www.janetburroway.com. AN IMAGINATION
PROCLAMATION. Whereas…is the right word to begin a proclamation, ...
Janet Burroway
[email protected] www.janetburroway.com
AN IMAGINATION PROCLAMATION
Whereas…is the right word to begin a proclamation, because it contains a promise of solution. Whereas this, and Whereas that, and Whereas the other, Therefore we propose to do this or that. Therefore I begin with the word: •
Whereas the United States of America began the twenty-first century with more money, power and leisure to devote to the arts both fine and lively than any country ever before in the history of humankind, and
•
Whereas we have failed with this bounty to develop and train the imaginations of our children, and
•
Whereas the culture we have created is sinking into schlock and slime, and
•
Whereas there is no larger lie abroad in the land than that creative people are immoral, and
•
Whereas on the contrary, preoccupation with profitability leads to mental and emotional coarseness, and
•
Whereas such habits of mind infect the body politic and lead to wrong action,
•
Therefore be it resolved that profit is the wrong measure of the arts; and that freedom of the imagination, including freedom from profit-making, is necessary to the health of the nation.
2 You may think I’m arrogant to compare these sketchy but lengthy remarks to the Emancipation Proclamation with which Abraham Lincoln (in one page of text) freed the slaves. But as it happens, Lincoln freed only the slaves in the States that were at war with the Union, that is, he freed the slaves only in the places where he had no power to do so. So I will proclaim the arts free in the society in which I have no power to do so, and make no apology for it. Further, I will speak of “we,” meaning the United States and Great Britain, which are the literary and educational landscape I know, but in the belief that Europe has adopted, from the plastic bag right up to credit default swaps, much of the worst that America has to offer. And I am going to commit the sin of personal history, not because I think my experience is significant of itself, but because I have had a fairly standard midlist career as a novelist, and I believe my experience can stand in for that of many, even the majority, of other writers, artists and educators..
When the 9/11 Commission delivered its report in the summer of 2007, its conclusion was that the twin towers had fallen because the government in Washington had committed four failures, of which the first was a massive “failure of imagination.” (The others--policy, capability, management – all come from the vocabulary of bureaucracy.) That is, although the government had extensive intelligence reports on the intentions and preparations of Al Qaida, and both Chief counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke and CIA director George Tenet had warned that “the system was blinking red,” our suited men of power could not imagine that a bunch of guys in beards and dresses, living in desert caves, “on the other side of the world in a region so poor that
3 electricity or telephones were scarce, could nonetheless scheme to wield weapons of unprecedented destructive power on the largest cities of America.” Yet these men were, in the Commission’s words, “sophisticated, patient, disciplined, and lethal.” (Qualities, including the last, admired in the West.) On our side of the Atlantic, “No one,” the Commission continued, “looked at the bigger picture; no analytic work foresaw the lightning that could connect the thundercloud to the ground.” (Interesting that when they want to drive home the point, they use a metaphor.) And it concluded dryly that, “Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies…” and in order to achieve such association it will “require more than finding an expert who can imagine that airplanes could be used as weapons.” I have since heard this judgment many times used to castigate our erstwhile leaders as a bunch of clueless dolts. But I have not heard anyone draw a connection between the failure of imagination in Washington and our failure to nurture and train the imaginations of the children in our schools. We are alarmed at how students in both primary and secondary education fall behind European and Asian nations in science and math, and we wring our hands over Johnny’s inability to read. But for the past fifty years – nearly two generations – we have continued to strip the arts from the early years of education because we suppose that these “soft subjects” are frivolous – and anyway, kids get more than enough “entertainment” on TV. Yet the failure of our educational system to open young minds to the arts and the failure of Washington to comprehend the threat of Al Qaida are not different concepts of “the imagination.” They are the same: the imagination as that human capacity which
4 allows a person to stand outside him or herself and, however briefly, to see the world in a different light.
