Alvah's Books

[Editor's Note: As I wrote in the previous post, this is Alvah Bessie's response to Maltz's article, “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” Special thanks goes to Dan Bessie for all his help in bringing this article to my attention.]

What is Freedom for Writers?

By Alvah Bessie,

The New Masses, March 12, 1946

Alvah Bessie, novelist, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, currently working in Hollywood, is the author of the article below, on the issues that have arisen since the publication of the article by Albert Maltz several weeks ago.

Albert Maltz’s recent article (NM February 12) would not have been half so astonishing had it appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature, a publication that is forced by its very nature as an organ of bourgeois tought perpetuate the utterly baseless categories Maltz resurrects in his article.

Let us first examine his overlying thesis, a cliché with which anyone can readily agree: that left-wing criticism in America for too long a time tended to be too narrow, doctrinaire and paralyzing in its effects on both writers and critics. As a former critic for NM who suffered acutely under its sectarian approach to books, plays, and motion pictures, I can utter a fervent Amen to Maltz’s attack.

At the same time it is possible to contend that Maltz is beating a dying horse, for there is more than ample evidence that the Left has been building—slowly and painfully as must be—a sounder Marxist approach to the arts. (The sounder the party of Marxism becomes, the sounder will be its approach to the arts, as well as its approach to the people.)

What is more important, however, is the fact that the approach Maltz castigates, narrow as it was, was never erected into a principle. We have had good Marxists who were bad critics and vice versa (and we still have both), but I cannot remember anyone ever insisting, in the name of Marxism, that art works of any category were automatically to be praised because they said the “right” thing or damned because they said the “wrong” –irrespective of their attributes.

What is so astonishing Maltz’s article, however, after he has disposed of this moth-eaten straw man, is the fact that his basic contentions are not only in-Marxist, but actually anti-Marxist. Perhaps I do Maltz a disservice in this associating him with Marxism, for he nowhere identifies himself in his article as anything more than “a working writer,” whatever that may be. He nowhere states his frame of reference or identifies the point of departure from which he launches what is, objectively, not only an attack on Marxism but a defense of practically every renegade writer of recent years who ever flirted with the working class movement: Farrell, Wright, Fearing. (And why not John Dos Passos?)

The un-Marxist character of Maltz’s approach is revealed in the almost endless series of idealist categories into which he divides writers and writing: “artistic activity” and “journalism”; the social “social novelist” and the “political novelist” and perhaps, by extension, the “working” novelist; the writer “qua citizen”; works written for an “immediate political end” and works written, presumably, for eternity.

I think a Marxist would contend that these categories are idealist, unreal, and basically reactionary. I think a Marxist would contend that when Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath he was at least under the influence of working class ideas—and people; that the served him as powerful inspiration, gave him a springboard into a work that served both “an immediate political end” and the questionable standards of “eternity.”

Now it is common knowledge that not only Steinbeck but also Farrell, Wright, Fearing, and Dos Passos have consciously repudiated the working class movement; all have found a place, or hope to find a place, in the very bosom of a class they once affected to despise. And the contention could be supported with every kind of evidence that not one of them has written anything since that repudiation that is worth reading—either “artistically” or “politically.” (And I include in this Black Boy, which, whatever the obvious distortions of Native Son, cannot hold a candle to that work, in either depth of conception, scope or penetration.) This is not a question of “literary taste”—nor do I understand what Maltz is talking about when he opposes literary taste to “an immediate political utility.” Did Grapes of Wrath possess both immediate political utility and literary taste? Or didn’t it? Did The Silent Don? Or even The Cross and the Arrow?

But the attempt to perpetuate these idealist categories (a daily phenomenon in the literary columns of The New York Times) leads Maltz to dangerous conclusions: that an “artist” is a self-contained phenomenon whose “art” bears no “inevitable, consistent connection” with what the artist thinks or believes. An artist may be “confused, or even stupid and reactionary in his thinking” and still do “good, even great work” as an artist.

This sort of thinking is a product of the bourgeois concept that regards artists as sacred idiots who should be protected from popular anger even when they are fascist traitors (Ezra Pound)—but Maltz himself told us (NM, Dec. 25, 1945) that Pound “is more guilty because he is a poet.” And yet he echoes the concept that says, “You don’t have to have any brains” to be an actor, a writer, dancer, painter, composer; all you have to have is talent—whatever the hell that is—and you should be “free’ to create without it being “incumbent upon [you] that [you] relate [your] broad philosophic or emotional humanism to a current and transient political tactic.”

Maltz quotes us Engles on Balzac, who was a great writer and a “reactionary” at the same time. Well, what about Balzac? He was a monarchist at a time when the rising bourgeoisie of France was the historically progressive class; that made him a reactionary, for his time. He loathed, hated and despised the power of money and the corruption of his own beloved aristocracy, whom he castigated more bitterly than the shopkeepers, merchants and bankers themselves. What is more, to quote Engels’ famous letter to Miss Harkness: “And the only men of whom he speaks with undisguised admiration are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloitre Saint-Merri, the men who at the time (1830 -1836) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses.”

If this is true then it is not enough to catalog Balzac as a reactionary and thus “prove” that it is possible to be a reactionary and a great writer at the same time, Q.E.D. To do so is to remove Balzac from his historical context and to isolate the word reactionary as though it were a constant, equally applicable to all times, places and persons. For it has frequently happened that what was progressive yesterday is reactionary today and vice versa.

