The Writer’s Audience

Wallace Stegner founded Stanford University’s Writing Program in 1946 and retired from it in 1971. This unpublished manuscript was discovered in the Wallace Stegner archives, source of a collection edited by Lynn Stegner (Penguin).

Related to the medium of language is the symbolic system by which we write it—the most difficult symbolic system utilized in any art with the possible exception of musical notation. By contrast, architecture and the graphic arts not only transcend time and space, but they operate with an intense direction; the bulls painted by Cro-Magnon priests on the walls and ceilings of the cave of Lascaux are as thrilling an experience as if they had been painted yesterday, though they are in fact perhaps twenty-five thousand years old, older than any language we know, or any historic civilization. To duplicate in language the intense power and movement of those bulls would be difficult enough at any time, a subtler and more indirect artistic making than to render the muscles and poised horns and lean flanks of the bulls in paint. It involves layers of substitutes, the sound “bull” for the actual thing, the written symbols b-u-l-l for the word, a whole complex of agreed-upon responses. The programming is much more complex, and it does not last as well.

Third, written literature is like the plastic arts (and unlike the performing arts, which exist not in space but in time) in that it is subject to indefinite amounts of checking. One can turn back and refresh the memory, correct a false impression, link consequence to cause—and this means that the written story must be meticulously made, where an oral story might survive many structural flaws.

Finally, in written literature the creator benefits by none of the excitement of audience participation. This artistic meeting between artists and audience takes place not in the open but behind closed doors—I have already said that it is no meeting at all. No choral responses aid it; it gets no benefit from repetitions and other mnemonic forms of emphasis or hypnosis. Where an appreciative crowd may move an actor or orator to outdo himself, a writer has to create the very air currents he rises on. A public-art audience often, like a mob, swings all one way, and swings the creator with it to some extent; the audience for a novel, or for any book, only infrequently can make its enthusiasm felt by the novelist, and then only indirectly and after the fact.

Obviously a writer would like to know whom he is talking to, and sometimes he makes an effort to talk to some particular segment of the reading public. In spite of its painful stereotypes and standardizations, America remains a wildly pluralistic society. It is made up of a hundred “special cultures” based sometimes on geography, sometimes on ethnic origin, sometimes on education or fashion or exposure to foreign influences. And so it is possible that Beats may write for Beats, sexual-revolutionists can write for sexual-revolutionists, Louis Adamic could write for Yugoslavs, historians can write for special and dedicated audiences of Civil War buffs, or frontier buffs, Mormons can write for and about Mormons, Jews for and about Jews, urban intellectuals for and about urban intellectuals. But generally speaking, none of these is an adequate audience, some of them are buried; and even if the special audience is reached, the writer has hardly any way of telling whether he reaches anybody else.

I can give you an example of how confused a writer may become about his audience. The late Flannery O’Connor some years ago wrote an article defending her use of the grotesque. Her justification was that people were so spiritually sluggish that you had to jar them; she distorted characters and incidents for exactly the same reason she would shout at a deaf man. And yet I never knew one of the spiritually sluggish who read Flannery O’Connor. The people I know who read her are spiritually pretty alert, maybe as alert as she was herself. They read her not to get a normally loud message through inadequate ears but to rattle and titillate their normal ears by an extra-loud message. So it looks as if Miss O’Connor thought she was writing for an altogether different crowd of people than she actually wrote for.

The mediators between writers and readers, the people who explicate and select and judge, recommend or squelch, are of course the reviewers and critics, but though a healthy criticism is absolutely essential to healthy creation, the critics don’t always live up to their full obligation. My mild complaint about them is not simply an echo of the perennial warfare between novelists and critics. Let me state my position. I share Chekhov’s feeling that a novelist seldom learns anything from a critic and that critics are the flies that keep the horse from plowing. Some critics seem to me to earn Hemingway’s definition as the lice that crawl on the body of literature. Nevertheless, in the total literary ecology they have a function, and one would feel less like calling the pest-control man and having them sprayed if they really performed that function. The difficulty is that (with certain notable and noble exceptions such as Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson) they tend to run in pack. They capture certain journals, literally corner the critical market the way Jay Gould cornered the gold market, so that for ten years at a time a single critical attitude rules, and a limited range of books is praised, a special vocabulary springs up, bright graduate students catch the tone and the lingo and write (and here is a case of writing with an eye very definitely on an audience) to please the reigning critics rather than to discuss a new book in its own proper terms. For a young critic in New York in 1964 the man in the armchair may well turn out to be Norman Podhoretz or Lionel Trilling or Alfred Kazin, just as a few years back he might have been Allen Tate or John Crowe Ransom.