There is always the danger of romanticizing one’s own childhood and family, and I run that risk. My maternal grandfather was a small-town Arizona banker, a generous lender, who however had so steely a morality that he once threatened my mother with a riding whip for changing a grade on her report card. My father was among other things an inventor, delighted with a gimic, a gadget, or a clever jingle, but such a perfectionist in his work that he never made any money to speak of; and as for his ethics, he must have told me fifty times that “the difference between stealing a penny and stealing a million bucks is the number of pennies involved.” My mother was an “elocution teacher,” a thwarted actress and a devout Methodist with a similar code, hers more firmly rooted in the King James Version of the bible. The forties and fifties in the American Southwest were repressive in all the ways you already know about, and when the time came, I had great personal need of Women’s Liberation. But what I experienced growing up, and which I think we have lost world wide, was the confidence that there was a panoply of values, good in and of themselves, interconnected and indivisible. Earning a living was good, and making quite a lot of money was probably very good, though being rich could be a little suspect because honesty too was a prime value, essential and indivisible, as were charity and fairness. Education was good in and of itself. So was the slightly different category, knowledge. Art was a good, as were patriotism and religion, but also included in the litany were more abstract virtues, such as loyalty, self-sufficiency, intelligence, humor, and kindness, all of
5 which connected in a scaffolding on which to build and maintain the good life. It was a world with many overt and hidden injustices, hypocrisies and bigotries. But I don’t think my family, or my town, were unusual in these assumptions about where Goodness lay. Simply put, what has happened in America over the course of my adulthood has been a realigning of these values, which now openly exist in a hierarchy instead of a network, where wealth is the ur-value to which all the others aspire, and in the service of which all – abstractions as well as activities – are delegated lesser positions. A hierarchy involves by definition ranking, which in this one means that hard facts, hard numbers, and productivity will be privileged over nuance, judgment and discernment, to the detriment of the arts. Of course, America has always been in love with get-rich schemes – the Gold Rush, railways, movie stardom, oil – which represent the paradox of the founding promise, “born equal” (a term, I now notice, that comes from mathematics). Equality leads to opportunity which leads to Horatio Alger and Henry Ford. The get-rich note has also always popped up in our religion, where, columnist David Brooks says, “It comes with a vengeance, and often in evangelical terms.” This is the pulpit of the gospel of wealth or, as my late friend Fred Bush put it, “the cathedral of the bottom line.” It gives rise to Andrew Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, and L. Ron Hubbard, who founded Scientology. Here it is in the words of the Baptist preacher Russell Conway: “I say that the opportunity to get rich, to attain unto great wealth, is here now within the reach of almost every man and woman who hears me speak tonight!...I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich…Money is power, and you ought to have it…because you can do more good with it than you could without it.”
6 But I believe this brand of reasoning had not colonized education and the arts by the time I entered college in the middle fifties, and that this colonization happened gradually, at first imperceptibly. I took my first writing course at Barnard college in 1955, and published my first novel in 1960, which means that my writing life has spanned major changes in American letters, and I'd like to run through some of those changes by way of illustration. In 1955 it was experimental, perhaps a little daring, for a serious university like Columbia to be offering a course in writing fiction. There was only one such course each semester. There were six people in my class. When I took that course, I was already ambitious to be a novelist and hoped to hone my skills, but nothing was further from my mind than that I was also in training for a career as a teacher of writing. In the intervening fifty years, writing programs have become one of the strongest components, and in some cases the bread and butter, of English departments in America. Until about twenty years ago British colleges considered this practice anathema; now creative writing courses have spread across the British polytechnics and the universities (and, I now learn, across Sweden). Moreover, imaginative writing will of necessity remain a college subject because, like philosophy and rhetoric, it is no longer an integral part of daily life. By the time students reach university they have watched more “drama” on television than the most privileged of Renaissance nobility, but they have not grown up reading fiction and poetry for pleasure. What is surprising is that so many, perhaps sensing the inadequacy of their passive participation in the imaginative act, arrive at college wanting to write. Often they have absorbed skills through their viewing. They know how to structure a plot, reveal a character, even pace a gag. But their models are often
7 stereotypical cop, gangster, science fiction or comedy series, and they need help tapping into the subject matter of their own lives.
