Fred Wemyss

I wonder if "wine and cheese" is still a phrase capable of turning an undergraduate Creative Writing major into a corner-sitting onanist. It certainly was in my day, when the prospect of sitting in one of those vertiginous amphitheatres watching some middle-aged drunk read from a copy of his fifteen-year-old chapbook from a podium in semi-darkness caused me to turn irreparably inward.

"There will be wine and cheese." That phrase has all the harrowing smily-faceness of the seventies. Forget the Brady Bunch. Don't bother with Watergate. Put Altamont aside. The seventies' was the time of Creative Writing and wine and cheese. It was the time for pretending the pot-addled sixties radical was a world-weary prize-fighter. It was the time to put a beige-suited bore up for a three-day weekend at the Holiday Inn. God knows the Department Chair had learned by '76 not to give the guy his phone number.

Wine and Cheese. Oh, yes. Oh, no.

Here's a story I wrote in 1978, when I was in twelfth grade. It was not a school assignment. I felt like writing it. I have taken it from a carbon copy because I can't find the original. I've put brackets around a line I may or may not have omitted from the final draft. (Carbon doesn't erase easily.) I've retained my poor spelling and punctuation. I've recently written an explanatory note. It appears below the story, after three asterisks.

The Literary Advisor

by Fred Wemyss

There was a very gigantic room with rows of desks throughout, which made room for only small crawlspaces, through which the Literary Advisor walked. Seemingly, the room teemed with writers scrawling or typing away, all ambitious to satisfy the Advisor Helmsley.

He was their idol. The image of the lonely observer, he was; noting every one of their moves and helping them. When he held up his nose and snorted it looked like a lack of hope; but not like disdain.

A writer in that room would write endlessly; hoping to perfect his work; feeling fearful and inferior. All the writers wanted to gratify Helmsley.

Helmsley walked along playfully; gliding. He saw one girl's work and said suddenly and very loud, "Your use of the phrase here 'blue patching' has," and he paused and raised his head, "texture."

The girl had trouble concentrating for the first few minutes after his flattering her, but her rigorous training helped her to a high level of concentration when she started work again.

At a point much farther down the room, Advisor Helmsley was standing and holding a writer's paper up closely to see. The man sat patiently with his hands folded, contentedly awaiting Mr. Helmsley's dramatic reading.

"People." Everyone looked up. "Please; pens and pencils down. Typewriters locked." The Advisor was holding the paper very carefully. Helmsley read:

"Spider walked along the balcony. Lavinia was on the rug on the lower level. Spider smelled the bouquet Lavinia held; and he flew off the balcony, and lowered himself on his string into that bouquet. Lavinia usually noticed things like..."

Helmsley smiled. "This is marvelous."

After the writers finished swooning, Mr. Helmsley gave advice quietly to individual writers; often advice on how to space lines and cross-out and improve.

The writers happily wrote away, in the usual line of things.

Helmsley picked up Bark's paper and saw the words, in quotation marks, "Spokane--The Town That Refreshes."

" 'Spokane. The Town That Refreshes?' Mr. Bark, I do hope you can continue with this." Bark was a literary genius. He had impressed his overlings all his life, and didn't have to practice. He had a literary authority which awed his peers and truly inspired Advisors. He didn't write anymore, though.

Helmsley said, "Please, read us this week's writings, Mr. Bark."

Bark took out a thick folder labeled with his name in heavy magic marker.

Helmsley was looking around the room smiling, with delighted eyes.

Everyone watched.

Bark pulled out his sheaf. He removed the top sheet and put it on the bottom. He took the new top sheet and put that on the bottom. Both of them were blank. Bark took a third sheet and placed it on a space on his desk, and plopped the stack onto it.

Mr. Helmsley had a disappointed, sorrowful expression on his face.

Bark took another top sheet and, lifting the stack, lightly put it underneath. He started flipping the sides of the stack.

He did this with a calm "I can't do anything about this either" expression.

"Do you--?" asked Helmsley.

But Bark started talking at the same moment. He was holding the paper with the one line he wrote that day. He read: " 'Spokane--The Town That Refreshes.' "

The writers were silent. [Mr. Helmsley asked Bark if that was all he had written. When Bark said it was,] Helmsley started to walk away, saying, "Well...", since he couldn't cope with any writer's downfall.

But, as he walked away, Bark stuck out his foot, sending Helmsley tripping. The genius Bark said, "Oh...I'm sorry. I didn't mean to trip you."

Advisor Helmsley smiled a bit and said, dusting off his pants, "Oh, it's alright."

Bark returned to his work--which consisted of thinking and sitting still--and Helmsley went around to help different writers quietly.

