes.
Before
he opened up the floor, though, he detailed his theory of novels--he said, in
fact, that novels' purpose is to create a dual world for the reader, a world
where you're waking up and having coffee and going to the doctor, but, in the
meantime, you're wondering, What are the people in that novel getting up to? He
said lots of people think this is a side effect of reading novels, but, he
said, he thinks it's the main purpose of a good book.

He made it sound almost
like long, good novels are companions for us as we travel through our lives.
He
also talked about how he learned to write and craft novels--through computer
programming. He said, Not to get too artsy about it, but first drafts for him
are like making clay to sculpt later. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle took him 15 years to write.

He talked about linguistics and animal
behavior. He answered some questions about an Edgar Sawtelle movie and about the next book he's writing, but I don't want to discuss it too much because who knows how much is meant to be public information. The new book, he said, is not part of a trilogy, but the books are triptych.

He
also talked about novels as "braided objects" where themes, images,
characters--or anything, really--will emerge, travel briefly on the surface, and
submerge again. These braids appear later on and that's part of the fun.
After
the reading and the Q & A, during the signing, I asked him what novel
exemplified his ideas about the novel as a form, and he said in his MFA program
there was a group of writers who were devoted fans of a book called So
Long, See You Tomorrow, a novel by William Maxwell.

I
ordered the book today on Amazon. It seems that Maxwell, the former fiction
editor of The New Yorker, was praised
by John Updike as "one of the wisest and kindest [voices] in American fiction."
You can learn a lot more about Maxwell (and read some of his writing) by clicking
over to NPR's website.

1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature;
2. Total objectivity;
3. Truthful descriptions of persons and objects;
4. Extreme brevity;
5. Audacity and originality (flee the stereotype);
6. Compassion

"It is a remarkably complete picture of Chekhov's artistic practice," Richard Pevear writes. Pevear, incidentally, is one half of the best Russian translator team working today; his partner is Larissa Volokhonsky. Together they have translated many works of Russian literature, from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (their translation was a national bestseller) to Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (which was gifted to me by a dear friend) to Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

There's no telling if Chekhov's rules still make for a good story (as John Gardner said, "The god of novelists will not be tyrannized by rules.") But, even admitting there are no rules for a good story or novel, one can see the similarity in Chekhov's rules to the rules that governed the personal philosophies of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. In fact, Carver's short story "Errand," printed in his collection Where I'm Calling From, specifically deals with Anton Chekov. The lyrical short story (which tells of the moments following Chekhov's death) was written shortly before Carver himself died, and, in my opinion, it's as beautiful as anything he ever wrote.

Francine Prose also thinks highly enough of Chekhov that she included an entire chapter on him in Reading Like a Writer; so far as I can tell, this tenth chapter, "Learning from Chekhov," is the only one that deals exclusively with a legendary writer. Other writers are mentioned, of course, in previous chapters: that's the book's premise. But Chekhov is the only one who gets his own chapter.

It's interesting (and worth noting) that Prose leads off the chapter with a page-long anecdote about her life at the time. She was depressed, anxious, and forced to commute two and a half hours every day to her teaching job by bus. And Chekhov, she says, moved her, distracted her, and showed her the world -- his stories told of sorrow and, most importantly, of hope.

This is important because Chekhov is often mistakenly viewed as a pessimist or a fatalist or a cynic. His writing, it has been said, is too sad. There's an old saying this reminds me to include here: "In a Russian heart there is always winter." But Anton Chekhov's winter is not the winter of depression. This wintry landscape, this void sensed by readers, is a blackness so deep and overarching and crushing that nothing escapes it; when faced with it a man or woman can do little but - to borrow an image from Pevear - beat their heads against the cobblestones in despair. This calls to mind the endless sorrows in Shakespeare's King Lear. How can people carry on beyond their breaking points? Somehow, from this void, the men and women and children in Chekhov's stories do carry on. Slowly, painfully, the author and his characters grope their way forward in darkness. To the untrained eye, literary critic Lev Shestov, wrote, they might not even appear to be moving. "It may be Chekhov himself does not know for certain whether he is moving forward or marking time."

"His only hope lies in utter hopelessness," Pevear writes of Chekhov. "Anything else would be 'a lie or a form of violence,' a general idea or a utopia at gunpoint. And it is here, in this 'void,' that Chekhov begins 'seeking new paths.'"

Winter is often used by second-rate writers as a metaphor for death, the end of things, a trite extension of the human condition - that is, mortality. But by writing beyond hope, exploring the darkest winters of humanity, Chekhov was detailing a very different version of the void: A winter of stark beauty, resolute survival, and unyielding compassion detached from philosophy but indebted to the force of nature colloquially known as God. 

