If you worry about 'how fiction works,' remember us clowns and trained seals

By Peter Kelton

Copyright © Peter Kelton

            MEXICO CITY — My sister-in-law walked into El Pěndulo bookstore here and suddenly became speechless, for there in a neat little display was "A Light in Polanco," a novel I had published just a few days earlier.

            I'd neglected to tell her that my publisher had donated 10 promotional copies of "A Light in Polanco" because this particular El Pěndulo bookstore was located in the neighborhood named Polanco. I suppose that helps promote sales.

Believing as I do that "the business of writers is writing," and not selling, I've always avoided self-promotion when it comes to literature. Those who write novels and also get paid to critique others walk along the blade of a double edge sword. They can cut others, including professional critics, thus gaining a reputation that helps sell books.

Now, all this literary lust has been brought back to me by a review of the critic James Wood's "How Fiction Works," published in The New York Times on the same day that my sister-in-law ran into my new novel in Mexico City. Walter Kirn, a novelist known for "Thumbsucker," a story about his agonizing adolescence, pounced all over "How Fiction Works," implying that Wood shows how to put readers to sleep.

Ever since that day, Aug. 15, a newsworthy debate has raged on, growing with backbiting acidity, between cultural writer Kirn and Wood supporters. (I mention my own works here to demonstrate that I've a platform from which to speak, not to promote myself.) The debate grows daily and is likely to continue in the news for years among literate cultural readers and writers, that observation coming from my 56 years in the news business.

Kirn wrote in The New York Times: ". . .having been incrementally diminished by Wood’s tone of genteel condescension (he flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic), the common reader is likely to concede virtually anything the master wishes — except, perhaps, his precious time. For someone who professes to understand the fine machinations of characterization, Wood seems oblivious to the eminently resistible prose style of his donnish, finicky persona."

Well, that's quite a put-down, coming from Kirn, who also writes puff pieces for such magazines as Elle (June 2008). He has stated such writing makes it financially possible for him to write fiction. That seems to underscore Kirn's own aloofness. Notices about Kirn always mention that he lives not in New York, where he has advised would-be writers to congregate, but in a comparatively remote state that we shall not mention.

My feeling about not self-promoting dates from the time in 1951 when Norman Mailer published "Advertisements for Myself," a trash can full of his own search for self.

            I was crushed. I loved his first novel, "The Naked and the Dead" (1948). It remains today the finest combat novel in English about World War II. But his stories of the post-war world, "Barbary Shore" (1951) and "The Deer Park" (1955), never measured up to that first novel. Nor did anything he published later.

            Mailer admitted to me once that failure wasn't as bad as the fear of failing. Luke Bright, a literary gofer who ran errands for Perry Knowlton at the Curtis Brown agency, walked into a Greenwich Village bar one night, tapping me on the shoulder.

            "Come on, Peter," he said, "I want you to meet my friend, Norman Mailer."

            We sat at a table in the back of the Corner Bistro, at the corner of Jane and West 4th streets, with Mailer shrouded in his trench coat. We discussed failure and the fear of failure, which he associated with San Francisco. Mailer said he couldn't ever sleep in San Francisco because a blinking neon sign had once kept him awake in his hotel room in the Bay City. I acknowledged that was a sad thing but left after an hour as that recurring theme dragged into the evening.

            At that time I lived in upstate New York in the Adirondack wilderness and was deeply involved in writing "Goranda," a film treatment for Gordon Parks Jr., while Gordon was on the verge of doing the film "Superfly." I ran into Mailer a couple of other times. His chitchat seemed haunted by failure.

We recall Mailer lived off of the promise of that first novel and encountered what he considered failure much of the rest of his life. Or was it his fear of failure?

We've come a long way from the classic literary spats of Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, with whom Wilson corresponded extensively and whose writing Wilson introduced to Western audiences.

This whole arena of self-promotion seems to lead to backbiting and put-downs similar to Kirn versus Wood, Wilson versus Nabokov, or the classic told to me by Jill Higgins, spouse of Irish novelist Aidan Higgins.

Seems Calder-Boyars, British publisher at the time for Samuel Beckett and Higgins, threw a coming out party for Higgins' novel "Langrishe, Go Down." Beckett attended and when Aidan refused to ask Beckett what he thought of the novel, Jill Higgins approached the "esteemed Mr. Beckett" ― her words.

"Sam," she asked, "what did you think of the book?"

Beckett turned and looked down his nose at Jill.

"Literary sh_t," he said.

Thereafter, whenever Aidan Higgins reviewed something written by Beckett in the Irish press, it was not a particularly favorable review.

If a writer avoids self-promotion, especially the kind that comes with reviewing other writers or critics, he may starve to death, but that's a choice he makes, not someone else. He's not compelled to make odious comparisons (as one might compare "Thumsucker" with D. J. Salinger's classic "Catcher in the Rye.") After all, agonizing adolescence has been rediscovered by each generation, by each reader, and away we go!

I like to recall from the great bastion of writers quoted on being writers, the sometimes quaint musing of John Steinbeck:

"Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals."

"The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business."

And, of course, Ernest Hemingway:

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

Clearly, James Wood in "How Fiction Works" did not recognize the verbosity of his iceberg, thus offending the literary sensibilities of Walter Kirn. We would not want either of them to review "A Light in Polanco," or any other novel, because such independent works tend to stand alone, on their own merits, and are generally reviewed for what they are, rather than for what they are not.

A reader reviewer for Barnes and Noble once characterized my surrealistic novel "Splat!" as "Laugh Out Loud Wacky Fun!"

I couldn't have said it better.

Writers should never forget that readers are often a lot smarter than we give them credit for, and here I can share my discovery of a reader critic with a tremendous sense of the narrative, or how a story sounds to the avid reader of fiction.

Tracy Speelman operates a one-woman critique service called Fiction Critique out of a post office box in Blue Point, New York. Often, people with post boxes raise suspicions when they offer services on the Internet, because it often seems like every rip-off artist in the literary world is out there offering to turn your sow's ear story into a silk-purse best seller (for a price).

Not Tracy, no way! Here's her secret:

"As an avid reader, I can offer writers the fresh eye of their audience . . .Sometimes the story has to be pulled out from under the words that garble it, and the writer cannot always see this from where he or she is sitting."

After Speelman read the first four chapters of "A Light in Polanco" about a year ago, she told me exactly where the reader might be confused, and how to fix it ― from a reader's point of view, not a writer's or a critic's point of view.

"I critique based on what is applicable to the success of the work," said Speelman in amplifying her approach, one from which Wood and Kirn could both benefit.

That's because she handles copy from professionals and amateurs with equal deference, having done a lot of work with children, excellent preparation for dealing with Steinbeck's clowns and trained seals.

Tracy Speelman operates Fiction Critique out of PO Box 104, Blue Point, NY 11715-1132, and from www.FictionCritique.net, with an e-mail address of FictionCritique@aol.com.

 

When last heard from, Walter Kirn was still jousting with James Wood, a senior editor at The New Republic and a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University. Said Kirn: "I wouldn’t mind challenging Mr. Wood to a duel, maybe on Charlie Rose or one of your civilized media debate forums."

Like children, clowns and trained seals, we often do what is just the opposite of what we say, seeking applause. That's why, believing as I do that "the business of writers is writing," and not selling, I've always avoided self-promotion when it comes to literature. This piece is, of course, an exception.

The cover photo for A Light in Polanco is copyright Ricardo Carreon, a NowPublic contributor.