by Tom Bissell
Table of Contents
Title Page
ALSO BY TOM BISSELL
Dedication
Epigraph
AUTHOR’S NOTE
UNFLOWERED ALOES
ESCANABA’S MAGIC HOUR - Movies, Robot Deer, and the American Small Town
EXT. ESCANABA AREA HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETIC FIELD—TWILIGHT
EXT. MAIN STREET—NIGHT
INT. ROSY’S DINER—MORNING
INTERMISSION
EXT. NORTHTOWN—DAY
GRIEF AND THE OUTSIDER - The Case of the Underground Literary Alliance
WRITING ABOUT WRITING ABOUT WRITING
HOW-TO
ON BECOMING A NOVELIST
USER’S MANUAL
GOLDEN PARACHUTE
NUTS & BOLTS, TEA & ANGELS
OLYMPUS
A BEAGLE’S LAMENT
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT - The Iraq War and Documentary Film
EUPHORIAS OF PERRIER - The Case Against Robert D. Kaplan
STILL RISING
THE SECRET MAINSTREAM - Contemplating the Mirages of Werner Herzog
KAPUSCINSKI’S LAST JOURNEY
GREAT AND TERRIBLE TRUTHS
CINEMA CRUDITÉ
A SIMPLE MEDIUM
INVISIBLE GIRL
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF NOT GIVING A SHIT - On a Visit with Jim Harrison
Acknowledgments
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SUBSCRIBE TO THE BELIEVER at BLVR.ORG
Copyright Page
ALSO BY TOM BISSELL
NONFICTION
Chasing the Sea (2003)
The Father of All Things (2007)
Extra Lives (2010)
The Art and Design of Gears of War (2011)
FICTION
God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories (2005)
HUMOR
Speak, Commentary (2003)
(with Jeff Alexander)
For Trisha Miller,
with whom every hour is magic
I think you are in love with more than a story this is the story of stories and what you have done with it.
——JAMES TATE,
“Brother of the Unknown Ancient Man”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The first essay in this collection was written by a twenty-five-year-old assistant editor living in New York City; the last was written by a thirty-seven-year-old assistant professor of English living in Portland, Oregon. How I managed to get through an entire decade while remaining an assistant anything is mysterious to me, but no matter. What is perhaps most important to know is that these essays are the work of an accidental nonfiction writer.
I have never studied journalism. Until my early twenties, in fact, I almost never read nonfiction. When I first started writing for magazines, I imagined that I would use nonfiction writing as a way to fund my fiction writing. This did not go exactly as planned. Insofar as I am known as anything today it is as a nonfiction writer. Earlier in my career, I was neurotic enough to let this bother me. When I started out as a writer, I regarded fiction—novels, especially—as the supreme achievement of the human imagination. While I still hold fiction in very high regard, and continue to write it, I no longer believe in genre chauvinism. Life is difficult enough.
When I am asked by students and younger writers for advice on how to get started as a nonfiction writer, I tell them to start small and look around. You need to find a story you are uniquely well situated to tell, a story that literally cannot be told without you. In my case, my first stories concerned my experience of republishing the work of Paula Fox and a film shoot in my hometown of Escanaba, Michigan. No one was particularly crying out for these stories, I knew, but both, I felt certain, had larger implications if properly explored. Shortly after “Escanaba’s Magic Hour” was published, a magazine editor asked me if I wanted to go to the Canadian Arctic and write about NASA’s Mars training camp. Yes. Yes I did.
Shortly before the trip, though, I had second thoughts and called the editor. “You’re aware,” I said, “that I’m not actually a journalist? That I have no idea how to interview someone?” The editor was undeterred. “Look,” he said, “just go up there and write about what you see.”
Most of what I have learned about writing nonfiction has come, practically speaking, on the job. However, I am quite certain that my years of writing fiction provided me with the necessary tools of storytelling, observation, and empathy—all that stuff that is as hard to teach as it is hard to learn without doing it badly for a long and necessary time. When I began to think about assembling a collection of my nonfiction, I noticed how often I wrote about people engaged in some aspect of creation. To create anything—whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom—is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic—which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.
—TCB
Portland, OR
October 19,2011
UNFLOWERED ALOES
We do not possess a thousandth part of the writings of the Ancients: it is Fortune’s favour which grants them a short life or a long one.
—Michel de Montaigne, “On Glory”
Destiny—the quaint notion that things happen as a matter of necessity—no longer retains much intellectual currency But a curious vestige of faith endures in many otherwise skeptical intellectuals, and nothing indicates it more than how they view literature. For intellectuals, destiny as it applies to life is a ludicrous thought, but destiny as it applies to works of fiction and poetry goes largely unquestioned. Call it literary destiny: the faith that great literature will survive and achieve recognition commensurate to its value. We read of Kafka’s deathbed plea to his friend and literary executor Max Brod to consign his fiction to the hearth, and grin with the realization that Kafka’s survival was ordained. (Never mind the fact that Kafka’s girlfriend, Dora Dymant, loved him enough to take his identical plea to her seriously, and put to the torch a large portion of material.) In a similar vein, we read the contemporaneous reviews that pilloried Melville (“trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature”) and Whitman (“his failure to understand the business of a poet is clearly astounding”) as dusty scuttlebutt. Yes, we console ourselves, great work may be greeted with scorn and may even disappear altogether for some stretch of time, but the slow process of literary recognition assures that the sweetest cream eventually rises to the top.
