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Draft
Poet vs. Novelist
By PHILIP SCHULTZ
May 24, 2014 2:44 pm
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
The word novel carries for me a weight as ominous, all-consuming and
unforgiving as any Job encountered. I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as
cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters
Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created. I stayed up all night,
writing description, dialogue, plot curlicues, stories within stories, convinced that
anything fewer than 10 pages was wasted time. One wrote the way Thomas Wolfe
did, I thought, with fury and hubris, translating everything one read, experienced
and felt into glistening, unswerving prose. I didnt need drugs, cigarettes or caffeine;
writing was my drug of choice. And the novel was the high point of literary
achievement.
Over the next 20 years I wrote novel after novel, all of which were rejected by
publishers. They were about my experiences growing up in a family of Russian-Polish
Jewish immigrants and various troubled relationships. But content was never more
than an excuse to display my talents over hundreds of pages. I never doubted my
talent. If talent was the circus, then I was its ringmaster and audience, applauding its
every move. No single book inspired me more than Bellows The Adventures of Augie
March. The gorgeous onslaught of highbrow thought and febrile emotion was
conveyed in a poetry of intense, nonstop filibustering language unlike any Id ever
read before. Who remembered or cared what novels like his were about? Percys The
Moviegoer was about a guy who went to movies and fell for his cousin Kate, whom
he tried to save. One didnt need much more plot than this. To me Bellows Augie was
about great drive and a love of the English sentence and being a writer at the height
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of his creative passions. It was about writing a masterpiece.
In between novels I wrote poems, mostly to console myself for the novels
failures. Mysteriously, all my heartache, worry and grief went into these poems,
which felt more like private notes to myself than professional attempts at writing
literature. Even more mysteriously, most of them were getting published. I worked
hard on them, to be honest, perhaps even harder than on my fiction, paying attention
to the heft and balance of each word and idea. With my fiction I focused on chapters
and overall conceptions, while in poetry I crawled along in the trenches of each
sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance. Each finished
poem felt realized, arrived at directly by way of an inner struggle between whatever
emotion had inspired it and the nuanced thought needed to both express and propel
its forward movement.
Was I on some unrealized level granting permission to the poet that the novelist
was being denied? In any case, The New Yorker magazine, the place I most wanted
my fiction published, started taking my poems when I was 28. When one, Like
Wings, generated a great flurry of letters (including marriage proposals and requests
for advice, equaling a record at the magazine, the then poetry editor, Howard Moss,
told me), I immediately explained to anyone who dared compliment me that, yes, it
was very nice, but just wait till the story I was working on came out. That would be a
real record-breaker.
Finally, in my late 40s, after a new round of rejections, I gave up writing fiction
and began to concentrate full time on my poetry. This, after some 30 years of
struggle. It was a memorable, if not happy, day.
Ive often suspected that the novelist in me resents everything the poet writes,
maybe especially the very desire to write poetry. Claiming such a division of purpose
may sound dubious at best, because how can one person harbor envious feelings
toward himself? But, as my friends and students all learned soon enough,
complimenting one of my poems often meant insulting the failed fiction writer within
me, and I suspected that my feelings of accomplishment in poetry were tinged with a
noticeable under-taste of nostalgia and regret. Its probably not too surprising that
the name of my book of poems that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 is Failure. I
thought the subject was my fathers business failures but have good cause to think
otherwise now.
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Perhaps the more interesting perspective is that of the poet in me toward the
novelist. Courteous and cautious, the poet is something of a gentleman in his
behavior toward the fiction writer. He tends to be deferential, even encouraging. The
fiction writer could be equally successful if he just tried a little harder. The fiction
writer, on the other hand, never wanted anything to do with the poet. His sole
ambition was conquest and domination.
In some ways this relationship reminds me of my two sons. Its a complicated
relationship born of great love and intense competition. But there, necessity
arbitrates a truce of sorts. They need each other on some keenly felt primal level and
know it. The novelist cant stand the idea of needing poetry, however much he likes
nice-sounding language. Perhaps sharing the same brain is more provocative and
internecine than sharing the same DNA and household?
Twelve years ago, I began work on a long poem about a subject Id tried dealing
with in several novels, my experience while working in a welfare building in San
Francisco in 1969. I decided to combine this idea with new material about a pogrom
in Poland in which 1,600 Jewish men, women and children were murdered. The
many narratives and characters required balancing techniques Id learned in writing
all those failed novels.
Winning the Pulitzer Prize had ended the rivalry, I thought. The poet in me was
triumphant. I was never meant to be a novelist. But when I finally finished the book
in the spring of 2013, my editor suggested calling this long poem a novel in verse. I
protested somewhat but finally gave in; both my identities were too exhausted to
continue the struggle.
Its hard not to smile when I hear myself explaining to people that The
Wherewithal is a poem that uses some novelistic techniques. The novelist seems to
be taking all this in his stride. He knows that the poet got the book published, and
that the lines are broken into stanzas, not paragraphs. Hes even being, well,
something of a gentleman about it. Forty-two years is a long time to struggle to do
anything. And the poet is more than willing to share credit, if credit is due. In fact, we
are on our best behavior. Maybe, after all these years, were finally learning to
cooperate, or at least live like brothers.
Philip Schultz is a poet whose most recent book is The Wherewithal, a Novel in
5/25/2014 Poet vs. Novelist - NYTimes.com
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Verse.
A version of this article appears in print on 05/25/2014, on page SR8 of the NewYork edition with the headline:
Poet vs. Novelist.
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