The Writer as Hot
Mess
In recent decades we've
heard a lot about the death of literature, meaning variously: the
death of print in the online era; the death of reading in the age of
digital distractions; and the death of “literature” in a time
when the mass audience has been lost to electronic media, the
remaining book audience has been lost to “YA fiction,” and,
anyway, modernism rendered the traditional novel aesthetically void.
Under capitalism, this millennial anxiety about literature inevitably
immediately issued in a new publishing genre: books about books,
extolling the wonders of books, talking about the author's
experiences with books, providing clueless or curious readers with
lists of books they ought to read.
The new myth of the
writer conjured by the works of three Spanish-language authors,
Javier Marias, Enrique Vila-Matas, and
Roberto Bolano, seems suited to these times. On the one hand, these
are writers obsessed with writers, or the idea of the writer, in a
modernist version of the turn-of-the-century self-cannibalization of
literature. But while this obsession speaks to the regard in which
they hold The Writer, their work simultaneously diminishes that
figure. In The Savage Detectives (1998),
Bolano nostalgically glorified a failed literary movement whose
chosen figurehead was an obscure and elusive experimental poet, as if
the movement, too, glorified failure (or “the literature of
desperation,” as it's called at once point), or saw it as the only
authentic kind of success; 2666 (2004) also uses the quest for
an elusive author as one of its structural devices. In Bartleby &
Co. (2001), Vila-Matas
wrote a “novel” that is really a work of literary theory about
the mostly non-fictional “Bartlebys” of literature, or Writers of
the No, who gave up writing temporarily or permanently or could not
get started in the first place. And in Written Lives (1992),
Marias's brief biographies of mostly famous writers, written as if
their “fairly disastrous” subjects “were fictional characters,”
produce an effect that “is hardly likely to lure one along the path
of letters,” as Marias litotically warns in the Prologue.
Indeed, the impression
one gathers from reading Bartleby & Co. and Written
Lives back to back is that you would have to be a fool to be a
writer. Marias, a self-conscious anti-hagiographer whose miniature
biographies often reminded me of the fictional ones in Bolano's Nazi
Literature in the Americas (1996),
but with less
generosity extended towards the subjects, strips even the glamour of
tragedy and Romantic self-destruction from his writers, eccentrics
who lead lives characterized by mainly quiet desperation, but also
occasionally marked by violence. Those memorable episodes of violence
– Turgenev's grandmother's grisly murder of a young servant in a
fit of pique, Sterne's father's being run through with a sword in an argument over a goose, Verlaine's brutalizing of his wife and his and
Rimbaud's mutual brutalization, the elderly Isak Dinesen's bullying
of a young male worshipful and whimsical threatening of him with a
pistol – are another link to NLITA,
in which the banal, the bizarre, and the violent jostle.
Although
Marias is remarkably short on sympathy (as opposed to pity) for his
writers, he saves his vitriol for his betes noire, Joyce, Mann, and
Mishima. In those chapters, Marias proves he can rival Camille Paglia
as an artist of the ad hominem, and it's hard to know whether he has
chosen sex as a ground on which to attack them or whether their
sexual psychology is part of what inspired his disgust in the first
place. We are, in any case, expected to share that disgust as he
quotes representative passages from Joyce's pornographic letters to
his wife, Mann's diary entries on his digestive complaints and
attractions to young men, and Mishima's public musings about his
sadomasochistic fantasies. One only hopes that Marias's sex life and
sexual thoughts are clean and orthodox enough to escape such a
treatment, or, if not, that they never fall into the hands of
posterity.
The
persona adopted by Vila-Matas in Bartleby & Co.
is much gentler, yet his celebration of literary silence does not
make the writer's life appear any more attractive. It is a life
largely wasted, as the writer loses sight of the reasons to write, or
never manages to keep them in sight long enough to get started, or –
like Vila-Matas's paradigmatic Bartleby, Robert Walser – contrives
a way to continue to write, but only with the lowest possible opinion
of his work. When I recently came across a New Yorker post on Philip Roth's announcement of his retirement, I saw it
through the lenses of Vila-Matas and Marias simultaneously: Roth's
retirement was an act of Bartlebyism, albeit at the end of a prolific
career, and he speaks of writing as an addiction that required such
single-minded devotion from him that he found taking care of a
friend's cat “consuming.” The post makes the life of a writer –
and a critically and commercially successful one – sound austere,
ascetic – even impoverished. I wondered, reading it, how a man who
had lived so little in order to write so much could have written
anything at all.