But in the fifties Creative Writing was a new subject in a revered field. Novelists still believed they could change the world. An editor in a trade publishing house, usually a man, had the power to decide what would be published, and he would be on the lookout for talent he could discover. Nearly all of the publishers in New York and London were independently owned, by people who loved books and were content to make a 3 to 5% profit. An occasional best-seller would subsidize half a dozen first novelists on modest advances, would begin a nurturing relationship with the publisher, and would instill in the writer a sense of grateful loyalty toward his editor or publisher or both. The trade houses were, to tell the truth, rather inefficiently run, and tended to inhabit pleasantly scruffy quarters. When my first novel Descend Again was accepted by Faber and Faber in London – the advance was a hundred and fifty pounds -- I climbed the three floors of threadbare stair-carpet in Russell Square to meet my new editor Charles Monteith. He put his thumbs in his vest pockets, peered at me between his glasses and his bald dome, and said, "Miss Burroway, I don't think either of us is going to make a fortune, or indeed a living, out of this book." Even at the time, I understood that this stern warning represented a compliment of the highest kind: we're going to lose money on your book, and we're going to publish it anyway. The chances of such a sentence being uttered by an editor in 2009 are almost nil. Shortly after that first novel was published, the legendary editor Bennett Cerf sold Random House to RCA, which seems to have been the starting gun for the race to merge,
8 and in the intervening 50 years virtually every independent publisher in New York, Boston, and London has been coupled, diced, expanded, amputated, taken over by a major corporation, and, by 1990, absorbed into one of five big international conglomerates. It is not entirely clear to me why RCA,Warner Brothers, Exxon and the like wanted publishing houses. The best guess I can make is that they saw these prestigious companies making negligible profit, and decided to show what a real business could make of them. The process involved both splashy spending and ruthless downsizing, massive marketing research and ongoing one-upmanship. By the time my third novel was published in 1970, an editor told me of this experience: the publishing company inhabited a fine though shabby old house on Beacon Street. in Boston. When he left one Friday afternoon there was a row of five editorial offices on his corridor. When he returned on Monday two of those offices had been taken over by accountants, and the names in gold leaf on the door had already been changed. The editors were never seen again. I now realize, which I did not at the time, that my editor was trying to warn me, but I was still a starry-eyed hopeful, and it was not until he had left publishing to become a rare book dealer that he told me the truth about what had happened to that novel. He had the power to decide to publish it, he said, but the marketing manager had the power to decide whether it would be a success. And no matter how good the reviews were, Marketing had decided against investing in me, because I was not likely ever to turn out a blockbuster. By the time I learned this, the fine old house on Beacon Street had been abandoned, and the company had moved to larger and more sumptuous corporate quarters on cheaper land in the industrial outskirts.
9 In recent years the editor, now usually a young woman, has no power to decide which books to publish. The decisions are made by committee, under pressure from marketing and accounting, with the overriding message: choose books that will sell. This message is conveyed in myriad ways from editor to agent to writer. The function of the agent, which used to be to advocate for the writer, is now to “find product” for the publisher who is her client, and to serve as buffer between the market and the unrealistic expectations of the author. Almost no translations are published. Mid-list authors, who get consistently good reviews and so enhance their publisher’s prestige but not his pocket, find it ever more difficult to find acceptance against a rack record of middling sales. There is also pressure to write faster. One paperback rights editor--a woman of excellent taste, wailed at me, "How can I sell your paperbacks if you only write a novel every five years?" But it’s the first-time novelists who are particular victims of this system, because the publishing houses compete with each other for the next hot ticket, and they auction promising first novels up to gargantuan sums, usually including the rights to a second book. The size of the advance itself generates publicity. The young novelist begins to believe the hype. A very, very few of books thus treated make the best seller list or the Oprah show, and the authors become celebrities – who then typically have a hard time coming down from the hype and high to write the second book. The vast majority of these talented first-timers fail to “earn out” the extravagant advances, are tossed on the literary trash heap, take a job teaching in a small liberal arts college, and spend their careers wondering what it was that made the first book so good and why they can’t do it
