American Writing, World Writing

Jumping off from LitHub's Approach to Writing Teaches Us by Ru Freeman for this post.

But is America served by such capitulation? Or are our skills of greater worth when we point out the way our languages, and what our languages describe, enfold a dynamic, evolving, and empathetic engagement with the world of which America is only, albeit a singular, part; a reality which is embodied in our very lives?

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Its most moving testimonies come from those whose markers of ancestry and culture are singularly American, but whose imagination roams free and, by doing so, encourage readers to host a more inclusive narrative: Roger Reeves, Rebecca Solnit, John Freeman, Nuar Alsadir, and Rickey Laurentiis come to mind. James Baldwin, arguably its most quoted literarian and the current darling of all races, certainly in the literary world, lived most of his life away from America and perhaps this is why he was able to articulate the fact that the American word, “success,” has no place in the vocabulary of any artist.

I keep repeating that KH and CC got me writing again and CC gave what to write and JC kept me going and pointed me down the road. I had wanted to be a writer when younger. Writing was the one thing I always took seriously. Not writing is where I first let down the expectations of my friends and family. I felt there was nothing much to say after Faulkner and Hemingway and Vonnegut and Bellow.

JC told me to read. Prison gave me time to fill in the holes of my education. He pointed me to Milan Kundera and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kenzaburo Oe and Mishima, and Halldór Laxness. Kundera pointed me back to Cervantes. Kundera abd Carlos Fuentes pointed back to Faulkner. Mario Llosa Vargas wrote about Somerset Maugham. Paul Kleinman gave me Israeli writers. Pete Tengardy turned me onto Hungarian writers. Dalkey Archive exposed me to Central and Eastern European writers. A fantasy and science fiction anthology got me over my fear of the Russians. The Leisure Library had a copy of The Tin Drum and I finished what I had started decades ago. The same library had Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain and so I found the Germans were more than Herman Hesse (a writer I never felt a connection to for all of his novels I have read.) Then I found a Balzac novel - Balzac being another long abandoned writer. And then there was Proust - whose name makes KH giggle.

And so what?

I learned the novel was more than Faulkner and Hemingway and Bellow. That they had not captured all there was to say in fiction or how to make fiction come alive. I think now they would have laughed at the idea they had had the last word in writing but would have pointed to Tolstoy or Conrad or James Joyce.

Taking the idea from a different perspective, What is Canadian?

...Contemporary Canadian multiculturalists like to claim that writers learn only from predecessors of the same racial, gender or sexual identity, usually across national borders; aestheticist critics have maintained, since the publication of John Metcalf’s What Is a Canadian Literature? (1988), that the best Canadian writers are influenced by the Americans and the British. Both groups see the idea of an endogenous Canadian tradition as a sham. Staines refutes this contention with impressive persistence, finding essays or interviews with nearly every writer he discusses from the early twentieth century on in which they acknowledge their debt to earlier Canadian writers, revealing an inter-generational web of influences. He summarizes: “The maturity of Canadian fiction is evident when writers turn to Canadian sources while never denying influences, too, from outside the country”.

Surely, what is good for the Canadians is good enough for Americans 

And this means reading translations, so LitHub's Interview with an Indie Press: Seagull Books “Translations build:

Seagull Books’ primary interest has been what may be called “the human condition.” All the books we publish somehow reflect on this, looking at this theme from different angles. But of course in terms of style we bend towards the literary and the poetic—even when are publishing writings on, say, philosophy.

Read widely, remember the novel belongs to the world, and - unlike me - do not give up.

sch 6/24/22