Weekly Readings #106 (02/12/24-02/18/24)

not experience but imagination

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week I published “The Law,” the penultimate chapter of Part Four of Major Arcana, my serialized novel for paid subscribers. The final chapter comes on Wednesday, the epilogue in two weeks, and then my largest work to date—largest in every sense, from word count to spiritual ambit—will be complete. Please subscribe today!

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I also released “In the Realms of Gold,” a lecture on John Keats, for The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. Dropping Friday: Lord Byron. In two weeks: Jane Austen. Come for the literary history, stay for the startling digressions, on everything from the inadequacy of contemporary criticism to the occult subtext of western literature. Please subscribe today!

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(I hope this won’t be construed as an “I will praise any man that will praise me” situation, but you’ll also want to check out Mary’s characteristically hilarious latest chapter of The Iris Murdoch Book Club—I’m down in the comments with a capsule review of The Black Prince—and Dan’s podcast with Laura Kipnis about Christopher Hitchens and Janet Malcolm.)¹

For today, a few thoughts on what makes a writer, in school and out. Should you get an MFA? Is there any point in writing before the age of 30? Read below to find out—and please enjoy!

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War and Peas: What Kind of Experience Does the Writer Require?

Edmund Dulac, The Princess and the Pea (1911)

I’ve seen much social-media chatter this week about what a writer needs to know and when. Such discourse was incited by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain’s caution against getting an MFA until you’re over 30. This has, perhaps strangely, dovetailed in my mind with some ideas, probably inspired by asides in The Invisible College, about that under-discussed and very powerful literary institution known as the Norton Anthology. Notes, then, toward an essay.

I was intrigued by the “wait until you’re 30” claim because it resembles advice I often give young aspirants to literature. To quote my recent reply to one such youth:

I wouldn’t worry so much about the writing at your age [21]. It’s a good period of your life to focus on reading! I also felt frustrated by my inability to write anything serious, at least of any length beyond a few decent stories or poems or my college essays, when I was in my late teens and early 20s. It will come with time and experience. Writing is not really a young person’s game; I didn’t write anything of value until I was 30.

30 isn’t a magic number, but it’s around the time one has amassed enough experience and knowledge to produce a novel of substance. I wrote a couple of whole novels between 20 and 30—just as I wrote a couple whole graphic novels between 10 and 20—but they weren’t substantive. They may have exhibited a certain precocious talent or energy, but not enough—what? I leave the word for others. One doesn’t say “wisdom” about oneself. One can say it of someone else, though, so I would advise you to compare, for example, Oliver Twist, written when the author was about 25 and bursting with talent and energy, to Great Expectations, written when the author was about 50 and suffused with sweetly melancholy sagacity. Oliver Twist is a good book; Great Expectations is, well, a great one.

Note that this ban on literary prodigies only pertains to the novelist. As the example of Keats proves, the poet may produce works of incomparable genius at the age of 23 or 24. And as I wrote last week, all I’d save of my own writings before the age of 30 are two poems I wrote when I was about 17. Somewhere in his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel explains that there can be musical but not literary prodigies because music, for all its formal rules, expresses immediate subjectivity and beauty accessible even to a child, while the beauty of literature incarnates an idea, and probably not an idea a child or even an adolescent can hold. The poet is the musician of language, equipped at 15 or 25 to sing with tremendous, unsurpassable authority. The novelist, on the other hand, requires more experience, more knowledge. You can be 24 and write “The Ode to a Nightingale,” but you have to be 53 to write Middlemarch. This isn’t to say that poetry can’t admit of mature wisdom, too—that you don’t have to be 63 to write The Tower—or, conversely, that the novel can’t partake of a mostly lyrical and beautifully adolescent spirit, as in The Great Gatsby, written at age 29. Still, I think the Hegelian principle holds.

But what kind of experience does the novelist require? I share HolyWhiteMountain’s disapproval of the monopoly on the arts now held by the upper classes after the more equable 1945-2008 period, but I fear such a political judgment’s decaying into what I think of as the cult of visceral experience: the idea—usually only held against male writers, by the way—that a novelist must go to the war or to the whale-ship before he earns his literary qualification.