10 again. From the publisher’s vantage point, there is always another young hopeful handy. And so the dominoes fall, ever toward the bottom line. The backs of review copies advertise how much the publisher is spending on publicity because this is seen as a signal of the publisher’s confidence in his product and how much attention reviewers should pay. For about twenty years the publishing companies arranged and paid expenses for book tours (no remuneration for the author’s time), no matter whether the authors did this well or not, whether they wanted to or not, whether it sold any books or not, because it was seen as part of the great publicity machine. Now the habit is firmly established, the trade house have one and all decided that neither advertising nor touring are cost-effective “Word of mouth” is now the gold standard, which means book clubs, web sites, blogs, chat rooms and email blasts – all the responsibility of the author. If the author travels for such contacts, she now arranges and pays herself. Authors are likewise enjoined to write endless puffs for the back jackets of their friends' books. Publicity directors ask: who do you know?—and the bigger the celebrity of your friends the greater the clamor to get their names on the jacket. As a reviewer you have to be careful what you say because any inflated adjective will certainly be turned into another puff. The advertising that results on the back of any work of the imagination is as overblown and empty as the rhetoric we hear from Washington. Here's a sample of it from the cover of a paperback I pick up off the nearest shelf: Exhilarating, vivid and precise; achieved in chapters of gem-like completeness; unusual panache and introspection, a heart grown even wiser, just when the world needs reminding what fine, true writing can do for a reader's spirit; a kaleidoscopic view of the
11 large and small dimensions of life; great vigor, wickedly funny, disturbing, triumphant, etched with laughter and sadness, dazzling, poisonous, elegantly plotted, exuberant, engrossing; a truly creative genius. I kind of like all this because it happens to be on the cover of a novel I wrote. But it's very clear that the point is to convince you, the buyer, that the book was a roaring best seller, whereas I have to tell you that it although took seven years to write, I didn't make enough from it to live for six months, and that I made about two thousand dollars altogether from the paperback thus adorned with praise. They printed 117,000 of the paperback edition, but I have no idea how many they sold, because paperbacks are not returned to the distributor. They're so cheap to produce that if they don't sell, drug stores and supermarkets send back the covers and dump the books in the dumpster. It saves the cost of shipping. They don't mention the returns to me. They let me keep the two thousand dollars. Just to bring full circle this personal experience, I should recount briefly the experience of my latest novel, Bridge of Sand. The book was accepted in late 2007 by the New York trade house of Harcourt. However, at about the same time an Irish financial consortium called Education Media Inc., bought the Boston house of Houghton Mifflin, leveraging $85 billion to do so. With this borrowed money Houghton Mifflin then bought Harcourt, creating Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, from which the redundant editor in chief, editors, publicists and assistants had to be expunged. My editor was at first spared. Then the financial downturn became a free fall, and in November HMH announced that it was acquiring no more books, a statement bizarre enough to shock the publishing world. David Shanks of the Penguin Group said, “You might as well put up a
12 sign saying, ‘we’re out of business.’” My editor said, “It took a hundred years to build up this wonderful company and it’s taken one year to trash it.” My novel was in press and so safe. But my editor and publicist were laid off the week before Christmas. In the same week the newspapers were full of the story of two multi-million dollar book deals, made with those two titans of literature, Laura Bush and Joe the Plumber. I met a poet at a writer’s retreat, who said to me, "At least you novelists can live on the illusion that you're going to get rich and famous. Poets don't even have the fantasy to keep them going." That was twenty years ago, and I laughed and agreed with him. Now I think the illusion is also disintegrating. A couple of weeks ago our house in Florida was visited by a brown thrasher, variously spotted and speckled in dull shades of brown, rather portly of belly, with a long, strong yellow beak. This bird was intent on getting into the plate glass window in our living room. The first time I heard him, I thought it was my husband having trouble with the lock, so I went to let him in, and found the thrasher flinging himself upward against the window, a thrashing of wings followed by a loud clack as his beak hit the pane. He balanced on the sill, flung himself upward and threw himself at the window. He threw himself at the window. This went on for perhaps twenty minutes until he lost interest, or I did. That afternoon he was back. Thrash, fling, clack. Thrash, fling, clack. Next day the same. On the third day it struck me that this thrasher was an avian novelist, no doubt enticed by his own reflection, trying to enter the exotic world of the commercially published, in the mistaken belief that this alien atmosphere would nurture his ability to fly.
