INTERVIEW WITH BENOIT LELIEVRE ON DEADEND FOLLIES

Hi folks,

BENOIT LELIEVRE INTERVIEW ON THE RAPIST

(As published on Benoit’s Dead End Follies.

Benoit conducts some of the best interviews on the planet and it was a privilege to be asked to sit down with him and chat. Gotta warn you--Benoit presented this in four parts because of the length and it's presented en toto here.

Question: Rapists are the most abhorred criminals in our society, next to paedophiles. What motivated you to write a first person narrative about one of them in your latest novel? Why did you decide to give a rapist a voice?

Response: I have to warn you—my answers aren’t going to be politically correct and I’m going to piss some people off.

First, it was never my goal to give rapists a “voice,” at least not in any significant way. I think of rapists pretty much as most folks do—as almost totally reprehensible beings. In fact, I don’t see it as a book about rapists at all, but rather a book about time and space and God and human beings. I thought about naming it The Memoir of Jesus Christ but didn’t as that would take away the power of the last line, which is what the book is really about. I did and do fully expect most people to see it as a book about rape and a rapist and prison and all that stuff, but there will be a few who I think will see it for what it was intended to be which is a book about the universe and God and how human beings fit in there and how it’s really all fucked up and there’s not much we can do about it. I don’t want too many of those folks, though. I hope most won’t be able to “get that.” If many did, I wouldn’t have achieved what I set out to do. The people I really respect and who I wrote it for—people such as Cort McMeel—understood it immediately and that pleases me to no end. Just about every one of the 31 blurbers got it perfectly and it’s those kinds of people I wrote it for. I would never write something intended for everybody. I write for my spiritual and intellectual twin and like most of us, don’t have many of those. I wrote it for Cort and I wrote it for Charles Bukowski and people like that. I didn’t even send it out for publication for over twenty-five years (wrote it in the late eighties) as I was pretty sure it didn’t fit any commercial guidelines. I just kept it in a drawer until the right guy came along. That guy was Jon Bassoff of New Pulp Press. There are others I would have happily published it with, like Allan Guthrie or Brian Lindenmuth, but Jon was the best for this book, I felt.

The idea for his book came from a Charles Bukowski short story, “The Fiend.” It is the most powerful, most honest, and most profound story I’ve ever read. The instant I finished it, I knew then that to write a story this courageous would be the best thing I could ever do and I also knew I would have as hard a time in finding an audience for it as he did for his work before the Germans discovered him and published him when America wouldn’t. In fact, I didn’t even consider a U.S. publisher until I met Jon. I always thought it would find a home some day with a French publisher. It’s a French book, you know. Intellectually. Perhaps Russian. The Russia of two centuries ago, not today.

What Bukowski did in that story was, to use an overworked word that in this case is precisely correct; brilliant. He took that person you spoke of at the top—the odious pedophile—and showed through his literary, insightful, particular genius that no matter what depths a person has sunk to (or risen to), he is still one of us. He is still human, no matter how grotesque and misshapen and evil his mind is. In this story, he wrote the single most illuminating line that has ever been written in literature. I’m not even going to use a qualifier for that statement such as “in my opinion.” It is just simply the clearest sentence ever written in literature. An early line in the story, spoken by the protagonist Martin as he is kissing the child, just before he rapes her, and the narrator says, “Martin’s eyes looked into her eyes and it was a communication between two hells--one hers, the other his.” When I read this line, it was as if I’d been struck by literary lightening.

Bukowski reached out from beyond the grave and touched me with his hand with those words and I knew then what I had to write.

And, that’s how The Rapist  came to be. My effort to write something as stark and honest and true as Bukowski had.

And, he’d already taken a “short eyes” as the character for his story, so all that was really left was a rapist. Never considered a serial killer or mass murderer as a character—most are really boring—all they do is keep repeating the same-o, same-o until they’re caught.

The rape and the trial and all that are only the window dressing. It’s really a novel of how I see the universe. It’s a story about a God who is omniscient, but who is also really old, and has all of the infirmities of age. After all, he made us in his image, according to the text, and I presume that means he endowed us with all of the same things as he himself is endowed with, including frailties and shortcomings along with all the strengths. It a novel explaining how time and space work. It’s chronological and at the same time, it’s not. It’s here and it’s there and it’s somewhere else that we can’t see because God hasn’t allowed us to see yet. It’s forever and ever and has always existed and it hasn’t yet begun and it’s already ended and that implies a circle. I see it as a ball of yarn, not of one continuous strand, but composed of countless strands, all woven together. It’s the past, the present and the future, all happening at once and yet not. It’s about a definition of time that we don’t yet possess, beyond the three most recognize.

What really struck me during the editing is that the copy editor, Alice Riley, got what I was trying to do. She pointed out that I vacillated between present and simple past and perfect past tense and wanted to know if that was on purpose as she suspected it was. Because of the time element, you see? It told me that she got it. That was an exciting moment for me. Most copy editors I’ve worked with probably wouldn’t have. They get the grammar and the spelling and syntax and all that stuff, but they often don’t really get the literature. She got that it wasn’t intended to be a chronological story at all. That the “parts” weren’t meant to fit neatly. They were like the pieces of string the old man explained to Truman on the mountaintop. I hope I get some readers like Alice. She understood that this was one of an unlimited number of memoirs that Jesus wrote. Is still writing. Hasn’t written yet. And, that he, like his father, got the pieces of time string mixed up sometimes. After all, they’re the same guy. That the parts that are mixed up are from the pen of the third party of the triune—the Holy Ghost. That poor guy never gets to get on stage, so I gave him some lines.

Tried to show that God had/has/will have a sense of humor. Probably a French sense of humor…

One more thing about Bukowski that I thought of because of something you said in your question. That first-person thing. I thought that while his story was the bravest thing I’ve ever read, he kind of copped a deuce with it. In almost all of his work, he writes from the first-person pov. In “The Fiend” he uncharacteristically employs a third person. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a third-person story from Bukowski other than this one. I think he got nervous at the last and wrote it in third because he was afraid someone would think he had that pedophile, hidden somewhere deep inside him, and he didn’t want people to ever think that about him. Because he didn’t. But, I think he was afraid that he might be viewed that way. I think maybe he saw what happened to Nabokov with Humbert Humbert where Nabokov had to come out and make public proclamations that, no, he wasn’t hiding a little Humbert deep down inside that he drew from, and Bukowski didn’t want people to think the same kinds of things about him about his character Martin. I decided I’d use first-person for that reason. It’s like Bukowski and I had one of those bar fights he was famous for and this was my secret weapon to knock him out. It’s the brass knucks I hid from him and brought out when he wasn’t looking. And, since he’s room temperature and can’t do anything about it, I can claim I won.

Question: Tell us about the long, hard road to publication for THE RAPIST . I'm sure finding it a home wasn't easy at all.

Well, it was and it wasn’t. It was infinitely easier to find a publisher for this than it was for my first novel, The Death of Tarpons, which collected 86 rejections before it found a home. And, that was by accident… On the right desk at the right time—the only five minute period it could have been there and been read. And that book won literary awards, which always makes me wonder about editor’s and agent’s acumen… As does THE RAPIST. I mean, it got 31 blurbs from some of the best writers in the world and yet not a single Legacy 6 editor wanted it? Okay…

 

I most likely would have found a home for it years before I did, but you have to send it out for that to happen. I wrote it over 25 years ago and it’s sat in a drawer, metaphorically, until now. I just didn’t think a U.S. publisher would see it as publishable. In the back of my mind, I kept thinking that once I got “established” (whatever that is), that I’d have work translated and through that I could interest a foreign publisher in it. I’ve always thought it fit the French mind better than anyone’s.

When I found myself in the MFA program at Vermont College, my last-semester advisor was Dr. Francois Camoin, a bona fide Frenchman. And, a bona fide literary genius. He was the first person I’d ever showed it to. He read it and then we had a drink together. He told me it was one of the most brilliant things he’d ever read, but that he felt I’d have trouble finding a publisher. He delivered the same exact thought that I had always had. He said he didn’t think it fit the sensibility of the American reader. He felt they were more attuned to Stephen King and John Grisham and the like and just wouldn’t “get it.” Too dark. Too intellectual. He went on to say that he thought though that someday if I got lucky I would find a publisher—like me, he thought it would be a European publisher—and that, even though it would be hard to get it published, once it was he predicted it would win all kinds of awards.

Well, over the years since then, I showed it to a few people. Mostly whoever was my agent at the time. The thing is, most agents—even though they’re nice folks, usually—are pretty much attuned to the top of their quality scale being commercial stuff like James Patterson, and none of them understood the book. So, I stuck it back into that drawer. And then, I became friends with a guy who I think has the best literary mind of anyone I’ve been privileged to meet. A guy named Cort McMeel. It took a lot by that time for me to trust anyone. Certainly not an agent! Most of them—while being nice people—could just as easily be selling Florsheim shoes—they’re salesmen and like the Ford salesman mostly want to move the latest car that’s hot. There really are no more Maxwell Perkins out there… That’s not a bad thing and agents aren’t bad people. They’re just not the sort of people you want in charge of something that’s intellectual, as a rule. That’s a type of product that’s outside their familiarity and comfort zone. They don’t want to represent Camus—they want to represent James Patterson.

Anyway, for the first time since Dr. Camoin, I met someone who I felt had a genuine literary mind. So I asked him if he wanted to read it. You’ll have to read the foreword which Cort graciously provided for the book to see how that went.

But… well. It went well. He loved it. In fact, he wanted to publish it under the imprint he’d just begun, Bare Knuckles Press. And, we had a deal until he ended his association with the press. Without Cort, I ended my own association with it. And, I happened on a new publisher. New Pulp Press. I chanced on a book of theirs that just blew me away. Jake Hinkson’s Hell on Church Street. Blew me fucking away. I went to their list and went down the row and read every single book publisher Jon Bassoff had published. Not a single clunker in the bunch. Not one! I know of no other publisher who has the record Jon does. Probably Allan Guthrie—don’t think he has a single book that isn’t brilliant. And Brian Lindenmuth. But, nobody had it like Jon did. That’s the guy I wanted to publish this book and it’s because of who he had already published. It was clear he was a guy who could read silently without moving his lips. He wasn’t much interested in moving Florsheim or Stacy-Adams shoes to make a buck… He actually understands and loves literature. Kind of a contemporary John Martin. I’m so glad I found him. And, like Martin, he even designed my cover himself. Damn—he really is John Martin!

I sent it to Jon, he liked it and he’s publishing it. I’m as happy as a clam before the clam learns there’s a thing called clam sauce… Pretty fucking happy… I’m hoping he likes two other works of mine he has on his desk and will want to publish them as well.