The simple problem is that this happy story is, in art as in life, not true. What determines a work’s longevity is in many cases an accumulation of unliterary accidents in the lives of individuals years and sometimes even decades after the writer has gone unto the white creator. “The race is not to the swift,” the author of Ecclesiastes tells us, “nor the battle to the strong ... but time and chance happen to them all.” Nowhere is this truer than literary survival. Some work, through no fault of its own, has simply not made it. If Max Brod had been as obedient as Dora Dymant, the twentieth century would have lost its most emblematic writer. In the face of this alarming possibility, Kafka’s greatness seems pale reassurance indeed.
W.W. Norton & Company stands among the last of the independent American publishing houses, and I came to work there more or less by accident. After a Peace Corps hitch and a magazine internship, I was hired by Norton as an editorial assistant, one of modern civilization’s least remunerative, most thankless, yet intensely interesting jobs. With my new worm’s-eye view of the publishing process, I became aware of the many invisible determinants in a book’s journey to hardback. Editorial meetings, for instance. Where I work, editors and salespeople gather every week
to determine which books they will buy. A week or two before the meeting, an editor circulates a manuscript or proposal he or she is interested in; at the meeting, the editor makes a case for the book, and discussion ensues. At this point the vagaries of taste and personality cast an inordinately long shadow. (Most editors can tell chilling stories of a cutting, off-the-cuff comment from a colleague that irretrievably turns an entire room against the project at hand.) Immense too is the influence wielded by a house’s sales director, who is forced to make immediate, hard-hearted judgments on what books will sell and how much. Indeed, I suspect that many writers would hang themselves in despair if handed the transcript of an editorial meeting commenced within even a literary house.
It still never occurred to me to question the mechanisms of literary survival. Certainly I believed, then as now, that the publishing industry as a whole does literature few favors. (“Publication is the Auction of the Mind of Man,” Emily Dickinson wrote, and I doubt there is an editor alive who would disagree, or an agent who would want to.) But I had faith in the books themselves. Every great work, I felt sure, eventually rises above base commerce and sheer indifference. How can one embark upon any serious study of literature without believing this? Accident may misrule the corridors of history and science, but the course of literature is charted by more attentive forces. (Even if, as the generalissimos of political correctness insist, these forces are racist and sexist.)
I had spent five months at Norton when I was invited to join its paperback committee. The ominous addendum was that I have “ideas.” As it happened, I did have an idea. When I first arrived in New York, I wandered the aisles of the Strand, the famous clearinghouse for used books, hunting for Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters. I’d first gotten wind of the book in Jonathan Franzen’s Harper’s essay “Perchance to Dream,” which I’d read and admired as an undergraduate. At the time, Franzen’s reference to Fox’s “classic short novel” struck me with dismay. Could there be a classic of which I’d never even heard? I lit out to buy a copy, but found it out of print. Two years after reading Franzen’s essay, not even the Strand could help. Now, with the opportunity afforded by Norton, I wrote Franzen for Paula Fox’s address, and she, in turn, sent me a copy of Desperate Characters. I read of Otto and Sophie Bentwood, forty-something Brooklynites whose lives of quiet, bitter unrest erupt over a long weekend after Sophie is bitten by a stray cat. From such quotidian material, Fox wrests a dread-soaked exploration of American life. A week later, I sat at a large polished wooden table and sheepishly explained to my colleagues why I thought restoring to print a thirty-year-old novel about a cat bite was a good idea. To my surprise, my colleagues agreed.
Months later, armed with a new introduction from Franzen and fresh encomia from David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Rosellen Brown, Shirley Hazzard, and Andrea Barrett, Desperate Characters was republished. It received a harvest of publicity virtually unheard of for a paperback reprint. Upon the strength of this showing, Norton signed up more of Fox’s out-of-print novels, including what I believe to be her best work, The Widow’s Children.
One might assume all this would make a young editor very happy. The longer I thought about it, however, the more troubled I became. I could not stop reflecting upon how arbitrary—how unliterary—the whole business was. Desperate Characters’s republication, despite the book’s greatness, seemed merely the yield of an inert aggregate of chance. I felt something akin to what I imagine haunts the recipient of a Hail Mary touchdown pass. Not only was the ball not meant for him, it was not meant for anyone. The joy of victory is cut with a terrifying void. Outcome is particulate; modulating the tiniest variable can spell ruin. In football, we accept this. But for writers, editors, and readers who view literature itself with quasi-religious reverence, this is intolerable.