13 It would be disingenuous to pretend that I did not see myself in the bird, or that I have not internalized the American way of fame. The reward of the work and the rewards for the work have warred in me since my earliest attempts at writing, when my Methodist mother urged me, “Honey, write for The Reader’s Digest. Write for the masses. People need to escape. They need to laugh. And, you know, that’s where the money is.” From repeated assertions of the supremacy of The Reader’s Digest, I learned that in order to please your mother—which is to say, your teacher, your agent, your editor, your publicist, your reviewer, your bank manager, Barnes and Noble, Oprah—you must avoid the awkward speculation, the intellectual digression, the difficult structure, the arbitrary riff, the downbeat ending. And these admonitions have virtue, because as William Sloane says, “Writing is for the reader, and that’s what writing is.” Too many of us define integrity as follows: I want to write what I want to write and then I want you to love me for it. The seeking of an audience is important because it is the measure of connection, with people you will never know and with people important to you that you didn’t know but because of that connection know now. It is important not because the point of writing is publication but because the point of publication is that it gives you the courage to go on. The trouble is that if you concentrate on pleasing your mother, Oprah, etcetera, the muse is likely to grow dull and depart. When the thrill of success is gone there will be angst in its place, a low level of serotonin that will lead to an addiction. You are likely to write, in your head, a bewitching review of the book you are not writing, and likely to
14 live, disappointed, from SASE to SASE addressed in your own hand. A career arc, by definition, goes up and then goes down. Writing for the masses is like marrying for money, an exhausting way to become a hooker. What I learn as I grow older—but never perfectly learn, so that it has to be learned over and over again, is that the joy of publication, prizes, prestige, money, is never adequate and always fleeting. It is taken away every time such successes fail to be repeated. That short joy could never be enough to compensate me for my solitary hours. But the moment of ecstase, ecstasy that comes usually at the end of a period of effortful and perhaps despairing concentration, and yet comes “out of nowhere,” not as an apparent reward but apparently as a gift—that moment stays, and such moments accumulate into an awareness of power in the sense of capacity, which cannot be taken from me.
I think it will be no surprise to you if I say that I have found education in America subject to the same corporate ravening as the publishing industry.
For thirty years I taught
literature and creative writing at the public university Florida State, and those years saw a creeping and deadening proliferation of reports, mission statement, reviews, “visibility assessment,” assessments of “outcomes” (whatever that means), rankings, prizes as opposed to raises, a monetary “teaching incentive program” – and so on. I recall one two-hour department meeting devoted to the question, “What is a book?” – not a philosophical issue, as you might suppose, but: how many pages did it have to be, what was the required reputation of the publisher, and did a bibliography count, and so forth – all in the service of attaching points to the promotion and tenure rankings. In this same
15 period I became aware of a gradual shift in our students from the enthusiastically ignorant to a clientele. I could still be taken aback at the end of the 'eighties, attending a luncheon by an ambitious new university president, when I listened to him for something like an hour and a half without hearing any aspiration that was not couched in numerical terms. He wanted to get at least ten percent of the state merit scholars into freshmen classes that grew by seven to twelve percent a year, and to see that the targeted top ten programs in the university were rated in the top fifteen percent of such programs in the nation, which he thought would help him raise four and a half million dollars by the year 2000...etc. What do such numbers mean? If the Knicks beat the Magic by a three-pointer at the buzzer, there is a kind of clean logic in the word "winner." We know that the game is the result precisely of our need to have something clear in a world of muddle and ambiguity. But if we try to apply such standards to complex institutions whose purpose is multiple, broad, various and subtle – what judgment do we get but a lie? Rank ordering, test scores, fundraising, publications totted-up, being listed in the top ten of whatever report or news magazine – in these ways quantification becomes a cudgel with which to bludgeon the complex organism of education. This luncheon occurred, as I say, in the eighties. It was almost the millennium before I heard the new director of my cherished Creative Writing Program say that what he concentrated on for his students was the importance of “career arc.” The same Program director also told me that he was among the top four candidates to write a Godfather sequel, and he was going for it, because for him personally, it was “time to grow up and sell out.”
