Language and Leonard Michaels

All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books!

—Elif Batuman

Catachresis leads to anthropophagy.

—David Bentley Hart

Ordinary people have a right to feel harassed when their language is criticized. We have grammar school for that kind of thing after all, and when you’re at dinner or the office, a lesson in verb agreement is tyrannizing. Writers, however, are supposed to be a different sort of breed. Their first love is language. Not ideas, not politics, not even books or other writers or art itself—but language. And, by their own lights, they intend to get the thing right. They seek the information, the instruction, they want the words and forms, because they’re in constant need of ammunition for their nightly campaigns at the writing desk. The mid-century writing workshop was born upon the wings of this desire.

This was how it seemed to go, anyway, up to the so-called MFA Era, at which time an interest in experimentation with language forms—reading, studying, conjuring, manipulating, playing, learning—seemed to slowly, and mysteriously, come to be viewed as a dangerous habit. The workshop began to build walls about itself like a monastery, with the forbidding spirit of Raymond Carver presiding over its minimalist moonscape like a titan, casting out dissenters and maximalists. Getting too cozy with the complexity of English and its many arbitrary rules, even if it were just to ignore those rules (which often it was), made you a crank and a boor. Irrelevant, old hat, out of touch. Carver and Chekhov—these greatest of writers—were all you needed.

It was a great shift. The fading of any literary tradition is a bad loss. But things got worse. Later, for a period in the 2010s, a certain laissez-etre sentiment bore fruit among would be writers in the form of a cliché reclamation project. It was insisted that cliché was morally good, the proud idiom of The People. (NPR in 2012: “At The End Of The Day, Clichés Can Be As Good As Gold,” in which Hephzibah Anderson, author of Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year Without Sex, wanly argues that clichés “create a sense of camaraderie.”) At that awful time, if you disdained the hip new pro-cliché notion, you were considered haughty, backward, a purity obsessive. So, dusty old phrasings and wooden platitudes arose from the swamp and had their merry comeback, the implications of which have not dissipated but remain relevant to the Anglosphere’s literary production today.

One forgets how much things can change. Long before all this, at the very beginning and very end of the 1980s, an edition of a book came out entitled The State of the Language (University of California Press). It’s quite a document, and hard to believe that such a fat book, one that intends to take the approximate measure of our ever-changing lingua, could even be conceived of today let alone published. In both the 1980 and 1990 editions, the form undertaken by the dozens of contributors is the short essay, or précis. But it’s really a book of feeling, of pensées. English being large and ungainly, there was really no better way to present this interesting venture than in brief flashes of light. To organize the cornucopia, the book is broken up into Englishes, The Body Politic, Money, Practices, Art, and, imperiously, Rectitudes. Some of the still-current names are Wendy Lesser, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Robert Pinsky. Less familiar to people today, and something of a surprise even to me, would be a name like Enoch Powell—of “rivers of blood” fame —and David Dabydeen, a Guyanese writer whose opening entry on African American Vernacular includes generous use of the n-word. Everyone was invited to comment on the state of our language. In these essays, cliché is simply presumed to be the enemy, and so is never mentioned (the authors’ varied interests run deeper and are far more lively than that).

Included in the book is a very short essay by Leonard Michaels. He (along with Christopher Ricks) also edited the volume. Michaels’ piece is interesting for, among other things, its narrowness, steadfast and deliberate. Michaels is very intelligent, unassuming. His intense essay, “I’m Having Trouble with My Relationship,” leaves the impression of an exegete monk scritching at his beard while lingering over a single passage of scripture. The target of Michaels’ cogitation is but a word: relationship. For just under four pages, he follows the history of this word back to Alexander Pope’s Dunciad of 1743. There, he tells us, this bland construction first appeared in written form purely as an insult. An odd word, Michaels suggests, because so “redundant” with its “prefix and two suffixes streaming from a tiny head of substance like ghostly remains of its Latin roots and Germanic ending (referre, n. latus, and ship).”

