Guests
by Kevin Baker, March 10, 2006 9:36 AM
This is my last posting for this guest blog, and I have to say that it's been great. I want to thank all of you out there who have responded, and all of you who are readers. I've never had the privilege to get to Powell's, but I would gladly come in a heartbeat. Many thanks to Dave, and everybody at the bookstore who made this possible. I want to say in the same vein that, for all the various complaints and issues I've raised this week, it is a privilege to be able to do this for a living. It's what I always wanted to do, and it took me a long time to get to the point where I could make a living at it. I wrote fiction nearly every day for fifteen years before I sold a lick of it and now here I am, doing it fulltime. I am well aware that there are plenty of talented writers out there who for whatever market reasons have to hold down other jobs, and all I can say again is that I am incredibly grateful. Which is not to say that I'm through complaining! It is, after all, the public duty of a writer to be critical; that's the whole purpose of freedom of expression. And I would like to clarify and expound upon a few of the week's rants, in answer to the comments you cared enough to post. To Hayley, who wrote sarcastically: "On book tours ? I wish I had such a torturous existence. Touring around in support of my work. Sounds like such a drag." Yeah, I hear you. We all talked the same way when we heard other writers complaining about their tours???until we got out there. I love traveling around the country, seeing new places, staying in great hotels. Hell, we were poor as church mice when I was growing up, off and on public assistance. I think of room service as a gift from the gods. But when you find yourself out there, in some store space full of empty chairs, with maybe five or six people on hand ? knowing that you are expected to speak and read to them for at least a half-hour ? knowing how embarrassed they're feeling for you; how embarrassed they're feeling themselves, to be in such a situation; what a pitying look the bookstore assistant night manager is probably giving you ? it's not a pretty situation. It feels, in fact, more like some kind of elaborate practical joke, designed to prove to you just how insignificant you really are. One more thing. I'm not a rock musician. My "existence" does not consist of book touring. It consists, mostly, of writing, reading, making some laughable attempts at working out, and spending time with my wife, my family, and my friends. It's a pretty good life. Like anyone else, I don't enjoy having it interrupted if you're just going to waste my time. To Jim John, Vladmir, him, and TTBear, regarding your posts in response to my blog concerning Bill "The Sage of Batavia" Kauffman, the Wall Street Journal's wonderful guest reviewer: I am, first of all, completely opposed to almost all censorship this side of child pornography. But the WSJ is not an infinite newspaper. It does not publish any and all viewpoints and it has, presumably, standards for reviews and reviewers. It chooses ? as we all do ? not to consider certain viewpoints because they are too loathsome, ridiculous, and thoroughly discredited by history and rational analysis. In the particular case of Mr. Kauffman, I really don't see how you can review any part of a series of books celebrating the triumph of a multicultural America when you believe, for instance, that our foreign policy is dominated by "Jewish intellectuals shrieking for war." (An actual quote of his from America First!.) One of my ulterior motives in posting that blog was to draw out some response from the WSJ regarding just what its review standards are. No dice, I guess. But contrary to what "him" wrote I did not direct any epithets that I'm aware of toward the paper (at least, not until now!). And there was no equivalence between what I was writing for Powell's, and what Mr. Kauffman was writing for the Journal. Powell's very kindly gave me a guest space to write whatever I wanted. The Journal probably violated its own standards and practices to let this anti-Semitic gentleman, with a clear conflict of interest, review my book. Mind you, I don't put this down to any particular political agenda on the part of the Journal. For one thing, the paper's notorious editorial page does not influence its outstanding news and features reporting, and I have in fact received very good reviews there in the past. For another, not even the WSJ editorial page shares Mr. Kauffman's bizarre, isolationist ravings. What I suspect really happened is something else that I find depressingly common in the book world: an editor carelessly tossed a book to an unqualified reviewer without bothering to learn anything much about his past. I see this all the time, unfortunately ? good books thrown to literary thugs and punks by the very people who should be the guardians of our literature. