Those Who Do It Anyway
I had trouble hearing my early teachers--their voices produced mysterious sounds that were beyond my understanding. In my early teens, I stood before a judge twice for petty crimes. I knew many other peaceful kids who liked adventuring. At sixteen, I quit high school and told my mom I wanted to buy a VW bus and drive to Europe. She wished me luck.
Soon I left Oregon and lived in Boston for a year, rooming with an accomplished twenty-year-old painter who had been homeless. That year was a great education for a young wanderer. I read Naked Lunch, On the Road, The Great Gatsby, Queer, Junkie, A Room of One's Own, The Ghostly Lover, A Clergyman's Daughter, and A Farewell to Arms.
Back home, I attended community college, and the university I went to the next year didn't require English majors to take math. It was good luck.
Later, I failed the GREs--"correct answer" tests are inscrutable to me--but the Iowa Writers Workshop was kind enough to overlook that fact. The most selective graduate program in the U.S., Iowa was a dropout's playground. Students weren't required to attend classes except for workshop once a week, and teachers didn't give grades.
I wrote all the time, at least six hours a day, sometimes ten, and read three or four hours. I annotated books on my own reading list, and casually read the books for the nonrequired lectures. As part of my financial aid, I taught creative writing classes to freshmen, and preached about craft and the lazy, hard-working lifestyle of writers.
My teachers were all terrific--Frank Conroy, Chris Offutt, Marilynne Robinson, Jim McPherson. Offutt's workshops presented such clear distillations of craft, and I was instantly changed as a writer. "A story's issues have to be set up and buttressed," he said once. "We need to learn the mother is depressed right away. You need to front-load that information."
It was wonderful to learn so feverishly in a loosely structured environment. Most people aren't stirred to ferocious work habits when they're told they can make their own schedules and they won't be graded. Maybe it's only writers and artists who do it anyway.
The Year of the Empath
2025 must be the year of the "empath." On LinkedIn, for instance, many of my connections seem to get in line to announce that they warmed their hummingbird feeder, or looked past a homeless person's rags to give him a bag of groceries. Those are positive things, but I'm curious about the frequency of such utterances in the culture lately--especially regarding what it could mean for writing.
The empath is definitely the new hero in writing circles. Two or three times a week I see a new article on "empathic writing" on social media. My email inbox often looks like an empathic logjam. We can read thousands of articles about this writing craze that's making the internet blink red.
Of course it's essential for writers to experience the suffering of their characters. But I believe writers have been working on the empathy project for hundreds of years or longer.
Hemingway, Melville, Woolf, and thousands of others demonstrate deep concern for their characters. Most of us--excepting sociopaths and those with narcissist personality disorder--have the ability to imagine ourselves inside another person's pain. We do need to develop empathy, but writers have always had their own way of doing it.
What troubles me is the public mania regarding empathic writing, and its possible influence on literature. Take the character Fuckhead in Jesus' Son, for instance. As a drug addict, he shows a capacity for violence that might fail the empathy test. But literary empathy demands that we basically accept our protagonist, in this case a drug addict. We should know that drug addiction reduces empathy, and therefore our protagonist might not have too much of it. That's showing empathy to our protagonist.
Fuckhead also exhibits a lot of vulnerability, pain, and lostness in his chaotic travels, and he's far more sympathetic than not. I despair of having to read the book where a guy like Fuckhead goes around showing empathy on every page.
All of that said, I celebrate true empaths. My mother was one. She volunteered as a hospice worker, and she stopped the car at night and asked kids, out walking, if they were okay. Like all authentic empaths, she kept this quality a secret. She didn't announce her recent kindnesses to everyone. She never began a sentence, "As an empath, . . ." I don't believe she ever even thought about it.
A loose count of American empaths must amount to 60%, based on magazine articles and social media interest. But I suspect the count of true empaths is closer to three percent. After all, the ability to feel and absorb others' pain to an extraordinary degree is special, a rare gift. Empaths were born that way. No workshop, book, or webinar is going to give us what they have.
A national march toward public empathy isn't the worst thing in the world. It's better than fake Christianity or fake patriotism, brought to us by MAGA.
But I fear that mimicking something rare and good, on a national scale, results in a trampling of the original flower. Public empathy isn't going to kill true empathy, but it might ruin it for a while, when everyone is sick of it and goes on to the next craze. Even something as beautiful and cool as the saxophone was finally obliterated due to overplay.
Writers need to learn how to express empathy on the page. But we have great books to guide us and our own human hearts.
Tropic of Cancer
Miller was a bohemian writer who intended to send shock waves through the English-speaking world. That might explain why his language is derogatory toward women and many others he encounters. It seems he's actually trying to alienate. At one point he laughs at the death of a colleague. Another time, he's horrified by the thought of a baby squirming in a woman's belly.
But he's up to something in his book that isn't readily apparent. He presents a Henry Miller who is far worse than the actual man. In life, for instance, he had a thousand friends, men and women. Once, when he was hungry and poor, he asked several friends if he could eat at their houses once a week. They all agreed. But he never would have received such hospitality if he treated men and women with scorn.
His hero Rimbaud encouraged authors to take up a "scummy" appearance and attitude to fight the antiseptic falseness of middle-class morality. Celine, another influence, told the truth in a thousand forbidden ways. Miller writes with these authors at his back.
Baudelaire, Gide, and later Genet were also part of this literary school of social combat. This describes part of their work, at any rate. They went out of their way to challenge norms, creating rebellious and sometimes low-life protagonists to strike blows against pious gatekeepers. Genet's glorified young gay criminals and prostitutes were indeed shocking, though he was beloved by literary authors.
For the most part, the French understand that exploration of taboo subjects and "crude" protagonists was part of their method and forgive them, or love them all the more.
Many American readers, on the other hand, who often fail to see the French influences in "Tropic," encounter a book that is inexplicably upsetting, as if it's a document without a context, history, or literary milieu.
Everyone knows that Henry Miller was American, but few know that his books are culturally French. That said, he can't escape his American side that pops up here and there.
The book is more inspiring and life-affirming than one might expect. On its first page, the protagonist states, “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.” One finds similar Whitmanesque pronouncements throughout.
Tropic of Cancer is, in part, an experiment in contradictions, stuffing the pages full of all that is terrible and good about this fictional Henry Miller. But here and there in these chapters we find a gentler man, and he was vastly more gentle in life.
Anais Nin recorded the great respect he paid to their friendship over years in her journals. Also, she loved "Tropic."
"Here is a book which, if such a thing were possible, might restore our appetite for the fundamental realities. The predominant note will seem one of bitterness, and bitterness there is, to the full. But there is also a wild extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times almost a delirium. A continual oscillation between extremes."
Henry Miller was a lifelong iconoclast--he wasn't making it up for his books. But twenty years ago, I believed he was a creep who tried too hard to be bohemian. After watching a few of his interviews, I got a sense of this kind and curious writer who was so beloved by those who knew him. After that, I read him in a different light.