By Eric Olsen
At the recent Iowa Writers’ Workshop 75th anniversary celebration, the concluding session was titled “The Writer as Public Figure.” I went with great expectations, silly me, looking forward to an interesting discussion on, I dunno, maybe the writer as “public intellectual?” You know, the writer as someone who writes for a general audience on topics of current import such as politics, culture, the economy, not necessarily from the point of view of an expert, but as someone who as a matter of routine in his or her work delves into human folly, perfidy, and sporadic nobility, and knows how to communicate complex insights in clear, simple terms. You know, the writer as someone who tries to make a difference….
But it turned out that what this “public figure” to which the title of the session referred was rather the famous and successful writer burdened with fame and fortune. The poor dear . . ..
But look, I don’t think I can be blamed for foolishly assuming the best. I mean, consider the panelists: Ethan Canin, MD, author of Emperor of the Air, Blue River, and Palace Thief, among other works, a member of the Workshop’s permanent faculty, and a Harvard-trained physician; Michael Cunningham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, author of several other novels including By Nightfall, A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, and Specimen Days; Jane Smiley, PhD, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than 20 novels, short-story collections, and works of nonfiction, including her most recent novel, Private Life, and the young adult novel True Blue, and a regular Huffington Post blogger on economics and politics and other matters; and Abraham Verghese, another MD, a physician on the faculty of Stanford School of Medicine and author of the best-selling and critically acclaimed novel Cutting for Stone.
Good grief, what a collection of talent, insight, and experience, I thought! Boy, are we going to get an earful.
And we did. It just wasn’t an earful of what I expected. Jane at one point did try to bring the discussion around to politics, and the fact she’s a regular blogger on the Huffington Post. And my ears perked up and I thought “Oh boy, here we go,” but Ethan Canin, serving as moderator, quickly brought the discussion back to the topic at hand, the burdens—gasp!—of fame.
Later, in response to another probing query about the horrors of bestsellerdom, Verghese dodged the question and said that he thought the topic of discussion was “something else.” He didn’t elaborate, but I like to think that by “something else,” he meant he thought, like I did, that the topic of the panel discussion was to be the writer as engaged public intellectual.
Verghese can be forgiven for such a misconception since he was born of Indian parents in Ethiopia, and in most of the rest of the world, writers are expected and expect to engage in the public discourse from time to time and hold forth on politics, culture, and the like. It comes with the territory, as long as the territory isn’t the U.S.
Richard A. Posner, archconservative appeals court judge and polymath, writes at length about the absence of rational and thoughtful public discourse in this country in his 2001 tome The Public Intellectual: A Study of Decline, stating that the public intellectual is disappearing “as a consequence of the absorption of intellectuals into university faculties in an era of specialization and professionalization.” Professors have a sweet deal, in other words. Why mess up a good thing getting engaged with life beyond the academy’s comfy confines?
Several years ago, I helped found and then run the first city of asylum program in the U.S., in Las Vegas of all places, and got to know a lot of very good writers from other countries who had tried to make a difference well beyond the comfy confines of the academy, and ended up in prison or shot at or otherwise persecuted for their efforts. Our program was part of a network of such asylum programs based in Paris. There were, at the time, 30-plus asylum cities in Europe and two in Mexico.
Until we started City of Asylum Las Vegas, there were none in the U.S. The asylum cities provided safe haven for writers and artists from around the world who were victims of censorship and persecution.
I found it interesting that none of the writers who ended up in our program got into trouble because of their art; rather, they ran afoul of this thugocracy or that one because of what they’d said or written in their engagement in public debate. The burdens of fame and fortune were the least of their concerns.
Our first writer in asylum was Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone, author of the novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar and most recently Stone Child and Other Poems. He wrote a series of newspaper columns criticizing the thugs who’d ousted his country’s elected government. He literally had to run for his life one night when the thugs came to murder him.
Our next writer in asylum was the Chinese artist, poet, and philosopher Er Tai Gao. As a young artist, he’d had the audacity to write an essay titled “On Beauty,” in which he rashly suggested that without freedom, the creation and apprehension of beauty was impossible. For his trouble, he ended up in a labor camp on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert in western China, where three-quarters of his fellow inmates, some 2000 of them, died of disease and starvation. He was in and out of trouble with the Communist regime for years after his release, and eventually escaped from China with his wife, Maya, and made his way to the U.S. and then to (of all places) Las Vegas.
While Gao was in residence with City of Asylum Las Vegas, he completed a memoir of his years in the Chinese gulag and we had it translated and helped place it with HarperCollins. Titled In Search of My Homeland, it was released in 2009. HarperCollins did nothing to promote the book, and just let it go out of print. Of course, I’m sure the fact that HarperCollins is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who has vast business interests in China, had nothing to do with the book’s fate . . ..
