Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  38

  COLUMBIA JOURNAL INTERVIEW: WRITING*

  Mary Phillips-Sandy: I wanted to start off with a really general question. What are you reading right now? And do you find yourself reading more fiction or nonfiction?

  Camille Paglia: I read almost entirely nonfiction, unfortunately, because of what I regard as the self-marginalization of fiction in America, at least following World War Two. I’m afraid I’ve made some rather extreme statements about this—that the cultural center in letters has migrated into nonfiction. I tend to read politics, ancient history, biography, that kind of thing.

  MPS: Who are some of your current favorite nonfiction writers?

  CP: I don’t think I have any one or even several favorite writers of nonfiction—aside from myself, of course! I choose books for their topic rather than the writer. In fact, that’s one of the problems I see. There’s been a tremendous opportunity for young nonfiction writers over the last ten or fifteen years, but while there’s often been a media stir over one figure or another, I don’t notice that anyone has emerged that strongly from what used to be called Generation X to dominate the scene in terms of consistency or quality of work or uniqueness of voice. It could very well be that the Web—and I’m a great proponent of the Web and began writing for it early on—may have drained off a lot of the energy that young people used to devote to poetry writing or fiction or nonfiction.

  MPS: I’ve read your comments about academia in general, and higher education, and how a lack of a humanities foundation is failing our young people. I was wondering about your thoughts on specifically creative programs, like MFA creative writing programs. Are those useful to writers, do you think?

  CP: It’s a good and bad thing. The good part of the MFA program is that it offers people a chance to spend quality time in the company of others interested in writing in a period when popular culture and mass media dominate the landscape. I’m a great admirer of mass media, but it has definitely driven serious writing to the edges. So going to an MFA program is a gift, I think, for many people—a golden opportunity to have like-minded aspiring professionals around them. To be able to talk about writing and deal with nothing but books is a literary oasis in the midst of a desert.

  But the bad part, the downside, is that this is not the way writers have trained themselves for more than two millennia. In order to write, there has to be some direct experience of life, it seems to me. Jumping immediately from college into an MFA program is a perpetual student bubble that young people get trapped in. There’s also a kind of slick professionalization that some teachers convey to their students—teachers who, especially in the last twenty years or so, belong to the postmodernist or pseudo-hip school of writing and may encourage their students to adopt these increasingly passé gestures as a way to get published or make a name for themselves. The absence of a topic to write about, because of a lack of experience of real life, leads to a self-cannibalization that’s inevitable.

  So I think the way a writer should be taught is through self-education—through absorbing as much literature as possible and through living independently—just going out and living. Doing things. There was a time when avant-garde artists earned rent money by unloading trucks or varnishing floors—manual labor that gave them a feel for life and an exposure to other types of people. Unfortunately, the students who go into writing programs, as well as the teachers themselves these days, are completely middle-class. It’s as suffocating and bourgeois as a suburban shopping mall—and that cloistered culture becomes the totality of the students’ experience. Now, I don’t mean to paint with such a broad brush—there are countless hard-working, committed teachers who truly want to develop students’ individual voices. But there’s no sure way to develop such a voice without going out and encountering life head-on.

  MPS: Of course, the homogenization of MFA programs, as you say, is to some extent related to the cost of them.

  CP: Oh, yes, yes. That’s a serious problem across higher education generally. All the elite schools, especially at the undergraduate level, are suffering from this. The parents’ outlay of hundreds of thousands of dollars—and the schools’ strenuous efforts to ensure “diversity” through scholarships—have created a strange kind of arch, fictitious world at the elite schools. Whenever I set foot on an Ivy League campus these days, it’s like Disney World! It’s a palpably self-enclosed realm. There was a time, following World War Two, when the only schools offering writing degrees were the progressive colleges like Bennington, where I taught for eight years. They were small schools, okay, not big universities. The casual, improvisational nature of those programs was, I think, a far more fertile atmosphere for development of the individual voice. These larger programs embedded within major universities—I can’t imagine what that’s like, trying to learn to write in that kind of artificial environment.

  MPS: What did you think about Stephen King, a pop-culture icon, winning the National Book Award? As a native Mainer, I was very proud, but many people in the publishing world were fairly upset about it.

  CP: Well, the number-one protester was my own mentor, Harold Bloom (who directed my doctoral dissertation at Yale). I was a bit disappointed with the dismissive position Harold took in his op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. I felt that it was unkind and unnecessary—at least before the ceremony took place. A case can indeed be made, from a traditional literary point of view, about deficiencies in King’s prose style. But anyone who’s been following popular culture for the past three decades has to realize that Stephen King’s imagination has had tremendous cultural impact, and that ought to be honored by the cultural establishment in some way.

