Working through has never had a clearer usage than to “work through an archive,” which is now my task virtually on a daily basis. Things emerge from files and folders with breathtaking immediacy, though in actuality they have been there all along—a form of latency that is also a structure of the present. An archive, in my experience, is not a thing of the past; we are constituted in the present by our archives. This notion of archive is distinct from memory—a memory can pop up at any time, prompted by as little as a similarity in sound or image or even a proximity in neural networking. I remember walking to our black Chevrolet in a San Leandro parking lot coming out of a Five and Dime store with my mother in 1956. An archive is more logically or interpretively or thematically structured; it has a filing system that is a product of labor, vertically organizing materials in their lateral connections to form a network that begins in the archived past but extends to the present. Just so, I was organizing a set of files to be accessed under subhead 5.3.3.1 “Discussions and controversies: literary/artistic,” of which I have seen many. I open the file marked “Georgia Review” to organize/distribute its contents in three records:
5.3.3.1. controversy (1981). NEA/Georgia Review
letters following publication of “Go Down Dignified: The NEA Writing Fellowships” [see also 5.2.2.1981.1–1982.1]
MASTERS and WILK articles, w introduction, xer, 14 pp.
D’SOUZA article, sent by FRANK CONROY to MARY MACARTHUR and LYN HEJINIAN, xer w notes, 9 pp.
BW > GEORGIA REVIEW, tcb, 5 ppl.; drafts, tcb, 3 pp.; > BILL HENDERSON (PUSHCART PRESS), tcb, 1 p., 1 cp.; > JEANETTA JONES MILLER (SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION), tcb, 1 p.; > BILL BERKSON, 2 tcb, 3 pp.; > THOMAS M. MEYER (attorney), tcb, 1 p.; DAVID WILK, tcb, 1 p.; FRANK CONROY (NEA), tcb, 2 pp.; STANLEY W. LINDBERG (GEORGIA REVIEW), tcb, 3 pp., 2 cp.
BERKSON > GEORGIA REVIEW, tcb w BW edits, 10 pp.; > LINDBERG (GEORGIA REVIEW), 2 tlx, 5 pp.; > BW, als and tls, 2 pp.
LINDBERG (GEORGIA REVIEW) > BW, tls, 1 p.; > BERKSON, 2 tlx, 3 pp.
WILK > BW, tlx, 2 pp.
HEJINIAN > HENDERSON (PUSHCART PRESS), tcb w hm note, 1 p.
HENDERSON > BW, tls, 1 p.
JENNIFER MOYER (CCLM) > BERKSON, tlx, 1 p.
MARY MACARTHUR (NEA) > BW, tls, 1 p.
BW notes, hm, 1 p.; mailing rects, 5 pcs.
This record lists the contents of the file of all published materials and letters, including my own notes and mailing receipts, of responses to Hilary Masters’s 1981 article on the 1979–80 NEA Literary Arts grants, one of which I received. In a separate file, under subhead 3.2.2, “Language writing: chapters, articles, forums,” I file the article itself, along with Dinesh D’Souza’s 1982 companion piece, titled “National Endowment for Pornography.” These materials, organized in categories and indexed by name, title, and publication, are retrievable through the archive’s search engine, revealing a vast structure of cross-referencing to authors and works. This structure of cross-referencing is nothing less than a literary history of its time: literature, as poetics, is constructed on such relations, which it interprets and expands on in its forms, where the author is a site and the archive its physical embodiment. “The clear air comes from the mountain of things” is never clearer than in the archive.
5.2.2. Georgia Review (1981)
HILARY MASTERS. “Go Down Dignified: The NEA Writing Fellowships.” Introduction by the editors and “A Restrained Response to ‘Go Down Dignified’ by Hilary Masters” by DAVID WILK
xer, 14 pp. [see also 5.3.3.1.1981]5.2.2. Policy Review (1982)
DINESH D’SOUZA. “National Endowment for Pornography”
copy forwarded by FRANK CONROY to MARY MACARTHUR and LYN HEJINIAN, xer w notes, 9 pp. [see also 5.3.3.1.1982]
The clear air from looking into the files, however, was more like a sudden gasp as I turned to the passages of Masters’s polemical article to see how I was used in it [here]. The argument Masters is making is, in retrospect, a species of literary paranoia: he sees a vast network of avant-garde authors and small press publishers who have somehow gained entry to the National Endowment for the Arts and colluded to get each other money and recognition [see the complete article, along with introduction and David Wilk’s response, here]. As with all paranoia, there is a kernel of truth in his claims: in the 1970s, the NEA set out to fund alternative publishing through its Small Press grants and even more innovative policies, such as setting up the West Coast Print Center, where I and other emerging poets (including book artist and theorist Johanna Drucker) worked long hours to produce hundreds of small press publications, many of whose authors would get grants from NEA.