Question: I think most of Dead End Follies' readers understand the purpose of true, groundbreaking shock value in fiction and THE RAPIST has a mouthful of it. What are the novels that shocked you and redefined your boundaries as an artist?

Great question! First and foremost, Camus’ The Stranger has influenced me more than any other single work. One of the biggest things that struck me was how absolutely perfect it was. I think Camus practiced Eastern philosophy upon it as he wrote it. That trope about how you always include a small imperfection in any art form so that you don’t challenge God. There’s a tiny imperfection in it, but I haven’t been able to find it yet. I keep looking though, because if it is, indeed, perfect, we may as well all give up as what we’re after has been attained and that makes it a second-place thing and who wants that?

Second, there are a handful of novels that taught me how to write a novel. At least the kind of novel I wanted to write. Among those, I count Killshot by Elmore Leonard, A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews, any and all of the collections of short stories by Ray Carver  , and The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley. Most of Faulkner’s novels. More than any other novel or book though, has been the King James version of the Bible. It’s the basis for just about everything we experience in our culture, even for the agnostics and atheists. It’s where our civilization comes from. I don’t know how anyone can pretend to know who they are if they don’t know the Bible. Doesn’t matter if you believe what it says or not. I’m not talking much about the religion in it in terms of its value. It’s the other things. The cadence of the poetry, for example.

None of these “shocked” me in any sense of the common definition. I can’t think of any book that has ever done that. I’ve seen things in my life that are beyond anything I’ve ever read in a book. I’ll give you an early example. When I was 12, I had already been working in my grandmother’s bar and restaurant ever since I could remember. It was a rough bar, what you’d call a honky-tonk, and I saw pretty much everything you can think of in such a place. On my 12^th birthday, Grandma thought it was time I learned her cab business, so she appointed me the night dispatcher. On my first night on the job, it was a slow night and the cabbies were all gathered outside the little shack where my phone and clipboard and assignment sheet and all that stuff was. My little desk and chair. Well, they got to screwing around after awhile and one of them found a dead rattlesnake—or maybe it was alive and he killed it—I don’t know. Anyway, he started waving it at another driver who didn’t know it was dead, and he was terrified of rattlers and kept telling the guy to keep that snake off him, but the other guy thought it was funny and kept tormenting him. Finally, the guy with the snake threw it at the scared guy and that man pulled out a pistol and shot him in the throat. About six feet away from me. Blood spurted everywhere and I got my share of it on me. Since I was the dispatcher, it was my job to call the cops, which I did. That was in the days before 911, so I had to get the phone book out, look up the number, and dial it and then tell the cops what had happened. All without looking like some kind of pussy kid. Later, I was called to the witness stand to tell what I’d seen. After you see something like that, what can be in a book that will shock you? Pretty much nothing. And, there’ve been lots and lots of experiences like that and far worse. So, I don’t anticipate ever reading anything in a book that will shock me in that way.

BTW, the guy was acquitted and left town immediately. The dead guy had a lot of friends and relatives who didn’t like what had happened.

That same year I got whipped bloody by my father with a live king snake and I tried to kill a group of older Mexican kids with a .38 I stole from a sporting goods store when they attacked me and my best friend down on a submerged barge down at the Brazos River by the shrimp docks. Witnessed a lynching in a way. By that I mean I was present when the sheriff was notified on the phone in our bar and knew from what he said what was going down. Remember watching him eat another piece of pie with tiny bites after he got the call and told us what was happening and how when he finally left to go “stop” them, he drove away at about five miles an hour. How you gonna stay down on the farm once you’ve seen Paree? By which, I mean how are you going to shock me with lines in a book?

What those books did was shock me with their beauty and with their power. Their ability to show a deep understanding of the human heart and the human soul. They gave me a standard to shoot for and one that I knew wouldn’t be easy to attain.

I have to take it back. I did read a book that shocked me and I just remembered it. A collection of Bukowski’s stories. TheMost Beautiful Woman in Town and Other Stories. It wasn’t the content that shocked me. The content was just about drunks and whores and stuff like I knew about since I was little. It was learning that the kind of stuff I wanted to write could be published. I had just assumed it couldn’t be because I’d never read anything like he wrote. He didn’t write anything very shocking, compared to real life. That it could become published; that was what was shocking. And liberating. And sad. Sad, that I was in my thirties before I found out the free society I thought I had been living in, wasn’t. That there was censorship everywhere and had been going on for a long time. Bukowski is the primary person who opened up the boundaries wide for me as a writer.

Thanks, Chuck.

Question: You made no secret that you've had a hard life. In fact, you seem pretty candid about it. How has it brought you to writing? What made you sit down and write seriously for the first time?

It’s the other way around, Benoit. It’s writing that brought me to a hard life, for the most part. I’ve actively sought out the dangerous places in life and for one reason—material for my writing. It’s only when you’re close to death that you come fully alive.

I sat down and began to write seriously when I was around four or five years old. Immediately after I was able to read the first book on my own, I decided at that moment that being a writer was the only thing I ever wanted to do and I haven’t wavered one iota from that moment. At that time, I thought I could write a better book than what I’d just read. I couldn’t then, but I think I can now.

I actually taught myself to read. My mother would read me those insipid children’s stories and I’d ask her to trace the words with her finger as she read so I could see where they came from on the page. They were really boring stories for the most part and trying to figure out the marks on the paper kept my interest better. Actually, they were more than just marks. My grandmother had taught me my alphabet and how to spell and write my name when I was about three and as half, so I had somewhat of an idea what words were. One day, I just continued out loud what my mother was reading—finished the sentence ahead of her. At once, she taught me phonics (the key to being a good reader, in my opinion). I was off to the races at that point.

The first book I read on my own was a book from my grandmother’s library. A collection of short stories by Guy deMaupassant. The first story I read was his “Two Friends.” He was imminently accessible, even to a small child. He just wrote plainly and clearly. I loved that book! My grandmother came in one day when I was reading it—actually, I’d stolen it from her library—and she took me up to the attic where she kept all of her books and told me I could read any of them I wanted to. She had a wonderful library. Most of the great French and Russian writers and that’s who I began with. She also had some Dickens but I couldn’t get into him at all.

This kind of ruined school for me from the start. The teacher would have us reading these really godawful books—stuff by James Fennimore Cooper in junior high, for instance—quite possibly the lousiest major writer in U.S. letters—it’s no wonder his work was made into early movies—it was “direct to video” writing. I loved Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, but Cooper was purely boring and his language was juvenile and just plain bad. When we had English classes, we were required to read books that were infantile and I couldn’t stand plowing through them. I’d bring in my own books and hide them inside the crap we were supposed to read. I remember being caught in second grade—we were all supposed to be silently reading some kiddie crap and I had secreted a copy of a Stendhal book inside the book we were supposed to be reading, probably his TheCharterhouse of Parma which I loved, and the teacher went ballistic. She called a meeting with my mother and told her I was defying her by reading a book not on the reading list—and that I couldn’t possibly “understand” it. We went back home and she told my grandmother who became incensed. She said she knew my teacher all her life and she’d always been a moron and thought everyone else was on her level. She called her up and read her the riot act and the upshot was I was allowed to sit by myself in a corner and read whatever I wanted while the rest of the class read the “approved” books. My grandmother, Louise Vincent, was one of the biggest businesswoman in town—she owned and ran a hugely busy bar and restaurant and a cab company, as well as owned a fortune’s worth of gas and oil and sulphur stocks and rental properties—and if she said something, people in town listened. I remember every year we’d go to New Orleans to Maison Blanche and they’d close the entire store while my grandmother and mother and my sister and I spent the day as the sole customers while models paraded the new fashions before them for Grandma and my mother to buy. Some little twit of a grade school teacher wasn’t going to make her grandson read The Hardy Boys Punk Ass Clubhouse or whatever.

In summers, we’d go to Louisiana to stay on my great-grandmother’s ranch which was the world’s largest Brahma bull-raising enterprise in the country. Those were great summers! My grandmother’s first cousin was U.S. Senator Allen Ellender and he was often there with other politicians and dignitaries. She was Louise’s mother and had an even bigger library than my grandmother’s and also gave me full access to it. She had more contemporary writers on her shelves than Grandma did—writers like Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who Grandma considered “sensationalist” and “trashy.” I couldn’t stand Fitzgerald (still can’t), but loved Faulkner when I first read him when I was I think, nine years old. Hemingway, I recognized as he seemed to write a lot like Stephen Crane who I also liked a lot. She also had a lot of good European writers like Balzac.

I’ve gone far afield of your question, haven’t I! Sorry. The thing is, I began reading very early, decided instantly that all I ever would want to do was to be a writer, and decided the best way to do that was to adopt the Jack London School of Writing. To always seek out new experiences. And, that’s what I’ve done all my life. I had one of my five wives after we’d divorced say, “You only married me for material, didn’t you?” To which, I replied, honestly, “Yes.” She was my first wife, a black woman I’d married in Bermuda where I was living at the time in the sixties.

I joined the Navy and afterwards began a life of crime, both for ostensibly the same reason. Experiences for material for my writing. Just about everything I’ve done in life was toward the same end—to accumulate material for my writing. And, since I had little interest in writing about the life and times of insurance salesmen or college professors, that pursuit usually led me to more nefarious environments. Who in their right mind wants to live in the suburbs and mow their lawns when they could be breaking into Joe’s Bar and Grill at one in the morning? Or working for an escort service and vacationing in Puerta Vallarta on some rich lady’s dime? Well, more accurately, what writer would opt for the ‘burbs over that?

Question: So if I understand well, you chose writing and constant seeking of new experience, but the fact you ended up in legal trouble, would it be fair to say crime fiction chose you? How have you ended up wanting to write about violence and the darker side of the human condition? Was there a triggering event?

I had to laugh, Benoit. “Legal trouble?” That sounds like I was sued for not cutting my grass often enough by the neighborhood association... I was a felon, pure and simple. And a convict and then, an ex-con. The “legal trouble” came from committing burglaries, armed- and strong-armed robberies, selling drugs, etc. Cracking a dude over the head with a crowbar. Stuff like that.

And, yes, there was a triggering event, sort of. I had always written about the darker side of life, mostly because that was what I’ve always seen and been exposed in my existence.

But, for a long, long time, I hid my past from everyone. And never wrote about the truly dark stuff. At the time, I just assumed it would hurt me, especially in publishing. I had no idea for the longest time that editors and publishers actually like real-life criminals as their authors! Half my agents never knew I did time or had held people up or outran the cops in high speed car chases or been in prison. Which meant that my stories, while dark, didn’t go into the really dark stuff I’d experienced.