As time passed, Bark began to notice that Mr. Helmsley was looking winsome and melancholy; he heard him advising the writers in a detached voice. Bark's curiosity faded, though, and he continued concentrating on his future and observing the blank paper.

Silently, Helmsley walked up behind Bark. He slowly tapped him on the shoulder. He slipped a stapled short story onto Bark's desk as Bark turned his head.

Helmsley was smiling with a pleading expression.

Bark looked at the story on his desk, and, after an inaudible sigh, began to read it to the writers.

It was about a Painting and Drawing Advisor's activities and hopes.

Helmsley breathed in deeply every two or three sentences while the writers "hmmmed" ponderously.

Bark read: "At this point she felt she might approach this strapping supporter with the piece that was the pivoting spot of her life. The self-portrait she hid all..."

Helmsley's nostrils were in a continuous flare from this paragraph on, and they finally wavered back to normal during the closing sentence. he studied all the faces as Bark cleared his throat and laid the story down.

Helmsley glance at Bark and Bark said, "There it is." He paused. "What does everyone think of this story?"

The writers didn't say anything.

Helmsley spoke up. "I'd like you to say what you think of it, Mr.--"

"Well I'll tell you, sir. When I was reading the third paragraph, I couldn't help noticing the blinding compliment the narrator--oh, bestows on the heroine."

Helmsley did not move.

"The narrator pulls us along, then, into a fatty passage about her being great but unappreciated. The author has the amateurish habit of dismissing the main character's intolerable activities as proper in the first place. Whoever wrote this only reads his own stuff."

Another writer finally spoke. "Well, i felt sorry for the narrator--I mean the author himself--because I can see how he is struggling to write a lovable story."

Now there was a general buzz of discussion around the room, and Bark eyed Helmsley sinking down the side of an empty desk.

"Oh, Mr. Helmsley," he said, drowning out and quieting all the other writers, "I noticed--" (meanwhile, Helmsley was moving his body up a little straighter), "--about three split infinitives in the last paragraph." He shook the paper a little bit. "It is written: 'She flushed the razor down the toilet to hopelessly confuse...' Note: '...to slowly drain one's life.'...Here we go. Number Three: '...to dismayingly be found...' "

Helmsley seemed to be trying to talk, but his mouth moved open for no sound.

Bark asked all of the writers: "What is wrong with this story?" Then he said, "I will tell you."

Numbering the faults, Bark dissolved the story Helmsley had cautiously handed him ten minutes before.

Helmsley was rubbing his hair while Bark pronounced his observations.

The writers were listening intently and would raise their hands and say things to indicate their fascination with Bark's observations.

Helmsley was finally called on to state his opinion.

He stood up proudly, and said nothing for about ten seconds.

At the ninth second, another writer started talking: "I actually don't think he made much of an effort."

Helmsley closed his mouth.

The writer kept formulating opinions, and during a pause Bark cut in, saying, "Another fascinating point--" and he was sly "--would probably be offered up by Mr. Helmsley."

Helmsley was standing, and felt his feet teeter-tottering a bit. He eventually spoke. "I know the story is not well patterned, but--"

Bark stared.

Helmsley had taken three and a half months to write the story.

"I feel it has merit in some spots; meretricious merit."

Bark asked for an example.

Helmsley sat down and said, "I'm sort of tired." He waved his hand slightly in an Advisor's indication to go back to work.

Bark had a satisfied look in his eyes, and put a piece of paper in a typewriter he lifted from the rack of the desk next to him, and started typing away furiously. His title was "Spokane--The Town That Refreshes." He wrote a whole page in about seven minutes.

The other writers pondered and wrote sentences minutes apart.

Helmsley sat with his hand on his forehead.

Bark had another page written in another seven minutes. he double-spaced, too.

He had a ten-page story finished in a little over an hour, which turned out a few centuries later to save humanity.

Helmsley sat in ignored, profound triviality.


* * *


I wrote this in 1978, after watching WOR's re-run of THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT, the British TV movie of Quentin Crisp's autobiography. John Hurt played Quentin Crisp. I'd seen it when it was run the first time, a few months before, and found it very moving, especially at moments when Crisp seemed as if about to faint. The second time it was run, I watched it with my father. He kept pointing out that Crisp was making very good points. Dad knew me better than I knew myself. When I wrote "The Literary Advisor," Hurt's performance was on my mind. Mr. Helmsley, the Literary Advisor, is based on that performance. I was making fun of Helmsley, but I hoped he was the sympathetic figure and not Bark, who was based on what I feared I would become. I'd had a Creative Writing unit in twelfth-grade English. The teacher told us that she'd secretly turned in a story of her own a few years before and that the kids had ripped it apart, causing her to weep. She loved us and told us she wasn't going to do that to us. I'd also had some exposure to the Creative Writing mafia, when, in 1974, my father got me in free to the Hofstra Writer's Conference. A Newsday reporter wrote an article about the Conference with the headline "Would-Be Writers Get Aid For Egos." Sombody taped it to a classroom door and several hurt people discussed it in a question and answer session with an established writer. I hated the Newsday reporter and the people who complained about it. A few months after I wrote "The Literary Advisor" I was taking Creative Writing in college and became quite as snotty as Bark. I saw Quentin Crisp almost twenty years later in a diner. He was giving an interview to a fascinated young man and was anything but defeated.

