On Becoming A Novelist
O'Rourke, William
occurred reeks of the opportunism which has in the past seen other Department D provocations grow to monstrous proportions." In a slide typical of the book, this hypothesis is soon asserted as...
...13 January 1984:25 and pornography...
...John Gardner's book is aimed at aspir2 ants, those foolish enough to want to join the fray...
...The disinformation campaign was at first directed toward trying to convince the public that an amendment was not necessary, or at least not necessary now...
...He does think his side, the "intellectually militant people," have been winning the battle...
...In brief THE CALL TO CONVERSION by Jim Wallis, Harper & Row, $9.95 190 pp...
...Throughout the book, Wallis intersperses descriptions of his own efforts to follow his evangelical heritage into the communitarian and social dimensions of conversion...
...more engineers, lawyers, etc...
...Griffin...
...7] Peadar Kirby treats you and your readers to a pretty fair sample of the kind of journalistic shell game used by the anti-abortion amendment campaign writers to confuse and hoodwink the Irish electorate in the recent constitutional amendment campaign...
...There are certainly more "creative" writers of ability today than there were fifty years ago, just as there are more talented golfers, tennis players, basketball players, too...
...confusion between "obtuse" and "obscure," and "ingenious" and "ingenuous...
...But the indisputable tenants of the world's glassiest houses, those who live the most revealed lives, are writers...
...It is a how-to book, though Gardner, along the way, gives his views on how to separate the gems from the paste, the true artist from the phonies_9 The material in the first half of the book is the sort of thing you would hear if you attended a solid creative writing class, say, one taught by the likes of a John Gardner...
...and sentences such as this (after the Vatican announced that the sick Paul VI's Sunday blessing has been canceled) "This brief statement heightened the perception of observers both in and outside the Vatican...
...He writes with passion and conviction of the need for the Christian churches to see the Bomb as a countersign to the Cross and to resist all of the Bomb's many manifestations...
...to subscribe to COMMONWEAL simply complete this coupon or send a facsimile to COMMONWEAL 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...Nancy Jo Mann, and Congressmen Henry Hyde and Chris Smith...
...giggled David Ansen of Newsweek," "sighed young David," "sobbed Mr...
...Griffin introduces people of insufficient renown) ran in Harper's some time ago, and have now been expanded and issued as a book...
...PANIC AMOR Tile PHILISTINES Bryan F. Griffin Regner7 Gateway, $12.9S, 2S9 pp...
...John Irving and his Garp come in for a lot of Mr...
...I do not know...
...I don't think the author most spat upon in his long diatribe would disagree with that notion entirely...
...You do not want to learn how to get rich from someone who is poor...
...Again, even with a sympathetic ear for so,~,: ~ of his complaints, one still must say that Mr...
...The ungainly prose does not prevent the book having its moments, e.g., the description of the conclaves which elected the two John Pauls and the whole detailed Ali Agca sequence including a spell in a Libyan terrorist training camp...
...one asks, when Gardner does a shilrs soft shoe for Bread Loaf-like writers conferences, complete with an adman's puffery: intense "love affairs" shaking the bushes...
...RICHARD J. CASSIDY Correspondence (Continued from page 2) "Justice in Irish Society" did not elicit such passionate controversy...
...The radio network was not much less restrictive than the TV network and was equally pro-abortion, perhaps even more SO...
...Raymond Carver's memoir, of Gardner as professor and Carver as student, which serves as a foreword to the book, is more to the point of how to become a novelist...
...Griffin stands like a small boy in a duststorm, not knowing why his eyes smart, but standing there stubbornly, rubbing them all the same...
...Griffin is not the sort of charismatic fellow you'd pick to head your crusade, despite his rhetorical similarity to Rev...
...I enjoy Davids attacking Goliaths...
...Leading pro-life speakers were denied permission to appear on TV -- American pro-lifers thus silenced included Dr...
...What fills out the bulk of Panic Among the Philistines is what Mr...
...she may be a novelist-to-be...
...And, these days, the shattering of glass can be heard everywhere...
...Perhaps the excuse for this prose is that the authors describe themselves as "social historians...
...10016 [] One year, $24 [] Two years, $43 [] 1 l-issue trial, $9 Sanle Address City, State Zip 1/13/84 Jim Wallis and the Sojourners Community have been involved in probing the implications of Christian conversion for the last fifteen years and they are well qualified to address the various aspects of this subject...
...The chapter on Christian witness against the nuclear arms race is perhaps the finest in the book...
...In some ways I am rather glad that we as a people can engage in passionate controversy on serious matters and still contain our passion within the constraints of the democratic process...
...It is, he tells the novice, beneficial to have something wrong with you: "A psychological wound is helpful . . . some fatal childhood accident for which one feels responsible . . . embarrassment about one's own physical appearance: all these are promising signs_9 He is also very much of the "trance" school of fiction composition, even to go as far as suggesting methods of self-hypnosis...
...The medium speed is the tone of the uppercrust snob, a preppy dismissiveness...
...Wallis does an excellent job of describing the challenges that the arms race and the surrounding arms culture pose for Christian faith...
