Life Stories #14: Anthony Swofford

Christa Parravani

In this episode of Life Stories, a series of podcast interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I’m talking with Anthony Swofford about Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails, a multi-faceted memoir that reveals the downward spiral he went through after the success of his first memoir, Jarhead, and digs into his efforts to repair his relationship with his father—and to say that process doesn’t go smoothly would be a severe understatment.

I was particularly drawn to talking with Swofford because he and I were born less than a month apart, both the sons of Vietnam veterans—and, because my own father died when I was a freshman in college, I feel like Swofford’s accounts of his arguments with his father are like a glimpse into an funhouse version of an alternate universe where I would have been able, in my thirties, to have those conversations, to deal with certain issues differently than I’ve done. (I mean, I feel reasonably well-adjusted; I’m just saying it would’ve been something to be able to have certain conversations somewhere other than inside my head.)

We also discussed what it was like, right after his first book came out, when Swofford experienced the pressure to be “that Jarhead guy,” and his decision not to go back to the Gulf to cover the second war in Iraq. And quite a few other topics besides!

Listen to Life Stories #14: Anthony Swofford (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

5 September 2012 | life stories |

Being a Book Critic Is Nothing Special

Since I first wrote about the call for less niceness in literary criticism, there have been a few more rounds in the argument, most noticeably after a particularly nasty review of Alix Ohlin’s most recent novel and short story collection, a review I went to town on not just for being badly written but for stemming from bad first premises. Shortly after my blog post, Commentary literary critic D.G. Myers offered some qualified praise for my response. On the plus side, Myers considered me “the only critic who grasped what was at stake in the whole controversy,” but then he ultimately decided that my critique of the reviewer’s style was wrong. Here’s the big climax:

“American fiction is in decline, because so much of it is ‘literary fiction,’ written not to defend a style—not to declare This and only this is how fiction should be done!—but to have a career, usually in a college or university somewhere, about which a creative writing professor can feel lucky. The indolence of Alix Ohlin’s prose represents a betrayal of the literary vocation, and William Giraldi attacked it in the name of defending the value and dignity of good writing. Those who would sneer at him for being ‘mean’ prefer the convention of social pleasantness, a heartfelt relativism which holds that every judgment is a personal preference anyway.”

For my own part, I think the problem has less to do with William Giraldi being “mean” than with him and other critics arrogantly assuming that they are gatekeepers capable of deciding whether a work of prose shows enough, to borrow his phrases, “linguistic originality wed to intellect and emotional verity” to pass muster as a “worthy assertion of imagination.” That they’re the ones sufficiently strong of heart and character to, circling back to the Katie Roiphe line that describes Giraldi’s self-selected mission so well, “protect beautiful language.” Even Dwight Garner touched on this tradition when he expressed a longing for more critics “perceptive enough to single out the voices that matter for legitimate praise, abusive enough to remind us that not everyone gets, or deserves, a gold star.”

I’ve used a Northrop Frye line about literary criticism being evidence of “the history of taste” a few times over the years on this blog, and I’m invoking it again—the idea that what critics are telling us is beautiful language reflects “the vacillations of fashionable prejudice” more than it demonstrates any intrinsic literary merit. They’re just subjective evaluations which, because they line up with a bunch of other subjective evaluations, get bundled together as a “tradition,” or a “canon,” or some such. I’d argue that this runs a bit deeper than Myers’ formulation that “every judgment is a personal preference anyway,” because that’s only half the story. This relativism, if we want to call it that, leaves “social pleasantness” in the dust—because I’m not suggesting “it’s all good,” I’m suggesting it doesn’t much matter whether any of it’s good or bad, because the idea that any of it is “fiction that will really endure” is the real convention of social pleasantness. We can prop some of it up for decades, maybe even centuries, but eventually it’s all going to fade into oblivion, and us with it.

There’s a cheery thought, right?

Now, I’m not saying that we should just abandon our critical philosophies (whatever they may be, and if that’s not too grandiose a way to describe them) and embrace radical nihilism. After all, I still get up every morning and look for stories—fiction and nonfiction—that entertain me and enrich my understanding of the life I’m living and the world I’m living it in (including all those lives that are profoundly unlike my own). What I am saying is that instead of pretending, to ourselves and to others, that we are holding up the banner for some great tradition or another, we accept the historical contingency of our beliefs about literary accomplishment and greatness. Actually, no, we don’t just accept it: We dive into it, probe it as vigorously as we’d probe the books to which we’re applying our judgment. Instead of saying “This and only this is how fiction should be done!” we can say “This is a way of doing fiction that works for me,” and if we can work past that level to “And here’s what I’ve figured out about why it works for me,” even better.

This idea that being able to do that is something special, though, that it puts those of us who do it (or at least try to do it) in some sort of cultural vanguard—that’s got to go.

(more…)

5 September 2012 | theory |