I Was a Memoirist

Appendix A of How to Sit Down

Recently I was identified in a biographical note as a “memoirist.” I stared at the word as if I’d never seen it before. It conjured up an image of people in formal dress sitting at a round table wearing blindfolds. Somewhere between “medium” and “mesmerist,” I guess. Not that either of those are labels I’d reject, mind you. I enjoy imagining myself putting an audience under my spell, and letting the dead speak through me. But come on. Yes, I wrote two memoirs. Sometimes I buff my nails—does that make me a manicurist? Sometimes I talk too much—am I a monologuist? Sometimes I find myself pouring more than one liquid into a single glass—can I now fancy myself a mixologist?

Over the years I’ve seen myself described as a journalist, an essayist, a critic, a historian, a chronicler, and so on. Yes, I’ve worked as a critic; I’ve written essays; I’ve published work in newspapers and magazines, which made me a journalist on those occasions; and I’ve written things that make use of historical materials, which does not by any definition qualify me as a historian. I’m a writer, period. That is the only word that actually applies. (It’s true that I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king, but that’s life.)

Anyway, this isn’t about me. It’s about the market-driven tendency to funnel writing into ever narrower tubes, which mirrors the division of labor, the capitalist practice of breaking people down into labor categories for ready exploitation. Before the industrial revolution everybody had worn several hats, because they led more integrated lives. The weaver also pastured goats and made cheese; the glass blower kept careful notes on the phases of the moon and played the fiddle in the evenings. When factories came to dominate, people were held to one task for ten or twelve hours a day, with no room for anything else besides eating and sleeping, and they perforce became their one task. You were responsible for tightening this row of bolts, and that’s all you needed to know. That was useful to the capitalists because not only could they call upon all the bolt-tighteners when more bolts needed to be tightened, but limiting workers to one job meant that nobody on the factory floor knew enough about the works to seize control.

This fragmentation slowly spread to other human endeavors. Until the twentieth century, scholars were generalists. You could study moths and also translate Greek inscriptions, and maybe do astrological readings on the side. When higher education became more generally available, universities began to be run like factories. The prospect who had written three books on Edgar Allan Poe’s punctuation was more likely to get tenure than the one who had written about three topics of greater import but not obviously connected. Failure to hyperspecialize was viewed as dilettantism, a bad word that made broad knowledge seem unserious, maybe suspect. Once you became an associate professor of Assyrian numismatics, you were expected to know everything there was to know about your subject matter and not trouble your pretty little head with matters above your station. Your fate was sealed.

Writing was once a seething hive of possibilities. Of course there were forms—the lyric, the epic—which you could make your nest in or occasionally visit when so inspired. Printing gave rise to new applications. For centuries pamphlets were the major form of literary distribution, and pamphlets could contain anything at all: poems, screeds, rants, fables, observations, dialogues, narratives, satire, pornography, historical minutiae, theological disputations, grand theories of everything. All were equal, and all were equally sold by market peddlers. With industrialization—newspapers, advertising, the filling of pages—the novel came into its own. Not that novels hadn’t existed previously, but now, with serialization and cliffhanger endings and writers paid by the line, the novel became a specialized trade category. The novel spawned the dime novel, and the yellow-backed boudoir novel, and the novelette, and the novelization. Pretty soon critics (who would all be writing novels at night) were declaring the novel to be the highest form of human expression. Somehow novels continued to be written after that.

People who wrote novels were called novelists. In the dead business English of Time magazine, they wore the label like a title: Novelist Sinclair Lewis, just like Comedian Fred Allen or Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. Poets had always been poets, a term that described a range of behavior not restricted to writing poems—or writing anything, for that matter. Playwrights became dramatists, with leaden casts of the comedy and tragedy masks hung around their necks. Short-story writers never got a one-word title, which either contributed to or reflected the inexplicably low status to which they had been relegated, as if short stories were like short pants, something to be outgrown. Essayists were people who wrote delicate reflections on the changing of the seasons or the importance of good citizenship; they were seldom seen in public. Journalists originally were those who covered wars and disasters on foot, pad in hand, although the term later expanded to include bowling columnists, agony aunts, stock-market prognosticators, and people who enjoyed hovering around musicians. Critics had historically been divided between those who pass judgment and those who discuss; now capsule reviewers claimed an ever larger market share. Then the culture produced an insidious new category: storytellers. Obviously there had been storytellers since humans discovered fire, but the term now referred to thought leaders in portfolio management who communicated to shareholders using metaphors evoking high-school sports.

