by Tom Bissell
I think so. Novakovich is a wonderful writer who would probably eat a bicycle to be published by a major house; I know, because I tried and failed to publish him when I was an assistant editor at W W Norton & Company. Novakovich (I do not think he would mind me saying this) also has a family; “university professors” do not, by and large, roll around in piles of money and typically see their writing time vacuumed up by teaching. The money was probably crucial manna for him and his writing life. That the ULA can take a fine, unsung writer such as Novakovich—a writer, moreover, hitherto neglected by the larger publishing world—and single him out for opprobrium is nauseating. He is exactly the type of writer whom the ULA should be championing, especially when Wenclas has claimed that the ULA is “a kind of advocacy group to stand up for writers.”
Jackman has explained that the ULA does not stand up for writers who wish to work through the traditional publishing world simply because “we are not interested in trying to hype writers who doff their caps and meekly enter the offices of a major publisher.... Let them try their way; we’ll try ours.” Which would be fair enough if the ULA behaved with such fair-minded quietude in how they regard these meek, cap—doffing souls.
“Publish about real life,” the ULA demands. William Goldman once wrote, with some rue, that the problem with novels is that they are written by novelists, all of whom necessarily share a basic similarity of foundational experience: bookishness, self—absorption, perceived alienation. Oftentimes, this can lead to shrunkenly personal work, something of which even Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was eye-crossingly capable. Recently in The Spooky Art, Norman Mailer made a point parallel to Goldman’s. Not once in the twentieth century, Mailer noted, has a single politician, actor, athlete, or surgeon emerged as a first-rate novelist, despite the dismayingly huge breadth of experience each profession affords. For better or worse, and I am prepared to admit worse, writers are writers are writers. This explains why so many mediocre fiction writers sound the same, why there exist so many books about writers, and why many talented fiction writers seem to think that their best option to distinguish themselves is to flee the quotidian to explore more fanciful subject matter. The resulting work (novels about talking dogs, alternate-world fiction) can indeed grow wearying for those of us who read a lot of contemporary literature. Once again the ULA is not wrong in finding a large number of American fiction writers culturally remiss. The ULA solution is less appealing.
What the ULA is asking for is, in its own words, “writing... done in plain English about subjects that matter.” What would such work look like? Steinbeck or, more likely, the interior of a Hallmark “Special Moments” card? The “plain English/subjects that matter” position reveals two things: 1) a perfect ignorance of the numerous novels—some would say too numerous—being written today that fulfill such a homely mandate; and 2) a stolid refusal to accept anyone who goes about his or her artistic life differently than the ULA. The ULA’s habitual concern with “real writers” is abundant proof of this. Who are the “real writers”? “Real writers” are those who starve. Those who do not starve, it then follows, who have managed some level of professional success as writers, are not real writers. Success ruins art. The system ruins art. If this heartless dialectic makes it seem as though no one but the ULA could possibly win this argument, that is because no one but the ULA can possibly win this argument.
To anyone with a passing knowledge of Soviet history such histrionics for Realism! Relevance! and Politics! may seem strangely familiar. In 1917 the Bolsheviks picked up their power from the shattered streets of St. Petersburg and set out instantly to crush those journalists and writers in opposition to the new and shaky Soviet regime. Despite a long, pervasive, and decidedly un-European tradition of censorship in Russia, in 1906 the tsar freed Russia’s newspapers to write what they pleased. This was to the short-lived relief of Russia’s small intellectual class, as Lenin’s very first public decree called for the suppression of all newspapers that did not recognize Bolshevik legitimacy. Lenin’s edict met such widely felt derision that he had to abandon it until power—at least in St. Petersburg and Moscow—was fully consolidated, in 1918. Russia’s hundreds of independent newspapers, some founded in the 1700s, were crushed over a period of mere days. Books, which enjoyed a comparatively smaller audience, were treated more leniently by the Bolsheviks, as they were by the tsars, but by 1922 all manuscripts were forced to go through the Main Administration for Literary Affairs and Publishing, otherwise known as Glavlit. Not surprisingly, the literary writers the Bolsheviks courted either rejected them outright or soon grew disillusioned with the regime’s metastasizing totalitarianism. The poet laureate of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Mayakovsky a quasi-fascist Futurist whom Lenin privately despised for his “arrant stupidity,” wrote gleefully of smashing the bourgeoisie. In one poem he speaks with chilling approval of killing the old men and using their skulls as ashtrays, and in another maintains that “he who sings not with us today / is against / us!” Mayakovsky’s mono—and dipsomania grew as terribly as the Bolsheviks’ power: his first volume of verse was titled I!, his autobiography I Myself. When Stalin tired of Mayakovsky in 1930, the poet did the world a favor and killed himself. The other notable Soviet poetaster was named Demian Bedny a true literary butcher Trotsky commended for his “hatred.” Bedny poems such as “No Mercy” and “Everything Comes to an End” were even worse than Mayakovsky’s. Stalin tired of Bedny, too, though in an atypical show of mercy only forbade him from ever publishing again. But what of the truly significant literary artists living beneath the nascent yoke of the Soviet regime? What of Anna Akhmatova and Aleksandr Blok and Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel and Boris Pasternak? They were thought “corrupt,” “fraudulent,” “impure.” They were not real writers. In a typically monstrous Soviet formulation they were, to the man, tarred as members of “individual nobility.” That is, they had fancy educations. They did not write about the correct subject matter. They did not address what mattered. Soon Akhmatova was reduced to cleaning floors for a living. Blok, after publishing a few poems in praise of the Bolsheviks, gave up poetry altogether and died of tormented guilt in 1921. Mandelstam and Babel perished in the Gulag. Pasternak survived, but, in the words of the historian Richard Pipes, “had to bear humiliation... that [a] less stalwart soul... would not have endured.”
