Re: Banned Books


Subject: Re: Banned Books
oconnort@nyu.edu
Date: Wed Mar 12 1997 - 09:34:48 GMT


> I could conceivably go on. The point is we are not so culturally bankrupt
> as is sometimes (cynically) believed.

Indeed. Last night I spent a joyous hour at a local Barnes & Noble
listening (for the umpteenth time) to Frank McCourt read from and
discuss "Angela's Ashes." I've read the book a couple of times, and
attended nearly every one of his readings, but the true joy last night
was his little pre-reading talk, which must have run 15 minutes, about
how his life as a high-school English teacher prepared him to write.

He described how when he started to teach, he had his little "mask"
of sorts, his act that he thought he needed to put on in front of the
class. And he said that since New York teenagers "are an especially
impatient bunch who see right through phonies," he had to find another
way to work. So what helped him, he said, was to learn how to be
plain and honest and direct. (His ideas about approaching the
school audience sounded a lot like Hemingway's ideas about the writer
approaching the blank page, as he expresses them in A MOVEABLE FEAST.)

And so he talked to us -- not lectured us -- as honestly as he
described his technique of holding class, and he said that his book,
to the extent that it works at all, works because he tried to be
straightforward in it and not judgmental about the people and events
he recounts.

It was one of the more uplifting readings I've seen in a long time, and
beautiful in its own humble way as William Faulkner's 1950 speech upon
receiving the Nobel Prize. ("It is easy enough to say that man is
immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of
doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging
tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will
still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still
talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely
endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among
creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a
spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's,
the writer's, duty is to write about these things.... The poet's voice
need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the
pillars to help him endure and prevail.")

There is something magnificent in the sight of this humble, retired
English teacher, who expected his book "to get a pat on the head from
the Times, and be rewarded with those two labels inevitably given to
'Irish' writing -- 'charming and lyrical' -- and then to fade away in
my own insignificance." Without seeming cheap or self-pitying or
anything but exalting, he stood there and talked generously of what
got him where he is now. He described how the only thing he could
offer his students, as he coached them to write, was to ask them to
look around themselves and record, as he had done in his notebooks,
the details of their lives, of their families, of their daily
experiences.

And he said that he felt -- but could not pick out the reasons for this
intuition -- that we were in the midst of our own literary renaissance
just as surely as the Irish had theirs at the start of the twentieth
century, and that we were just as unaware of it as Yeats was when *he*
was writing.

We can all make our lists of people (like JDS, when Buddy describes
wanting to shout out the names of the writers he loves), or we can
bemoan that we have nobody to offer in our time, but they are here in
our midst, and they are working: consider Madison Smartt Bell (nine
novels, a couple of collections of stories, and a forthcoming writing
textbook, all this from a man still in his 30s!). Lorrie Moore. Rick
Bass. Elizabeth Spires. Connie May Fowler. Paul Auster. And (to
steal a line from Vonnegut) so on and so on and so on.

I guess the point is that I can make my lists and you can make yours,
but even without the benefit of hindsight we can look around us and see
writers writing now, men and women whose work will endure and prevail.

These are not gloomy times for the written word, not at all. But of
course the good work rarely chases after you; you have to seek it out
and devour it and eventually come to see all the good that is sprouting
up around you.

--tim o'connor
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