What If Art Doesn't Matter?
What If Nothing Does?
A few months ago, I posted about the demise of the quarterly Gettysburg Review, a literary journal of the highest caliber, where I was proud to serve as managing editor between 2004-2011. Here, then, is an essay from the final issue:
Editor’s Pages
—Mark Drew, former editor of the Gettysburg Review
Dear Reader,
In case you haven’t heard the news, Gettysburg College has made the regrettable, deeply lamentable decision to cease publishing the Gettysburg Review. You hold in your hands what may well be, likely is, the final issue.
Those of you who have been loyal readers of the Review over its thirty-five year history have, I’m sure, noted some differences between founding editor Peter Stitt’s and my approach to editing. Foremost, perhaps, is the notable absence, after I took over in 2015, of the Editor’s Pages, a forum Peter embraced with enthusiasm, even if some of our readers did not. (Truth be told, even Peter wearied of writing them; his last, a recollection of the Review’s first twenty years, appears in the Spring 2007 issue.) I preferred a more modest approach. I’d rather give those pages over to a story, essay, or poem than offer my opinions on matters literary and otherwise. Which isn’t to say that Peter’s pages weren’t compelling, entertaining, outrageous, and witty. They were often all of that and more. His was a tough act to follow in many ways, and, to be honest, I wasn’t interested in trying to replicate his style, save to continue the magazine’s high standards and tradition for excellence, while also expanding its breadth by including more work from new and underrepresented writers and artists. I’ve always been content to stay behind the scenes, to work with writers, and to let the writing in the magazine speak for itself. But, given what’s happening to the Review, and has happened to other exceptional little literary magazines, I felt the need to offer up some thoughts. When will I have another chance to lament the Review’s passing, to talk about my time here, to say good-bye?
“I’d Like to Thank the Academy . . .”
Almost immediately after Lauren and I were told about the decision to close the Gettysburg Review, I started working on an announcement to post on our website and other social media outlets. I tried corralling some of the thoughts racing through my head about my disbelief, devastation, and heartbreak, but what first made it to the page was, surprisingly, gratitude. My note reads like an Oscar recipient’s thank you speech. I thanked (and still thank) Lauren Hohle for “dedicating five years of her professional life to this publication. I will be ever grateful for her passion, commitment, and intelligence, all of which helped make this already stellar magazine better and made these recent years of budget reduction and staff cuts tolerable.” I went on to remark about my twenty-five years with this journal (Twenty-five years! Oh, that it had been thirty-three and I had seen Lauren take over after my retirement and this beautiful project continue—), noting that “I’ve spent the entirety of my professional literary editing career here, which is truly remarkable, given how precarious the lives of literary magazines are.” Then, I went on to thank Peter, “who gave me my start and believed me worthy of being his successor, and all of the editors I’ve had the pleasure of working with here: Emily Ruark Clarke, Mindy Wilson, Kim Dana Kupperman, Ellen Hathaway, Jess L. Bryant, and, of course, Lauren Hohle.” And, again, my thanks to each of you.
Still the thanking continued: “Thanks as well to the many others who have, in ways small and large, helped to keep this enterprise going, which includes a long list of interns, editorial assistants, and submission readers, in particular, Christopher Kempf and Corey Van Landingham. Thanks to all of the subscribers who supported and read this carefully edited and thoughtfully assembled literary review. And, finally, the biggest thanks of all to our authors. Obviously, without you, none of this would’ve been possible, but I can’t begin to express my gratitude to you for trusting me withyour work. It truly has been a pleasure, even when it wasn’t.” (Writers who’ve suffered my copyediting will understand that last bit.) Soppy as all that thanking and sentiment sounds to me now, weeks past when Lauren and I were told of the Review’s termination and nearing the end of my job, I still mean it. All of it.
Serendipity and a Poem
Rebecca McClanahan came to campus last week. On October 17, to be precise. She read, among other pieces, a new epistolary essay addressed to her dead father, catching him up on the news since his passing. As usual, it was beautifully crafted and heartbreakingly moving, and I sadly won’t be able to publish it in these pages, though Rebecca has graciously contributed a tribute to the Review, which you’ll find toward the end of this issue. Her essay brought to mind a quasi-epistolary poem I wrote back in grad school, prompted by Robin Behn’s suggestion that we write something that scares us. Peter later accepted and published it in the Summer 1995 issue, the first serious publication in my abortive poetic career. (Rebecca’s essay “With My Father in Space-Time” is also in that issue, separated from my poem by two Paul Zimmer poems. Small world.) I recall that I’d been reading about Houdini and discovered that, as a boy in Wisconsin, he swam in the upper reaches of the Fox River, the same river that slowly courses through its eponymous valley in Illinois, passing just down the street from whereI grew up in St. Charles. I fished it often, sometimes wet-wading in cutoffs and an old pair of Chucks, but never swam in it, as it had the reputation of a polluted river, one shot through with sundry agro-industrial poisons. Bike-path walkers would frequently marvel at my folly, warning me about the risks of wading in that dirty river, asking if I’d caught anything besides an infection, and if I had, whether it had three eyes. I took that bit of serendipity, Houdini and I having stepped into the same river, as permission to write about him . . . really to take on his voice, which I put in the guise of my dead father, using it, in an act of macabre ventriloquism, to make a man I couldn’t, still cannot, remember, speak, and speak specifically to me.
