We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
Not too
long ago, a rather cynical person said to me that, in New Zealand, film-making
is the new pottery – the thing that artily-inclined people enter into, but
usually in a cottage industry sort of way. Most aspiring film-makers get no
further than the short films that are perhaps seen in a few festivals (if they
are lucky) before being archived. It is only the very rare film-school graduate
who makes an ongoing career in film in any genuinely creative way.
Now there
are some even more cynical people who would say similar things about the
Creative Writing industry. Never before have there been so many institutions
that teach Creative Writing, and yet it is only the rare graduate of them who
makes an ongoing career in literature. This can raise all sorts of questions
about both the utility and value of such courses. Indeed, there are some
Illustrious Elder Literary Figures who have opined that all aspiring writers
really need to do is to read widely, learn how the best writers achieve their
effects, and then get on with it, the way writers in the past did. Creative
Writing courses, they imply, are a commercial con giving false hope to the
untalented.
Stephanie Johnson has the right
to write a novel about Creative Writing. Not only is she an accomplished
novelist, but she is also a teacher of Creative Writing and has another stake
in the culture industry as co-founder of a writers’ and readers’ festival. The Writing Class is an insider’s view
of the whole phenomenon.
Ageing Creative Writing tutor
Merle Carbury was once a promising novelist, but her writing has for years
taken a back seat to her teaching. She supports a chronically-depressed husband
Brendan, who was once a documentary film-maker but now plods about the house in
his pyjamas, smoking and idling. They have a mysterious German lodger Jurgen,
with whose mysterious situation we are tantalised. At work, Merle’s fellow
tutor is the younger Gareth, who wrote a novel once but hasn’t been able to
write anything since. Intentional or not, there seems to be at least the
suggestion in The Writing Class that
tutoring Creative Writing isn’t necessarily healthy for the creative energy of the
tutors. They have to give so much of themselves to assessing and offering
advice on their students’ efforts. A sense of weariness hangs over the
enterprise.
The novel plays out in the last
term of a writing course’s year, in which Merle’s students are preparing final
drafts of the works they intend to submit for assessment. Some are thinking
(too optimistically in most cases) about finding publishers. They are a varied
bunch – the roughneck male writer; the out-and-open lesbian; the former nun;
the Chinese woman writing a fictionalised life of her grandmother; the Indian
man going for a generational saga; the sweetie writing a children’s book; the
fake Rastafarian. More women than men, of course, but then that is the way of
writing courses (and of literary festivals). Egos have to be massaged by the
tutors, and criticisms muted so as not to discourage the students. Students
also have to be encouraged to read their work out loud to an audience, in an
environment where new books are publicised by readings at writers’ festivals.
The big emotional story, intertwined with Merle’s sage observations, involves
Jacinta, a highly-strung and wealthily-married student, and her affair with the
rumpled tutor Gareth.
In presenting what the novel is
about like this, I am in a way falsifying it. The Writing Class is very self-referencing, with chapter headings
drawing our attention to the fact that it too is a product of the Creative
Writing process. (“Ways of Beginning”, “To Be Going on With”, “The Writer’s
Life” etc.). This stylistic alienation effect is at one with the novel’s
reference (on page 137) to Stephanie Johnson herself; and with the reminders
that the main character’s surname, Carbury, comes from an Anthony Trollope
novel.
It all opens with a stunning
morning panorama of a New Zealand city waking up. (It could be more than one
city, but my brain converted it into Auckland.) “What a charmingly old-fashioned way to set the scene,” I
immediately thought. But then I saw how Stephanie Johnson was gently teasing
us, for the chapter that follows has Merle conducting a class on how to write
arresting openings. She reflects on how few of her charges actually read
anything. When she presents them with opening paragraphs from well-known
novels, to show how it can be done (E.M.Forster, Carson McCullers, Elias
Canetti…. and Rosie Scott) she can sense how irritated they are that they have
to read this old stuff when they’d rather be flicking around with their I-pads
or skimming the ‘net. And she reflects on departmental rivalries. And on how
universities are downsizing humanities and how people in the older English
departments hardly ever read anything new because they want to wait until books
are part of the “canon”.
By this stage, we are alert to
how the novelist sets things up and how she is deliberately drawing our
attention to artifice. The opening is followed by articulated reflections on
openings and indeed by other chapters that could equally validly be openings.
We are being asked to scrutinise this story as a narrative construct, right up
to discussions on how it should all end.
