Guests
by Ian MacKenzie, July 17, 2009 11:03 AM
[ Editor's Note: This is Part Three of a three-part essay; Parts One and Two were published on Wednesday and Thursday.] I certainly do not mean to disparage the hundreds — the thousands, I suppose — of young writers who apply to and complete MFA programs. How somebody sets about writing a book is an idiosyncratic, unreproduceable process, and plenty of terrific books emerge from the galaxy of creative writing programs. (I mentioned earlier a list of books I taught to my students, because they were among my own favorites. Two are by writers who hold MFAs; a number of my good friends hold them as well.) I have no desire to promote a cheap binary opposition. I write here only of my personal experience. I didn't see what use an MFA would have been to me, and I still don't. If I had been writing that second novel within the comfort of a degree-granting program, I don't think it would have been any better; I was still at a point when the necessary work was interior. Three reasons exist for taking an MFA. The first is straightforward: instruction. A student attends medical school because he wants to be a doctor, and because without the knowledge and training offered at the school he could not possibly become one; you need to know which is the kidney and which the spleen. (I use medicine as an example because of its special role in literature: look no further than Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson or Ian McEwan's Saturday; let alone The Magic Mountain and Cancer Ward.) An MFA program, like a medical school, confers a degree on its graduates; it would be logical to assume that it educates them in its given discipline, as well. But a writer's education has always been in the world. That isn't to say that an aspiring writer has nothing to learn in classrooms or from mentors, only that there is a diminishing marginal utility to the classroom education of writers. Even the program literature from Iowa expresses a "conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged." John Ashbery sought out support from Auden, Hemingway received Gertrude Stein's; in The Ghost Writer, about the young Nathan Zuckerman's similar pursuit of spiritual sponsorship from the eminent writer E. I. Lonoff (probably a substitute for Bernard Malamud), Philip Roth diagnoses the religious aspect of all this "laying on of hands." I could name others. But the writer's task is one of temerity; at a certain point he must strike out on his own, and take succor only from himself. All that encouragement has to end somewhere. A second reason for the MFA is credentialing: those with MFAs teach at MFA programs; and some who do have only a scanty record of publication. An MFA can secure a job down the line. Louis Menand, in a recent piece in the New Yorker, on Mark McGurl's The Program Era, mentions that there are, apparently, 822 degree-granting creative writing programs in the United States. Somebody has to staff them. The MFA credentials a writer in a second way: the degree may prick up an agent's ear; it's something to put in the query letter. But, with the possible exception of Iowa, no one program guarantees an agent's attention; 822 programs will produce a lot of writers with MFAs. Even with an MFA you're still part of an enormous undifferentiated lake of aspiration. You still have to write query letters; and you still have to put stamps on those envelopes. And, unless you are fortunate enough to win one of the few available fellowships, you are spending an awful lot of money for the privilege. The third, and most compelling, reason to pursue an MFA is its generous harvest of time: for two years all those hours are yours to write in. But, as just mentioned, all but a lucky few are paying dearly for those hours. More important, the flabbiness of so much time doesn't test a writer. When I was a teacher, the strictures of those two hours at the end of my working day, even if they didn't leave me with a published novel, gave me a more useful resource, determination. None of this is meant as advice; it is simply an account of the process by which I made the decision, both at the end of college and then while I was a teacher, not to apply to MFA programs. I never planned to siphon material from teaching; I haven't written about teaching and as of yet I haven't been inclined to. Teaching was important because it was a real job, a profoundly involved one, which gave me a set of concerns unrelated to writing, and which tested my resolve as to how much writing actually meant to me. That was the education. Some good fiction has been written about creative writing programs — Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys and Francine Prose's Blue Angel come immediately to mind — but we don't need much more. More, of course, has come since those novels, and more will continue to come; a greater and greater number of writers possess as the signal experience of their lives the MFA program. But one's material ought to come from somewhere else, I think. If a writer has money, and he has his material, then perhap<
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Guests
by Ian MacKenzie, July 16, 2009 11:07 AM
