No Strength in Numbers
Writing has ceased to be an individual pursuit — and literature is the worse for it
August Kleinzahler, the socalled pugilist poet, is one of the prickliest loners in American letters. It’s no accident, then, that his new book, Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send- Offs: Selected Prose, 2000–2016, offers up a number of portraits of forgotten poets and critics — all of them eccentric cranks.
There’s Thom Gunn, who, Kleinzahler writes, had a “strong dislike” for “literary gatherings.” There’s Kenneth Cox, who “sought and achieved almost complete invisibility outside of his writings.” Roy Fisher — “a lifelong, rather cheerful agoraphobe and hermit” — behaved like an island of one. Lorine Niedecker quarantined herself on an actual island and accessed the world, when she needed to, by post.
In recent decades, however, the idea of the writer as an individualistic outsider has acquired a layer of dust. We used to be okay with literary types asserting independent, fortified egos. If your time was spent putting together sentences, you were almost expected to be anti-social. But today, we’re too savvy to indulge such a romantic myth. The aloof rebel is merely an affectation, a pair of Ray-bans you slip on. When Bob Dylan was slow to acknowledge his Nobel Prize in Literature, many were scandalized. “It’s impolite and arrogant,” huffed a member of the Swedish Academy.
What, then, has displaced the idiosyncratic recluse? Literary community — that is, a supportive web of like-minded practitioners. In recent years, poet-critics such as Stewart Cole have made an eloquent case for the importance of fostering a cooperative spirit that “privileges civility over cynicism, sociality over narcissism.” Novelist Jess Taylor has reflected on why “culture-creators” have to help community “grow and thrive.” And writer Tatiana Morand has written about how the Canlit community needs to be more “welcoming and willing to translate its secret language for anyone who’s interested.”
Writing is such gruelling, lonely work that it’s not hard to see why authors would be drawn to a line of reasoning that encourages them to engage with other carbon-based lifeforms. Plus, didn’t graduate school insist that writers are socially constructed anyway, the products of power and privilege? You might as well accept that you’re a node in a network.
But you don’t have to buy into the myth of the Byronic hero to be worried about the fact that our novelists and poets — valued for their independence of vision and language — now pine to be part of the crowd. What do we lose when writers are afraid of being alone?
Let’s be clear: Writers have always occupied some sort of social context. The Dadaists had the Cabaret Voltaire; Dorothy Parker, the Algonquin Hotel. Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, and Clive James honed their wit upon the whetstone of their Friday lunches — “the potential stuff of a new ‘Bloomsbury’ legend,” Hitchens half-joked.
But while no one is ever truly isolated professionally, writers have become more mutually entangled than ever. Workshops, readings, book launches, conferences, artists’ colonies, and other glorified mixers foist literary types on one another. Social media ensures we’re always connected. Pick up a contemporary book of poems or fiction: the acknowledgements page is a cup that runneth over. It’s now almost unthinkable not to run your manuscript by a long receiving line of applauding peers.
But be careful: those same peers might one day boo and jeer. Literary controversies are now less about aesthetic feuds and more about group outrage. The left, according to Carmen Aguirre’s recent essay for this magazine, “has become the new puritanical church, shaming, bullying, condemning, and expelling anyone in its ranks who is seen as taking a misstep.” Last spring, when I suggested that critics
should reference themselves a little less in their reviews and essays — brilliant advice I’m clearly forgoing — I might as well have draped myself in “Make America Great Again” bunting or throttled a sloth on YouTube. Writers I was once friendly with disappeared. Writers I’d never met fumed on social media. The whiff of scorched bridge practically wafted through the Wi-fi.
The most consistent complaint directed at my essay? That it was, in effect, anti-community. One writer accused me of pushing away the “routinely marginalized, whose points of view are less frequently given voice.” Another said my thesis “overlooks that subjective approaches to criticism allow for a broader inclusion of vantage points.”
Canadian poets are especially energetic tribalists. They tend to swerve and feint en masse like a school of tuna. Perhaps they recognize that endorsing the artist-as-individual would be a bad career move. Exiling themselves to the basement won’t yield a bestseller. The material rewards for poets often come in the form of, well, more community! Teaching gigs, reading invitations, and the interest of grant and prize juries.
At a more basic level, however, literary community can have a deadly impact. The most obvious fatality: your critical faculty. It becomes harder to file an honest review of a book if you’re always rubbing shoulders with other writers. Years ago, I ventured out to a reading and encountered a poet whose debut I’d recently been assigned to review. His poetry was dull, but he seemed decent enough. It took me months to file my piece, and even then, I pulled my final punch — and I’m one of the few jerks in Canada willing to bloody a book. How are younger, less jerky writers ever going to develop the independent spirit required to lob a rotten tomato if they’re committed to nurturing the community garden? That’s the ultimate casualty here — an independent spirit. Most Canadian poetry critics rarely sound a negative note, and most Canadian poets sound indistinguishable from one another. If you could shake the bylines free from a volume of The Best Canadian Poetry, you’d have a devil of a time restoring them to their rightful pieces.
“‘What is the role of the writer to her society?’ was a question Wallace Stevens took up and his answer was: none,” says the poet Souvankham Thammavongsa, whose strange lyric miniatures underscore her belief that she, too, represents a constituency of one. A writer’s real responsibility, she argues, is “to build a voice and to keep building that voice.”
“Building that voice” is certainly what Bruce Taylor did. Taylor has twice won the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry, but he has laboured mostly in un-networked obscurity, having issued something like one collection a decade, to crickets, since the 1980s. His is an idiosyncratic vision. (He describes “17th-century rain” as “curled / like a great cascading periwig / over the cankered rooftiles of old Delft.”) In his one interview with the CBC, he outlined his day job: “Irenovate our big, confusing old house, prepare meals, and drive the kids around. Which is to say, I am a housewife.” If Canlit has become a community garden, Taylor’s work belongs in the cellar, pickled in the brine of its own stubborn intelligence for future consumption.
Such writers as Thammavongsa and Taylor know that they can extract from literature very nearly all of the society they require. They recognize that it’s the quality of their work, not their capacity for kibitzing, that will ultimately secure ameaningful, long-term readership. They might have a few literary friends or a social-media account. But if writing well is their aim, they will tend to resent claims on their time. They prize a commodity more precious than community: privacy.
When prose stylist Fran Lebowitz was asked which three writers she would invite to a literary dinner party, her answer was “none.” “My idea of a great literary dinner party,” she explained, “is Fran, eating alone, reading a book.” If that’s too glib for you, try Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who offers up a handy model for being a writer:
I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — dialogue, community, and workshopping.
I’m kidding, of course. The weapons with which Stephen proposed to arm himself were “silence, exile, and cunning.” You probably wouldn’t have enjoyed his company.