Even in my first novel, The Death of Tarpons, which is about an abusive father and that boy’s struggle to find himself, was presented as fiction, even though it was about 85% true and from my own boyhood. And “cleaned up,” quite a bit from much of the horror that was my childhood. In fact, I had a publisher who offered me a $10,000 advance back in the mid-eighties for it, with the proviso I would allow him to put it out as memoir. I told him I couldn’t because it was only 85% factual. He was okay with that and still wanted it presented as memoir, and the reason I eventually did pull it from him was that he wanted to take out some parts that would “offend some readers.” In particular, a scene where the boy’s father beats him with a live king snake. In his words, it “might offend the snake lovers.” This was in the days before we even had the term “politically correct” and this asshole was way ahead of the times, I guess. Offend the snake lovers? That’s gotta be what? Five or six people? Like, who gives a shit about some frickin’ snake lovers? Plus, it was a true event and it was integral to the story so I told him, thanks, but no thanks, and pulled it. When I could have used ten dollars, much less ten thousand. But, what price is one’s integrity?

Anyway, I held back in that book, simply because I thought it would hurt my chances at publication if I exposed too dark of an environment, especially if it was factual.

Keep in mind, this was the eighties and an entirely different climate than today. Today, I know a whole lot more about what publishers want than I did then.

What changed everything for me was first reading Charles Bukowski and realizing for the first time that what I really wanted to write about could be publishable.

The second event occurred in talking to Diane Lefer whom I chose for my adviser twice for my MFA at Vermont College. I ended up trusting her enough that I revealed my background to her. To my shock she told me that my past was a decided plus in publishing. Knocked my socks off when I heard that. And, that’s when I began going to the really cool events in my life.

Diane opened my eyes to a lot of things. Once, she asked me what I thought about a writer whom I won’t name, but who is renowned for writing dark and even criminal stories. This guy’s won about everything out there and kind of acts the tough guy. I told her that my impression of him from his writing—I’d never met him in person—was that he was a phony… and a bit of a poser and a pussy. That he tried to exude this persona of a bad ass or even a criminal, but that his writing gave him away to one who’d actually done time… i.e., moi. I told her he sounded like a guy who drew mostly from the experience of maybe doing a few days in the city jail for drunk and disorderly, but he’d never been close to the inside of a real prison. That his idea of being bad, came mostly from hanging out maybe at titty bars and the like. She said she was glad to hear that, because even though she didn’t have experience herself with the criminal life, his books had always struck that same chord in her.

But, he enjoys this “persona” of being the “real deal,” and he isn’t even remotely close. I’ve run into writers like him since. A lot of them, actually. Whose idea of a criminal is the little drug dealers in their neighborhoods, most of whom are little suburbanite punks trying to supplement their allowances from Mommy and Daddy. Or from hanging out at stripclubs, maybe, thinking that the guys who frequent those places are some kind of real criminal element. Usually, the kind of guy who hangs out in those places is a loser of the nth degree and real criminals mostly laugh at them. Not saying that some of these guys don’t do criminal acts—some do—but really aren’t the kind of truly scary dudes you’re going to be celling with.

And meth and crack dealers? Gimme a break. These are just the bottom of the criminal barrel. Why would anyone think they’re remotely interesting unless their own lives are utterly boring? They’re the far-fringe, unsuccessful moonshine dealers of yesteryear. Hillbilly wannabes who think that because they own a gun and have shot someone that they’re the baddest thing on the planet. Nothing bad ass about most of them at all. Dumb as a box of hammers is the image that springs up in my mind. Pretty easy to figure out, as a rule. They don’t scare anybody except for those who grew up in suburbia. I guess they seem exotic to ‘em… Must be because that seems to be the audience for these kinds of fiction. About all that happens in a lot of those books is a lot of gratuitous violence that seems to be there mostly for the shock value.

Back to your question. I write about violence and the darker side of humanity because that’s what I’m most familiar with. I grew up with it and I chose that life when I came of age and had a choice and could have gone the safe and secure route. It’s never dull. And, I hate boring. Now, of course, I’m paying for it and I was pretty sure at the time that some day I would. I didn’t work for a corporation or a bureaucracy and so I have no pension. No savings, no money in savings, no pension. Nada. And, that’s fine. I had a really cool life and did more in just about any given week than some of these folks have done in their entire existences. And lived that kind of life year after year after year. I just never wanted to be that guy whose biggest deal in life was the two or four years they spent in the service, or the same amount of time spent in college, or the one time they went to Europe and backpacked for the summer. That’s it? That’s sad. As far as I know, you only get to go around once, so why on earth would an intelligent person spend most of their life doing boring-ass shit?

Here’s a for-instance. There’ve been several times when I was homeless. I was homeless in Costa Mesa, one of the richest towns on earth, and I was sleeping on the concrete floor of a garage and eating out of the dumpster of the Bob’s Big Boy next door for my meals. Was in pure agony from a severely pinched nerve to where I had to be up three days in a row to be able to go to sleep for an hour. No health insurance or money for a doctor and that was fine. Was right on PCH and from the front door of the garage could look out at the QEII, anchored there. Never for one second did I feel sorry for myself. Why? I was living life and it was never boring, not for a second. I remember looking out at the QEII and thinking about some rich dude out there, and feeling sorry for the guy. I imagined he kind of at least suspected inside that probably the only reason the babe on his arm was there was because of his bank account. I was living in that garage with a gorgeous redhead who had convinced me to come out to California from where we’d been living in New Orleans, and I was pretty sure the guy on that boat would have loved to have a girl like that on his arm, knowing she was there because of him and not because of the checks he could write. That kind of shit is priceless and I’ve always been aware that it was, even in the worst of times. It’s those times that let you know you’re alive.

I feel like I’ve lived the Frank Sinatra version of life. I did it my way. I was getting laid every night by a girl who screwed me because she liked the way I screwed, not because I could give her a charge card. How do you put a price on that? The guy at the cocktail party on the QEII was the unlucky one. I’m pretty sure your body feels pretty much the same way in jeans as it does in an Armani suit. It’s your weak-assed mind that tells you it feels better, mostly because some dickhead you don’t even like pretends to your face that you’ve accomplished something by wearing it. Your skin doesn’t know. Trust your skin.

But, I owe a debt to both Bukowski and to Lefer. They showed me what was possible.

Question: You're a creative writing teacher and you have written writing advice books. What's your take on the current writing advice market and how do you think young writers should use such a tool?

The writing advice market is bigger than it’s ever been and in many ways, better. In other ways, not better. Looking back to when I began writing many decades ago, there were very few such books available. Writers learned primarily from… reading novels and trying to figure out what worked and then adopting that for their own work. Today, there are so many books out there that the learning curve can be tremendously shortened. Although, like anything, there’s a downside to the flood of advice. Like anything else, there’s a lot of good… and there’s a lot of slag and dross.

There are expectation problems among many writers. The expectation that there are going to be “secrets” revealed in these books that are somehow going to catapult them onto the bestseller lists if they only unearth and use these secrets. I hate to be the one who tells folks that there really are no such secrets to becoming a good writer. All of the secrets in writing are right there in the open. They’re in the pages of novels you have open before you. When you see something that affects you emotionally in the novel you’re reading, stop and go back and figure out what that writer did that worked and how he or she accomplished that.

Often, writers read as… readers. Not as writers. They’re reading books on a very superficial level. For entertainment. That’s fine for nonwriters, but for a writer that’s foolish. To be blunt, it’s kind of stupid. It’s passing up the single best way to learn to write available.

I had a student ask me one time that if he tried to analyze every novel as a student and not just to be entertained, wouldn’t he lose the “magic” of the work? As it happened, this guy was a musician. Well, I said to him. Do you understand how to play an instrument? I won’t give his responses to the questions that follow because his answer to each was “yes.” Do you know how to play several instruments? Do you know how to write lyrics? Do you know how a symphony works—how all the parts go together to form a whole? Do you know how to create and build emotion within the listener with progressions? I asked a bunch more questions in this vein and then I asked him: “Does your knowledge affect your enjoyment?” Sheepishly, he answered that it didn’t. It added to it, he said, because he knew better than most the skill and craft and art the performer brought to the work. It only heightened his enjoyment.

Another time, I had a college basketball player ask me what was basically the same question. Well, I said, do you understand how a man-to-man defense works? Do you know how zone defenses work? Do you know the differences between a one-three-one and a two-three and a three-two? Well, sure he said. Of course. Do you know how a pick-and-roll works, I asked? Do you know that to be a good shooter you aim for the back of the hoop and never the front? Again, he answered in the affirmative. Then, I asked the clincher. Does that take away from your enjoyment in watching a game? Do you think the guy sitting next to you in the stands who knows nothing about the intricacies of the game enjoys it more? I trust you can guess his answer.

The same things could be asked of a chef. Because of a chef’s knowledge of spices and foodstuffs and combinations of foods, does he enjoy eating a meal less? It’s a question that can be asked of any art form. The answer is always going to be that the more the participant knows about the art and craft of anything, the higher the level of enjoyment is going to be, even though part of his focus is always going to be on how the art was created.

This sounds like a no-brainer and a waste of space to even point this out, but you’d be surprised at how many would-be writers have this attitude. Personally, I wish more of them had it. We’ve got enough competition as it is…

All of this is to say that there are too many writers who don’t do the work themselves while reading and expect to pick up the latest and greatest craft book as a kind of shortcut to find this stuff out. It can’t work like that and it doesn’t.

Does that mean that craft books are useless? Not at all. The only thing I’d suggest is that they’re not relied on at the exclusion of the writer doing his own work to learn.

Also, the writer needs to realize that craft books are these days often seen as cash cows by some publishers. There is more pressure than ever to convince a bestselling author to write one. They bring an enormous audience with them and that means, sales and money, boobie. Several of these aren’t delivering much in the way of scholarship or new material, but are mostly regurgitating things most writers already know or have already been promulgated in earlier books. The bestselling author often likes to write them as well, as it’s attractive in that very often it has the effect of making them look smart and even somewhat “academic.” I imagine if Stephanie Meyer and James Patterson come out with a craft book, the publisher is going to be rubbing his hands together in glee at the thought of all the large Christmas bonus checks he’s going to be able to write out to his employees.