Today I'm giving this space over to an article written in 1917. It is by H. L. Mencken, one of the funniest writers who ever lived. This article is a serious one, but it is the work of one humorist writing about another. I just read Twain's HUCKLEBERRY FINN (which I first read in High School) and sought out Mencken's views on Twain. I found this on the internet. I certainly doubt there's a copyright on it. Here it is. It appeared originally in THE NEW YORK EVENING MAIL:

MARK TWAIN'S AMERICANISM

by H. L. MENCKEN

November 1, 1917

When Mark Twain died, in 1910, one of the magnificos who paid public tribute to him was William H. Taft, then President of the United States. "Mark Twain," said Dr. Taft, "gave real intellectual enjoyment to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come. He never wrote a line that a father could not read to a daughter."

The usual polite flubdub and not to be exposed, perhaps, to critical analysis. But it was, in a sense, typical of the general view at that time, and so it deserves to be remembered for the fatuous inaccuracy of the judgment in it. For Mark Twain dead is beginning to show far different and more brilliant colors than those he seemed to wear during life, and the one thing no sane critic would say of him to-day is that he was the harmless fireside jester, the mellow chautauquan, the amiable old grandpa of letters that he was once so widely thought to be.

The truth is that Mark was almost exactly the reverse. Instead of being a mere entertainer of the mob, he was in fact a literary artist of the very highest skill and sophistication, and, in all save his superficial aspect, quite unintelligible to Dr. Taft's millions. And instead of being a sort of Dr. Frank Crane in cap and bells, laboriously devoted to the obvious and the uplifting, he was a destructive satirist of the utmost pungency and relentlessness, and the most bitter critic of American platitude and delusion, whether social, political or religious, that ever lived.

Bit by bit, as his posthumous books appear, the true man emerges, and it needs but half an eye to see how little he resembles the Mark of national legend. Those books were written carefully and deliberately; Mark wrote them at the height of his fame; he put into them, without concealment, the fundamental ideas of his personal philosophy -- the ideas which colored his whole view of the world. Then he laid the manuscripts away, safe in the knowledge that they would not see the light until he was under six feet of earth. We know, by his own confession, why he hesitated to print them while he lived; he knew that fame was sweet and he feared that they might blast it. But beneath that timorousness there was an intellectual honesty that forced him to set down the truth. It was really comfort he wanted, not fame. He hesitated, a lazy man, to disturb his remaining days with combat and acrimony. But in the long run he wanted to set himself straight.

Two of these books, The Mysterious Stranger and What Is Man? are now published, and more may be expected to follow at intervals. The latter, in fact, was put into type during Mark's lifetime and

privately printed in a very limited edition. But it was never given to the public, and copies of the limited edition bring $40 or $50 at book auctions to-day. Even a pirated English edition brings a high premium. Now, however, the book is issued publicly by the Harpers, though without the preface in which Mark explained his reasons for so long withholding it.

The ideas in it are very simple, and reduced to elementals, two in number. The first is that man, save for a trace of volition that grows smaller and smaller the more it is analyzed, is a living machine -- that nine-tenths of his acts are purely reflex, and that moral responsibility, and with it religion, are thus mere delusions. The second is that the only genuine human motive, like the only genuine dog motive or fish motive or protoplasm motive is self interest -- that altruism, for all its seeming potency in human concerns, is no more than a specious appearance -- that the one unbroken effort of the organism is to promote its own comfort, welfare and survival.

Starting from this double basis, Mark undertakes an elaborate and extraordinarily penetrating examination of all the fine ideals and virtues that man boasts of, and reduces them, one after the other, to untenability and absurdity. There is no mere smartness in the thing. It is done, to be sure, with a sly and disarming humor, but at bottom it is done quite seriously and with the highest sort of argumentative skill. The parlor entertainer of Dr. Taft's eulogy completely disappears; in his place there arises a satirist with something of Rabelais's vast resourcefulness and dexterity in him, and all of Dean Swift's devastating ferocity. It is not only the most honest book that Mark ever did; it is, in some respects, the most artful and persuasive as a work of art. No wonder the pious critic of The New York Times, horrified by its doctrine, was forced to take refuge behind the theory that Mark intended it as a joke.