To have survived the guns of our grammarians and displaced more pleasant words in the natural history of English, it [the word relationship] must answer to an exceptionally strong need. The other words [“romance, affair, lover, beau, fellow, girl, boyfriend, girlfriend, steady date, and so on”] may seem impossibly quaint, but it isn’t only the sophistication of relationship that is needed. It is the whole word, including the four syllable sound, which is a body stumbling down stairs, the last two—shunship—the flap of a shoe’s loose sole, or loose lips and gossip. In fact, relationship flourished in the talky, psychological climate of the modern century as we carried it from the offices of our shrinks, and, like a forgotten umbrella, left romance behind.

The essay is remarkable for being so thought provoking, so filled with mourning and—as with all of Michaels’ interesting writing—so very angry. He was, even then, bemoaning the blandification of English, a process destined to accelerate in our own time.

The essay is also very good writing, a bright example of originality and word play. You feel privy to the writer’s mind at work, a mill churning through a river of material, dispensing with cliché and diving for the allure of the counterintuitive and fetching (the “flap of a shoe’s loose sole”; that “forgotten umbrella” of romance). Reading this, you begin to feel the qualities, the history, of this unimportant word—and you begin to be convinced, rather, of its importance. Or at least of its importance to Michaels. Relationship takes on a living form and undergoes something of a life cycle: gossiping, leaving things behind, falling down stairs, and ending up ghostly remains. You can sense the qualities of Michaels himself.

The language used here, in less than 2,000 words, convinces you of something: that the abstract undercurrent of language is alive, and that it gives life, and that to use this living material to invent (rather than to encourage decay with dead Latinate words like relationship) is to be free, unvanquished, rebellious—an artist.

Few can muster such a feeling for mere language today. Which writer out there studies these tiny crooked half-buried creatures—words—their lineage and meter, so closely, evoking a deeply specific illumination of a single one? Gradually, almost without anyone noticing, the healthy English obsessing that writers were once famous for seems to have been traded up for something good deal more poisonous.

Anger and Poetry

Then again, Michaels was one America’s most poetic minor writers.

He began publishing mostly short stories and essays in his mid-thirties, and his two very short novellas were published some 10 years apart. In the meantime, he got tied up with Vietnam protests and a relationship to a mentally unwell woman, Sylvia Bloch, who after 3 years of marriage killed herself. He wrote a brilliant novel about her (Sylvia). He taught. He edited other books. He studied Byron. He got off to a late start and then failed to gain momentum. A sad but common tale of hesitation and stuttered output.

But Michaels is uncommon in his brilliance, especially in the poetry that he brings to his prose.

Terry sat opposite me. Small muscles rippled in his bald front. He chewed pecan pie, crushed the sticky nuts to pulp. To my left, Berliner sat hunched, heavy with deliberation, sipping his marijuana. Paul had rolled the cigarette, then passed it to him with a conspiratorial wink. They were simpatico. Drug brothers. To Paul’s left sat Harold Canterbury—lean, pale, static. He watched Paul twist a new paper around a pile of desiccated grass. To Canterbury’s left, at the end of the table, big Cavanaugh. Bottle of wine before him, neck enveloped in his hand. The sheen of eating made his cheeks looks swollen and metallic, his head monumental, dominating silver, glass, ruined meats—chicken, salmon, various patés—and marijuana smoke winding above the devastation like an Oriental melody. Slow, pythonic weight. How I felt, beneath my exhilaration, having eaten too much. My body was a philosopher brooding on multitudes within as I gazed at a salad bowl just beyond my plate. Green shards clung to the inner spin like leaves in a storm. Nobody spoke for several minutes and then Berliner said, after drawing marijuana essence into himself and savoring fine effects, “Good grass.” Paul nodded. These two, beyond the rest of us, were feeling things.