Those are some of the negative things about craft books. The positives, however, mostly far outweigh the negatives. One very substantial benefit to a writer to read them is that very often seeing a particular bit of advice on the page validates something his instincts have told him is something he should be doing but he erroneously thought he shouldn’t. I had that very experience happen to me. Like most of us, I suffered through periods where I didn’t trust my instincts in writing. I had read book after book, sat through workshop after workshop and lecture after lecture, where the advice had invariably been to “just get it down, lickety-split, and then go back and ‘fix it’ through rewrites.” Apply that “work while the ‘muse descends’ white-hot fever of creation” and then go back and rewrite it. Well, my instincts always told me not to do that. What I wanted to do was make sure every sentence, every paragraph was perfect before I went on. But, who was I? I was this little nobody and all of these published, successful writers were continually telling me that my instincts were wrong and that I should just write as fast as I could. So I did what they said.

And, then, one day I picked up a new craft book and this guy (wish to hell I could remember who it was to give him proper and deserved credit!) was saying just the opposite. I can still remember the day I read him. He said to not do what everybody was always advising. He said to take your time, craft each sentence perfectly before moving on. He said that when you marked things to be rewritten, or underlined a word you furnished in haste and knew there was a better word but you didn’t want to stop to figure it out, or knew you were having your character make a wrong turn, that you almost never were able to return to your frame of mind at that point and that instead of rewriting, you became a copy editor instead. He advised (this was in the typewriter days) to always use your best, most expensive paper—that 20-bond stuff with the watermark—and not the cheap stuff. He said when you came up with a word that wasn’t quite right to stop right there and find the perfect word. That you should never go onto the next page until the page you were writing was as good as you could possibly make it. He said a whole bunch of other things along these lines, and at the end, he said that you’ll still probably have to do a rewrite but he predicted you’d do far less rewrites than you had previously.

And, he was right. Before I read this guy, I rewrote every novel an average of 8-10 times. The instant I applied his advice, I went to an average of one rewrite per novel.

What had happened was that I was like most writers. I was unsure of myself and of my instincts. I needed someone in “authority” i.e., a bona fide writer, to tell me that what I wanted to do was okay. That my instincts were sound and to follow them. Bless this guy! He gave me “permission” to do something I had always known I should do, but was afraid to because it seemed to go against the overwhelming “wisdom” of the writing fraternity.

What I didn’t realize fully at the time that most of us who write do so because first we were readers. Voracious readers. That means we’ve already assimilated most of the writing techniques we’ll ever need as writers, simply by dint of our history—of reading thousands and thousands of books. That we already know by all that reading what’s good and what isn’t and how to achieve good writing. That we have good “instincts” honed by years and years of reading. In fact, I can tell very quickly the folks who join my writing class who’s going to make it and who isn’t. The person who’s been reading nonstop and voraciously since the age of five or six has a decent chance of becoming a good writer. The one who admits they’ve read very little most of their life, has very little, if any chance of success. We begin to learn to write at around that age. Not when we’re twenty. And, I know there are stories of people who’ve had success who fit that latter description. But, I’m talking about “good” writers, not necessarily published writers or even bestselling writers. Good isn’t always descriptive of those authors…

Another benefit to reading craft books is related to the above. Very often, they serve to remind us of things we already knew and that’s valuable. Or, they show us something that we kind of knew or suspected was true but we hadn’t yet articulated it to ourselves and the book made it clear the thing we were perhaps fuzzy about.

What’s important about craft books is that even the very worst will almost have at least one piece of solid information in it. If a person spends say fifteen bucks on a book and learns one tiny piece of useful information, that book has paid for itself. So, I’d suggest to buy every single one of them. The ones that are repetitive or don’t show us much of anything new are still worth the purchase because if nothing else, they’ll probably serve to remind us of something important we’ve forgotten.

The other thing is that writing changes. The public’s taste in novels changes. That means the writing advice has to also change to keep up. John Gardner, author of one of the most popular writing books in history, realized this (although some of the people promoting his books don’t), when just before he died, he had lunch with his most famous pupil, Raymond Carver. At this lunch, he told Carver to “forget everything he’d taught him in college.” That “everything in writing had changed and that his advice then no longer applied.” And, he was exactly right. It’s too bad that there are tons of writing teachers in colleges world-wide that never saw this advice he gave Carver, because they’re still recommending his books to their students. That doesn’t mean they’re useless—they’re still very valuable, but only in context to his era. That’s the part they don’t tell their students. Probably because they don’t know or realize this. Much of what Gardner had to say is extremely valuable… and much of it isn’t. If he’d lived, he would have written other books on writing that would have refuted at least some of what he said in his earlier books. But, he didn’t. He died and his words are frozen in amber while the writing world has moved on in major ways.

And, so as not to mislead—I heartily recommend Gardner’s books on writing. But, in context. That means, read his, but read everything else in craft books, especially the current ones. Even the bad ones, but hopefully more of the good ones. The more you read, the more you’ll be able to sort out what works today and what doesn’t.

By the way, the single best piece of information on writing I’m aware of can be found by studying Richard Brautigan’s brilliant short story, “1/3, 1/3, 1/3.” If you read this and understand it, and more importantly, see yourself in the story, there aren’t enough craft books in the world to help you master the craft. You’ll see why Flannery O’Connor said in response to the interviewer who asked her if writing programs discouraged writers: “Not enough of them.”

Question: Last but not least, mandatory manly question: who wins a fight to death between a Ninja and a Viet-Cong?

Ha-ha. I wouldn’t have a clue! I know nothing about ninjas at all, except they have all these cartoons and chasey-fighty movies about them that some teenaged boys enjoy, and while I was in the Navy during the start of Viet Nam, I wasn’t stationed there, so know nothing about the Cong either. I suspect the Viet Cong dude would prevail, however. I’ve known several people who wear those cute little black suits designed by airy “artistic” types down at the dojo and who learn martial arts and never have worried about them too much—too often they seem to have taken up these activities because they either have a Napololeonic complex or have a history of getting shoved around and think that learning this stuff will make them bad, somehow. My knowledge of the Viet Cong is that they were serious dudes who would cut you down in a New York second without even thinking about it much. Plus, the few movies I’ve seen with ninja-like characters usually look like some choreographer who was a bit light in the loafers programmed their shit and when twenty of them attack a guy, they seem to favor doing so one by one, which always struck me as a curious way to fight and not a way I ever saw or was involved in down at the Dungeon in New Orleans. I think if they came up against a Viet Cong, he’d just kind of shake his head and mow them all down with his machine pistol. I do think that breaking boards and bricks and things is kind of cute, though.

To be honest, I don’t have much of an opinion of martial arts. I’ve known several guys who were into that stuff—both on the bricks and in the joint—and nobody takes them very seriously. I’m sure there are some who have an attitude and can back it up—I’ve just never met them, to my knowledge.

I remember a guy in high school whose dad was a state cop and who had him take all of these classes. Guy ended up a black belt in something or other. The guy was a first-class bully. He pulled some of his Karate Kid pink flamingo moves on me in school one day and I hit him up alongside the head with a rock the size of a baseball when we met up after school. I guess my black belt in rocks trumped his in Tai Kwon Whatever… I think a lot of those guys log in a lot of mirror time, looking at themselves practicing their “moves” and imagining themselves down at the beach kicking the ass of the guy who kicked sand in their faces in front of their little girlfriends.

I have a story about this guy. One night during my senior year of high school, I was living in the little town of Lakeville, about fifteen miles south of South Bend. One night I was up in South Bend partying and left for home about three ayem. When I hit the outskirts of town, I punched it and all the way home the speedometer stayed at 120 mph. There weren’t any other cars on the road so I had clear sailing. I’d just hit Lakeville and was making the turn on the far side, when a cop’s light went on behind me. I pulled over and up walks this state trooper.

He took me back to his car and started writing the ticket and talking to me. He said, “I’ve been chasing you ever since South Bend and I had you at 120 all the way.” I said, “Well, that’s kind of good news. Tells me my speedometer’s right ‘cause that’s what I had.” He handed me the ticket and I looked at the name and recognized it right away. It was the Karate Kid’s father. I told him I knew his son and we were great friends. We got to talking and he ended up tearing up the ticket and writing me a warning. True story. That wouldn’t happen today, of course. But, in those days and in that town everybody drove like that. And, we didn’t have the point system yet nor DUIs or any of that stuff. In fact, in Lakeville the Justice of the Peace was also the town barber and he’d let you pay your tickets off in installments. There wasn’t a single week out of the year when I wasn’t paying off several tickets at once.

A good friend of mine, “Hairs” Miller and I had a contest that year to see who could get the most tickets. Alas, I lost. I covered three walls of my bedroom with tickets and Hairs covered his entire bedroom, plus half of the ceiling. He had a ’55 Chevy and nobody could catch him.

I saw the trooper down at our teen hangout a few weeks after he’d given me the warning, and it turned out his son had told him that maybe we weren’t such great friends after all and that I’d been the guy who’d thumped him. He came up to me and told me if he ever caught me again, it wouldn’t be good for me. Luckily, he never did.

The guy was kind of a joke to begin with. He’d sent a good friend of mine to the joint a year or so before for life—the guy’d killed his mother and this guy was the cop who caught him—and my friend swore in court that if he ever got out he’d look him up and kill him. He wasn’t the first who’d told this guy something like that. There were a lot of guys in Pendleton and Michigan City who’d made the same threat and some of them were out. Anyway, this trooper ended up wiring his house and driveway and yard so that if anyone pulled up or moved in the yard, all the lights would come on in the house and outside and start flashing. He’d throw something on and come running out with his shotgun. All the kids in school knew it, and when we were out drinking at night, there were dozens of times we’d just whip into his driveway, watch the lights come flashing on, and then beat it out of there. Funny stuff!

There was a dude in Pendleton who, when he came into population the first day and out in the yard for recreation, started yapping about what a bad ass he was—had some kind of black or purple or rainbow-colored or whatever the big color is in those belts and he’d be walking along and whip out one of those “Cute Lil’ Tweety Bird Crouching Tiger” thingys, and all I saw was guys grinning and I gave him about a week before somebody turned him out. It was a lot sooner than that… And, I’m pretty sure they didn’t surround him with twenty guys and go at him one-on-one… On the other hand, if a Viet Cong had showed up in the yard and people knew it, I don’t see the same reaction happening… That’s a guy who’d get some respect.

The thing is, when a guy has to attend a school to learn how to fight, he’s probably not going to be a dude you have to give much thought to. It’s kind of like those guys who lift weights down at the gym. Gym muscles are cute, but I’d worry more about the fat slob or the anorexic dude who looks like a stiff breeze might knock him over and who doesn’t say much, but who you know has a nine under his arm and will use it. I suspect a lot of these guys spend a lot of time starring in the movies running through their heads… You can just tell…

Anybody you'd like to thank, regarding the release of THE RAPIST?

