by Tom Bissell
All the animals in Orwell’s Animal Farm are equal, remember, but some are more equal than others. So, too, then, are some outsiders more outside than others. A few writers, such as Thoreau, seem for the sake of vanity or affectation to will upon themselves outsider status. Thoreau’s friendship with Emerson, probably the most prominent writer of the day, indicates that he was something less than a solitary literary soul. There is the Clown Outsider, such as Whitman, who was not taken seriously until most of the insiders who despised him were dead. There is the Spurned Outsider, such as Melville, whose early success with Typee led him to believe that his skeleton key would forever provide entrance to the inside literary world; by the time Pierre appeared the locks had all been discreetly changed. There is the Outsider from Mars, such as Dickinson. There is the Outsider by Temperament, such as Jack London, who, however magnificent a man, was not actually a very good writer. There is the Square Outsider, such as Willa Cather, loved by readers but secretly loathed as a hopeless square by those on the inside. There is the Outsider Who Unexpectedly Finds Himself Inside, such as Jack Kerouac. There is the Nutcase Outsider, such as Hunter S. Thompson. There is the Geographical Outsider, such as the novelist Jim Harrison. (I once made the mistake of admiringly telling Harrison that I regarded him as the dean of Midwestern literature. His long career of being belittled by urban critics had acclimated him to regard that statement as a scatologically vivid insult. I am still apologizing.) There is the Outsider Mistakenly Regarded as an Insider, such as John Updike, who is in fact so outside he does not even have an agent.
And then there is the True Outsider, the writer who believes, as he believes nothing else, that he has no hope of ever accessing the inner literary world. This conviction often sadly fulfills itself; people, artists especially, tend to internalize their fates. Nevertheless, not a few True Outsiders have met with literary success, though in many cases only when it was far too late to have any earthly benefit. The suicide John Kennedy Toole is probably the most famous True Outsider, though it pains me to admit that I regard A Confederacy of Dunces as one of the most overrated novels ever published. I am glad, all the same, that it was published, if only for the moments of reflection it caused those who rejected it to suffer.
Literature tends to maltreat outsiders more frequently than the worlds of music and film. Or so it is commonly supposed. Compared to the world’s literal millions of unpublished novels, one hears relatively little of the numerous wrapped independent films that never see release. The logistical difficulties of mounting a film production surely have something to do with this, as does economics. Since movies made beyond the clutches of studios have been proven, at least in concept, financially viable, independent film has for the last decade been growing steadily less independent. The music industry, on the other hand, tends to mainline the energy of anarchic independence to such an extent that it packages even its grossly mainstream outfits in the roguishly tattered robes of the True Outsider. Given the considerable seductions of both industries, the successful True Outsider does not, as a rule, tend to stay True or Outside within them for very long.
The publishing industry, on the other hand, has little faith in and less regard for the True Outsider because it is difficult enough to make money on sure-thing insiders. It is a real challenge to come up with more than a tiny handful of self—printed novels of serious artistic intent published in the last hundred years that achieved even the mildest sort of cult status. (James Joyce’s Ulysses, though not exactly self—printed, was a deeply homegrown publishing endeavor. A more modern example might be Arthur Nersesian’s underground hit The Fuck-Up, though one could hardly claim it is well known.) In a weird quirk all but unique to publishing, even literary movements that furiously reject the mainstream—the Beats are the prime example—tend to be more or less gratefully published by traditional, mainstream houses. This is because traditional houses offer what are essentially the only means of widely dispensing one’s work. This is also because the literary world is not usually regarded as spinelessly money-hungry as the worlds of film and music. In short, a different, less rapacious sort of person is attracted to the literary world, and the typical literary novel sells, if it is lucky, 5,000 to 10,000 copies. This is quite a bit less than one tenth of one percent of the American populace. The conglomerates could board up and soap the windows of lit—erary publishing in a day, if they chose. People would complain, certainly. But would most Americans care?