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Journal really has a good reason why it would let a loony anti-Semite onto its review pages. If so, I'd like to hear it. To Miriam, Aaron, Vladmir, and others who wrote such nice things about different posting: Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. Writers can't get enough positive reinforcement, in case you haven't noticed. But thanks as well to all of you above, for at least engaging with what I was writing. This happens all so rarely today, and it's the first step away from our long, national sleepwalk toward the abyss. One final note that relates, weirdly enough, to my amazement last time out that anyone could have ever taken seriously Jim Frey's passages about reading War and Peace to his fictitious cellmate, "Porterhouse." A friend of mine, who is part of an anarchist group dedicated to getting books to prisoners, informs me that in the Oregon state prison system, inmates are not allowed to receive books, ostensibly because it is too easy to hide weapons in them. Instead, they are limited to a maximum of ten, loose-leaf pages of printed material a day ? just one more instance of the gratuitous, self-destructive cruelties that our governments on all levels now seem so bent on pursuing. My friend's group claims to have actually received a request for War and Peace from an Oregon inmate. They went and did it, copying the whole book, mailing out ten pages a day to the inmate, on the condition that he pass on those ten pages to other inmates, once he had read them. I don't know how all this worked out, but it seems to me a better story than any of Mr. Frey's prevarications. Good-bye for now, and thanks again for having
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Guests
by Kevin Baker, March 9, 2006 8:11 AM
Picking up where I left off... Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the whole Jim Frey controversy was the tendency of the media to treat it mostly as a case of consumer fraud. Oprah Winfrey herself ended up, at one point ? during her immensely entertaining public scolding of Mr. Frey ? by chastising publisher Nan Talese, "But you said it was true!" ? as if Ms. Talese had colluded in selling her, say, a piece of rotten beef with a false expiration date. I don't mean to let Frey or Talese, or anyone else, off the hook regarding their deception. When you say something is true, it should be truth, or at least as close to the truth as you can honestly determine. And I give Oprah her props for discarding her original contention that Mr. Frey was telling an "emotional truth," and holding Frey and his publisher to some level of accountability. But I fear that we are now divided into two, equally simplistic camps, one of which doesn't want to bother with anything that's not "true" ? such as novels ? and the other which clings to the postmodern pose that it's impossible to ever know the entire truth, so therefore it doesn't matter what one says or writes. In other words, "reality" TV vs. Wikipedia. A more useful criteria would begin with the understanding that all good writing seeks the truth, whether that's a metaphorical or an objective truth, and it should be judged accordingly. Deciding if a book is "true" or not should never stop at the title page; a good reader should never suspend his or her critical faculties. This is precisely why reading is such a mentally interactive experience, why writing is ? in my opinion ? an essentially higher art than other, more passive media. While reading a book, one must constantly be engaged in trying to hear dialogue, visualize surroundings, judge character and background. A good book, in turn, challenges a reader; makes him or her rethink what they are sure they know and believe. I have to admit that I have not read Mr. Frey's "memoir," A Million Little Pieces. But every excerpt I have seen from it struck me as utterly false on the face of it. A cellmate with the nickname "Porterhouse," whom he reads War and Peace to, finishing on the very last day of his sentence? A girlfriend who hangs herself on that last day of the sentence? As a novelist, such events seemed to me hackneyed, clichéd, unlikely ? untrue. Of course real life can be highly unlikely. But then, if we are to truly tell a story, we must draw what we can from this, too. The picaresque is a respectable literary genre, but it does not simply consist of what Henry Ford called history ? "one damned thing after another." We take what we can from any slice of life, we grapple with it, we try to learn lessons, detect humor, pathos, sympathy. This is the very nature of consciousness. The trouble with what is untrue goes beyond labeling; it touches upon the organic whole of any work of art. Take the recent movie, Munich, for instance. For me, what was often a compelling drama with a real moral dilemma at its core ? when is retribution necessary, and when does it start to degrade the humanity of those meting it out? ? was severely occluded by some very unbelievable plot points. A beautiful hit-woman who lives on a houseboat with her cat? A sympathetic French resistance fighter-turned-gourmand, who supports his family by trafficking in guns and information? I don't know enough about the real history to say for sure, but such characters seemed to me ? at least in the way they were presented ? to be Hollywood inventions, designed to obfuscate the real methods by which intelligence services operate. They were a needless