Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a piece that’s also posted at
.Best,
Sam
ON LITERARY CAREERISM
For my Inner Life posts, I usually take some long, somewhat theoretical essay and try to work through the arguments in it. In this case, the jumping-off point is a book review — or, really, a single line in a review.
In a discussion of Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth, the critic Christian Lorentzen writes, “More than realism or its rival, the dominant literary style in America is careerism.“ He continues: “The ways writers used to mythologize themselves have either expired or been discarded as toxic. In the end there is only the careerist, the professional writer who is first, last, and only a professional writer.”
Lorentzen sees that as not being particularly a problem. For him, “that’s neither a judgment nor a slur” — just a fact. The rest of the essay, a perfectly-excellent treatment of Philip Roth’s career, is an attempt to grapple with Roth as “the original and so far ultimate careerist in American literature.” I’m not going to write so much about the discussion of Roth as to argue with Lorentzen’s initial contention. Basically, I believe, ‘careerism’ should be “a judgment and a slur,” and it’s not great that Lorentzen doesn’t see it as such.
The trend towards avowed careerism in American literature — and I agree with Lorentzen’s framing in viewing it as contemporaneous with Roth — has produced several decades-worth of weak, tepid writing by professional writers, and not weak and tepid because writers somehow got worse but weak and tepid precisely because writers allowed themselves to be sold on the new careerist paradigm, because the institution of writing virtually all by itself precluded saying anything actually bold or interesting.
In a litany of the writers of on earlier era, Lorentzen adumbrates the personae that various writers adopted — as ‘cranks,’ ‘drunks,’ ‘shamans,’ ‘committed radicals,’ ‘disabused radicals,’ ‘patrician men of letters,’ ‘recluses of uncertain eccentricity,’ etc. One red thread connects all the writers Lorentzen lists — they were all interesting people, and their personae, far from the self-mythologizing ‘branding’ that a more cynical age attaches to it, were genuine reflections of who they wanted to be out in the world, with their writing as a concerted extension of themselves.
Lorentzen is right that, if I now leaf through the fiction ‘new releases’ table at Book Culture or McNally Jackson, what I will be struck by above all is the essential sameness of the author bios. They have gone to such and such an MFA program, received such and such a grant or residency. They always seem very turned-out for their author photos, are meticulous in thanking everybody they’re supposed to thank in their acknowledgments. The book I’m holding often strikes me as being more a kind of class yearbook or a résumé item than an audacious work of literature. As Lorentzen correctly notes, a professional writer’s career is now inextricable, under the Roth template, from the “writer’s campaign of public-image control.”
Lorentzen views this evolution as “an inevitability.” I’m tempted to see it more as a betrayal.
The question, really, is what is a writer? For me, the answer is that a writer is — more than anything else — a person who says what they mean. When I was starting out writing as an adult, trying to shed my ‘undergraduate’ sensibility, my collegiate influences, a sort of mantra came to me that: writing is the thing that’s different from everything else.
What that meant for me was that, first of all, writing is disengaged from the social hierarchy. Your status — how affluent, how good-looking, how likable, how popular you may be — means nothing when you sit down to write and are faced with the stark equality of the blank page. And, second, it meant that writing is not temporally constrained in the way that just about everything is. Writers aren’t really writing for their era — or for anybody they know or may know. They’re writing for people who don’t exist yet, they are attempting — assuming that some mode of literate transmission survives — to convey the truth of themselves and their era for people who will never experience it themselves.
Both of these are holy tasks. They make writing a fundamentally different activity from speaking — which is socially and temporally constrained, and redounds on the social status of the speaker. But when a person is bold enough to write, they are extracting themselves from their social persona and from social consequences attendant on their behavior. That means that they are willing to say shocking or abhorrent things if they feel them to be true — and the work of a literary community is to develop a protected space in which that sort of honesty may be honored and transmitted.
But all of that has been in short supply in the era of careerism. Every book is a kind of advertisement for the next book, a writer more or less an employee of their agent and publisher, and ‘the work’ of a writer is widely understood as being that of the sort of genial figure who goes on book tours and gives interviews and does credit to agent, publisher, MFA program, and so on. (Or, really, a ‘professional writer’ is better understood as being a teacher — virtually all of the known professional writers get their income from teaching somewhere within the university system, with their published work as an important C.V. item, and are subject to the same kinds of institutional constraints as any other teacher.)