Hence the problem the True Outsider has in the publishing world. The peddling of literature is itself an outside industry. So few literary movements have sought to destroy this fragile creature because without it, what on earth would they do? There is, however, one literary movement today that seeks to save the publishing industry by smashing it into a million genteel smithereens. They call themselves the Underground Literary Alliance. They also call themselves “the most exciting literary movement in America.” They might well be, as I cannot really think of any other existing literary movement in America. This, they would say, is the problem. The system, as it currently exists, does not welcome movements or true independence, only perversely canny individuals who have figured out how to work that system as though it were an uncommonly prodigal slot machine. Here, perhaps, I should share another appellation the ULA has earned, this from an editor acquaintance: “The ghastliest group of no-talent whiners to have ever walked the earth.”
The ULA’s founding members first connected during the early-to mid-1990s in what they themselves refer to as the “zine world.” These writers read one another’s zines and dispatched fan letters to the authors of the work they admired. Many of these letters were filled with complaints and jeremiads about what was currently being published, which makes them the least unusual writers in the history of American literature. (A quick scan of the letters of William Faulkner or Virginia Woolf will find them, too, railing against the perceived mediocrity of their contemporaries: in Faulkner’s case, John O’Hara and James Gould Cozzens; in Woolf’s far less happy case, James Joyce.) Nevertheless, in the summer of 2000 these writers decided to band officially together. Not to mention officiously together: theirs was a literary movement based not so much on some shared aesthetic or philosophy of generational focus but on the premise that just about every contemporary writer’s work sucked.
The ULA has no apparent geographic center, and many of its members hail from faded industrial capitals such as Detroit and Philadelphia. If the ULA’s own mythology is to be believed, Hoboken, New Jersey, became Bethlehem to its literary messiah. (This was followed, of course, by a three-day pub crawl.) Shortly after the group’s launch, Michael Jackman, today the ULA’s executive director, wrote the group’s manifesto. Like most manifestos, it is neither punctilious nor especially logic-ridden, and it reads like the wail of True Outsider grief that it almost certainly is. Why has the ULA been founded? “Because writing is being professionalized.” (Yes, depressingly.) “Because professionalization initiatives push aspirants away from thinking in their own ways.” (Probably yes.) “Because professionalization enforces a priori prejudices of what ‘good writing’ is.” (Possibly yes, but when has it ever been different?) “Because great writers must never be frightened that their ‘credentials’ may be revoked.” (Absolutely yes.) “Because literature is elitist.” (Yes—and it should be elitist, though creatively elitist rather than politically or socially elitist.) “Because literature is completely out of touch with the reality of contemporary life.” (Whose literature? Which writers?) “Because literature has become just a tax deduction, mired in the upper class, written for readers isolated in their wonderful homes, who wish to believe that the world is filled with wonderful things.” (Well, sort of, maybe, but mostly: huh?) “Because the literary lights of big publishing have nothing to be contentious about—they’re sitting on top of the world.” (God no.) “Because the literary establishment does indeed have an agenda, and the first point on that brief is that nobody criticize the agenda.” (One whole agenda
for everyone? A slightly Protocols of the Elders of Zionish notion.) “Because literature must confront the evil and corrupt system of class, greed and exclusion that this country has been based upon from it’s inception.” (Sigh. And, guys: it’s its.) “Because writers should see something wrong and denounce it, no matter how many friends it costs them.” (Okay.) “Because style has become convoluted.” (Dude. Whose?) “Because the literary establishment is corrupt to the core.” (No.) “Because corruption, cronyism, nepotism, and cowardice are mixed into a toxic potation that poisons the soul of all who drink from it.” (Come on.) “Because writers have become addicted to big words and stuffy syntax that puts the reader into a torpor, to the point where words clog up the pipes of the mind and produce a deadly sewer gas.” (That’s... that’s just rich.) “THEREFORE, we renounce the professionalization of literary craft that has become part and parcel of the literary world.” Well, they certainly renounced craft while writing this manifesto.