distraction, and one that made me wary of the whole rest of the narrative. What is untrue diminishes fiction as well. Take the otherwise withering Eliot poem, "Gerontion," which is defaced by three gratuitous, anti-Semitic lines as thoroughly as if someone flicked a random gob of red paint onto the face of the Mona Lisa. The rest of the poem's meditation on aging and death is not invalidated by these earlier words, but it is lessened by them, for again we are distracted, and no longer quite trust the reliability of the narrator. Yet the interaction of what is true and untrue gets much more tangled. One recent, notorious example I have in mind is Dutch, Edmund Morris's biography of Ronald Reagan. Frustrated by the fact that he could find no core in Reagan's personality to clutch on to, Morris resorted to making up a fictional character, a lifelong friend of Reagan's who was supposedly saved by the Gipper during his days as an Illinois lifeguard. This narrative Morris attempted to impose as the heart of Reagan???never seeming to note that Reagan claimed to have saved 77 people from drowning in his 7 years as a lifeguard. 77 in 7? Claimed by a man who dabbled in astrology and numerology for most of his adult life? There was, in fact, Morris's core ? the fact that there was no core to Reagan, just a talented fabulist; the son of an alcoholic father who made a brilliant career out of telling all of America what it wanted to hear. There was no need for any fictional device. The case of Morris and Dutch interested me in part because in Strivers Row I was trying to do much the same thing, only in reverse. The inspiration for this novel was The Autobiography of Malcolm X. This is an iconic American work, the moving story of a man caught up in the maelstrom of race in this country ? and a much truer memoir than anything Mr. Frey seems to have written. Yet the Autobiography is at the same time a classic conversion text, and a bid for power. Over and over, Malcolm makes the case that he has fallen to the very depths of the black experience in America ? and that therefore his rise, aided by the Nation of Islam, was all the greater. He even presents himself as the very best at the worst sorts of black racist stereotypes. He is the baddest criminal, the coldest pimp, the best dancer. He is, in short, the blackest of the black, and therefore the man best suited to lead what was then a civil rights movement approaching its zenith. The Autobiography is complicated by the fact that it was largely dictated to Alex Haley, an author with his own, complex relationship with the truth, and published only after Malcolm's death. But there are passages in it that even Malcolm must have known were not true. At one point, for instance, he recalls that on his very first night out dancing, he and his date were so impressive that they cleared the floor of the Roseland State Ballroom, and that
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Guests
by Kevin Baker, March 8, 2006 7:54 AM
Having taken on the book tour and the Wall Street Journal in my first two blog entries, I thought I would move on to Oprah. Not Oprah herself, of course. I'm not that stupid. Instead I thought I would put in my two cents worth regarding the whole Jim Frey controversy, which is rapidly becoming a pivotal cultural moment in regard to how we think about truth. For me, I think the most telling statement to come out of the whole controversy was from William Zinsser, an author who has written extensively on the art of the memoir. When the whole Frey controversy first broke, The New York Times quoted Mr. Zinsser as saying: "I think that the strength of the memoir comes from history and from the truth of what people did and what they thought and experienced. That is more rich, more surprising and funny and emotional and compelling than anything that could be invented." As a novelist, I was tempted at first to snarl, "Sez you, bub." But in fact, I don't really disagree. What is most bemusing about Mr. Zinsser's remark is that he seems to believe that somehow fiction writers don't write from life but just "invent" everything ? much the way one believes as a young child that artists just blithely draw people and landscapes across a canvas, without requiring a model. Of course good fiction writers draw everything from life, whether directly or indirectly, from all of our own, human experiences. This even goes for science fiction and fantasy writers. As a historical novelist, I "make up" very little. I like to say that no one can make up anything more colorful, fascinating, or downright bizarre than actual history, and particularly American history. I do extensive historical research on my books, and I feel that research very much informs the work. For me, the "fictional" work lies in trying to personalize this history, to make these other times and places come alive in characters that the reader can intimately identify with. What was it like to be a mixed-race family, in the streets of New York during the terrible draft riots of the Civil War? To visit the world's first, incredible amusement parks out on Coney Island? To walk into a rent party in a Harlem apartment during World War II? Don't we all