{"id":125894,"date":"2018-05-29T09:00:48","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T13:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=125894"},"modified":"2018-05-29T12:13:12","modified_gmt":"2018-05-29T16:13:12","slug":"helen-dewitt-lacerates-the-literary-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/29\/helen-dewitt-lacerates-the-literary-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Helen DeWitt Lacerates the Literary World"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Helen DeWitt. Photo: Zora Sicher.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The literary world is small. Once you\u2019ve worked a few jobs in or around the publishing industry\u2014I\u2019ve been an intern at a trade magazine, an editorial assistant at an old-school book review, a publicist for a university press, a freelancer for more publications than I can easily count, and a fiction writer\u2014it can begin to feel, only somewhat inaccurately, as though you\u2019ve met everyone who works with books. One of my fellow former assistants just replaced another one of our former colleagues as the reviews editor for a prestigious literary magazine. While feeling especially awkward at a New York party a couple years ago, I struck up a conversation with the woman standing next to me. She was my agent\u2019s assistant; she\u2019d just read my manuscript. She had some notes.<\/p>\n

As someone who has spent the majority of the past five years writing fiction, this familiarity has had limited professional utility (my \u201cfriends\u201d have too much \u201cintegrity\u201d to shuffle my work into print-on-demand), and it also presents challenges for the work itself. For one, cynicism is an unattractive quality in a fiction writer, and smirking knowingness can kill a work of fiction as surely as it can kill a conversation. More prosaically, it renders large swaths of one\u2019s social knowledge off-limits in one\u2019s writing, or at least subject to extreme vetting. Most editors and publishers can take a joke, of course (or can pretend to), and recent books by Andrew Sean Greer, Rachel Cusk, and many more take the egotistical denizens of the self-regarding literary scene as their subject. But a more dangerous and difficult task is showing up the still-prevalent notion (at least in marketing materials) of the writer as heroic individual by revealing the process through which a work is transformed\u2014and sometimes even created wholesale\u2014as it moves through the machinery of the publishing world. That is the bold project Helen DeWitt has been taking up for years in the stories now compiled in the book Some Trick<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

DeWitt\u2019s ruthless honesty about the sausage making of literary production is no doubt autobiographical. She has described<\/a> her travails in the selling, copyediting, and typesetting of her now classic first novel,\u00a0The Last Samurai<\/em>, as well as the baroquely harrowing ordeals with the publishing industry and the financial difficulties that followed. But the generosity and humor of these stories soften any sense of personal grievance into something much more interesting and complicated. The stories are devastatingly specific, and yet they serve as broad parables about the inevitability of being misunderstood, both as an artist and as a person.<\/p>\n

The first story in the collection, \u201cBrutto,\u201d is also the harshest. It relates the struggles of a middling abstract painter who specializes in all-white compositions in which the paint is \u201c20 centimeters thick or maybe more, it can take a year before it\u2019s really dry.\u201d Her career is transformed by an influential Italian gallerist named Adalberto, who, upon seeing a stunningly ugly garment that the artist made as an apprentice dressmaker (\u201cMa che brutto!\u201d), persuades her to sew nineteen more suits for a show in his gallery. Despite her complete lack of creative engagement in the project, she agrees and is given a budget far beyond anything she\u2019s previously had to work with. DeWitt lays out the dilemma ruthlessly, methodically: \u201cArtists are lucky to get a gallerist, and you think if you get a gallerist the world is your oyster, and then maybe you are still teaching or working in a call centre \u2026 And there are gallerists that people watch, they can make a career. So you know if you tell one to go away because he is interested in something that doesn\u2019t interest you, probably you will never meet someone like that again.\u201d<\/p>\n