In The Mysterious Stranger there is a step further. What Is Man? analyzes the concept of man; The Mysterious Stranger boldly analyzes the concept of God. What, after all, is the actual character of this Being we are asked to reverence and obey? How is His mind revealed by His admitted acts? How does His observed conduct toward man square with those ideals of human conduct that He is said to prescribe, and whose violation He is said to punish with such appalling penalties?

These are the questions that Mark sets for himself. His answers are, in brief, a complete rejection of the whole Christian theory -- a rejection based upon a wholesale reductio ad absurdum. The thing is not mere mocking; it is not even irreverent; but the force of it is stupendous. I know of no agnostic document that shows a keener sense of essentials or a more deft hand for making use of the indubitable. A gigantic irony is in it. It glows with a profound conviction, almost a kind of passion. And the grotesque form of it -- a child's story -- only adds to the sardonic implacability of it.

As I say, there are more to come. Mark in his idle moments was forever at work upon some such riddling of the conventional philosophy, as he was forever railing at the conventional ethic in his private conversation. One of these pieces, highly characteristic, is described in Albert Bigelow Paine's biography. It is an elaborate history of the microbes inhabiting a man's veins. They divine a religion with the man as God; they perfect a dogma setting forth his desires as to their conduct; they engaged in a worship based upon the notion that he is immediately aware of their every act and jealous of their regard and enormously concerned about their welfare. In brief, a staggering satire upon the anthropocentric religion of man -- a typical return to the favorite theme of man's egoism and imbecility.

All this sort of thing, to be sure, has its dangers for Mark's fame. Let his executors print a few more of his unpublished works -- say, the microbe story and his sketch of life at the court of Elizabeth -- and Dr. Taft, I dare say, will withdraw his prominciamento that "he never wrote a line that a father could not read to his daughter." Already, indeed, the lady reviewers of the newspapers sound an alarm against him, and the old lavish praise of him begins to die down to whispers. In the end, perhaps, the Carnegie libraries will put him to the torture, and The Innocents Abroad will be sacrificed with What Is Man?

But that effort to dispose of him is nothing now. Nor will it succeed. While he lived he was several times labeled and relabeled, and always inaccurately and vainly. At the start the national guardians of letters sought to dismiss him loftily as a hollow buffoon, a brother to josh Billings and Petroleum V. Nasby. This enterprise failing, they made him a comic moralist, a sort of chautauquan in motley, a William Jennings Bryan armed with a slapstick. Foiled again, they promoted him to the rank of Thomas Bailey Aldrich and William Dean Howells, and issued an impertinent amnesty for the sins of his youth. Thus he passed from these scenes -- ratified at last, but somewhat heavily patronized.

Now the professors must overhaul him again, and this time, I suppose, they will undertake to pull him down a peg. They will succeed as little as they succeeded when they tried to read him out of meeting in the early '80s. The more they tackle him, in fact, the more it will become evident that he was a literary artist of the very first rank, and incomparably the greatest ever hatched in these states.

One reads with something akin to astonishment of his superstitious reverence for Emerson -- of how he stood silent and bare-headed before the great transcendentalist's house at Concord. One hears of him, with amazement, courting Whittier, Longfellow and Holmes. One is staggered by the news, reported by Traubel, that Walt Whitman thought "he mainly misses fire." The simple fact is that Huckleberry Finn is worth the whole work of Emerson with two-thirds of the work of Whitman thrown in for make-weight, and that one chapter of it is worth the whole work of Whittier, Longfellow and Holmes.

Mark was not only a great artist; he was pre-eminently a great American artist. No other writer that we have produced has ever been more extravagantly national. Whitman dreamed of an America that never was and never will be; Poe was a foreigner in every line he wrote; even Emerson was no more than an American spigot for European, and especially German, ideas. But Mark was wholly of the soil. His humor was American. His incurable Philistinism was American. His very English was American. Above all, he was an American in his curious mixture of sentimentality and cynicism, his mingling of romanticist and iconoclast.

English Traits might have been written by any one of half a dozen Germans. The tales of Poe, printed as translations from the French, would have deceived even Frenchmen. And Leaves of Grass might have been written in London quite as well as in Brooklyn. But in Huckleberry Finn, in A Connecticut Yankee and in most of the short sketches there is a quality that is unmistakably and over whelmingly national. They belong to our country and our time quite as obviously as the skyscraper or the quick lunch counter. They are as magnificently American as the Brooklyn Bridge or Tammany Hall.

Mark goes down the professorial gullet painfully. He has stuck more than once. He now seems fated to stick again. But these gaggings will not hurt him, nor even appreciably delay him. Soon or late the national mind will awake to the fact that a great man was among us -- that in the midst of all our puerile rages for dubious foreigners we produced an artist who was head and shoulders above all of them.