I recently came on this short reverie, which I'd committed to the page in anticipation of completing a collection of unfashionable essays. Its opinions may well belong to a man of 71 (68 back when he wrote it) who is set in his ways and who bristles at change. In fact, that's exactly to whom it belongs. Make of that what you will.
On Bibliodiversity
I
am no theorist, nor even a man who thinks well about philosophy, politics, or
social policy in their broader avatars.
My testimony, then, is only that of a writer devoted for the most part
to ‘minor’ genres.
There I stood at the top of a
small local mountain in rural Vermont, where I live, the snow deep, brilliant, crossed only by tracks
of deer and coyote . I was 68 years
old, and had just sold my ninth book of poems to an independent
publisher, its editor/director the most sensitive and competent I’ve
known.
There
was some satisfaction in that, but just then another project announced itself
to me: a book of essays on certain people and landscapes of Vermont, and of a place in remote Maine
where my family has had a fishing camp for four generations.
Many
of those people would be well over a hundred if they still lived, men and women
so attuned to their backwoods environments that in memory I still find it hard
to tell in their cases where human nature ends and actual nature takes
over.
Their
culture and particularly their narrative
skills have all but disappeared now, none of them left a written account of
those lives and times, yet they had meant so much to me as man and artist that
I felt I owed them a tribute.
An
evil voice asked, Who will publish a book
like that?
A
better voice replied, It’s what you want to write, so write it!
As it happens, a certain New York house has since that morning expressed interest in that very volume.
This is a
‘niche’ publisher, which caters to readers with similar enthusiasms to mine –canoeing, fishing, hiking, hunting.
There appear to be enough of them that the house can survive on sales alone.
To most publishers of poetry,
non-academic literary criticism, personal essay and short fiction, however,
government support is increasingly crucial, and here’s the rub: the American hagiography of– The Market. Despite the fact that unfettered U.S.
capitalism lately produced disastrous effects at home and worldwide, an article
of Market Faith is that if it
sells in plenty, then it must be valuable. Efforts, especially from the Republican party, to stifle the
National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, crucial supporters of work
that does not meet the market standard of value, are therefore unrelenting.
Given
the Latin etymology of the word, with its emphases on saving and
together, it strikes me as bizarre that
the congregants in this faith regard
themselves
as ‘conservatives.’
As
I stood on my snowy eminence, I remembered doing so on other hills when I lived
farther south in the state. From there, my
prospect today would be onto out-of- scale new
houses ... or else much older ones, lived in by single families for generation
upon generation but now belonging to relocated suburbanites, who have entirely
altered them and their surroundings. These newcomers seem oddly intent on
transforming what they fled to into
what they fled from.
In a word,
downriver from me a demographic revolution has occurred, native families –the
ones so brilliantly limned by Robert Frost– forced out, consumerist culture
imported, along with such notions as that no real town can endure without a
five star restaurant, and so on.
This
is conservatism, this sundering of
community and tradition?
A warning about the
extinction of upper New England’s hill people may have less glamor than an
elegy on the indigenous people, say, of the Amazon basin; and yet the juggernaut of The Market
and of Globalization is assaultive of both.
Where
am I going with such apparent divagation?
Well, the social transmogrification to
which I’ve alluded in Frost’s territory (and in the Latin-American rain forest) makes a lot of money
for certain non-local entrepreneurs.
Similarly, if one looks at the best seller list of the NY Times, one finds it dominated by what we
call page-turners, books that have scant regard for felicities of style or
intricacy of narrative but seek, in effect, to ape the pace, dazzle and
formulaic quality of television, film, and now the so-called social networks
and video games– in a word, books which, to the delight of large interests,
sell in a hurry and in large numbers.
As with real estate, what makes the most money becomes what’s most
important.
And
yet some of us keep insisting on writing and reading the ‘minor’ genres, on the
related urgency of language both precise and lyrical; we go on living, at least
metaphorically, in precious and vulnerable little houses, which may be razed or
‘refashioned’ when the global market’s juggernaut reaches them, as surely it
must.
With respect to writers and
readers of American poetry, for
example, these little houses have been and become more and more the sort of
little publishing houses that I have
stuck with throughout my long career– with one disastrous exception: I once
sold a collection of poems to a company,
only eight per cent of whose assets lay
in publishing as we once knew it;
the corporation, or so I was told by my excellent editor there, actually had
much more invested in food for pets than in poets.
My
book sold well by my measure...but not nearly well enough to avoid rather quick
consignment to a shredder; the pages I’d labored on were then turned into paper
towel (another of the company’s investments). That fine editor got fired,
probably for taking too many books like mine. The executive officers wanted an 18 percent return, and neither
I nor my poetic fellows would be contributing much to that.
I’ve never had such an
experience with a small press ...and yet, as I have hinted, these presses are
heavily dependent on financial support not only from individuals of means but
also from state and federal governments.
It’s not hard to imagine what may become of them if the dismantlers of such support for the arts prevail.
Of course it behooves these
publishers, along with their writers and readers,
to pressure political representatives for aid to our less commercially
viable arts. But I suspect, to make an analogy, that just as
many more people watched bear baiting in Shakespeare’s time than watched his
great tragedies, so today the poet, the essayist, the short fictionist all appeal to constituencies whose political power is paltry
when stacked up against The Market or Globalization or– what is for us the
same thing in many respects– the producers of
those page-turners.
Do
I sound like a pessimist? I am.
Now it may well be that our
future lies in the world of cybernetics: online publishing, electronic books,
Google, what have you? I am all
but innocent of that world, my own computer, for example, serving me solely as
a very high quality typewriter and a machine for sending and receiving
e-mail. So I can scarcely offer an
opinion one way or another on such a score.
If
that is literature’s future, however, I may live long enough to miss the feel
of an actual book in my hands, the
capacity physically to turn its pages, back as well as forth, and to regard
favorite old volumes as they in turn regard me from their shelves. I'll miss the tiny Woodsville Bookstore
across the river in New Hampshire, from which I buy all my reading materials,
and with whose cheerful and literate proprietor I share tips on new authors;
the chain Leviathans will have forced such a shoestring
operation into nonentity.
As I stand and look out from
any local promontory, it is all too easy to imagine an immense, garish and
costly modern structure standing in the vista, like some grand Random House
looming over the crumbling small houses and shops of my actual, my metaphorical,
my spiritual village.
Notes:
The prose volume I refer to was A North Country Life, since published by Skyhorse early in 2013.
The Woodsville Bookstore I thought I'd miss somewhere down the road has already vanished. RIP.