  I think there’s an analogy to Edgar Allan Poe here. In the 1830s and ’40s, Poe was just a trashy newspaper writer with a low reputation. He was considered a ne’er-do-well, and the genteel literary establishment thought his prose style was execrable. No one took him seriously—his horror stories were considered sensationalistic and so on. Well, Poe’s reputation was hugely elevated by one of his major fans, Charles Baudelaire, the French Romantic poet who translated Poe’s work and laid the foundation for Poe’s European reputation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the French criticized America for neglecting one of our greatest poets—they regarded Poe as a poet not just because he wrote poems but because of the power of imagination in his stories. And of course Poe had an enormous influence in terms of inventing the genre of detective fiction, revitalizing the short story as a genre, and transmitting Gothic fantasy to modern horror films.

  So now we look back and see Edgar Allan Poe as a giant of literary imagination in the nineteenth century. I guess I would have expected Bloom to have considered the Poe precedent in his article—especially since it was Bloom who revolutionized literary Romantic studies by foregrounding the principle of creative imagination in Blake and Shelley. It’s possible Bloom didn’t realize how beloved King is as a cultural figure. Usually Bloom takes anti-establishment positions—he’s had huge quarrels himself with the academic establishment. So I might have expected him to identify more with King, who’s so productive and unpretentious. I personally think it was a fine gesture to give King that award.

  MPS: I’m thinking of the so-called chick-lit that sells incredibly well—Bridget Jones’s Diary, The Devil Wears Prada, and The Nanny Diaries. As a feminist and as a critic, what do you think about these books and what they say about current reading?

  CP: Look, throughout the entire nineteenth century, the main consumers of novels tended to be women. So it doesn’t particularly surprise or disturb me. Anything that gets people to read, including Oprah’s Book Club, is positive. We are moving very rapidly toward a post-literate culture, where most information is being conveyed via the Web in very unreliable form. The entire practice of book reading itself is seriously threatened. After all, it’s pretty much a blip in the history of culture. We thought it was going to last forever, but mayb
e it’s not! So I can’t get too worried about it—if young women who buy Prada are willing to buy a book with Prada in the title, I can’t complain.

  MPS: What do you feel is the role of a writer in a society?

  CP: A writer is reflecting his or her own times and connecting it to the past and the future. I feel that a writer has an obligation to absorb everything, to take in every possible detail of everyday life as well as the social and political scene. And then to constantly be processing that into language, to try to adapt one’s own private language to English as it evolves. I’m an enormous admirer of English, partly because I came from an Italian immigrant family. All four of my grandparents and my mother were born in Italy, so English is relatively new to my family. And I think it’s one of the most superb instruments ever invented. It’s an American writer’s obligation to use that instrument, to find some way to sing with it, to make it fully expressive of the writer’s individual consciousness.

  A writer must always think about being read in the future. That’s certainly one of my motivations. As I’m writing, I’m always thinking how to make what I’m writing relevant not only to contemporary readers but to someone looking at it ten, twenty, or thirty years from now. In order to do that, I carefully study works and passages of the past that I think still have resonance. The prose style of people writing in the 1920s, let’s say—what in there has retained its power? What in it has dated? I’m constantly subjecting prose to that kind of test.

  I am convinced that certain things remain constant in English. One of the terrible problems that’s happened to writers of English in the last twenty years or so is that a French style of writing—very contorted, self-conscious, and effete—became fashionable through the exposure of American academics and the downtown New York art scene to translated versions of French theorists like Lacan and Derrida. You can find it in postmodernism everywhere, in fiction as well as academic books. It’s derailed highbrow American writing—I mean seriously derailed it.

  There’s a distanced irony in French intellectual writing that’s utterly inconsistent with the pragmatism of the American style. American English is very close to concrete reality—there are firm, vigorous speech rhythms in good American writing that come from a real person talking. The cliché in French theory is that there is no person behind the text, that the text exists on its own and that it’s questioning, sabotaging, and dissolving itself. That kind of stuff—all that pretentious posturing that came over from Paris thirty years ago—is a recipe for suicide for any aspiring writer. The American writers who tried to write that way, servilely mimicking the French theorists, have completely lost their own voices. They cut their own throats as writers, so now they have no voice at all. It’s just been done to death, and the people who practiced it have faded fast over the past decade. Their works are going to be consigned to the rubbish heap of history.

  Coming from an immigrant family, I was fascinated by American voices. I heard the American style, with all its vitality, and I tried to absorb it. What I also try to do as a writer—and I would urge this on young writers—is never to have just one voice. I adapt my voice to situation, context, and audience. I have quite different voices when I’m writing for Salon.com or The Wall Street Journal or The Times in London.

  When I pick up books today—fiction or nonfiction, except for works of history, which are often well-constructed if not particularly distinctive in terms of prose—I just don’t see that people are spending much time on prose style in America. Great Britain is different: the British have a tremendous sense of literary style, sometimes to excess, so that it becomes glib or facile. Books from England can be all style and no substance! But in America, I don’t see anyone, including famous writers, spending much time on their own prose. Joyce Carol Oates, for example—I can’t believe she just throws that stuff out there! The number of books she writes and the blatant lack of attention that she pays to her prose style—I just don’t get it. I don’t understand how people can have such a tin ear for their own prose, and I don’t know how readers can tolerate it. On the other hand, my favorite novel of the post–World War Two era is Patrick Dennis’ Auntie Mame.