The ULA is the kind of group which boasts on its website not of any achievements but its protests. Thus one learns, in a long, exhaustive register, of the ULA’s protestation of “millionaire socialite” Rick Moody’s Guggenheim Award; of its protestation of a Best Zine prize awarded to McSweeney’s, which the ULA regards as too “fancy” and “dandified” to be a zine, even though the entire operation is fronted with its own money and printed independently, which, at least as I understand it, pretty much defines a zine, but what do I know; of a purported victory at a debate between the ULA and the Paris Review, when, in fact, the Paris Review’s editor, George Plimpton, had gone into the debate with high hopes and fellow feeling but grew swiftly disgusted by the ULA’s infantile antics; of its crashing of “an effete, boring reading” given by the novelist Elissa Schappell at KGB, where the ULA was thrown out after clapping inappropriately, and for which ejection the ULA’s explanation is cast in the weaselly passive voice (“Alcohol was involved”); of its “Big Underground Invasion Reading in Detroit,” the ULA’s “first stop on its National Breakout Tour,” where “Underground heroes read, rocked and revved up the crowd,” which for all one knows they did; and of its “letters of challenge” sent “to many NYC publishers and writing programs,” about which good luck.
With all this in mind, it will come as no surprise that occasionally—actually, way more than occasionally—the ULA is thuggish, cruel, and petty. Many of the writers on the receiving end of ULA vitriol have felt seriously threatened and, indeed, nearly terrorized. Many writers, including Dave Eggers (who at one time was sent poorly written mail from the ULA), were against the publication of this piece; their concern was that anything that might fuel the ULA’s anger was a bad idea, as it might result in new eruptions and cause distress to fellow writers.
But the ULA seems worth examining, to me at least. In January of this year, the ULA turned up at a reading held at Housing Works, one of New York’s most venerable used bookstores. The reading was intended to celebrate the alternative publishing community, embodied by the literary magazines Open City, McSweeney’s, and Fence. By all accounts, including their own, the ULA made a thoroughgoing mess of the evening. In a report ominously titled “The Incident at Housing Works,” which is posted on the ULA website, ULA founder (now publicity director) King Wenclas notes that the “crowd of several hundred was upscale and nearly all white.” (I would be very curious to learn of the racial makeup of the average ULA reading.) Wenclas regards the event’s audience as “pod persons with plastic smiles. . . . The ULA was among a cultural aristocracy that evening, an aristocracy filled with smugness about their meaningless art.” With the requisite ULA name-calling out of the way, Wenclas’s more substantial gripe quickly surfaces: “Many things are happening outside the doors; a widening gap between America’s classes; an approaching war. There was scarcely a vibration of any of this among the trust funders. Can our nation’s most nurtured writers be so out of touch with their own country (or even their own city)?”
The readings that evening were given by Ben Greenman, a McSweeney’s contributor and formidably clever, very funny satirist; Tina Brown Celona, a Fence poet; and Sam Lipsyte, an Open City fixture whose willfully slight but, again, extremely funny novel The Subject Steve had the unluck to be published on September 11, 2001. Whether these writers or their audience are “trust funders” is a little beside the point; my own experience with the youth demographic of New York City publishing leads me to suspect that most of them, in all likelihood, are not. (A quick resume check of my closest publishing friends, admittedly not the most comprehensive portrait, reveals a young publishing world hardly born on velvet. One friend hails from a hardscrabble Mississippi background, another from upper-middle-class Brooklyn, another from rural middle-class Virginia, another from middle-class New Jersey. I myself hail from a lovely speck of a town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I suspect our accumulated savings could probably cover a down payment on a nice apartment in the heart of Appleton, Wisconsin.) The only legitimate question, then, concerns the work the Housing Works readers shared. As Wenclas tells it, that night’s offerings consisted of stories and poems about a “tree [Greenman], a cunt [Celona], and a candy bar [Lipsyte].” Wenclas wants to know, “Where were the current Balzacs, Zolas, Tolstoys?” Maybe in France and Russia? “We were accused,” Wenclas notes of the hostile Housing Works crowd, “of wanting to inject politics into literature, because we asked for literature to be relevant.”
