Myles Weber
CONSUMING SILENCES
How we read authors who don’t publish
159pp. Athans, GA: University of Georgia Press. Paperback, $19.95.
0 8203 2699 2
J. D. Salinger is almost as famous for having published nothing in the past forty years as he is for his bestselling single novel, The Catcher in the Rye. He was certainly an author in 1965, but is he still? That is one of the provocative questions posed by Myles Weber in Consuming Silences, his study of non-publication as a literary commodity. Four famously stalled or one-hit writers, Salinger, Tillie Olsen, Henry Roth and Ralph Ellison are presented as examples of how some unproductive writers “have been able to command serious critical attention and remain literary celebrities by offering the public volumes of silence, which have been read and interpreted like any other text”.
Weber’s thesis is an entertaining, mischievous riff on Foucault’s idea of the “author function”, the agencies – author, publisher, interpreter and so forth – by means of which “a certain rational being that we call ‘author’” is constructed. Why bother writing books, Weber asks, when it seems that the author function can exist quite happily on its own? Material texts may not be necessary to maintain a literary career – “texts of silences” will do as well; better, perhaps in a case such as Salinger’s, critical discussion of whose work has come to centre on the “puzzling masterpiece” of his reclusiveness and refusal to publish (a puzzle which books like Ian Hamilton’s unauthorized biography, In Search of J. D. Salinger, could only complicate). Salinger’s author legend may have reached “its self-declared end”, as Weber says, “but the author-function grinds on”.
The four writers Weber cites all produced remarkable first books, exciting the highest expectations among critics and commentators and lending a tragic aspect to their subsequent silences. Henry Roth’s great modernist novel, Call It Sleep, was published in 1934, but was only hailed as a masterpiece on its rediscovery and republication in the 1960s. Attention focused naturally on what the author had been doing in the intervening thirty years (he had pursued a series of dead-end jobs, including one as a poultry farmer) and Roth responded
by “talking and writing compulsively” about his writer’s block. In a series of articles and interviews, he put the blame for his silence at the door of anti-Semitism, cultural alienation (in Harlem, where his family moved when he was eight) and the demands of the Communist Party. But at the same time as this first set of explanations was being constructed, Roth was evolving a different narrative, turning on his awakening to Zionism during the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. The change in his outlook was so dramatic, he claimed a year or two later, that he felt the shadow of writer’s block lifting, and had begun keeping a confessional “continuum journal”’ that he hoped to make into a novel, picking up the story of his life where the heavily autobiographical Call It Sleep had ended.
The new manuscript was indeed so confessional that Roth didn’t at first consider publishing it in his lifetime; it was also of unwieldy length, thousands of pages. But two years after the death of his wife in 1990, the first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream appeared, and one more of four was published before Roth’s own death in 1995. Roth’s reasons for caution became clear; in the book, the narrator is goaded (by his computer) to reveal “that most crucial element in your account”, avoided for years – the fact that for a long period he committed incest with his younger sister:
“It was adroit. You made a climax of evasion, an apocalypse out of your refusal to go on, an apocalyptic tour de force at the price of renouncing a literary future. As pyrotechnics, it was commendable, it found favor, at any rate.”
The sensational revelations of Mercy of a Rude Stream came too late, or were perhaps too shocking, to change how the author’s long period of non-publication was interpreted. Weber proves himself in Consuming Silences not just an excellent chronicler of Roth’s contradictory author-legends, but acute in understanding their significance. “Roth had attempted to seize control of his own biography, but the critical consensus ruled that the author legend coming from the pen of an elderly Henry Roth was inferior and should be ignored; instead the more palatable author-function version of events was retained.”
Indeed, the author function seems to have the potential to be as threatening to authors as any material, social, or psychological “block”. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was so hard for critics to digest that the author felt the need to keep explaining and glossing it for decades: no wonder, perhaps, that he never got round to writing a follow-up. Ellison had trouble letting go of his manuscript, partly because he anticipated a difficult reception. Even when Invisible Man was hailed as a masterpiece, Ellison continued to spend his eloquence on its defence, while at the same time insisting that the book should speak for itself.
But it is the case of Tillie Olsen, “the representative silenced female author”, that demonstrates the problem best, and elicits Weber’s most pointed criticism. Olsen was an unmarried working-class woman and an active member of the Communist Party, when her first story, “The Iron Throat”, was published in Partisan Review in 1934. On the promise of this story, she was signed up by Random House to write a novel but, despite the comfort of the contract and encouragement from her circle in California, the project stalled, and Olsen decided to forfeit the advance and go back to political work. She also married and began a family, but Weber thinks that the demands of political activism really impeded her writing career more, a contentious claim, given that Olsen’s whole author legend depends on presenting her writer’s block as a form of gender and class martyrdom. He points out that it was only in the mid-1950s, with the rapid collapse of the Party in the United States, that Olsen completed the four stories that made up her first and only book of fiction, Tell Me a Riddle. “The painful irony . . . is that the author seems to owe the recommencement of her writing career, at least in part, to McCarthyism.”
Tell Me a Riddle, published in 1961, established a career that thrived on non-production. Olsen’s claim to a set of crippling inhibitions in fact demanded that no second book, nor even individual story, appear. All through the 1960s, Olsen was in high demand as a lecturer on the subject of her “special muted quality”: she was greeted with standing ovations by campus audiences and was awarded a series of valuable grants and fellowships, which Weber is keen to enumerate. Towards the end of the decade, she published the text which corroborated her position, Silences: When writers don’t write. Anyone familiar with the book will know that the second (and largest) part is almost staggeringly incoherent, a hotch-potch of quotations from other authors on the subject of blockage and Olsen’s own notelike jottings, rarely formed into whole sentences. As an example of her signature syndrome, it takes some beating. Even the key section of the book, “Silences in Literature”, contributes to the phenomenon. It appears with a note explaining that it is the transcript of a talk Olsen gave at the Radcliffe Institute, “spoken from notes”; in other words, it was never actually written at all.
If the Olsen story seems at times to be beyond satire, Weber isn’t beyond drawing it out, and the later stages of his account are savage about the reception that the academic establishment, especially its feminists, gave a pet writer. He is sardonic about their acceptance of Olsen as the highest authority on her own work and their wholesale investment in her account of “spirit-deadening setbacks at the hands of the patriarchy”. Praise for Olsenher in these quarters has verged on idolatry; she is “something of a saint” who “saves lives”, and her four stories constitute “almost a sacred text”. But if the foremothers were duped, Weber suggests, they were duped willingly, and in the service of a higher cause: “the sympathy that academics naturally feel for underdog
artists and a self-interest in their own professional advancement compel them to embrace Olsen’s self-fulfilling narrative of defeat and silencing – embrace it so intensely, in fact, that it no longer matters that the text in question is self-contradictory”. Weber certainly relishes reporting on the emperor’s new clothes. Like his casual admission of the motive power of “professional advancement” in the generation of academic texts, his remarks seem very carefully aimed.
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for any of Tillie Olsen’s champions to counter Weber’s accusations. Silence, I’m sure they’ll decide, is the most appropriate response. Myles Weber must be pleased and chagrined in equal measure to see that Stephen G. Kellman’s new biography of Henry Roth (which has appeared since Consuming Silences was published) continues to pedal the author legend proposed by Roth himself when he first came to fame.