Of course, that any good book sees publication is a miracle on par with the loaves and fishes. New books are, by their nature, subject to the cruelest happenstance. A novelist can be hit by a bus, manuscript under arm, on her way to the mailbox. But rediscovering a work creates an altogether different quandary. Smuggling forgotten titles back into print is more difficult than ever. When such an opportunity presents itself, the majordomos of modern publishing will reliably issue a stark mandate on one of several themes: It is money poorly spent. It is effort wrongly exerted. It is throwing away a spot on the list better reserved for short story collections detailing the adventures of young women and their diaphragms.
Publishing is a business with little consolation but the books themselves. Republishing Desperate Characters made me wonder if this was a most fleeting solace. Is greatness, in the end, no purer guarantee for survival than awfulness is for swift dispatch?
Art, Wallace Stevens wrote, “lives uncertainly and not for long.” Nothing illustrates how uncertainly better than what remains of ancient literature. The first performance of Aristophanes’s The Clouds was held at a festival in 423 BCE. Judged today by many critics to be Aristophanes’s greatest satire—it is almost certainly his funniest—it disappointed its author’s hopes by placing third in the festival’s competition. It was defeated by Kratinos’s The Wineflask and Ameipsias’s Konnos. It must have particularly galled Aristophanes to place second to Ameipsias. Among other things, The Clouds attacks the sophistic movement then sweeping Greece, satirizing its leader, Socrates, with such glee that Plato believed it helped create the atmosphere that led to Socrates’s death. “Konnos” was the name of Socrates’s music teacher, and thus it is likely that Ameipsias’s play mounted a similar assault. We must rely on such phrases as “likely” because Ameipsias’s play, like a number of Aristophanes’s, no longer survives. Whether these works were abandoned by copyists, incinerated in a doomed library, or carried off by plundering Ostrogoths, we can never know. All we can know is that individual excellence is a virtually useless consideration when pondering their disappearance.
For obvious reasons, religious literature has been better safeguarded against the obliterating levers of time. But one event in particular demonstrates the precarious stewardship to which all ancient literature is subject. In 1945 an Egyptian peasant named Muhammad Ali al-Samman discovered in caves near the town of Nag Hammadi one of the most significant caches of religious manuscripts in history. They would come to be known as the Gnostic Gospels. Contrary to the workings of popular imagination, the Gnostics were heterodox groups of Christians of highly varying beliefs. Prior to Muhammad Ali’s discovery, all scholars had to piece together Gnosticism was the denunciation of church fathers like Irenaeus and Tertullian and the odd recovered fragment from works like the Gospel of Thomas. Texts in hand, and completely ignorant of what they contained, Muhammad Ali took them home and dumped them in a pile near the oven. Over the next few days, his mother burned an unknown number of manuscripts for the noble cause of preparing dinner for her family.
As Nazism demonstrates, censorship and genocide are part of the same continuum of eradication. As monstrous as intentional book-burning is, something more troubling flickers along the margins of the Muhammad Ali episode. For work that has survived nearly two thousand years to find itself sacrificed to the domestic pyre clearly reveals that literature is less vulnerable to concentrated efforts to destroy it than blind, innocent accident.
Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson form American literature’s most influential troika. Their appearances are unprecedented; their innovations immeasurable. Mark Twain, Henry James, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, great nineteenth-century writers of equal if less profound influence, would have left unfazed one early judge of American literature. In 1840,Alexander de Tocqueville could write, to general agreement, that “Americans have not yet, properly speaking, got any literature.” By that, he meant no American writer had yet kicked over the traces of European influence. James and Hawthorne never really would. As for Twain, Tocqueville’s comment, “Only the journalists strike me as truly American,” seems instantly, if unhappily, applicable.
Melville and Whitm
an share both a birth year (1819) and a death year (1891). Dickinson, a decade younger than either, died in 1886. But for post-mortem developments that had, at best, oblique connections to their work, it is possible that Melville would be familiar only to a small group of antebellum scholars, Whitman remembered only as the author of the Lincoln eulogy “Oh Captain! My Captain!,” and Emily Dickinson enduring only in the whispers of Dickinson descendants as the unmarried shut-in who wrote abstruse verse.
Of the three, Whitman’s survival is least perilous. Before embarking on his career as a poet, Whitman failed at everything he attempted. He was a newspaper editor (publicly fired, on one occasion, for laziness), a hack journalist, and the author of a forgettable temperance novel. He became a poet, at least initially, to amuse himself. Trained as a printer, he set Leaves of Grass’s first edition on his own. (The printer’s term for experimental writing then was “grass,” a larky job to be done during downtime.) In Whitman’s day, poets were freighted with tripartite names like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Whitman was America’s first literary bohemian, and for that crime endured many stripes by its reigning establishment gentlemen—all but Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whom Whitman sent a first edition of Leaves of Grass. Emerson’s 1855 response is probably the most celebrated blurb in literary history. One of its less famous sections reads: “I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits.” Whitman, to Emerson’s undying annoyance, promptly printed Emerson’s words in gold print on the cover of the second edition, which still sold no better than the first.
