"NECESSARILY LIMITED": ON WRITERS AND THEIR WORK
By Alex Good

"A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the stream of the world." - Goethe

Let’s begin with some theory. Goethe’s remark may be taken as a touchstone of Romanticism. It locates the individual artistic talent outside the rough currents of the "stream of the world," where it is nurtured in isolation and stillness. The critic Maurice Beebe called this attitude the "Ivory Tower" tradition, one that "exalts art above life and insists that the artist can make use of life only if he stands aloof." The Ivory Tower, not yet a term exclusively identified with academic pursuits (though that was certainly coming), is the artist’s pure retreat from the world. In his book on the subject, Beebe contrasted this Romantic (yet asexual) approach to a Classical "Sacred Fount" tradition that equates art with experience. While the Romantic is a figure "likely to be alienated from the mundane world outside his ego," the Classical artist is a man of the world, a citizen who "has continually to absorb life so that he may throw it off again in his work."

Whatever the label - Ivory Tower and Sacred Fount or Romantic vs. Classical - the dichotomy between the stream of the world and the life of the imagination is a familiar one. That it is a conflict of no small personal significance to writers is evidenced by the fact that it lies at the heart of most novels purporting to be portraits of the artist. In a novella by Henry James, "The Lesson of the Master," the alternatives are made very clear. An aspiring young author named Paul Overt meets Henry St. George, a once promising writer who has unaccountably fallen into decline. As St. George explains it, a tranquil domestic life has prevented him from achieving the "great thing." Young Overt protests: "You’ve had such a full rich masculine human general life, with all the responsibilities and duties and burdens and sorrows and joys" that such a life entails. The Master rejoins:

  "They’ve given me subjects without number, if that’s what you mean; but they’ve taken away at the same time the power to use them. I’ve touched a thousand things, but which of them have I turned into gold? The artist has only to do with that - he knows nothing of any baser metal. I’ve led the life of the world, with my wife and my progeny; the clumsy, expensive, conventional, materialized, vulgarized, brutalized life of London. We’ve got everything handsome, even a carriage - we’re perfect Philistines and prosperous hospitable eminent people. But, my dear fellow, don’t try to stultify yourself and pretend you don’t know what we haven’t got. It’s bigger than all the rest. Between artists - come!"

Overt’s immediate response is violent. "What a false position, what a condemnation of the artist, that he’s a mere disfranchised monk . . . What an arraignment of art!" But we may be less sure in our denials. Schemes for putting artists into categories may have even less value than the taxonomies created for their work, but considering some of today’s fiction I find myself thinking more and more about Ivory Towers, Sacred Founts, and the bitter lesson of the Master.

There is a point in time when any reader of the bildungsroman has to ask why these earnest young men and women never want to become plumbers. The reason? In short, because plumbing - or carpentry, or factory work, or accounting - are things they know nothing at all about. And this ignorance of the "life of the world" is bearing its own weird variety of hothouse fruit.

Item: A recent online column at TheDeal.com asked why so few of today’s authors are writing novels set in the business world. Aside from the occasional satire, business fiction was said to be "scarcer than Republicans who are proregulation." Why? According to one expert quoted in the column, there are two reasons. The first is the general turning away from the social scene as being too materialistic. Literary authors, it was assumed, want to concentrate on spiritual and psychological truths. This is the Romantic tradition I began by mentioning, the Ivory Tower approach, but it is also Bloomsbury as well as the rationale behind many of today’s artists’ colonies and retreats. If art is a religion, the true believer insists on a strict separation of Church and State.

More on this later. But for now let’s turn to the second reason given for the demise of the business novel: the rise of academic creative writing programs, whose graduates’ "familiarity with the wider world and the means of production is necessarily limited."

According to Noah Richler, even that limited familiarity may be an understatement. In a surprisingly bitchy column that ran recently in the National Post, Richler reflected on how creative writing classes cannot substitute for "life experience." In particular, he wondered

whether trained writers would have been better served by being out there in the streets and towns and out of the way places of this vast and various country of ours. Doing some other things to get by - so that experience, the individuality that comes from solitary writing, and not a teacher’s group instruction, hones the gift.