Since there are no digital copies of the issue in which it appears, and two physical copies left in our archives, which are destined for Musselman Library, I’m only somewhat gratuitously republishing it here. What you should know context-wise is that my father was killed in a car accident in February of 1968, when I was a year and eight months old. He was a passenger in a car driven by a work friend who decided to pass blindly a slow moving vehicle, a stupid decision that resulted in a tragic loss. Here’s the poem:
My Father as Houdini
1. The Car Wreck Challenge
Pinioned and fluttering,
I breathe gasoline and antifreeze.
I leak blood. My teeth are lost
among the cubes of safety glass
spangling the dash. A crowd gathers.
Where are my assistants? Slender vapor wisps
from the buckled hood, accumulates
about the car and Poof!
I’m gone.
2. The Death Trick
I’m not supposed to die. No one is.
Everyone wants me to come back;
you want me to come back.
I’m not promising anything,
but think of my body full of preservatives,
think of the shelf life of the soul.
With the right audience, anything is possible
if you just know the trick.
Watch me pull these words from your mouth
like a knotted skein of parti-colored hankies
my mother, your mother, and her mother weep into
at my death.
3. Metamorphosis
Larval, straight-jacketed,
my ankles bound and slung from a hook,
I dangle over you like a nightmare and writhe.
Encased in a coffin of water and glass, I squirm,
mouthing secrets so you won’t turn away.
I’m a ghost shackled in your mouth,
I’m a face hung in a hallway.
I insinuate myself into you.
I’ve always known how to keep an audience.
4. The Show Must Go On
Kid, we live
from deception to deception.
You keep me on stage.
My final trick?
Look at me and I’ll live forever;
turn away and we’ll both disappear.
Whatever this poem may reveal about melancholia, or obsessive and arrested mourning, or unresolved trauma, I leave to others to formulate, but for me it was, and to an extent continues to be, a breakthrough that resolves into a trap, a frozen moment in which two intimate strangers engage in a desperate but cruel staring contest, the one in the beyond daring the other in the poem’s present to risk his existence by turning away.
I offer all this not to justify shamelessly reprinting my poem, but to explain the loss that I feel, that I’m feeling, that I will continue to feel at the death of the Gettysburg Review, not to mention the haunting regret.
Yes, the circumstances are different, but the emotions uncannily similar. I offer this also as testament to the difficulty I have that I’m having saying good-bye.
The New York Times Article
The first (and to date only) major media outlet to reach out to Lauren and me about the Gettysburg Review’s demise was the New York Times, which surprised and excited us. The buzz created by the social media storm had apparently caught its attention. We talked with the journalist for nearly an hour, detailing what had happened. The article appeared today, Friday November 3, and I confess to feeling tremendously let down. I’d hoped it would reach a wider audience ofpotential sympathizers perhaps even someone who could engineer an eleventh-hour rescue. Foolish, I know, but it’s proving quite hard to accept that this is over.
The article is mostly about cuts to the humanities at state and private higher ed institutions alike, many of them rationalized by fiscal shortfalls, but also by the pressures they are under to show students, parents, potential donors, and politicians (with their not-so-hidden agendas) a “return on investment,” presumably in the form of a remunerative job for every student immediately upon graduation. I love this quotation from the Mississippi state auditor, Shad White, who was given too large a presence in the article if you ask me: “Are we paying or using taxpayer money to fund programs that teach the professor’s ideology, and not just a set of skills on how to approach problems in the world?” The set of skills that students desperately need are those that expose and parse the reactionary presumptions informing Mr. White’s alleged “pragmatism.”
Shoe-horned about two-thirds of the way into the article is the news of the Review’s shuttering. The journalist refers to us as “collateral damage,” then goes on to offer a random quote from me, something said more off-the-cuff than on-the-record, and ends with a reiteration of the reasons for the magazine’s closing, with which it’s fair to say I disagree. But this is not the space to litigate that disagreement, other than to say that, more foolish than hoping for a last-minute rescue, I suppose, is believing that the value of a college education, or art, or literature can transcend considerations of capital in a capitalist society. We in the arts can pretend this for only so long, and at our own peril.
Last Things
It’s Sunday, November 12, and I’m in my office trying to bring my thoughts and these pages to a meaningful close. Lauren and I are in the process of orally proofreading the contents for the final issue. To those who may be unfamiliar, this is when we check copyedited and author-approved manuscripts against typeset copy by reading each piece aloud, including punctuation. It’s one of the last things we do to ferret and fix errors.
