few contemporary controversies resemble the legendary Gordian Knot so much as the issue of sexual harassment, but beware anyone who claims the ability to cut through it with the sharp swords of law or theory. Alexander the Great died 2,300 years ago — and besides, sorting this one out is no job for a soldier.
The American military’s own inability to cope with the intricate shiftings of modern sexual politics proves that. One day the drill sergeants in Aberdeen, Md., are carrying on as if their trainees are some kind of commissioned personal harem, the next Staff Sgt. Delmar Simpson is being sentenced to 25 years of military prison for “raping” several women who admit to having “consented” to sex with him. For everyone who considers that penalty extreme, there’s someone else who believes that boot camp is an artificial environment where ordinary notions of autonomy and responsibility don’t apply, and therefore the Army is entitled to its own peculiar definition of rape.
Of course, in this case, there’s also the matter of race (Simpson is black and some, but not all, of his accusers are white), the Army’s recent history of embarrassing sexual harassment scandals, the quarrel over whether women belong in combat units to begin with, the possibility that the women involved might have used their relationships with Simpson to advance their standing in his unit, and so on. Every sexual harassment case seems to resemble a Talmudic text, a puzzle of multiple facets and infinite complexity, something that could be studied for years and still yield new angles, insights and interpretations. Freud observed that every time a couple goes to bed, six people actually participate — phantoms of the lover’s parents play a role in the tryst, as well. Sexual harassment cases multiply this crowd: By the time a charge goes public, the entire citizenry has piled into the room, ready to duke it out in earnest.
Confronted with such a mess, sensible people are likely to tear their hair, toss up their hands and despair of ever finding a way to apply the law fairly. But in case you haven’t noticed, sensible people are rarely consulted in these matters. They’re so much less entertaining than the ranters and grousers, the feminist ideologues with their hothouse analyses and the coot pundits with their soft spot for the Bad Ol’ Days. Universities, in particular, have seen some pitched battles over sexual harassment, and as a result, it’s in academia that reasoning feminists are colliding with their more fanatical sisters. Those tortuous collisions are sparking some fascinating new books.
“i’ve become a spectacle,” writes Jane Gallop, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and the author of “Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment,” a slim volume describing her response to finding herself in that odd situation. Gallop, a veteran of the Women’s Studies movement of the 1970s, was found innocent of harassing the two female students who accused her, but still censured for engaging with one of them in a “consensual amorous relation.” (Her university, like an increasing number of others, prohibits any such relationship between teachers and students.) That relation consisted of flirtation and sexual bantering, culminating in one passionate, exhibitionistic kiss before a group of colleagues in a lesbian bar.
Gallop argues that the teacher-student relationship, especially at its most fertile and exciting, is by nature one with erotic qualities. Like the dynamic between a therapist and her patient, it stirs up intense, often infantile emotions (what psychologists call “transference”). She believes that the campus feminists and affirmative action administrators who reprimanded her seek to divorce the intellect from the libido, a prospect she finds dehumanizing and dull.
This argument initially makes Gallop a sympathetic figure; she’s the lone proponent of passionate, risky, vital teaching squared off against a passel of life-denying PC puritans. And the charges leveled against her were ludicrous and overwrought, smelling suspiciously of sour grapes and hurt pride. But Gallop’s personality, as revealed in “Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment,” is disturbingly reminiscent of the professor’s in David Mamet’s play “Oleanna,” about a female student who accuses her male professor of sexual harassment. In the play, it’s clear that the professor never did hit on the student, but it’s also clear that he handled the girl’s emotions with a thoughtless brutality that shattered her already fragile ego. She had a legitimate gripe, but one she could never prosecute; her sexual harassment charge is metaphorically appropriate.
Although Gallop also never technically seduced her students, she evinces much of Mamet’s professor’s complacency, with her sense of her own importance, her smug assumption of her flawlessness. She’s the kind of swashbuckling, provocative academic theory “star” post-structuralist graduate students swoon over almost as breathlessly as teenage girls sigh for pop idols. She’s not so much angered that anyone could be charged with sexual harassment on such flimsy pretexts as she is outraged that she should be. She mostly seems irritated at being interrupted in the act of contemplating her own “bold,” “clever,” “sassy,” “smart,” “sexy” baaad feminist self. Although her memories of being “turned on” — intellectually, socially and sexually — by her adventures in the early women’s movement are tonic reminders of headier times, she never ponders why so many young academic women today are gravitating toward a grim, fearful, “protectionist” version of feminism instead. She never asks herself why the field of women’s studies — the institution she helped build — attracts such personalities and fosters such behavior, and what her own responsibility might therefore be. Not a whiff of self-questioning ever enters the hermetically sealed righteousness of “Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment.”