Given the growing criticism of university creative writing programs, one suspects there is something to this. For the record, I think these programs are of some benefit if only because they require writers to keep writing. That they cultivate a generic style of professional "literary" writing is what bothers me most about them. Richler’s comments, however, raise another concern. The career trajectory of today’s young authors is beginning to take on an appalling sameness: bright, upper middle-class kids who have gone to university, perhaps done some post-graduate work or creative writing program, then settled into a job working in the "media" if they can’t support their writing through grants. These people have never done the nine-to-five, much less shift work, never woken up to an alarm at 5 am dragging them through the snow, never struggled to figure out the tax implications of too much overtime coming on their paycheques. And, not surprisingly, these are subjects we rarely find mentioned in their work. (The sole exceptions seem to be Maritime writers. In the fiction coming from that depressed region we still have a sense of the blue-collar life, people doing things for a living, a world of trades, professions and even the real unemployed, as opposed to all the hip denizens of Slackertown.)

This is more than just an attitude. Today’s writers have grown comfortable not only with, but within the Romantic concept of art as alienated from work. Indeed, they identify work as the very antithesis of their art. Defending the recent raising of the value of Britain’s Orange Prize, the prize’s founder and honorary director explained why the prize "has to be big": "Our intention was always that the winner should be able to give up their day job, if they had one, and concentrate on their writing."

Right. If they had one. As if Anne Michaels (winner in 1997) and Carol Shields (winner in 1998), would want to quit their day "jobs." (Shields is a lifelong academic; Michaels teaches creative writing, but one bio I found for her also includes such job references as "cultural administrator.") And as if Margaret Atwood, shortlisted twice for the Orange, ever had a day job.

This doesn’t mean that writers without a day job are necessarily bad. What it means is that their fiction is, in the words of the Deal article, "necessarily limited." Should we be surprised by the (frequently observed) fact that Canadian literary fiction seems entirely made up of historical romance and domestic drama? Today’s younger authors are in a hopeless position, their portraits of the larger world having to be culled from how they spent their summer holidays or vacations in Europe. Any trace of the exotic in their biographies merely seems like a stunt, or the result of some youthful larks (what used to be called "bumming around"). In the column by Noah Richler I quoted from earlier the "life experience" of author Timothy Taylor is offered as an antidote to the spawn of Canadian creative writing programs. Even allowing for resume inflation, Taylor has credentials that Richler obviously feels are pretty impressive. Indeed, he positively gushes over an employment background that includes (in its totality?) navy cadet, salmon fisheries consultant and banker.

One immediately suspects that this doesn’t bear very much looking into. Was Taylor a banker, or did he work in a bank? There is a difference. Exactly what duties does a salmon fisheries "consultant" have? Is it harder than being a cultural administrator?

And navy cadet - navy cadet! - the mind boggles before an overwhelming question:

Does Noah Richler honestly think that being a navy cadet . . . is a job?

Should a young writer try harder? Maybe not. In a Quill & Quire column that tried to explain "The Emerging Writer’s Do’s and Don’t’s" we find the following:

DO take yourself seriously. "I took on Dennis Bock (The Ash Garden) because he was totally invested in writing," says agent Denise Bukowski. "He took no straight jobs. He didn’t have a woman. He didn’t have anything. That’s what I look for. People who aren’t doing that, who aren’t taking a risk, I tend not to take on."

What a fascinating quote. Leaving aside the bit about not having a woman and whether it means Ms. Bukowski would prefer to keep only eunuchs in her stable (no Sacred Fount here!), there is that wonderful mention of Mr. Bock not taking any "straight jobs." Well done, Dennis! And, in case you were wondering, here is Mr. Bock’s biography as taken from the Web-site Bookbrowse.com:

He entered the University of Western Ontario after high school, and took one year off during that time to live in Spain, returning to Madrid for 5 years after graduating with an Honors BA in English and Philosophy. In Madrid he began writing his collection of short stories, Olympia, and worked on it while in residence at Yaddo, the Banff Centre, and the Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain. It was published in 1998 . . .

