`I Should Like for My Work to be Human'

That endangered species, the man of letters, may be best represented in the United States by a writer out of North Carolina, Fred Chappell, who is 70 years old and since the nineteen-sixties has published novels, short fiction, poetry and much readable criticism. Chappell is a formidably bookish man who taught for 40 years at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, but his criticism is less formal scholarship than reviews and personal essays, published in newspapers and literary journals alike. In other words, he loves books and loves writing about them, rare qualities among today’s academics.

Over the years I’ve read most of Chappell’s work and have reviewed one of his novels, so browsing through The Fred Chappell Reader, published in 1987, feels like going to a family reunion where you actually like most of the people in attendance. The book’s afterword, “A Pact with Faustus,” is a chronicle of Chappell’s enduring love for Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, a book he first read as a boy growing up in “the grimy little town of Canton, North Carolina (pop. eternally 5,000; tucked away in the folds of the far western mountains of the state).” It’s a superb essay on two levels – as a bittersweet evocation of his boyhood friendship with Harry “Fuzz” Fincher, a musician (like the hero of Mann’s novel, Adrian Leverkuhn) and fellow Tarheel aesthete; and as a meditation on the interdependence in our lives of reading and writing. Chappell admits that he eventually had to suspend his emotional projection into the figure of Leverkuhn, whom Mann based on Arnold Schoenberg:

“It is clear that I am no figure of literary `importance,’ that I have not the means and no longer any desire to transform the outer contours of the art. In my case adventurous experimentation with form seems to lead to overintellectualization, to desiccation, of content. I have got to where I should like for my work to be human, and I do not much care if it even becomes sentimental. Perhaps it would be nice if a few artists in our time decided to rejoin the human race, and I think that I would be glad to do so, however much I disagree with its politics.”

Chappell’s candor feels like pure oxygen after three days in a mine shaft. I think of a writer like John Barth, whose early novels I briefly loved, but who became unreadable for me about 25 years ago. I still think of Barth as a supremely intelligent, very funny novelist who could write crystalline prose that sometimes reminded me of Evelyn Waugh’s. But, like a dirigible, Barth’s books tend to be big and empty and often in danger of blowing up. They are cold performances, not “human” in Chappell’s formulation, and you can easily understand why they appeal to some academics and theorists of “metafiction.” Chappell continues:

“New heroes come to me, figures I wish I had known how to long to emulate as a lad. Spinoza is a lovely and brilliant man; there is more worth for me in Robert Browning than in a platoon of John Berrymans; I don’t see how Carl Ruggles can be much less a composer than Mann’s imaginary figure; Chaucer is a supreme artist, full of grace and light and wisdom and humanity. Is he really so much less a poet than Dante? Is consistent System so much greater a good than superabundant spirit?

“As soon as I set these rhetorical questions down, they no longer look rhetorical. There are probably sufficient critical reasons to prefer Dante over Chaucer and maybe even Berryman over Browning….But I have been through that, and it has seemed important to me to set, however regretfully, strict critical necessity aside. It is only my temperament that makes me say so, of course, but sooner or later an artist must take account of his temperament as one of his basic materials. There are already so many artists whom one admires more than he likes. Am I the only reader who finds in the achievement of James Joyce something that is – well, a little obtuse? Who sees Chekhov as being in some intimate way not only better, but greater?

“Probably not.”

All heresy, of course, but aren’t some of our purported literary tastes rooted in snobbery and defended with a reverence that is almost religious in nature? Aren’t many acolytes of Gertrude Stein and Finnegans Wake the literary counterparts of biblical inerrants, staunch protectors of texts they defend without understanding? And isn’t the prose of Stein and late Joyce a species of glossolalia – that is, talking in tongues, understood only by the initiated?

Chappell may be wrong about Berryman, but he’s right about Browning, Chaucer and Ruggles, and he’s certainly right about admiring some artists more than we like them. Especially among the young, admiration can seem more important, more sophisticated, than mere enjoyment. Saying you enjoy Pound’s Cantos is like saying you enjoy the taste of Scotch. No one believes you. The Joyce vs. Chekhov contest, fortunately, is not an either/or proposition. I love Joyce at his best (Dubliners, Ulysses), and not to love Chekhov is to foreswear one’s essential humanity. When it comes to books, I feel no compulsion to be consistent.