...Gardner was also well-off and died actively in a motorcycle accident...
...Everyone he quotes either "giggles," or "sighs," or "sobs...
...The reasons for this would make an interesting subject to pursue, hut Mr...
...it is a disheartening display of literary anthropophagism...
...In a slide typical of the book, this hypothesis is soon asserted as a fact which underpins the authors' main thrust: that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt on John Paul I1...
...I fear his book will have the same, effect on the literary celebrated he takes potshots at as did mad Hinckley's attack on Reagan -- it will bring them only sympathy...
...Thomas's novel The White Hotel, it is discomforting to realize that even when one (here and there) agrees with him, his prose remains insufferable, and so too the attitudes that infest it...
...REV...
...But who lives in a glass house...
...Griffin calls, typically capitalized, The Important Subject: sex, and its depiction in various forms in print...
...A little sex, a lot of violence...
...He encourages culturebound Christians of all denominations to recognize the betrayal that political and economic conformity ultimately involves...
...One aspect of Gardner's book, that needs noting: it is a success story...
...Well, yes and no...
...In the present context of increasing Christian peace witness and a flowering of grass roots Christian communities, The Call to Conversion is a sensitive and helpful book...
...Though one may tolerate Jerzy Kosinsky's getting kicked around yet again, this time for his pornography collection...
...That the technique was successful up to a point is evident from the fact that even such a clear-thinking person as Malcolm Muggeridge was bamboozled -- together with one-third of my compatriots...
...Jerry Falwell...
...His reports on Vietnam have appeared in the Boston Globe, the St...
...Bernard Nathanson, Mrs...
...He does not seem to have grasped that the literature of earlier centuries appears purer than ours because time has already blown the chaff from the wheat (and along with it, alas, some of the best wheat...
...Low is a sort of antifan magazine diction: no one "said" anything...
...I'm surprised Cardinal Koenig did not spot that one...
...Griffin's raspberries, but if Mr...
...I looked forward to reading this material...
...DESMOND O'GRADY is an Australian journalist who has lived and worked in Rome for many years...
...It is instructive, though, to contrast his ideas with those found in Annie Dillard's Living by Fiction, published last year, which has been recently reissued iri paperback [Harper & Row, $4.95, 192 pp...
...They did not mention that the Commonweal: 26...
...The hugely successful should be made to endure a few knocks on their well padded reputations...
...Well, listen to the everso-canny Casaroli in Pontiff: "There was a very real possibility that the KGB was content to let the world know it was implicated -- that it deliberately wanted the attack on the pope to be seen as a stark message that the Soviet Union has the capability to eliminate opposition anywhere...
...John Gardner, the author of fourteen books, many of them novels, who died recently, takes a different tack in the posthumous On Becoming a Novelist, but he, too, heaves a handful of stones, though his principal aim is that of a buoyant real estate agent, showing off a few glass houses to eager buyers...
...Lord knows there is a lot wrong with the literary community these days, but Mr...
...But though the practitioners of literature are increasing, the audience for their work seems to be an endangered species...
...The seven chapters effectively delineate seven important dimensions of conversion...
...Indeed, he barely stops short of calling out for lynch-mob justice against the lewd scribblers he sees hogging the arena of popular culture...
...Pontiff begins in 1978 with Ali Agca planning to kill Paul VI, then switches back and forth between the Vatican and the Turk headed for St...
...But this is silly_9 Silly or not, that is, more or less, how Gardner describes novelists...
...However, biblical material which provided a foundation for the earlier analysis is sometimes repeated in the later chapters...
...Pontiff is an inextricable farrago of fact and fancy, a masterpiece of disinformation...
...Griffin seems woefully ig[norant of recent literary history...
...II William O'Rourke II~[~ EOPLE who live in glass houses IF shouldn't throw stones...
...it's the same advice someone who has never been published but who has tried will give you...
...Ansen" -- and that's just one paragraph...
...There most of the straight advice is doled out: "Neatness counts," and so forth...
...and one may even think Griffin right, but for the wrong reasons, about D.M...
...But, of course, there wouldn't seem to be too many writers if there were more readers to go round...
...Where is his tongue in cheek...
...In a chapter on cultural seduction, he inveighs against the pattern he describes as "evangelical nationalism...
...But surprisingly, most of the trouble, according to most of the essays that I have seen, is not the fickle public, the publishers, or the late twentieth century, but other writers...
...The anti-amendment faction, which included practically all of the news and information media, fought an all-out battle in which no holds were barred...
...One complaint heard often today (and made a number of times by Griffin) is that there are already too many writers...
...Two long pieces of this sort by "someone named" Bryan F. Griffin (that is how Mr...
...If the referendum was "a last final salute to traditional Catholicism" then it is a Catholicism of " l i b e r a l " imaginings irredeemably tied to a nineteenth century model...
...Annie Dillard, at least in her published Commonweal: 24 work, has been thus far living by nonfiction...