[ Editor's Note: This is Part Two of a three-part essay; Part Three will appear tomorrow.] Summer came. A teacher's high perk. I finished work on the novel and assembled a catalog of literary agents to send it to. I labored over the query letter and the synopsis. One by one, with my girlfriend's help and encouragement, I stamped and addressed dozens of envelopes. (Fewer agents accepted e-mail queries then.) One by one, I received the form letters — so brief they hardly qualified as disheartening — and, far smaller in number, the quick, polite requests to see "50 pages" or "three chapters." To someone in my position, those tenuous forward steps contained the emotional force of ironclad guarantees. The season wore on. I wrote a short story; it was flimsy, and was deservedly sent nowhere. Writing and then sending a query letter to a literary agent fixes a young writer in a state of high emotion, and in the long, eerie silence that follows, the months of silence, that emotion spoils and wanders. It is like ginning yourself up for a fistfight and then finding that your opponent is absent. When you send letters to fifty literary agents, that emotion is multiplied fifty times over. One is told to forget about it; one can't. September. The second year of teaching; all the distraction and stress of the classroom. But, I found, I was a better teacher. I entered the room more calmly and was less anxious for the bell to conclude each forty-five minute session. In the back of my mind hung those initial flares of response from the agents — requests to read my writing — but, with each, after a few weeks or a couple of months, a short rejection would come; or, worse, there would be nothing, a dead silence. I tried to be a better teacher; I felt more in control and so expected more of myself. I prepared my students for the state exams. There was one class of juniors I had had when they were sophomores, and to them I felt a special responsibility. Instead of relying on the scattershot selection in the school's book room, I taught books I loved — The Stranger, Giovanni's Room, Drown, Interpreter of Maladies, Lucy, This Boy's Life — which meant that I often had to run out the night before to Xerox the next chapter at the Staples in Union Square. A few more e-mails from agents; one actually phoned me to request the first chapters, which was exciting, but a few days later she sent an e-mail. (Phone calls are good news; e-mails aren't.) I tried to work on a new project: just a few paragraphs, a scene or two; it didn't feel like much. After so much waiting, tangible good news came, by nature, suddenly. In December, two agents offered to represent the novel; I took my time making a decision. By January I had an agent and a novel out on submission. I was still a teacher, but it felt different; again I mistook a short forward step for a guarantee. The book languished on submission. Editors praised and then rejected it; the rejections piled up in a slew. The emotional collapse replicated the feeling of receiving rejections to query letters, but now I felt like a failure on behalf of my agent as well. Spring ticked forward; I made the decision to leave teaching. I was going to freelance and, I believed, have more time to write. In April I got a call from my agent; not the call I'd hoped for. She was no longer going to be my agent, or anyone's; she was leaving to become an editor. What little remained of my book's submission cycle would be handled by her colleague. This did not sound promising. In a few months there would be a last, cruel glimmer of hope — an editor liked the book and was taking it to her bosses — but I knew then that I was not going to publish the second novel I had written. My final weeks as a teacher went by. I told my students I wasn't coming back; I explained that I was leaving to finish writing a book. I realized that I would miss my students. I realized that I liked teaching; I liked having the identity of a teacher. If I hadn't wanted to be a writer instead, I might have stayed on as a teacher. Two years had passed since my graduation from college: if I had entered an MFA program, I would now have been finishing it; I would surely have written a lot more, and I would probably have had the attention of many more agents. Instead, I had the e-mail addresses of a couple of agents who liked the previous book and were "willing" to look at something in the future. That was three years ago. My first novel — my third novel, in a sense — was published two weeks ago. I have no idea if attending an MFA program would have led to earlier publication; I have no idea what I would have written in Iowa or Syracuse or Austin or wherever. During the past three years I have had more time to write than I did when I was a teacher, but I have also had to cobble together each month's worth of wages from assorted freelance jobs which, in their own way, are as depleting as teaching was. Sometimes I think that the compression of those two hours at the end of the day, with my half pot of coffee, were the best quarters I could have had for writing. Certainly those hours were the best education: I learned that I could and would put aside everything else and, for two hours, be a writer. It was both a piece of knowledge and a skill. An MFA program wouldn't have taught me
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Guests
by Ian MacKenzie, July 15, 2009 11:44 AM
