Wrapping up BASS 2018: The elephant in the anthology

The Best American series of anthologies--which include poetry, short stories, essays, comics, and probably others I don't know about--are openly acknowledged, even by their creators, to be less-than-precisely named. Nobody is claiming that the 20 stories or 75 poems in each anthology each year really comprise the "best" that America has to offer. Even if it were possible to rate a poem or story with a score like you'd get in a video game and then pick the ones with the best scores, the anthologies wouldn't work like that. Rather, the series gives, in the words of Robert Pinsky, speaking about the poetry series, a "vivid snapshot of a what a distinguished poet finds exciting, fresh, and memorable."

That phrase "a distinguished poet," or, for Best American Short Stories, "a distinguished fiction writer," is critical. The choice of what to put in the volume is left up to the guest editor of the year. Although the guest editor gets help whittling it down, the final product is a product of what the guest editor values. So it's as much about what the guest editor liked at the time as it is about what was good in American literature at the time.

Nobody wants twenty stories about college kids in New England, or twenty stories about poor kids trying to make it in a third-world slum, so every editor tries to balance it out a bit as far as subject matter. The idea is to have the twenty stories that together make the best collection, not the twenty that are individually the best.

Some editors try to balance the series out by giving it as objective a sense of diversity as they can. They try for ten men and ten women, with a sprinkling of ethnicities and sexual orientations that mirror, as much as possible, the American population. Others figure that the diversity comes from changing guest editors every year, and so when it's their year, they should just pick what interests them the most. In 2015, Sherman Alexie raised a few eyebrows when he picked an extremely high number of minority poets for BAP. Alexie is many things, some of them frustrating and full of crap things, but the man is not a liar. He was honest about what he was doing. That volume is probably best remembered for the row over a white poet using a Chinese pseudonym to publish a poem and having it picked by Prairie Schooner and then by Alexie for Best American Poetry...after having first been rejected more than 40 times under the poet's real name.

Alexie didn't duck what he did. He called it "a form of nepotism," and justified it by saying he'd seen plenty of similar nepotism from white editors. He also kept the controversial poem in the anthology even after learning what had happened (and, he says, being furious about it). If that's true, I respect Alexie more than I can say for keeping a record of what really happened. However you interpret it, it's a fascinating anecdote of American literature in 2015.

The Gay BASS anthology of 2018

Roxane Gay followed the "I pick what I like" theory of filling out an anthology. Therefore, the collection doesn't have ethnic or gender "balance" like a lot of volumes do. Of the twenty stories, only four are by male writers. Two of those men are white. (If my numbers are off, I apologize. This was all my own Internet research, and I'm going off pictures, names, and assumptions in some cases. It's not like writers list race on their Twitter pages. Also, Rivers Solomon is, I believe, non-binary, so it's four cis-males, fifteen cis-females, and one Rivers Solomon.)

(As a total aside, I have to note Gay's omission of "Cat Person," on of the most talked-about short stories in years. It was published at the right time to make this year's BASS, but Gay has said before she disliked the story, partly because of its too-frequent fat shaming. She was really following what moved her personally.)

Harold Bloom's unforgettable introduction to the Best American Poetry 1988-1997 edition

Gay's gender and ethnic anthology choices immediately took me back to the introduction Harold Bloom wrote to the Best American Poetry series' "best of the best" book from 1997, after it had been putting out yearly best-of anthologies for ten years. (BASS is a lot older than BAP.) It's Bloom in a nutshell: exasperating, lucid, erudite, anachronistic, codgerly, and wrong in all the right ways. When I read it, I couldn't believe the incredible "fuck you" he was giving to the people who gave him the job; he essentially said, "I picked the best I could find out of what they gave me to pick from, but American poetry will probably die before long, and only a few of these are even close to the best poetry I've ever read."

He started his introduction with a quote from Thucydides: "They have the numbers, we, the heights." By "we," he meant the scholars who still thought art was about aesthetics, meaning what was good, beautiful, and perceptive. By "they," he meant those whose thought art was about politics and the dull sub-categories of politics like gender, sexual orientation, etc. His immediate venom in that introduction was aimed at the 1996 Best American Poetry volume, from which he did not pick one poem for his ten-year wrap-up. He thought nearly all the poems in it were terrible. He claimed guest editor Adrienne Rich had followed "the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet."

Bloom had a more enduring irritant than the 1996 BAP in mind, though, and he swept up his vitriol against it along with ranting at Rich's choices. He was taking shots at cultural shifts in American universities, their obsession with the various programs of cultural "studies": gender, race, orientation, etc. He saw the origin of this shift at the university as "cultural guilt," a phrase that isn't too far away in terminology or sentiment from the more popularly used "white guilt."

The focus on "cultural criticism" had weakened the ability to carry out literary criticism. Good readers were dying, and, Bloom suspected, good poetry would soon follow.

I don't know if good poetry has died, but Bloom was certainly prophetic about some things. Mainly, he was correct that the political focus on college campuses had (and still has) done little to change the political culture outside those campuses. Republicans and Democrats continue on with their political charade, capitalism continues apace, the counsels of the powerful are not troubled--then in 1997 and now.

Bloom and those who followed him have been criticized along the usual lines: there is no such thing as apolitical art, even to be apolitical is itself a political position, etc. But I think there is a more direct critique of Bloom one could make, one that is more applicable to a discussion of the 2018 BASS put together by Roxane Gay.

Would BASS 2018 have made Bloom happy, or would it have made him look like this? 