Our literary history disproves this bias. For every Melville who caught the first whale-ship out of town or Thoreau who deliberately contrived his own unusual life-experiment, there was a Hawthorne or a Dickinson who lived a more or less settled and ordinary middle-class existence. Of the two biggest American novelists of the subsequent period, Twain and James, the one was a journalist-factotum who’d worked a steamboat and attempted to become a miner, while the other scarcely endured anything more visceral than an awkward dinner party in London—and yet they reign over their literary epoch at each other’s sides. The mandarin is perhaps even a bit higher in the pantheon than the would-be miner. The great novel of the American Civil War was written by Stephen Crane, who hadn’t fought in that or any other war. Hemingway mocked Cather for never having seen combat, yet they, too, now come before us as literary equals.²

Hemingway was moreover outraged when Faulkner accused him of cowardice, since he had gone to war while the Southerner only claimed (falsely) to have done so. But the prevaricating Faulkner meant imaginative courage, and there he was right. Unfair as it seems, getting your legs almost blown off on the Italian front is one thing, writing Absalom, Absalom! quite another. Toni Morrison once daringly asserted that, while some good books have been written in concentration camps, so have some bad ones. Her point was that writers shouldn’t romanticize their suffering;³ my point is not to confuse experience with what imagination makes of it.

But I would, at the risk of provocation, go still further. I remember being told the fable of the princess and the pea in the second or third grade. The moral of the story, apparently, was, “What a spoiled little brat,”⁴ and the actionable advice to be thankful for your blessings and not resentful over minor discomforts. That’s fine as far as it goes. The YouTube mystics I watched to research Major Arcana always counsel cosmic gratitude; they advise that even if all you can manage to do is to draw one more breath, then you should give thanks to the universe for that breath. Likewise, my late grandmother, suffering in the grip of extreme old age and still years from a death she might have experienced as liberation, told me, “Every day is a blessing.” I have no problem with any of that; I find it a salubrious attitude.

Yet there’s another way to read the story of the princess and the pea, at least the simplified and de-ironized version my teachers gave me: the moral might be that suffering, precisely because it’s relative to its context—both to experience and to expectation—is finally irreducible or absolute.

I believe this is the best approach to experience for the writer to take, especially the writer of fiction or drama, perhaps even of narrative nonfiction. I don’t ask if my characters have any right to their suffering or weigh their suffering in some scale against their privileges or deserts. Hard as it might be to say, the peasant woman watching as her whole village is washed out of the stony hills by a foaming cataract and the princess stubbing her little toe against the gilded divan in a palace boudoir are equal in the eye of god—at least the god of art.

I insist on such an outrageous proposition because the alternative is claiming that Shakespeare must have been an aristocrat or courtier, claiming that no rural provincial turned urban arriviste could possibly imagine, for example, how the king might be the least free man in the kingdom, his crown at once jail and tomb:

                          For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humored thus,
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell, king!

It doesn’t matter, then, what kind of experience novelists accrue before the age of 30. Pretty much any experience will do, provided novelists also train their imagination to make use of it. Here, some form of schooling may well be of use.

One way to train the literary imagination, probably the best way, is to immerse yourself in the best imaginative productions of the past. Life will take care of what school cannot, but the best school qua school for writers is therefore not a school of writing but a school of reading.

And so I return to my too-late proposal to save the English department by merging the literature and the creative-writing curricula. Creative-writing students should read comprehensively in the tradition or traditions—in whatever tradition is most relevant to the work they aspire to produce—not be dumped into a shallow pond of short-story writers who don’t pre-date Langley’s conquest of Iowa City. Meanwhile, it makes less sense to me by the day that students of literature should be taught to respond critically and not creatively, as if the world really needs another critical essay on Hamlet or Beloved.⁵

Still under the mistaken impression that I teach in an English department, W. W. Norton sent me the new table of contents for the forthcoming edition of their English literature anthology. Aside from this acerbic observation, I also couldn’t help but notice that the idea of a national literature is growing more and more threadbare for them. It was fraying from the first—did Yeats and Joyce ever belong in a collection of English literature?—but now they feature a panoply of writers from Britain’s former colonies, including ones who didn’t and don’t write in English. Is the whole enterprise of organizing literature by nation and language not becoming implausible and imperiled?

