Few experiences are more humbling for an author, not to say
humiliating, than coming across one’s early work. Fortunately, very
little of mine exists prior to 1999. What output I had before then
appeared in long defunct college literary magazines, or was
archived on obsolete floppy discs that have long since been
recycled, along with my notebooks, diaries, and all other evidence
of a premature writer’s life.
Then came the Internet.
At first blush, the Net seemed like a boon and a blessing.
Budding Shakespeares could — in the time it used to take to lick a
stamp — deposit their brilliant submissions in the inboxes of
anticipative magazine editors. None of this ten or twelve drafts
nonsense. You typed out a rant or a bit of verse, hit send, and you
could knock off for the day. Sometimes these slapdash pieces were
even published. Online, that is. The more naïve among us took this
as vindication of our prodigious talent. It wasn’t until decades
passed, and our skills and judgment had somewhat matured, that we
realized how badly we had misjudged our abilities, to say nothing
of the critical faculties of the editors.
In the pre-Internet era, there were countless literary,
political or news magazines, most of them of consistently high
quality. If a young author published a piece in, say, Three
Penny Review or Politics, it meant it was a pretty
good effort. Maybe not Pulitzer-Prize worthy, but certainly nothing
to be ashamed of.
At the other end of the spectrum were the so-called
‘zines, often slapped together by one or two unemployed English
majors on the public library’s Xerox machine. Few of these
publications lasted beyond a year. And, like an old bachelor, when
they passed into oblivion, they left no trace of their
existence.
Then came the Internet and its myriad third-rate webzines.
Today, any dreamer with a Macintosh can start an online magazine,
and often does. The only barrier to some enterprising Harold Ross
wannabe is the suffering he will have to endure reading thousands
of hopeless manuscripts. When I was starting out, I published a lot
of dreck on these sites. And a lot of it is still out there,
haunting me. (Or should I say taunting me?) Unless the website goes
offline for some reason, these stories can remain live for
generations, serving as a constant reminder of one’s humble, not to
say, inept beginnings. I keep praying these sites will become
defunct, but for some reason, despite their awfulness, they
stubbornly hang on in cyberspace, while much better sites (remember
Feed and Suck?) have gone the way of the broadsheet.
TO BE SURE, there are some authors whose early writings
are master works of prose, who seem to spring fully formed like
Greek demigods on the page. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud was so
good out of the gate he stopped writing at 21, no doubt thinking,
“Been there, done that,” in today’s un-Rimbauvian parlance. But we
late-bloomers can do little but pray our cruder stuff ends up at
the butt-end of any Google search.
It does no good to try to get the stuff removed. I’ve
asked editors to take down some of my more crude early writing, and
they inevitably refuse. If they published such dross in the first
place, they probably think it is worth preserving. “I still like
it,” they tend to say. “I think we’ll leave it up.”
I am reminded of an essay by the cantankerous Edmund
Wilson titled “Thoughts on Being Bibliographed.” What did
Wilson think of the honor? Not much. He would have preferred his
trivial early work be left buried and forgotten, not drudged up and
placed on display for all posterity. Wrote
Wilson:
My scholarly instincts were tempted as well as my literary
vanity, and I have ended by scraping up items of nauseating
puerilia and insignificant reviews and paragraphs which the Library
might never have found for itself and which might better perhaps
have been left unidentified…
Late in life, H.L. Mencken had second thoughts about the art of
poetry. He decided the form was no medium for grown men. Mencken
was so embarrassed by his first book, a collection of poems called
Ventures Into Verse, he attempted to buy up (and destroy)
all of the copies of the book he could find.
He must have missed one. Today, Ventures Into
Verse is available for all to see — on the
Internet, of course. Actually, the poems aren’t too bad.
Compared to mine, anyway.
