“Writers use people,” Richard Russo writes in Harper’s. In other words, writers appropriate. They take something that’s not theirs—the experience of others—and make it their own by making it into something else. Of course, that doesn’t mean writers should use every person. Not everyone is interesting, firstly. Secondly, some people’s lives are so foreign to a writer’s own, it is difficult to use it successfully in fiction. But that doesn’t mean a writer doesn’t have the right to try:

Earlier this year, when I mentioned to my elder daughter Emily, a bookseller, that I meant to write an essay defending the creative imagination and its moral urgency, she cringed, then posed an interesting hypothetical. What if the same mysterious force that made me set aside my novel for a memoir showed up again with an even more suspect project? Suppose I felt a strong imperative to write a novel about what it feels like to be a black man in America. Oh, come on, you say? Why would a white writer suddenly be visited by this particular sense of must? A fair question—except, well, it happens.

Consider John Howard Griffin, a writer who back in the Fifties darkened his skin in order to, in his own words, ‘become a negro.’ The book he wrote about his experience traveling through the Jim Crow South was the huge bestseller Black Like Me, and despite the book’s extraordinary sales, there’s little evidence of opportunism in its writing or publication (both Griffin and his publisher envisioned a small, mostly scholarly readership). Apparently, the author just needed to know, firsthand, what it felt like to navigate the South as a black man. It could be argued that even with the best of intentions, he was still the wrong person to tell that particular story. But it could also be argued, given the historical context, that the wrong man was actually the right one. After all, black authors had been writing about the corrosive effects of racism for decades, and white readers had turned a deaf ear until one of ‘their own’ chimed in. What Griffin did not do, however, is as interesting as what he did. Despite being a fiction writer, he didn’t write a novel. Rather, Black Like Me was a kind of literary hybrid, a ‘non-fiction novel’ that predated Capote and Mailer. Griffin’s decision not to fictionalize his experience suggests he believed that being treated like a black man didn’t mean he could imagine what it would have been like to be born black and to live as a black man over a lifetime. After the publication of Black Like Me, he became friends with Martin Luther King Jr., Dick Gregory, and other prominent members of the civil-rights movement, but as time passed, Griffin grew increasingly uncomfortable talking about his famous book. There were other, more authentic voices, he decided, and they deserved the microphone more than he did.

But none of this negates the moral imperative Griffin must have felt to undertake such a radical experiment . . . When writers like me (older, white, male), who were taught that literary imagination was our stock-in-trade, leap to its defense, we don’t always realize what those justifications sound like to writers who are emerging into a very different publishing reality. When I broke in, there were more publishers to submit books to, and that competition led to larger advances. Back then, there was no Big Tech devaluing print books, not to mention no digital piracy. Nor was the internet chipping away at our attention spans with clickbait. Newspapers were still healthy enough to have book review sections. Authors of important, serious works understood that while they probably weren’t going to make fortunes, at least they had real careers, as did long-form journalists. Even younger writers got book tours, not because tours resulted in huge sales but because publishers were playing a longer game. Introducing and growing new talent was crucial to their own futures. And only a few publishers were owned by conglomerates that also sold televisions and cars and refrigerators (and expected books to yield similar profit margins).

Considering all this, can today’s emerging writers be blamed for concluding that they’re late to the party, that those of us who got here first have grazed the buffet, drunk all the champagne, and then ensconced ourselves in the comfortable chairs from which we can’t seem to stop banging on about the creative imagination and how all writers should be unfettered in its use? To them it must seem as though our real goal is to extend the many privileges we’ve gotten used to and now regard as our due. What choice do they have but to call us out, to turn the discussion to ownership, to argue not just that certain stories, but also the very materials out of which stories are made, belong to ‘people like me,’ not ‘people like you.’ Okay, I get that and I sympathize, but it’s also worth pointing out that ownership shifts the discussion from art to commerce, and these have always been at odds. Indeed, we seldom get really angry until money enters the equation. Yes, cultural appropriation is a serious issue, but books that garner ten-thousand-dollar advances and have initial print runs of eight thousand copies rarely spark serious outrage, even when they’re thoroughly botched jobs. The heated debate over the literary merits of American Dirt, a novel by a white woman about a Mexican bookseller fleeing a cartel, was no doubt a necessary one for the industry, but it was the book’s seven-figure advance and aggressive marketing campaign that caused battle lines to be drawn and invective hurled.

