“A Hundred Visions and Revisions”

Several of the pieces in this issue reflect directly or indirectly on artists and their potential influence on us. Cheryl Strayed’s memoir “Munro Country” tells of her own amazement as a young writer when her model author, Alice Munro, wrote to her; the connection Strayed felt was intense and driven by deep need, yet also impersonal and tenuous. Jeffrey Condran’s story “Praha” describes the strained meeting of two men, once rivals, in Prague, in the shadow of a statue of Kafka, while Richard Dokey’s luminous mortality tale “ Zippers” is reminiscent of Hemingway’s spare style at its best.

In his essay “The Boy Murderers: What Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn Really Teach,” Andrew Levy asks whether we know Twain’s novel as well as we think we do. He sets forth convincing evidence that in Huckleberry Finn, Twain was addressing a plague of violence and bullying by children, especially boys, not unlike the rash of school shootings and other acts of child violence we’ve seen in this decade. He also describes the relationship between Twain and author George Washington Cable on a twenty-seven-city lecture tour that the two did prior to the publication of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain was a performer during parts of his career, but he didn’t spring full-blown into the role of a “great entertainer.” After a grueling and partly unsuccessful tour in 1871–1872, he had stopped lecturing. Twelve years later, anxious about whether he could still do it, he talked Cable into touring with him. The four-month journey with Cable started badly. “It was ghastly! At least in the beginning,” according to Twain’s later notes on the experience. He had not yet figured out that unlike Charles Dickens, he couldn’t read his stories but had to memorize and dramatize the reading, interspersing it with conversational asides. Touring with Cable, he failed at first but then finally discovered what he was doing wrong and improved his act. Unfortunately, as Levy shows, Cable managed to inadvertently upstage him.

The practice of literature—of all the arts—can be cursed by myths of genius and perfection. The Romantic poets, who canonized the idea of genius, were also the ones who invented the concept of the writer’s block. In his interview, Benjamin Percy, author of two books of stories and The Wilding, his forthcoming novel from Graywolf Press, notes that his writing comes from hard effort and overcoming obstacles, however that can be done. A block can be all in a normal day’s work. “Sometimes you’re just feeling a bit dead—pun intended—at the keyboard, and you don’t have much energy despite the coffee you’re sucking down, and you’re looking for inspiration, so I go to the graveyard or I might go to my story file. . . .”

When speaking frankly, authors are more likely to discuss the labor of writing than visitations of genius. Recalling his editing of a collection of Paris Review author interviews, Malcolm Cowley said that he was surprised to learn that most writers have starting routines to get through the difficulty of beginning a day’s work: Hemingway sharpening twenty pencils, Willa Cather reading passages from the Bible, Thomas Wolfe taking long walks. Cowley pointed out that the “magic” of the best writing comes from routine and messy hard work. In this issue’s essay review, Michael Cohen describes the fact that for him, reading is in many ways as disorderly as writing. He plans to read certain titles, starts and stops them, shelves and then comes back to them, on occasion years later. Serious reading, like serious writing, arises not from some imaginary, stilted order but from the supple mind creating its own structure out of disarray.

Over the years this magazine has printed a number of previously unpublished letters, diaries and manuscripts by well-known writers. We’ve also published features on “fringe artists.” They have included some who are at the border of being considered serious artists and others who work in areas which are themselves considered by some to be “not quite” fine art...