Literary Men Were Ixnayed

Paul Clayton On A Lifetime's Struggle With The Publishing Industry

Dear Republic,

Having begun its life with warm and upbeat pieces on underestimated writers, etc, The Republic of Letters will now start trying to piss people off a bit with a round of more controversial pieces. ‘What Has Happened to Literary Men?’ is — I have to admit — not the most original topic in the discourse. (Since sending out the prompt, there have been excellent pieces on it by Henry Oliver, Naomi Kanakia, Andrew Boryga, in addition to that Compact piece.) But it does seem to stir up strong feelings! — and I am very moved by Paul’s story and the dimensionality that he brings to this conversation. If you disagree with Paul’s piece — as you well might — please feel free to write in with a riposte to republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com. By the way, there’s a piece arguing the opposite position coming out in a couple of days. Please keep commenting, writing, sharing, et al!

-ROL

LITERARY MEN WERE IXNAYED

I can’t tell you what has happened to ‘all’ literary men. Nobody can. But David J. Morris tries to in his New York Times piece titled, “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.” I can’t even get past his title, because it’s laughable and lies by omission. It’s not ‘literary men’ who are going missing, but rather ‘white’ literary men, and… the phenomena primarily affects the literary novel category. There are plenty of men writing and selling ‘genre’ fiction. Genre fiction is mostly plot and action driven, entertaining, fast-paced, and easily forgotten. Literary fiction, the fiction of ideas, is more challenging, more character-based, more interior. It generates thinking and new ideas. It can change hearts and minds. And that makes it dangerous — to some.

A quick search for prize-winning literary novels yields up mostly women authors, and a minority of non-white literary authors — Percival Everett, Tao Lin, Colson Whitehead, James McBride, Kazuo Ishiguro, Junot Díaz, and Kaveh Akbar. I am not taking anything away from their obvious talent and success, I am merely asking, what the hell happened to the white male literary writers?

I believe that politics holds the answer. A hero of the right, Andrew Breitbart, coined the phrase, “Politics is downstream from culture.” Whoever controls and owns the culture owns the resultant political landscape. If you had an animus toward white men and wanted them to turn away from books, you would begin with young white boys and not feature them in juvenile novels, or only feature them as bullies and bigots. You would make them read books about girls and women, and non-white boys, mostly written by women. Morris states that he favors this, that he welcomes “the end of male dominance in literature.” But even that’s not really true. Morris evidently welcomes the end of ‘white’ male dominance in literature. And he believes they’ve regressed of late, having been too influenced by the likes of Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, and Joe Rogan. This is a ridiculous dodge. This has been happening for decades and has nothing to do with Trump.

So what happened to white literary men? They didn’t just walk away from their keyboards and their books. No. The predominately liberal female literati has purposely disappeared them slowly and systematically. The feminist literary commissars simply decline to publish white literary men. That’s all. It’s sterile, quick, and effective. And if white male writers survive and ‘self-publish,’ they can still be disappeared. Self-published works are deemed not eligible for all the big book prizes. And self-published books are not welcome in book clubs. Nor are they reviewed by reputable review web sites, newspapers, and magazines.

The proof is out there. Joyce Carol Oates recently touched on this, writing, “A friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. This is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own ‘privilege.”

Again… I can’t tell you what happened to all white literary men. But I can tell you about one. I was once a young white literary man. Now I’m an old white literary man. I have never been critical of my ‘white’ privilege. That’s because I never had any. Raised in a little three-bedroom one-bath row house in Southwest Philly, I had a father and mother, neither of whom went to college, and five siblings. I had poverty, passion, and persistence. Nobody ever told me I was brilliant, quite the opposite. I didn’t care much about sports or academics. Books, however, were a different story.

I suffered a severe depressive episode when I was about ten or so, likely caused by my parents’ moving us to a different city. All my childhood friends were suddenly gone and I didn’t fit in with the new crowd. However, the books I got from the local public library got me through. And when I began classes at a Catholic high school things started to improve. Every spring we were given a list of books to read over the summer vacation. Books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Narcissus and Goldmund. I read them all and hungered for more. I was young. My friends were young. We had the sap of life oozing out. Our beginnings were working class and modest at best; at worst, Depression Era-like poverty. Until we got out of our neighborhoods, we didn’t think about that or wallow in it. But we did listen attentively when the Animals sang, “We gotta get out of this place.”

