The Literary Genius
That Could Be Anyone
There is too much bull on the rungs of the ladder of success.
Current statistical studies certainly support the 'Stagnant Class Circulation' thesis. Yes, a few ordinary people do win the lottery, and a few ordinary people become successful, or rich and famous, if you like, due to a combination of virtue and luck. But most people stay where they "belong," and that is wasteful given their untapped talents and abilities. And that’s not because they don’t try to get ahead.
Virtual petrifaction of people within the social strata has been obvious to the man and woman in the street for countless years, especially if he happens to be an unemployed literary genius in a city calling for creative revitalization but which presently has no positions open in his field, or anything else for him to do for that matter.
Diane Stafford, Business and Workplace columnist for The Kansas City Star, writes that laid-off employees should reinvent themselves and become self-employed entrepreneurs. When she heard that "one of the greatest writers in the country, whose intelligence is really scary," namely me, was seeking work at her newspaper, she overlooked an apparent delusion of grandeur, and replied, "I have no specific knowledge of any relevant openings, but I know for sure that daily newspapers aren't promising."
She can say that again. Anyway, she is a very helpful person: she suggested that Yours Truly, one of the greatest writers in the country, the greatest writer the world will ever or never know, approach monthlies and weeklies.
Tony Ortega, managing editor of Village Voice’s ‘The Pitch,’ Kansas City's popular sidewalk rag, best known for its excellent entertainment reviews, counter-cultural critiques, Ortega's screwball opinions, and interminably corkscrewed articles about irrelevant subjects, thought I was suffering from delusions and told me so. Ortega had just received my plea for literary employment, accompanied by a free sample of the my ‘Man on the Street’ dialogues and several of my typically brilliant and provocative essays on controversial subjects.
Ortega said I was hardly great; that the dialogue was contrived; that the essays were interminable screeds. They were not his cup of tea, so do not expect his business. Furthermore, he advised me that one has to play the ropes: a writer has to painstakingly move up the ladder, rung by rung, to get a column somewhere. An aspirant cannot just walk onto the set and take the anchor man's seat; et cetera in about 800 words. He advised me, the greatest author the world will ever or never know. to drop the dialogue and write about what was really going on in Kansas City; that is, about the truth. Alas, however, the niche occupied by The Pitch does not have much room for the absolute, unmitigated truth, and each rung of the ladder is covered with bull.
Wherefore many excellent writers, many of whom are better writers than those who are secure in their air-conditioned offices and seldom walk the streets for stories, call themselves "freelance writers." All too often, that means they are unemployed, perhaps desperately so, for artists are prone to sacrificing their lives for their art even if they cannot land a job in their preferred field.
Such a plight should remind the discriminating Midwestern reader of Eugene in Theodore Dreiser's The ‘Genius.’ Dreiser's protagonist was a painter made in the author's image. He had failed to sell sufficient art or get an art directorship to secure his living. He was almost at the end of his economic rope, wherefore he sought a position doing something else, anything at all, just to get by. Of course he had an innate feeling of superiority or over-qualification when he considered others standing in job lines. One noticed his lofty demeanor:
"Look what wants to be a clerk," one applicant remarked.
Eugene became so depressed that he stopped filling out applications when he got to the heads of job lines. He simply stood in the lines and observed, with horror, the grinding of the wheel of fortune.
"It was a horrible picture to him in his present condition. It was like the grinding of millstones, upper and nether. These were the chaff. He was part of the chaff at present, or in danger of becoming so. Life was winnowing him out. He might go down, down, and there might never be an opportunity for him to rise any more.
"Few, if any of us, understand thoroughly the nature of the unconscious stratification which takes place in life, the layers and types and classes into which it assorts itself and the barriers which these offer to a free migration of the individuals from one class to another. We take on naturally the material habiliments of our temperaments, necessities and opportunities.... He found that he was naturally barred by temperament from some things, from others by strength and weight, or rather the lack of them; from others by inexperience; from others by age; and so on. And those who were different from him in any and all of those respects were inclined to look at him askance. 'You are not as we are,' their eyes seemed to say; 'why did you come here?' "
Oh, what a shame, what a shame it is that I know exactly how Eugene feels. I was appalled the other day by yet another of Ms. Stafford's illuminating HR articles, one about the expectations of the Hallmark Card’s human resources director she interviewed. The director said anyone applying for a job at the card company had better do their homework, had better research the company and know exactly what they want to do for the company before bothering to apply for a job. By the way, there was only one job opening that week, running a card-folding machine.
Still, if it were not for Ms. Stafford's article, Jessica Flint, who has a Masters degree in English and who writes charming little poems she has been unable to sell to Hallmark, would not have revised her resume and gotten the card-folding job the next week.
We are all familiar with the results of strict adherence to the qualification process. Credentials can be a good thing, but they can also be a curse. Dreiser, for instance, did know exactly what he wanted to do: he wanted to be a newspaper reporter and to rub shoulders with important people. He could not complete a sentence, yet he pestered an editor until he got a writing job, and eventually became a foremost pioneer of realism—called naturalism or sensationalism at the time.
And we know about a certain fellow who graduated from high school, got his bachelor's degree, learned how to write according to a certain formula, and got hired by the Kansas City Star. He has held the job for some time now, but he cannot do the job nearly as well as any number of persons who do not formally qualify to do that sort of job—brilliant authors. He is generally regarded by his fellow journalists as "kinda stupid," but he is a nice guy, and many readers like his column because he has a "positive mental attitude" about what the authorities want to do with the taxpayers' money, like build a new printing plant for the Star as part of the latest downtown revitalization program.
A few rapidly growing, progressive-minded companies during the dotcom craze took a somewhat different approach. Applicants on the whole did not apply for particular jobs: They were given a battery of tests for occupation preference. One questionnaire included such questions as, "Do you turn around when you get off the toilet and look at your stool?" If hired, they were trained and routed to the appropriate positions; sometimes positions were tailor-made for them. Alas, the companies went bust in the dotcom crash. But I think their creative approach, hiring human beings for jobs they can do best and want to do, instead of fitting pegs into holes, should be further explored by large companies, especially large newspaper and magazine companies.
But what do I know? I am not a human resources expert. Maybe that card-folding job is open again—I hear they have a high turnover in the card business.
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Kansas City, Missouri 2003