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When
I was a kid, the comic strip Dondi drove me and my
brother into an agitated frenzy. Every day, the adorable dot-eyed
orphan said something that exasperated us. In one storyline,
Dondi was declared to be brilliant, though if Dondi were smart,
my full scholarship to Princeton would have been assured.
The adults in the Dondi world kept saying that Dondi was "gifted,"
which is what people used to call smart kids back in the olden
times. Dondi, that two-dimensional paragon of intelligence,
thought this meant he was getting a present. When Dondi mused
about what his gift would be, my brother and I became irate.
We could have gouged out his dead black eyes with a dull pencil.
In fact, I recall that we stabbed the newspaper that day,
thus thwarting my father's attempts to complete the word jumble.
What
does this have to do with Stephen King? There was an incident
involving Stephen King over three years ago that I'm still
all riled up about it. Like a bad comic strip, I can't stop
revisiting it, even though it's annoying and counterproductive
and it may mean my father can't do the jumble.
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| Photo
by Amy Guip |
In Fall
2003, the National Book Foundation announced that author Stephen
King had been chosen to receive their Medal for Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters (awarded, per the NBF website,
for enriching "American literary heritage over a life of service,
or a corpus of work"). The DCAL had previously been awarded
to Philip Roth, John Updike, and Eudora Welty, among others.
King is in good company, and his name isn't out of place on
this list. There was a time when it was he, and not J.K. Rowling,
who kept the publishing industry alive. I have no beef with
King's writing overall nor his place in American literature
and popular culture.
After the
NBF announcement, big fat literary critic Harold "the Hut" Bloom
told The New York Times, "That [the NBF] could believe
that there is any literary value [in King's work] or any aesthetic
accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is
simply a testimony to their own idiocy." In a Los Angeles
Times article, Bloom said that King "is an immensely inadequate
writer, on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book
basis."
As one
can imagine, this unleashed a shit-storm of protest from those
who aren't clued into the world of literary criticism enough
to know that Bloom is not taken seriously by most people under
the age of 102. Neil Gaiman was among the first to chime in,
calling Harold Bloom "a twerp" (Neil! "Twerp"? Is that all
you've got?) and saying that Bloom's "L. A. Times article
is puffed-up snobbery of the worst kind." The internets participated
in quite a bit of intellectual discourse, much of it along
the lines of "I <3 King! Bloom can suck it!"
For the
sake of full disclosure: Despite the name of my column, I
think Bloom is a bombastic misogynist who has been given a
pass due to his uncanny ability to make exactly no sense in
such a way that makes readers feel stupid. So, really, despite
my usual literary pretensions, I was more than slightly on
the King side of this whole scuttlebutt.
Until
I read King's acceptance speech, that is.
King
was giving a very nice speech, mostly about how rockin' his
wife is, and then all of a sudden, he drops this:
You
can't sit back, give a self satisfied sigh and say, 'Ah,
that takes care of the troublesome pop lit question. In
another twenty years or perhaps thirty, we'll give this
award to another writer who sells enough books to make
the best seller lists.' It's not good enough. Nor do I
have any patience with or use for those who make a point
of pride in saying they've never read anything by John
Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular
writer.
Reading
this was like the time when my elementary school principal
announced, at graduation, that he was doing away with all
awards that celebrated academic achievement. He felt it was
unfair to single out individual students for their intellectual
gifts. I remember the anger that floated around my little
section of kindred nerdnics. And then he announced, "I will
now present the awards for Most Valuable Player on our football
team."
My reaction
was like that of a comic book character's: ARGH! NO! YOU HAVE
TO BE KIDDING! HOW? WHAT? It was OK to award people who were
better coordinated, but not OK to give out an award for a
great essay? Didn't the athletic kids already get all the
perks? They were featured on the back pages of The
Staten Island Advance, not the girl who knew no English
but within a year was the school's best speller, not the kid
who stayed up late for a week making a wooden model exhibiting
plate tectonics with countries that actually fitted together
and slid apart.
Let's
think of the National Book Awards as academic achievement
awards for the writers who toil away for tiny advances and
low print runs, who don't get to talk to their editors frequently
but still continue to write better and sharper and more beautiful
books than anyone has a right to write. Those awards are for
them.
The National
Book Foundation's mission, as stated on their website, is
to raise the cultural appreciation of great writing in America--not
to reward the already-oft-rewarded. And a
look at past winners will show that they haven't gone
out of their way to exclude best sellers—the year The
Catcher in the Rye was nominated, From Here to Eternity
won. Looking at the NBA's lists—especially from the 1950's—it's
hard to argue with any of their choices. For the most part,
the fiction nominees are iconic books of American literature,
and many of them—including The Collected Stories of
John Cheever, Cold Mountain, and The Shipping
News—were best sellers before winning the NBA. Sure,
there are some years when the nominees were a little more
obscure than other years, but overall, those were anomalies.
Even look at the people who won the DCAL: Toni Morrison in
1996, Arthur Miller in 2001, Oprah Winfrey in 1999, and Ray
Bradbury in 2000.
Let's
think of King, Grisham, Clancy, et. al., as the football players.
They're the popular kids. Writing is a no-brainer for them.
They get handsomely rewarded for their efforts. Every day,
they get fan mail. When they do a book tour, they're not reading
to three homeless people escaping bad weather. I'm not saying
these writers are bad or they're liars or they're in this
for the money—no one starts writing for the money.
But not
everyone likes popular literature. I've got a lot of books
I want to read before I get to the books King thinks
I should read. Demanding that we all read popular writers
is like demanding that we all eat meatloaf: It's fine for
some, but not for all. "But this meatloaf is real delicious!"
King says. I don't care! I'm pretty sure my ancestors came
to this country specifically for the freedom to read whatever
the hell they wanted (or not read, in my father's case). If
King wants me to eat Mary Higgins Clark's meatloaf, I will
demand he read Ben Marcus's Notable American Women,
which is the literary equivalent of fugu.
King
went on to say that we should build bridges between the popular
and the literary, but it appears that what this means to him
is that everyone should read the books by the popular
kids and stop giving so many awards to William Gaddis. King
calls people like Peter Straub and Grisham "pop lit" but his
speech equates it to "genre lit." He thinks the National Book
Foundation has ignored the genre writers. But King's argument
falls flat when one realizes that Ray Bradbury, who is both
popular and a genre writer, won the DCAL in 2000. It only
took the NBF three years to award the DCAL to another best-selling
popular writer, despite what King asserts in his speech.
It would
probably be wrong for me to psychoanalyze King, but I'm going
to do it anyway. He's got, as Henry Rollins eloquently put
it in the 90's, low self-opinion, also known as low S.O. What
else could explain his outburst? Why did he let those silly
little remarks from a pompous blow-hard upset him to the point
of dissing people like Joyce Carol Oates, Tim O'Brien, John
Irving, Alice Walker, and E.L. Doctorow? Did they not deserve
their awards because he prefers Tom Clancy? Does he really
believe that 1992's The Firm is a better book than
Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, which won
for fiction that year? I think that if King actually looked
at the list, he wouldn't have made such a bizarre speech—a
speech that totally managed to detract from the most important
occurrence at the National Book Awards that night: Walter
Mosley's appearance sans signature hat.
And it
seems that King's speech had the opposite intended effect—the
subsequent fiction nominees have, overall, been books with
tiny print runs and written by unknowns, and the winner of
the DCAL in 2006 was Adrienne Rich. Way to go! At least it
saves me the trouble of stabbing King's eyes out on his book
jacket photos, like that day I mutilated Dondi's eyes in the
Daily News.
You can
read King's acceptance speech here.
(May,
2007)
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