by Tom Bissell
One of the few pieces of fiction posted on the ULA’s website is an excerpt from Michael Jackman’s The Corridor. Jackman’s is one of the more angrily eloquent voices within the ULA, and his pleas for honest, socially relevant fiction appear the most heartfelt. Thus, I read his fiction with great interest. What I found, though, was an artless ramble. I do not mean artless in the positive sense of seeming unforced or natural. I mean it in the sense of having no art. “I have always been a procrastinator,” is how Jackman’s narrator introduces himself to us, “and at the very last minute I had to get serious about finding a new place to live—I had told Henry I would be out of his apartment by the end of November, which was two days away. I needed cheap digs in a hurry.” When Jackman’s narrator suspenselessly opens the newspaper to find an apartment—its $200-a-month rent serves the same grandstandingly sociological purpose here as a Thomas Pink tie does in the work of Bret Easton Ellis—he decides to go have a look. (“I had no choice!”) The apartment is in a bad neighborhood (barking dogs, trash, chain-link fences), details Jackman does not insert so much as rivet into his work. At least the apartment is not in the suburbs. All the same,“This place is a nightmare!” I thought. Still, I had to get out of Henry’s hotel room, so I handed Stan [the landlord, who smells bad] the first and last months’ rent. He wrote out a receipt on the back of an envelope, folding the keys inside. I drove downtown and requested juice at the utility office. They told me to expect to be on the grid within 24 hours. I drove to the record shop to go to work.
The excerpt staggers on, as though trying defibrillate the suburban heart from its living bourgeois death: “When I had tossed the last of my boxes on the living room floor, I checked the power in the bathroom, but it wasn’t on yet. I checked the stove. No gas hissed to life. I couldn’t even boil a cup of tea!” Here we have fiction of negative perfection: so boringly real it cannot be read.
I held out greater hope for the work published in the ULA’s zine, Slush Pile. One of the writers the ULA hypes most sincerely in Slush Pile is a young woman—I am guessing she is young—named Urban Hermitt. A Hermitt story (or something) entitled “‘I Don’t Know’” is about a young woman named Urban Hermitt and her crazy adventures:When people say, “I don’t know,” i growl. “Whatta ya mean you don’t know?” i retort. ‘Cuz i always thought that people secretly knew why they did the things they did. Like you drink beer ’cuz you secretly can’t handle reality and you wanna fuck. Like you avoid eye contact with a cutie’cuz you secretly can’t handle reality and wanna fuck. Well, i couldn’t handle reality either and boy did i wanna fuck.
It is not that Ms. Hermitt is not able to write, or is not, often, sort of amusing. Of her crazy adventures in Mexico, she notes, ‘Only eat food served to you in hotels,’ the travel book on Baja Mexico says. ‘And if you eat food from a street vendor, make sure you take pepto—bismol.’ These travel books make all street vendors seem EVIL. And then they expect you to down this ‘pink’ liquid called pepto-bismol which is full of all this chemicalized crap!” Hermitt’s problem is that she, like Jackman, has mistaken emotion and purity of intent for art. Wenclas has defended Hermitt’s work by saying, “There can be no rewrites.... Attempts to impose order—grammar, spelling, and logic—would cause the fragile bursts of immediacy to fall apart.” To that one is tempted to argue that poiaurna fopiuay bnvmnnab.
Another story, “Weddings in Purgatory” by Cullen Carter (whose bio says, winningly, that he “likes beer”), has any number of paragraphs filled with writing like this: But then Sofia took off her coat and introduced herself. There was a small spark of life in me when I noticed those firm breasts hidden underneath that tight black sweater of hers. I hadn’t had any in awhile, and I was feeling sex-starved. We ended up hooking up, and I was happy for a couple days, thinking I could maybe build a fire with that spark, thinking that maybe I could finally get on with my life.
