so difficult for so many to see the changes in the actual object itself and that cause those caught up in the rush for originality to end up repeating, often to the letter, the experiments of the past and—save those among them familiar with more of the workings of art’s history—producing works that are just not very original. Often they find the common audience bored or uninterested by their efforts—and the more sophisticated, unimpressed. No more than any other enquiry into aesthetics can this book solve such problems. But it does not ignore them either.
In his manifesto “No More Masterpieces” that forms the centerpiece for his influential collection of essays on art, The Theater and Its Double (1938), the French actor, writer, and director Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) wrote:
One of the reasons for the asphyxiating atmosphere in which we all live without possible escape or remedy—and in which we all share—is our respect for what has been written, formulated, or painted, what has been given form, as if all expression were not at last exhausted, were not at the point where things must break apart if they are to start anew and begin afresh.
We must have done with this idea of masterpieces reserved for a self-styled elite and not understood by a general public …
Masterpieces are good for the past. They are not good for us. We have the right to say what has been said and even what has not been said in a way that belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct, corresponding to present modes of feeling, and understandable to everyone.
It is idiotic to reproach the masses for having no sense of the sublime, when the sublime is confused with one or another of its formal manifestations, which are moreover always defunct manifestations.
How could one not agree? Or not applaud? Or not run off to spread the news? But as the little history that I have already given suggests, in the seventy years since Artaud wrote his manifesto, the “masterpiece” as it was conceived of in the nineteenth century that Artaud is polemicizing against is by and large no longer part of the active aesthetic landscape. (We read Ulysses for pleasure and are even awed by it. But nobody would try to write out another one, full-scale, any more than someone would try to write another Hamlet in verse.) As well, no one has been able to get around the fact that the “masses” really require education.
Since Artaud wrote his manifesto, it has become widely evident that when the “masses” are left to themselves, the artists who are trying to “say what has been said and even what has not been said in a way that belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct,” are precisely the artists who most bore and bewilder the masses, who flock instead to the old, tried, tired, and true—not in terms of the classic sublime, but in terms of the formulaic, the violent, and the kitschy. Despite the fears of the moralists, the masses don’t seem to retain any lasting interest even in works of pornography.
V
My education as a writer has been a diverse one. In just over forty years of publishing, I’ve read a handful of books about writing that I felt have saved me some time. (I’ve read many others that gave me little or nothing.) Among the ones I found useful were:
ABC of Reading (1934), by Ezra Pound: Pound’s cranky, cantankerous, wildly opinionated, and wholly individual notions of literature can come as a vivifying breath to those who have endured the teaching of literature as an authoritarian enterprise done this way and not that way. He is almost always right and almost always interesting. Those whose literary educations took a more laid-back form sometimes have difficulty, however, conceiving of whom he could be polemicizing against. Indeed, Pound is a good example of what rebels sound like seventy or eighty years after they have been almost entirely successful.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Lectures in America (1934) are both by Gertrude Stein. I devoured the first in a Vintage paperback shortly after I turned seventeen. In that book, Gertrude Stein tells the nineteen-year-old composer and writer Paul Bowles, “If you don’t work hard when you’re twenty, Paul, no one will love you when you’re thirty.” It’s the first piece of literary advice I ever remember conscientiously deciding to take. The book also brought home to me a lesson without which it is almost impossible to become a professional writer: from it I first learned that the writers who wrote books, the writers who created published works, brilliant works, exciting works, were people. They had bodies. They lived in actual houses. They ate meals. They liked certain of their acquaintances and disliked others. They had personalities. They were neither gods nor primal forces—voices alone, moving, bodiless, through space and time. Their day-to-day humanity ceded them the material for their art. This was as true for Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton as it is for Jay Wright (b. 1935), Richard Powers (b. 1957), Angela Carter (1940–92), Michael Cunningham (b. 1952), Alice Munro (b. 1931), and William Ernest Gaines (b. 1933). Had I not suffered this revelation at seventeen, I wouldn’t have published my first novel three years later at twenty.
Having read and so much profited from one of Stein’s books at seventeen, at nineteen I gambled on a second, Lectures in America—and again lucked out. Among these half dozen meditations on English literature, Stein writes, “The paragraph is the emotional unit of the English Language.”
There are myriad technical reasons to begin a new paragraph: another character speaks, the narrative switches focus to what another character is doing, the writer changes to a new rhetorical mode (from external action to internal reverie, from internal reverie to external description), and, of course, the all-purpose change of topic. But all are, finally, one form or another of movement between Stein’s emotional units. In reading over his or her own prose, the writer who can forget the emotions that impelled the writing and can respond to the modulations in the emotions the words on the page actually evoke will generally be able to solve the problem of when to begin a new paragraph, that is, when the tenor of those emotions shift—and it’s time for a new line and an indentation.
Stein was famous for writing in a kind of baby talk, with many repetitions and what was often taken as a childish disregard for punctuation. In that same collection, in what some critics during her lifetime called “Stein-ese,” she wrote:
The thing that has made the glory of English literature is description simple concentrated description not of what happened nor what is thought or what is dreamed but what exists and so makes the life the island life the daily island life … And in the descriptions the daily, the hourly descriptions of this island life as it exists and it does exist it does really exist English literature has gone on from Chaucer until now … That makes a large one third of English literature. (14–15)
Description (or psychological analysis, or any other rhetorical mode associated with fiction) without story to support it risks becoming interminable. But story without description soon becomes insufferably thin. “Good prose,” Flaubert wrote his mistress, the aspiring writer Louise Colet, “is stuffed with things”—another observation of what I suspect is only a different aspect of Stein’s perception.
The more I read and reread Gertrude Stein, the more I am convinced that, for writers, she is the most important critic-writer between Walter Pater and Antonin Artaud—with both of whom, indeed, she overlaps.
I have always found George Orwell’s (1903–50) essay “Politics and the English Language” (1948) a wonderfully clarifying document. In certain circles, during the 1970s and 1980s, Orwell’s piece was used widely as a writing aid for college freshmen and sophomores, most of whom were neither sophisticated nor widely read enough to take in its points. It has never been a popular text with beginning writers (an audience it was never intended for). As well, if you read it carelessly, it can be taken as attacking some of the cherished pleasures of those of us who enjoy the rarified heights of literary theory and its attendant complex rhetoric. But Orwell’s essay is for people who seriously want to write—and who have done enough general reading in fiction, journalism, and criticism so that it