This writing, this rough poetry, comes from Michaels’ first novel, The Men’s Club. The book was made into an absolutely horrific film in 1986 (written also by Michaels). The reason the prose does not work well on screen, though, is telling. With what movie magic, Hollywood smoke and mirrors, can a director properly render this scene of narcotized men sat around a dining table observing each other and eating food that is not theirs—Canterbury’s monumental head dominating, the Oriental melody of smoke winding, the philosopher brooding on multitudes within? There is, in fact, nothing to film here, precisely because it’s poetry.

Many, including during Michaels’ lifetime, pointed to a certain misogynistic tendency in his work; he had a somewhat macho reputation. Personally, however, he was very supportive of young writers, often female writers, and his devotion to his troubled wife was legendary.

In my reading of Michaels’ work, I see more of a generalized hostility at human beings. This rage drives his creativity. It’s what makes him a poet. By the end of The Men’s Club, the men have destroyed the house, gone to bitter battle with their oversized egos, and disgusted the host’s wife, who returns home to rightfully berate them all. These men are repugnant, despicable. But it’s not the storyline or events that tells the reader this—it’s imbued in the writing itself.

Look again at that paragraph above. Did it strike you that these men are honorable, decent, moral, admirable? If not—why not? With the use of words like “devastation,” “pythonic,” “dominating,” he has evoked a vision of modern savages luxuriating in moonlit decadence before a tableau of ruin. They chew and crush and envelope, offering each other only two words, “Good grass,” almost as a ritual necessity emitted to stave off the threat of inevitable violence. What’s more, though these are not good men, they’re also not bad, not criminals or gangsters; in fact, they’re ordinary people, described as real estate agents, fathers, educators, businessmen. They’re common—they’re everyman. They’re you and me. Specifically, they’re you. Michaels doesn’t think much of you.

What Michaels is saying here about men—and women, in my view—is fairly obvious by the end of his two short, brilliant novels. We’re brutes: unworthy of this world, unworthy even of our suffering.

A Disorienting Detour that I Hope Pays Off

Many claims have been made over the years regarding the MFA system and its cumulative impact on literature.

One theory has it that writer training at programs like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop have made fiction more "uniform" (whatever that word means is up to you). A second claims that MFAs stymie minority, nonwhite, and working-class voices with a sea of arbitrary literary rules founded upon white Anglo ideals of high art. Still, another says that high-dollar workshops have actually raised the general quality and made all contemporary writing superior to that of past mid-list novelists, though less engaging with respect to storytelling: the "highly competent but dull" notion of Elif Batuman. There are probably more theories, but these are the three most important.

Here I would like to make a fourth claim, one that apparently doesn't get around as much. It’s that since the advent of the MFA, the average quality of literary writing has become illiterate. Literary writers exiting these programs tend to write in a uniquely poor way, making extensive use of cliché and, worse, egregious misuse of English.

In conjunction with our increasingly non-reading population, our literary culture is busily producing writers with no literary sensibility whatsoever. This has brought us to a place where the average writing by a mid-list English-language writer today is considerably worse off than it was a century ago.

These days, because of this state of affairs, my wife has taken refuge in scads of obscure midcentury novels. She used to read strictly contemporary fiction, but during the pandemic she dropped the pretense and began reading discontinued domestic inter-war, largely British fiction by female authors whom the reading world was has seen fit to forget. We josh each other about our reading choices, but she is open about how these books aren’t high art, just good stories competently rendered in tolerable English, unlike the cloying contemporary stuff she has finally abandoned.

I’m often curious about these books of hers, and I may browse her dusty, overstuffed bookshelves and pick up a few of the Dean Street Press, Persephone Press or the ratty old pre-war Viking hardbacks at random and flip through them. The opening paragraphs I find there are generally simple, workmanlike, competent, but clear and satisfying in some way. But often, the writing is rather good, such as the following opener by an author named Rumer Godden:

            Old Mrs. Quin died in her sleep in the early hours of an August morning.

            The sound of the bell came into the house but did not disturb it; it was quite used to death, and birth, and life.