Although I loved reading books, I never considered writing one. My experience as a draftee infantryman in Vietnam changed that. There were high points — the deep camaraderie of my fellow soldiers, white, black and Hispanic, the jungle scenery, the occasional ride in the Hueys, our jungle-booted feet dangling earthward — but they were peppered with moments of extreme terror. I saw my share of dismembered and mutilated bodies, but I was lucky and suffered minimal damage. When I returned to the States the Army treated me and my fellow ‘Nam vets as excess chattel. When I got out I wanted to recreate my experience on the page. I wanted to witness, to testify. I wanted to inflict that experience on all those who had finagled their way out of going, and especially on the rats who had sent us over there, feeding us to the monster — on average, 525 American deaths a month; average age, 23.2.

So I wrote a book about it — Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam. After finishing it around 1986, I spent 15 years pitching it to agents and publishers and discovered that nobody was interested in it. Yes, some of that reluctance might have been due to the national trauma over the war, and some peoples’ desire to just forget about it. But I believe some of it was due to class. We who served were, for the most part, lower and middle class men. Cannon fodder. And there was also an assumption — a prejudice — on the part of editors, especially female editors, that books about that war were likely chest-thumping, flag-waving Rambo action adventure genre. Not at all the case with my novel.

Despite that, I managed to get an old white literary man — Willie Morris (James Jones: A Friendship, My Dog Skip) — to help me. Willie sent my book to one house and they declined. He called me on the phone and assured me he was going to send it to others. Then he had a heart attack and died.

I turned to genre, writing a novel, Calling Crow, about the clash between the Muskogee People of the Southeast Coast and the Spanish Conquistadores from Hispaniola. I sold that and two more. But I still had not published Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam, my literary novel.

It ate at me, so I eventually gave up and placed the book with a Canadian publisher, Electric Ebook Publishing, in 2000. They published the book in PDF, a new format, and it sold eight (8) copies. However, unbeknownst to me, they entered it in the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards. Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam was named one of twelve finalists along with works by David McCullough (John Adams), Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless), Amitav Ghosh (The Glass Palace), and Alan Furst (The Kingdom of Shadows).

I went to the Frankfurt Book Fair. My book didn’t win, but surely, I thought, I’ll get a book contract out of this. I was wrong. It took another four years before the book was published by Thomas Dunne in 2005. (It was not promoted by the publisher and went out of print about four years later.)

So, from the finished draft to publication, it took 20 years. Now I’ve written a sequel to that book. I have been sending out The Fake Memoir of a Mid-List Writer for the last 17 months. But those who run publishing are not interested. So far I’ve gotten nowhere, with not one encouraging word, not even an insult, just an awful silence, as if my life and experiences, my thoughts and dreams were worth nothing except to my own self.

Is this evidence that I’m not really a literary man? Or maybe evidence that I am a literary man, but of the wrong color? I believe the latter. I’m 76 years old now, in good health. But obviously I’m not going to spend the next 20 years trying to find a home for my latest. (More about that later.)

To all the young white literary men reading this, never give up! Tell your stories without self-censoring. Be proud of yourselves and your writing. And never beg Lady Lit for acceptance, don’t dare become one of her ‘pet men.’

The current hyper-feminist literary establishment is unnatural and grotesque. I don’t believe its bosses and true believers will ever willingly give up their unfair advantages and biased practices. It will, however, eventually collapse due to its own false and fragile ethos.

Our hope lies elsewhere, most likely in new upstart, brave publishing houses and literary agencies that will put craft, honesty, good sound thinking and story-telling over sexual, ethnic, and racial propaganda.

In the meantime, keep writing.

Paul Clayton

is the author of a historical fiction series on the Spanish conquest of the Floridas — Calling Crow, Flight of the Crow, and Calling Crow Nation — with Putnam/Berkley. He has also published a fictionalized memoir, Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam, with Thomas Dunne, 2004. Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam was a finalist at the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards along with works by David McCullough, Joyce Carol Oates, Amitav Ghosh, and Alan Furst.