The Sorrows of Fat City; Or, Eclecticism and Other Bad Habits

Abstract

AM AFRAID that this will not be yet another dialogue of one self with another. The writing self, myself, whatever else it may be, is much too fragmented for that rhetorical strategy. Parts and pieces, I guess, of a broken mirror replicating the same multiple image in many different, accidental sizes. More plausibly, this piece must take on the twin forms of confession and autobiography. Neither of which, of course, can or should ever be completely trusted. Not even, perhaps least of all, by the author. Consider it this way. I have, during a career which seems to me brief only because it has kept me so busy, written poems, stories, novels, some skits and plays for stage and TV, screenplays, several odd kinds of words for music, the lyrics for one popular song, as well as long and short book reviews, various kinds and forms of criticism of particular texts in particular contexts, and (precious little, though, yes indeed, sometimes a little) theory. I have written one (anonymous) guide book and a little journalism off and on. I have written one literary biography, James Jones, and one brief critical studyUnderstanding Mary Lee Settle (1988). And I have worked as an editor, of one kind and another, for half a dozen magazines; also served as an editor or advisor or reader for a number of university presses and, on occasion, commercial publishers. Similarly (it comes with the territory), I have served a variety of foundations--Ford, MacArthur, Whiting, Henfield, the National Endowment-in a variety of ways, and I have judged more contests for prose fiction and poetry than I can ever remember or care to. Few, if any, of these duties even existed for writers when I first began to publish during the late 1940s. Now they are entirely typical exercises for the middleaged writer who is required to be, in a way his predecessors were not, an active monitor of the contemporary literary scene.