One such small press was Bill Berkson’s Big Sky Books, which published my Opera—Works (1975), and another was This Press, which published Berkson in This magazine several times, along with many others funded by NEA. Bill is in my archive in far too many places to list: when I arrived in the Bay Area from Iowa in 1973, he got me work typesetting his magazine and books and those of others—the beginnings of a literary network that took off from there. It is precisely that network that Masters is objecting to and fearful of: a hidden cabal of literary influence that, with official recognition, becomes an early instance of “Deep State.” And that is not the only ideological trope in this seemingly literary dispute to read at this distance. A dark conspiracy theory emerges as a prescient example of “Fake News,” with numerous claims of fact and interpretation that are falsifiable—for instance, the claim that Big Sky Books and This Press shared the “same address,” which was in fact the address of Serendipity Books Distribution. David Wilk’s rebuttal does the necessary when faced with this kind of innuendo, as he painstakingly unlinks the argument and explains the literary small press and its relation to the NEA.
There was nothing easily dismissible, however, about the effects of Master’s article (which apparently had been in circulation for some time, and had been rejected by several publications). David Wilk would be out at NEA, to be replaced by Frank Conroy; the support of avant-garde and small press publishing would tilt in the direction of the Writer’s Workshop, which Conroy would go on to head. The Reagan Era, with its threat to defund the NEA, would provide many further moments of opportunism, most notably Dinesh D’Souza’s 1982 piece in the Heritage Foundation Policy Review [for a much circulated xerox of the article, see here]. Conspiracy theory combines with censorship with a homophobic pitch to the Religious Right:
Critics of the National Endowment emphasize, however, that they are not objecting to obscenity per se, but rather the total lack of literary merit of the works funded, of which the prevalent obscenity is a symptom. In other words, authors who have nothing to say ramble on about orgasm after orgasm until, totally exhausted, they stagger to Washington, D.C., to collect $10,000 from the federal government to revive themselves. (152)
This was the start of a bonanza for neocons such as Hilton Kramer and D’Souza. In the 80s, D’Souza’s pitch was to Reagan America, questioning government funding for arts, and by the end of the decade there was a strong push for arts organizations toward the corporate sector, both monetizing them and making them more conservative. Senators Tom DeLay and Dick Armey kept the pornography argument alive in their attacks on the NEA, while the Christian Right, championed by Senator Jesse Helms, was galvanized by the scandal over Piss Christ and the NEA 4. It is important that not only would the Neocons and Christian Right become opportunistic allies through their revulsion for the avant-garde; the populism of the Poetry Wars, in its objection to avant-garde “elitism,” would be galvanized as well. In this ideological soup, one sees the future combination of populism, religion, and the Alt Right that produced Trumpism, in a hegemony formed by the exclusion of sexual minorities, alternative publishing, and avant-garde art.
We know what happened with Dinesh D’Souza: he is a major spokesman for the Alt Right. What about Hilary Masters? It turned out that “Go Down Dignified” was a big career move for him, following publication of his memoirs—which take up his relationship to his father, Edgar Lee Masters, author of Spoon River Anthology—and leading on to a professorship at Carnegie Mellon University in 1983, which he held until his death in 2015. From his obituary, we learn that Masters originally wanted to become a poet, but “‘I realized I couldn’t write poetry,’ he said.” His father was a topic of some tension and ambiguity, and his work “sounds themes of abandonment.” As a prose writer, Masters had a motivated antagonism toward poetry, which was tied up with paternal recognition. Whether he sported an elbow patch on his tweed jacket is unknown, but one can imagine he did “go down dignified,” with not a mention of the careers, even literary networks, that he took out on his way.
Notes and links
Bauerlein, Mark, and Ellen Grantham. National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965–2008. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts, 2009. Online pdf. See pp. 79–82.
D’Souza, Dinesh. “National Endowment for Pornography.” Policy Review (Heritage Foundation) 21 (Spring): 147–55. [here]
–––. “Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader.” New York: Touchstone Books, 1997. See p. 101.
Masters, Hilary. “Go Down Dignified: The NEA Writing Fellowships.” Introduction by the editors and “A Restrained Response to ‘Go Down Dignified’ by Hilary Masters” by David Wilk. Georgia Review 35, no. 2 (Summer): 231–56. [here]
Roberts, Sam. “Hilary Masters, Novelist and Son of American Poet, Dies at 87.” New York Times (18 June 2015). [here]