Quite the opposite is true of Helen Garner’s “The First Stone,” an account of a sexual harassment scandal that roiled the exclusive Ormond College at the University of Melbourne. The Australian novelist and journalist’s book is subtitled “Some Questions About Sex and Power,” and mostly that’s what it is: a squirming mass of meditations that eat their own tails — reactions, second thoughts, third thoughts, probing interviews, bitter arguments, soul searching and confession. In that, it feels both closer to the daunting realities of the sexual harassment controversy and — in its fearless commitment to expressing the truth and fostering a just relationship between the sexes — more feminist than anything I’ve read in a long time. Garner strikes me as trustworthy precisely because she doesn’t pretend to have figured it all out, to have a one-size-fits-all theory for what sexual harassment is and what should be done about it.
Briefly, the Ormond College scandal ignited when two female students accused a male administrator at the school of harassing them (touching their breasts and, in one case, talking suggestively) during a somewhat drunken campus party. For months after the party, various officials bumbled around with the charges while the man himself, Colin Shepard, remained uninformed. Long after the event, he was brought into the local police station and charged with “indecent assault.”
When Garner read about Shepard’s arrest, she felt a “jolt” at the rage and severity of the response to what sounded like a “clumsy pass” by a “poor blunderer,” the kind of thing feminists of her generation (now “pushing 50″) shrugged off. Shepard’s career was ruined, and his family (who Garner found decent and unembittered) traumatized by the trial and its aftermath. To Garner, who had spent her youth campaigning for abortion rights and against sexual discrimination, the case felt like a “destructive, priggish and pitiless” travesty of feminism’s original, expansive quest for social justice.
Garner’s investigation of the case introduced her to the tut-tutting old boys’ network that once reigned supreme in Ormond’s pre-coed era, and to a new breed of feminists, “cold-faced, punitive girls” bent on, in their own words, “retribution,” like the vengeful God of the Old Testament. She had long, surprising talks with her friends, filled with revelations of past rapes and sexually predatory teachers and bosses. She worried about being out-of-date politically, of inviting the “scorn” of her daughter’s generation for her soft position on the vagaries of sexual power. She juxtaposes Shepard’s offense with the horrific reports of sexual violence that studded the daily papers at the time. But one thing she never did was talk to Colin Shepard’s accusers. The two women, and nearly all of their supporters, utterly stonewalled Garner after branding her as unsympathetic.
Much of “The First Stone” relates Garner’s multifarious, exasperating efforts to get these women to tell their side of the story. She writes letters that plead and others that fulminate about the need for “open discourse,” all to no avail. Even so, the case grows whole new annexes of possible meaning as she goes. Did the college fail to back Shepard up because he was considered a somewhat gauche outsider, and a relatively painless sacrifice to a troublesome and vocal campus minority? Could the conflict have been resolved without the police if the college had had a mandated procedure for such cases? Who circulated the inflammatory anonymous leaflets suggesting that Shepard was a potential rapist and urging women students not to “panic”?
Garner raises many intriguing questions, but perhaps the most pressing is this: What causes “the mysterious passivity that can incapacitate a woman at a moment of unexpected, unwanted sexual pressure”? At the party in question, after being allegedly fondled by Shepard, one complainant quietly retreated to a group of friends. “The spontaneous collective response was to make it look as if nothing untoward had happened … Everything they did was directed at protecting him from knowing that he had offended her.” Was the wrath finally unleashed on Shepard the pent-up result of dozens of other incidents with many other men, none of whom were confronted with the disagreeableness of their advances? Does vanishing into a group — whether friends on a dance floor or a cadre of anti-sexual harassment activists — ever help a young woman achieve the kind of self-possession that makes deflecting unwanted passes less than a federal case?
When “The First Stone” was originally published in Australia, it raised what Garner calls (in the afterword to the American edition) a “primal” furor, and, predictably, Garner was falsely accused of making all sorts of ridiculous statements. The book, she observes, “declines — or is unable to present itself as — one big clonking armour-clad monolithic certainty.” This inflames readers who “located their sense of worth in holding to an already worked-out political position … permanently primed for battle, they read like tanks.” Fortunately, the book found many more readers who were “relieved that ambiguity might be re-admitted to the analysis of thought and action.”
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that, as these passages indicate, Garner writes with so much more fluidity, color and eloquence than Gallop, whose stilted prose suggests a jargon-jockey awkwardly playing to the bleachers. One writer trusts the average, intelligent reader with the raw, confusing truth; the other simply seeks to consolidate her position as prophet of the One True Feminism. One demonstrates the strength of her convictions by her willingness to re-examine her politics; the other is miffed at being challenged at all. To help us find our way to just, humane policies on sexual harassment, we need thinkers able to describe the terrain as it really is.
the coming out of Ellen DeGeneres is a Big Deal in the well-oiled, carefully spun manner of engineered media events. The coming out of her lover, movie actress Anne Heche (“Walking and Talking,” “Volcano”), who appeared hand-in-hand with DeGeneres at a White House Corespondents Dinner in Washington on Saturday, is another matter entirely. From “Oprah” appearances to news magazine covers to the trumpeted episode itself, the fact of DeGeneres’ lesbianism has been fed to us, spoonful by spoonful, like baby food processed to a consistency judged digestible by the public’s finicky stomach. Heche’s announcement of her own homosexuality, from the unsettled tone of the coverage so far, arrives like a lump in the pabulum, as if the press and the industry wonder if we’re ready for that much solid food.