Paul Bowles, in a preface to his novel Let It Come Down, wrote about the circumstances of the book's creation: In India the daytimes were devoted to exploration; I wrote at night, and my windowless workroom was far from satisfactory. The air was always several degrees above blood temperature, and the oil lamp felt like a furnace on my face. (The indicated place to work, of course, would have been the bed in the next room, save that no light could be lit there for the thousands of winged insects that would immediately enter. I went to bed in the dark.) But as writers know, intense discomfort often helps to induce intensive work. He's speaking here of physical discomfort, but he is also making a larger point. Writing gains from the friction of the real world, of other responsibilities. At the end of college I could have applied to MFA programs. I had written a novel as my undergraduate thesis, and it had won a prize. But it wasn't published; it had no chance of being published. It was an apprentice work. That I very much wanted to publish a novel was meaningless: I had not written a publishable novel. I was 21 years old. Like many of the students who did attend MFA programs, I had wanted to be a writer since I was quite young, and, despite having written a book from one end to the other, I was still on the outside of a room I wanted to enter — of a country I wanted to enter. The country of published writers. It had strong borders. The MFA was considered, as it still is, the most effective passport. I had just spent four years in college. I had worked hard, I had had a job, etc., but college was not the real world; college bore no resemblance to the real world. I had learned nothing about my own limits. I knew that I wanted to write, but I had not learned what I was willing to give up to write. As my date of graduation neared, I applied to a single job: public high school teacher. I was accepted, and, within days of leaving college, I entered the summer training program in New York. That first summer, I woke at 5 a.m. to write before the daily 10-hour sessions began. During those two months I completed a single short story. It was O.K. It earned me what is commonly called a "nice rejection," from, I think, the TriQuarterly Review. My work as a teacher began. (I was part of the New York City Teaching Fellows program; essentially, it is an educational experiment that fills gaps in the city's teacher corps with uncredentialed pedagogues.) Suddenly I had five classes of high-school students to attend to, at a large school on the corner of Grand Street and Bushwick Avenue, in Brooklyn. September that year was hot, and the air conditioners didn't work. For months, I wrote nothing. I was overwhelmed by the work. As anyone who has taught knows, during those first months of teaching — during the first year — you lose the ability to make conversation about anything else; you become a brutal bore to anyone who is not, himself, a teacher. With other teachers, you talk about your students the way baseball fans talk about the players: "Jose's looking good this year." What you don't do is write novels. I have no idea how many students in my college class went off to MFA programs, but some did, and they weren't worried about whether Jose was looking good that year. They were staring out at dancing cornfields and leading undergraduate workshops and writing short stories in peace. As it happens, one of my closest friends published a novel right out of college, and it had become an extraordinary success: it deserved to; he had written an extraordinary book. He gave me a direct view of the world to which I wanted to belong. Whether I liked it or not, I learned through him everything about publishing, and everything about what it is to publish a successful novel. I was able to imagine the experience vividly. He once phoned me in the morning as I was preparing for the first class of the day: he was calling from the studios of NPR, where he was about to give an interview. Slowly, I found time to write; I made the time to write. It was a matter of discipline. I set aside a two-hour block of time in the evenings, from 8 to 10 p.m., for writing; at 7:55 p.m. I put on a half pot of coffee. For a while I went back to the novel I had written as my thesis and tried to rework it; it was a losing effort. Then I began something new and got about 30,000 words into it before realizing that I had no idea where the book was supposed to go. Winter crushed the city; we had a lot of snow that year. My commute in the mornings took about an hour, and I was out of the house by a quarter after six. The calendar shuffled along, I wasn't writing, the semester changed over. I had some new students in my classes. Spring approached and I began to work on something new; a novel. It was short and I quickly completed a draft. Teaching was wearing me down; it was a depleting job. Quietly, I applied to other jobs; and, almost without admitting it to myself, I began keeping a list of PhD and MFA programs. But sitting in the midtown offices of what would have been a less depleting job, I realized that it would have been more spiritually enervating to live at a desk for eight hours every day; I needed a job that meant something in and of itself, not a day job. And I knew, even as I was making those lists, that I had no interest in returning to school. The temptation of the MFA was evident: even if it was not quite the country I wanted to belong to, it was at least a colony. Yet I still recognized the distinction. None of the objections I previously held toward MFA programs had expired: I still wanted to live in the world; I still had faith in the ability of the world to instruct. This is the Part One of a three-part essay; Part Two will be published