In the 1990s, bookstores briefly ballooned to stadium size before succumbing to the internet virus, and that dictated new categories. Being old and innocent, I was taken aback when I found at my local B&N an entire aisle labeled Teen Paranormal Romance. Writing proliferated in previously unexplored genre substrata, which expanded to fill the nagging emptiness of the cubic footage. Of course the subgenres were merely old genres—home on the range, doctors and nurses, froggy went a-courting, what is this dagger I see before me, we have created the thing that will kill us—with added bells and bumper stickers. The goal, eventually, was to refine the salient points of your subgenre to such a degree of specificity (left-handed heroes only!) that the affiliated facebook group wouldn’t get totally out of hand. That was genre, a category that has produced more great things that you can name, but has always primarily catered to a core readership that wants to keep having the same experience over and over.

And I’m not even getting into all the new designations in the soi-disant non-fiction aisles, esoteric new varients on self-help, crisis management, chiromancy, how to raise whippets, phone calls from the dead, the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo, etc. And then over here you have “fiction,” proudly adult and non-genre—although really it could be divided up into subgenres if anyone had a mind to it. Sometimes, in some very select bookstores in high-end zip codes, you might have a section labeled “essays,” or even “literature,” mostly consisting of secondary studies of the Greats. The one bookstore I remember having a more liquid approach to the concept of literature was the old St. Mark’s Bookshop—but then again the new-releases wall was divided into two sections with a firm divider between them: man books and woman books. Although I recognized that it was probably a righteous decision in somebody’s reckoning, it bothered me no end, for obvious reasons. Now that bookstores are modest and “curated” and can only be found in high-end zip codes, the balkanization of literature has continued online—even more so, because you can’t accidentally spot something unrelated to your search-term niche.

Young people often have trouble picturing how small everything once was; you could display all the recent books, high and low, in a single section near the cash registers. In my youthful innocence, still learning the language and trying to figure out the mores, I assumed they were all literature. One year the big best-seller was a book called How to Avoid Probate. Having no idea what “probate” meant (I’m still hazy on the subject), I was free to imagine something ghastly. It reminded me of the Mad magazine feature “Horrifying Clichés.” I didn’t for a minute consider that it could be mere advice on tax matters. I thought, very earnestly, that everything written had to be literature, almost by definition. And I still do, even if I’m older and should know better. I’ve never seen any good reason why any book meant for a general (i.e. unknown) readership shouldn’t be considered literature. It’s a bit like Gary Merrill’s soliloquy in All About Eve:

What book of rules says the theater exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City? Or London, Paris, or Vienna? Listen, Junior, and learn. Do you want to know what the theater is? A flea circus. Also opera. Also rodeos, carnivals, ballets, Indian tribal dances, Punch and Judy, a one-man band, all theater. Wherever there's magic and make-believe and an audience, there's theater. Donald Duck, Ibsen and the Lone Ranger, Sarah Bernhardt and Poodles Hanneford, Lunt and Fontanne, Betty Grable, Rex the Wild Horse, Eleonora Duse, all theater.

But I mean something more than that. All theater is theater, and everything written can be read as literature, the way a friend of mine used to interpret the contract bridge column in the New York Times as his horoscope. What we need is for everything to be thought of as literature by its authors. Yes, you are writing about tree surgery or how to remove warts or the War of Spanish Succession, but since you are writing a piece, or a book, that means you must be attentive to the container into which you are folding your thoughts. That entails making form follow function, ensuring that your language is measured and deliberate, considering how your text will be read and absorbed, allowing for the reader’s pleasure, thinking beyond the mere requirements of your task. It also means that when you write something you are a writer. When you address the page, you are operating outside those categories of trade, even if those categories temporarily determine your meager standard of living. You are not a machine part. You are descended from Homer and the author of Gilgamesh and the author of the Mahabharata. Buck up.