Why the difference? It’s partly that DeGeneres’ coming out feels like a national project, exhaustively discussed until almost everyone seems to have agreed on its meaning and message (tolerance, honesty, courage, etc.). Heche’s looks impetuous by comparison, a passionate, personal act, and the New York Times’ Bernard Weinraub reports that it “has struck Hollywood hard.” The industry leaders Weinraub contacted were “perplexed and dismayed,” despite the widely supportive response to DeGeneres’ coming out. Their uncertainty has to do with the difference between TV stars and movie stars — and the strange, primitive ways we fantasize about both.
My college roommate had a huge crush on one of those overly refined British actors usually cast as aristocratic characters in second-rate films. As we acquired gay male friends (the way young women intent on becoming cosmopolitan inevitably do), they teased her mercilessly for her infatuation: “He’s gay!” they’d crow. My roommate looked crestfallen and not quite convinced, but we figured our gay friends ought to know. Rock Hudson may have been closeted to the general public before his death, but the announcement of his homosexuality came as no surprise to anyone plugged into the gay grapevine in California.
Nowadays, everyone thinks they’ve got the inside scoop on the private lives of celebrities and the backstage machinations of the entertainment business. (Is there even an “outside” anymore? Perhaps there’s a designated family somewhere, an old married couple — Republican fundamentalists, of course — living in a tract home in Kansas and completely oblivious of Clinton’s poll ratings, Mike Ovitz’s latest career move and how far over budget the new Geena Davis movie went. God bless them; if they weren’t outside, how could we, the readers of Entertainment Weekly and viewers of “E!” be in?) We relish being clued in to the secrets of Hollywood’s closeted homosexuals, and no disclaimers or candid interviews, no comely spouse or bouncing baby, can persuade us to stop smirking knowingly about Tom Cruise or Whitney Houston.
Aren’t we sophisticated? And yet, we still haven’t sorted out the fantasy world of the movies from the often lackluster realities of actual life. Try, if you’re heterosexual, expressing lust, or even dewy-eyed romantic longings, for certain screen icons, and some smart aleck will surely chirp, “But, s/he’s gay.” We’re supposed to be discouraged. The star’s homosexuality is supposed be an insurmountable obstacle to the erotic reveries that movies have exploited from their birth. It’s as if we have to believe that there’s a chance of consummation, however remote, or the whole fantasy disintegrates.
When the New York Times quotes an “important Hollywood agent” speculating on Heche’s ability to convince audiences to “accept (her) as a female romantic lead,” the issue isn’t her skill as a performer. Gay actors have been playing heterosexuals convincingly for years. It’s Heche’s ability to become a movie star that’s at stake. Stardom isn’t about acting, it’s about transforming oneself into a totem or fetish — a heady mix of Greek god, parent as seen through the eyes of a small child and the most popular kid in high school. Should someone ask us if we thought stars were the same people in real life that they play on screen, we’d reply with a commonsensical “no.” It’s just a movie, right? But deep down, we’re not so rational — some part of us can’t quite make the separation, and doesn’t really want to.
A movie star must appear glittering and blessed enough to invite worship, but never rub his or her complete inaccessibility in our faces. Would-be Cinderellas every one of us, we lavish adoration and riches on princes because we each secretly, idiotically, hope there’s a fairy godmother and a glass slipper in our future. If we’re frank with ourselves, we realize that, whatever their sexual orientations, neither Winona Ryder nor Mel Gibson is going to wind up on our arms or in our beds. But we don’t go to the darkened room of a movie theater looking for honesty. We go to delude ourselves.
As a TV situation comedy star, DeGeneres is part of our fantasy lives too, but she’s a lovable, goofy sister or best friend, not an icon. Her coming out happens in our living rooms, along with the usual mess of everyday existence. She’s practically a member of the family, and if she turns out not to be quite what we expected, well, we’ll cope, the way families should. Besides, she’s not interfering with our need to believe that Ellen the character is indivisible from Ellen the performer, since both character and comedian are coming out simultaneously.
But Heche, auditioning for the role of dream girl — a mythical creature, when you get right down to it — gets cut a lot less slack. Each time she presents herself as a “leading lady,” she’ll force us to remain conscious of the fact that she’s only acting, that the whole glamorous palace of movie romanticism is just a mirage. Of course, we know that already. We’d just rather not be reminded.