The general lack of nerve within the writing profession is most apparent in the political sphere. Thinking of the great social crises of my lifetime, the patriotic jingoism of 2001-03 and the the curtailment of civil liberties in 2020-21, I’m maybe struck above all that the writers (the pedigreed, much-fêted, serious writers) were almost completely absent from them. Susan Sontag offered a heterodox perspective after 9/11, and Giorgio Agamben during the Covid lockdowns (for which they were both roundly denounced by colleagues), and that’s pretty much it, as far as I can remember. Many of the more literary writers are able to take cover behind the claim that ‘art is for art’s sake,’ that they are fundamentally not political, but the super-literary, mandarinesque literary figures of earlier eras understood their roles very differently. People like Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn may, in their different ways, have had much to answer for once the dust settled from the middle of the 20th century, but one thing that they all were was engaged, they felt that they occupied a privileged position in which people would listen to what they said and in which they were able to speak as individuals rather than as some of office-holder, and they felt that that compelled them to articulate whatever they took the truth to be, even if in some cases it led to their imprisonment or psychiatric confinement.
But, as Lorentzen notes, the careerist sensibility manifests within the ‘works of art’ themselves. “Authorial image management now seeps into the writing of fiction,” he writes. That holds true for both of the modes of literary writing that are dominant at the moment. There’s ‘autofiction,’ in which the pretense of creating fictional worlds is discreetly dropped, the writer inserted as narrator and the work of art meant to be evaluated a bit the way you would evaluate someone you meet at a party, above all on their ‘likability,’ on whether or not they are ‘sympathetic.’ And there’s literary pyrotechnics — treating writing as an ‘activity’ in which the ‘competition’ is about trying to write the best sentences possible. Unfortunately, both modes have nothing to do with what makes writing special, what ‘makes it different from everything else.’ Writing isn’t a social event and it isn’t an activity — it’s an extension of a true self.
Lorentzen is carrying out a delicate dance in his take on Roth. Roth was emblematic of the careerist turn in American literature, and was a zealous promoter of his literary reputation, but, at the same time, Lorentzen argues, Roth was an astute enough writer to tweak what was going on all around him. “Roth was the spokesman of the careerists,” Lorentzen writes. “The zeitgeist of Roth’s generation was boom and so-called meritocracy. He looked at its underside…He was the ventriloquist of their private ambitions and of their shame.”
That’s a very favorable interpretation of Roth, and I’m not sure how sincere Lorentzen is about it. The more I think about Roth, actually, the more underwhelmed I am by his achievement. Portnoy’s Complaint is a kind of extended stand-up routine. American Pastoral has a stunning hundred pages in it before Roth gets to the actual plot. The Human Stain makes no sense. The later novels are slim exercises pointing in the direction of some unwritten book. And that’s to say nothing of the middle years, when Roth was at the apex of his celebrity and produced a cascade of really breathtakingly bad writing — The Breast, The Great American Novel, Operation Shylock, etc.
Lorentzen helps to put all that into perspective — that Roth’s career is better understood as public relations than anything else, as ongoing image management. As Lorentzen writes of the career template that Roth established: “Figure out what you’re good at and keep doing it, book after book, with just enough variation to keep them guessing; sell out your friends, sell out your family, sell out your lovers, and sell out yourself.”
It doesn’t sound very nice, and Roth seems not to have been a happier person for any of it, let alone a better writer. What he got — and paid a steep price for it — was a career. That’s his choice, his bargain, but not necessarily one to be emulated: the whole point of writing is to move into some dispensation out of the normal social scramble, out of careerism.
Whether it’s Roth’s responsibility or not, the careerists have taken over American literature. They do ok, they’re competent people and write competent books, and they hold onto their positions, they make it seem like no other way of doing it exists. But all of that is the opposite of what writing really is. If the careerists have taken literature, the next thing to do is to take it back.
“The question, really, is what is a writer? For me, the answer is that a writer is — more than anything else — a person who says what they mean.”
What a silly statement. The talk of “holy tasks” is more kitsch.
Worth noting, Roth addressed (with intelligence, wit and much rigor) the Vietnam War, Nixon, urban collapse & crime in the 1970s, the aftermath of genocide on the Jewish community, assimilation, the fate of Eastern European (he also was Milan Kundera’s greatest champion), rightwing nationalism in Israel, feminism, the alienation of poor uneducated whites and a host of other issues.
Stunning. Thank you.