Poet vs. Novelist

27. May 2014 22:57 Poet vs. Novelist - NYTimes.
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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
27. May 2014 22:57 Poet vs. Novelist - NYTimes.com
this. To me Bellows Augie was about great drive and a love of the English
sentence and being a writer at the height 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.
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 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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