And yet ULA members do not always write badly. One of the group’s more prominent writers is Jack Saunders, a Santa Clausishly lovable sort who for years has been fruitlessly pestering the publishing world. I received a letter from Saunders in 2000, shortly after I published an essay in The Boston Review about the historical obtuseness of the publishing world’s judgment, for instance its rejections of Melville and Whitman. Saunders’s letter—angry but cheerful—contained excerpts of the many brush-offs he has received from editors, not all of them unkind. (It also, somewhat alarmingly, included a photo of him and a topless woman.) Saunders all but dared me to put my money where my essay was and publish him at Henry Holt and Company, where I then worked. I enjoyed what I read, but since I regarded—and regard—Saunders’s work roughly as salable as a Hefty bag filled with used hypos, I was too depressed even to write him back. I also suspected that, if I did, I was going to get an extremely loquacious pen pal (and perhaps even increasingly nude photos). In an excerpted essay about the novel’s future, Saunders writes:Anybody can become a writer if he ditches a perfectly good wife to marry one with a rich uncle, leaves the kids with nannies—or puts them in boarding school—and goes off on safaris, stabs people who have helped him in the back.... And most of our writers have done things like that. Even the ones I admire. If you’re married and have kids, you have to do your part. To be a good father to your family. Only then can you write. In the time remaining. No great novels are going to be written that way. But you can become a better human being that way.
Which may be dippy and which may glisten with more than a little old-coot-type treacle, but it is also pretty hard to argue and bravely unfashionable to say. Especially for an author like Saunders, who has boasted of writing nine novels in six months. At the very least, one senses a real human heart within this sentiment rather than the sort of sense-deadened literary adept whom Borges once criticized as writing as though it were “a trick they had learned.... They know that when they have to write, then, well, they have to suddenly become rather sad and ironic.”
A 1997 essay by King Wenclas, “Living in the Real America,” is equally worth considering. “Currently I work as a release clerk/ truck dispatcher for a customshouse broker at Detroit’s Ambassador Bridge,” the essay begins, “the great commercial NAFTA gateway of North America.” The point here is thankfully not trade-and-tariff politics but the plight of many Americans to make what is sometimes cruelly known as a living. “When it rains,” Wenclas notes of his workspace,the ceiling leaks. We have no place to hang our coats, we have no lunch room, we grab food when we can in between processing the unceasing paperwork and dealing with the multiplying regulations of numerous government empires.... Phones constantly ring. ‘The container hasn’t arrived.’ It’s sitting in a railyard in Detroit.
What sort of people work these jobs? Well, Wenclas tells us:Young Latino girls, eastside ghetto blacks, downriver white trash, and broke losers like myself. The pay ranges between minimum wage and ten dollars an hour. We endure working conditions worse than those that caused Bartleby to go insane. How many hours do you want? 60? 70? 16—hour shifts? We work hard.... We have no rights, we have no unions, we have no time, money, or energy with which to enjoy any but the barest existence. We are the new American worker....Amid the madness, on the dock[,] observing the activity[,] sits a four-month-old white baby strapped into a plastic seat. He’s one of Tabitha’s [a coworker], who can’t afford sitters. “Tabitha!” I yell. “You left your kid on the dock.” “My mother’s picking him up,” she yells back. “I got drivers! Could you keep an eye on him?” The baby waves his arms. I wait with him, past and future[,] wondering what the world has in store for us.
It would be easy to assume that Wenclas is doing a lot of alienated socio-economic posturing here. I think it would be far too easy to assume this. The piece’s early publication date and simpler, less hysterical tone suggests a writer whose voice has not yet been calcified by rejection and outside indifference, a writer who still had faith that the power of his human outrage, stated well, might allow him a way out of his desperation, tha
t might make others awake. And yet, in his title, Wenclas has one thing wrong. The “real” America is not poor and desperate, just as the real America is not young and wealthy and hip. They are both America, and both can be written about in revelatory ways. Wenclas is living in Wenclas’s America. It is his duty as a writer to convey that America to his reader, and here, at least, he does so well. I wonder how much work Wenclas has in this voice, and if it’s as good. I wonder also if it would even matter, knowing too well the likely fate of even a superbly conceived piece of work dealing with the realities of our American underclass: regretful rejection and cheerful good wishes, followed, of course, by a completely understandable authorial despair. I then find myself thinking about the ULA’s arguments even more, and I wonder if the fact that I am so surprised by how riled their arguments make me might not suggest that many of them have, in fact, an unpleasant tincture of truth.