Fuzzy logic
Since Tiger Woods is a “Cablinaisan,” is he free to insult every race?
By David Futrelle
in last week’s Seinfeld, Jerry’s dentist announced that he had converted to Judaism — and followed up this announcement with several jokes of the “two rabbis walk into a bar” variety. (Sample punchline: “Those aren’t matzo balls!”) Jerry was furious: He was convinced the dentist, a former Catholic, had converted just for the jokes.
The Seinfeld show was an illustration of what we might call the “Zero Degrees of Separation” theory of ethnic humor. That is, it’s OK for Woody Allen (and his Jewish dentist, if he has one) to make jokes about rabbis; it’s not OK for Louis Farrakhan to do the same; it’s OK for Eddie Murphy to make jokes about black men’s penises; it’s not OK for Mark Furhman.
Infractions of this rule are severely punished — particularly if the joke in question isn’t that funny. So when Fuzzy Zoeller let fly a couple of grossly stupid remarks about Tiger Woods, fried chicken and collard greens, he was doomed from the get-go.
After all, Americans of all shades had, in the immediate aftermath of Woods’ victory in the Masters, anointed the quiet young man a virtual saint (albeit the first one with a cushy endorsement deal with Nike). Blacks celebrated the victory of one of their own; so, for that matter, did Thais. “As he is a Thai, I’m proud to be a Thai also,” exclaimed Naris Ruabrat, the manager of an exclusive Bangkok golf club, talking to the Associated Press. “The Western press rarely mentions that he’s Asian,” another golfer at the club told the AP. “Americans like to say he’s American. Blacks like to say he is black. But Thais are proud of him as an Asian.”
Of course, no one was quite so excited about it all than us white folk. And though Woods is one-eighth Caucasian, they weren’t celebrating the victory of one of their own, they were celebrating the fact that none of their own had viciously attacked the young golfer of many colors. Imagine! A young black man (well, a more or less black man) strode confidently onto the greens of America’s top golf courses — and no one even called security, or asked him to bring them a drink! “On a windy Sunday in the Georgia hills that seemed to blow away sports and society forevermore, the clenched fist of Tiger Woods was a vision of triumph and, let’s hope, a bridge to a colorblind world,” gushed Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times. In the Washington Post, meanwhile, Michael Wilbon celebrated the happy fact that “a kid of African and Asian descent can be mobbed adoringly by a predominantly white audience in Georgia on land that used to be a slave plantation, and when the uniformed sons of the Confederate are offering a handshake instead of a billy club.”
Granted, the Augusta National golf club hosting the Masters reportedly has only two black members, and that most of the clenched black fists on the grounds are clutching mops, cleaning tables or carrying golf clubs other than their own. But still, white Americans didn’t let that spoil the fun. After all, they had a dream. A dream that one day on the greens of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners would be able to sit down together on the golf cart of brotherhood.
And then, of course, Fuzzy Zoeller opened his big fat uncontrollable mouth. Sportswriters around the country piled on Zoeller, who promptly and tearfully apologized; Kmart dropped him as a spokesman; NAACP President Kweisi Mfume denounced his remarks as “vicious and demeaning”; Woods himself, though accepting Zoeller’s apology, declared Zoeller’s “attempt at humor” to be”out of bounds.”
Lost in the media outrage over Zoeller was the simple fact that only a short time ago Woods himself had made a few, well, demeaning remarks of his own. In a briefly notorious interview with GQ, Woods told reporter Charles Pierce a bunch of dumb jokes, most of them dealing with the subject of black male penises, including one memorable anecdote referring to interracial oral sodomy and the Little Rascals. He also told a joke involving lesbians — who, he says, get places quickly because “they’re always going sixty-nine.” (My highly unscientific survey of one, er, representative of the lesbian community suggests the joke doesn’t exactly rank up there in offensiveness with Jerry Falwell’s recent remarks about “Ellen Degenerate.”)
Still, at least one journalist, Dave Anderson of the New York Times, made the connection between Zoeller’s unbridled tongue and Woods’ foray into humor — and he demanded an apology from Woods. Not for the lesbian joke, which clearly violates the “zero degrees of separation” rule, but for his remarks about African-American men. I am trying to imagine how that might go:
To: All African-America Males
From: Tiger WoodsDear Black Men:
I would like to humbly apologize for suggesting that your penises are extremely large. No man, black or white or any shade in between, wishes others to think that his schlong is comparable in size to that of Long Dong Silver. I recognize the shame and humiliation that you must have felt when, without thinking, I suggested that your whangers dangled down to your toes.
By the way, I would like to add that some of my best friends are black. My dad, for example.
Thank you,
Tiger Woods
P.S. Did you hear the one about Ellen DeGeneres and the lady golfer?