I am not suggesting that the ULA wants to exterminate writers in a Stalinist burst of classocide. (Although who would know it when they say things such as: “These pretenders are in fact members of the cognoscenti: literary-bureaucrats-in-waiting. At best, they’re Gorbachev-like reformers. But to the ULA, the mass media can’t be reformed, only overthrown, destroyed, and replaced.” Even the history in that statement is, in the politest possible terms, completely fucked. The putatively hapless reforms of Gorbachev restructured the Soviet Union right out of existence.) The point here is to call attention to the ramifications of the ULA’s argumentatively reckless style. The Bolsheviks changed their names to reflect their personas (“Lenin” derived from the Lena River; “Stalin” derived from steel; “Molotov”: hammer; “Bedny”: poor), and many ULA members, such as “King” Wenclas, Wild Bill Blackolive, Urban Hermitt, Crazy Carl Robinson, and Will Ratblood, seem to have indulged in similar nomenclatural baptisms. To rename oneself in such a way is a gesture both of concealment and aggression. The rhetoric one employs both fills out one’s new persona and solidifies the always-hazy world into hatefully clear antipodes. In short, one simply cannot toss around such words as “destroy” and “overthrow” without their nasty energy bleeding right down into one’s mental topsoil.
“One must avoid ambition in order to write,” Cynthia Ozick once said. “Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.” I suspect that the Underground Literary Alliance would vomit on that statement. And I suspect, too, that very few writers would want to live in a world in whic
h the Underground Literary Alliance determined who could and could not write.
Reading through ULA agitprop, one is left with a persistent residue of the group’s general cluelessness as to how the literary world actually functions. For one, it assumes that the literary world does, in fact, function. Yes, many literary people in New York go to too many parties. Yes, many have unfair social advantages—though just as many do not. Yes, personal connections account for a lot, but personal connections account for just about everything in any adult’s professional life. Connections in this sense are, after all, just another word for luck. When someone within the industry likes one’s work as a writer, it becomes a connection. When someone within the industry dislikes one’s work which is just as likely, it becomes another connection—a negative connection. This process is neither sinister nor corrupt. It is human and, for most editors, it is permeable and subject to unpredictable point mutation, not the least of which is when someone writes something someone else believes to be good. Connections are also rather defiantly not the final word. When I was an intern at Harper’s Magazine in 1997—a position I lucked into with no connection -whatsoever—I sat in on editorial meetings and watched in quiet awe as one Famous Writer’s short story after another went down like Japanese Zeros over Midway. I would need several pairs of hands to count the writers, many of them excellent, wired for every connection one could dream of, whose novels and story collections continue to go unsold.
It is while attacking specific literary figures and organs that the ULA goes most woefully lost. The ULA speaks of the magazine Open City as a “well-hyped trendy NYC lit journal,” and imagines its readers as “Binky” and “Bret.” Open City is a fine journal but well hyped it is not, and I would be willing to wager my iBook that neither Amanda Urban nor Bret Easton Ellis regularly cracks open its issues. Similarly, the admirable, small circulation Bookforum is called a “mouthpiece” of “the literary establishment,” which I imagine Bookforum longs were true for the sake of the ad dollars alone. The ULA impugns well-known fiction writers as merry Vichy collaborators when, in fact, many of them would cross the street to avoid one another. Other times, the ULA simply does not make sense at all. When the ULA challenged the Yale English Department to debate the future of American literature, a professor named Nigel Alderman kindly agreed, provided that the ULA read some books of his designation. [I]n other words,” Wenclas fulminated, “that we accept his premises; that we receive his indoctrination; that we THINK in roughly the same way he thinks—which would defeat the entire point.” No, actually. The point is that Professor Alderman wanted to have a debate.
Finally, the ULA seems wholly ignorant of the Gissinglike toil faced even by “successful” writers with dozens of “connections.” The ULA routinely refers to “cushy” university and editorial positions, when in reality these jobs are tenuous, difficult, and roughly as cushy as a six-foot-tall cactus. Many of the writers I know who work as college instructors or editors do it for the money, health insurance, and stability—realities that the ULA’s studied blue-collar sympathies might be expected to accommodate. Working as a professional book editor today can be especially trying—it is certainly not financially rewarding—and not a few in my acquaintance belong on suicide watch. Being a writer, published or unpublished, is a life of frustration and rejection, which is why the dismayingly vast majority of writers who publish one book never go on to publish another.