I
have no doubt myself that the mythology of the writer is part of what
lured me into my career... as a Bartleby. As a teenager I devoured
biographies of writers whose behavioural excesses and tragic
trajectories made them compelling subjects, and although my life has
been conspicuous for its lack of excess (although the disasters have
been plentiful), I am nonetheless as guilty as any of assuming, based
on this mythology, that to be a writer was to not only be good at
writing – but to also be interesting.
Between, say, Oscar Wilde in the 1890s and the generation of Capote,
Mailer, Vidal, and Williams, the writer was a proto-rock star; the
American writer of the Franzen, Chabon, Eugenides generation is, in
contrast, at best an indie rock star.
The
Great Gender Divide
The
myth of the writer-rock star lives on, however – only now it's gone
international. Just go on Scott Esposito's online lit journal, The Quarterly Conversation,
and what do you see? In a sidebar to the right, a row of links with
photographs, devoted to Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace, Haruki
Murakami, and Roberto Bolano. Notably, two of the four died young,
and notably, the writer as rock star, like the rock star, is gendered
male. Not that female writers are incapable of inspiring cults by
dying young, but the Sylvia Plaths are left to feminists. Women read
trash, men don't read, intellectual men read male modernists, and
feminists read female modernists. And if you think I'm simply
parroting stereotypes about the literary tastes of average North
American men and women, take a look at the 2011 winners of the Goodreads Choice Awards for Fiction, and you
tell me which gender
is using the site more, what kind of fiction they're reading, and
which gender is writing it. Jessa Crispin's popular Bookslut
site appears to be a gender-neutral literary site – despite the
gendered monicker – where women and men who are interested in
serious writing by men or women can gather and contribute; the
question, however, is why there should ever
be gender segregation on literary sites.
Or
in books about writers, because female writers are rather left to the
side by Marias and Vila-Matas (and not a sexy sidebar). Out of his
dozens of Bartlebys, in a book stuffed with literary references,
Vila-Matas mentions less than a dozen female writers in
total. Only three, or possibly
four, of them are Bartlebys, and they are: a friend of the fictional
protagonist who gives up on the idea of being a writer after her head
is turned by literary theory; a woman who ghost-wrote feminist plays
for her famous husband; a courtesan who ghost-wrote a few lines of
verse for Goethe; a member of Strindberg's circle who wrote a memoir
of her childhood and adolescence. And this despite the fact that off
the top of my head I can think of two female modernists who fill the
qualifications of a Bartleby better than many of the male authors
Vila-Matas includes: Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles. One can only
conclude that Vila-Matas either doesn't read that many female writers
(he seems mainly to hear of their existence through rumour, perhaps
while reading biographies of Goethe or Strindberg) or doesn't think
too hard about them if he does. I'll definitely be interested in
seeing how he represents his relationship with Marguerite Duras, his
landlady (who is quoted a few times in Bartleby & Co.), when he
was a young aspiring writer, in Never Any End to Paris.
The
Great Gender Divide in contemporary letters needn't be attributed to
anything more sinister than identification: Vila-Matas may stick
mainly to male authors because they stick mainly to male
protagonists, which are easier for both reader and writer to identify
with; and when Vila-Matas, as a writer, muses about Writers and
Writing, for the same reason it's male writers he thinks about. And
this neglect of female writers – whether in books by male
modernists or on literary sites devoted to modernism, like The
Quarterly Conversation –
reinforces the same tendencies in female writers.
