A TEA PARTY ON THE LAWN

Two years ago I stopped attending the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula. It was my fault. I got cranky. I’d been put on a panel about the controversial issue of memoir versus autobiography -- at least I thought of it that way -- and welcomed the chance to air the topic in a university town where I assumed there would be insights and telling arguments. It turned out to simply be a long table of authors who had written about themselves, regardless of genre, reality, or method. Several of the books were self-published. The chair was DETERMINED that there would be no unseemly quarreling, which she dubbed “ugly.”

I had gone astray when I thought that my experience at the University of Chicago conference on deconstruction, later called the “Derrida Corrida” and destined to be a high water mark that people talked about for years, would be the model. The issue that time was related: artful narrativity versus writing as simply a set of evidence to be interpreted by the reader, arbitrarily. My hero professor, Richard Stern, was a rather testy organizer and my other hero, Stephen Toulmin, was in the bullring as toreador with a powerful bull, Edward Said. Some of it was over my head at the time, so ever since I’ve wished for a transcript of the exchanges.

The University of Montana intelligentsia (if there are any) was not on this festival panel. These issues were missing: Can anyone who is not a Native American write a “true” account of a Native American context or individual? How has the huge shift from the television version of 19th century white male frontier adventures to the “People’s History” points of view -- from women, Jews, Asians, Mexicans, Metis and so on -- challenged the morality of Manifest Destiny, not just in moral terms, but also in terms of outright fact? How do we know what really happened, and is it possible to know? What should be the status of journals, diaries, written records by early whites be and how can they be reconciled with the oral records of indigenous people? What is the relationship of “truth” in some scientific sense to “truth” as experienced reality? Is there something morally wrong with changing the facts because they are misleading or would hurt someone? If so, what constitutes that “wrongness?” In a published work, who has responsibility for lack of facticity? The author and/or the publisher? Should one shun all writing that isn’t Biblical in its unchallengeability?

Instead, the panel consisted of a rancher who understood himself to be part of the heritage of the state after a long contributing life, someone who had found trauma and injustice in Vietnam and wished to testify, a familiar writer who in retrospect gave an account of his rise to reputation, and so on. The issues that surfaced were things like, “at what point is someone important enough to deserve a book written about him,” or “should you write disturbing and possibly unpatriotic things?” The unspoken thread always present was prosperity. Can one get rich by writing books? The woman who insists on writing about horrendous abuse from her father was not on the panel. My attempts to describe “Bronze Inside and Out” as anything but adventure were diverted.

It didn’t strike me until afterwards that the problem was that the Montana Festival of the Book is based on advertising, the need to promote the “brand” of Montana writing. Montana book buyers want to know how to become prosperous and high status but only in terms of the middle-class. Or so the publishers, even the self-publishers, seem to think. A few adventures are fine, but no questions like “why climb Mount Everest?” or political challenges about the environment or economy.

The “festival” -- which likes to present books written by dogs or Shakespeare tragedies rewritten to have happy endings -- takes this sort of middle-class popular approach because the model is the Squire’s Fair, turning the lawn into a festival ground for a day or two. We’ve all seen them in those BBC movies about the Victorians and Edwardians, which remain the model for genteel living in Montana. All is elegant and mannerly as a tea party because that’s what it IS, a 19th century tea party. (Not the tax-related kind.) The real business happens in the private chambers of the landed gentry. (In this case, hotel rooms.) The revolutionary coffee house with violent arguments and bills of particulars are not there, though there are always a few token troublemakers safely confined to the stage of the Wilma. Someone preposterous like that guy who writes about extreme fighting. This crowd does not take him seriously. (Cut Bank, oil ruffian town, does.) When a few environmentalists actually burst into tears over beloved places they had seen desecrated, everyone looked away, embarrassed.

The list of presenting writers is controlled via subsidies for gas and per diem. (I can’t attend without that money. I assume this is true for others.) The money for that comes from grants from the Montana arts cartel, who are mostly ladies. The high dollar admissions are for a “name” speaker not from Montana. (David Sedaris this year) and the authors’ cocktail party. The vendors complain that people are not there to buy books -- they merely want to be part of the action. The first year 100 writers were present; this year there are 65.

Over the past few years I’ve begun to become aware of writers who are not considered invite-able to this festival mostly because they don’t run with this crowd and didn’t even when they went to school in Missoula. Some are writers of wicked stuff, which the festival only likes when the authors, like James Crumley, are old and venerated. Others simply move in quite different contexts, including many of the Native American writers. They aren’t invited because no one in Missoula ever heard of them.

We begin to think of a Salon d’Refusees, however you spell it, where an alternative but parallel event happens not far away. The CMR Auction in Great Falls saw that happen with many off-premise auctions at the same time. It has made the event attractive to out-of-towners, which raises the stakes quite a bit if money is the goal. (Of course, the same forces have broken the official auction in half.)

But the Montana Festival of the Book is about Montana’s version of Paris, about as racy as it gets. (You can buy pot there.) There ARE coffee shops. But the real bad guys hang out in bars where there are more likely to be fist fights than highbrow confrontations. Some of them read books.