            The usual house sounds went on, but muted; footsteps: upstairs, Doctor Taft’s, though he did not stay long; “Cause of death, stopped living,” wrote Doctor Taft on the certificate and said he would call in at Mrs. Abel’s on his way home: then Mrs. Abel’s steps as, quietly, she did what she had to do and, downstairs, Cecily’s as she carried in the coal and made up the kitchen fire, hers and Bumble’s, the old spaniel’s, padding as he followed her backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards; Bumble was uneasy while August, the young poodle, rushed to the front door, back door, upstairs and down, barking, anguished by he knew not what. The fire made a warm fanning sound; a tap ran; the post-van came and the postman dropped letters in the letter box. Trill, the canary, sang. Moses, the cat, miaowed for his morning milk and rabbit as, in their turn, Toby, the tabby, Minerva, the stately white cat, and the naughty small one like a sprite, Cuckoo, miaowed too. Groundsel had come at eight o’clock as usual and left his pasty on the kitchen windowsill for Cecily to take in and warm for his lunch: now the sound of his shears as he clipped a box hedge came in from outside, with the calls of blackbirds and robins and the throbbing of an engine from the farm where they were threshing. With all these other sounds, mingling with them, came the bell: “In the midst of life we are in death” was the message of the bell; the house seemed to answer, “In the midst of death we are in life.”

This novel, China Court, was published in 1960. Godden, of course, did not undertake an MFA program. In fact, she had no formal education. Educated at home into her early teens, she never went to college. She opened a dance studio in India at 18 and never studied literature or writing seriously, and she didn’t publish her first novel until she was almost 30 years old.

Her writing here, though imperfect, is as engrossing as any middlebrow novel could hope to be. The opening lines conclude in a drift of fetching poetic incantation (“…to death, and birth, and life.”). The biblical theme she pursues in these paragraphs is substantive and, importantly, the language she uses to render it is skillful, lively, memorable, engaging. We get a full picture of the home, people, and surround, and a cooling touch of melancholy. No single word or grammar point is off or in need of editing. In fact, some of it is nicely creative (the “warm fanning sound” of the fire, and the cat’s “miaow”). Who are all these people with interesting names (“Groundsel”) and why do they have so many animals? She caps the section with a literary reference to the Book of John, then playfully turns that on its head. This is interesting writing.

Now let’s take a look at the opening to a popular and well-regarded recent novel entitled, unfortunately, Cloud Cuckoo Land:

A fourteen-year-old girl sits cross-legged on the floor of a circular vault. A mass of curls haloes her head; her socks are full of holes. This is Konstance.

From the start, the title of the book—which is, of course, part of the text—we find ourselves accosted by cliché. The phrase “cloud cuckoo land” means an unattainable utopia, and author Anthony Doerr gets points here, I suppose, for unearthing an outdated turn of phrase that is both unfamiliar yet sapped of originality. Then, we have the fourteen-year-old girl in a “circular vault,” despite that a vault cannot be circular, like a ring or hoop, though it can be round. Next, we have a “mass” of curls (presumably of hair, but of unknown color) that “haloes” her head—but how does a “mass,” especially of curls, “halo” something—I’m having trouble picturing her head here—and what does it mean “to” halo? Is the mass of curls floating, like a circle of light, a halo in other words, above her head? Following this, we have an unnecessary semicolon (this is better as a period) before colliding (in less than three lines of text) into our second cliché: socks “full of holes.” This, we’re told, is Konstance.

Well, I already dislike Konstance and don’t care much about her round vault or her floating, circular curls. The succeeding pages contain too many crimes against language to get into here, but some of the highlights include: a stationary machine that both rises and hangs, a “translucent cylinder” (a clear tube?), a misuse of the word “twine” (which means “to separate” or “to wind through,” as in “the river twines the valley”), and a vapid hyperbolic noun phrase (“entanglements of astonishing intricacy”) that offers nothing but flat vagueness in trying to help us picture this apparently complex machine he’s describing (it’s called “Sybil”).

