Some Thoughts on the Day

I had occasion today to correspond with a former student – he must now be thirty-something – who wished to go on to an MFA. Would I recommend him? I’ve done that for literally hundreds of students, who are a faithful bunch and after all have their way to make. But in this case, I growled, Writers Workshops and MFA problems are a plague and a pestilence. It is thanks to them that an excrescence like the New York’s Forty (or was is twenty) Young writers got cobbled together. They take up literary space, these people do; they chat, they tweet, they Face and above all they log-roll.

So I vented to the young man. I said that when I wound up in one, in Iowa, sixty years ago, it was because they laid on some money for me, which I lacked. I met a lifelong friend, Paul Engle was a generous prairie-fed maecenas, Robert Lowell shambled through poetry, the most talented boy in the program, Bob Shelley, killed himself, and Dylan Thomas blew through town, drunk, to get his teeth fixed. I was a lousy writer at 21 and Iowa didn’t do anything for me, or for anyone, at the time. It offered fellowship at a time when literature was taken seriously.

That is no longer the case. The joints proliferate the way literary festivals do, What can an MFA program offer but replicas of what the failed writers who staff them (or the occasional ‘name’) think is good writing? True writers know the art is unteachable. What a still-young writer needs is to write, to put stuff out, to get rejected; to read a lot; to learn what it is to tell a story that someone else will want to read; to know a lot, languages (plural) especially, so that his diet is not just stuff spawned from MFA programs; to see the real world and forget his own little special self.

Still, I will write his letter: the way he wrote his reply suggested he may know that already.



The University of Maryland and one other stateside institution, back a kind of ‘medical’ program offered by something called the Ibero-Americal University with its seat in Costa Rica. In this country where there is no real education or culture, such ‘universities’ spring up like hollyhocks. This is now quite common. Our universities are now just marketers, and the underdeveloped countries are the ‘huddled masses’ of the day: ripe for academic exploitation.

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My London bookseller, John Sandoe, is usually very good to me. I patronize them because they have taste, because all writers should support independent booksellers, because they deserve our custom (at full price). I buy most of my books in England because I like well-produced books as objects, too, and America now binds in plastic, uses heavy paper, and is otherwise unattractive.

When I go into Sandoe’s, I let each of its staff pick a book I might like. They have batted at about .800, which is pretty high. Until this last time, when they passed off on me two novels that were complete disgraces. Both of them, of course, bore the usual accolades, Thomas Leverett’s The Exchange-Rate between Love and Money (which the Guardian found ‘dazzling) was simply unreadable. On the first page I was offered Frito, who’d ‘heard about this amazing thing love, had been trying to score for some years – He’d painted a target on every girl he met and shot himself out of a cannon at them, but none ever withstood the impact.’ Anyone who thinks that has anything to do with love is simply a smart-aleck. I did twenty pages of that one and then fled.

The second, Simon Mawrer’s The Glass Room (‘a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry’) had an unbearably turgid story line – a Jugendstil house – to which, as in those epitomies of history published by earnest divines in the nineteenth century, a set of ‘characters’ were marched through. There were Nazis and Jews and artists and women who smoked cigarettes in elongated holders, venal servants and nasty little communist bureaucrats. None with any life whatever.

That one I read all the way through. The author was so goddam earnest I would have felt it lacking in charity not to wave goodbye to him at the end.