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A rumination on the question of why people write — delivered by legendary culture writer Greil Marcus — that took in his personal history, the history of the tail end of World War II, and David Lynch’s classic Blue Velvet proved a moving and thought-provoking start to Yale’s Windham Campbell Festival on Wednesday evening. The festival, which runs Thursday and Friday, celebrates the world of words, centering on this year’s recipients of the Windham Campbell Prizes.
Funded by a gift from Donald Windham and administered by Yale and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes are awarded each year to eight to nine writers working on projects from nonfiction to fiction to drama to poetry, with the idea that the award is large enough that the writers can concentrate on their work for a year without real financial constraints. The first awards were given out in 2013. As of this year, 91 writers have been supported by it. The 2023 recipients — poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, nonfiction author Darren Anderson, poet dg nonouk okpik, playwright Dominique Morrisseau, playwright Jasmine Lee-Jones, novelist Ling Ma, novelist Percival Everett, and nonfiction author Susan Williams — each received $175,000.
On Thursday and Friday, a series of events will celebrate the writers, their works, and the wider world of literature with a series of talks, listening parties, and screenings held across Yale’s campus. All of the events are free and open to the public; visit the festival’s website for a full schedule of events here.
Marcus.
But first, the audience in the nearly packed auditorium of the Yale University Art Gallery on Chapel Street on Wednesday was treated to a talk from Marcus taking on the question of why people write — or more specifically, why he does — that proved that, decades into a writing career that has produced a couple of stone-cold classics, including 1989’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century and 1997’s Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (also known as The Old, Weird America), Marcus is still writing and thinking at the top of the game of culture writing.
Marcus started simply, deceptively so, saying that he writes for fun, for play, and to discover; at its best, he said, it felt as if the writing was coming from someplace else. He quoted Dylan, who described the lyrics to the song “Like a Rolling Stone” as “20 pages of vomit” when he was younger, but as an older man, said “it’s like a ghost is writing a song like that. It gives you the song and then it goes away.” There was the sense of “a genie granting you a wish.” He quoted other entertainers saying the same thing about their own art forms, about the art feeling like it was coming from somewhere else.
Nice sentiment, and true enough. But also, we’ve heard it before, right? Marcus had more up his sleeve.
“Writing is rooted in memory,” he said, and “no one’s translation of life is the same.” He recalled hearing a radio broadcast as a child about a child losing a parent. In hindsight, he said, that broadcast was an “invisible meteorite,” the impact of which reverberated in “an echo chamber” in his mind for years later. Looking back, it was clear why: his own father, Greil Gerstley, had died six months before he was born, in December 1944, when the USS Hull, the ship he was second-in-command of, sank in a typhoon near the Philippines. Marcus mentioned this and moved away from it.
“We all have memories of things we didn’t experience,” he then said. He recalled the memories he constructed as a kid about Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, Ruth because “a great aunt had supposedly slept with” him, and Cobb because he lived in the same town Marcus did (Menlo Park, Ca.) and his friends visited him. The adolescent Marcus never worked up the courage. “What I wouldn’t have given to have more nerve,” Marcus said.
Then he switched to talking about David Lynch’s 1986 masterpiece Blue Velvet, and specifically its opening sequence, which, he said, at first “seems to parody the American fantasy of home … and appliances.” Until the idyll is shattered by a heart attack in the yard, and the camera moving below the earth’s surface into a “charnel house, a secret world” of insects devouring one another. But in Marcus’s assessment it wasn’t parody; rather, it was pointing out “how familiar the familiar really is.” Pushing the point further, he said, it showing just how false the construction of personal memory was.
The opening sequence evokes small-town America, but “nothing in there is specific to anybody,” only an archetype of “the United States.” Blue Velvet was instead tapping into a “common memory,” shaped by popular culture — by books, movies, TV shows, music. It showed that our own memories “are colored, shaped, even determined by the affinities your personal memories have to common memories.”
Having uprooted (quite rightly so) the reliability of our memories, Marcus made his first big move: “If personal memory is false, what happens when you try to construct a memory of something you can’t remember, but desperately want to?”
In a stunning move of vulnerability and self-awareness, Marcus then traced how growing up without his biological father (his mother remarried when he was young), and not being able to learn much at all about him, or how he died, fueled his fascination with “secret histories, stories untold” as a writer. Despite talking to his father’s family members, his father remained a cipher, even as he shared his first name.
“I was left with a name,” Marcus said. “I always had to explain it, but I had nothing to explain.”
He recalled being the subject of an interview in which the interviewer zeroed in on a line he’d written: “Lost children seek their fathers, and fathers seek their lost children.” The interviewer asked Marcus what he’d meant. Marcus waved it away as a rhetorical flourish, when it was “the most autobiographical passage” in the piece.
At the time, he said, “I didn’t want to reveal myself to myself.” Instead, his writing mind revealed him to anyone who read him. And the early questions continued to fuel him. As a child, he had wondered how his life would be different had his father lived. As a journalist, he was as interested in what could have been as what was. “I developed my obsession with the past,” he said. “I used the cultural memory of my past as a spur.”
Decades later, thanks to a documentary and a book about the USS Hull, Marcus did learn what happened to his father. He learned about the series of bad commanding decisions that led the Hull into the typhoon, and about how the crew had pressured his father to start a mutiny, which his father declined. (Novelist Herman Wouk used the what-could-have-been scenario for his book The Caine Mutiny.) He learned about details of his father’s last hours, of being hurt when the ship started tilting, and at last sliding into the open ocean.
“So now I have these facts. I have a story I can tell. I’m telling it now,” Marcus said. But the images in his mind, he knows, are false. They are “no more mine than the images that open Blue Velvet… It’s a story I might remember but don’t.” It’s constructed from “the common memory.”
What was left? he asked. Neurosis. Fixation. Haunting. “I’ve used it all my life.”
He recalled at one point having an opportunity simply to look over all the titles of his books, and realizing that in the words of those titles, like the unrolled plans of a master criminal in a pulp movie, was the code of his life: “invisible,” “secret history,” “traces.” He hadn’t put a lot of thought into those titles at the time. “Those words arrived unbidden,” he said.
And that is why he wrote. Fun. Play. Discover.
I’m amazed at how this review of our local literary awards and festival has sparked so much in me! I’ve never heard of Greil Marcus before- now I’m interested in not only reading his books but also about him, about his father, even watching Blue Velvet which I may or may not have seen. Thank you for reviewing the event and bringing it all to life.