( . . . to nearly total oblivion. Then Ms. Bukowski picked him up and he got a quarter million for his first novel. The rest is history.)

Emerging writers may learn a lot from this. Toss aside stereotypes of starving artists shivering in garrets. Living in Europe and hopping from writing colony to writing colony without "anything" (except, one has to assume, the means to enjoy such a lifestyle) is the only risk you need to take.

I’m telling you, I could never make this stuff up.

I am not advocating the writing of a great proletarian novel. It is unlikely there will ever be a return to documentary realism in fiction. The current literary landscape seems dominated by the resurgence of the "new journalism" school of non-fiction and some variety of magic (or rather "television") realism. And if history is any example, "life experience" is probably overrated anyway. A sheltered or privileged life doesn’t disqualify anyone from writing a great novel. But while not every great writer has been able to draw on the rich life experience of a Chaucer, Dickens or Conrad, it is also true, I believe, that even the great introverts of the past had a broader range of experience to draw on than today’s bunch. Should we be surprised that a generation of writers raised by the university and in many cases still employed by the university are writing historical fiction? These are the sorts of books you write in a library.

But what truly disturbs me is not the narrowness of range and experience, but of interest and concern. That these people don’t know anything about how 80% of the world gets along isn’t important. Nor is it important that, one suspects, they don’t even know anyone who knows. What is troubling is the fact they don’t seem particularly interested. The labouring classes certainly aren’t very interested in contemporary fiction, and so contemporary writers in turn ignore them. This has led to a great closing of the literary mind. After all, why waste time on so many obviously limited, if not downright stupid people leading boring repetitive lives? Maybe it was inevitable that idealism and political conviction lost the battle to irony, but at least one had the sense that previous generations of writers cared.

I will be prescriptive. Writing does require a certain amount of freedom, but authors still need to resist setting up residence in subsidized ghettoes. Even Plato’s Philosopher Kings were expected to finish their apprenticeship with a 15-year sentence in the School of Hard Knocks:

Let these Ph.D.’s pass down now from the heights of philosophy into the "cave" of the world of men and things; generalizations and abstractions are worthless except they be tested by this concrete world; let our students enter that world with no favor shown them; they shall compete with men of business, with hard-headed grasping individualists, with men of brawn and men of cunning; in this mart of strife they shall learn from the book of life itself; they shall hurt their fingers and scratch their philosophic shins on the crude realities of the world; they shall earn their bread and butter by the sweat of their high brows.

Such a Classical education may not be essential for a politician or Philosopher King, but for an artist seeking to become the unacknowledged legislator of humankind? For a writer whose mission it is to re-create life out of life?

In literature, no limitations are necessary. You just have to open the door.

Notes:
Essay first published online July 18, 2002. A clarification: Timothy Taylor was not, in fact, a naval cadet but commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in the Canadian Naval Reserves. He worked for four years in commercial finance at the Toronto-Dominion Bank.
It was only after I wrote this essay that I happened to read George Orwell's 1939 essay on Dickens. Some of what he said is worth repeating here: "If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole. . . the ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go round, have always been ignored by novelists." And later: "the characteristic English novelists of the nineteenth century . . . felt at home in the world they lived in, whereas a writer nowadays is so hopelessly isolated that the typical modern novel is a novel about a novelist. . . . What [Dickens] does not noticeably write about . . . is work." Orwell is amazed that Dickens's heroes don't actually do anything once they've become successful but simply go on to embody "the strange, empty dream of the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century middle bourgeoisie . . . a dream of complete idleness."
Not completely idle, I would say. The point Orwell misses is that they now have all the time in the world to read long Victorian novels.
Also interesting is a comment made by Ian McEwan in 2005. He was on tour promoting his novel Saturday. The hero of Saturday is a London neurosurgeon. Why a professional man? "There are too many characters in contemporary literature who never get a job."