POISON PEN; OR, LIVE NOW AND PAY LATER
George Garrett
Stuart Wright, 1986
258 pp., $20.00
The conditions of modern culture involve us in painful but inescapable ambiguities. Politics, the noble pursuit of harmony and justice in community, cannot be separated from expediency, greed, fanaticism, and the vulgarities and superficialities of mass communications. Education, a high and essential calling, is entangled beyond recall with a bureaucracy of immense power and dubious social utility. Literature, which has traditionally enjoyed the allegiance of some of our best minds and most human aspirations, cannot be extricated from the imperious requirements of publicity and marketing.
Thus, in a society of immense wealth and population, anything that our forefathers would have regarded as a serious book is, at best, of marginal profitability. Publishing, once both a culturally esteemed and practically useful enterprise, now concerns itself largely with Jane Fonda exercise books, the memoirs of Lee Iacocca, the social reflections of Nancy Friday, and the art of Harold Robbins. A serious literary culture exists, or rather several serious literary cultures, within the increasingly imaginary borders of the United States, but in a fragmented and compromised state.
In fact, what usually passes for our serious literary culture, though it likes to think of itself as in perpetual heroic revolt against commerce and Establishments, prospers chiefly as a function of the business of publicity and itself constitutes an Establishment which ruthlessly enforces cultural and political conformity. With few exceptions (Bellow and Percy, for instance) those "serious" current writers who come readily to mind do so not because of their intrinsic superiority but because they are the ones selected, from among many others, to be published by the major New York houses, celebrated by the New York (it used to be Boston) critics, promoted by the major bookstore chains, studied in the prestigious Northeastern universities, and, as a simple reflection of the above, recognized as "important" by the federal public broadcasting and arts bureaucracies. (The proclivities of the last mentioned, as far as a somewhat distant observer can tell, have been little affected by the Reagan Revolution.)
It is no great exaggeration to stipulate that nearly every American writer of the last half century who is of any standing in the perspective of the ages has, at least at times, been "unknown" to the New York literary Establishment or has (like Faulkner) related to it in a state of barely suppressed outrage. And it is no accident that George Garrett, the author of Poison Pen, has been an active critic of the Establishment and in an "unknown" essay has written a devastating expose of the arts bureaucracy ("Unknown" = anything that is officially unrecognized in New York, although it may be "known" to thousands or even millions of people who don't count.) Writes Garrett in Poison Pen, referring to certain critics: "They are a tough bunch, Christie [Brinkley], and, like the rest of the Establishment, they pay only a pursed and puckered lip service to the battered old concept of free speech. Free speech is when they want to say something. Get it?"
These prefatory remarks are necessary for the uninitiated. For how else can we
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