Still, perhaps Anderson has a point. After all, it’s not altogether clear that the “zero degree” rule applies to Woods, who doesn’t think of himself as “black.” Woods, a virtual Rainbow Coalition all by himself, labels himself a “Cablinasian”: one-eighth caucasian, one-fourth black, one-eighth American Indian, and one-half Asian (a mixture of Thai and Chinese). Does this sort of multicultural blending so water down his various ethnic heritages that he’s effectively prohibited from making any ethnic jokes at all? Or is he, rather, the only known person in the world (besides Don Rickles) who can make black jokes, Oriental jokes, Indian jokes and even honky jokes without getting punched in the nose?
I don’t know. All these percentages confuse me; I had no idea identity politics could get so complicated! But Woods should be able to figure out the math. After all, he’s one-half Asian, and we all know how good they are at that sort of thing.
Historical and exotic settings have always been a godsend to makers of soft-core erotica, especially when they want to appeal to audiences made squeamish by the slightest suggestion of sleaze. The same old inane plots, lavishly displayed flesh and coyly shot sex scenes that would offend the sensibilities of art house audiences if they were set in Sherman Oaks are touted as sensual, passionate and adult when the characters are, say, bohemian writers in 1920s Paris and wear lots and lots of scarves.
The difference, then, between Playboy Channel trash and highbrow Saturday night date film is really just a matter of outfits and locations. Mira Nair’s “Kama Sutra” succeeds ever so handsomely in both departments. The story is cheesy, the history dubious, the connection to India’s tradition of tantric meditation tenuous and the championing of “female sexuality” spurious — but, what the hell, it’s still pretty sexy.
The story concerns the schoolgirl rivalry between Tara, a princess, and a serving wench named Maya in 16th century India. Tara may be the pretty one, but Maya’s sultry ways tend to capture male attention. Maya, angry at having to make do with Tara’s hand-me-downs all her life, seduces her friend’s bridegroom the night before the wedding. Cast out of the palace afterwards, Maya takes up with a studly, long-haired sculptor and learns Kama Sutra techniques from a retired courtesan. When the sculptor goes all angsty and distant on her because he thinks a relationship will hinder his art, Maya consents to become head courtesan for the king who married Tara. Despite his dissolution and burgeoning opium problem, the king has never forgotten his night with Maya, and soon poor Tara feels like the odd girl out.
“Kama Sutra” looks gorgeous, from the obligatory scarves (in dozens of saturated colors) to the posh, cushion-lined interiors, to the graceful, statuesque women and their dashing menfolk. The hairstyles alone are worth paying seven bucks to see. Yes, it’s full of dumb lines like “There she is, my lotus woman!” and “You don’t know this, but you inspire all of my work,” but at least Indira Varma, as Maya, really does seem possessed of a mysterious, vixenish allure that transcends her otherwise ordinary good looks. And the midriff-baring beaded number she wears in one scene practically deserves a screen credit all its own.
“Kama Sutra” has nothing to do with the complex, codified Indian society of the actual historical period, just as any claims Nair makes to addressing the spiritual aspects of the real Kama Sutra are pure malarkey. This movie is your basic harem fantasy, easy on the explicit sex and dominance/submission dynamics, but lavish on the gauze, ambient sapphism and romance. There’s even a bare-chested wrestling scene between the king and Maya’s Fabio-esque sculptor beau — a bonus for the ladies, I guess. It’s only the jarring ending that strikes a gloomy, real-world note.
To assume that India’s history of erotic art and literature emerged from a society entirely comfortable with sex is a bit like looking at all the naked people in Western painting and deciding that we must be completely at ease with nudity. In fact, contemporary Indian cinema prohibits the depiction of the most modest sexual contact, even kissing, although rape is a commonplace narrative device. “Kama Sutra” itself has been bogged down in the certification process imposed by the Indian government’s censors for months and Nair had to go to court to get the film released in her homeland.
None of this affects the goofy, Never-Neverland appeal of the film itself, but it does undermine the liberal American tendency to imagine every other culture — the more exotic, the better — as less sexually repressed than our own. That’s as flagrant a fantasy as Nair’s blithe vision of seductive houris and handsome princes.
between the moment when an individual decides to become a fiction writer and the day he or she sells that first book lie some terrible years — a wasteland of self-doubt, false starts, flagging discipline and humiliating obscurity. Sometime in the 1960s, university creative writing programs stepped in to fill those years with structure, support and training. At least, that’s their stated intention. The literary world has been arguing for years over whether or not they succeed.