Balzac was a monarchist in a period when industrial proletariat was practically nonexistent. Can Maltz cite us a monarchist writer today who could at the same time be a “great” writer? Today’s ultra-reactionaries are fascists. The proletariat rules a country covering one-sixth the land surface of the globe. Can Maltz cite us a fascist writer who is “great”? Will he contend that it is even possible for a fascist to write a great novel when the mere fact of being a fascist premises an attitude toward human beings that makes it categorically impossible for a person to see or write the truth about anything?

No one will deny the possibility of a writer coming out of the mountains of Wyoming, never having heard of Karl Marx in his entire life, and still writing a book that will be great—because he has profoundly observed, deeply felt and honestly and felicitously set down what he has seen. But if it is true that Marxist historical materialism can equip the writer with an insight into human relations that is more valid than that provided by any other philosophy of life, that it can be denied that a writer, having once accepted that philosophy and then repudiated it (talent being equal), will thereafter write anything possessing the validity of the work he wrote under the influence of that philosophy.

I am not saying here that a bad writer automatically becomes a good one when he becomes a Communist; nor am I saying that a writer who is not a Communist is necessarily a bad writer. But I am saying that there is a correlation between the quality of a writer’s work and his grasp of human history. And I am proceeding from the assumption that a sound understanding of Marxist theory and practice will provide a writer with a sounder grasp of human history—which is human character.

What Maltz actually seems to be saying when he defends such pipsqueak talents as Farrell, Fearing and Blankfort is that the trouble with them is not that they are minor writers who never developed but that Marxism itself, applied as a critique to their work at the time they fondly imagined themselves of the Left, stunted their development. They failed because we failed to appreciate them, nourish them, praise them, tolerate their peculiar political, social and personal vagaries!

The facts simply will not support such a contention. Not one of them was major talent to begin with—and neither was Dos Passos. But it is a fact that when they were on the periphery of the Left, when they themselves—for the moment—placed their work at the service of the working class, they wrote better than they ever wrote before or have written since. And the same is true of Clifford Odets—the only real talent of them all—who, since he became separated from the people he new best, loved best, and whose interests he attempted to defend (as an artist and a man), has “gone downhill”—both as an artist and a man. For the artist and the man are inseparable, and there is “a commanding relationship between the way an artist votes and any particular he writes.” It may not be immediately evident in “any particular work” but it is evident in the totality of his work, and Maltz himself is an example of this relationship.

Maltz springs of the middle class, yet in the depression he first made an identification with the working class and he has maintained that identification.

The stories he wrote in the thirties are instinct with a true—if scarcely profound—understanding of the people who suffered most during that crises. In The Underground StreamMaltz wrote a poor novel. It is not, however, a poor novel because it possessed immediate political expediency—in frankly asking sympathy and understanding for the auto workers and their Communist leader. It was a poor novel simply because Maltz did not profoundly understand either the Communist leader, his party, the workers he was trying to lead or their antagonists. So the characters become well-intentioned stereotypes (the workers), and the fascist became a rubber stamp.

The Cross and the Arrowhas many of the faults of The Underground Stream, in its earnest and uninspired attempt to understand project people with whom its author is really unfamiliar. And while it deals with one of the crucial issues of our time (political expediency) its faults spring from an imperfect (a synthetic and researched) examination of the German people under Hitler. And its virtues—which are far greater than any Maltz displayed in his earlier work—spring from the growing maturity of the writer, both as a man, a novelist, and a student of politics. This is a contradiction which is the essence of the truth about Maltz.

For there are no constants—in the individual or in society. We cannot say, “This is a social novel,” this is “art” and this is “journalism” (Paine was a journalist—and he was an artist, Ehrenbourg is an artist—and he is a journalist. So is Aragon). Should “a new headline in the newspapers” cause a writer to rewrite a novel? No—if it is a headline and nothing more. Yes—if the “headline” involves a fundamental reorientation of human history. So far as the American Communist movement is concerned, the Duclos letter was not a headline. Neither was it a strategy or “a current and transient political tactic,” to which a Communist writer must willy-nilly “relate his broad philosophic or emotional humanism.”

For if we should accept Maltz’s contention that we all need ask of writers is that they work “deeply, truly, honestly recreating a sector of human experience” within “the great humanistic tradition of culture” (whatever that may be), then surely there is no need for a Communist Party so far as writers are concerned, and certainly there is no for them to join it, for it would only cramp their style. By the same token, there is no need for the Party or even a trade union, so far as workers are concerned, if we only ask them to behave themselves, keep their noses clean, live deeply, truly and honestly—and if they will only do so.

I do not mean to vulgarize Albert Malt’s approach to this complicated problem or offer ready-made solutions for it. But this is what he seems to be asking for in his article—“freedom” for the artist to “create” irrespective of party working-class needs, aspirations and criticisms. “Let them leave us alone,” he seems to say, “to work deeply, truly and honestly, and we will automatically write the truth.” This is nonsense, but it follows inevitably from the separations Maltz makes between the artist qua artist and the artist qua citizen.

No. We need more than “free” artists. We need “Party” artists. We need artists deeply, truly and honestly rooted in the working class who realize the truth of Lenin’s assertion that the absolute freedom that they seek “is nothing but a bourgeois or anarchist phase (for ideologically an anarchist is just a bourgeois turned inside out). It is impossible to live in a society and yet be free from it. The freedom of the bourgeois writer, artist, or actress is nothing but a self-deceptive (or hypocritically deceiving) dependence upon the money bags, upon bribery, upon patronage.” Lenin wrote these words in 1905 and they still touch the very heart of the liberal dilemma.

We need writers who will joyfully impose upon themselves the discipline of understanding and acting upon working-class theory, and they are the writers who will possess the potentialities of creating a truly free literature.

