I Wanted to Write

By Fred Poole

I knew what was wrong with my boozy fake Gothic New Jersey college’s English department, where everyone seemed to hate American writing, all of them dismissing Wolfe and Farrell and usually Fitzgerald — the slow-talking Faulkner expert writing that Faulkner was passé, the tweedy Anglophile Hemingway authority so smug that he had discovered Hemingway was no gentleman. They were all able to tell you all you needed to know about a writer by telling you what the books meant. I found I could do better on exams if I did not disturb the professors with actual reactions to anything that felt real — though I did not yet recognize how extreme was their fear of anyone working from life.

My most successful attempt at writing in this long-ago time was a novella about my stirring introduction to a Rome brothel — which I watered down to safety by giving the experience to a character who had nothing to do with me – forgetting that the characters that affected me most strongly in “fiction” were taken straight from the lives of the authors.

Much later, when I was finally bringing myself as fully into my work as I could — which seems to me the duty of any artist whether using images or movement or sound or words — it was the time so many book reviewers and academics, as if heeding the advice of my old college professors, had succeeded in limiting fiction to made-up stories, turning it into something genteel and safe. They now attacked so-called “confessional” real-life writing - to such an extent that I suspected that if the books of Faulkner and Hemingway and Farrell and Wolfe and Fitzgerald — the books that terrified my old professors — were being published today it would be not as fiction but as memoir.

An excerpt from Authentic Writing: the Book, a work in progress.

Fred Poole will be leading an Authentic Writing workshop November 4-6. Click for more info.

 Back to Center Post Contents