If you’re a publisher or agent, here is a sort of formula for producing a book. First, watch magazines for an article that is “different” and has a lot of punch. Look for a gimmick: they’re immigrants or minorities, they’re victims of something, they have two heads. Find the author and see if they can expand it into a book. If it turns out they can and it remains as punchy as that first article, sign them up for three books. The main money comes from the first book. If the first book is promoted hard and actually takes hold, the second book should come out fairly soon so it can ride the coattails of the first one. The third book is kind of a loss, but it can clean up the last of the interest -- unless it’s too different.
They know a book would sell much better if it were produced by an “unknown,” a “discovery,” a “diamond in the rough.” So a writer is caught between what the publisher needs: proving reliability, productivity, value-certified by academia, and -- on the other hand -- being “authentic,” which readers seem to want, though to many people it means naive, a rube, unsophisticated. It’s a hat trick to project both qualities.
Writers know that everything rides on that first article or “the first ten pages” of the actual manuscript one is shopping around, so that’s where writers go for broke -- maybe push the envelope. Almost always the first ten pages of a long piece is throat-clearing, ramping up, achieving velocity. Many writers go back -- after completing the book -- and amputate the first ten pages. Or maybe look through the whole manuscript for a part that’s “hot” and put that at the front. I do both.
Two female authors were tripped up by this practice. The first was Montana author Judy Blunt, whose first chapter developed from a “memoir” assignment in a university writing class. She had been a ranch wife who badly wanted to write. One day she got so absorbed in her writing that she failed to produce lunch on time. Her father-in-law took offense at this and she claimed that he smashed her typewriter with a sledge hammer.
When the book came out, the father-in-law -- seeking to save his local image -- objected and then sued Judy to make her take that account out of the book. By this time the book was much celebrated and winning prizes, with the incident of typewriter-smashing sort of summing up the whole problem of alpha males on ranches who don’t value literacy or women, either one, and think that if they use violence they can control both. Incidentally, I happened to run into some of Blunt’s neighbors from that time and they said they knew this father-in-law and found it easy to picture him doing such a thing.
But he succeeded in forcing Blunt to say she made the whole thing up and to apologize. By then she was gone, the marriage was gone, and there was never any money from that source in the first place, so the only thing she had to sacrifice was family harmony. She was not willing to give that up, mostly for the sake of her kids and partly because she is an essentially honorable and peacable person who was used to taking damage herself rather than inflicting it on others. (The book is "Breaking Clean.")
The second example is Annie Dillard in her wonderfully written “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” The first chapter tells about an old tomcat she had that went hunting every night and leapt back in her open bedroom window to print her bare chest with rosettes of bloody paw prints. The image is so strong that few questioned it, but someone did, and Dillard confessed that she had “borrowed” the cat story from a student who was male. A bare male chest with cat footprints is different from Annie’s nude bosom blossoming in that way. Anyhow, every cat I ever had would sit down and wash its feet before it went very far. And yes, I DID sleep with the window open and my cat went hunting in the night. I never found blood on my nightgown, but I found voles on my carpet.
Dillard claimed her student cheerfully gave permission for her to tell the tale as though it happened to her. A common rhetorical device is the “was-you-there-Charlie” factor of witnessing in first person. One of the sophistications teachers try to convey to readers is how to distinguish reliable reporters from unreliable narrators by looking for internal evidence or using critical thinking.
A noted essay took Dillard to task for “stealing” this tale and even yet the discussion list-servs will seethe with rage and indignation every time it comes up. (Try googling it.) The small crack in Annie’s facade was soon expanded into an assault on her writing in general, at least in “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” Suddenly the book that had won prizes and was so well-loved by so many, was thrown out of the curricula, an embarrassment. By then Dillard had gone on to quite different contexts and genres while her imitators were left trying to defend themselves
The whole misguided witchhunt aspect of criticizing narratives has been especially vexed when it has gotten confused with identity politics. The assumption is that a person with some or all of the genes of the ethnic group in question will reliably “know” what is authentic to that group. First, they are assuming that ethnic groups are a uniform blob without variations and uniqueness that comes from being an individual and, second, they assume that the genes expressed by those people -- whether or not they were ever exposed to the environment that controlled the expression of those genes, to say nothing of the thought patterns shaped by the environment -- either gives them unique access to some kind of supernatural knowledge or ethically entitles them to a monopoly on all such knowledge. This is particularly prone to happen to persons with a few Native American genes (a large part of which are identical with Asian) who define “Indians” in a 19th century way, usually shaped by the Jewish Southern California culture of Hollywood.
Here’s a shocking little story. The first year I taught in Browning High School (1962-63), the attention of the class and myself was attracted to a commotion across the street in what was called “Moccasin Flats.” It was an area of cabins and shacks where many people, mostly enrolled in the tribe and of either low or nonexistent income, barely managed to survive. A drunk woman was in an old car trying to run over a drunk man, who was so floppy that he just rolled around in the dirt under the rather high undercarriage. She was determined to get a wheel to go over him and though he wasn’t exactly evading her, it didn’t happen. In a while they gave it up, went off with arms around each other, and left the car sitting in the road.
I’m convinced I saw that. It was fifty years ago. I didn’t know the people, but could see they were Indian of some sort. Students who must have been there variously report they did or did not see the happening. It was certainly not typical of all Indians or all the people in that town. Some would like to suppress the story as an embarrassment and would say that repeating it does harm. Others would say it’s absolutely true and tells readers something important to understand: what alcohol can do. A few will think to themselves, “that’s what Indians are like.”
I am not Indian. Not many would say this was anthropological information important to record or sale-able in the way po-mo critics would say white people have profited by accounts of Indian life, though picaresques of wildly colorful characters is one rather lucrative way to write about Indians.
Should I have told you this story? I was there, Charlie. Should it be my first chapter?
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