And
so the discussion of female modernists and their Bartlebyian
tendencies is left to its own book, or books – like Kate Zambreno's Heroines(Semiotext(e)/Active Agents),
which I have not read, because it's not in my public library system,
but which does discuss Bowles and Barnes – and the Great Gender
Divide perpetuates itself. Which makes Bolano's feminist gesture of
making a female poet the object of his two male poets' quest in The
Savage Detectives all the more
remarkable, although it only seems logical to make the “silenced”
female writer (or, for that matter, femininity, the no-thing, as
negation) into a symbol of literary modernism in general.
Symbols
aside, however, the truth – as Bartleby & Co.
proves in abundance – is that male writers are every bit as likely
to be Writers of the No as female writers are, as sad as it may be
when the latter have more famous husbands who are also writers. The
reverse still seldom happens, although Sylvia Plath's suicide and
subsequent appeal to feminists and precocious teenage girls does mean
that more non-poetry-readers have heard of her than of Ted Hughes (in
any capacity except as her husband). Likewise, the feminist embrace
of Frida Kahlo means that now, at least, more people with no great interest
in art have heard of her than of her artist-husband. It helps, too,
that Kahlo made her own image the subject of her art, which lends an
illusion of intimacy that the mass audience seems to respond to – like
Oprah putting herself on all her magazine covers.
Marias,
who has stated in a Paris Review interview his distaste (he must have more of
those than any celebrated writer since Nabokov) for writers who write
from the perspective of the opposite sex, includes only three women,
Isak Dinesen, Djuna Barnes, and Madame du Deffand, out of 20 authors,
in the main portion of Written Lives;
he then devotes a second section to even briefer portraits of six
“Fugitive Women.” I can't say I understand what makes these women
more fugitive than the others, or whether “fugitive” is meant to
suggest that they are fleeing (like hunted outlaws), fleeting (three
were short-lived), or elusive figures, but it's certainly a
Bolanoesque concept of the female writer.
To
this concept Marias, however, adds the further meaning that the
interest of several of these women's literary work is also fugitive.
Two, Vernon Lee and Violet Hunt, are treated as hangers-on in
important male literary circles (in fact overlapping circles). Adah
Isaacs Menken, a mid-19th
century American actress whose fame was due to her appearance at the
climax of a play by Byron, in which she played the male protagonist,
in a flesh-coloured leotard, tied to a horse, is treated more
affectionately by Marias than almost any other figure in the book,
perhaps because of her unabashed and abundant absurdity, yet she
seems to have been sneaked in because she happened to write a
critically excoriated, posthumously published book of poems. It does
give the impression that Marias is scraping the bottom of the barrel
to come up with women of letters to write about.
Somebody,
please, send him some binders.
Pretty
On the Inside
You
may have noticed from the foregoing that I am impatient with any
attempt to set female writers apart from male ones with even the best
of intentions – by male or female writers. I can't think of
anything more alien to me than the idea that the sexes are so alien
to each other that they can't enter into each other's perspectives,
or that the imagination of the writer – I should say, The Writer –
is so feeble that it can't transcend something as fictional as
gender. If all we're going to do for the rest of all time is read and
write about our almighty, all-important experiences “as woman”
and “as men,” we might as well all start taking literary silence
literally.
However,
the writer so incapable of imagining an experience different
from his or her own as to produce inadequate characters of the
opposite sex is fully deserving of ridicule. Interestingly, in
Written Lives Marias
is guilty of the same trespass against feminism that recently rocked
the internet when Jonathan Franzen made it in his NewYorker piece on Edith Wharton.
Not only does he remark on his assessment of Djuna Barnes's
appearance in his second paragraph on her; her returns to the subject
in the book's third section, in which he analyzes photographs of
writers. Out of 23 writers, Barnes is the only female writer whose
picture he includes, and it causes him to confidently proclaim,
“Unlike Wilde, who tries to be and to seem handsome, she knows she
is not pretty and does not believe she can seem so, that is why she
makes no attempt to adopt the faraway look that flatters most faces,
instead she looks straight ahead, skeptical and mocking, trusting
only in her costume (especially that raised collar), and in the
confidence of her pose.”
