A Literate Journey

Abstract

A Literate Journey John Tytell (bio) . . . a plenipotentiary from the realm of free spirits. —Tropic of Cancer The worst professional possibility for a writer is the news that your work has been rejected again. Related to that, I suppose, is the discovery, sometimes months after the fact, that your previous book has disappeared from a publisher's list, still available, perhaps, used on Amazon for a pittance, or even found with the occasional coffee stain in a public library. In more gallant times, publishers would remainder such titles and offer their authors an early opportunity to purchase copies at a greatly reduced rate. Henry David Thoreau once boasted that he had a library of a thousand books, nine hundred and ninety-eight of which he had written himself. His book Walden (1854), it needs no explaining, is one of the classics of our literature. In my attic in Vermont, I have hoarded a similar supply of books I have written, each disowned title stacked in boxes to the eaves like so much ballast in a ship's hold. The marauding mice and the more destructive red-tailed squirrels, which eat clothing and most anything else, have not yet resorted to this obscure library. Perhaps my private stash for posterity doesn't taste as good as the holy argyle of last winter, or maybe it lacks sufficient nourishment, or is my subject matter a literature too refined for country tastes? Today, short-staffed publishers may not even inform the writer that they no longer wish to represent your work or even store it in warehouses which they can no longer afford. If the public library, then, becomes the cemetery for old books, my attic is a private burial ground, the weight of all those words an anchor in the winter winds. Contemporary writers may have the grim satisfaction of seeing copies of their books in electronic versions blinking into an uncertain future, though such a possibility may seem more spectral and less substantive than seeing your book displayed in a bookstore window. For the writer, the death of a [End Page 39] book is an ultimate rejection, akin to what a parent must feel after a divorce or when a child dies first. I realize that the child's death is inconsolable. In the writer's case, the void may be filled with a new project. The writer may be more prepared, the death of the book more expected so less shocking, but the loss may still be profound. The deceased child's memory remains in the heart while the lost book may resonate more in the mind, but both losses have metaphysical connections to the soul. Over the years, the taboo nature of my subjects—writers who quarreled violently with established values—has subjected me to the pressures of editorial qualms whose anxious hermeneutics signal that cultural nerves meant to be hidden are being exposed. Allow me to offer two examples. In the winter of 1987, Nona Balakian, an editor with The New York Times Book Review, asked me to review The Last Museum (1986), a novel written by a visual artist named Brion Gysin. In Paris in the late 1950s, Gysin had introduced William Burroughs to what they called the "cut-up," a technique allowing Burroughs to insert a selection from a news clipping or a writer he admired into the fabric of his own text without attribution—what painters called "collage" or contemporary musicians "sampling." Set in a bordello, The Last Museum was deeply influenced by Burroughs, who had provided an introduction. As a reviewer, I thought it was my job to describe some of the bizarre dream sequences and burlesqued scenes of twisted sexuality. I submitted the review only to hear from Balakian that The New York Times could not print it. When I asked why, her icy retort was that she worked for a "family newspaper." Since I knew Gysin deserved attention, and that quite possibly the novel would not receive any other notice, I agreed to let her tone down the review by omitting the more salaciously insalubrious details of its plot, at least those that seemed, this late in the history of Christian civilization...