R.I.P. Carol Bly

I’d meant to argue with her more. In our oblique local culture, Carol Bly was direct. I disagreed with her deepest assumptions about politics. She believed that conservatives were not simply wrong, but less evolved than liberals.  (On the other hand, I recently exclaimed, “Awesome! A Gerald Ford stamp!”) But Carol Bly’s insistence that the fiction we create should include politics has led me to think about what including politics in fiction might mean. I don’t think she would agree with the conclusions I’ve come to, that politics is almost always ironic in fiction, that it is undercut by the delusion and self-interest and instability and opacity and forgiveness that fiction explores. (Then again, that might just be the kind of sloppy opining that gives blogs a bad name.)

Her directness helped me in other ways. She was an early supporter of my literary magazine Two Cities, subscribing immediately and writing me notes about what I could do better. She critiqued a story of mine and told me that, if you write one story about someone, you always have to ask, “why this day?” The point may be obvious, but I didn’t know it then and always remember it now. She cared about writing and how it was taught and took on the workshop early.

She was less effective, and less celebrated, than she might otherwise have been because her natural mode was the lecture and to lecture is to condescend and to condescend is, in some small way, to make an enemy. Her weakness was not that she cared but that she seemed to assume that she was the only one who cared. 

Lecturers aren’t good listeners and she had, to my own imperfect ear, a tin ear which made her more personal pieces goofily endearing but which hobbled her more polemical pieces. 

She cared about outstate Minnesota and, in Letters From The Country,  treated seriously what others have treated sentimentally.  I hope this book lasts. The personal essay was her first and best form. The “personal” gave her writing detail and her voice humility. The “essay” honored her directness.   

The start of an essay I had left bookmarked for years until I picked up the book this morning: 

I have been thinking about the positive side of Minnesota blizzards. Another of the blessings is that extended-family occasions come to a halt. Thank goodness. The extended-family dinner is a threat to the pleasure and ease of the American farm family, yet it is hard to say so.

And this, about the small town in rural Minnesota where she lived with Robert Bly:

Before a storm, Madison is full of people excitedly laying in food stocks for the three-day blow. People lay in rather celebratory food, too. Organic-food parents get chocolate for their children; weight watchers lay in macaroni and Sara Lee cakes; recently-converted vegetarians backslide to T-bones. 

Comments

[Joseph]

I read the first sentence of your post and knew exactly what you meant. Carol Bly's view of literature has felt to me both limiting and profound, but her writing has pricked me into ardent consideration of fiction and politics, more so than anyone else's has. Like you, I often can't agree with her, but I need to read writing like hers to help me strive for honesty in literature and in life.

I'm really glad you were able to benefit from her personal attention to your work. It is amazing how much she cared.

[Eric Hansen]

Carol excelled most writing teachers precisely because she did care. She cared generously. She often called or emailed (sometimes both) about a piece I had written for class; this was in addition to a long, typed comment she would pass out at our next meeting. She would email and write comments for in-class exercises, not just major projects. What workshop teacher would give up so much of their own writing time?

Yes, she gave lectures. She had ideas. Carol loved ideas like nobody else I've met, her own ideas and those of others. How many times in a class did she read from a piece of literature (and she counted our work as literature) and say, "That's just marvellous. A marvellous idea." If she said an idea or a piece of work was bad, then she really meant it when she said something was good. God did she take the role of the teacher seriously. She listened to her students' ideas and thought them through. Another Hamline student told me she was sure Carol was the only person on her thesis defense committee who had actually read her work.

Carol lived, taught, and wrote in sharp contrast to what she called "USA junk culture." It's gross how somebody always has to get mean and frothy right after the passing of such an extraordinary figure.

[K]

Wonderful comment, but it's unfair to characterize what I said as either "frothy" or "mean." I deliberated abour what I wrote and never traded accuracy for a joke or a cute phrase and my negative comments were an attempt to honestly assess her contribution.