Now I do believe in the ability of some national spirit, however ineffable, to be incarnated in national literatures. Evidence of this includes such a spirit’s ability to override mere ethnicity, as in the case of the writing of immigrants’ children like myself. Doesn’t Don DeLillo write recognizably American literature and Kazuo Ishiguro recognizably English literature despite their merely “ethnic” provenance? So ingrained is the idea that this national spirit should furnish the basis of a literary curriculum that, left free in The Invisible College to do anything I wanted, I still defaulted to British and American syllabi.

What if we take the merger of the literature and creative-writing curricula still further, though, and convert the former to the methods of the latter? Why not cease to divide literature, for pedagogical purposes, into American, British, world-in-English, and world-in-translation, and divide it instead into poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction? (Or some cognate categories,⁶ like poetry, performance, and narrative, or epic, drama, and lyric, etc.) The national character, like any other form of largely non-literary experience, can take care of itself. One can become an American just as well as one can suffer—outside of school or in it. But in school, our ephebes will be trained to write in their chosen forms and modes by absorbing the richest prior models the world over.

That, anyway, is my utopian reflection on what a young writer needs to know. Maybe in the future, as chief pedagogue of a virtual school, I will even reck my own rede!

1. Intriguing synchronicity (or maybe the republic of letters is just a very small republic, more Nauru even than Switzerland): Kipnis says she was commissioned by Colin MacCabe to write the essay on Hitchens under discussion on Eminent Americans. As I may have said here before, MacCabe was the professor of the undergraduate course on James Joyce I took in my first year of college, in the spring of 2001, just before that day of fire that would prove so fateful for Hitchens. I obviously owe to MacCabe and to that class (mainly a semester-long study of Ulysses) certain tastes and interests I now transmit in The Invisible College and, indeed, in Major Arcana.

2. This is not to mention that the kind of experience literary critics value has drastically changed since their own time. Critics today might ignore Willa and Ernest’s divergence over matters of war and peace entirely and fixate instead on the way she signed her letters “William” and he requested to be called “Catherine” in the bedroom—one type of (largely internal) experience they seem to have shared.

3. I think we worry too much about romanticizing suffering. Can we avoid suffering if only we don’t romanticize it? Not likely. We’ll suffer whether we romanticize it or not, so why not make something out of the experience? Behind the anti-romantic stance also lurks the related thought that perhaps Woolf or Wallace, or Plath or Berryman, wouldn’t have killed themselves if that idea of the poète maudit hadn’t been in the cultural atmosphere since Romanticism. Personally, I doubt it. I think they killed themselves not because of some literary archetype but for the same reason anyone else does: they felt they couldn’t live another day. Literature may not have saved them, but it didn’t murder them either. You won’t prevent any suicides by telling poets not to dress all in black. Whether this makes any fashion sense is another question, of course.

4. I received a truncated version of the narrative, obviously, and not Andersen’s beautifully ironic fable, which has a very different point. After a little more schooling—graduate schooling, to be exact—I came to see our Princess as the ancestress of Des Esseintes, Dorian Gray, Stephen Dedalus, Proust’s narrator, Stevens’s personae, the speakers of poems by Keats and Baudelaire, and all other super-sensitive connoisseurs of subtle and exquisite experience, whether of pleasurable pain or painful pleasure. I gather that this is the real meaning of Andersen’s tale, written as it was in the century of Keats, Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Wilde, and with its ordeal meant to equate legitimate social superiority only with superior sensitivity, as if to elect a monarchy of spirit alone. To my mind, the irony of Andersen’s line, “Nobody but a Princess could be so delicate,” targets less the presumed over-refinement of the ruling class than the idea that such a sensibility could ever be a matter of “selective breeding” or caste. But in whatever redacted form it came to me in elementary school, the story was presented much more simply as a warning against petulance and ingratitude, not as a thought experiment in aesthetic meritocracy.

5. The world arguably doesn’t need another juvenile story or poem either, but writing such a thing does more for the budding writer’s Bildung than does writing the critical essay. And the last decade of the internet has surely been enough to declare a moratorium on cultural criticism for the next 10 years, if World War III doesn’t do it for us. (Unlike my probably offensive comments about suffering and suicide, which I very much meant, this judgment against criticism should be taken in the jocular spirit of Socratic gadflyism rather than as a sincere contention I’d defend to the last bullet.)

6. Pleasant as it might be to do without categories altogether, I doubt we could think at all in their entire absence. We just need to remember that they are always porous and provisional.