Notes from New Yorker staff members on their literary engagements of the week.
While rummaging for something else in The New Yorker?s archive online, I recently uncovered a short memoir by Elizabeth Bishop, ?The U.S.A. School of Writing,? which ran in the July 18, 1983, issue of the magazine, four years after the poet?s death. It was like finding a twenty-dollar bill in the pocket of an old coat?sweeter for having been unexpected. Not to fall in love with Bishop is almost impossible (ask Robert Lowell). Mild, precise, self-doubting, and ironic, brimming with undemonstrative rapture at little noticed things (a lunch-partner ?silently stretch[ing] her large mouth over the bulging tiers of a sandwich,? man-of-war birds that tense their wings ?like wishbones, till they tremble?), she has all the best qualities, and they are all on display in ?The U.S.A. School of Writing.?
The memoir describes Bishop?s stint working as an instructor at a New York-based correspondence school in the mid-nineteen-thirties, shortly after she graduated from Vassar. During her interview for the position, the school?s president informs her that ?the U.S.A. School of Writing stood for ?The United States of America School of Writing,??? a happy example, if ever there was one, of what Bishop called ?the always-more-successful surrealism of everyday life.? It quickly becomes clear that the ?school,? housed on the top floor of an elevatorless building near Columbus Circle, is a racket: ?Our advertisements specified that when an applicant wrote in inquiring about the course he was to send a sample of his writing, a ?story? of any sort, any length, for our ?analysis,? and a five-dollar money order. We sent him the analysis and told him whether or not he really did have the right stuff in him to make a successful writer. All applicants, unless analphabetic, did.?
Bishop is required to write to her students under the name of Mr. Margolies, ?which had been the name not of my predecessor but of the one before the one before that.? (She becomes friends with another instructor at the school, one Mr. Hearn, who is in fact ?a tall, very heavy woman, about thirty years old, named Rachel.?) There is something irresistible in the thought of this most costive of writers, who famously spent seventeen years working on a single poem, ?The Moose,? receiving envelope after envelope of unredeemable prose.
Bishop, however, was nothing if not resourceful. In describing her students? poor writing??its slipshoddiness and haste,? ?the almost complete lack of detail,? the ?grand, if ill-fitting, ?moral,? or allegorical interpretation? tacked on at the end?she arrives, via negativa, at a statement of everything she valued most in literature. And indeed, ?The U.S.A. School? embodies as much as it articulates what Bishop thought writing should be. Her description of one of her students, Jimmy O?Shea??aged seventy, occupation ?retired????is a model of vital and humane comic portraiture:
His stories were fairly long, and, like Gertrude Stein, he wrote in large handwriting on small pieces of paper. He had developed a style that enabled him to make exactly a page of every sentence. Each sentence?they usually began with ?Also? or ?Yes??opened at the top left-hand corner and finished with an outsize dimple of a period in the lower right. Goodness shone through his blue-lined pages as if they had been little paper lanterns. He characterized everything that appeared in his simple tales with three, four, or even five adjectives and then repeated them, like Homer, every time the noun appeared. It was Mr. O?Shea who wrote me a letter that expressed the common feeling of time passing and wasted, of wonder and envy, and of partly sincere ambition: ?I wasn?t feeling well over my teeth, and I had three large ones taken out, for they made me nervous and sick sometime, and this is the reason I couldn?t send in my lesson. I am thinking of being able to write like all the Authors, for I believe that is more in my mind than any other kind of work. Mr. Margolies, I am thinking of how those Authors write such long stories of 60,000 or 100,000 words in those Magazines, and where do they get their imagination and the material to work upon? I know there is a big field in this art.?
?Giles Harvey
Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never read ?Anna Karenina.? I already knew how it ended, see, and there are so many other books. Worse, until a couple of months ago, I had never read ?War and Peace.? I didn?t know how that one ended. It ends with a thirty-page, extra-narrative meditation on the nature of history that is na?ve and dull, so perhaps my ignorance was fortunate.
Well, that?s all changed. Borodino, Bald Hills, Pierre, and Natasha?old friends, now. I took ?War and Peace? on a four-day trip to the beach: a hundred and fifty pages per day, times four, would get me far enough into the book that, on my return, I could just coast through to the finish. I went to a used-book store and, suffering some big-book anxiety, bought the shortest of three versions. It was nine hundred pages, and, as I learned when I got it home and read the introduction, turned out to be a ?first draft,? or ?sketches for ?War and Peace.??? Back to the bookstore for a copy of the new and approved translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I stuck to the plan at the beach, read it with heavy arms on the subway, and cruised to the end, feeling proud and improved. Now you know the material conditions that prevailed while I read this book. I tell you all this in lieu of interpretive theories of the book, or rationales for why you should or shouldn?t read it. You?ve read it, I know. It?s great! Of course it?s great. What else?
Sometimes, before I read an ordained classic, I like to read its one-star reviews on Amazon. Many ungenerous readers of ?Anna Karenina? criticize its agricultural bent. ?I never again want to read a ?romance? novel where 30 pages are wasted describing how fields were ?mowed? in Russia 100 or so years ago!!!? one writes. I happen to be reading this section right now: Levin, having retreated to the country after his humiliating and unsuccessful pursuit of Kitty Shcherbatskaya, finds purpose and life force in agriculture. At dinner one night, he?s enraged and befuddled by the bien-pensant views of his brother, who favors political reforms to make the lives of the peasants easier. Levin makes some confused, reactionary objections, but, in a clear but also human irony, wakes extra early the next morning and spends the day mowing the estate with his peasants. It?s a little humiliating?the peasants don?t really approve. ?It?s not the master?s work,? one says, and, besides, he?s not very good at it. But he keeps going. ?A change now began to take place in his work which gave him enormous pleasure. In the midst of his work moments came to him when he forgot what he was doing and began to feel light, and in those moments his swath came out? even and good.?
This is my favorite part, so far. As a person who sits at a desk all day, I find Levin?s ability to recognize his rage and inarticulacy as physical symptoms, as well as his sublimation of his emotional energies into physical labor?well, I find it enviable. Maybe I?ll get a standing desk.
?Willing Davidson
I am an incorrigible over-the-shoulder subway reader. Even when the shoulder belongs to someone flipping through what I believe to be a Korean newspaper, I still try to make out what sorts of stories the person favors. And I pass judgment accordingly. I dole out the literary stink-eye left and right, the intensity doubled for those reading Kindles, thereby depriving me of my fun. (Also, Kindle owners are obviously reading soft-core erotica, or something else embarrassing, like ?Little Men.?) But right now I am in the middle of a book that is earning me my own share of glowers from the F-train gang: the short story collection ?Self-Help,? by Lorrie Moore, a series of elegiac how-tos for the lovelorn. (?Sit on the couch and tell him he?s stupid. That you bet he doesn?t know who Coriolanus is.?) Moore should earn me snobby nods of approval from people carrying lit-mag totes. Problem is, judging the reader by her book cover?a photo of lots of pill bottles, across which is printed ?Self-Help??one might surmise that when Deepak Chopra stopped being able to get her jazzed, she upped her dosage of print-based life-affirmation. Or so I assumed, until earlier this week, I looked up abruptly and caught a woman laden with Trader Joe?s bags reading over my shoulder. And?did I imagine this??was she reading my book and crying? ?Lovely,? she muttered. I switched cars.
?Emma Allen
Illustration by Nolan Pelletier.
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