Absolutely! Cort McMeel and Francois Camoin for believing in me and this book; Jon Bassoff for the same and for putting his own reputation and own money behind it, which is always the truest test if someone believes in a book; a whole shitload of writers I respect for reading, blurbing and reviewing the book and giving it their blessings and high marks, and to Charles Bukowski and writers like him for showing me the way. And, of course I’d like to thank my readers. Without readers, writing is like having sex with yourself. The feedback you get for your performance is ultimately flawed.

Thank you for a wonderful forum and opportunity, Benoit. Thank you for pushing me to be honest and posing great questions.

That’s it, folks. Check out Benoir Lelievre at his Dead End Follies  for great interviews, book reviews, and all kinds of things on writing.

Hope you enjoyed this.

Blue skies,

Les

Political Correctness - A Venal Concept

 Hi folks,

In light of recent developments where a man was fired from his job because of his honest opinion, I thought perhaps it might be timely to rerun a blog post I ran some time ago. The following is what I gave as my graduating talk at Vermont College upon graduating with my MFA in Writing degree in 1997. I thought perhaps it was a particularly timely post for today. In fact, if you didn't know it was written over a decade ago, you might think I just dashed it off today...

One of the faculty, Pam Painter, told me she'd taught at VC since the very beginning and that the audience for my talk was the single biggest ever, for student or faculty. We not only filled the main hall, there were people gathered in the entrances into the room and all along the stairs leading to the second floor. I kind of had the reputation for saying things that upset some folks and that other folks liked, and this kind of proved out that, as when it ended, I received comments from both ends of the spectrum. That made me happy. No expression of an idea is any good if everyone is in agreement with. That usually means... it sucks.

Bring popcorn. It's a long one...

CENSORSHIP AND WHY I LOVE CHARLES BUKOWSKI

By

Leslie H. Edgerton

(Lecture Delivered to MFA in Writing Students & Faculty at Vermont College, January 8, 1997)

          Like most of you in this room, I’ve always written, always had to write. I had this thing inside me that said I had to be a writer. Notice, I said had to be. Not “wanted” or “yearned to be”. Had to be. There was no choice in the matter. God looked down and saw this little runty red thing laying in his bassinet, sucking down a PBR with a formula chaser, and He said, “I need another writer for my Grand Scheme,” and Bingo! There I was. A writer. When God Himself says you’re gonna be a writer, then, boy, you better be a writer. You play the hand you’re dealt.

          I didn’t have any argument with that. I mean, who argues with God? Except, maybe Francois Camoin. But I didn’t have the advantage of being French and cynical and all that like Francois did- I didn’t even know where to begin to buy a beret or a black painter’s smock or an attitude. I mean, for Christ’s sake, I was a kid in Texas. None of those things could be gotten in Texas. If you couldn’t barbecue it or shoot it, fuck it or ride it, forget it. Not available west of the Pecos.

          So I had to be a writer who grew up in Texas and my opportunities were pretty limited because of that.

          Unfortunately, I was the product of a traditional American education. I say “unfortunately” because the literature I was exposed to in that system included what might be termed “safe” writers. Thackery, Milton, Shakespeare, Melville, Whitman, Steinbeck, Faulkner...you know the list. It’s the list we’ve all been exposed to.

          I tried. Believe me, I tried. But my models for writing were all wrong, in a way. They were guys like Balzac and Dickens, Henry James and Jonathon Swift. Ladies like Louisa May Alcot. Great writers, sure, but from another planet as far as I was concerned. I grew up in a bar, saw my first man killed when I was twelve - shot six feet in front of me. I was the night dispatcher for my grandmother’s cab company when that happened and had to phone the police. Nothing like that ever happened in Little Women, near as I could tell.

          One by one, I tried all the genres and styles I became exposed to and one thing or the other doomed each experiment. I mean, I loved the books I read and of course I tried imitating them in style and content, but even though they were wonderful books, they weren’t about worlds I inhabited. I guess I assumed you weren’t allowed to write about the planet I happened to find myself on.

          I just didn’t realize you were allowed to write about real life, at least life as I knew it. It was my first brush with censorship, although I didn’t know it. Our local public library, which was my only source of reading material just didn’t carry anything in the contemporary realism category. Looking back, I know now the head librarian hauncho probably felt those kinds of books would damage my tender and developing character, so even if they had such books on their shelves, they were kept from youngsters like myself.

          So, for years, I continued writing what I thought was the only kind of stuff that could get published and little by little became more and more disillusioned with writing and literature in general. Perhaps if I had gone to college at an earlier age, I might have discovered there were books out there to which I could relate, but I didn’t. I was in the Navy and then in prison, and in those kinds of environments you just don’t run across literature that’s much different than what you’d find on your average high school English recommended reading list.

          I quit writing for a number of years, because, frankly, I was bored. It was by chance only that I came upon a writer who relit the literary fires.

          Charles Bukowski.

          Wow.

          Lights went off.

          This guy was doing things I didn’t know you were allowed to do. He was writing about life, about real life. Nitty-gritty, down and dirty life. Lots of it was funny, most of it was sad, but it all touched me, way down deep there in that literary G-spot all writers (and readers) are forever trying to connect with.

          I read another guy about the same time that turned me on fire inside as well. Kurt Vonnegut. I read this interview in the Paris Review in which he said, “Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.” Big spark of understanding there. Ol’ Kurt said exactly what I had been unable to articulate for a long time, ever since I started reading the “masters.” The old boys (and girls) had some good stuff going for them, but it seems like literary sphincterism had set in by the time I came along, all these deified contemporary writers were sitting around contemplating their own navels, it seemed. I was reading all this stuff about upper-middle class angst. Really jazzy stuff, like how some guy was sorrowing because all he had out of life was his Chrysler agency and ten million bucks and was searching his soul and was in this big blue funk because he hadn’t gone off with Easy Sally that time at the senior prom way back in H.S. Every book I picked up at that period seemed to have a similar theme. I just couldn’t identify. Hell, I never was able to afford a used Chrysler, let alone an entire agency, and I had run off with Easy Sally--yeah, I was that guy, the one in the leather jacket and the slicked-back hair--really! I had hair, back then--and believe me there isn’t a lot of angst to be used for material in the writing trade when you’re sitting in the trailer and Easy Sally is looking like Even Easier Sally and you don’t know where your next PBR is coming from and the TV is flashing those little tornado warnings across the bottom of the screen and you’re trying to quiet the little rascal on your knee that has your last name but the propane delivery man’s hook nose. I just knew somewhere deep inside my bones I couldn’t fake writing a whole, entire book out of what it meant to be the Executive Vice President in Charge of Sales for Southeastern Florida for the Tidy Bowl Corp and sorrowing over the lost babe of his childhood or the sad fact that he’d chucked it all and gone off to paint Tahitian sunsets. Or that his wife had. Crap like that.

          All of a sudden, here’s this guy Bukowski writing about shit I knew about. About whores and hustlers, winos and fathead bosses who were always worried their wives would go to bed with the help so they got their mad out in the open right away.

          I picked up a book of his, a collection of stories called “The Most Beautiful Woman in Town and Other Stories.” I loved those other stories. It was like sitting down with a homeboy or your rap partner in the joint and swapping lies. Better yet; it was entertaining. All of a sudden, I remembered why I had first started writing. To make someone laugh. Or cry. Learn something about another human being. Just feel something. Feel what I was feeling. Here was this guy, Bukowski, and he was doing exactly what I’d always wanted to do.

          Bukowski’s stories weren’t about middle-aged English professors who were all in a fret because their wives no longer get excited sitting around listening to them conjugate French verbs and deducing that their lives, the meaningful portions of them, anyway, were over. Some of these guys, it seemed, took 400 pages to figure out why the major babe in their life was leaving. They were bored, Jack.

*                                               *                                               *

          I know this was billed as a lecture on censorship and you may be wondering where the censorship angle comes in. Well, where it comes in is that not only were folks like Bukowski not being published by so-called “respectable” presses in this country, but other books by writers like him were not generally available to people like myself. They weren’t talked about by our English teachers, they weren’t on the shelves of our hometown libraries--or if they were, they were kept from our view and knowledge. In other words, there was a form of censorship operating that kept this kind of book from me and others that exists today and it is this and other forms of censorship, overt and covert, that I’ll get to, by and by. I want to show what it is about Bukowski that turned my whole life around. Well, not my life--I mean, I still have to mow the grass on Saturday and take out the garbage--but this story saved my writing life, which is, after all, the only life worth having.

          The story was The Fiend. You may have read it. If you did, you either became a fan of Bukowski’s or you hated his guts. Personally, I became a fan.

          Basically, it’s a story about a middle-aged guy named Martin Blanchard, who’s been defeated by alcohol. He’s lost his wife and family, two wives, two families, actually, his job, everything. Twenty-seven jobs he’s gone through. That’s a lot of jobs. This guy’s just your basic average slob who can’t leave the juice alone. He’s reduced to living in this squalid apartment, four flights up, and drinking wine. His only source of income is his unemployment checks and money left in parking meters. Badly educated, yet he listens to classical music, preferring Mahler.

          He begins to notice this little girl outside playing. He begins to notice she has on these interesting panties...and... you guessed it, he finds himself masturbating. Afterwards, he feels relief. It’s out of my mind, he thinks after he gets off. I’m free again. Only, he’s not. It’s just the beginning of a new obsession, a perversion. For the first time in months, perhaps years, he has an interest. It repels him, but he can’t resist it, either.

          At first, he thinks it’s just something weird that overtook him and now it’s out of his system, but after he drinks his last bottle of wine, he sees the little girl outside in the street and begins to get hard again. He decides to go to the store to replenish his wine supply and as he walks outside he notices the little girl and the two little boys have gone into the garage across the street. He finds himself walking into the garage behind them and shutting the doors.

          He then proceeds to rape the little girl, in very graphic detail. When you read this part, if it doesn’t make you sick, you’re probably beyond the kind of help counseling can give you at this late date. All the while he’s committing this heinous act, the two boys are asking him questions. They express genuine curiosity and don’t seem to be overly-frightened, exhibiting more of an amoral attitude than anything. Bukowski does something quite skillful here. Instead of having the two young boys be scared shitless, he shows them to be mainly curious about what Martin is doing to their friend. These kids are witnessing something pretty horrible, but then they’re just kids, and there’s an amoral innocence about their reaction that blurs the morality. Raping a child is without doubt a truly horrible crime, with no redemption in such an act, but since it’s hard to wholeheartedly condemn the two boys the reader is moved into an area of moral ambiguity that creates a kind of complicity with the boys. The reader then becomes, like the boys, a kind of voyeur to Martin’s act. This also helps humanize the monster Martin is, inasmuch as any such person could be seen as having human qualities.