To this one could not object at all if there were at all times adequate provision for dissenting critical voices. Being so pluralist a nation, we ought to have pluralist literature and pluralist literary criticism. The fact is that in nothing so much as our literary criticism do the forces of fashion and stereotype take over. In spite of (or is it because of?) the fact that the present reigning critics are ostentatiously polymathic and affect a world-tone, we have been getting essentially one kind of literature, one kind of moral and aesthetic stance, or else one kind of literature has been getting all the critical notice. It amounts to about the same thing. And whole areas of America find themselves essentially voiceless: writers who essay to be their voice are either diverted or neglected; many readers who look for themselves in contemporary books find nobody who even resembles them. They read what the reviewers and critics praise, and find it either strange or antipathetic. Sometimes it strikes them as sick. They venture to express their personal tastes and the knowing laugh at them.

Let me make an important qualification or distinction here, for fear I should sound like some Midwest regionalist or southern agrarian complaining that we are dominated by New York intellectuals. Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay could feel that way around 1920, a southern agrarian such as Donald Davidson feels that way to this day. But it is not the mere centralization of publishing and the critical establishment in New York, and it is not intellectuals as such (though they are sometimes ignorant and sometimes arrogant) that I am speaking of. There have been times when, even with publishing concentrated in New York, other groups have succeeded in capturing the critical establishment almost as thoroughly as it is captured now. There have been times when little regional magazines actually pulled off a revolution. In the 1910s Poetry and the Little Review, both published in Chicago, had more weight in promoting modernism than a hatful of periodicals ten times their size and circulation. There was a time in the 1930s when the knowing went not to New York but to the Southern Review, the Kenyon Quarterly, the Sewanee Review, and other magazines for what was then the yeasty and rising dope. Whether the fashion happens to be midwestern realism or imagist revolt or agrarian sectionalism or urban intellectualism, is less important than that avenues be kept open for other manners and other preoccupations, and for the kinds of literary performance, whether experimental or traditional, that may offer outlets to bottled-up writers and frustrated readers.

This is a big lack, and it has been apparent to many for a long time. First novelists have trouble even getting reviewed, much less praised, and in consequence sometimes try any startling or shocking gimmick to attract notice. The reviewing journals dwindle and fade, the Saturday Review of Literature becomes the Saturday Review and cuts its book coverage by two-thirds, and the New York Times Book Review grows so stodgy that people all over the country complain, and during a Times strike the rival New York Review of Books is born—to many, a hopeful event. But week by week the New York Review of Books shows itself in turn to be dominated by a group, and seems more and more the journalistic brother of the Partisan Review; and even if it were as good as we all hoped it might be, its policy has consistently been to give large space to a few books and leave out of notice a great number. We need some sort of widely disseminated and influential journal like the London Times Literary Supplement, with its brief, responsible, and numerous notices of new books.

What all this comes to is that the writer, who must write out of his special culture because it is all he has, can hardly write for his special culture alone, unless it happens to be the fashion of the moment. He must write, eventually, for the man in the armchair, being aware of him without very seriously trying to define him. He will turn out, I suspect, to be someone very like the writer himself, and in this sense it may be said that a writer writes to please himself and lets the audience find him. Yet the man in the armchair (or the lady in the chaise longue) is someone other, too, and that makes all the difference. A writer is a man in search of an audience just as surely as he is a man in search of form; and just as form is at its best a discovery, something arrived at through the trial and error of creation, so the reader himself is a sort of discovery, and often a pleasant one. And despite the standardization of the reviewing media, despite the temporary suppression of whole areas of the American land and experience and people, that discovery may be made if the book has anything to say. I have said somewhere else that a work of literature is not primarily a gem but a lens, a thing to look through, and that one thing we get by looking though it is a sense of intense acquaintance with the best in the man who wrote it. The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

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