The artist becomes, in short order, the instrument through which Adalberto executes his own artistic project. He displays her twenty suits in Milan: \u201cThe show could never be so transgressive outside Milan\u2014if you have no sense of style, if you know nothing of design, you cannot see<\/em> the stupidity of the ugly pocket which only a trained apprentice could execute correctly. But in Milan they practically fainted.\u201d The show sells out. The stakes are raised. For her New York show, Adalberto conceives of a conceptual piece (in the tradition of Young British Artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin) in which the artist will display her blood, urine, and various other bodily fluids in glass containers in the gallery across from her suits. Again, despite her ambivalence, the artist justifies the project as a good career move, and again, the show is a success. In the story\u2019s final turn, her newfound prominence gets her shortlisted for the prestigious Turner Prize, for which she can submit any piece she has made for consideration. \u201cAnd maybe you would think that this would be the big chance to show what interests you,\u201d the narrator tells us. We know better. She submits the original hideous suit that first caught the gallerist\u2019s attention, along with a glass jar of spermicidal jelly.<\/p>\n

If DeWitt had made her artist-protagonist an underappreciated genius\u2014in other words, if she was more like DeWitt herself\u2014the story wouldn\u2019t work. What keeps the fable from bludgeoning obviousness is the genuine pathos created by the relationship between the mediocre artist and the marketing genius. The work that the artist is passionate about is, as far as the reader can tell, hopelessly dull; the work that the gallerist wills into being is, at the very least, superficially engaging. Unlike all-white paintings that take a year to dry, badly sewn suits and exposed viscera are the kind of thing people like or at least are interested in talking about. The dilemma is not between being true to one\u2019s inner brilliance and selling out. It\u2019s a weirder, more uneasy question: to remain obscure making one kind of junk or to become well-known making another. Maybe DeWitt is suggesting that this is closer to the dilemma most artists face than we would like to admit. I\u2019m certainly ready for my <\/em>Italian patron to convince me to write something with commercial promise.<\/p>\n

Throughout the collection, DeWitt presents variations on the \u201cBrutto\u201d scenario. She sets up experiments in which eccentrics and artists are set loose on a world that admires them superficially but wants to leverage their talents for status or money. In \u201cMy Heart Belongs to Bertie,\u201d Peter, a writer who has produced a very successful \u201cbook of robot tales,\u201d is driven to despair by the fact that he can\u2019t get a hotshot literary agent to sit still while he explains a statistical probability model that he sees as essential to his work. Peter wants to work with an agent and editor who have the sufficient mathematical expertise to help him with his book, which seems rational enough. But the agent, also sanely, tries to steer him away from this line of thinking. \u201cLook,\u201d the agent says, \u201cwe could waste a lot of time talking about editors. We\u2019re only interested in the ones who are willing to buy the book we have to sell.\u201d The situation is maddening for both parties, not to mention to this \u201cfunctionally innumerate\u201d reader trying earnestly to follow DeWitt\u2019s lesson on the binomial distribution. DeWitt is clearly on the side of the writer who shows up to a meeting at a diner with printed PDFs of Gaussian curves, but despite her own painful experience with agents, she also has the skill to dramatize the absurdity of Peter\u2019s position. (She does allow him to devise what he sees as an elegant solution to his predicament, but wisely ends the story before we find out whether it is successful.)<\/p>\n

\u201cClimbers,\u201d originally published in Harper\u2019s <\/em>in 2014, is surely the best piece of fiction about literary publishing in the twenty-first\u00a0century. It follows a group of young industry-adjacent men and women as they try to turn the work of Peter Dijkstra, an obscure Dutch novelist who has recently spent time in an asylum, into \u201cthe next 2666<\/em>\u201d (notwithstanding the fact that \u201cbased on the two pages he had read,\u201d Dijkstra himself \u201cwas not a big fan of 2666<\/em>\u201d). The man on whom everything depends is Ralph, a young agent so vivid in his dogged ambition and vacuous-but-contagious enthusiasm that it\u2019s likely you\u2019ve already met him at a party celebrating the new issue of a literary journal. Ralph\u2019s client Cissy and her friend Gil are<\/em> intellectuals or at least writers. Their genuine (slavishly over-the-top, in Gil\u2019s case) devotion to Dijkstra spurs Ralph\u2019s mercenary interest, leading to a volley of transatlantic email exchanges with the eccentric genius and a frenzy of interest among the Americans in the scattered notes that Dijkstra sends when pressed for \u201csome pages\u201d by Ralph. (\u201cHe could not say why, but he really disliked that use of the word \u2018pages.\u2019\u2009\u201d)<\/p>\n