          The kicker for me in this story was a line a little earlier on in the story, as Martin is kissing the child, just before he rapes her, and the narrator says, “Martin’s eyes looked into her eyes and it was a communication between two hells--one hers, the other his.” When I read this line, it was as if I’d been struck by literary lightening.

          What I have always thought good writing was about was people, all kinds of folks, and what made writing about people good, was that it showed you something about them. Something you didn’t know or were confused on or were ignorant of. And not just politically correct folks, either. In fact, preferably not politically correct folks. Is there a more boring bunch in the Solar System? You see, I was in jail, I was an alcoholic, I was a drug user, I was all those kinds of dudes that aren’t allowed to buy a house in Westchester County--well, that’s not right, exactly, according to my New York friends, most of the citizens in Westchester fit that description--but you know what I mean--and I knew they weren’t all weak or stupid or worthless. They didn’t all start out that way. Something happened along the road. Some of the most intellectual conversations I’ve ever heard were in soup kitchens. I met a guy once who used to teach physics at M.I.T., one fine Thanksgiving Day at the free turkey blowout the Salvation Army was hosting in Baltimore. This guy could make hydrogen bombs in his sleep and probably cure cancer if he got a year off the sauce.

          Anyway, back to Bukowski and his story about the child rapist. Bukowski doesn’t excuse this motherfucker, nor make him out to be anything but the monster he is, but he does show us something about the guy which we probably wouldn’t have known in any other way. He shows us there’s a human being running around inside the guy someplace. A somewhat troubled human being, but one of us at any rate. And this is what literature should be all about. Showing us to one another. The good, the bad, the ugly as well as the downright perverts.

          All his stuff isn’t good. In fact, a lot of it stinks. Kind of masturbation-on-the-page type of stuff. He considers himself a genius--well, he is, actually--and Bukowski seems to have thought that everything he had a thought on was important because it came out of his brain. Not true. That virtually everything he wrote got printed may not have been his fault, but more the fault of publishers who bought into his self-created myth.

          Almost any other writer that this same story would have occurred to, would have taken the point of view of anyone but Martin’s. The little girl herself, the boys, the cops who came and arrested him, the parents. An adult who discovered the crime. A fly on the wall. To write this kind of story from the pov of the perp, in my mind, is the stuff of literary courage. It’s very dangerous stuff. It you don’t bring it off, it almost makes the writer appear as if he excused Martin for what he’s done, which would have made Bukowski an even bigger monster than his character. What he’s been able to do is present Martin exactly as he is - a hideous member of the human race...but amazingly, yet...still a member of humanity. It’s interesting in one respect, too, in that Bukowski wrote this story in the third person, while most of his other writing is first person and confessional autobiography. It looks as if he wanted to make sure readers didn’t confuse the narrator with the author, which, if he did, renders him just a little less courageous. I don’t want to think of him that way, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

          With that one little sentence, “Martin’s eyes looked into her eyes and it was a communication between two hells--one hers, the other his.”, Bukowski gives us an insight that is deeply profound. And that, in my opinion, is what great writing is all about.

          It takes enormous courage to be able to write about the kinds of people Bukowski does. Readers, even intelligent readers, tend to associate the writer with the narrator. In my first semester, I wrote a story about a character who was a criminal, and I had the concern that the reader of the piece would want to know if I had been a criminal myself. I addressed my concern to my first advisor here, Phyllis Barber, and she said, “an intelligent reader will never ask if a piece of writing is autobiographical, so don’t worry about it.” Well, Phyllis meant well, and in a perfect world, this would be true, but believe me, even very intelligent readers at least wonder if the stuff they’re reading comes from the writer’s own experience and even the brightest of readers will wonder if very negative or dark stuff is what the author really thinks and feels. It’s just human nature. It’d be nice if readers accepted work labeled as fiction as just that--fiction--but the truth of the matter is, there’s something of the prurient in all of us that makes us hope that the stuff on the page--especially the dark, forbidden stuff--is derived from the real experience of its creator. It gives most of us a delicious little shiver of horror to be standing this close to depravity without actually having to get any of it on ourselves. There is some part of almost all our souls that craves the darker side of life. We are alternately titillated and repulsed by immoral behavior and I think that is the reason books and stories and movies about bad guys are so well-attended. We can satisfy this baser part of our souls in a safe and acceptable manner, so long as they get put in their places in the end.

          Most of my own writing output has been about such people, and without exception, those who read it and are acquainted with me, will come up and ask, in almost an embarrassed fashion, “Was that yourself you were writing about?” Up until just recently, I would usually answer that, uh, no, I just know some people like that. I’ve usually taken the coward’s way out. Just recently, I’ve begun to admit that, yes, I’ve done many of the things that show up in my stories. I’ve been a criminal, done time, sold drugs, been involved in various sexual aberrations, broken many and diverse laws. I don’t do them any more--well, not as many--I’d be room temperature by now if I’d continued doing some of the things I used to. And, I’m a different person than I was when I was involved in those things. That’s why I’ve usually lied when asked if the author of my work was the same as the narrator. Most folks, no matter what they say, will assume you’re still that kind of person and that kind of reputation will keep you from getting some of the nicer rewards of our civilization.

          The thing that writers like Bukowski represent to me is truth. As a group of animals endowed with a superior intellect--as compared with, say, monkeys or tse-flies--and if we do indeed have this intelligence, then what we ought to be about primarily is the pursuit of truth. This is what education should be about, although sadly, it seems not to be the Holy Grail it once was. Back in “my day” which was the nineteen-sixties, that’s what a lot of us were interested in. Truth. We were into toppling institutions. Institutions we felt were based on lies. And, I guess that’s why writers like Bukowski appeal to me so much. The one thing we weren’t being in the sixties was safe. Although, that’s not entirely true. There was a large contingent of folks that were concerned mainly with making sure they didn’t go to Vietnam and get shot at. A lot of the hyperbole in that era was, in fact, centered around changing a system that could put one’s physical unit in jeopardy. But for many of us, especially those of us who had been in the military at the time, the things we were involved in were anything but safe. That’s what seems to be missing today. Most of the stuff I pick up and read, while quite good in many instances, is for the most part, safe writing. The mood has changed, as it always does, but the direction it has moved to is a dangerous one.

          I’m speaking here of the phenomenon sweeping through this country referred to as being “politically correct.” Like many grandiose ideas, there is a noble intent at the center of this outlook, but also like many other popular notions, it has been perverted until it is the antithesis of what it originated as. Being PC nowadays amounts to out and out censorship in my opinion. For every writer like Bukowski, William Vollmann, and David Sedaris who breaks through and becomes a cult hero, there are hundreds of writers who are being stifled, vilified, and destroyed, simply because they do not preach the party’s message nor do they conform to the parameters set up by the PC folks who seem to be in charge. Too often they are stifling themselves by trying to placate society. What used to be considered simply bad taste nowadays takes on a more sinister connotation and that is dangerous if we value freedom of thought and value the time-honored tradition of the debate of ideas which is the only viable method for advancing knowledge and understanding.

          Plato himself spoke about political correctness in The Republic, when he said:

          “Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only.” How about that.

          In another of Bukowski’s stories, 3 Chickens, he continually beats his girlfriend. Definitely not a PC story. Here are some direct quotes from the story:

          once she was screaming these insanities from the fold-down bed in our apartment. I begged her to stop, but she wouldn’t. finally, I just walked over, lifted up the bed with her in it and folded everything into the wall.

          then I went over and sat down and listened to her scream.

          but she kept screaming so I walked over and pulled the bed out of the wall again there she lay, holding her arm, claiming it was broken.

and

          now, another time she angered me and I slapped her but it was across the mouth and it broke her false teeth.

          I was surprised that it broke her false teeth and I went out and got this super cement glue and I glued her teeth together for her. it worked for awhile and then one night as she sat there drinking her wine she suddenly had a mouthful of broken teeth.

          the wine was so strong it undid the glue. it was disgusting. we had to get her some new teeth, how we did it, I don’t quite remember, but she claimed they made her look like a horse.

and

          the bar was full, every seat taken. I lifted my hand. I swung. I backhanded her off that god damned stool. she fell to the floor and screamed.

          There are more abusive incidents in the story. This is horrible stuff to anyone--and I imagine that’s most of us--who is interested in consciousness-raising about spouse abuse and battering--but there is a value to being exposed to this kind of material. How else can we understand anything about violence unless we observe and portray it accurately? It exists, just as surely as serial killers exist, and how can one combat evil unless one understands its nature?

          Gordon Weaver, who was on the faculty here at Vermont until a few years ago, told me in an interview, that, “If our special interest, as writers and/or editors, is the precise use of language toward the end of a viable perception of and effect on reality, we may argue there is some virtue implicit in any utterance (written or oral) that confronts the consensus of any gathering.” He gives an example. “There is a cost that will be paid by all concerned if one tells a Polack joke in the presence of Poles, but I contend the cost is greater if one stifles or sanitizes the anecdote.” Gordon has something here, I think. Weaver also told me that academicians are perhaps the newest bullies on the censorship block and perhaps the most dangerous of all. He stated that, “There is a greater danger, it seems to me, when the censors come from the ranks of the presumably ‘enlightened’. It is not surprising that a number of college and university communities nurture factions who wish to control free speech; it is unsettling when more sophisticated citizens (faculty) add their clout to movements desiring to police our utterance in the interests of what minority or another deems politically incorrect.”

          Whether or not you agree with writers like Bukowski, or Weaver for that matter, is unimportant. What is important is that they and others of diverse opinions have a forum to be heard and read. That forum is disintegrating under the onslaught of those who wish to stifle speech that disagrees with theirs. Truth is in danger of being extinguished, and it may fall to us who write to be the last vanguard of free speech. That is why writers such as Bukowski need to be published and need to be read by establishment presses and before they’re dead. There are some of us who feel we are plunging back into a Dark Age. History would confirm that to be so. After nearly every period of enlightenment, anarchy prevails again for awhile, and this is what I see us heading toward, as a nation and as a world.

          It is the nature of groups to want to stifle opposing viewpoints. In this country, supposedly the land of free speech, attempts at suppression have been with us since the adoption of the First Amendment, but the preponderance of that type of activity has been traditionally borne by extremists of the far right and far left political and societal spectrum. Those with the hot fire of righteousness in their bellies have been the usual standard-bearers for the termination of ideas contrary to their agenda and such should probably be expected.

          Gordon Weaver told me that although he dislikes boorish and bigoted expressions, he sees a greater danger in disallowing their spokesmen an opportunity to be heard.

