Our father wrote this almost 30 years ago, and not much has changed. But it seems timely, so we reproduce it here with no edits. Parenthetically, he also came up with the title “Letters From The Crank”.
I read recently about a university literature course being offered–I think it was at Georgetown–called “White Male Writers.” As a recently retired professor of literature, this struck me at first as amusing, since I thought it might be an ironic commentary on all those bogus literature courses infesting English departments everywhere–in Women’s literature, Black literature, Chicano literature, Homosexual literature, Native American literature–this last especially puzzling, since American Indians had no written literature that I know of. Suspicion increased when I learned that the teacher was a black woman; a nice touch, I thought. Alas, my sense of irony proved wrong. A fuller description made it clear that the course was simply another exercise in political correctness, an effort to destroy literature as a serious study–which has been the apparent purpose of the assault by Marxists, deconstructionists, and feminists over the past decade, and which has had a success inexplicable to rational persons.
Literature, in its origins, was a largely aristocratic interest. People who haven’t enough to eat are not going to spend their time writing poems, or even reading them. One has to have some leisure in the first place to learn to read; and to read enough to get some sense of the complexities of serious literature; and then to see writing as a possible avocation, or even occupation. It is not surprising, therefore, that an interest in serious literature still is not the chief preoccupation of ordinary people. Nor is it surprising that few Africans or Indians appear as authors until the 20th century. As for women, their historical role has been bearing children and keeping house–which left little time for frivolities like writing. Most writers, however, have not been wealthy but middle-class, even in some instances, lower-class. Indeed, as western society developed, writing and publishing grew into a possible avenue of success for some poor boys, like Dickens. The real aristocratic class may have generally consumed literature, but didn’t produce writers of note; and the wealthy class today (if there is a difference) produces few.
To bemoan the fact that much of what we have called literature over the centuries has been produced by men is simply to ignore the realities of history. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the ability to read became very widespread; universal literacy is a 20th century ideal, and not yet a reality in many parts of the world. But there have always been intelligent and capable women who wrote serious literature, and when they appeared, they became part of the main body of literature. Jane Austen, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and many other women are part of the standard “canon”; they were not ignored or denigrated. The fact that there were not so many of them as men is due to the social facts of the times, not to any exclusiveness exercised by men writers, who usually recognized quality writing and praised it. If some women writers were not necessarily great, it is also true that most men writers were not great, either. Literature offers many examples of minor writers of both sexes who are interesting, intelligent, and well worth reading–though not as substitutes for the truly great– Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Wordsworth, et. al. Austin Dobson has his place, as do many other writers with small talent–Wilde, Firbank, and others.
Nor does the fact that most literature in previous centuries was created by men (and most art and music, too) mean that there were an equal number of great women writers whose work was suppressed or ignored, but rather that few women in those times had the opportunity to create much more than children. The trouble with modern feminist critics is that they seem to have no historical sense, no willingness to see other times as fundamentally different from ours, and driven by other values and forces. It is only very recently that women have been relatively free from the connection of sex with pregnancy, for instance. But this is an enormously significant change in their fate, opening up to women in general–for better or worse–careers undreamed of in previous ages. The past was not a conspiracy against women writers; but it adhered perforce more closely to the natural facts of life, which modern women seem less bound by.
In our time, because of the peculiar susceptibility of democracy to organized pressure, various political groups have set out to create the illusion of a literature where little or none existed by alleging that “their” people were deliberately kept out of the main body of literature because it was controlled by “white men”. Women, Blacks, Indians, homosexuals–people fundamentally in the resentment business–want us to believe not only that they were unfairly excluded from rank in the literary army because of their sex or race, but that in restitution they should be admitted now and retroactively “because” of their sex, race, or whatever. As evidence, they assert that there is a large body of literature created by these persons that has been deliberately ignored, for sexist and racist reasons.
This is a deliberate falsehood. To make such an idea fly at all, the definition of literature has to be changed. The whole notion of it as “the best that has been thought and said” must go out the window. But, if no quality judgment can be exercised, then the most fatuous nonsense by persons who can hardly write can be accepted as vital literature. And, if Rita Mae Brown is as good as Tolstoy, why read Tolstoy at all? This scheme of things relieves us of any obligation to inform ourselves about the great writers of the past, since there weren’t any. It allows us to judge literature only on the basis of its politics, its social bias, the race or sex of its author; and the result is a hodgepodge in which anyone you like is great because there are no criteria for greatness. “Aesthetic” is a bad word in itself; and since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, anything can be beautiful. We have seen many of the results of such nonsense; Bob Dylan is a great poet, for example, only to those who don’t know what great poetry is.
In fact, although feminists and others have worked assiduously at trying to create a literature by and about women, they do not seem to have succeeded very well. No major overlooked figures have come to the fore, no great women writers have suddenly appeared. Kate Chopin was long a well-known minor author to literary persons; but no amount of hard pumping can make her into a great one. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a big mover these days among feminists, but she pales beside Emily Dickinson. A small group of minor (but sometimes interesting) female authors have been dredged up and polished and overassessed simply because they are women. To a feminist this may be a satisfying mythology, but it has little to do with uncovering overlooked talent. Fanny Fern and Susan Warner were competitors of Hawthorne (and much more popular), but they cannot be made into writers of significance–unless, of course, you change your definition of “significance”. Curiosity, maybe. But if your only criterion is sex, or race, you can find lots of candidates, especially in the nineteenth century, when there were (as Hawthorne put it) “mobs of scribbling women.”
Alas, the blacks have fared little better. Desperate to find candidates to be matched against white writers, scholars have for fifty years now beat the bushes for any black at all who got published, or even who didn’t. The nature of black literature, however, is heavily sociological and political, which may be understandable, but can’t substitute for normal literary values. Is Franz Fanon a major literary talent? Is Malcolm X (whose only book was written by his wife)? Only if your view of literature is political–and in that case, it has to be the “right” politics, meaning leftist. There have been black writers who have produced fine literary works, mostly in the twentieth century: Langston Hughes is one, and Ralph Ellison; but they have always been known, and “racism” doesn’t seem to have prevented them from being published. But, given the facts, is it any wonder that black people want to redefine literature to fit their facts?
One is infinitely depressed to learn, for instance, that Oxford press is planning a 200 volume series of Black women writers. What sort of material do you imagine this series will contain? One hopes fervently that a few fine but overlooked writers will be brought to the fore, but one can’t have high expectations. What it represents, unfortunately, is the sad fact that publishers are desperate to please loud interest groups, rather than find the best material they can–for the publication of 200 obscure authors, with the best of intentions, may prevent the publication of a considerable number of worthy authors who may, unfortunately, be white men.