“This literature will be free,” said Lenin, “because rather than careerism and pecuniary motives it will be the socialist cause and sympathy with the workers that will draw ever new forces into its ranks. This literature will be free because it will serve not the overfed heroine, not the overweight and bored ‘upper ten thousand,’ but the millions and tens of millions of workers who are the flower of the country, its strength, its future.”

And this is what we shall ask of writers. And in time we will get it.

As part of the June tribute to Alvah Bessie, I’ve been posting a few of his book reviews, and for the remaining part of the month, I’ll be posting my own reviews of his books. However, I’m feeling a little mischievous and I thought I would mix things up a bit and even stir up some controversy by including a piece  that the late Albert Maltz (screenwriter and Hollywood Ten associate) wrote in February 1946 in The New Masses, “What Shall We Ask of Writers” and follow it up with Bessie’s response.

Below is a summary that was borrowed (okay, taken) from the 1946 Communist Review via Reason in Revolt. This will give readers some context when they read Bessie’s article that appeared later in March 1946. Below is essentially an annotated version of Maltz’s position

SUMMARY OF THE “NEW MASSES”

CONTROVERSY ON ‘”WHAT SHALL WE ASK OF WRITERS?”

MAX BROWN

Maltz commences his argument by defining its limits. He says, “the left wing has also offered a number of vital intellectual assets to the writer . . . Schneider enumerated these assets and 1 take them here for granted.” Within such limits Maltz states a case which abbreviate by the following selections:

1. “To the degree that works of art reflect or attack these values (i.e., class values), it is broadly -not always specifically-true to say that works of art have been and can be weapons in men’s thinking and therefore in the struggle of social classes.”

2. ‘ . . . . as interpreted in practice for the last fifteen years of the left wing in America, it (i.e., the concept ‘art is a weapon’) has become a hard rock of narrow thinking . . . . the nature of art-how art may best be a weapon …. has been slurred over. 1 have come to believe that the accepted understanding of art as a weapon is not a useful guide but a straitjacket . . . . Finally in practice it has been understood to mean that unless art is a weapon like a leaflet, serving immediate political ends, necessi-ties and programmes, it is worthless or escapist or vicious.”

3. “… under the domination of this vulgarised approach, creative works are judged primarily by the formal ideology.”

4. ‘… from this type of thinking comes the approach which demands of each written work that it contain ‘the whole truth….. This …. demand rests upon the psychological assumption that readers coma to each book with an empty head.”

5. “A creative writer … works intellectually in an atmosphere in which the critics. the audience, the friends he respects-while revering art-actu-ally judge works on the basis of their immediate political end. If the end is good, it would be absurd to say that this may not be socially useful … but he is led by his goal into idealistic conceptions of character, into wearing rose-colored glasses which will permit him to see in life that which he wishes to find in order to prove his thesis.”

6. “I am convinced that the work-in-progress of an artist who is deeply, truly, honestly recreating a sector of human experience, need not be affected by a change in the political weather.”

7. “In his appreciation of Balzac Engels understood two facts about art: First, the writer qua citizen making an election speech, and the writer qua artist, writing a novel, is performing two very different acts. Second, Engels understood that a writer may be confused or even stupid or reactionary in his thinking – and yet it is possible for him to do good, oven great work as an artist – work that serves even ends he despises. This point is critical for the understanding of art and artists I”

8. “Writers must be judged by their work, and not by the committees they join.”

9. “The political convictions of a writer or his lack of political convictions may have something to do with his growth or creative decline. Writing is a complex process . . . . There are many, many reasons why writers grow and sometimes retrogress.”

10. “The great humanistic tradition of culture has always been on the side of progress. The writer who works within this tradition-is writing a political work in the broadest meaning of the term.”

Such is Maltz’ main thesis. In the same issue Isidore Schneider, New Masses Literary Editor, takes no exception to any of the above statements, but does stress the positive achievement of left criticism in establishing the analysis of the social relationships of a work of art as a standard critical procedure, against the bitter opposition of the American ruling class.

TWO FINGERS AND A THUMB, by Dan Bessie

With just those three digits my Pop (we never called him Dad, Father, or Alvah), pecked out, during his 65 year writing life, six novels, three book length works of non-fiction, several translations from the French, dozens of shorts stories, perhaps a dozen screenplays, hundreds of articles, poems, theater pieces, speeches (to be delivered by himself and others), and countless book, theater and film reviews, flyers, leaflets, essays and newspaper copy. And he edited two anthologies. In a career that began during high school with indignant letters to the New York Times, blasting hunters who callously shot American eagles, to an affectionate piece on his pet Iguana Jaime (written a few years before his ancient typewriter was stilled), Pop’s literary output dealt almost exclusively, as does that of many writers, with what he knew, or what intimately concerned him.

He had initially hoped for a career dealing with reptiles and amphibians. But when a departmental head at New York’s Museum of Natural History let him know- after he’d spent weeks misclassifying 7,826 specimens of Hyla crucifer (the spring peeper), that “You don’t a scientific mind, Alvah,” he gave it up. And went on to author, among so much other writing:

A first book, of which writer and editor Whit Burnett (who he met in Paris in 1928) said, “That was a novel. Full of humor and young love which became, we think, slightly contaminated due to the indiscretions of the young protagonist’s merry old aunt.” Pop never did tell me what caused him to finally burn the manuscript instead of submitting it to a publisher. Was it because he passed out from the immense “glass washtub” of Spatenbrau he downed at the Café Balzar one evening? Or perhaps he decided that since he himself was the young protagonist, and his cousin’s mother, Ella, the model for the merry old aunt, he’d be revealing too many purple family secrets?

