August 3, 2019: Acknowledgments

All I ever wanted to do was write. I typed my first novel when I was nine; it would have become “Game of Thrones” if I’d have been older, imaginative, clever, and diligent. I wrote constantly through high school—stories, a novel—a silly puerile thing, Catch-22 meets The Catcher in the Rye. Then in college, I wrote stories that always won the magazine’s writing contest, and I knew I was going to be a capital W writer.

As I expected in my arrogant youth, I was given an assistantship for an MFA at UNC-Greensboro, a noted creative writing program. It should have been an ideal program for me, but I was too young for it—20—and I wasn’t that mature. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, not that I knew that.

I didn’t go to class my second year. Not that “class”, as we called it, was all that useful, frankly. Twenty-five or so fiction writers crowded into a room of couches, heavy curtains, and very blue air due to the cigarettes, that, in 1974, were still permitted in classrooms—this one, anyway. Class met for three hours on Monday nights, 6-9. Once, the teacher announced that he was too drunk to teach, so we all followed him to Ham’s, a bar that also desultorily served light food. On that night, as I recall, Fred essentially went around the table and told us how we were all deficient. (“You don’t mean me, Fred? Do you?” all the young writers pleaded. Yes, he did.)

One thing I had learned somewhere, here or earlier: I thought that one crafted his or her art on her own. It was lonely because it was supposed to be; you were plumbing the very bottom of your soul, for chrissakes. You burrowed into your secret space, and you didn’t emerge until you had pages that were ready for someone to read. I mean, READY. Like one step short of publication.

Maybe I got it wrong. Certainly some of the MFA students formed writers’ groups, and I was in one, briefly. But writers’ groups repel me. They consist of people generally devoted to telling you how well they’re doing, have an agent, something under consideration, blah blah and another blah, and you look this person in the face, note the blank expression, the non-observant eyes, the waving hands, and think, you’re a fraud. Do you want this person to be commenting on your fiction?

Also, consider James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: wasn’t that me at 20? The protagonist, a young Dublin student named Stephen Daedalus, as he contemplates a life of writing, says,

“When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”

And at the end of the book:

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

He does nod at a muse:

“Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”

But it wasn’t “old gang of fifty pals”.

I suggest that those statements imply aloneness, solitude. He doesn’t fly by those nets with a writers’ group. His entire MFA program sure isn’t going to sit down and forge anything in the smithy of their collective soul. This is serious alone time.

I recently read Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, by Casey Cep. Harper Lee was famously and obsessively all alone in her writing. In this episode of her life, she attends a murder trial and researches fervently, scouring documents, interviewing anyone possibly relevant, and then she goes away to write about the trial by herself. Her solitude is so complete that finally no one knows what she’s written, if anything; people variously report that she’s delivered the manuscript to her publisher; that they’ve seen chapters; that she has assured them that it’s nearly done. The planned book, The Reverend, never comes to light.

She maintained that that had been her method in composing To Kill a Mockingbird, but the record shows that she had enormous guidance from her editors and agents. That book made her rich. Maybe she should have shown The Reverend to someone.

I would have written acknowlegments for Nancy and my books, except no one helped. We wrote them and we sold them. No one between us and the editors. Maybe that’s why they sold so badly. And none of my four novels sold. Would that I had known that it was supposed to be a group effort! To be fair, I don’t get along well with others. They couldn’t have helped anyway. What I did do was hire an experienced writer to read my work, but, as I said, ONLY when I was done.

Look at a lot of contemporary novels, and you wonder how the authors got any writing done, as busy as they were chatting up everyone around them. And then thanking them in a two or three-page acknowledgment section. Invariably the writers are young. Maybe age gives you confidence to do it on your own.

One example turned me off so that I didn’t read the book—something by Jodi Piccoult, who’s been very successful (oddly enough I worked some with her brother John at AIG). She thanked “Team Jodi”. Just no.

A post or two from now will be an example of what you can expect to find tucked away at the back of a novel. I suggest a stiff drink or two before reading it.