          “The censors will always be with us,” he said. “It is the nature of both institutions and individuals to desire the silence of those they wish to suppress. Institutions with political power or ambitions for same (government, churches, schools) can probably be fended off--as they have been in modern times at least--by organized responses. The American Civil Liberties Union has a pretty good record in this regard. Simple crackpots (racists, militant feminists, and other self-appointed arbiters of community morality) seem to wither away if studiously ignored.”

          Repression comes in many forms, not always overt. Kathleen M. Sullivan, a professor of law at Harvard Law School, in talking about the censorship issue as it affects funding for the NEA, says of the PC issue, “An artist who receives a check in the mail (from the NEA) with a ‘hit list’ of forbidden ideas attached will forego too much valuable and innovative expression for fear it will come too close to the line. As (US Supreme Court) Justice Thurgood Marshall once put it, the problem with a ‘sword of Damocles is that it hangs--not that it drops.’”

          Fred Grandy, former actor on the Love Boat and now a Congressman from Iowa, says, “I am no artist and have 10 years on TV to prove it. But I have spent enough of my life around creative minds to know that you cannot have art without risk. You cannot write language proscribing the human imagination that will not turn artists away in droves.”

          Speaking of Congress in terms that could be applied to college professors and publishers as well, Grandy said, “Trying to eliminate smut by allowing Congress to tell America what is and is not artistic is as misguided as attempting to legislate patriotism by amending the Constitution to prohibit flag burning.”

          And publishers. How do they, as deciders of what news is fit to print, view the censorship debate? Reactions range from the moderately perplexed to the horrified doomsayers.

          Robert McDowell, who publishes the Story Line Press, wrote an opinion piece for the Register-Guard in Eugene, Oregon, which perhaps synopsizes the publisher’s view. “The debate pits a democratic majority believing in our First Amendment rights of free speech against a well-financed and well-organized minority extolling the virtues of all that is wholesome and the government’s right to control the subject matter of the books we read, the music we enjoy, the paintings and plays we experience.” McDowell calls Senator Jesse Helms and other individuals and groups’ efforts to censor materials funded by the NEA, “the most severe legalized censorship in this country since the McCarthy era,” and labels such censorship efforts as being “shameful attacks on free speech and the artist’s right to represent the truth as he or she perceives it.”

          Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist, Larry McMurtry, in a Washington Post article, accused the Jesse Helms-led forces of attempting to “eliminate all sex from American art if they can. Rembrandt’s sketch of a fully clothed heterosexual couple attempting the missionary position behind a bush would likely not be thought fund-worthy by Helms, whose stated preferences would limit us to snow scenes, pictures of bird dogs or romantic landscapes involving, if possible, humble tobacco farms.” McMurtry goes on, “The narrative as these individuals see it, in their determination to tell Americans what they need and don’t need in the way of publicly funded art, is rigidly chaste: no public money for anything with sex in it! (They may claim that (they) only want to withhold public money from art that depicts or describes ‘wrong’ sex-- i.e., homeoerotic (no grants to Leonardo or Proust!) sadomasochistic (no Westerns, no film noir), exploitive of children (no Lolita, no Lewis Carroll), but it’s clear that they really mean to eliminate all sex from American art if they can.”

          Kathleen Sullivan puts it even more succinctly, when she says, “A free society can have no official orthodoxy in art any more than in religion or politics. And in a free society, such orthodoxy can no more be purchased by power of the purse than compelled by power of the sword.”

          Just a couple of years ago, Stanley Banks, Kansas City playwright and poet, offered the balance of such cost: “We will begin to see dull art which has no freshness of vision. Certain points of view will be silenced. When that happens our society will be seriously threatened without a bomb being blasted.” He warns us not to “call for laws to censor artists who challenge our consciousness in ways that might be uncomfortable, irritating, risqué, etc. For those who don’t want to see or hear or read about acts or points of view contrary to their own, he advises, “simply don’t look, buy it or let the kids have access to it!”

          Banks’ “dull art which has no freshness of vision” is already upon us. It has always been with us, since censorship in one form or another has always been around--it has only increased mightily in the past few years. The result is art which is becoming blander and blander, much resembling the “art” that was allowed to surface in totalitarian governments such as the USSR of a few years past and in many other governments. America is not yet at that stage, but if current developments continue in publishing, in the university, and in government, we are not far from achieving total censorship, imposed by the group in control.

          What scares me the most is that universities should be the bastion of free thought but the state of the matter is that free debate of ideas is rapidly disappearing from the college campus. As more and more writers come out of university settings and are being influenced by teachers with a decided political bent, the writing they produce becomes more and more insipid. These same writers take over the litmags and editor positions at publishing houses and impose their political beliefs on those who submit, publishing only those that can pass the PC test in the content of their creative material. As Kurt Vonnegut said in a quote cited earlier, “Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.” Well, it’s in great danger of doing just that. It’s about halfway up the anus.

          In interviewing folks for an article I wrote on censorship for Circle K Magazine, I was referred to the brother-in-law of a friend of mine, an Australian, who was teaching physics and doing research at one of America’s leading universities which I cannot name because I’ve promised him anonymity. This man says, “I think it’s a myth that censorship doesn’t exist on college campuses. I believe universities should be places where anybody can say whatever they want and everybody should be very tolerant, but it’s just not true. Students are punished for saying certain things. You could say whatever you wanted at the University of Sydney (where he’s from). They were much more tolerant there. In student publications there was much less concern about libel, for example. The litigation aspect puts a lot of pressure on what ideas you can express.” This man only agreed to give me his views when I swore several times I wouldn’t use his name or even tell what university he was at, for fear of losing his job. It’s a sad day when a person from another country is allowed a greater freedom of expression there than in his adopted country which professes to be the freest nation on earth.

          This professor went on to say, “I think there’s more of a tradition in European-style universities for freedom of speech--that that’s what universities are for. In America, the impression I get is that universities are for other purposes...for training professionals and for football games. It’s not about intellectual freedom. You pay us (educators) your money and you want something at the end. You want a guaranteed elite job in society, and it has nothing to do with expanding your mind. You’re buying a product. It’s more of a consumer orientation.”

          He adds, “The government is trying to censor more and more science that they are actually paying for. For example, on sensitive subjects as global warming, the government wants to see research results first, because of the possible political consequences.”

          Americans should be ashamed when they have prided themselves on theirs being the leading example of a free society, when others in the world community may be seeing us very differently, as evidenced by my anonymous critic and source.

          Anita Manning, writing for USA Today, says that the issue is different in colleges than it is in the lower levels of education.

          “In K through 12, there is a school board or some sort of governing body that chooses what books are included in the curriculum...whereas in the college setting, the individual professor or instructor chooses the books for that course and students choose whether or not to take the course, leading to entire different issues.”

          In June, 1992, Brenda Suderman, acting media relations officer for The Bulletin, the student newspaper at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, reported that the university deleted about 170 files containing material on sexual bondage and pornography from the Internet computer system the university subscribes to. Gerry Miller, Director of Computer Services, made the decision in consultation with Terry Falconer, Vice-President (administration), saying the material was removed because “we felt they (the deleted files) didn’t support the mission of the university and we felt they were objectionable.”

          Alisa Smith, co-editor of The Marlet, the student newspaper at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, published what university officials deemed objectionable material as exampled by a lesbian, gay, bisexual issue put out in 1991 which featured male and female genitalia on the cover. About 2,000 copies were thrown into dumpsters by campus traffic and security functionaries upon administrative order. Even so, Smith feels the press is becoming a bit freer. (Yeah, well--go figure…)

          She says, “The mainstream media is covering a lot of issues that only the alternative press used to cover. I suppose the backlash against political correctness is sort of an attempted censorship, like trying to silence people, but not by directly shutting down their newspapers. (Universities) are trying to shut down thought, rather than newspapers. All the articles that you see are about how PC’s have sort of gotten a grip on society and how people can’t say what they want anymore. I guess it’s like a left-wing phenomenon.”

          Let money talk, though, and censorship takes on yet another clever form: the economic kind.

          “Personally,” says Smith, “I think the biggest form of censorship right now is the fact that the economy is so bad, making advertising really hard to come by. A lot of papers used to have a fairly idealistic boycott list for advertising that they wouldn’t use because of things those advertisers were funding--like nuclear systems contracting or because they were pro-apartheid in South Africa. Editors are finding they can’t make ideological choices any more because of monetary pressure. If you’re really dependent on advertising dollars, you have to basically write the kinds of things that won’t offend your advertisers and don’t disagree with their stances.”

          This latter statement seems to contrast with her earlier one that “the press is becoming a bit freer,” and is perhaps a good example of why censorship is unnecessary. If you allow anyone to talk freely long enough, they may provide sufficient evidence by their own words that they should not be taken that seriously when giving us the benefit of their opinion.

          Fearful of bad publicity during stressful economic times, it is not so surprising college and university administrations are increasingly acting to suppress anything that might bring adverse publicity to their campuses. What is surprising is that faculty members are increasingly joining in, even in the supercharged Politically Correct environment that has permeated most higher-education campuses in one way or another.

          A 1992 incident at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, exemplifies the debate and poses difficult and perplexing arguments for both sides of the issue.

          A cartoon ran in the student newspaper, the Nicholls Worth, poking fun at three black singers in a rap group that had performed on campus. Black students who were offended, protested by burning about 150 copies of the paper publicly. Their complaint was that they were greatly upset by the exaggerated features of the cartoon figures and the stereotypes it reinforced. Eric Knott, president of a black fraternity denied that the protest had anything to do with being politically correct.

          “I’m not one to hide behind racism and claim that everything in society is racist, (but) the cartoon clearly degraded the black race,” Knott says.

          Marty Authement, student editor of the paper, said that he “used poor judgment” in allowing the cartoon to be published, but was also concerned that “political correctness is limiting what journalists can do. These days you have to be more sensitive than you usually would be. If you live by the strict law of political correctness, there’s not much left.”

          I had a very jarring and dismaying experience with PCism with my own novel THE DEATH OF TARPONS. A few years before it actually got published, a regional publisher in the Southwest wanted to buy it. A very few months before this offer, I was sleeping on a garage floor in California and eating out of a Bob’s Big Boy dumpster, so the money he offered had the same value as a million dollars to me. I almost signed the contract until the publisher said, “Well, we have to change a lot of this. There’s stuff in here that might make certain folks upset.” He gave as an example a scene in which the boy’s father whips him with a live king snake. This might offend the snake lovers, he said. That’s got to be what?--seven or eight in the U.S.A.? Not counting, of course, the folks who use them in church services. He cited about twenty other scenes I’d have to change because they might offend this person or that. Reluctantly, I withdrew the book, not knowing if it would ever be published, and indeed, it was another five years before I found a publisher who wasn’t as concerned about snake lovers’ feelings and was more concerned with putting out a book that she felt had literary value.