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Guests
by Ian MacKenzie, July 14, 2009 9:57 AM
Camus was the first serious writer I engaged with seriously. Political writing is frequently disastrous; but Camus was never disastrous. Quite the opposite. He was spare, calm, controlled, lucid, stylish. He was, and so was his writing. Camus was also deeply principled; he was consistent in his principles. Like Sartre, he was, for a time, a committed Socialist; but unlike Sartre he sloughed off Socialism — and any ideological fealty to the U.S.S.R. — when he saw that it contradicted higher principles. Political expediency was not in his blood. He saw through the lie. He knew that a human being is a human being is a human being; and that human beings are more important than ideas. When I was twelve my mother gave me a copy of The Stranger as a birthday gift; I quickly read it twice. Since then, I have read it many times in English and at least once in French, and, when I was a high school teacher, I taught it to my students. The Stranger was an initiation: I fell for Camus. From the library I took out a volume of essays and read, with heavy admiration, "Reflections on the Guillotine." Seeing my adoration of this writer, and knowing that I wanted to be, like Camus, a writer, my mother gave me a paperback edition of his Youthful Writings. Camus helped to shape my young mind. Elizabeth Hawes had a head start on me by some three decades. Her engrossing new book — part monograph, part biography, part memoir — has returned me, almost in an instant, to the fervor of admiration and awe I felt for Camus and his books. His presence rushes forth from the pages of Camus, A Romance. Hawes catalogs his appealing fillips of insight: "What I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport"; "In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer." She identifies the essence — aside from the writing itself — of his appeal: "[O]ne of the qualities that made Camus Camus was his deep-seated pudeur, a protective reserve and modesty." He was moody and sexy; he wore trench coats and smoked cigarettes. And Hawes knows what makes Camus a more enduringly compelling figure than Sartre, for all the chic and élan of the latter: it was his "insistent morality," as opposed to Sartre's mere "existentialism." Camus lived in the world: he insisted upon the world. Even as a young man he had a clear vision; there is a reason he was, as Hawes notes admiringly, the second-youngest recipient in the history of the Nobel Prize in Literature. For proof of Camus's importance, one may look to The Stranger and The Plague and The Rebel; but in addition to those, I find myself almost equally impressed by the urgency of his writings for the Résistance newspaper, Combat. His editorial writings for the paper are collected in Camus at "Combat" and they make apparent that he not only perceived the truth of what was happening during and immediately after World War II, but that he could see the lines along which postwar history would travel. He was more than perceptive: he was prescient. I suspect that my early attraction to Camus's writing began not only with the moody allure of The Stranger but with an intuition about his strength of character. Few writers have shaped their bodies of work around such a controlled, refined essence of self; and in those who have, such as V. S. Naipaul, the acuity of vision is often paired with a long bleak character flaw. (In Naipaul's case it is his frequently unsparing treatment of others as well as his troubling behavior toward women; as much is detailed in the remarkable new biography by Patrick French, The World Is What It Is.) Only two other writers have shaped my view of the world as deeply as Camus has: James Baldwin and William S. Burroughs. I began reading Burroughs around the same time I began reading Camus, and in him as well I recognized an effort to peel away artifice and to expose hypocrisy. (Talk about a flawed man. Burroughs was a heroin addict until the day he died, and he killed his wife in an utterly preventable accidental shooting.) Baldwin is the intellectual hero of mine who comes closest to Camus in moral standing; he lived raggedly, but honestly, and he, like Camus, recognized that the basic unit of moral currency is the human being, and that to spend them cavalierly in the service of creeds, nations, or ideologies is an unforgivably profligate way to do business. For obvious reasons, it is humbling and gratifying that more than one person has described the influence of The Stranger in my own novel, City of Strangers. But it is also a surprise. The echo in the title of my book may seem like a tip-off; but it was not the title I intended to use while I was writing. Camus did not enter my mind except at the very beginning, when, for a time, I planned to use an extract from one of his columns for Combat as the epigraph. In a different sense, though, Camus has always been there in my writing; he was the writer who meant the most to me when I first tried myself to write. It is good to know that, even as other influences have informed my writing, his presence remains when I knock together a sentence: an ancestral element in the prose.