...That brings us to his third and last voice, the high, the hortatory: "In practical terms, it is the battle between those who would use the tools of civilization -- education and knowledge and liberty and peace -- to savage those v a l u e s . . . It is the everlasting battle in which there are no truces, the battle between the smile and the leer, between innocence and sophistication, beauty and lust, truth and cynicism, love REVIEWERS JOHN SPRAGENS, JR., is a journalist on the staff of the Indochina Project of the Center for International Policy in Washington...
...These pages reveal an obviously warm and generous spirit...
...What Gardner would need to reveal to explain his own success -- well deserved though it was -- is how to be at the right place at the right moment, and in front of the right person, which, of course, is impossible to learn...
...If you have readers you feel you have enough space around you...
...Barbara Willkie, Mrs...
...But, on most other things, people will disagree...
...But, even after dwelling too long on the material that disgusts him, what he cries out for is not its banishment, but that an offender like Christopher Isherwood be "reprimanded" for "reminiscing in public about the dear dead days when he used to cavort with German p r o s t i t u t e s . . . " It's the in public that really seems to bother Mr...
...So, like white mice in an overpopulated cage, writers have begun to cannibalize each other...
...His writing has, like a cheap appliance, three settings, low, medium, and high...
...There has been no shortage lately of articles by novelists and poets with a variety of grievances...
...covering people "walking out of church" in protest against unpalatable pulpit invective, he is a trifle naive to construe this as a "new" phenomenon: it has a long history in Ireland...
...Griffin has a good deal of scorn for professors -- he only uses the label as an insult -- but his book would have had some mischievous value for future literary historians if it had been outfitted with some scholarly apparatus, citation of sources, and an index...
...Griffin is not overly distressed about violence...
...Who has a heart so kind that he wouldn't enjoy Mr...
...Aspirants & philistines Ill ON BECOMING A NOVELIST John Gardner Harper & Row, $13.95, 150 pp...
...Griffin's arguments bring to mind the picture of the backwoods judge who views all the pornographic films three times before issuing an injunction against them...
...Griffin has the sort of style That Gives One A Headache (to adopt his manner of enlivening every third sentence with the stuttering capital...
...what he desires is a return to gentility, to the world before 1917 (his date), to a world whose hypocritical but dignified surface is restored...
...WILLIAM O'ROURKE, author of The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, teaches ar the University of Notre Dame...
...Could this be Department D at work after all...
...They have learned that authentic conversion "has everything to do with community" and Wallis's book presents many valuable insights about the economic and political consequence of a Christian commitment to live in community...
...Kirby's amazement at disCommonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...But Gardner's pages on how-to-get-published can be had from anyone...
...But when I hear it complained that sex and violence have increased in our visible culture, I wonder why it is not more generally observed that violence has carded the day...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Christian Science Monitor...
...But, alas, he has set back the whole noble cause of the kamikaze attack...
...FATHER RICHARD J, CASSIDY directs the Ofrice of Justice and Peace in the Detroit Archdiocese...
...Griffin has actually read Irving's book he must know that violence overwhelms the sex in it -- as is the usual case these days...
...Politicians, celebrities...
...Peter's square while popes succeed one another...
...One minor weakness of the book is its slightly repetitive character...
...If it happens to be a person of startling output, his name is prefaced with the most everyday of his accomplishments: "a fifty-year-old professor of creative writing named John Barth...
...And so Mr...
...The device is effective and the narrati~;e technique is well handled despite the subjournalistic prose capable of "wide breadth...
...Sex exercises him mightily...
...The media gurus assured the public that the 1861 law already prohibited abortion and the courts could be trusted to uphold the law...
...Pontiffs conclave and Ali Agca stories are plausible but then so are other sections which I know are mistaken_9 Thomas and Morgan-Witts also assert John Paul II wrote to Leonid Brezhnev warning he would return home to fight if Poland were invaded_9 They interpret Vatican denial of this story as further proof of its veracity...
...And on and on...
...Letters of not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance of being published...
...He throws quite a few stones, though what usually upsets him is that the writers most vulgarly known are the most vulgar, a tautology he seems not to notice...
...The kindest and most sympathetic reading of Griffin's Panic Among the Philistines (his first book) will turn up at least one point: there were more good books written in the last twenty-five centuries than in the last twenty-five years...
...As to Mr...
...Given the present social and political climate there is a lot to complain about -- I have a few complaints myself...
...MARTIN RAFFERTY, C.M Irish bamboozlement Quebec, Canada To the Editobs: In his article "A Pyrrhic Victory" [Oct...
...There Dillard writes disapprovingly, "People still magically regard novelists as helpless, fascinating neurotics who compose in deliriums or trances _9 . . young writers may be misled into thinking that novelists are rich or even that they are active...
...A seasoned author, therefore, will look in vain for some irony through the book, especially in the second half, which is, in many ways, embarrassing...
...if you are denied readers, or access to them, the claustrophobia becomes lethal...
...everyone who is not a household word is introduced by a demeaning label: "someone named Earl Ubell...
...Griffin's wielding his chain saw on the grotesquely overpraised...
...But anyone who has written a, novel will not entirely laugh off some aspects of Gardner's description -- even if it is ridiculous as instruction...
Vol. 111 • January 1984 • No. 1