University fiction workshops, in which a group of students, led by a teacher, offer each other detailed critiques of their manuscripts, are usually, but not always, part of a two-year master of fine art degree-granting program. A number of highly regarded writers, including David Foster Wallace, Ethan Canin and Lorrie Moore, have graduated from such programs, and many ambitious young writers regard them as a necessary career steppingstone. But the programs have also been criticized for more than a decade. Critic John Aldridge best distilled the complaints in his 1994 book “Talents and Technicians: The New Assembly-Line Fiction.” One of Aldridge’s charges is that fiction workshops lead to a “cookie cutter” effect, prose “so bland, so competently but unexcitingly written, so interchangeable in style and substance that it very seldom stimulates a distinct response.”
In a recent issue of the Paris Review, several leading editors, including Grove-Atlantic’s Morgan Entrekin and TriQuarterly’s Reginald Gibbons, blasted workshops for producing work marked by what Gibbons called “the conventionality of its artistic choices.” Karl Wenclas, editor of the New Philistine, denounces workshop writing as “constipated, homogenized products … a putrid disease.”
the granddaddy of all gripes about workshops, however, is that they fostered the dominance of minimalism — or “Kmart Realism,” as novelist Tom Wolfe snidely called it — in American fiction. The arch-practitioner of the style, the late Raymond Carver, inspired a generation of writers whose work Aldridge condemns as “technically conservative … and often extremely modest in scope.” This is fiction full of lower-middle-class characters who light cigarettes, lean silently against their kitchen counters, and contemplate the anomie of their stifled lives and relationships. When critics and editors decry “workshop stories,” it’s this type of writing they’re referring to. (In its upper-class mode, this is what Entrekin calls “the ‘divorce and cancer in Connecticut’ school of fiction.”)
“Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops 1997,” a new annual series edited by John Kulka and Natalie Danford (with novelist Alice Hoffman as guest editor on this particular volume), may not contain much minimalism, but it’s unlikely to convince these critics. The editors culled these stories from “nearly 100 prestigious writing programs around the United States and Canada,” including the supposedly more adventurous and avant-garde programs at Johns Hopkins and Brown. Very few read like the stoic, spare prose of Raymond Carver or Ann Beattie. It seems that everyone knows better than that by now. But, with few exceptions, this isn’t remarkably inspired or memorable writing, certainly not “strikingly fresh” or “astoundingly diverse,” as Hoffman claims.
Frederick Busch, a seasoned novelist (“Girls”) who has taught at the University of Iowa’s famous Writers’ Workshop and at Columbia and who served as a judge for Granta magazine’s 20 Best American Novelists Under 40 competition, dismisses the quintessential “workshop story” as possessing “a laconic voice that says, ‘I’m not complaining, but I really am.’ There’s a searing moment or a memory of a searing moment. Then there’s an epiphany where they realize something about their entire life. The cellos come up, and we go out on a quiet, pensive note.” Ben Yalom, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, describes it as “psychological and small in scope.” Its focus is nearly always domestic.
If the Scribner’s anthology allows for a bit of stylistic variation — including the staccato stream-of-consciousness technique employed by Helen McGowan in “Chemistry” — it certainly toes the line when it comes to subject matter. Twelve of the 22 stories included here are about parent-child or sibling bonds (many with child protagonists); six center on marriage or primary romantic relationships. Only Adam Schroeder’s witty “The Distance Between Prague and New Orleans,” about a spoiled movie star’s efforts to claim his “heritage” in Czechoslovakia, feels like it was written from a more expansive perspective. Not coincidentally, it’s also the only genuinely funny story in the book.
This myopia plagues a lot of American fiction, but how much of the responsibility lies with writing programs? Yalom observes that Iowa “does have an ethos” that insists on “close attention to the words on the page, making sure they’re clear, comprehensible and unambiguous. The result, which is unintentional, can be that young people tend to become cautious in content as well as style.” And, as Glasgow Phillips, author of the novel “Tuscaloosa” and a veteran of Stanford’s creative writing program, points out, “To workshop a story, you need a common set of terms, and American realism is the most common and discussable style. You can ask, ‘Is the dialogue believable? Does the narrative arc resolve in a satisfying way?’”
Critiquing fiction containing elements of the fantastic often baffles many workshop participants. Yalom says he was perplexed that “the writers held up as models at Iowa — Robert Stone, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford — didn’t include some postmodern, international or magic realist writers who are some of the major novelists working today: Milan Kundera, Paul Auster, the Latin Americans. While I was there, I encountered only one person who was writing a historical novel, and a small handful who were doing research to bring into their work.” This despite the fact that readers, who have put even the sometimes difficult historical novels of Umberto Eco on bestseller lists, obviously love the stuff.
But even students at schools with more adventurous reputations complain of the rarefied environment at university writing programs. Alvin Lu earned his MFA at Brown, which “prides itself on not making everyone sound the same. But it has an ideology, the ideology of the avant-garde. I knew people there who wrote more conventional fiction, and they felt they couldn’t get an honest critique. Someone would suggest they cut their story up in seven pieces and rearrange it randomly.” If schools like Iowa concentrate on teaching students “craft,” which will help them write “publishable” work, at Brown the goal was “writing breakthrough, genius-level prose. You could learn craft there, but Brown was much more about how much of a genius you were.” Ultimately, Lu felt that he was “writing for about six people … I lost sense of a larger audience.”