want to know these things? And everything else? Different writers have different approaches. They are just as valid. My friend Darin Strauss, the author of Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy, and one of the finest historical novelists writing today, takes a diametrically different tact. He believes in doing "as little research as you can get away with" ? a dictum he learned as a student of E.L. Doctorow, who believes the same thing and who does this sort of work better than any of us. The idea is not to be overwhelmed with digressions and historical detail, but to concentrate more closely on the characters involved. I need the research to find what I wasn't looking for. To get those little tips and clues to the zeitgeist of a time. Which leads to a whole other question, when one comes to writing about the past. How fundamentally do different times and societies affect human nature? I started off writing historical fiction with the idea that human personality is essentially fixed ? hence the failure of the fascist and communist "new man," and countless other ghastly social experiments over the ages. That while customs change completely, human beings are still motivated by the same, basic desires and emotions: lust, greed, love, fear, hatred, jealousy, sympathy, joy, etc. This still strikes me as basically true. But after writing historical fiction for some time, I began to question just how meaningful this formulation really was. Isn't it possible that different times and places can produce human psychologies so different from ours today that we would find them truly alien? I put this question to Martin Scorsese, when I had the privilege to interview him prior to the release of Gangs of New York. He replied that he had long wanted to produce a television series showing the progress of a Roman family through the period when the Empire moved from being predominantly pagan to officially Christian; c. 300-350 AD, or so. He would have liked to examine how the family's whole way of thinking, its whole worldview changed. I think this is an excellent example. There are no doubt many others, especially in modern times, as all of human existence seems to accelerate, and change becomes more and more rapid and dramatic. And hence my own thinking has changed. This is, now, a dynamic tension that I try to keep in mind as I write about different eras: remembering how deeply alike we all are, how universal our experiences...while also remembering how different the way we see the world can be, how our perceptions and beliefs can lead us to do things that, in another time, would be seen as inhumanly cruel and barbaric; or blasphemous and hubristic. All of which leads us back again to the basic question raised in the Frey imbroglio, which is to say what is truth ? or maybe to put it a little more precisely, what is the value of truth in writing? For my answer to these and other earth-shaking questions ? you'll have to wait until tomorrow. I have five days to fill up, after
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Guests
by Kevin Baker, March 7, 2006 8:44 AM
Now that I've started my blog week at Powell's with an entry on book tours, I thought I might turn to the subject of reviews. I know what you're thinking: Great. More writerly groaning. Don't these people ever stop whining? Well, no, as a matter-of-fact. Complaining is our main hobby. But I'm feeling a little more bloody-minded today, and I think it's time to get the knives out. Back in the nineteenth century, unscrupulous editors used to put scathing reviews on the covers of literary magazines, in the hope of starting literary feuds. They knew what they were doing. In the interests of full disclosure, let me say first of all that the overwhelming majority of reviews I've ever received have been very favorable. I'm immensely grateful for each and every word, and of course have forgotten all of them. On the other hand, every single one of the very few negative reviews I've received has burned into my brain like little cigarette holes. But ? save for raving to all my long-suffering friends and loved ones until I'm blue in the face ? I have usually accepted bad notices as part of the game. Until last month, that is, when my latest book, Strivers Row, was reviewed by a literal neo-fascist. I'm not talking about somebody whose politics are a little right-wing, mind you ? a Bush Republican or, say, a member of the creationist movement. I mean a real-life, bona fide, neo-fascist. Let me explain. The review in question appeared in the weekend Wall Street Journal, written by someone named Bill Kauffman. I had never heard of Mr. Kauffman before this, but he seemed to have it in for me. His review was unduly personal; among other things, Mr. Kauffman felt obliged to mention both his own ethnicity and my skin color ? something I had never previously encountered from a reviewer. His general complaint was that I was too nice to the black characters in my novel, too mean to the Irish ones ? and, unkindest cut of all, that I was not nearly the historical novelist that Gore Vidal is. I can't pretend that I wasn't unruffled by all this. Goaded into a murderous rage would be more like