Several people told me that any remotely personal dealings with members of the ULA uncovers not some secret cabal of literary anarchists but folk who are basically polite and, indeed, almost shy. One on one, I was told, ULA members come off less as fearless statue-topplers than maladjusted adolescents who have decided that the best way to get a pretty girl’s attention is to snap her bra. It is when they gather that the problems begin (also like adolescents). The Open City poet (and lead singer and songwriter for the Silver Jews) David Berman learned as much when he sent a lacerating letter to Wenclas challenging the ULA to a “relevance read-off.” Upon receiving Wenclas’s sharp though polite reply, Berman shot back, “Look King, if you’re going to be so civil about this then disregard my first letter. I thought you were hot-headed assholes looking for a fight.... Obviously I’m talking to the wrong guy. Who’s the head asshole over there? Tell him to call me.”
During an interview conducted over e-mail, I asked Michael Jackman about this occasional severance between the ULA’s spiteful tactics and the personalities of its individual members. He responded, “I think I know what you’re getting at with this question. I can probably sit down and have a civil conversation with you. I can pass. I can even make my voice sound just like those voices on NPR.... In any event, sure, we’re caring and decent people. I’d say that the most caring and decent people are belligerent when faced with injustice.”
Although I can hardly claim to know him, I like Jackman. Possibly this is because I have a high tolerance for people who regard things that offend them as “injustice.” I posed a series of fairly pointed questions and Jackman answered them quickly, intelligently, and well. When I asked if the ULA can appreciate how blatantly jealous it appears by attacking the writers it does, Jackman said my question reminded him of high school, in particular the timeless propensity of popular kids to look upon the actions of unpopular kids, no matter how innocuous, as an attempt to get the popular kids’ attention. “How self-satisfied does somebody have to be to look at the opposition and simply see envy!” Jackman fired back. “What blind arrogance!” That his mind instantly retreated to the bivouacs of Phys. Ed. and prom is probably more revealing than he intended to be, but his point stands that fiercely opposing another person does not necessarily mean that all opposition is birthed in envy. “The ‘big brainy writer’s club’ simply presents us with an appropriate target,” Jackman went on. “They do an excellent job of representing everything we regard as foul. They are a smarmy, backslapping network of people who have very little experience out there in the world.” When I asked which writers Jackman admires, he mentioned Charles Bukowski. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Bukowski’s initial experience with the world was largely consigned to seeing it through the bottom of a shot glass when he was not delivering people’s mail. While this does not make him a bad writer, it certainly does not make him a good writer either.
I realized about here that Jackman was not actually criticizing these big-brained writers themselves, as writers. My secret suspicion is that he has probably read the writers he professes to loathe carefully and, somewhere within him, found at least something to admire. Otherwise they would not make him so angry. He was criticizing, instead, the image of these writers. In Jackman’s mind, these writers have “very little experience out there in the world”—a ridiculous position in itself; everyone has experience out there in the world, seeing that everyone actually lives in the world—because, for him, these writers are only images. Images do not have experience. They are images.And this is the problem. It is an old problem, but it is still a problem.