Is
it a double standard that I think Marias's analysis of the Wilde
photos – those wonderful early dandy photos (probably more
responsible than any text in fooling me into thinking that to be a
writer meant to be interesting) – in terms of Wilde's desire to
appear handsome and his momentary achievement of that goal (as if by
force of will, the way Bette Davis made herself appear pretty in
Jezebel) – but that
this analysis of “prettiness” as a central concern in Barnes's
life is piffle? I don't know anything about Barnes's private life
other than what Marias wrote in his sketch – as I know nothing
about Wharton's private life besides what Franzen wrote in his
article. Perhaps if I did, the male writers' assertions not just
about the female writers' appearance but their feelings about it
would make that life snap into focus for me – which is what
happened when I read Marias's lines on the Wilde photos. The pursuit
of beauty is certainly a major motivating factor in Courtney Love's
life, for example: she's sung about it, talked about it in
interviews, and given herself a very public makeover that
unfortunately degenerated into a plastic surgery addiction.
Oscar Wilde, before he stopped trying to incorporate the object into himself and went in pursuit of it.
Bette Davis, defying you to think she's not beautiful.
Djuna Barnes gets it right.
Courtney Love before she started trying to incorporate the object in herself.
Franzen and Marias are, at
the very least, guilty of showing a Romneyesque insensitivity to
context; their failure to provide biographical evidence for their
theses reads as though they have such difficulty imagining the female
mind that they have grasped desperately at the one clue society has
given them: “Women want to be pretty!” Which, moreover, causes them to underestimate the human capacity for complacency and self-delusion, as anyone can see nowadays by going on Facebook, my own account not excluded.
Besides,
Marias has chosen the wrong photo of Barnes for his claim that she
was neither pretty nor believed she could seem so. There's another
from the same session in which Barnes, attempting a softening smile
that is in fact less flattering to her face than a frank expression,
looks downright awful. In the photo from Marias's postcard collection
of writers' portraits, on the other hand, to me Barnes looks like a
perfectly presentable, somewhat eccentric woman who precisely
thinks she can sometimes pass as pretty – and has done so here.
Marias's emphasis on Barnes's modesty in the next sentences is also
revealing: apparently one of the first things he looks at when he
looks at a picture of a woman is how much skin she's revealing, which
issues immediately in a judgement on her virtue. Of Barnes he
declares approvingly, “She is a woman dominated far more by modesty
than by esteem for her own image,” which translates into the
vernacular thusly: “She keeps her clothes on instead of running
around showing off her body to get attention from men.”
Some people aren't meant to smile.
Maybe
it's a good thing that Marias doesn't try to enter into women's heads
very often: instead of vividly imagining Barnes's inner life, he can
only file her appearance into his limited, dualistic categories for
women – sexually attractive (good) or not sexually attractive
(bad), virgin/matron (good) or whore (bad). Not that women don't have
the same categories for men (Rhett or Ashley, Team Edward or Team
Jacob?), but one expects a little more of a writer of international
reputation writing about another writer of international reputation.
Speaking
of writers' appearances, Kate Zambreno's blog,
Frances Farmer Is My Sister, has finally gotten me to take an interest in Clarice Lispector –
one of the very few female writers whose name I've encountered on The
Quarterly Conversation. The
Amazon.com summary of a recent biography by Walter Moses gets off to
an hilarious start by quoting his description of Lispector as “That
rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia
Woolf,” but I'm intrigued by Moses' thesis that the Jewish
Lispector, whose family fled to Brazil in 1922, when she was two
years old, is “the true heir to Kafka.” I would actually be
intrigued by any writer who's supposedly the true heir to Kafka, but
if she also happens to look like Marlene Dietrich, you can't beat
that package. And to judge from the pounds of makeup Lispector wore
throughout her life, neither her narcissism nor her preoccupation
with philosophy and mysticism interfered with each other in any
manner. It's only the less physically and intellectually gifted of us
who are superficial enough to be interested only in our appearance or
in our inner life.
The writer as movie star.