Good art and genius art

Bloom's contention was that Rich, in her choice to put identity issues first, had picked bad poems. I have no opinion on the 1996 BAP Rich put together, but I have an opinion on the 2018 BASS. Clearly, Gay was motivated even more than most editors by concerns centering on the gender, sexual orientation, race, and gender identity (a thing that had barely entered Bloom's consciousness in 1997) of the writers. One could allow that Gay was mostly just picking what interested her, and as a black, feminist, bisexual woman, what she liked reflected those interests, not a conscious decision to have any particular array of writers. But even accounting for that, there was probably some "balancing" that went on. There was still a story from a Korean-American perspective and one from a Chinese-American perspective. There were a couple of stories about Latinos. There was a story about a gay man. It had some of what is typically referred to as "balance," an attempt to have appropriate numerical diversity based on categories of identity. But it was balance on Gay's terms.

Here's the thing about that balance, though. Bloom thought Rich's choices were identity-based and bad. Gay's were identity-based and excellent. What does this do to Bloom's idea that "the school of resentment" would destroy perceptive works of art when the most identity-based collection I've ever seen was also the best BASS I've read in six years?

It wasn't uniformly excellent, but its heights were higher and there were far fewer lows than in past collections. The lowest points, interestingly, were the two white men included in the collection. There's something perfidious going on with the way men are writing these days. Men seem to be encouraged to produce works about men behaving badly, what's called "toxic masculinity" nowadays. These works tend to be gritty and violent and have characters who are not really like most men I know.

I've written my share of stories with men and violence in them. "Brokedick" was about young men who join the Marine Corps to prove their manhood, and how a man's sense of his own fitness as a man can depend on physical factors, some of which he can't even control. I wrote "What Every Parent Should Know About Head Injuries in High School Sports" (maybe the bleakest story I ever wrote) full of violent, racist football fans. But I tried to tell the whole story about toxic masculinity. I was aiming for what Bloom said about Shakespeare: "his men and women never invite us to believe that when we know the worst about them, then we know exactly who they are."

The fact is that when you're threatened by a violent man, you want another man capable of being violent more effectively to stop him. Being ready to deal that violence--which, like it or not, men are still rewarded for being able to do and disrespected for not being able to do--requires a difficult balancing act, if you intend to also live as a functioning member of an enlightened society. You have to keep a wild animal alive inside you, but keep it caged until needed. It's not easy to do, and men fail at it. But the picture we're getting isn't really the balanced and nuanced picture of maleness I'd expect from perceptive writers. In fact, it's women who are writing more memorable male characters than men, because men are expected to write their men as so appallingly bad.

Aside from that, though, the 2018 BASS is excellent. I've already cited the best works from it in my last twenty-two posts. Clearly, there is a problem in Bloom's contention that merely focusing on cultural criticism instead of literary criticism will weaken the aesthetic excellence, or "perceptiveness," of a work.

But there may be a critique of Bloom's that is worth considering here in 2018. His real concern was that genius--inexplicable, mind-bending genius--would disappear when poets had to bend to a particular political ideology. Poets were meant to be "liberating gods," those who "are free throughout the world." The 2018 BASS is full of very good stories, but all but one of them--Emma Cline's "Los Angeles"--are somewhat safe in their political convictions. They are the sorts of stories, with the sorts of sensitivities and underlying political convictions, for which literary fiction writers are rewarded nowadays. With literary fiction being closely tied to universities and their writing programs, the politics of those universities have spilled over into serious writing in America. It's hard to imagine someone with openly conservative political ideology in his work being printed in a BASS anthology. I often think Cormac McCarthy only gets away with the conservative nature of some of his work because it's mistaken for being a commentary on toxic masculinity rather than being a commentary on an effete culture that scolds masculinity on the one hand and refuses to stand up to its worst forms on the other.

The two most truly mind-blowing short stories in BASS since 2013--as long as I have been reading it--were Joshua Ferris's "The Breeze" and Elizabeth McCracken's "Thunderstruck." Neither was political. Writers should, of course, never run from writing about politics. But it can't be the only thing we have to talk about, either.

Racism, sexism, bigotry--these are all terrible evils. But none is the main evil. These are all just tools of the main evil, which is something unspeakable and more terrible than political works could ever hint at. The job of art is to uncover this unspeakable thing, to speak to it in the heart of people and somehow, implausibly, to charm it out of them. Until it's been driven from all of us, politics is just a delaying action, a game of inches gained and inches lost.

Anis Shivani wrote that competence has killed the American short story. It has led, as he put it, to stories "so very good, they're intolerably bad." The short stories of BASS 2018 are very good. But in some ways, they might be like what Bloom saw in cultural studies: a seemingly rational response to the political realities of the moment that somehow doesn't correct those political realities at all.

If Jamel Brinkley and Danielle Evans and Jacob Guajardo and Tea Obreht never move beyond writing the kinds of stories that are in BASS 2018, I'll still read them. They're that good. I hope these writers turn their energies, eventually, to more enduring themes, themes that will be recognized in fifty years or five hundred. There were already hopes in BASS 2018 of breaking out: Emma Cline wrote a political story, but a daring one that flirted with heresy within the liberal enclave of literary fiction; Kristen Iskandrian and Amy Silverberg wrote classic coming-of-age stories. Dina Nayeri managed to write a story about bigger themes than America of the moment, in spite of writing a novel very much about America at the moment.

Bloom's worries for the future were foolish and unfounded in some ways, but also troublingly prescient. America's best literary minds are sometimes too focused on fighting rear-guard actions against the political issues of the day, but because literature is a slow process in a world where we all talk about the Tweet of the day, it is not a very effective tool right now in leading the struggle. It is producing good, but not always genius, work. If I have hope, though, it's that the work is so good, I believe the best minds in American literature today will find a way to transcend the issues of the moment and produce enduring works the world will read centuries from now with profit.