Dwell in the Wilderness: his first published novel (and best in my view), tracing the life of a Michigan family from 1876 to 1925, was culled from my mother’s memories during a long Vermont winter that she and Pop spent “gracefully starving to death” (as he once put it), and closely details my mother’s early life and those of her parents and brothers. (Some in her family were not too happy with the portrait.)

Men in Battle / Alvah Bessie’s Spanish Civil War Notebooks (the latter published posthumously, and on which Men in Battle is based), detail his 1938 experience, along with other American and international volunteers, opposing Franco’s revolt against the Spanish Republic. Gritty and honest, the memoir and notebooks reveal his hope to return alive, and his eagerness to shed himself of a privileged early life by submerging himself in a body of ordinary men championing a cause. Hemingway, who Pop (as both a foot soldier and as a front line reporter) met in Spain, called Men in Battle “A true, honest book … Bessie writes finely of all that he could see of it and he saw enough for one man.”

Bread and a Stone: once again drawing on my mother’s life, this time Pop, who appears in the novel as brother-in-law Bill Hogan, recounts a Pennsylvania case in which Mom’s new husband (she and my father had been divorced for three years) is tried for a murder committed during a muddled armed robbery, carried out in an effort to keep our family’s head above water during the last days of the Great Depression.

Objective Burma: an original story for Warner Brothers, for which Pop received an Oscar nomination, the film finds Errol Flynn leading a troop of American soldiers on a search and destroy mission against a Japanese radar facility. The character of a middle-aged journalist clearly represents Pop. (Shown in London, the audience pelted the screen with rotten vegetables, because it was well known that Allied activity in Burma was strictly a British operation.)

The Heart of Spain: an anthology of writing about the Spanish Civil War. This fine collection, edited by my father, and introduced by Dorothy Parker, includes work by such writers as Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Martha Gellhorn, Frederico Garcia Lorca and Lillian Hellman – as well as by many veterans of the war, including Pop. Significantly, Hemingway isn’t included; because at that point the American vets who had volunteered for Spain felt that his For Whom the Bell Tolls was a dishonest view of the war.

The UnAmericans: drawn from his experience in Spain and that during the witch-hunt period, this somewhat didactic work (as I consider it retrospectively) melds several former Communist Party comrades (among them, CBS correspondent Winston Burdett), with non-communist individuals Pop knew (such as journalist Vincent Sheean) into the fictionalized informer Frances Xavier Lang. Ben Blau, the novel’s protagonist, combines several veterans my father knew (principally Joe Hecht and Aaron Lopoff) with aspects of his own personality.

Inquisition in Eden: a straightforward, often amusing, sometimes revealing and always colorful account of Pop’s two year internment as a screenwriter at “Warners concentration camp,” followed by his ten-month incarceration at the Federal Correctional Institute in Texarkana, Texas, for Contempt of Congress, following his appearance before the House Committee on UnAmerican activities.

The Symbol: though not terribly successful at marriage, Pop often had an uncanny knack of getting into the minds of women for whom he had great sympathy. In this case Marilyn Monroe is the thinly disguised subject, in the person of movie star Wanda Oliver. Trashed by several reviewers, writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn nevertheless felt that “Bessie has accomplished a superb feat of the imagination by inventing a woman who is not a man-made puppet; she is a breathing female, alive on her own. That is a magical achievement and cannot be explained. It has happened.”

One for my Baby: the Night Box stands in for San Francisco’s legendary hungry i. Headlining comedian Dr. Sour is a composite of the hungry i’ mainstay, “Professor” Irwin Corey – along with Aaron Sussman, an aesthetic young man Pop had known as a youth. Jose “Pepe” Gonzales, the proprietor, is loosely modeled on hungry i owner Enrico Banducci. And the character of Dan Noble, a blacklisted actor who announces the acts, is Pop himself. (He later wrote an excellent screenplay based on the novel. It has never been filmed.)

Alvah Bessie’s Short Fictions / The Serpent Was More Subtil (that’s the Biblical spelling), comes full circle, combining my father’s youthful and often hysterical misadventures as an aspiring herpetologist, with several of his early short stories. Fictionalizing himself as Julian Leonard, the thinly disguised Serpent memoir also reveals a great deal about life in the Bessie family, including Pop’s dislike (that’s too mild a word) of his stuffy and conservative father.

With the exception of a few comments herein, I don’t feel it’s my job to analyze Pop, my relationship with him, or his writing. But I can honestly say that I’ve enjoyed his work, and found him to be an unusually skilled and often perceptive writer. (And once in a while a less than adequate one.)

In spite of our occasional differences, the angst that crops up now and then between fathers and sons (or mothers and daughters), I’m enormously proud of the part he played in the drama of our times; of his standing shoulder to shoulder with the Spanish people in their fight against fascism, and for the courageous and self-sacrificing position he took against our own native reactionaries. Not too many sons can say that. It pleases me that I can.

And that the vast majority of his creative life was accomplished with just two fingers and a thumb is something I find quite astonishing.

