But Is It Art?

Years ago, when we had the misfortune to have some rich friends, one of them was walking with my wife and asked: "Does Crawford write potboilers?"

If only my novels really did boil pots, instead of raising a thin steam!

But I understood what our rich, dim friend was getting at: the distinction between hack writing aimed at a popular audience of people who read until their lips get tired, and Art. Literature.

It's an old and tedious argument. Jonathan Swift poked fun at it in The Tale of a Tub, about the 18th century's endless quarrel between the Moderns (bad) and the Classics (good). At its core, the argument is about who is to be master, and thereby impose a particular taste on the rest of us.

We forget that Charles Dickens was considered a vulgar sensationalist in his own day. Far from being forced on highly educated grad students, he was snapped up by ordinary readers looking for thrills, suspense, laughs, tears, and gore...not to mention sex that was all the steamier for being implicit. The "serious" writers of his day are totally forgotten, even by the grad students. Their pious attitudes and conservative platitudes made them politically correct but doomed to oblivion when their society vanished along with the social values they promoted.

I well remember various authors who appeared on the cover of Time in the 1950s—guys like James Gould Cozzens, who were hot stuff then and not even literary trivia items now. No one in the big media paid any attention at all to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers when it first appeared back then (serialized, like Dickens), but guess who's still in print and provoking debates?

"Mainstream" literature gets most of the media attention these days, but few media articles note how this year's epic, life-affirming novel is next year's remainder-bin special...and as dead as James Gould Cozzens the year after that. By then, someone else will come along to affirm life as it is wished to be lived by the ruling classes.

Meanwhile, the rest of us live our own lives and find them reflected in downmarket genres like romance and thrillers and science fiction. God knows that we, like our literary betters, obey Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of science fiction is crap, and so is ninety percent of everything else. Today's literary genres (including "mainstream") were the cheap entertainment of working-class boys and girls before movies and TV came along, and genre fiction is still despised as much for class reasons as for its lack of invention. That's why Orwell foretold novel-writing machines in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and why the Newspeak word for their products was "prolefeed."

(Poor Orwell! He still imagined the proles would actually read, instead of watching wrestling and Fox News on their telescreens.)

While Orwell was ostensibly writing a kind of prolefeed himself—a science fiction novel—we all recognize that his dystopia was also art. In fact, it's art of a very high degree, a magnificently constructed literary palace full of symbolism. Every paragraph carries the intense meaning of a poem, and not an easy poem either. Very few readers have realized that Winston's half-assed revolt against Big Brother (including his romance with Julia) is entirely scripted by O'Brien, who's been feeding him directions via the telescreen: "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness." When I understood that, I felt as if the world were falling out from under me...the sure sign that I was reading real literature, not prolefeed.

So are we writers also creating art? Will future grad students pore over our Harlequins, our spy thrillers, our Tolkien hommages, hoping that their world will fall out from under them? Statistically, probably not. But that's not the point.

The Greeks said: "Call no man happy until he is dead," meaning that something awful can happen to even the richest and most powerful. ("Happy" and "happen" both come from an Old Norse word, happ, meaning chance or luck.)

So call no writer an artist until he or she is dead...and still read. If what we write still makes sense to the next generation, or the one after that, then we must have conveyed our message with some skill that survived us. We weren't just chattering in the slang of our particular moment; to paraphrase Ezra Pound, we reported news that stayed news, and we had something to say to people of a different era and culture.

In the meantime, we are fully occupied with just mastering the goddam craft of writing, never mind the art. I love writing because I will never, no matter how long I live, learn it all. Age cannot wither, nor custom stale, the infinite variety of writing. The craft itself is as beautiful and surprising and scary and enigmatic as a lover we don't deserve—we should be grateful for even a one-night stand, and we can hope for maybe, just maybe, another night.

We can be proud just to be good at our craft, whether or not we end up on the cover of Time. Leave the judgment of art to our grandchildren.

Comments

[Matthew Bin]

Thanks for this. Couldn't agree more, and couldn't have said it as well.

I find it interesting that Orwell and H.G. Wells were known in their time, and are still remembered across the pond, for their non-SF writings (Wells' Ann Veronica and Orwell's Homage to Catalonia as examples). And I doubt they thought they would be thought of as "science romance" writers after their deaths. Never mind that most readers today try to see their SF work as "chilling visions of things to come" rather than biting commentaries on very contemporary (for the writers) subjects.

Incidentally, I've tried without much success to convince highly educated grad students that Dickens was lowbrow crap...

I couldn't agree more.

Is it just me or does Crawford think all conservatives are dim?

[Crawford Kilian]

Well, it's not just you—a lot of people have that mistaken impression. I'm very conservative as a teacher and writer...as a teacher because most radical teaching styles don't work, and as a writer because the stories I want to tell don't need avant-garde techniques.

Since the advent of that right-wing barking-loony radical George W. Bush, I've discovered I'm conservative politically as well, because I want to conserve old-fashioned principles like not starting wars and paying taxes for the social services you want.

[B.Ambersøn]

You’ll have to excuse me; I was just informed I am dim. I was under the impression that secular socialism is relatively new idea in the timeline of world history. Those who wrote the American constitution could never have imagined things like health care and education being considered a human right as the left would have us believe today. They were more concerned with things like the right to life, land ownership, a fair trail with citizen jury’s, a self determined future, and the freedom of worship. So, when you say old-fashion when referring to social services, just how far back are you going? Personally, not only do I not want to pay more taxes, I don’t want to depend on the government for education, health care, utilities, and who knows what else.

I thought you painted an appropriate picture in Henderson's of what socialism holds for the future of Canada and for the US as well since it seems destined to follow in Europe and Canada’s footsteps.

BTW, I do enjoy your site and I think Henderson's has a great premise. I can’t wait for you to finish it.