In the literary community, we are obsessed with the old masters. Who they were, who they knew, who they loved, what they did. The days before the rise of the film as a viable alternative—and to some, a serious threat—to the written word are heralded as the golden age: it was and is known to many as modernism, and flows on to the beginning of post modernism. I speak not having read vast papers on the subject, but through observation and osmosis.

The periods that seem most loved by American literati seem to fall mostly between 1800 and 1950, with foci on the English writers of the 1800s, the modernist movement, and Hemmingway. The masters with which I am most familiar fall in the latter categories, modernism and Hemmingway. As much as they are studied, I often wonder how much they’re really understood.

It’s a very different thing looking back. Looking back, what was made in the 1920s is old, and all works from this period are classics. Classics are stories which have influenced many and have been read by legions. Classics seep into culture, and become institutions.

But to understand the masters, we cannot look at them through the lens of history. The lens of history turns men into historical figures. Historical figures are distorted versions of men. Specifically in this case, it can be easily forgotten that these were not people who were making classics. These were people who were searching for the cutting edge.

They did not do what was old, what was safe. They did not write with the respect of the world. Rather, they earned the respect of the world gradually, over great time, through what they wrote.

To understand the difference, we must look at the forgotten writers. My best example of a forgotten writer is one who is paradoxically remembered, though for the life of me I don’t know why. He SHOULD be forgotten, and yet we are often forced to read him during the purgatory of high school. His name is James Fenimore Cooper, and he wrote Last of the Mohicans, among other stories. He was wildly popular, and perhaps this is from where his lasting fame comes.

I can only refer to him as the Jerry Bruckheimer of his day.

The last of the Mohicans was nothing more than the literary equivalent of a blockbuster. The prose had no luster or interest. The story followed the exploits of a scout and to “noble savages” seeking to save beautiful maidens from “vile savages.” There is no attempt in the novel to be factual, consistent, or, really, artistic. If you don’t believe me, ask Mark Twain.

You can read what he had to say about Last of the Mohicans by clicking here–http://users.telerama.com/~joseph/cooper/cooper.html — To an article in which one can sense the annoyance and confusion of an actual writer as he ponders the fact that a hack such as Fenimore Cooler managed to be considered so good by his audience. I recommend it, it’s actually very funny. Here’s how he opens:

It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature at Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper.

Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in “Deerslayer,” and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

This is probably the most kind section of the whole article, by the way.

Can anyone say: Tom Clancy? Thomas Harris? (That’s the unskilled author of “Hannibal”) It’s the exact same thing today. For god sakes, and I know because during a quite dreary period I was reduced to reading it, Hannibal’s “plot” featured a villain who planned to exterminate his enemies using a breed of vicious man-eating pigs he raised especially for that purpose. That’s right. Man. Eating. Pigs. I think this was supposed to inspire fear and suspense, but it may have been one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read.

And they made it into a film. For the love of god, man eating pigs.

Who is popular now, as well as the majority of writers, are not likely to have any focus in history, because we don’t remember those who followed convention, as the vast majority of instantaneously popular authors do. We remember those who created conventions, and they were almost always embraced only in the community of artists, if even that, at least for a long time.

Hemmingway writes of hunger, extensively, in “A Movable Feast.” He says that one shouldn’t even look at the great French impressionists’ work unless one is hungry.

Why? Because the painters were hungry, that’s why, hungry in a way that became a way of life. Because their paintings weren’t selling. And Hemmingway knew this because he was hungry too.

People were reading James Fennimore Cooper, and people were reading dime novels, books with western settings about romantic outlaws and noble sheriffs. Hemingway, a future icon, was building a body of work.

It took Joyce over ten years to get a publisher for Ulysses. If there ever was an old master, it was Joyce, and no one would even print him. Why? He rewrote the rules. He had, for example, extensive scenes that took place in bathrooms while the protagonists were defecating. This was simply not done. I won’t even get into his crazy prose.

To those stuck gazing backwards at the historical ideal of an author, reinventing the rules is synonymous with breaking them.

(Please note, Cooper wasn’t good enough to reinvent the rules. In my view Twain is correct in his opinion that Cooper just broke them, not out of intent but because he lacked basic skill.)

And this is what gets lost in history: the writing we venerate as classical was not at all classical. It was cutting edge. Avante garde. Way out. Unappreciated, in many cases, unnoticed, undistributed. These people suffered in their youths, worked day jobs (a collection was taken by Hemmingway and others to get T. S. Elliott out of an life as a bank employee) and often died broke, perhaps after achieving notoriety, perhaps not. These people wrote poems in their bedrooms and never went outside. These people longed for the attention of a world they felt should have loved them, and often didn’t get it until they were in the ground and perhaps another life.

The old masters were young masters first.

They bucked convention, which means they disregarded the styles of THEIR old masters, instead searching for their own. The Zen Buddhists have a saying, which I have heard at two intensities: 1) if you see the Buddha walking down the road, run away; 2) if you see the Buddha walking down the road, kill him.

It seems a paradoxical statement, and it is. But with enough thought, as with all Zen koans, it opens like a flower.

The way to enlightenment cannot lie through another. The Buddha must be ignored, once his teaching are understood, because to follow the Buddha past a point is to forever lock yourself in an inauthentic journey. And the old masters must also be ignored, as they ignored the masters before them, once their lessons are understood. Because mastery is a solitary journey. It cannot follow in another’s footsteps. We’d all do well to remember this, in my strange little world.

What I’m trying to say is, we literary types need to focus on today.

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