16 As higher education goes, so go the lower grades. You are no doubt aware of the “No Child Left Behind” act for the American primary schools, in which schools whose pupils fail to meet a certain competency goal, are fined instead of being targeted for extra help. Teachers complain that they do nothing but “teach to the test” and the response is superficial tinkering with the test. The American ethos is in any case shot through with this paradox: a belief in education together with a mistrust of the intellect, and this fact complicates educational issues at every level. We in American pay our respects by paying money, so that the low pay offered teachers becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in which low pay equals low respect equals a difficulty in attracting talented teachers. But this is not a problem only in America. In England too, some champions of better teaching set out “to develop new technologies to improve teaching costeffectiveness” and achieve “value for money from higher education.” Now the general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers laments that “The drive to improve ‘literacy’ has killed the subject of English.” Education that is test-driven proceeds in bits and bytes. Students no longer study whole plays of Shakespeare, but analyze snippets in order to learn how to analyze snippets. Children’s book publishers, under pressure from testing boards, dictate an approved list of words that may go into children’s books (no Jabberwocky here!). A high school board rules that a given course must produce three thousand three hundred and thirty three words from each student, and both teachers and students who had previously thought in terms of topic sentences and persuasion, begin to count the words. In such an atmosphere of what is supposed to be “accountablity,” the losers in terms of both time and funds are the “electives,” chorus,
17 band, art, drama – exactly those subjects that teach concentration and skill through development of the imagination.
These commodifications and quantifications infect every area of what we still quaintly call the liberal arts. In England, Michael Billington sees in the professional theatre the “triumph of the unthreatening hi-tech popular musical over the quirky, questioning, individual playwright” and a “shift in power from subsidy to commercial sponsorship and from the artist to the executive director.” In America, The National Endowment for the Arts reports declines in voluntary reading, in the learning of foreign languages, and the audiences of straight plays. Margaret Thatcher’s Minister of Arts felt that many in the arts world “had yet to be weaned away from the welfare-state mentality” and that “the only test of our ability to succeed is whether we can attract enough customers.” Translation: If it’s any good, it will make money. So musicians starved, as usual, or took day jobs in insurance; but now we are told that even rappers, pop and rock stars aim their music at advertising contracts and video games where the money is – which, says critic John Pareles, “creates pressure, subtle but genuine, for music to recede: to embrace the element of vacancy that makes a soundtrack so unobtrusive.” Our great film and television industries, to the degree that their goals are expressible in numbers –gross and net profit, attendance, audience share, prizes, ranking – continue to appeal to the instinctual excitation of sex, blood, torture, destruction, and death. By 2009 creativity itself has been co-opted as a corporate strategy. This is Steve Juvetson, managing director of a venture capital firm, writing in the Harvard Business Review: “Our education systems and workplaces plunge us into deep mental ruts…We
18 need to find our way out of these ruts and rekindle the creativity we left behind in childhood.” How does he propose to do this? Personally, he flies model rockets, but for his company, “…after the economic downturn in 2000-2002, Alliance Business Academy started conducting annual team-building exercises…focused…on endeavors such as completing joint tasks, clarifying group values, and improving team processes.” Since then, he assures us, the “trained teams have been 50% more productive, on average, than untrained teams, according to aggregated measures of quality, time, and cost.” That is, the end goal of rekindling the creativity of childhood is productivity. Here is the new yin and yang of art and business: on the one hand, if art is any good it will make money; on the other, think outside the box because it’s good for the box. And it is not merely art and business that are so conflated. A CEO in a recent interview fondly recalled a piece of advice given him by Mitt Romney, a contender for the Republican candidacy in the last Presidential election. “He said, ‘Greg, in any interaction, you either gain share or lose share. So treat every interaction as a kind of precious moment in time.’” Here we have the cathedral of the bottom line generalized to all human contact, a competition you either win or lose. “Any” in this context means “every.” The distancing Latinate “interaction” is used to mean conversation –perhaps even touch!? What makes every moment of human interaction valuable is the opportunity to win. Win what? “Share,” meaning stock on the market. ‘Precious’ is then used in its monetary sense of ‘worth money.’’ Therefore cuddling my baby or making love to my husband is precious because it offers an opportunity to gain or lose share? Is there now no other way to value human contact?