“Art is the mattering of life. It is the cool shade between work and sleep, and we can find it every day.”
—Sean Bernard
Sometime last week, as we were proofing a new story by Leslie Pietrzyk, I read out these sentences, thoughts that flash through the head of her protagonist, an art student trying to be an artist in New York City in the 1980s: “What if art didn’t matter? What if nothing did?” Serendipity again. Or, perhaps more precisely, synchronicity. Either way, my heart went straight to my throat. This moment in Leslie’s story along with all that’s been happening with the Review, not to mention all the other horrors taking place in the world that make the Review’s peril seem so small...it was too much. I almost said something to Lauren but stood up instead, feigning the need to stretch my legs. I walked the short distance from her office to mine, maybe fifteen steps, thinking of the last things I’ve been doing for the last time: the last slush read, the last rejection, the last acceptance, the last copyedit, the last chat with Albert and Margaret over changes, the last oral proofreading. In the coming weeks, the last reading the Review will host, the last ordering of contents, the last drive to Hanover to pick up office copies, the last thrill of opening a box to see, hold, and smell the new issue.
What if art doesn’t matter? What if nothing does?
I don’t want to give in to cynicism in these deeply cynical times, but, when you’re witnessing the death of something you love, it’s difficult to keep faith. What do I tell our current interns when they ask similar questions? What do I tell myself?
The Letters and a Letter
Lauren was spot on when she said, as the letters poured in celebrating the Gettysburg Review and pre-mourning its loss, that it’s like witnessing one’s own funeral. Contributors, submitters, subscribers, former interns, other literary magazine editors, and complete strangers alike have written us, and although their words haven’t changed the fate of the Review, they’ve buoyed Lauren and me. As much as I’d like to quote from and comment on them all, I’m running out of space and, sadly, time. A true deadline looms.
But I’d like to preserve some of one letter here, in my first and last Editor’s Pages. It’s penned by Sean Bernard, the author of three clever, offbeat, and incredibly moving stories that debuted in issues of the Gettysburg Review. He takes a more oblique route in his argument for supporting intellectual and artistic endeavors like the Review.
Two days ago I had a conversation with students. Like many at your college, these two are exceptional undergraduates. We were talking about our anxieties, as lately they had been having a hard time of it, medications, the future, family and loved ones, all of it so terribly shaky. One shared that his ongoing anxiety of late is this: he worries that while he’s sleeping, in the middle of the night, another planet will crash into ours, and that’s how existence will end for us. For all humankind. In the night, while sleeping. The other student laughed, but not in a mean way; I think because the thought surprised her; the sound of her laughter was so lovely. She said, very gently, “Why be afraid of that? You’ll be sleeping!” To which the other student blurted, “Because then none of it will matter.”
Every morning I am sure that you . . . get up, as I do, as we all do, still feeling tired. We are pressed in by so many things. We go to our work that nowadays reaches its fingers into our lives far away from the office, seemingly all hours of the day. We are always working, always trying to solve the pressing problems, to make the right decision now so that tomorrow will be maybe a little brighter or at least not so much duller compared to today. Sometimes we manage to sleep okay. Even when we get a break from work, there are more chores to do—housework, family, all the other burdens, mundane and important both. This is the work of life. It’s the work we all do.
Some are lucky enough to take breaks, to travel, go on vacation. But for those who can’t, or for all of us, when we don’t have the time and money to leave off from the work of our lives: what is there?
There is art. Art is the mattering of life. It is the cool shade between work and sleep, and we can find it every day. It is the solemn space where any of us may sit for a while, even just for the briefest moment. Where we can quietly step outside ourselves and think, Look at what other people have accomplished. Look at this beautiful thing. We are a part of an ongoing story, a civilization, a species, and art is the thing that connects us. We shiver before the terracotta army. We feel wordless joy before a Botero portrait. We hear a song by the Rolling Stones and the rebel in us surges. Or we read a poem by James Tate and think, This is it, this is the truth, the beauty, the pain.
Right now a small spacecraft tumbles through the universe, a human beacon for other species, our message to the rest of existence. It carries within it art.
To support your literary journal is to support the beauty and meaning of art—to say to the people in your community, to the students and employees at your school past, present, and future—to say even to yourselves that art matters. Even if something large and dark comes crashing into us while we sleep, there is beautiful meaning in our lives, gathered and illuminated by artists for us all to share and to feel across space and time.
Thank you, Sean, for this letter, which helped me stave off many moments of despair that have beset me over the past month and a half. Regrettable as the loss of the Gettysburg Review is, it is done. There’s little left for me to say, other than thank you again to all who supported us over the years, and, finally, good-bye.
This is a very moving piece, an essay that tells an important story and richly expands the genre.