This essay is from the anthology “MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction,” edited by Chad Harbach, which will be published later this month.
Todd Solondz’s Storytelling famously features an encounter between a writing instructor and a college student. He has just eviscerated both her and her boyfriend’s work, calling the boyfriend’s story “a piece of shit.” When she sees him at a bar, she claims that she agrees with him, she’s “really happy with the class,” and she’s “a great admirer of [his] work.” He says almost nothing. So she asks, “Do you think I have potential as a writer?” “No,” he says.
In the next scene she follows him, with obvious terror, to his apartment. In the bathroom she finds an envelope that contains nude photos of the student he says has talent. He tells her to take off her clothes and, in the one note of complexity that enters the story, is able to dominate her partly by exploiting her fear that she may be latently racist. (She’s white and he’s black.) His other tool of domination is the workshop dynamic. Despite having told her she’s hopeless as a writer, here he’s willing to be prescriptive.
Predictably (the script itself is self-consciously modeled on a “workshop story,” with carefully articulated motivations and a neatly turned ending) she reads aloud in class a fictional account of what she describes as rape. The student whose photos she found says the story is dishonest. “Jane pretends to be horrified by the sexuality she in fact fetishizes.” The instructor agrees. “Jane wants more, but isn’t honest enough to admit it.” Still, he says, this story is better than her last one. “There’s now at least a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
Solondz has written a workshop story in more than one respect. The first rule of writing about workshop is that there should be some sex. One student should be sleeping with another or with an instructor or ideally both. How could a story get by with characters who only want to write fiction? Some other desire has to intervene to make it interesting.
Theresa Rebeck’s play Seminar revolves around a famous instructor who, for a substantial price, agrees to lead a workshop for four young writers. The instructor, Leonard, is charismatic, demanding, and not only seduces one of the women but incessantly talks to all of them, men and women, about sex. As soon as the play appeared, in New York in 2011, critics made the connection between the Leonard character and the highly influential, erotically fixated longtime writing teacher Gordon Lish. Like Lish, Leonard evaluates his students’ writing after having heard a single sentence, and does so almost entirely in terms of its capacity to seduce. The one story he praises, written by the young woman he goes to bed with, has “a lightness, a touch, a sexual edge to the language which is I got to say, it got me on board. Va voom.”
Rebeck doesn’t appear to have taken one of Lish’s classes (if she had, she could probably recall a more articulate response than “va voom”), but basically she knows the score. Lish—who taught and edited young writers from the 1970s through the ’90s, editing fiction at Esquire and Knopf and teaching at universities and private apartments—asked students to write to seduce him, and when female students succeeded he often took them to bed. Once he became an editor at Knopf he often bought his students’ work as well, sometimes midsemester and sometimes, or so it seemed, midclass. So in two ways his workshop extended beyond the established boundaries of the classroom: if he really liked what you were doing, he might sleep with you, or he might publish your book.
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Lish figured out how he wanted to run his workshop when he started teaching undergraduates at Yale in the early 1970s. He had just turned forty and had earned a reputation as a dynamic young fiction editor. One afternoon a week, he came from the Manhattan Esquire office full of a sense of power. He asked each student to read from her work but stopped her as soon as he lost interest; usually this was before she finished the first sentence. Then he took advantage of the silence to describe, in intensely eloquent monologues that could last hours, how to write work he would want to hear read aloud. “Remember, in reaching through your writing to a reader, you are engaged in nothing so much as an act of seduction,” former student Tetman Callis recalls him saying. “Seduce the whole fucking world for all time.”
Lish’s willingness to be bored and show it was one of his strengths as an instructor. He created a situation in which each student had to approach him, like a stranger at a party or a bar, to see if she could catch his attention. Lish shot down these nervous suitors one by one, not even bothering to hear out the pickup lines they fretted over. Then he shifted in an instant to a masculine role: talking endlessly, enacting his charisma, awing his listeners into submission.
David Leavitt was one of the Yale undergraduates who took an early Lish workshop. Around that time Leavitt wrote his great story “Territory,” which appeared in The New Yorker and then in many anthologies, forever marking him as having been a precocious writer. Leavitt later wrote a novel, Martin Bauman, about this period of precocity. His descriptions of the Lish character, Flint, show how eros, writerly ambition, and the writing teacher get bound up together:> I suppose now that I was a little in love with Flint. And why shouldn’t I have been? He was a good-looking man, lean and surly, with hands like broken-in leather gloves. Nor did his reputation as a womanizer in any way detract from the effect he had on me. On the contrary, it served only to intensify my idea of him as an avatar of masculine virility. For what I wanted from Flint, I told myself, wasn’t so much sex as permission—to write, to think of myself as a writer. Today I recognize the degree to which this need for his approbation encoded a desire I had heretofore never admitted: the desire for men—and more specifically, for older, fatherly men who didn’t desire me.
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