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November 12, 2007

Reflections on Leonard Michaels

Reviewing MATRIMONY in the NYTBR, Jennifer Egan mentions in passing that the creative writing professor in the book, Professor Chesterfield, is reminiscent of Gordon Lish. This is true, I suppose. I never met Lish, but then you don't have to meet Lish to meet Lish. In actuality, though, the inspiration for Chesterfield was my own first writing professor, Leonard Michaels, whom I studied with when I was living in Berkeley shortly after I graduated from college. Let me be clear about a couple of things. Chesterfield isn't Michaels. He isn't even based on Michaels. But he was inspired by Michaels, who, like Chesterfield, was a cantankerous, larger-than-life personality.

Lenny's star has risen again, thanks to the publication of his collected stories, and I've been happy to see TEV give him some attention too. And there have been some really good essays about him recently, including David Bezmozgis's in Nextbook and Wendy Lesser's essay about her friendship with Lenny in her book ROOOM FOR DOUBT. But when I knew Lenny, in the late eighties and early nineties, his reputation was in decline. The Men's Club had been turned into a terrible movie, and Lenny had been both seduced and appalled by Hollywood. He was getting bad reviews, most notably one by Antole Broyard in the NYTBR that has to go down as one of the most vicious reviews the Book Review has ever published.

Lenny was not by traditional standards a particularly dedicated teacher. He could be both lazy and dismissive. Whereas in most writing workshops the stories get handed out a week in advance and the students go home and critique them, Lenny couldn't be bothered with such things. He would walk into class, drop the stories on his desk, then leaf through them haphazardly and start to read aloud from one until at some point he tired of it, and then he'd read aloud from another one. In many cases, one got the sense that he was reading the work for the first time. But the way he read the stories made you hear things in the work you hadn't noticed before, and he always had a sharp and observant comment about the story he was readiing from and about writing in general.

In fact, it was what Lenny said in asides that was often most instructive, and even if he could rant about literary theory and feminism to the point of near-paranoia, he was smart and well read, and if he liked you, as he liked me, he would champion your work. Interestingly, Lenny himself seemed fairly preoccupied with Gordon Lish. At least he talked about him with some regularity. They seemed to have a competitve relationship, the source of which I can only guess.

Lenny taught me to be punctilious and ruthless with my own work, which is the greatest thing any writer has taught me. And he did it mostly by example, without even realizing he was doing it. One of my clearest memories of Lenny is of his accosting me in the hallway on Berkeley campus, overcome by what seemed to be a matter of considerable urgency. It was, it turned out, the word "smidgen." He was using it in something he was writing, and he wanted to know how I thought it was spelled. This was in the days before the Internet, and Lenny had in his office various dictionaries and textbooks, all of them lined up, it seemed, for the sole purpose of determining how to spell smidgen.

It seemed to me obvious how to spell smidgen--exactly the way I'm spelling it now. But Lenny was convinced it worked better as smigeon--like pigeon. On and on he went for what seemed like weeks. Every time I saw him on campus he would mention another piece of evidence why the word should be spelled this way or that. In the end, I believe he decided that there was probably more than one way to spell smidgen, and I think he went with smigeon. Or maybe not. I can't recall. I couldn't sustain interest in the question, and Lenny moved on to other obsessions. But it was the obsession itself that struck me, as well as the passion Lenny brought to everything he did. That's what a writer needs, and Lenny had it. That's why his stories are so great, and why they're finally getting the attention they got when they first were published and that they deserved all along.

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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