19
Those who build institutions – governmental, religious, judicial, educational – do honorable and hugely important work. They do it by a process of generalizing: this is how it is, this is how it should be, this is how we propose that it shall be for all the people equally. Artists work by detail, so in effect they are always saying: here is an instance in which your generalization does not work, or does not quite work, or has unintended consequences. Whether in a fiction that takes you into an alien circumstance, or a painting that invites you to contemplate a frozen moment of time, or music that, bypassing reason, conveys you directly into emotion, art refuses the habitual, the documented, and the determined. This is why art is called subversive; it is always saying No to the great institutional abstraction. This is also hugely important work. Fiction offers the most direct of these subversions. It offers an impossible thing, the experience of the world from inside the mind of another person. To the extent that the author has a developed imagination, this is a remarkable gift. The farther the gift takes us from our own concerns and habits, the greater the scope of the gift. That is what the arts are for – to allow us to see from another perspective, to stand for a moment or an afternoon or the time it takes to read this novel, not merely “outside the box,” but outside our own skulls, thereby to imagine the Other, and so to imagine each other, and so, perhaps, identifying with our mutual humanity, to move more slowly to take up arms against each other.
We face two now huge unknowns: one from technology, which is throwing into chaos the system of royalties and revenues we’ve constructed for the arts. The other is the failure
20 of the great financial myth itself. Our world is a ponzi scheme, and money is a metaphor for goods we don’t want, can’t afford, and do not exist. At this point we know nothing about what shape the publishing world will take. Google is in the process of digitizing all the great libraries of the world and all books in English in and out of print, which will be a boon to research and to authors like me whose novels have gone out of print; and it will also make Google’s monopoly so complete that it will make international consortiums look like the mom & pop publishers they replaced and destroyed. The condition of publishing is dire, but literary fiction will probably be taken up by little and university nonprofits, possibly to the profit of literature, if not its authors. Amazon has effectively killed off all but a few independent bookstores and is in process of killing its two competitors, Borders and Barnes and Noble; but online ordering makes it possible to get almost any book by any press, no matter how small. Literary magazines are dealing with slashed budgets, but they are used to slashed budgets, so they will probably survive. A few of the best, like Narrative Magazine, will bestride print and the web, ambitious to marry them with a new congregation of young readers. Beyond that, all we can know is that: •
The dissemination of literary works will continue. In what form, nobody has any idea.
•
Writers will continue to be underpaid for their work and will continue to do it.
•
In spite of the free-for-all of blogs and chat rooms, someone will continue to fulfill the necessary judgment and nurturing task of the editor.
•
The business model for literature has been tried and must now be discarded.