Nevertheless, few graduates of writing programs consider the experience worthless. Perhaps perversely, most, like Yalom and Lu, found workshopping a honing process, one that taught them to take good criticism and to understand that most criticism isn’t worth taking. Phillips dropped out of the Stanford program after his first year “because who is anyone to tell me what they think about what I do? It’s just not for me.”
Even purportedly “homogenizing” programs like Iowa’s produce highly original writers like Denis Johnson, whose brooding, almost biblical fiction can hardly be called Kmart realism. Johnson, who has also taught at Iowa, thinks that the “sameness” in the work of some workshop graduates is “just temporary; the talented ones get over it.” What good programs do offer is an accelerated learning of the nuts and bolts of building fiction. “You have to put in an apprenticeship, as with any art,” says Busch. “A workshop can help them shorten their apprenticeship, which is a pretty good thing.” “It takes a lot of manipulation of language to make a story,” Johnson concurs. “You have to practice a lot. I didn’t get anywhere with prose until I’d written a couple of books worth of stuff.”
Everyone seems to agree that grant-making programs like Stanford’s Wallace Stegner fellowship are commendable. “It keeps people afloat for two years when, if the funding wasn’t there, they’d have to go out and get a job,” says Phillips. In a culture that strikes many as hostile to literary values, writing programs, as Johnson puts it, give beginning writers “some endorsement of the effort they’re making and of the idea of putting everything else aside to learn this hard thing. It offers a sense of community and camaraderie that we imagine existed in Paris in the ’20s, and which you don’t always find.” “It’s sad that things like literary community, which should happen in the real world,” Lu sighs, “only seem to happen in artificial academic environments.”
But if writing programs can make life easier for writers, they often infuriate “gatekeepers,” like editors, critics and award judges. Kate Moses, a reviewer, former editor at North Point Press and literary advisor to the grant-making Lannan Foundation, has done all three, and read hundreds of manuscripts and published novels over the years. “Writing programs are a bunch of crap,” she declares. “Almost anyone can be taught how to craft a musical sentence, but passion and something to say, these you can’t teach. There are only so many people who can soar above the multitudes. Writing programs make more people think they can and determined to try to do it publicly, whereas once people indulged that sort of thing privately.” The increased volume of “facile but mediocre” manuscripts and novels, she fears, makes it much harder for editors and critics to discover the “gems.”
Of course what constitutes a “gem” remains highly debatable. Alice Hoffman considers the stories in “Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Writing Workshops 1997″ to be “exciting,” the “debuts of important careers,” while the same work struck me as tepid. But if what Moses calls a “write what you know” ethos has led to “an age of waning imagination” in American fiction, it’s still possible to be riveted by a book whose premise sounds tired (like Frank McCourt’s memoir, “Angela’s Ashes”), provided the writer brings the sorcery of great storytelling to the table.
McCourt, however, has had nearly 60 years to polish his yarn-spinning skills. Johnson notes that writing programs can push fledgling writers into a premature professionalism. “They’re not themselves yet,” he observes of the twentysomethings who emerge with MFA in hand, fully expecting to publish immediately. Publishers look for young (and preferably good-looking) first novelists, because they make for
good press. Often enough, these writers, in Moses’ words, “haven’t found their voice yet, or, most of all, something to say.” Readers fascinated by young novelists often relish a romantic notion of fiction writing in the Jack Kerouac mode — the miraculous gushing of passionate genius fleetingly captured on paper between cross-country jaunts, sexual adventures and drinking binges, all the mediagenic pursuits of youth. In reality, as Johnson relates, novels are usually the result of years of practice, discipline and a certain amount of outright calculation.
Perhaps the biggest and most unsung benefit of writing programs is the fact that they offer a reliable income to older writers like Johnson and Busch, artists in their prime who don’t always attract the attention lavished on the Next Big Thing. In that case, there’s still cause for concern: Johnson says that while he was teaching at Iowa, the volume of problem-ridden manuscripts he read left him “confused” and unable to write more than a sentence. He even speculates that some novelists go into covert “retirement” by becoming instructors. “They’ve published their books, done what they wanted to do, and now they just want to teach, collect a paycheck and hang out with young people.”