About Dan Bessie
Dan Bessie began his film career in 1956, with MGM’s animation department. Later staff and freelance assignments saw him contributing to TV cartoon series such as Spiderman, Lineus the Lionhearted, and Mr. McGoo, Moving on to educational films, he wrote, produced and, or, directed more than 125 titles, including several award winners. In 1973 he co-produced Executive Action (Burt Lancaster), a dramatic feature dealing with the assassination of JFK. From 1979 until 1995 he was a partner in Shire Films of Santa Cruz, California, writing and directing the feature Hard Traveling (New World Pictures, 1986), and Turnabout: the Story of the Yale Puppeteers (PBS,1993)., along with Peter and the Wolf, The Ugly Duckling and Beware the Jabberwock (all starring Ray Bolger), which appeared on CBS, HBO, Showtime and the Disney Channel. Author of the family memoir Rare Birds (University Press of Kentucky, 2000) and Reeling Through Hollywood (Blue Lupin Press, 2006), detailing his 40 years in film, Dan also critiques and consults on screenplays and novels, and takes freelance assignments as a writer and cartoonist. With his wife Jeanne Johnson, also a writer, he lives in southwestern France.

From The Washington Post:

The Origins of a Novel
By Colm Toibin

In the summer of 1967 when I was 12, my father died. For a month or more the house in the evening was filled with people, but by September, when I had gone back to school, things were quieter. People called in ones, in twos, to express their sympathy to my mother. They usually came in the evening, stayed for an hour or so, then left. My brother and I wanted this to stop because the television was in the room where they sat talking. I hardly ever went into that room while there were visitors. But one evening I did, and heard an interesting story being told.

A woman was talking to my mother, talking on and on, about Brooklyn where her daughter had been. I began to listen. She’d never been to our house before and was never, as far as I remember, a visitor again. I saw her on the street sometimes; she was a small, stout, dignified-looking woman who always wore a hat. It was almost 40 years later before I took what I had heard, just the bones of a story about her daughter who had gone to Brooklyn and then come home, and began making a novel from it.

To read the rest of the article click on the title.

Go Ahead. Spoil My Appetite.

The idea of this essay came about by a thread on literary mash ups on the Writing Forum at the Internet Writing Workshop concerning Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. After reading some of the comments, I thought it would be interesting to have two essays, one pro and the other con about mash ups.

Contributing writer, Victoria Mixon, penned the essay analyzing (leaning on the pro side)  the genre. The writer who started the thread and was stridently against it, never responded to my note asking her to write the “con.”  Below is Victoria’s essay, and I’d like to add that Wide Sargasso Sea is now on my reading list.

Literary Mashing, or Zombies Don’t Dance by Victoria Mixon

One of the best-known and most beautiful literary mash-ups in the literature of any language must be Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.

Jean Rhys, if you don’t know, was a writer of peculiarly lovely prose and desolate perspective. She was born and raised in the Caribbean in the 1890s in a generations-old British colonial family and traveled to England in her late teens to more or less “start her life”. She tried to establish a career in the theater and wound up in traveling stock, working hard and earning peanuts. When she became the mistress of a young professional man in London, it took no great brains to realize this was a far more comfortable life than that of an itinerant chorus girl. This was around 1910. You can guess what happened when the young professional man got tired of her.

Rhys’ life followed a predictable trajectory, punctuated by her sporadic attempts to get a grip on it. She drifted in and out of relationships with young professional men who supported her for as long as they felt like it and dropped her when they lost interest. Her finances were never even faintly secure. She married and for a few years lived the high life in Vienna and Paris, had two children, one of whom died in infancy, and was unceremoniously dumped back into poverty when her husband was arrested and banished from the country. The marriage wasn’t working, she wanted to be a writer, but she had no profession. The powerful British writer Ford Madox Ford and his wife took her under their wing and, in short order (according to Rhys), into their marriage.

It was Ford who helped Rhys get the first of her four slender early novels published. But it was a much later fan of her work who, in the 1960s, tracked down the alcoholic and reclusive Rhys and learned that she’d written but never published a literary masterpiece, the gorgeous and bleak Wide Sargasso Sea.

Wide Sargasso Sea is the unforgettable story of a woman much like Rhys, born Creole in the Caribbean in the 1800s and taken to England with no real concept of the 19th-century English, of their prejudices against their colonial families and particularly those of mixed race, or of what life in England was really like. Rhys’ heroine, like herself, is immediately taken advantage of by a man born to all the privileges of upper-class masculine British dominance. She is first romanced, then rejected, and finally brutally controlled, entirely through her female lack of social power, even though her weakness doesn’t include lack of money. She is, in fact, used for her inheritance. Eventually–unlike Rhys–her heroine is psychologically destroyed by the cruelty of her life. In the end it makes perfect sense to both writer and reader that she chooses suicide as her only escape.

The authenticity of Rhys’ voice, her chilling understanding of her heroine’s history and doom, and the beauty of her language make Wide Sargasso Sea a milestone in the ranks of literature.

Now, you might well wonder what this has to do with literary mash-ups. Rhys was an original, a genius, someone to be mashed. All of which is indubitably true.

But she was a masher.

Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Jane Eyre’s famous competition for the hand of Mr. Rochester, the original madwoman in the attic, the violent and lunatic Caribbean-born Mrs. Bertha Rochester.

Jean Rhys mashed Charlotte Bronte.

Interestingly enough, Charlotte Bronte herself was a masher. She mashed her brilliant (and superior) sister Emily Bronte when she rewrote sections of Wuthering Heights for its re-publication after her sister’s death. She even rewrote Emily’s extraordinary poetry, over Emily’s vehement opposition, after Emily was dead and could no longer object. Charlotte “clarified it”, meaning she altered lines and added stanzas of heavy-handed explanation to what Emily left ephemeral. Then Charlotte re-published it under Emily’s name. How’s that for mashing with a vengeance?

Admittedly, the vast majority of literary mash-ups are garbage, many of them puerile and insulting garbage.

