In January, when USA Today’s weather map is jammed with perturbations, it’s a balmy 80 degrees, with
gentle breezes making a light sweat a pleasant cool-off.
And keyed up indeed
were the 200 participants in the seventh annual Literary Seminar—held,
appropriately enough, at the Tennessee Williams Fine Arts Center (1977) of the
Florida Keys Community College.
I came to savor two of my favorite writers—Peter Taylor, the
laureate of the Memphis genteel middle class, and Bobbie Ann Mason, an eloquent
voice for the heretofore speechless blue collars of Paducah, Kentucky, and
thereabouts. I was not disappointed.
Taylor prefaced his reading of “Her Need” (about a
middle-aging, by-husband-abandoned bank officer) with a magisterial 20-minute
gloss on how he learned from his superiors (Chekhov, Turgeniev and James) how
stories gestate out of notebooks.
This half hour in itself was more than worth the eight-day
Greyhound journey from San Francisco that led me there. And the septuagenarian
teacher talks about his former students with passion and eloquence.
He talked to me at the reception of his junior Virginia
colleague John Casey, whose remarkable first novella, An American Romance, was the first post-feminist novel in which an
autonomous heroine is the center of the narrative. I was fearful that Casey was
having a Ralph Ellison-type block. No way. Taylor reported gleefully that Casey
had no fewer than three volumes about to appear.
When I saw Robert Wilson, the very able book critic of the much-maligned new medium USA Today,
I assumed he was the seminar’s official rapporteur. Wrong. Wilson, it turns out, was a Taylor student in
Charlottesville. What a legacy of writers and critics. More than a literary
legacy: a mega-legacy.
Bobbie Ann Mason is too young yet to possess any legacy but
her growing oeuvre. But at a reception
after her reading, the youngest authors and aspiring ones—like Will Weaver of
Bemidji, Minnesota, whose first work comes out in March—basked in the warmth of
her outgoing personality.
She read “Wish” from her forthcoming (fourth) volume, Love
Life. It is an audit by an 84-year-old man
of his long life, which ends with his fond recollection of his first
lovemaking, under the stars on a quilt spread over freshly mown grass.
She schmoozed easily and utterly without affectation. I was
curious about the precise title of her last book, Spence + Lila—it being my hunch that the “plus” sign signified
that their luminous union was much more than simple addition of their separate
private lives.
Not only was my intuition correct, but she teetered on the edge of testiness when
editors, critics and readers—including the man who introduced her at the
seminar—sloppily substituted “and.”
But savoring the reading performances of treasured writers
is a long haul from enjoying multi-celeb panels on the renaissance of the
American short story, this year’s theme.
They were keynoted by one Frank Conroy, the indefinite article signifying my total ignorance
of the man and his work. It turns out he’s a veritable superstar of the
subsidized lit subculture.
He ascended this year to the directorship of the premier
writing workshop in the country, the U. of Iowa’s, after having been the
Maecenas of grants at the National Endowment for the Arts’ literature section
for five years. Bureaucratic largesse has its perks.
And Conroy is no shadowy, faceless pol of the Culture Biz.
He had sharp and perceptive things to say about the 30-year-old phenomenon of
the writing workshop / creative writing adjunct to English departments.
His most acidulous remark was to note that if all the people
who tried to get their poems and stories into little mags subscribed to them,
the mags wouldn’t need to be subsidized. Hmm. I’d add a corollary to that. If
all the writers and critics starring at the seminar were catholic readers,
they’d be better informed guides.
I happened to be carrying Daniel Hoffman’s Hang Gliding from Helicon as longueurs
insurance in case the panels were boring
(none was, itself a miracle). But if I were to finger the poets and critics who
had never heard of him, I’d wreck their reputations and careers.
I have a short word for that condition: narcissism. The
subsidized writing programs are tax-supporting solipsism. Sadly, they create “a
world elsewhere” culture parallel to the Disney-dominated one they never, ever
leaven. It’s not exactly what Matthew Arnold and Emerson had in mind, is it?
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, February 15, 1989
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