The Patronage of Writers

The university has taken over the role of Patron of the Arts, especially for creative writing, as the New York Times points out in Those Who Write, Teach.

Five years ago I gave up the full-time writing life and became the kind of domesticated writer known as a professor. I was not shot with a tranquilizer gun, tagged and shipped off to a university. […] [W]hile a couple of generations ago it might have been a surprise to find a writer who taught at a college, now it’s a surprise to find one who doesn’t.

Many parallel points are made by Keith Gessen in his 2006 article “Money” for N+1, in which he argues that a writer only has four options to support his or herself: “the university; journalism; odd jobs; and independent wealth.” He goes on to describe the historical transformation of moving writers toward the university’s bosom:

Practically no writer exists now who does not intersect as some point with the university system—this is unquestionably the chief sociological fact of modern American literature. Writers began moving into the university around 1940, at the tail end of the Federal Writers’ Project, which paid them to produce tour guides of the United States. The first university-sustained writers mostly taught English and composition; in the 1960s and especially the 1970s, however, universities began to grant graduate degrees in creative writing.

The author of the NY Times article, David Gessner, is primarily concerned with one question: “What exactly does all this teaching do to our writing?”

He answers first by appealing to Wallace Stegner, who managed a full career of both teaching and writing, and then by anecdote: “I have two writer friends, successful novelists who could afford not to teach, who insist that rather than detract from their writing, their lives as professors are what allow them to write, and that given more free time, they would crumble.”

I would have to say that I agree with those two writer friends. The structure of teaching, the very schedule and formality of it, provides blocks of time that I have to work around. It offers stability, and then the instability of writing swoops in and fills in all the cracks of time still remaining. Even though in the middle of every semester, when I receive a brilliant idea and have to spend six hours grading papers, I pine for vast stretches of empty time that would allow me to devote myself entirely to writing. I’m afraid, however, that I’d go insane with all that free time.

I have to disagree with Gessner, though, when he writes, “and that writers who depend on bosses for their employment might produce safer, less bold work.” Every writer has to have a master, and The Public or Commercial Success or The Publishing House encourages conformity and safety much more than the University. In fact, on the whole, I think the university encourages avant garde work, cheap pharmacy onhealthy with the possible exception of work that becomes so controversial that it attracts national public condemnation. Especially with the advent of tenure, which gives a professor carte blanche to write whatever he or she wants, within extremely large boundaries (by looking at Patrons of other ages, you’ll see the limitations of former time periods are quite narrow in comparison).

But Gessner is correct when he says, “I think it is legitimate to worry that writers pressed for time will produce work that is more hurried; that writers who hand in annual reports listing their number of publications might focus as much on quantity as quality.” This is a problem that Wendell Berry addresses in his essay “Feminism, The Body, and the Machine.” This essay began as a defense of using a typewriter over a computer, but spirals into several other topics as a good essay does. Eventually Berry gets to talking about professors, and why every professor encourages him to use a computer:

But a computer, I am told, offers a kind of help that you can’t get from other humans; a computer will help you to write faster, easier, and more. For a while, it seemed to me that every university professor I met told me this. Do I, then, want to write faster, easier, and more? No. My standards are not speed, ease, and quantity. I have already left behind too much evidence that, writing with a pencil, I have written too fast, too easily, and too much. I would like to be a better writer, and for that I need help from other humans, not a machine.
The professors who recommended speed, ease, and quantity to me were, of course, quoting the standards of their universities. The chief concern of the industrial system, which is to say the present university system, is to cheapen work by increasing volume.

This seems to me to be the deeper issue behind Gessner’s problem with the university: It’s operating on a industrial system, a production line that aims to churn out as many articles/books as possible, which are viewed as jewel-like pieces of prestige that allows the university to charge more, or to attract better professors, or to attract better funding, or to build themselves, corporation-like, into the very stratum of the clouds.

Yes, if writers buy into the system, this could very well impact the way that writers write. Therefore, there’s always a kind of resistance that needs to take place. But writers are used to resistance. We resist what our families tell us to write, what history tells us to write, what our publishers tell us to write. In fact, those who do not resist sufficiently are not worthy to be called writers.

And if writers are cognizant of the pressure exerted on them by universities, that’s the first step in resistance. Be aware, and follow the higher calling of the material being written.