Lost in the tumult, I think, is how much time we spend documenting the literary imagination’s limitations when we might be extolling its triumphs.

In other news: If we are going to save the family, Yuval Levin writes, we must first understand what it is and what it does: “These two facets of what the family does—serving as a means of provision and a means of recognition—are increasingly central to our contemporary understanding of the family’s function. But they leave out the family’s formative purpose, the ways in which it shapes our soul and molds our character. When we put aside the formative functions of the family, we might be able to persuade ourselves that thriving families are important only for economic and symbolic reasons—that so long as our material needs are met and our relationships are recognized, the family has served its core purposes. Where families prove unable to meet their members’ material needs, other forms of assistance, both public and private, can fill in the gap, and the family can just stand as an acknowledgment of mutual love among its members. This would suggest that the form of the family, and therefore its formative potential, may not be essential to its function. But, of all our institutions, this is surely nowhere less true than in the family. The family is our first and most important institution, not only from the perspective of the history of humanity, but also (and more simply) in the life of every individual. It is where we enter the world, literally where we alight when we depart the womb. It gives us our first impression of the world, and our first understanding of what it is all about. It then sees us through some of our most vulnerable years of life, taking us by the hand as we progress from the formless ignorance of the newborn through the formative innocence of early childhood to the fearful insecurities of juvenile transformations and hopefully, eventually, to a formed and mature adjusted posture in society. This is a process of socialization, and therefore fundamentally of formation. But it is not a formation that happens through instruction so much as through example and habituation. The family forms us by imprinting upon us and giving us models to emulate and patterns to adopt.”

In praise of Herman Wouk: “The Economist got it right in its review of The Winds of War when it came out in 1971, suggesting that it was ‘as serious a contribution to the literature of our time as War and Peace was to that of the nineteenth century’. A big claim, but it was, I’m convinced, justified.”

David Mamet on the intersection of code and elegance: “Raymond Chandler wrote, in his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1939), that it is near impossible to craft a good murder mystery, as it requires two otherwise unconnected skills: the ability to write beautifully and the ability to fashion a code. He is near right in his observation. The two skills—while not mutually exclusive per se—are unlikely to be found fully developed in any practitioner, because to achieve excellence, he or she would have to devote all energy to one or the other. I know of no great contemporary instrumentalist who is also a great composer. The intersection of cryptography and literary merit is discoverable, though, in one very particular craft, and it is my own: writing drama. For the drama has much in common with the detective novel. The clues in each must, scene by scene, be displayed to the reader in such a way that their importance will become both clear and acceptable only when the protagonist (and, so, the reader) has finally arranged them, correctly, at the work’s conclusion. If a clue is omitted, the writer is cheating; if it is too apparent, he is a hack.”

J. K. Rowling to publish a new children’s book online for free.

Julian Jackson reviews Patrice Gueniffey’s Napoleon and de Gaulle: “The French have a love-hate relationship with heroes. For the great 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, the French Revolution was supposed to have inaugurated the age of the people: ‘France cured of individuals,’ he wrote in the preface to his history. But that same Revolution created a pantheon for its grands hommes. Anyone who has spent time in France will be familiar with the names of those figures celebrated endlessly in street names: Hugo, Gambetta, Pasteur, Jaurès, Moulin and so on. Many French people might now be hard-pressed if asked who some of these heroes were. But the two names everyone knows — even if neither is actually in the Panthéon — are Napoleon and de Gaulle. In this erudite book, Patrice Gueniffey has had the interesting idea of comparing the careers and the myths of these two legendary figures. And there is a nice symmetry to their stories.”

Photo: Löhrbach

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