Why am I picking on Doerr and comparing him to a virtually unknown midcentury English writer of quiet realist literature? Because, though Godden’s excellent novel was read in the 1960s it was quickly forgotten and received little acclaim and no awards, whereas Doerr has been stuffed with accolades for his sub-literate “writing.” (He also won a Pulitzer, but let’s not worry ourselves about that prize which, as William Gass put it, “takes aim at mediocrity and never misses”). His novel was called “wildly inventive,” “engaging,” and “lyrical” by critics, and the frontmatter of the edition in stores was splattered with gobs and gobs of breathless blurbs, from The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, Forbes, The Los Angeles Times, and a hundred others. People—critics!—loved this book.

Doerr of course has an MFA. He, apparently, reads. As do the reviewers from all the publications just mentioned. Uneducated Godden is immeasurably better from the first page—refined, thoughtful, and literate. Yet in our current context, someone like Godden gets shown the door while Doerr gets praised.

The Point

But it’s not only unacceptable. It’s uniquely bad. This is my real message.

It seems to indicate a culture that has lost its way and, though it can understand words, cannot really read anymore. It certainly cannot obsess like Michaels. We don’t know how to judge literature, because we’ve forgotten what it’s like to use and play with language. We’ve lost our handle on English. But the fault does not lay fully with the MFA system.

Nor is it the fault, in my view, of screens and technology and so forth. I think I know enough of history, of the literary and other sorts, to realize that we’re simply in a slump. Global powers demand a certain level of conformity. Neoliberalism sapped our will to live. Rent is too damn high. Few have a strong sense of what our country, or this world, is all about, where we’re headed, what it all means. I think in literary terms the long decline began with so-called postmodernism, which somehow led us to this final critical point where the worst writing you’ve ever read gets the Pulitzer and actual genius wouldn’t be recognized if it set itself on fire in Times Square.

And I do think Michaels was a genius. By today’s standards, he’s Lord Byron wrapped in William Shakespeare.

To dispense with the usual things, no I don’t judge an individual for reading pop fiction and “enjoying the story” of a novel even when the writing isn’t great. And as I’ve tried to indicate, I’m not necessarily mad at the Pulitzer board for rewarding trash—it’s their stock and trade.

What concerns me is the lowness of the low we’ve reached. After decades in the MFA gulag, writers emerge now with no sense of what English can do and less respect for it as a craft and duty.

The great David Bentley Hart once wrote that “it is only a short road that leads from grammatical laxity to cannibalism.” He was being playful, of course, but many serious thinkers over the centuries have noted that a decline in linguistic competency and a preoccupation instead with visual spectacle often precedes historic societal declines that can have real consequences—if not anthropophagy, at least something like chaos or struggle.

In reading Leonard Michaels’ diaries (Time Out of Mind, Riverhead Books), two things become very clear. The first is that he had a rich range of social relationships, regular engagements with pals, oddballs, students, professors, landlords, rich, poor, and the quality of their conversation seemed to have been high, often profound. He was a man who, in his loneliness and isolation, sought out interesting or damaged people and desired to learn from them.

The second is that the man read obsessively. His inner life was made of language. No author escaped his judgment. “In [Henry] James’s The Ambassadors I counted sixteen uses of the phrase “hung fire” before I stopped reading.” Books were his life. In 1965: “There has been a great change of some kind. I don’t much like it, but I can hardly say what it is.” What he probably sensed was that he was among the last American writers— he died in 2003—to sustain a love affair, a romance, with our language. He was the last true poet who wrote novels.

Things don’t look great at the moment, politically, socially, etc., but who can say what the future will bring? With luck it will bring more great book reading, deeper love, less MFAs, more poetry and less “writing.” As Michaels wrote in “On Love” (The Essays of Leonard Michaels, FSG), “It’s been said that we live now in a world of images and imitations, and that this is just as likely to be true of, say, the phony tomatoes in your salad as the passions in your heart.” May we eat of the phony tomatoes, and put away the phony passions.

Tyson Duffy is a writer living in Atlanta.