About Writing. Samuel R. Delany
probably most of the minor ones as well—gave readings of an afternoon or evening in their homes or at the homes of their friends. Throughout the nineteenth century, writing their recollections of the French poets Rimbaud (1854–91) and Baudelaire, people described such occasions. The practice continued up through World War I and over the period between the world wars. William Merrill Fisher (1889–1969) writes about one such poetry reading “at home” in New York City, which the young Austrian-born American poet Samuel Greenberg (1893–1917) attended. From the sixties, I recall a woman who lived on Greenwich Village’s Patchin Place telling about such a gathering when she was a student at Smith College in the late thirties, at which Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) read from her recent work.
I was born in the opening year of America’s involvement with World War II. Only twice in my life have I been to such an “at home” reading. Once was with an elderly German woman in Vermont, when I was eighteen (I am now sixty-three). The second time was about a half-dozen years ago, when a bunch of graduate students at the University of Michigan dressed up in eighteenth-century costumes and gave a “tea,” at which a few people read their poems. That is to say, it was in imitation of a discontinued practice.
Consider, though: while all of them gave readings at peoples’ houses, neither Byron, Shelley, nor Keats ever gave a public reading of his poems during his brief life. (Prose writers such as Dickens and Wilde went on lecture tours, which even brought them to America, where they often did readings. But they did not come as poets.) A development of the last sixty years and almost certainly encouraged by the large number of returning soldiers to universities after World War II, the public reading, started at the 92nd Street Y in New York City in the years between the two world wars and was given a large boost by the popularity of the poet Dylan Thomas’s public readings. The idea spread to San Francisco art galleries and Greenwich Village coffee shops through the forties and fifties. Today readings are a staple of college campuses and bookstores with any literary leanings whatsoever, so that even the likes of Barnes & Noble sponsors them. “Open mike” readings and poetry slams are a regular part of contemporary urban culture. Only a few nights ago, with my life-partner, Dennis, I went to see Def Poetry Jam, a staged reading on Broadway, at the Longacre Theater, by nine urban poets (one of whom I’d taught with out at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, the previous summer); the event grew out of the Home Box Office television series Def Poetry Jam. Now writers such as Maxwell Anderson (1888–1959), Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962), Ira Gershwin (1896–1983) and Dorothy and DuBose Hayward, Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes (1902–67), and Dylan Thomas (1914–53) all had verse plays (or operas) on Broadway. But despite Fiona Shaw’s one-woman presentation of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1996, this is the first time, I suspect, that contemporary poetry, read by the living poets themselves, has hit the Broadway stage. Def Poetry Jam received a wildly enthusiastic standing ovation. Once again, art and the artist—specifically the literary arts and the literary artist—fit into the society in a very different way today from the way they did in previous epochs.
When the change is this great, a phrase such as “the position of the artist has changed” no longer covers the case. Rather, such positions (where, as W. H. Auden once put it, “the artist is considered the most important of the state’s civil servants”) are no longer there for artists to fill—while other positions, however less exalted, are. This is tantamount to acknowledging that art—specifically poetry and prose fiction—has become a different sort of social object from what it once was, as English-language literature itself became a different social object when, shortly after World War I, it first became a topic of university study and so became the object we know today and more and more ceased to be the study of the philology of the language from Old English through Chaucer through Elizabethan English to the present—what “English Literature” had mostly meant before World War I, when it was taught at London and Edinburgh Universities in the 1880s and 1890s.
The things we look for “literature” to do in our lives, how we expect it to do them, and the structures of the social net in which it functions have changed. This is not even to broach the displacements, transformations, and borrowings effected by movies, television, or, most recently, the internet.
While these changes are very real, sometimes we can make too much of them. Art is a tradition-bound, tradition-stabilized enterprise. Often those folks newly alerted to the changes want to see a total erasure of the slate, allowing us to do anything and everything in completely new ways. But it is the traditions—especially (and paradoxically) the traditions of experimentation, originality, and newness—that make it 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