This does not make The Writing Class a cold intellectual
enterprise, however. It has an in-built suspense (how are the students’
writings going to turn out?) and some in-built mystery (what is that German
lodger’s secret and what exactly is his muted relationship with Merle?) and a
fine and precise way in presenting characters. It also has its scenes of
feverish emotion in the Jacinta-Gareth story. But even here, we are forced to
consider style. Both when seen from Jacinta’s viewpoint and when seen from
Gareth’s viewpoint, their adulterous coupling is close to overwrought romantic
writing – but then this is the point isn’t it? After all, he’s a tutor in
Creative Writing and she’s a student of Creative Writing; so don’t they both
have a tendency to over-dramatize and create fiction about themselves and
others? And then there’s that moment where Jacinta, having just bonked
ecstatically, sits down and momentarily considers how she can make use of this
experience in her writing. Writers as self-conscious parasites on reality,
maybe?
What I enjoyed most in this novel
were its comments on literature, academe and the writing process. I cannot
refrain from quoting some.
When Merle speaks to her students,
she thinks with regret of the world before there were writing courses:
“ ‘Before the invention of writing courses, the relationship between
emerging writers and established writers was more organic – they would seek one
another out and form relationships outside institutions.’ Merle feels nostalgic
for those days. Faces of beloved older writer friends float through her mind,
some passed on to whatever literary hell or heaven dead-writers may occupy. A
lump rises in her throat, which has to be swallowed down before she can return
calmly to the subject at hand.” (Pg.81)
Sometimes Merle reveals harsh and
bitter truths about her work:
“As she stands before the class, Merle reflects on how in our times,
writers seem more than ever to flock together. Friendships are forged in
courses, more numerous and inclusive than those formed in the old salons of
Europe. The schooled are taught to form ‘writers’ groups’ which will endure
beyond the course calendar. The unschooled, especially those whose careers
pre-date the creation of Creative Writing degrees and courses, will form
alliances easy and not so easy at proliferating writers’ festivals around the
world. Merle remembers her first writer friend Jay, a man twenty years her
senior, who introduced himself after her long-ago debut. She remembers his
sensitive, anxious face, and she remembers his kindness and guidance through
what proved to be a minefield of petty jealousies. Now first novels by young
women are published almost hourly. Then it was rare. Now it is more important
to have ‘done a course’ than to have published. The deception is universal and
complete: everyone can write, and if they can’t they can be taught. And very
often they’re taught by people who have PhDs in Creative Writing and virtually
no publishing record.” (p.156)
Merle is aware that her students
can be over-sensitive, and have to be treated with kid gloves:
“….she is mentoring Szu-Wen, who has a doctorate in bio-chemical engineering
and is working full-time for a huge multinational agricultural conglomerate.
The student has never received anything less than an A+ in her entire academic
career, but the novel lacks suspense and colour, and Merle lacks the courage to
tell her so. How can she? Szu-Wen is so clever, sweet and earnest, and she paid
her fees on the understanding that she would be taught to write, that anyone
can be taught to write.” (pp.87-88)
In an age where students are too
reliant on their electronic gadgets, Merle also gives some sage advice against
instant feedback when she tells her class:
“Before
a person can truly say she is a writer, she must have readers. It’s a very
necessary equation. All writers long for a response from their readers – a
positive one! – but it’s a kind of luxury. At least, traditionally it has been.
We waited first to be published and then for reviews to appear in the media.
Now, if you put things up on the net, you can have an almost instant response
from strangers. I think this is addictive. I think it’s important to let things
settle. It’s common to hear writers talk about how they wrote a novel or short
story and put it away ‘in the bottom drawer’. Some time later, when the
manuscript is retrieved, the writer has an epiphany about how to improve and
enrich it. This process of enrichment is endangered by instant publishing and I
think in time we will draw away from it. Most intelligent readers want to read
intelligent, multi-layered, mature writing, not something cooked up out of a
desire for instant feedback.” (p.219)
I am not, however, falling into
the trap of seeing Merle as the author’s mouthpiece, although I am sure that
much of what Merle says comes from Stephanie Johnson’s working experience. And
I do note that other characters also make rueful comments that are credible
social observation. Here is the tutor Gareth just before he plunges into an
affair with the student Jacinta:
“Gareth does not make a habit of sleeping with his students. He is
firmly aware of his era. That sort of behaviour is regarded as anachronistic by
young academics such as himself. Long gone are the times when professors and
tutors openly looked over each fresh intake for prospective sex. There are too
many women on staff now, and besides, the students are too aware of their
rights and likely to make a complaint of harassment. They complain anyway, just
for professional failure to recognise their genius…” (Pg.54)
And here is Jacinta reflecting on
the decline in the mystique of literature, as compared with her husband’s
career as a surgeon:
“Once, a long time ago, novelists were regarded the same way, with awe.
They were in possession of an instinctive arcane magic that enabled a long,
multi-layered narrative to come together to form a vision of life more humane
and glittering than the real thing. Now it is possible to learn how to do it at
universities and community colleges all over the world….” (p.135)
I could quote more, but that will
do.
This is an urbane and accessible
novel, engaging and often ironically funny. In isolation, some passages could
be taken as clinching arguments against
Creative Writing courses; but whether that was Stephanie Johnson’s purpose is
more than I can guess.