In my opinion, one Denis Johnson story is worth more than the entire contents of “Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops 1997,” so it’s heartening to hear he keeps his teaching gigs to a minimum. “If you’re at a teachable stage, writing programs can be helpful,” he says, “but mostly you should just go someplace where it doesn’t cost much to live. That’s the secret: Quit your job.”
favorite movies, like certain songs — or, for that matter, the sense of smell — seem to slip in under our rational faculties and head directly for the most primal parts of our brains. It’s telling how many of the contributors to Salon’s latest Personal Best issue seek to pin down a mood, something almost as hard to describe as perfume. “Holiday,” one of Hollywood’s classic romantic comedies, makes Stephanie Zacharek sad, and “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” one of Robert Altman’s ’70s masterpieces, has a similar effect on Charles Taylor. “This is Elvis” made Gary Kaufman want to drive 100 miles an hour, and “Psycho” gave Mary Elizabeth Williams a permanent case of the unholy Freudian creeps. We all know that each of these is “only a movie,” but sometimes film works so much like a drug it makes you marvel that the stuff is legal.
But unlike drugs, movies have an effect that’s so unpredictable and idiosyncratic that a concept like Personal Best seems the only way to write about them. For an art form so saddled with numbers (budgets, box office grosses, video sales) and technical terminology (dolly shots, fades, steadicams), film is, ultimately, sheer voodoo — what really matters is whether or not you believe. At Salon, we’ve argued, and heatedly, about movies like “Leaving Las Vegas,” “Breaking the Waves” and “Lone Star” over the past year and a half, the Fors and Againsts eyeing each other across the table with a mixture of bewilderment, derision and hurt. This stuff really is personal. Perhaps that’s why top 10 lists consistently fascinate us even though they vary wildly and it’s simply impossible to name the “best” moves of the year, let alone of all time. Reading those lists is really just a covert way of snooping around in other people’s fantasies. Our choices reveal more about us than they do about the movies themselves.
When you’re done, we’d like to recommend Salon’s previous two Personal Best issues, on music and books.
JON CARROLL:
ALL OF ME
DWIGHT GARNER:
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
GARY KAMIYA:
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
GARY KAUFMAN:
THIS IS ELVIS
LAURA MILLER:
THE THIRD MAN
JOYCE MILLMAN:
THE KING OF COMEDY
SCOTT ROSENBERG:
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
ANDREW ROSS:
DAYS OF HEAVEN
JENN SHREVE:
DELICATESSEN
CHARLES TAYLOR:
MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER
MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS:
PSYCHO
CINTRA WILSON:
NETWORK
STEPHANIE ZACHAREK:
HOLIDAY
i first saw Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” on late-night television, during one of the spates of classic film watching with which I whiled away my early teens. It struck me as startlingly real, defying both the dreamy, confected world of the rest of the ’30s and ’40′s movies I’d been devouring and the sullen, rebellious romanticism film had inherited from the ’60s. It seemed like the creation of a sensibility terribly old and wise, and most of all very European; it was the very essence of world-weary sophistication. In it, Holly Martins, an American author of pulp westerns — played by Joseph Cotten, tall, brash and handsome — arrives in post-World War II Vienna expecting to meet an old buddy, Harry Lime. Lime, it turns out, has just been killed in an automobile accident, and Martins decides there’s something fishy about the situation, something that only a bright, irreverent Yankee has the wherewithal to uncover.
Based on Graham Greene’s novel, with a screenplay also written by Greene, “The Third Man” boasts his trademark of moral confusion coupled with a devious plot. Reed gives the movie a weird, exhausted, paranoid atmosphere in which the rest of the characters observe Holly’s “investigation” with the impassive tolerance of adults humoring a deluded child. The skewed frames; the gnomish middle-aged Viennese with their myriad secrets, tiny dogs and fussy clothes; the inky, cobblestone streets and the interiors — whether battered or ornate, they’re always strangely hollow — combine to make a menacing, alien environment where Holly is immediately, and obliviously, over his head.
As Harry, Orson Welles shows how easily Holly’s energy and initiative could curdle into evil if only he were a bit smarter, too smart in fact, for anyone’s good. Harry’s satanic charm — he gets the movie’s best speech, a jaunty bit about the art of the Medicis vs. the Swiss and their cuckoo clocks — gives the movie just enough additional gas to power it through its famous sewer chase with that gorgeous, indelible shot of Harry’s fingers reaching through the grate.
Holly may be the protagonist of “The Third Man” (such a movie could never have a “hero,” or for that matter even an “antihero”), but (Alida) Valli, as Anna, Harry’s grieving lover, is its soul. Playing a principled woman who learns that the man she loved was entirely bad, and that even this doesn’t matter in the end, Valli has a dignity seldom afforded to women in movies — her inner life surpasses those of the men around her. If the bruised-little-boy heart of noir finally grew up, it might wear a face as beautiful and sad as hers. The sewer chase may be the most famous sequence in “The Third Man,” but I’ve always remembered her cool, solitary walk down the long graveyard road at the movie’s end, her deliberate indifference to Holly’s offer of comfort. It’s the walk of a woman who knows herself, however painful that knowledge, and she stands taller than any cowboy.