          Mind you, this was several years before the wholesale PC attitude took over the country. This asshole--and I don’t excuse myself from the term--was merely the forerunner of what is a terrifying fact of life today.

          If you believe this to be the ravings of a paranoid mind, consider these facts:

          A record 348 incidents of attempted censorship occurred in the 1991-92 school year, according to The American Way, a liberal watchdog group. That’s an increase of 20% over the previous high, a figure they claim poses an alarming advance in assaults on a basic Constitutional right--a right almost universally assured in most of the free world.

          The Literary Network, a project jointly administered by Poets&Writers, Inc. and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses report over 6,000 attempts to remove books from shelves in American libraries in the 1980’s and ‘the number of incidents is noticeably on the rise.”

          Concerned Women for America, a conservative, pro-family group asserts all censorship attempts are not necessarily bad. Caia Mockaitis, speaking for the organization, says the issue is one of selection, not censorship, many times, in that “there are some materials that are appropriate for kids and some that are not,” no matter what adults’ political bias, liberal or conservative.

          Mockaitis has plenty of like-minded supporters. Censorship attempts at banning outright or restricting access to books and magazines in secondary school libraries were successful in nearly one-half of instances between 1987 and 1990, reports a University of Wisconsin survey of 6,600 schools. Challenged publications were removed 26 percent of the time, restricted by age or grade level 22 percent of the time, and more likely to occur at small schools.

          The book challenged most? Judy Blume’s Forever, a story of a teenage girl who loses her virginity. Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue and Rolling Stone were the most-challenged magazines at secondary schools, according to USA Today, Jan. 20, 1992.

          Consider this item: “Pornography Victims Compensation Act” was a bill on the U.S. Senate floor that would enable victims of sex crimes to file civil suits in an effort to recover damages from producers and distributors of obscene materials (including publishers, wholesalers, and booksellers) if the victims can show that the materials “caused” the crimes. This “third-party liability” bill is a way of imposing censorship through a back door. This item was reported by the American Booksellers Association.

          Here’s another: In May, 1990, Ferris Alexander, operator of a chain of bookstores, theaters and video stores in the Minneapolis area, was found guilty of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) obscenity forfeiture law. His crime? Selling four magazines and three videotapes found to be obscene and valued at less than $200. Alexander was sentenced to six years in prison, fined $200,000 and forfeited a $25 million dollar business. This was reported by The Media Coalition.

          Here’s another. Three editors of the Ohio State University student newspaper, The Lantern, resign when members of the journalism faculty issue a policy statement that the faculty advisor had the authority to review articles for libel before they were published. This story from The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 4, 1992.

          Censorship is everywhere and rising in attempts and more frightening, in successful attempts.

          Free speech advocate Nat Hentoff, the author of Free Speech for Me - But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other from HarperCollins, feels that in too many cases, publishers, school boards and principals remove or change material for students rather than face the wrath of militant parent groups. Seeing authorities suppress ideas in some cases, and being in a school in which books keep disappearing, gives a graphic lesson to students, Hentoff feels, in that they may have doubts that theirs is a country of intellectual freedom.

          And it appears it is special-interest groups that are behind these efforts and that the majority of Americans are against censorship. A survey conducted by Louis Harris for the American Council for the Arts and sponsored by Phillip Morris Companies, Inc., in February, 1992, polled 1,500 adults over the age of 18 by telephone. Part of the findings were that 91% felt it important for school children to be exposed to and participate in the arts; 67% felt learning about the arts as important as learning about history and geography, 60% say as important as math and science, and 53% believe the arts are important as learning to read and write. It’s evident that it’s a small but vocal and politically-powerful group of minorities who are succeeding in censorship activities and these groups emerge from both ends of the political and societal spectrum.

          Virtually every publisher in the country, from the smallest litmag to the largest publishing conglomerate, is terrified of antagonizing any reader whatsoever, unless the person offended is not part of a highly-organized, highly-vocal political group. This includes both right and left-wingers. It seems everybody in America has now organized, has a group with a slogan, a newsletter, a home page on the Internet, and a secret handshake. The battle is being waged over who gets ultimate control of the presses. And it doesn’t matter who wins. We all lose. What we lose is freedom of expression. And once that happens, we are done as a free society. I go to Gordon Weaver once again, who said it as best as it can be said. “Censorship from without is bad for the language, bad for those who speak or write it; self-imposed censorship, whatever the motive is worse. If you won’t say what you think, you run the risk of losing the powers of both speech and thought. I suspect we’ll be safe just as long as we refuse to accept censorship for anyone.”

          Again, I quote Gordon Weaver for perhaps the best take on the situation. “If the king is naked, we’re all (including the king) better served if someone says so.”

          Well, the king is indeed, naked. The only problem is not enough of us are saying so, preferring to remain safe, keep our jobs, get our material published and so we go on, giving silent tacit agreement to what is happening. This is an understandable position for many in our society; it is unforgivable for writers, at least in my opinion. Writers should be like the canaries in coal mines, the warning system that things are not right and that danger looms. As a group, we have many of us become complacent, intent only on saving our professional selves at the expense of freedom of thought. Maybe we understand too well that although the canary in the coal mine provided a valuable service, in doing so he ended up room temperature.

          I cannot count the numbers of instances acquaintances of mine have said to me, “I cannot say certain things I believe in, to my class, my teachers, my peers, or in my writing, because I would lose my job or be censured or not see my work in print, etc. What’s wrong with us? What kinds of writers are we producing in this country that are fearful to take stands on issues they believe fervently about simply because they risk disapproval? What kind of chickenshit writer is it that the little squiggles he or she puts down on paper consist of half-truths and integrity that is compromised regularly? We are surrendering something precious more by what we don’t do than what we do. Are we so enamored of safety and comfort that we are willing to give up the freedom to express ourselves honestly? It seems that we are. It is a growing malaise that is sweeping the country and I hold that the only ones that can stem the tide are the writers in our society. But where are they?

          Some are out there. There are a few. William Vollmann. Brian Everson. Michael Tolkin. Bukowski. There are others that we’ll never know of because they can’t find a forum. There need to be a lot more such voices. What is really needed is for establishment forums to begin looking more at the quality of the writing than the content. To give an ear to voices that refuse to be influenced by a job, a smile from an empty-headed bureaucrat, publication in a white-bread magazine or by a bottom-line mentality of a publishing conglomerate.

          I think back to when I began writing as a grade school kid. One of the things I used to do was write humorous sketches of some of the more terrifying individuals I faced daily. Individuals like the bullies I and others faced, from the schoolyard rowdy to the teacher who thought her job was to intimidate her class into submission. I’d show these “pieces” to friends, they’d be passed around, and in some cases, public opinion ended those offenders’ bullying careers. Nobody likes to push someone around if he’s going to get laughed at by everyone else. It just plain takes all the power out of it, not to mention the fun.

          The problem today is, the bullies have taken over not only the schoolyard, but the university, the Congress, and the publishing house. Many of us in this room became writers because of a bully somewhere in their past. Maybe it was another kid, or a group of kids, or maybe it was a parent or a teacher. We found we could effectively combat these kinds of folks by the written word. If we were physically weaker we possessed a strength that was virtually indefensible against. The power of ideas, expressed upon the page and in open debate. Do we want to give up our only weapon against tyranny? I hope not.

          And by the way--those writers I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture--Whitman, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Thackery, Milton, Shakespeare, Melville, Alcott--and that I described as “safe”, were anything but that when they were being published. They were almost all rogues in their time and were, by turns, either censored, vilified, viewed with shock, attacked by those in power, or even unpublished in their lifetimes because of the content of their writing. It is only after many years had passed and the political climate had shifted, that the original perceptions of them and their work were considered nonthreatening enough to exist in our libraries and schools. Although many of them are still censored, even today. Steinbeck routinely makes his appearance at book-burnings and other censorship attempts, along with Faulkner, Whitman and even Shakespeare. They were “safe” to me when I read them, simply because I was reading them in a different, more removed era, but in fact, those writers who have become what we call “immortal” have largely been the risk-takers of their time, who wrote in line with their conscience, rather than the political and social mores of their period. Many of them endured great distress because what they were writing was politically incorrect at the time. The thing was, there were then and still are now, publishers who gave them a forum, often at great risk, and there were those who read them, and so the world has been enriched through those individuals’ courage. Knowing this, it would be easy to say, “well, hey, those folks got published and there are those today being published who don’t parrot the party line, so what’s the problem? The problem is, once we as writers and future editors and educators begin to think like that, complacency sets in and we get the attitude to “let someone else worry about it” and that’s when our freedom of expression becomes seriously eroded and in danger of disappearing. Freedom of expression is a value that must be continuously fought for, over and over. That war is never finished unless one side or the other lays down its arms. As part of this generation of writers, it is our duty to take up the battle.

          There is another point of view that says that it’s not the job of an artist to express a viewpoint or an opinion at all. While I respect the right of those who feel that way, I disagree. Indeed, is it possible to find a writer of note who hasn’t expressed his point-of-view, politically, through his or her writings? What else was Steinbeck commenting on in “The Grapes of Wrath” if not a political system? Perhaps he didn’t stand on a stump and proclaim to the world his political views but they sure are right there in his fiction. There are countless others I could give as examples and I’m sure you have your own list. Some artists feel it is their job to present a vision of the world, not a political opinion. I don’t see a difference. It seems to be a matter of semantics. What is a “vision of the world” except a political opinion? Or you might call such a view a “philosophy” but again, philosophies (in my opinion) are nothing but political ideologies dressed up in a tuxedo. I believe it all comes down to politics and I mean politics in the purest sense, as in I want mine and you want yours and I’d kill you for yours if we hadn’t agreed that we’re civilized and have figured out a way for both of us to keep our stuff and not worry about the other taking it. And, for me, that’s what censorship finally boils down to. It’s refuting the principle that I can have mine and you can’t take it and you can have yours and I can’t have it either. You can just substitute the word “opinion” for a particular possession. What I object to is the closing down of forums for all but those who agree with the body politic, not in an overt way but by more subtle and insidious means.

          Thank you for your time. I hope I’ve given you some food for thought. I hope you’ll read some Charles Bukowski, some William Vollmann. I don’t even care if you don’t like or agree with them. In fact, the only way this little talk will be a success if people go out of here arguing with each other. Personally, I’m like Robert Duvall in The Apocalypse Now - I love the smell of a good argument in the morning. I’d like to leave you with one of my favorite quotes. In the preface to the infamous Story of O, Jean Paulhan wrote, “Dangerous books are those that restore us to our natural state of danger.”