Foreword

Foreword What this country needs is more good readers. We make a big deal of writers. We give them prizes for their better work, we pay quite a number of them to simply be themselves, we even educate a priesthood of critics and teachers to try to understand them. And what do the poor readers get outside the halls of the academy? Why no one pays any attention to them. All out there across the land, readers—at this moment—are doing such things as finally finishing War and Peace, tackling Ulysses for the ninth time, and reading the French Romantic poets in dual-faced editions. Bravely they are putting away their Danielle Steele and taking up Virginia Woolfe. It is due in part to the law of supply and demand, the delusion of availability, that we forget how rare and precious good readers and good reading are. Despite our complaints about prices, books are still relatively cheap and more widely available than they have ever been. Literature, to us, appears to be as plentiful as dandelions. Travel the world a bit, and one can find quite different circumstances. Or travel back in time in our own country—no farther back than the memory of living people—and one gets a glimpse of how historically provincial our nonchalance toward literature is. Carrie Young's essay on "The Education of a Family" makes just that journey. It describes the heroic efforts of her pioneering parents in the northern Midwest to educate their large family of children. This family underwent sacrifice, self-denial, and at times even mortal danger just to get the children through school. Carrie Young and her brothers and sisters were carried above the inclemencies of premodern and Depression America by the sweat of their father and the courage, stubbornness and canniness of their mother, the one in their family who provided the last line of resistance to defeat. Young's account makes me wonder if there isn't something heroic about a lot of families today who prevail over the sometimes subtler hazards of modern America to get the kids educated. If television is one of those modern hazards, we find in Mark Miller an able critic of the medium. Miller hates network television and he isn't shy about saying why. In a previous issue of this magazine, he explained why he deplores the way the networks use spurious, trumped-up television "drama" in their coverage of presidential races. Here he tells why he feels that TV entertainment, which held promise in its early days, now has gone to the dogs. "The End of Genre in Television" portrays the decline of TV storytelling as a process in which literate drama has been replaced by "good TV," a monolithic but extraordinarily thin rhetoric concocted to appeal to the weaknesses, vices, and passive desires of homo telei'itiais. Whatever the cause, we have somehow forgotten what reading can do for us—and how precious the really good "find" is. A good reader is like a diamond merchant. He can look all day at stones—big stones, impressive stones, finely cut stones—appreciating their qualities without being particularly impressed; but then occasionally along comes a jewel which through some subtle agreement of color, clarity, and dimension sets the heart pounding, reminding him of the elusive Perfect Stone within himself. Our poetry coeditor Sherod Santos had such an experience with the "Five Poems" of James McMichael. Santos, who isn't given to careless compliments, says that they are the most interesting poems he's ever accepted for the Missouri Review. I too had such an experience with one of the stories in this issue. Upon finishing the story, I heard a voice speaking very firmly within me: "This is a classic. It will be in print a hundred years from now." Then a wonderful, strange feeling overcame me. The hair literally rose on the back of my neck and a sensation of coolness ran through my head. "Yes," I said aloud, shuffling the pages, shaking my head. "Son of a —" I then muttered a string of expletives, addressing the author, fondly cursing and admiring him. This is surely not the textbook...