If anyone is interested, you can buy Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's Anton Chekhov: Stories by clicking here. You might also want to check out Lev Shestov's "Creation from the Void," an essay published in 1908, four years after Chekhov's death (it's the highly respected article I quoted above). The text is available for free by clicking here.

First of all, the serious novelist can seldom punch straight through, write from beginning to end, knock off a quick revision, and sell his book. The idea he's developing is too large for that, contains too many unmanageable elements--too many characters... too many scenes... too many moments... He may work for weeks, even months, without losing his focus and falling into confusion, but sooner or later--at least in my experience--the writer comes to the realization that he's lost.

John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist
"The Writer's Nature, Part IV," Page 64

I have been writing a novel for the past eight weeks or so--maybe more like six--and three weeks ago, after my novel-fragment appeared in KU's MFA workshop, I became hopelessly lost. This loss of focus occurred around the same time my students' papers were due and around the time I was conferencing with those students. I was putting in an extra 13.6 hours a week on teaching. The novel, as it stands, is something like 14,397 words long. 51 pages, give or take, and I anticipate the final product being upwards of 60,000 words (between 200 and 250 pages long).

By the time I figured out where the narrative needed to go and what needed to be done with the writing--Thursday last week--I was kind of a mess. I needed a friend to tell me it was going to be all right. Luckily, my wife is supportive of my projects. She always helps me keep things in perspective.

I'd also been thinking a lot about the ghosts of writers, the "refined and distilled spirit" of a writer that Wallace Stegner talks about in On Teaching and Writing Fiction, and I wanted to talk to another writer by reading his or her books and hearing, from the mouth of a professional, that these things I was going through are normal. At the same time, I was wondering, with a sort of detached bemusement, why the hell I even came to an MFA program at all if what I really wanted was time to write. I chose KU's MFA because I was promised the chance to write, write, and write more; I have no interest in being a professional teacher, which, up to this point, is mostly what I've been studying.

And I thought, Wait a minute--where have I heard those things before? And then it hit me--I needed to commune with the refined and distilled spirit of John Gardner.

I picked up On Becoming a Novelist that day. Rather than tear apart and fix my novel, I needed to get my head on straight.

During my last years in college, my adviser--he was just an acquaintance at the time, a novelist from the Iowa Writers' Workshop--recommended Gardner's books to me. Talking with Gardner, the older, experienced critic and author, gave me insight into fiction. His books helped me make the first leap from bumbling amateur to a professional--if somewhat inexperienced--freelance writer. Somewhere in his books, I remembered, I had decided I wanted to become a novelist.

Probably it was in the "Preface," which detailed a strange issue "young novelists" face, one I hadn't thought of (but one I was dealing with at the time; am still dealing with, if you want to know the truth).

The young man or woman who announces an intention of becoming an M.D. or an electrical engineer or a forest ranger is not immediately bombarded with well-meant explanations of why the ambition is impractical, out of reach, a waste of time and intelligence. ... And the discouragement offered by other human beings is the least of it. Writing a novel takes an immense amount of time... The writer asks himself day after day, year after year, if he's fooling himself, asks why people write novels anyhow... Almost no one mentions that for a certain kind of person nothing is more joyful or satisfying than the life of a novelist... More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists.

John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist,

"Preface," Page xxiii - xxv

So, if you're wondering what's normal for a novelist, or for a writer, and you need some words of encouragement, you can't do better than the reassuring tone of Gardner, whose literary-firebrand-and-trouble-magnet reputation doesn't detract from his fierce, protective tone when he talks about the young novelists he taught in life--and that he continues to teach today.  

     The question one asks of the young writer who wants to know if he's got what it takes is this: "Is writing novels what you want to do? Really want to do?"
     If the young writer answers, "Yes," then all one can say is: Do it. In fact, he will anyway.

John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist,
"The Writer's Nature, Part V," Page 72

The Dueling Typewriters 2009 Charity Write-Off will benefit Bathtub's programs for Lawrence and Kansas communities, especially our version of Writers in the Schools (WITS). The grueling competition will pit man and woman and machine against one another in what can only be described as a life-threatening and irresponsible spectacle.

Also, since this will be November, and the duel will be held outdoors, it will probably be very, very cold. Medical professionals may or may not be standing by to offer encouraging words, to mix up hot chocolate, and to check the writers for signs of Sudden Onset Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (SOCTS). Not to mention frostbite.

If you'd like to participate in Dueling Typewriters 2009, or if you'd like to sponsor your favorite wordslinger or wordsmith or some such thing, contact Benjamin D. Cartwright immediately. You may also email the collective at bkswriters@gmail.com.
 

*We use the term 'champions' loosely and metaphorically in this sentence.