Our third writer was Ammar Abdulhamid of Syria. A novelist and filmmaker, he’d had the temerity to criticize Syria’s latest dictator, Bashar Assad. For his trouble, Ammar and his wife and two young children were forced to flee Damascus in the dead of night, just a step ahead of Bashar’s thugs. This was five years ago, and Ammar’s criticisms of Assad were amazingly prescient, as recent events have proven.
It is this prescience that writers can bring to the table, if not specific expertise in a particular field. Or if not prescience, certainly the benefits of imagination, the vital precursor to prescience, that finely honed ability to think about what might have been, or will be and to tease out human emotions and motivations and rank stupidity and put them into believable and illustrative situations. And to present it all in clear prose free of academic jargon.
Actually, Jane Smiley, a public intellectual if there ever was one, makes this very point in one of her HuffPo blogs:
English majors understand human nature better than economists do. If, as Krugman [Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate in Economics] said, ‘homo economicus’ is perfectly rational, where did the folks who came up with this simplistic idea go to college, and didn’t they read, say, Shakespeare, Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, Dickens, Trollope, Proust, Zola, or even Freud?”
I like to think this is the point she was trying to make when the discussion was rather abruptly turned back to the more pressing matter of the awful burden of fame and fortune . . ..
Amen. This is brilliant and right on. What an embarrassing situation. Here’s to “the writer as someone who tries to make a difference….”
Hear, hear!
You’ve summed it up brilliantly and with your City of Asylum examples have gone beyond the call of “duty,” which, you remind us, none but Jane seemed to have thought about. I liked all the panelists, know them all but Abraham. I wanted to reach out and take Michael and Ethan by the scruff of their necks and say, “What will remain of literature if all you, of all people, talk about is what you’ve tossed off for HBO?”
I have to say that I shared your disappointment. I was sure when they set this up that we were going to talk about politics, but when we were waiting in the green room ahead of the performance, and I brought up politics, everyone was surprised. So, sorry not to have been more assertive as the panel was moving more and more toward celebrity….
One thing writing success gives the well-known writer (if wanted) is a public platform – a bully platform at that – i remember Jane mentioning (before being redirected) that she got 86ed from op-ed-ing at the Gray Lady.
This she believed was because she was denounced as the merest ’89th most un-American person in the USA’ by some Bush-Cheney-esque, ultra conservative named Bernard Goldberg.
After reading ‘Stones’ and Abraham’s well researched Ethiopian bloody politics chapters, I was disheartened that he didn’t have more to say about writing, writers and their work as having political importance and positive consequences.
After all Marion had to escape the repressive right-wing persecutions and political upheaval of Haile Selassie’s regime to progress the plot to New York in the book.
One would think that at very least – as Abraham and Ethan are MD’s – sworn to make this a better world for the sick – they could have spoken to making the world a better place through writing too. (I believe at this point the discussion deteriorated to film rights and authors working on the sets of their adaptations.)
Important to remember the difference between ‘political writing’ and ‘writing politically’. A public figure can write letters to the editor, op-eds and articles with a ‘humanist political agenda,’ secular or otherwise. Not a problem.
Writers of conscience can also write politically motivated fiction with a goal of changing the world. The Jungle, Sinclair, The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn, our own KV, Jr. doing his social engineering themes——often disguised as sci-fi work from outer space or Kilgore Trout’s.
But many writers have denounced other formerly great writers when their material becomes little better than fulsome propaganda.
Interesting that I was just reading a piece by Chistopher Hitchens about the change in Solzhenitsyn’s writing after being exiled to the US.
“The ayatollahlike tones of his notorious Harvard lectures (as I called them at the time) turned out not to be misleading. As time went by, he metamorphosed more and more into a classic Russian Orthodox chauvinist, whose work became more wordy and propagandistic and——shall we be polite?——idiosyncratic with every passing year.”
In my favorite story of one of our own, Vincent Panella——from his “Lost Hearts” book of stories——he writes that after reading one of his rejected pieces his friend, an Israeli artist living in their artists” rooming house, tells him,”Your writing is better than the subject. Fix that and you’ll have art.”
For the concerned writer this could mean tone down the politics and go back to matters of the heart.
I noticed this morning that – “Since 2001, more journalists were forced to leave their homeland in Ethiopia than any other country in the world.
Anyone else think that there are probably courageous writers in Ethiopia, like Doc Abe could have been when he was there, that are facing persecution just because they’re simply trying to write honestly about situations in their country?
Or is it “Too Late (for) the Phalarope” in Ethiopia?