21 As for our financial situation generally, we know no more. The recession that now begins to look like a depression will severely hamper the arts, but we have the slightly reassuring model of the thirties, when, as observed by William Solomon, an expert on the Great Depression, “One of the most remarkable aspects of the period was the impulse to reconsider the social functions of art and the forging of collective bonds.” The WPA projects kept artists working even when people couldn’t pay for art. “A time of hardship and suffering on a massive scale, The Great Depression was also the crucible” for A Farewell to Arms, The Sound and the Fury, Flowering Judas, for Big Bands, the Marx Brothers, Eudora Welty, Our Town, The Grapes of Wrath, for Rockefeller Center and the Chicago World’s Fair, for Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry,” Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, for George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and Agnes de Mille. Now President Obama has salvaged a fifty million dollar stimulus package for the National Endowment for the Arts in the face of Republican scorn – bringing the NEA budget to just over $200 million, or about one-third the cost of one Black Hawk Helicotper. A freak hundred-million dollar bequest to Poetry Magazine has spawned a nation-wide program of poetry in the schools and an institute to study the place of poetry in American life, including poetry and the new media. The 2008 NEA reports for the first time since 1982 a modest increase in the number of people reading fiction, plays and poetry. The situation is dire. The gains are tentative and small. The hope is tenuous but persistent.
22 Meanwhile, we need all the writers we can get. You have all been amused – and stung – by Flannery O’Connor’s reply to the reviewer who asked, “Do you think that writing programs discourage young writers?” She said, “Not enough of them.” O’Connor was a genius, but she was wrong. We now live permanently in a world of permanent communication, and so that communication should not become chaos, we need all the writers we can get.
"There is nothing in the labor of art itself that will automatically make it pay." That was said about thirty years ago by the essayist Lewis Hyde. Hyde had set himself the task of answering this question: what is the place of creativity in our market-oriented society? Why does art fit so awkwardly into capitalism? The result was a superb book called The Gift, for which, Hyde said, he had to make himself into an anthropologist, archeologist, historian, psychologist and stock market analyst, because a man of letters could not answer the question. Hyde examines the curious fact that even in our commodity society we speak of artistic talent as a "gift," and writers, artists and musicians also refer to their inspirations as gifts, frequently saying that they are merely the "instrument" or "voice" or even "channel" through which the art appears. Hyde observes that a work of art once created exists simultaneously in two spheres. It is a commodity, the "rights" to it can be legally owned and sold, it can be produced and reproduced. It can be "stolen" and that theft can be prosecuted. But at the same time a work of art or literature retains the quality of a gift in that the person who "receives" it "owns" something in an entirely different sphere than is represented by legal ownership or the price of the concert or the object that is the book. Hyde points out that
23 it is the nature of transaction that no human relationship need result; you pay and walk away – whereas it is the nature of a gift, both the giving and the receiving, that a bond is acknowledged or made. Now, a book has both these properties. You pay $11.95 for my paperback and you're quits with the publisher and the bookstore. But in a real way you have not yet "bought" the book. You have not opened yourself to receive a gift and have not received one. In terms of pure commodity, a book is a very bad bargain. The paper and ink it is printed on are worth maybe less that a twentieth of what you paid for them. Also, the overwhelming likelihood is that the author is the only one in the publishing chain that hasn't made a living wage. If it's a paperback the author himself is likely to make twoand-a-half percent of what you paid. The rest went to editors, secretaries, PR men, trucking companies, supermarkets, and profit for the publisher and the distributor. Nor as object, will the book perform for you. It will not sing to you at the touch of a button, it will not plug in and make your toast. Before it's of any real value, you have to make a further investment, one that is in terms of your time and its monetary value worth a good deal more than $11.99. You have to read it. And then an exchange has a possibility of taking place, between the lonely writer and the lonely reader, that is worth something not represented by numbers, and which above all does not end but creates a connection. Pablo Neruda puts it best: "I have been a lucky man. To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes to us from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to
24 us...that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things." That gift – as much a gift on the reader's part as on the writer's – is the value that I'm concerned to preserve in the great upheaval of the world of which we are a part. In a totalitarian society it’s easy to see how writers are silenced. They are jailed, tortured, and killed. In a capitalist or “free” society it is not easy to see how writers are silenced. But they are silenced, under the shadow of the slogan “if it’s any good, it will sell.” Such a society promotes celebrity, stardom, schlock, and a great deal of money. It does no favors for literature. Understand: I am not saying that we should support the arts instead of feeding the poor. I am saying that without nourishing and cherishing the arts we will never feed the poor, because we will never be able adequately to get outside the bone box of our own skulls to imagine their humanity and their plight.
