The Last Page
Packer, George
NOT LONG AGO I attended a conference on the theme, "Are serious books in serious trouble?" The question was rhetorical. One by -,..— one the suspects were arraigned on charges: publishing...
...But now and then it's important to step back, as I was obliged to when Iraq entered the room, and ask: what would Americans be doing if we weren't all writing our memoirs...
...And into marching on behalf of one's own book...
...A possible war's intrusion on the conference startled me into a thought, which went something like this: the people here, a few famous, most not, but nearly all consumed with the supremely difficult task of writing something valuable and finding readers for it—the struggle to be noticed—would have been doing something else twenty-five or fifty years ago...
...Noam Chomsky was frequently invoked as the prime example of a serious writer with books in serious trouble...
...It's hard to focus on germ warfare and "collateral damage" when the world, distracted by money and buzz, refuses to notice your existence...
...They were the sort of people—educated, principled, perhaps endowed with enough comfort and leisure to dedicate themselves to concerns beyond the weekly paycheck—who used to join social movements...
...Everyone has a right to write...
...In every man there is the soul of a poet," said Coleridge...
...The connection became more explicit when a novelist I admire rose to point out that our country was apparently going to make war on Iraq without any meaningful public discussion, and that this was a symptom of the decline of the serious book and of our ability to think, argue, and—more to the point—read...
...By the end American culture itself was on trial, and some of the jeremiads sounded like bigpicture attacks on imperialism, with the roles of Nixon, Kissinger, and the International Monetary Fund filled by Viacom, Rupert Murdoch, and Barnes and Noble...
...Every articulate person you meet these days turns out to be a writer...
...They used to write letters to the editor...
...They used to be temperance advocates, suffragists, civil 128 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 rights workers, antiwar activists...
...Its in the Constitution...
...One by -,..— one the suspects were arraigned on charges: publishing conglomerates, superstores, television, public education...
...I don't know when it happened, or why, that graphomania and its discontents overtook a large portion of that class of Americans who, when I was a boy, used to harangue the neighbors into attending fundraising parties...
...Perhaps we need a sharper distinction between the need to write and the desire to be a writer, which inevitably brings added desires for contracts, reviews, sales, reprints...
...Beneath the applause that spread across the room there was, I felt, an uneasy stir, for we had just been reminded of carnage potentially even bloodier than the slaughter of Basic Books and the local independent...
...Not every book deserves to be reprinted," said one editor on the panel, in the conference's most subversive moment...
...I also realize what's wrong with saying, "Lock the door after me, the party's too crowded," rather like a bumper sticker I once saw on a car with New York plates in a Massachusetts resort town that demanded, "Keep Egremont Small and Beautiful...
...But I've grown acquainted with the nature and extent of the phenomenon through teaching writing in adult education and M.F...
...Now all that energy, that vast American capacity for moral self-expression, goes into writing books that are not being sold or read...
...We might be arguing about going to war...
...Having suffered my share of these desires, as well as making part of a living off them, I'm deeply familiar with the sweet taste of sour grapes...
...In this sense, the activists have themselves become oppressed...
...AND WHY NOT...
...We all have a story and an urge to tell it...
...Most of the people in the room were already on shaky moral ground, because what they often meant was "my serious book" and "my serious trouble...
...A. programs, hanging around the offices of small magazines, and attending conferences on serious books and serious trouble...
...Everyone needs to write," the novelist I admire said when the conference was over...
...But most of them are such damned bad ones...
Vol. 45 • April 1998 • No. 2
