American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring

by William Giraldi

There are long moments when this country resembles nothing so much as the grimmest of popularity contests. . . . My point is involved with the great emphasis placed on public approval here, and the resulting and quite insane system of penalties and rewards. It puts a premium on mediocrity and has all but slaughtered any concept of excellence.

Ralph Ellison in 1957: “The novelist must take chances or die.” Yes he must.

The spirit-ennobling energies of poetry and classical music will never measure on Wall Street. Remember Osip Mandelstam’s quip about how Russia respects her poets enough to murder them? We’d be in much better stead as a people if we began to value our poets as much.

Donate to arts advocacy organizations. Purchase physical books from independent and used bookstores. Hide your face in shame should you partake of pirated music. Keep your mouse off Kim Kardashian’s ass. If you believe that the life of your mind is inseparable from the health of your life, that serious art and artists are an essential component of human nourishment, then you have an obligation, to yourself and your children and us all, to do something about the grave circumstances Timberg sets before you.

Here’s what I know with an almost religious surety: to be tagged a Catholic novelist is to be tagged a failed novelist.

As any novelist knows, his characters can be a surly, seditious bunch who rather enjoy thwarting his intentions for them, and the wise novelist will let them revolt. But when a novelist summons and enacts his religious faith, he strips his characters of their free will, of their own capacity to be alive, to morph or evolve in whatever direction is truest.

“There were books of which I had passionate need,” says Ryecroft, “books more necessary to me than bodily nourishment.

Someone with thousands of books is someone you want to talk to; someone with thousands of shoes is someone you suspect of soul-death.

Committed readers are precisely those who understand the Socratic inkling that they aren’t smart enough, will never be smart enough—the wise are wise only insofar as they know that they are not wise.

Anthony Burgess once suggested that “book” is an acronym for “Box Of Organized Knowledge,”

This is how the nonreader’s question Have you read all these books? manages to miss the point by more than a bit. The tense is all wrong: Not have you read all, but will you read all, to which, by the way, the bibliophile’s answer must still be no.

But let me assert this truth: like the bicycle, the book is a perfect invention, and perfection dies very, very hard. The car hasn’t murdered the bike and the Web won’t murder the book.

Books, like love, make life worth living.

The above targets were Lawrence’s friends, so just imagine the letter you got—the missive as missile—if you were his foe. He ends the note to Russell: “Let us become strangers again. I think it is better.”

In the middle of the last century, when images overthrew linear script as the primary mode of assimilation and comprehension, how we perceive became more important than what we perceive. It doesn’t help that the average reader seems not to read very well at all anymore, no doubt because he’s reading with his feelings, and reading on a screen with three other screens in his lap.

Suffering from terminal neglect and the infertility of his wrath, the hate mailer wants your attention, and so the unkindest thing you can do is not to cut him down in a reply, but to deny him the rumble or rumba he’s come looking for. Never write back. You can’t quarrel with inanity; it makes more sense than you do. What’s worse, hate mailers are all too often humor-impaired. Is it me, or do the humor-impaired have a badly skewed picture of what’s happening in the world? One wishes for wiser, funnier detractors, worthier adversaries, of the D. H. Lawrence or Rebecca West variety, because talking books with many of my assailants would be rather like talking geology with an evangelical.

Dearth of talent might be the first reason most of the world’s writers will remain forever unsung, but Jackson makes clear that for the crafting of an immortal reputation, talent alone won’t cut it. The immortality-making contraption has a multitude of moving parts, each of which must be perfectly greased and tuned or else the whole thing stalls.

“For Johnson, numbers count because they demonstrate wide appeal, and wide appeal matters as confirmation of truth to nature, or universal validity,” and you can’t help but see that the bestsellers in Johnson’s day were considerably more literate than the bestsellers in our own. The good doctor would no doubt revise his notion of numbers if he could behold the sales figures and purulent prose of Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey.