The best books make you think. You put them down and days, sometimes weeks, later your hindbrain will toss up some revelation about life in general or your life specifically. Sometimes these revelations will alter the path of your development as a human being. Sometimes they’ll simply shine some light on an event or person that makes you see things a little differently.
I’ve been reading Valencia by Michelle Tea. It is not one of the best books but it has led me to some interesting questions and some not quite fully formed conclusions. The questions first: when did squalor become romantic and artistic and when did “authenticity” become an excuse for bad writing?
Western culture has long romanticized the “starving artist” with, I think, some justification. The starving artist type is committed to her art. No, no day job for the starving artist type; that might interfere with her creative mojo. Unwilling to bow to the rules and whims of mainstream society, the starving artist usually works a series of menial jobs, if she works at all, or relies on patronage, charm, or graft to meet even the most basic of life’s needs (shelter, food, and, of course, supplies for whatever her art might be).
Because the starving artist barely skates by, living in constant uncertainty about where the next rent check is coming from or how she is going to buy groceries, quite frequently the starving artist lives in conditions that are pretty damn rank. Houses that come pre-inhabited by decades old colonies of cockroaches and mice. Houses with little security of place and roommates who are content to let random people simply wander in and out; the kind of places where you never know when you wake up who might be sleeping on the couch (or mattress) in your “living room.”
Most of us think we could tolerate this lifestyle for a while, at least until we hit it big with whatever our art might be, and some subset of us really don’t have that many standards about cleanliness or personal security, but most of us outgrow the circumstances in which the starving artist lives somewhere around age 26 (if not sooner). The practical circumstances of the starving artist’s life are not what we envy.
What we envy, and envy is a key part of the romantic haze that surrounds these ideas, is the freedom that the starving artist’s life implies. Let’s face it, if given a choice most of us would not get up and go to our jobs every day. We would pursue the things that interest us, the hobbies we barely have time for, the relationships that we have to work to maintain, the random past-times that catch our eye for a while. The starving artist, by maintaining her “principles” and her “commitment to her art,” has that freedom we all lust after. And because we lust after it we ignore the facts of that life or imbue it with that romantic haze. But where is the line between romantic haze and squalor?
Valencia, which takes place in San Francisco in the early-mid 1990s, Tea writes in her introduction is “…a snapshot, more or less, of my twenty-fifth year on earth, written not how it happened but how I felt it happened, and how I felt about it happening.” And it is a particular interlude, one in which she and her friends are stoned on mushrooms, that inspired my first question. Tea writes
We sat outside on the front stoop, a great place to sit, maybe the best in the city. You were connected to the absolute hub of 16th Street, but you sat in a dark corridor, apart, quieter, like 16th Street was this incredible secret and my street was the moment before you told it. You had the sense that something was building, sitting in the subtle glow of the streetlights facing the bottlebrush tree sprouting freakish bristly blossoms that actually looked like bottle brushes. I had seen a bottlebrush tree once before…
…
Now I had one right outside my house, growing all the way up to my window, filling the frame. A great tree. The one from which Laurel hung upside down in the rain the night she learned her friend died from heroin…Laurel cried and George smoked a damp cigarette and then Laurel hung by her knees from the bottle brush tree. The tree also served as a kind of toilet bowel when you were out on the stoop drinking 40s and smoking and felt too sluggish and congested to climb the stairs to the bathroom. Or maybe you didn’t want to miss anything, so you pulled down your pants and squatted over the patch of dirt the tree grew out of.
Michelle Tea, Valencia (Berkeley,CA: Seal Press, 2008), 76-77
San Francisco: land of foot traffic and narrow sidewalks. Call me square but I think dropping trou and pissing in the treebox in front of your house on a regular basis transcends the boundaries of the romanticized discomfort of the starving artist lifestyle and lands square in the land of total, absolute, unreconstructed squalor. I mean, seriously, are we talking about, as my friend M. would say, grown ass people or animals here?
My second question is tangentially related to my first question in that one of the other key markers of our romanticization of the starving artist lifestyle is the idea that how down and dirty the artist gets, and how much the artist “suffers” for her art is directly proportional to how “authentic” the art is. Basically, we have this misguided idea that people who live comfortable lives can not produce any artistic work that speaks any kind of truth because their comfort blocks them from having access to “real life.” This presupposes that there is only one kind of truth about life, and there is only one “genuine” route to that truth.
Whether you buy into the idea that the more an artist suffers the greater her access to truth and the more “authentic” her art is has a bit of bearing on what standards you apply to that art, and with writing there are, indeed, standards (we call them grammar and punctuation).
Warning: this next passage is not for the faint of stomach.
Tea writes of this year “[t]hat was the year I puked on every winter holiday.” She also writes of the Thanksgiving night on which she, a vegetarian, indulges in turkey with gravy:
Somehow I made it to the bathroom, the narrow red water closet. I folded myself around the bowl and stuck my head in like I was bobbing for apples. My entire internal system clenched and released, clenched and released as I threw up forever. It smelted worse than anything.
(ibid, 139)
Yes, you read that right: her the ore of her vomit refined worse than anything.
Now, I’m all for colloquialisms. I could have let “smelt” go by without a blink; it is an accepted colloquial past participle of smell. But smelted? This isn’t authenticity. This is just plain bad writing no matter how you cut it.
I also happen to think that this is posing, the self-conscious striving to be “authentic” which is itself inauthentic as hell. Why do I think this? As I was looking for the citation information for this book I noticed that the Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data for this book are:
1. San Francisco (Calif.)-Fiction
2. Lesbians-Fiction
which means someone took the time to polish and edit this book which also means someone consciously let this go out with “smelted” in print.
Again, call me square but if you’re going to edit a book I don’t think that making it make a little bit of sense detracts from the overall authenticity and ambiance.
In fact, maybe, just maybe, it might actually make it more accessible to more people. And really, if the point is to share the experience (which is the point of these memoir-type pieces of fiction), then don’t you want to reach the broadest audience possible?
But please don’t misunderstand, I’m not necessarily picking on Tea specificially. There are some good pieces of insight into human nature in Valencia like this one buried in a recounting of an encounter with an ex-girlfriend when Tea is in that stage where you’re still attached emotionally but only out of reflex and still attracted physically and you have no idea why:
Good Night, I said, digging for my keys. Have another cigarette, she coaxed. What was this about? She didn’t want me. This was fear, this was the primal fear of abandonment, it was childhood, fear of death, the infinite void, fear of the unknown. This was not about me. That’s what killed me, worked in into a cold astrological bitch. To have someone know you so thoroughly and not want you. Is there anything more painful? I was a favored piece of clothing that had lost its novelty. I was bound for the thrift store, to be bought by someone who would think I was new. I just couldn’t kiss her again.
(ibid, 175)
No, Tea isn’t the only memoirist to wallow in squalor. James Frey and Augusten Burroughs are both guilty of the “squalor effect” as well with Frey having writing standards issues. In fact, is seems these days that most memoir-fiction dips into the squalor barrel in some way, enough so that it’s starting to seem like a requirement for publication. If you can’t show the scars from the suicide attempt or the burn marks you got from the trick or you don’t have a kid you lost in a custody battle because you were a meth addict prostitute, well, sorry, your book just isn’t publishable (even though it’s about gardening).
I’m not sure what conclusions to draw except to say that I wonder about our progress as a species if these two trends are to become standard.
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