The Disappointment Artist

I don’t have a tremendous amount of other things to say about The Disappointment Artist beyond what I said yesterday, that it’s good, worth reading, and that I fear Jonathan Lethem preemptively stole all my best bits.

Not many of the essays are online, unfortunately. You can read “You Don’t Know Dick” at Bookforum here and “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn” from Harper’s here. Comics geeks will definitely appreciate Lethem’s take on Jack Kirby at the London Review of Books here.

But the absolute best essay in the book, “13, 1977, 21” — which focuses on Lethem’s seeing Star Wars 21 times in the summer of 1977 — can only be found in bastardized form at the New Yorker website here. The full essay in the book is far superior.

But the passage I wanted to highlight here is a quick rumination on writing workshops from the book title’s essay, “The Disappointment Artist,” which should hit all of us a little close to home:

That the writing workshop, the sort led by an established writer and populated by aspirants, is a site of human longing and despair is undeniable. Fear and loathing, the grosser undercurrents of hostility, fratricidal and patri- or matricidal impulses, fox-in-henhouseish preying on one’s own potential successors, those are more like secret poxes–venereal flare-ups, to use a metaphor beloved by Dahlberg. The famous teacher who steals from his students–that’s a story going around. Alternately, one hears of the writer with the former protege, one extensively favored with opportunities, opened doors, who’s now, after publication, brushed his mentor off but only after making an unacknowledged appropriation of signature aspects of the elder writer’s live-performance shtick. Typically, in our correct, passive-aggressive era, hostility has gone underground. The last remaining interrupters, ranters, tantrum-artists–and a handful do still roam the creative-writing landscape–are mentioned with the tittering that disguises our uneasy awe. No one approximately my own age will tell even his or her worst students, as Dahlberg often apparently told even his very best, that they are simply not a writer, that they ought to give it up. And every one of us feels a queasy guilt at this hesitation; are we perhaps only leaving that job to be done by some subsequent disenchanter–an editor, or a series of rejection slips, a teacher braver than ourselves? Are we like bogus farmers, raising crops already scheduled to be destroyed in some government buyout?

No one can say. So we smile in the classroom and work out murkier feelings among ourselves. Tongues scarred with bite marks, then loosened by a little red wine, wag in late-night gripe sessions. A few teachers circulate excerpts from the laughably inept, others memorize the unforgettable lines. A prize-winning poet shocked me years ago, explaining casually, almost sweetly, that the majority of her students could be shown how to write an adequate, competent poem–the problem was that few of these poems would ever be anything but too “boring” to read. The ferocity and finality of that modifier wasn’t lost on me. A cheery type (at least by Dahlbergian standards), I like many of my students personally. Their striving mostly stirs me, often inspires me, sporadically breaks my heart. Yet I participate in the venting, too, and the whispered framing of guilty questions: Is it for more than the paycheck that we go on propagating this farce?

As a recent writing student myself, I can assure you that this very question is forever on our minds as well. I’m just glad to see a writer teacher finally admit it.