Believe me, I’ve got no fondness for the staggering amount of porn out there masquerading as “sequels” to beloved classics like Pride and Prejudice, and I certainly haven’t made up my mind whether or not to even bother reading the recent version involving zombies. I’ve decided to wait and let Rebeca advise me on that. I read Wicked, the mash-up of the inimitable The Wizard of Oz, and lived to rue the day. And don’t get me started on the subject of laziness and fan fiction.

But Shakespeare mashed both popular and lesser-known stories of his time, and everyone from Tom Stoppard to Gus Van Sant and Billy Morrissette has since then mashed Shakespeare, often with brilliant results.

Robert A. Heinlein mashed The Wizard of Oz, Gulliver’s Travels, and Doc Smith’s Lensman series, among other great literary works, many of them in the single classic science fiction novel, The Number of the Beast.

Edward Eager deliberately mashed seven well-known children’s books in his own children’s classic Seven-Day Magic as a technique for encouraging children to read his favorites.

Literary mashing has produced not only invaluable additions to the literary canon, but also vast numbers of parodies, many of them outstanding.

Kurt Vonnegut actually mashed himself.

Flannery O’Connor (who, so far as I know, never mashed anybody) coined one of the most inarguable aphorisms in literature when she said, “It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.”

Mash if you must. Mash if you dare. But understand before you begin that mashing a beloved classic earns you the automatic opposite of a fanbase: a hatebase. You must overcome not only readers’ indifference to you as an unknown or only-marginally-known writer, but also their active hostility toward anyone who messes with their beloved.

Readers are not to be trifled with.