Of the many words and phrases hip-hop culture has injected into in the lexical bloodstream of America, few equal the brilliant definitional succinctness of “player hater.” Player hating is not the same thing as jealously, exactly, though jealously obviously forms a keystone of the average player hater’s emotional architecture. Player hating is less rational—not to mention less melancholy—than jealousy. This is not Shakespeare’s “green-eyed monster” but a merciless, fire-breathing Godzilla. And the ULA takes player hating to a plane of Iagoan proportions. They are player haters who hate so purely and reflexively that they have run through all the players. Thus they constantly elevate non-players to player status, just so they can hate them, too.
One senses something of the ULA’s transparent hunger for celebrity from the kind of the writer they consistently assail. All are young, thought to be wealthy, usually male, usually live in New York City or environs, and possess to the utmost that highly qualified species of fame known as literary fame. Rick Moody has been pursued by the ULA so ferociously he is probably checking his shirts for a stenciled-on “Valjean” by now. Jonathan Franzen is another target often fired upon, as is Jeffrey Eugenides. The ULA has virtually nothing to say about the actual work of the writers it hates, other than to point out that it is “much-hyped” or some similar approximation. The ULA’s hatred of Moody appears largely centered upon the fact that Moody is independently wealthy (or that his family is—the ULA seems to believe this is the same thing, which maybe it is, but it is hard to see how this is the business of anyone whose last name is not Moody or relevant to whether or not his work is any good) and that he accepted a grant. Franzen’s doctrinal breach seems relatively minor: he accepted a grant after becoming unbelievably famous (though it was applied for before that crime). One of the more realish pieces of literary criticism to be found in the available ULA oeuvre concerns Eugenides’s novel Middlesex. The review, written by Michael Jackman, concerns itself almost entirely with demolishing Eugenides’s vision of “white flight” from Detroit, though it saves a little room to attack the use of “imagination” in writing. “Perhaps,” Jackman writes bitterly, “I don’t have the precious imagination that Eugenides seems to be blessed with.... Yes, writing can reach inside and find out what’s within us. It certainly can cover what’s happening inside the mind and below the belt. All I ask is that we turn that same scrutiny on the world around us, on the injustices and great crimes.” Although it is nice to see a writer responding to a novel with something more potent than typical book-report musings, it would be hard to imagine a more ax-grindingly butt-headed reading of Middlesex. Dave Eggers, however, earns from the ULA a highly specialized anger—that of class betrayal. “The Dave” (in ULA parlance) emerged, after all, from a zine background similar to that of the ULA’s founding members. What appears to bother the group most intensely is that Eggers is doing exactly what they would all like to be doing, only much better. ULA contributor Steve Kostecke all but admits as much in the micro-essay about a McSweeney’s event: “After [the reading] came a short play and, at a local bar, music performed by a band.... These things in combo I myself had envisioned years ago [emphasis most certainly mine] .... The McSweeners understand... that those who are easily bedazzled by the scent of things literary will react to them with hyperbole.... What they need... is an injection of substance, of the writing that now only exists in the raw authenticity of the zine scene.”
Perhaps now is the time to examine some of that raw authenticity.
It should immediately be said that the ULA has yet to find and develop its Jack Kerouac. Or its Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Or even its Ed Sanders. Nonetheless, though most of the work available on its website is bad, it is always bad in an interesting way. “Before You Know It,” an essay by Emerson Dameron, contains several florid avalanches of prose that in some writers’ hands are known as paragraphs:It’s dangerous to play it safe. America is a powder keg of free-floating hostility. The upper class micromanages its chokehold on economic power, filling its media with vaccinations against the peons’ sizzling discontent and pit—ting neighbor against neighbor like battling scorpions. It makes its lettuce sacrificing pawns such as you. And yet, among the plebes
and I have to stop, though Dameron doesn’t. (Incidentally: Emerson Dameron. Anyone blessed with a name like that has no call writing so poorly.) Another essay, “Style vs Substance” by Chris Zee, argues against the workshop:How would people with the leisurely disposition to study “the craft of writing” explain their own privilege? If these writers held a mirror up to themselves and the
world they enjoy, they might squirm a little at what they see.... It is no wonder that I’ve met more than one workshop writer who confided to me that they feel they have mastered the “craft” but they struggle in generating relevant subjects to write about.
Good points all, and these are points I have heard numberless editors and agents make. These are also points I have heard writers make. These are also points I have heard people who teach in workshops make. These are also points I have heard in workshops.
Prose that has passed through not a few of these ULA writers’ minds does not always survive its transit. What does survive is usually trembling, starved, and weak. It subsists on a thin broth of cliche. Thus, any dash is a “mad dash.” The past is inevitably the “not-too-distant past.” We have “the daily grind,” “the unwritten law,” stories occurring in “a sterile laboratory” Things “cross the mind,” get “stamped out,” and are kept “under hats.” One essay, its author an evident cruiserweight of cliche, ends with this left-hook, right—jab combo: “Because you only get so many chances. It’ll be over before you know it.”