If serious reading is in peril, and I believe it is—though I also believe that in peril may well be the default condition of serious reading—maybe it is because, for many, serious reading is increasingly revolving around nothing but image. Writers become brands or poses rather than individuals trying to communicate something human to their readers. What is particularly horrifying about all this is the fact that the writers themselves are rarely to blame for their images. To talk about books with many in the publishing industry and God knows I have been as guilty of this as anyone, becomes less an occasion to discuss books than to conjure up some unreal quasi-world of byzantine intrigue and thrillingly naked literary Darwinism: Who is up. Who is down. Whose book sold. Whose book did not. How success has ruined A. How B is no longer in. How C never wrote anything good after the divorce. It is little wonder that the manner in which this gossipy system publishes many writers’ work appalls those it excludes. I often find it appalling myself, and I used to do it for a living and might well, someday do it again.
Literature is sacred. It is as sacred to me as anything I know. I suspect that most editors and agents feel the same way, if only during the quiet hours of the night. But there is always the issue of how one goes about selling the sacred without defiling it. There is the issue of how one goes about superintending the sacred when ten of thousands of fellow brethren, some of them abundantly insane but many of the truest sort of heart, want to add to its flame. What does one tell them? That they are not holy enough? However one personally and professionally elects to handle these troubling issues, a tiny piece of the sacred is ruined. For me, at least, all of this inevitably leads to a small, quiet grief. We would all like for our worlds to be bigger.
For Jackman and the ULA, however, it leads somewhere else. When I asked why the ULA does not attempt to call attention to the numerous published novels that disappear from public view so completely it is as though they were never published, he replied that the ULA is “not on a level playing field. We are engaged in a kind of cultural warfare here, and we’re a small bunch of guerillas taking on a large opponent with vast resources.... If you’re small and your opponent is large, attack—then the opponent has to devote resources to its defenses.” He went on, “It’s shocking to me how the ULA apparently believes in writers and believes in literature more than the people who control the industry” I countered that the people who control the industry know horrendously well how poorly most books sell—even those that are “hyped.” “I can’t think of any other business that operates with that catastrophic lack of vision!” Jackman responded. “Every business in this country tries to court success aggressively, it would seem, with the exception of literature.”
It is sentiment such as this that makes me admire Jackman, even as I recognize that he does not always know what he is talking about, even as I suspect that, if The Corridor is any indication, he could not write his way out of an issue of Ranger Rick, and even as I believe his literary judgment to be basically not so good. He is a nobly unreasonable person leading an unreasonable group seeking to unreasonably alter the terms of a fundamentally unreasonable debate. Not only that of commerce versus art but art as it is enriched by ethics and ethics as they are challenged by social injustice. He is far from the only writer concerned with such matters, but he clearly believes he is. This strange, bug-eyed moral certainty is what is interesting about the ULA and what is repellent about the ULA. But it is usually more interesting than repellent. It is also more moving, especially when t
he ULA sucks the venom from its voice and speaks more to its very human concerns.
I wrote earlier of the sacred. Indeed, literary movements have a typical development not unlike that of religion. They begin in revelation, grow in consolidation, mature in strength, decay into complacent necrosis, suffer schism and partial inner destruction, and then are born anew. If the ULA follows this traditional arc, one of two things will happen. They will either grow frustrated, stop writing, surrender their faith, and disappear; or one of them, or two of them, possibly three of them, but no more, will publish or self—publish something that finds an audience large enough to move the traditional publishing houses and larger magazines to swing their censer before the ULA’s eyes. Any such success will, no doubt, be a moment of some philosophical difficulty. The money will in all likelihood be convincing enough to allow these lucky ULA writers to swallow their rancor toward the system that shunned them, and with weighty hearts they will step into the bloody crossroads where art and commerce meet. Perhaps, then, the ULA will become the literary equivalent of, say, Episcopalianism. Suddenly, they will be the ones turning away expectant apostles. Theirs will be the door to which many will nail their bad-tempered theses. I personally hope for the latter, both because I believe that the ULA’s movement is fundamentally one of hope and because I suspect that only success will convince the ULA that art, like death, is life’s great leveler. We all grieve of it equally, and at no point can any of us expect to be treated fairly.