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Guests
by Ian MacKenzie, July 13, 2009 11:33 AM
Oregon, I'm afraid, exists for me only in the imagination. That is to say, I have never been to Oregon, but I have spent time imagining what it is like. I want to visit Oregon, but, as with other places I have only imagined and have not visited — India, Buenos Aires, Iceland — it is hard to say exactly why: I imagine that I will like it, or that I will find it interesting. That imagination is nourished, in the age of the Internet, by an astonishing variety of secondhand information; by photographs, films, personal accounts; by other people's strong belief in certain cafés, restaurants, natural attractions, bars, bookshops, pieces of coastline. A similar glut of information exists for virtually every spot on the planet. Call it globalization. All this borrowed knowledge creates a tension: you feel guilty for all the places you haven't visited. You could do worse than read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast if you want to imagine Paris; or Isherwood's The Last of Mr. Norris if you want to imagine Berlin. But, then again, you would have gotten only the romantic, hyperpersonal versions of those cities. They are books written by visitors; visitors can meet only one narrow side of a place. More recent examples give us contemporary London (Ian McEwan's Saturday), New York (Joseph O'Neill's Netherland), and Berlin (Chloe Aridjis's moody first novel Book of Clouds). These are memorable novels and each firmly claims its quarry; they are written by, respectively, a native, a permanent transplant, and a longtime resident. They get at what it is to live in their host cities. Oregon, likewise, has found a native chronicler in the writer Jon Raymond. Raymond's recent collection of stories, Livability, is proof of his strengths: fine, confident descriptions of the land; an intuition for the delicacies of friendship; the single stroke that defines a character on the page. The greatest accomplishment in Livability is a story called "The Suckling Pig." At its heart is Tom: a second-generation Chinese-American man who works in insurance and is recently divorced. He plans a dinner party for himself and a couple of friends; during the afternoon beforehand he drives by a shelter where Mexican day laborers wait for jobs; he picks up two men and brings them home to take care of some yard work, including the felling of an giant, elderly tree; both friends then call to cancel, leaving Tom with a mountain of food; he invites the laborers to stay and gives them expensive tequila; the friends show up anyway; the rest of the story charts the collision of people who, under normal circumstances, would never have to talk to one another. In a sense, the story could take place anywhere. But that is part of its point: the anywhereness of everywhere these days. Tom feels a deep satisfaction as he watches the men uproot the tree: a literal deracination. The tree had been on the land longer than Tom or his family; certainly longer than the men who are paid to tear it out. Tom's pleasure is that he has made the land his own: he has had it cleared. The men he hires — whom he plies with tequila so expensive they could never afford it even though they are from the country where it is made — are working just to find a foothold. It is a story about Oregon, but, you come to realize, it is a story about globalization as well; it is about Oregon as a place within the world. Likewise, one finds, with the new novel by Jim Lynch, Raymond's neighbor to the north. Lynch lives in Washington, and Border Songs builds its escalating plot upon the novelty of the Canadian border: it is novel in the sense that before 9/11 it did not feel like much of a border at all; the border was "thin as a rumor." I had the pleasure of reading with Jim this past weekend, at Northshire Books, in Manchester Center, Vermont, and his book, like Raymond's, maps a newly uncertain terrain. He entertainingly braids humor and episodes of drama while navigating the central irony of globalization: in an increasingly borderless world, the borders matter more than ever. The mode of expression is the personal: wider forces channeled through individual experience. In "The Suckling Pig," this is especially true. Raymond never names his themes outright; he hangs close to the characters and allows their moments of tension and release to speak about the wider world. "The Suckling Pig" is a chamber ensemble piece, and in this sense it is similar to Olivier Assayas's new film, Summer Hours. Assayas, too, interrogates the changes effected by globalization, and, just as Raymond does, he makes his points in a rich miniature. The family at the center of Assayas's film consists of three adult siblings and their mother; when she dies, they must divide the estate, which includes, notably, a great deal of fine art. Predictably, dividing the estate divides the siblings. But in back of this is the idea of France itself: the disassembly of a French identity in a world stretched and transformed by globalization. The youngest of the siblings now lives in China with his wife, where he works for Puma, the shoe company; he talks about China but we never see it: for everyone but he, it is a China of the mind. But globalization is like that. Globalization, we are told, is a fact; yet it still requires an effort of the imagination to recognize when it is happening to you
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