About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

Letter to Q—

161 East Lansing, Michigan October 2, 1997 Dear Q—, We are two days beyond the first snow. When, this morning , I left my room (I think I told you, Dennis and I have been housed in the back hall of a girls’ dorm), outside stood six rows of bicycles, their handlebars, wheels, and seats piled and puffy, making waist-high arches, white interlocked waves. Pines and maple branches were still bowed down to the cottony ground and, in many places, joined it. I walked the wooded thirty yards between the campus and Grand River Avenue under falling splotches and splatters. From the tall pines, nonstop, sun-silvered ice chips glittered down, in fifty-foot curtain after curtain. A city boy, I’d never seen that before—not to such an extent. Grand River Avenue’s brick sidewalks were clear, with only a graying gabbol at the curb. (I don’t think there is a word “gabbol .” But there ought to be: it means something lumpy, uneven, and cold, and it’s equally applicable to old, shoveled-up snow as to the rougher surfaces on oatmeal, when, abandoned on the kitchen table and left three hours in the bowl, you scrape it out into the Disposall.) My “free bagel” card was all filled up; so, this morning, at Bruegger’s I got my Santa-Fe-turkey-on-aspinach -herb bagel for nothing. A friend of mine has just completed a book on the crafting of alternative fiction. In writing me about it, he’s several times said that most writing textbooks teach the subject as though no fiction has been written since 10. But I wonder if his “10” metaphor—which he’s repeated in several letters, now—can do the job, vis-à-vis alternative fiction, he asks of it. I have just finished rereading Toni Morrison’s The฀Bluest฀Eye (1970) for a class I’m visiting the day after tomorrow. I think it’s a bad book. It’s bad in some particularly contemporary and characteristic ways. But it could not have been written in 10— in terms of style, content, or structure. 162 Part฀II:฀Four฀Letters If you’re going to fight the aesthetic failings of our day, it occurs to me, the proper place to aim your brazen arrows is not at the fiction of 10. (I also think Cather’s O฀Pioneers! is a bad book—while her My฀Ántonia is a beautiful one, as are most of Cather’s subsequent novels, especially My฀Mortal฀Enemy—which ranks with Joyce’s The฀Dead, Joanna Russ’s฀The฀Second฀Inquisition , Glenway Wescott’s The฀Pilgrim฀Hawk, and Guy Davenport’s Dawn฀in฀Erewhon, among this century’s finest English-language novellas.) A good deal of what passes for “good” or even “excellent ” contemporary fiction could benefit from a somewhat larger helping of the virtues of (the best) fiction of 10. I can easily imagine the editorial suggestions the George Sand (an infinitely smart polemical writer) of Indiana (12) would have made to Morrison in ’6 to ’69, when she was writing The฀Bluest฀Eye. Those suggestions could only have improved it. (The problem with actual writing workshops is the far more important writers’ workshop they keep the writer from forming , where the suggestions come from Huysmann and Proust and Ernest Gaines and Anne Brontë and Olaudah Equiano and Mrs. Gaskell and John O. Killens and Émile Zola and James Gould Cozzens and Dashiell Hammett and Frank Norris and Stephen Crane and Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett and Charles Chesnutt and Kate Chopin and whoever else is needed, because they have already wrestled with the problem you are now confronting and have learned something that left, in dramatic form, a lesson in their texts . . . a lesson you can only read if you have also read another writer who has failed before the same problem.) First, Morrison’s novel is a bad book on the level Matthew Arnold specified when he explained that, for the novel to be meaningful, the novelist must convince us the actions the main characters perform and the incidents befalling them are characteristic of at least some group of actual people. If they are not characteristic (i.e., believable), then the book is about purely idiosyncratic and eccentric people and happenings and thus not of any relevance. Well, as a black man who grew up, not in a small town but in New...