In mashing—as in so much of life—some aspiring writers need to learn this the hard way.

~~~~~~~

Victoria Mixon is a professional writer and editor who has worked in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for over thirty years. She co-authored the nonfiction Children and the Internet: A Zen Guide for Parents and Educators, Prentice Hall, 1996, and has published pieces in various literary magazines. She freelances as an editor for fiction authors and writes articles on the art of fiction at www.victoriamixon.com

A Look Back at LOLITA by Randall Radic

In one of the most beautiful places on earth, or at least in Europe, is one of the most beautiful ‘walks’. Kind of like the boardwalk at Santa Barbara, California, or the cement sidewalk along Mission Beach near La Jolla, California. Only much longer. The ‘walk’ goes all the way from Villeneuve to Vevey. Along the way you pass the Place du Marche’. And there, disconcerting to some and admired by others, stands a statue of a rock star. Freddy Mercury, facing the brilliant blue waters of Lake Geneva. And why not? The rock band Deep Purple made the city famous in their song ‘Smoke on the Water’.

The city is Montreux, Switzerland. Numerous small villages surround Montreux, including La Tour-de-Peilz, Clarens, Territet, and Villeneuve.

The grave marker is large and rectangular, cut from a single piece of purplish stone. The façadeof the stone is very rough, like just-poured cement that hasn’t been smoothed. Behind the marker, carefully trimmed, stands a hedge of white oleanders, flat-faced with flowers. In front of the grave marker is a single, double-wide slab of cement, which covers the graves. The slab is smooth and surrounded by green grass and flowering plants.

This is the Cimitiere de Clarens, the Cemetery of Clarens, Clarens being one of the villages near Montreux.

The two names engraved on the rough face of the purplish stone are Vladimir Nabokov, and just below it, in somewhat smaller font, Vera Nabokov. Vladimir and his wife, Vera, lived in a suite at the Montreux Palace Hotel from 1960 until 1977. They now live together in a somewhat smaller suite in the Cemetery Clarens.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov wrote many novels, including the controversial Lolita, and demonstrated how a memoir should be written in his Speak, Memory, which may be the best memoir ever produced. Nabokov was also an accomplished lepidopterist, and a master of chess.

His childhood, which he himself called “perfect,” was spent in St. Petersburg (Stalingrad), Russia. The family spoke three languages, Russian, English and French on a daily basis, and enjoyed the privileged lifestyle of their aristocratic heritage.

With the revolt of 1917, the blue-blooded Nabokovs fled Russia for the relative safety of Crimea. After eighteen months in Crimea, the family moved to England. Vladimir became a student at Trinity College. He graduated from Cambridge and moved to Berlin, where a large ghetto of Russian emigres resided. Taking the nom de plume of Vladimir Sirin, he began writing and married Vera Slonim.

Tragic and mysterious events chaperoned the family: Nabokov’s father was assassinated by Russian monarchists in 1922, a case of mistaken identity. Nabokov himself, like Kandinski, was a synesthete, which, in Nabokov’s case, means he not only associated letters with colors, but that the letters were actually colored. Later on, Nabokov’s brother, Sergei, who was homosexual, died in a Nazi concentration camp.

Vladimir Nabokov moved his family to Paris in 1937. Then because of Germany’s invasion of France, Nabokov fled to the United States in 1940. He taught comparative literature at Wellesley College, simultaneously working as a curator of lepidoptery at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Biology. In his spare time, he wrote.

Then Lolita, after much hesitancy on the part of publishers, was published. This hesitancy, due to obscenity laws and potential lawsuits, once overcome, eventually resulted in Lolita becoming an international bestseller. The story of the twelve-year old girl’s affair with an older man provided Nabokov with fame and financial independence. He continued to write, producing many other fine novels, and devoted much of his time to studying the blue butterfly, Polymmatini Lycaenidae, his favorite.

Lolita, to the average, ignorant-white-trash-tornado-bait reader, is detestable, and described as the disgusting story of pederasty glorified. It is not. Actually, Lolita is the story of obsession, the obsession of humanity with love. It is the strange, sad story of one man’s search for love, initially, through sex with a twelve-year old girl. Here, then, is the – still – common contemporary confusion of sex with love.

Finally, at the end of the story, Lolita is older, has a child and is not lovable. She is used up, ugly and hard. Yet it is at this point that Humbert Humbert, the older man, falls truly in love with her, and comes to appreciate love for the wonderful thing it is. He loves the unlovable.

Like Joseph Heller’s Major Major in Catch-22, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert is an example of reduplication. Reduplication, in linguistics, means to double a word, so as to form an inflected or derived form of the word. It’s a grammatical change, which indicates a change of relationship. Thus, Humbert the lover of the unlovable at the end of Lolita, is the derivation of Humbert the pederast at the beginning of the story. The relationship has changed. Humbert has changed. And Lolita is the elegant production of that process: a nasty worm entering its chrysalis and coming forth a splendid butterfly, someone new and different both in the story and in the repetition of the name.

Lolita, then, is an instance of symmetry, two stories within one story. There is a dividing line in the story. In the beginning there is no love, confusion about what love is, and ugly pederasty. At the end there is love, the confusion has disappeared, and the beauty of love reigns.

The genius of Nabokov.

In person, Nabokov was a handsome man, tall and well-formed, who radiated an aristocratic air. He loved detail and contemplation. However, he was boring, as if all his parts were subtly tightened from within. This tightness of being is evident in his memoir Speak, Memory, and probably explains his being a sentimental, but meager father.

Nabokov definitely failed his siblings, shrugging off the vaunted Russian sensibility of family ties. This is clear from his guilt over his relationship with his brother Sergei. Nabokov couldn’t get around his brother’s homosexuality. His mood toward Segei was tightly complex, composed of sour indifference, flippant disdain, and a deeper zone of doubt and foreboding: all the product of three basic factors: his own aristocratic snobbishness, the security provided by his fame and wealth, and the simple fact that Nabakov could not imagine any other response. Such as forgiveness, understanding, tolerance and love. It never entered his mind to be anything but judgmental and disapproving. Yet when Sergei died, Nabokov felt as if a piece of his own flesh had been torn from him. He realized he loved his brother and that if had tried, perhaps he could have done something for him. Too late.

Lolita, too, despite the genius of the story’s construction and its depiction of the sublime quandary of love, is banal. The story does not have the staying power of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Lolita, because of the very symmetry previously exposed, has no magnetism, and thus fails to engage the reader on any level but the intellectual. There is no visceral response in the reader.

Controversy imputed life and longevity to the book, not the sheer majesty of storytelling. Lolita, as a story, lacks emotional breadth; it is neutral. And I, for one, believe this neutrality stems from Nabakov himself. For he was neutral in his emotions, which explains why he moved to neutral Switzerland, where passion is controlled, shoved down to subterranean levels. There will be no political upheavals in Switzerland, nothing worth fighting over that’s for sure, and none at all in Nabokov either. Both the writer and the country he chose to live in put a premium upon gentility, which they considered high among the virtues.

Like Rumpelstiltskin, who turned straw into gold, Nabokov transformed words into works of art. But like the King in Rumpelstiltskin, Nabokov had no zest for life, no real personality. He just played his part, then when things went his way, lived happily ever after. The King remains outside, aloof from, the struggle in Rumpelstiltskin. And so did Nabokov. Unlike the blue butterflies, which were his favorites, he remained trapped in his pod. The blue butterflies twitch and spasm their way out of the pod, escaping the casing. Once out, they can expand their wings and fly. If they don’t fight their way out of the pod, they can’t fly, and if they can’t fly, they can’t mate. Even if they do get out and fly, if they’re not pretty, they get rejected.

Nabokov mated, and he was pretty. But he didn’t fly the way he could have.