it, particularly since Mr. Kauffman also grossly mischaracterized most of my work. But I just put it down to the fact that Mr. Kauffman must be a devoted Vidal fan. Maybe he had been upset by the nastiest review I have ever written myself, one ripping Vidal's novel The Golden Age in the pages of the Los Angeles Times a few years ago. (Actually, I like some of Vidal's novels. They have everything in them except people.) Anyway, I was grudgingly willing to accept this as one (very stupid) man's opinion until about a week later. Rooting through some library stacks for another book, and happened to come upon one of Mr. Kauffman's own works. There was its title, floating in golden letters right before my eyes ? America First! by Bill Kauffman, with a "foreword by Gore Vidal." In other words, Mr. Kauffman was now more than a fan. He was an active collaborator with Mr. Vidal. Where I come from, that's known as a conflict of interest. But even more intriguing was what was inside America First! There, indeed, was the glowing foreword by Vidal, one that referred to Mr. Kauffman as, among other things, "the sage of Batavia." More intriguing still was the text, where I found all sorts of truly nasty, anti-Semitic and racist comments from the Sage of Batavia (henceforth to be referred to as "Sage O' "), along with impassioned defenses of some of the more notorious demagogues and race-baiters to come down the pike in American history, including Father Coughlin, George Wallace, Charles Lindbergh, and Pat Buchanan. For Sage O', the Confederacy was an admirable "localist rebellion," and our involvement in nearly every war in our history ? including World War II ? was a huge mistake, one probably manipulated by nefarious, internationalist bankers. In short, Sage O' is part of a populist tradition so radical that it has turned 'round bitten its own tail, becoming evermore paranoid, isolationist, and racist. Vidal himself, of course, is the reigning leader of this ragged band, a position that has led to his own anti-Semitic utterances over the years, not to mention the conspiracy theories that have crowded his later novels, or his sordid dalliance with the late Timothy McVeigh. Now, I don't expect my reviewers to share my politics. It's even a little exciting to encounter so anachronistic a creature as Sage O', rather like catching a glimpse of a carrier pigeon, or maybe the yeti. But Mr. Kauffman's basic worldview goes beyond that of principled dissent, or noble iconoclasm. It is dependent upon a fantastical, race-based interpretation of reality. My question is whether such an individual should really be reviewing my book ? or, more importantly, anyone's book ? in the pages of a respectable daily newspaper. Where is the line drawn? Just how many anti-Semitic or racist things does one have to say or write, in order to be banished from the pages of the Wall Street Journal, or any other paper? Is it all right if you've published a certain number of books? Or is it okay if you say all sorts of other outrageous things, the way Mr. Vidal likes to do? I tried raising some of these points in a very respectful letter to the Journal's books editor, submitted through my publisher, but I have not been favored with a reply. So I will take it up with all of you... not having a literary magazine at my disposal. Just where does the right of free expression run up against the problem of empowering a
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Guests
by Kevin Baker, March 6, 2006 8:53 AM
Forgive me if none of the following makes much sense, but I've never written for a blog before and I'm just back from my book tour for Strivers Row, and still a little logy from the trip. Most writers have great book-tour stories, and we like nothing so much as to complain. Get enough of us into the same room, and it will soon turn into a hilarious bitch-fest, with all of us trying to outdo each other with tales of spending a Saturday afternoon in Blytheville, Arkansas, or the Friday night when one person showed up to that lonely bookstore in Winetka, Illinois, or the store in Albany that scheduled a reading even though it didn't have a space for a reading, just one, slightly wider aisle??? It's an exquisite torture, the tour. We're chauffeured in limos to airports, taken everywhere by a solicitous media escort, put up in some of the best hotels in the world, and showered with all sorts of other perks that writers don't usually experience. My suite in Denver this time around even featured a live goldfish. Then, you go out to the bookstore to do your reading???and five people show up. There are those of us who believe the whole concept of the book tour was devised by a nefarious sect of monks to teach us humility. The trouble is that neither the publisher nor the bookseller has yet to hit upon any surefire way to turn out people for a reading, so attendance is haphazard, to say the least. Last week, for instance, I found myself in a large college town that looked as if it had been hit by a neutron bomb. There was scarcely a soul on the streets, never mind the bookstore. The store manager explained apologetically that I had arrived in the middle of spring break, something that