A South Orange County Disease

Posted on November 22, 2004 in The Orange Writing Groups

About a year ago at this time, I was in my last days of participating in a read and critique group. A year later, I look at that experience and realize what was wrong. In some ways, I hinted at the problem: a lack of self examination and humor when it came to one’s own limits. When this group of people wrote about themselves, they did so in a very glowing light. There was no self-questioning of the values that guided them and plenty of denial about their bodies and their motives for doing things. It was the 1950s — not as it was lived, but as it appeared on television: mom in the kitchen happily cooking the meals and Dad smoking a pipe after a hard day at the office. All intentions were pure and honest.

Another common theme — which they universally proclaimed to be “brilliant” were the stories they wrote about the working class and the poor. These all seemed to be junkies and criminals who never got the message.

Now consider the social class of the writers in question: middle to upper class, involved in sales and teaching professions or retired to some of the new luxury communities. These people never write about people like them except in a nostalgic vein. To write as they write about the “others” would demand that they face the uncomfortable in themselves, the questions that Baudelaire brought to poetry and short prose in The Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen, namely where is the ugliness? Out there or in me? What happens to others because I choose to live like this? In what ways do I perpetrate violence and suffering on others? In what ways, am I an addict or otherwise misguided?

It is a South Orange County disease. Those of us who have descended into or lived close to the poverty line know how they caricature rather than capture the anxiety of the underclass. I might have stayed if there had been an Edith Wharton or a Henry James among them, but there wasn’t. For these, the world of the poor is entirely a criminal one and they masturbate in words about it, all the while avoiding turning the pen towards themselves. They fear that once they stain their clean white shirts, they can never again get them out. And that, I dare say, is the point of good writing.