Randall Radic, a former Old Catholic priest and a convicted felon, lives in Northern California where he reads, writes and smokes cigars. He is the author of A Priest in Hell: Gangs, Murderers and Snitching in a California Jail, and the forthcoming Gone To Hell: True Crimes of America’s Clergy.     

 When I was in my twenties, I thumbed my nose at “chick-lit.” Friends recommended favorite novels, and I thanked them for their suggestions but rolled my eyes on the inside. After all, I had a BA in English literature and was going for an MA in English, with a writing concentration. Those silly books were beneath me. Then one was picked for my book club-and I loved it. The book was chock full of symbolism, beautiful writing, plenty of discussion points and characterization. I would not have classified it as “chick-lit,” but since the book appealed to women and had women as main characters, the gods of marketing wanted to package it in a pretty pink box and put a dress on it. After reading that novel, I shook my hair out of its bun, traded my fancy coffee for Dunkin’ Donuts, and did not let a book’s imposed label ruin the reading experience.

Fast-forward ten years.

I have recently completed my first young adult (YA) novel. Are images of the eighties Sweet Valley High series filling your head right now? Are you pushing your glasses down the bridge of your nose to give that condescending look more impact? (Hi, Karma, nice to see you.) But before you dismiss the whole genre as frivolous or introduce me to “real” literature, ask yourself, “What would J.D. Salinger or William Golding do?” You may not classify Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies YA literature, but today’s book world does. That alone, should give you a glimpse into today’s teen lit.

So what it is YA? Good question and not one with a simple answer. According to Wikipedia, “fiction written for, published for, or marketed to adolescents, roughly between the ages of 12 and 18.” Sounds simple enough…until you read further for the characteristics of this genre and its comparison to adult literature. One major defining characteristic of YA literature is that the protagonist is a teenager. Would that mean that any book with a teenage main character is automatically YA? Some would argue yes and bookstores do not help clear up the confusion when they place adult novels such as The Lovely Bones in the YA section. Wikipedia further muddies the waters with this explanation “The distinctions between children’s literature, YA literature, and adult  literature have historically been flexible and loosely defined….Some novels originally marketed to adults have been identified as being of interest and value to adolescents and, in the case of several books such as the Harry Potter novels, vice versa.” To avoid an explanation like “I’ll know it when I see it,” I consulted another site, Literacymatters.org. They had this as part of their definition: “Anything young adults are reading of their own free will.” Talk about erasing all boundaries.

Although what can be classified as YA is murky, it can be agreed that the YA literature of today is crossing more limits than in the past. Today’s books have worlds with homosexual characters who are not just in the book as a lesson but because they are representative of today’s teen world; protagonists who have had abortions, been raped, who self-mutilate, who are transexual, heroin addicts, and religious fanatics. They explore the world around them with beautiful language, deep thoughts and wit and usually do not have the all-knowing English teacher guide them to an epiphany. In fact, much of today’s YA does not end in a tidy epiphany but rather with the protagonist’s angst still as raw as at the start.

It is easy to stay skeptical, but if you are willing to branch out, push those glasses higher up on your nose, and recognize YA books as the literature they are, below are a few of my favorite titles to get you started. Read them, give these books a home on your shelf beside the “classics” and don’t be surprised if the characters befriend you, keep you up at night, and leave you wondering about them long after you read the last page–just like real literature meant to do.

1. If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson

2. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

3. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

4. Dreamland by Sarah Dessen

5. King Dork by Frank Portman

6. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron

About Margaret Gelbwasser

Margie Gelbwasser is a freelance writer who writes about teen issues, education, parenting, and the writing craft. She has recently completed her first YA novel, INCONVENIENT–out in November 2010 by Flux books–and is at work on another set to be published in 2011. Please visit her websitewww.margiewrites.com.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.–Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“Surely, my dear, you must have heard the expression meaning that something is not a true picture, or has it quite died out nowadays? ‘All my eye and Betty Martin’.” –Agatha Christie, “Strange Jest”

Christie’s indubitable Miss Marple solves the mystery of the “Strange Jest” by knowing more than one antiquated saying. The other is “gammon and spinach” which, according to her, means “nonsense”. There is no way that a reader unfamiliar with these terms could draw the conclusions that she draws, that the recipe for ham and spinach is a nonsense recipe, that the dying man who tapped his eye and left behind love letters from Betty Martin was pulling someone’s leg.

Like Dickens, whose Tale of Two Cities chronicles the fall of the French monarchy, without history Christie would have had blessed little to go on.

At first glance, though, it seems that history has blessed little to do with fiction. Fiction is pretend. History is real. Fiction is entertainment. History is inevitable. Fiction falls from the fingers of its author, willy-nilly, without interference from outside source. 

History is the outside source.

If you were Samuel Beckett, you could claim to write in a historical vacuum. Poor Estragon and Vladimir wait and wait for Godot, completely cut off from the world around them. It seems they could be a couple of everymen from any land, in any human epoch.

And yet you’d be lying. Waiting for Godot clearly owes homage to King Lear and just as clearly influenced Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. History moves on, reflected in the parade of literature, from corrupt Elizabethan politics to the ennui of post-WWII shellshock to the absurdity of anti-establishment psychedelia. In every era, the little guy faces down the powers that be. In every era, the little guy’s expectation of failure or success — the expectation of the manner of failure or success — alters.

We are the children of our times. I was born in the 1960s, when dingaling hair-sprayed go-go girls dancing in cages could exist alongside hippies in rags staging love-ins against war. I grew up in the 1970s, amid the cacophony of disco and fear of OPEC. I was a young adult in the 1980s, when Reagan’s Trickle-Down Economics brought us the homeless and the adult children of ’60s radicals brought political activism into mainstream American culture.

There’s always a little guy. There are always the powers that be.

And through this we find our fiction, the imaginary universes that writers dream up, where average flesh-and-blood characters grapple with the mocking forces of fate — sometimes gaining ground, sometimes losing it, sometimes on top of the wheel of cosmic fortune, sometimes dragging through the muck and slime at the bottom. They put on their go-go boots and spray their beehives and march out there to contend with life to the best of their abilities. Will they fail? Of course they will. Life is infinitely bigger, stronger, smarter, and better equipped than a dippy dancer with hair-spray. Life is going to kick their butt.

Do we want to hear about it? Of course we do. That’s us in the go-go boots. That’s us carting around those towering beehives. We long to be righteous, ethical, innocent, and courageous. Our hearts yearn for meaning. At the same time we desperately need to be accepted. If everyone we knew were wearing shoes built inches up from the ground and blindingly-bright rayon shirts and leaping around a lit-up plastic floor posing momentarily and staring gloomily straight ahead and flinging our arms from one compass point to another as though guiding an airplane into the hanger — we’d do it too.

Don’t you know how to do the Funky Chicken? Don’t you know how to Hustle?

So do fictional characters. They know all about living heartfelt among the debris of the ridiculous. That’s what history does to human beings.

Write it down, testify to the real history of the human race. We will always remember.

About Victoria Mixon:

Victoria Mixon is a professional writer and editor who has worked in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for over thirty years. She co-authored the nonfiction Children and the Internet: A Zen Guide for Parents and Educators, Prentice Hall, 1996, and has published pieces in various literary magazines. She freelances as an editor for fiction authors and writes articles on the art of fiction at www.victoriamixon.com.