Now, I have nothing at all against the writers who read at Housing Works that night, but I have been to enough such readings to have felt, from time to time, something of Wenclas’s frustration myself. A fair amount of the work reaped in alternative publications such as McSweeney’s, Fence, and Open City does seem only vaguely intended to be read. As for today’s politically minded younger fiction writers and poets.... Jesus, it is a little depressing. Wenclas is not wrong to want a stronger, more serious literature, especially during these sorrowed times, but his anger is more than slightly disingenuous if he expected to find an artist of Tolstoyan wingspan at a reading featuring the author of Superbad. If Greenman, the writer responsible for Superbad (which, let me say, is a terrific book), had somehow fallen from the fold of serious fiction and embraced apolitical tomfoolery, then one could at least understand Wenclas’s puzzlement. But Greenman is primarily a satirist, and Lipsyte is a comic writer. That Greenman read a story about a tree and Lipsyte a candy bar is not surprising. Wenclas, surely, knows this. (I also imagine Greenman’s tree story was a lot funnier than Wenclas lets on. I have seen Lipsyte read his “candy bar” story, and it is hilarious indeed.) To find fault with either for the reasons the ULA gives is a little like criticizing The Producers for not being more like The Sorrow and the Pity. Why are these writers not allowed to write what they want? There are, after all, other writers doing different things. And why, for that matter, should Tolstoy be the writer under whom we all fall into lockstep emulation? Tolstoy was a great writer, obviously, but if every published novel were Tolstoyan, I, for one, would be forced to kill myself. Most likely, Wenclas objects to the high-profile venue these writers were given. But as any writer who has given a reading knows, most readings are the precise opposite of high profile. They are almost exclusively attended by the assorted roommates, former roommates, girl- and boyfriends, former girl- and boyfriends, close friends, family members, and acquaintances of whomever happens to be reading. This leads to a certain insularity, but surely the ULA’s readings are no less insular. Furthermore, in terms of the expected fun to be had at a reading, most place up there with trips to the Laundromat. People simply do not go to readings because they want to; they go because they have to. (“Ah, I can’t tonight. I have this fucking reading I gotta go to.”) I suspect that many of those who witnessed the ULA’s Housing Works rampage—at one point, the fiction writer Thomas Beller and Wenclas nearly came to blows—found the disruption to be the evening’s inarguable highlight.
The Underground Literary Alliance takes as its stated revo
lutionary mission the search for “America’s great writers! If we don’t do it, no one will.” There are good, needed, and necessary revolutions, and then there are revolutions that upon successful completion require a new flag and lots and lots of tombstones. There is little doubt which type of revolution the Underground Literary Alliance has in mind: “The goal is to overthrow the literary establishment and get access for real writers. The public wants writing that’s worth reading!” The sentiment behind the lattermost position is genuinely touching, even inspiring, and it saddens me to note that, in fact, the public does not want writing that is worth reading. By all available evidence, the public wants one novel after another starring Goodhearted Lawyers Fighting the System, Goodhearted Christians Battling the Antichrist, and Goodhearted Heroines Humped Silly by Manly Strangers Who Will Ultimately Leave Them but Damn, That Was Some Orgasm, Was It Not?
The ULA’s other, less dismissible beefs amount to the following: “Put Populists on funding panels. Publish about real life. Support our starving real writers. Admit that today’s system ruins art.” Insofar as grants go, the ULA is probably correct to maintain that the grant system, particularly that which is overseen by the National Endowment for the Arts, is if not corrupt outright then at least hopelessly back-scratchy. The argument can be made, though, that the very nature of any funding scheme based on the decisions of self—interested judges, Populist or not, is itself corrupting. Is it not completely unrealistic to hope that the NEA behaves any less cravenly than, say, the Department of Defense when it dispenses its contracts? A truly revolutionary argument would be to oppose any and all government funding of individual artists. It is hard to seem rebellious, after all, while whining about who got daddy’s money. Alas, complaining about grants has lead the ULA to some fairly appalling arguments, such as when they fingered fiction writer and “university professor” Josip Novakovich for receiving an NEA grant in 2002. It was, the ULA pointed out, his second NEA award in a decade: “Out of the many thousands of writers in America, should one of them receive TWO NEA awards? Is Professor Novakovich that outstanding a writer, or in that need of help? We think not.”