As in \u201cBrutto,\u201d there\u2019s no obvious hero here. Dijkstra, as far as we know, is legitimate, but he\u2019s also willing to manipulate the Americans\u2019 misguided enthusiasm for his own ends. From his perspective, the essentially extraliterary fantasies that Gil and Cissy and Ralph impose on him\u2014some in earnest, some more cynically\u2014are useful insofar as they lead to him being able to reliably afford cigarettes. Cissy daydreams that if she brings Dijkstra to New York, she\u2019ll play the role of Sontag<\/a> introducing Sebald to New Directions; when juxtaposed with the actual daily life of the obscure, mentally ill European novelist, her fantasies seem absurd. But what DeWitt, through Dijkstra, also understands is that Roberto Bola\u00f1o doesn\u2019t become \u201cBola\u00f1o\u201d without the Ralphs and Gils of the world. Whether or not this is a good thing is a fair question because it certainly isn\u2019t fair<\/em>, but her recognition of it feels unique in contemporary fiction. The fact that she\u2019s doing it under the imprimatur of New Directions, a stalwart of literary credibility, adds another winking layer to the gamesmanship.<\/p>\n

DeWitt captures the particular mix of sincerity and jadedness of the publishing world and of those whose job it is to be enthusiastic about highish culture in the face of periodic reports of its demise. In an industry where you\u2019re likely to work with the same dozen people, cycling through escalating roles over the course of decades, it pays to be polite. When writing fiction, I try to forget, or at least suppress, the skills that made me a competent\u2014if deeply undistinguished\u2014publicist, editor, and cocktail-party chatterer. (Living in Boston, where \u201cpolite\u201d is the sound a thrown snow shovel makes when it ricochets off a windshield, helps.) But it\u2019s unlikely that those manners can be entirely unlearned. They inevitably exert a malign\u2014if, one prays, minor\u2014influence over the work one does. There\u2019s no getting away clean, in publishing as in life. As DeWitt\u2019s stories show, perhaps there\u2019s no use pretending we\u2019re innocent. It can be honorable\u2014in fact, it\u2019s essentially the first principle of fiction writing\u2014to wrestle sincerely with the problems we know best. It\u2019s probably not good for most writers\u2019 sanity to spend a lot of of time analyzing the cycles of hype, money, and fate that can dictate a career. But DeWitt has already done the work. One little look or two won\u2019t hurt.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Andrew Martin\u2019s debut novel,\u00a0<\/em>Early Work,<\/em>\u00a0will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in July.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The literary world is small. Once you\u2019ve worked a few jobs in or around the publishing industry\u2014I\u2019ve been an intern at a trade magazine, an editorial assistant at an old-school book review, a publicist for a university press, a freelancer for more publications than I can easily count, and a fiction writer\u2014it can begin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":260,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[34234,34233,19084,34235,5245,34221,22680],"class_list":["post-125894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-brutto","tag-climbers","tag-helen-dewitt","tag-my-heart-belongs-to-bertie","tag-new-directions","tag-some-trick","tag-the-last-samurai"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHelen DeWitt Lacerates the Literary World<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"DeWitt\u2019s ruthless honesty about the sausage making of literary production is no doubt autobiographical.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/05\/29\/helen-dewitt-lacerates-the-literary-world\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Helen DeWitt Lacerates the Literary World by Andrew Martin\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"May 29, 2018 \u2013   The literary world is small. 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