  I urge anyone who’s writing to study the dictionary, to analyze and really understand words and their history. That’s a big problem with the young writers who have emerged in the last fifteen or twenty years, I think. They don’t know English well enough—they don’t have enough respect for English. They don’t take care with individual sentences or paragraphs. It’s like this blather, blather! It all seems thrown together, even things that are very arch and affected in the postmodernist way—sloppiness, slackness in diction and syntax and construction of the prose. Well, that’s a very long answer.

  MPS: It’s a good answer. As an aspiring writer, I think it’s important to hear that answer.

  CP: I should add in regard to honing writing skills that, with the shift to e-mail, the art of letter-writing is probably gone forever. Historians have mentioned this as a potential future problem—letters are an enormous resource for historical research. But e-mail is a very instantaneous form of communication. It’s fantastic—it’s like sending bulletins from a spaceship. I mean, I love it, it’s simplified my life in so many ways. But no one works on the style of an e-mail. I’ve realized that, over the years since I was very young, long letter-writing to friends was one of the ways that I was developing my own writing style. We’re now in such a period of instant gratification that even a simple thing like that has deprived young writers of another forum for practice, for developing the craft.

  In terms of my own career, I want to emphasize that even though I’m well-known now and have had three bestselling books, I was virtually unpublished until I was in my forties. In the early ’80s, to add to my income while I was teaching part time, I was writing for alternative newspapers and little town weeklies. And I regard that as an important thing for writers to do. To write for every possible kind of venue, no matter how small the readership or pay. That’s a problem today, especially with these high-profile writing programs: people are looking for prestige placement of their material. They don’t think of writing as a craft that should be exercised wherever you can get an opening.

  My philosophy is that writers should admire writers—period! It’s good to go to an MFA program, but ultimately it’s up to the individual writer to make a connection with the dead writers and be inspired by them. Writing is a living continuum. The more attention you pay to your own style, the more likely it is that you’ll eventually break out of the pack. Writing right now is terribly sloppy. If a book isn’t well-written, I’m just not interested. I see all this media praise for new books by celebrated writers or just-arrived figures, and I go to the bookstore thinking this must be an important book. Then I open it up and see page after page of weak, crappy, disconnected prose—which I’m never going to subject myself to. There’s no reason for it! I’m just going to go home and turn on the television and watch a soap opera or old Hollywood movie. Very few contemporary American writers have a distinct voice any longer, an instantly recognizable voice—where you open the page and say, oh, yes, I know who wrote that.

  The only way to go forward as a writer is to go backwards—to absorb everything that you most admire from twenty, fifty, or a hundred years ago. There’s another thing I used to do as a student from adolescence through grad school: I would copy out passages I found especially striking in anything I encountered—whether it was fiction or nonfiction, contemporary or past. I have whole notebooks where I laboriously copied those things out and tried to understand the way they work. What makes them work in terms of structure, feeling, vocabulary, or rhetoric? Even an individual sentence—what’s so fabulous about this sentence? I think if you pay that kind of attention to the basic mechanics of prose, over time your mastery of your craft will steadily improve, just like learning an instrument.

  * [Mary Phillips-Sandy, A Columbia Journal
Interview, Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art, Columbia University, Issue 39 (2004).]

  39

  THE DEATH OF NORMAN MAILER*

  Norman Mailer’s extensive obituaries this past week could not disguise the fact that his enormous fame was decades in the past and that very few young people (outside the writing community) had ever heard his name. Mailer was certainly a major player when I was in college and grad school. I didn’t care about his novels—I don’t care about any novels published after World War Two (Tennessee Williams is my main man)—but I was impressed by Mailer’s visionary and sometimes hallucinatory first-person journalism. And I was directly inspired by his eclectic Advertisements for Myself (1959), which I took as a blueprint after my first books were attacked by the feminist establishment in the 1990s.

  Mailer’s “The Prisoner of Sex” (the original 1971 Harper’s essay, not the book) was an important statement about men’s sexual fears and desires. His jousting with Germaine Greer at the notorious Town Hall debate in New York that same year was a pivotal moment in the sex wars. I loved Greer and still do. And I also thought Jill Johnston (who disrupted the debate with lesbo stunts) was a cutting-edge thinker: I was devouring her Village Voice columns, which had evolved from dance reportage into provocative cultural commentary.

  Feminism would have been far stronger had it been able to absorb Mailer’s arguments about sex. If my own system seemed heterodox for so long, it’s because I appear to have been one of the few feminists who could appreciate and integrate all three thinkers—Mailer, Greer, and Johnston. I’m sorry that Mailer, presumably cowed or pussy-whipped, abandoned the gender field. It would take Madonna, thanks to her influence on a generation of dissident young women, to bring authentically Dionysian ’60s feminism back from the dead. That pro-sex wing of feminism (to which I belong) has of course resoundingly triumphed, to the hissy consternation of the puritans and the iconoclasts—those maleducated wordsmiths who don’t know how to respond to or “read” erotic imagery.