made me want to scream at him like the title character in Dr. Strangelove, "Vy didn't you tell the publicist?!!" Instead, I confined myself to a few minutes of frothing and writhing on the floor before getting up and doing my reading. Because I'm a pro, goddammit. What this book tour did include was also something very welcome: Black people. Let me back up for a moment. My book, Strivers Row, is a historical novel set in Harlem, in 1943. One of its two leading characters is a young Malcolm Little, later to become Malcolm X, and it also contains some frank flashbacks about the founding of the Nation of Islam, better known as "the Black Muslims." This, combined with the fact that I am a white man, caused all sorts of consternation among my white friends and acquaintances. In the weeks and months leading up to publication, I was bombarded with comments such as "Aren't you worried about what the reaction will be from black readers?" Their concerns grew so urgent that I realized they were picturing mobs of angry African-Americans showing up at my readings, and issuing fatwas until I was forced into a Salman Rushdie-like existence. I took to replying to them with brave, pithy lines such as, "A writer never fears controversy. What he fears is being ignored," or "Isn't all literature an act of audacity?" But in truth, I wasn't all that worried, mostly because what I was writing was pretty sympathetic to the young Malcolm, and because my black friends didn't seem to have any trouble with the whole idea. I assumed that what made my white friends wary ? still ? was the reaction William Styron received to his 1970 historical novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. At the time, some black critics had expressed outrage that a white author would dare to write in the voice of the leader of the most famous slave rebellion in the first place, and above all that he would have his hero develop feelings of love for the young, white daughter of his master. I happen to think that this was a brilliant device in a brilliant book, but whatever one thinks of Nat Turner, shouldn't it be obvious that some things have changed over the past 36 years? That now that we are past the immediate aftermath of the modern civil rights movement, with all of the passions it unleashed, it should be possible to sit down and have a more reasoned discussion about our common, American past? On the first stop on my tour, I got my answer at a great event at the Dekalb County Public Library, organized by Bill Starr. It was a good turnout, and moreover, maybe sixty percent of the audience was African-American. The black men and women in the audience gave me a nice reception, and afterwards asked probing, incisive, but generally friendly questions. In fact, they asked all the questions. When the reading was over, I realized anew just how great the racial gap remains in this country. It's something any observant person understands intellectually, of course, but it takes certain moments to really bring it home. That night in Georgia it occurred to me just how lily-white so many of the audiences for readings of my past books had been. Outside of my friends and colleagues, I had rarely seen more than a couple of black faces at any of them. And it saddened me even more to see the reticence of white audience members to ask questions in front of a large, black presence. It struck me that whether or not they remember the flap over Styron's book, most whites still think of blacks as crazily oversensitive individuals, quick to take affront and incapable of engaging in any frank, constructive dialogue about race in this country. This is not true, of course, but it's a self-propagating belief. Thinking of African-Americans as essentially different people ? even, somehow, a different species ? whites come to unconsciously embrace the idea that it is illegitimate for a white person to be writing about black people. Hence the composition of my previous reading audiences. This whole concept of "niche-marketing" ? i.e., racial profiling ? is one that publishers have bit into, hook, line, and sinker. Not so many years ago, as industry insiders will tell you, the dirty little whispers in the halls of our major publishers were that "Black people don't buy books." Proved wrong by any number of outstanding black authors, publishers have now reacted forcing everyone into their respective cubbyholes. Whole genres of literature now pander blatantly to women, to men, to young people, to whatever separate, discrete group. Almost always, these sorts of books simply reinforce the worst sorts of stereotypes regarding the people they are aimed at. Lately, for instance ? as a prominent black writer complained in the New York Times ? publishers have taken to filling up the shelves of bookstores' African-American sections with a bizarre, new genre of soft-core, urban erotica. Where all this Jim Crow publishing will lead to is anybody's guess, but it would be nice to see those of us who care stand together for a universal literature, one that recognizes our common humanity. Just getting to talk to faces of all colors felt like a nice start in that
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