Writing the Conservative Mind

On novels and interiority

The craft of writing fiction, and the novel in particular, matters because there is so little room for interiority in our tech-addled, hyper-politicized, and culturally-suspect moment. In red-blue politics, ambiguity is not prioritized; it is, more often than not, outright demonized. Every recent presidential election, it seems, is waged on apocalyptic terrain. Either democracy falls and fascism is ascendant, or the Democrats will let criminals ravage every American city and town, immigrants stealing all the jobs and unleashing a second Great Depression for the native-born. Art itself is weaponized for either end. Liberals grow suspect of what cannot be easily categorized and commodified for the great clashes with conservatives, and right-wingers, with few exceptions, devolve into overt anti-intellectualism, or celebrate men—J.D. Vance’s favored pundit, Curtis Yarvin, comes to mind—who rarely think deeply beyond how they might antagonize college-educated liberals. Vance himself is what passes for an American politician-intellectual because it was a physical book that launched his career. Vance has not published anything since Hillbilly Elegy in 2016; his preferred communication mode is the podcast, which has done tangible damage to the ticket he’s occupying with Donald Trump. Regardless of whether Vance is elected the next vice president, we are long removed from the moment when the leader of the conservative movement could closely read novels and interview their practitioners on television. In 1985, a 59-year-old William F. Buckley was curious enough about the state of contemporary fiction to invite Bret Easton Ellis and Fernanda Eberstadt on Firing Line, where he probed them on the particularities of their debut novels. Joining him was a prominent literary critic from The Nation, which espoused a liberal and leftist politics otherwise anathema to Buckley’s conservatism.

Those immersed in politics or cultural war can’t tolerate the novel because they aren’t sure what, exactly, it does for them. Sure, there are examples like Uncle Tom’s Cabin that seemed to spur political change, but these are few and far between. Literary fiction cannot elect a Democrat or a Republican, or even offer much grist for the stump. The best novels, even those that have been overly simplified through canonization, do not advertise themselves so easily—not as readily, at least, as a thirty-second campaign hit. Or, if there are a discernible politics and the politicized critic doesn’t find them sufficient, the work is dismissed. Reading the leftist writer Malcolm Harris’ Palo Alto, I was struck by his clear disdain for Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest. Kesey first found success as one of the great high school wrestlers in Oregon history, and later took graduate classes at Stanford with Wallace Stegner, the acclaimed novelist of the West. An early proponent of LSD after being subjected to CIA-financed studies at a Bay Area veterans’ hospital, Kesey became a champion of the nascent counterculture—he clashed bitterly with Stegner, who did not know what to make of the bohemian roughneck—and found fame, after publishing Cuckoo’s Nest, for traveling across the nation with his Merry Pranksters in a psychedelic school bus. (Stegner and Kesey, for the record, were literary equals; Angle of Repose is among the finest novels I’ve ever read.) The image of Kesey as the acid-brained, day-glowed pied piper of the hippies was hardened by Tom Wolfe’s account in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. For Harris, who in Palo Alto writes on Silicon Valley’s corrosive and exploitative history, Kesey’s actual novels mean little except as emblems of an empty, individualistic politics, one not attuned to the vital causes of his day. “You have the case of the anti-war protesters who invited Ken Kesey to address a crowd; they had this idea that the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, “Acid Test” guy was going against the war in Vietnam,” Harris said in an interview with The Nation. “But he didn’t speak to that at all, and instead thought the anti-war people were obnoxious, which I think is stupid. Kesey was politically naive and represented the worst of that sort of hippie thought.”

Kesey believed in a revolution of individual consciousness that would be divorced from the outcome of political decisions; he thought, through LSD, new paths of perception were possible which could, over the decades, change America for the better. This might have been solipsistic or “naive” in Harris’ telling but Kesey was never going to be a conventional progressive political activist. He was, at his core, an artist, and his first two novels, published before he turned thirty, belong high up in the American literary canon. Cuckoo’s Nest certainly got there—thanks to its inclusion in high school curriculums and the Jack Nicholson film, it has long outlived the Kesey mythos, and will remain in print as long as physical books exist. Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, polarized critics upon its release in 1964. The novel, a staggering feat of psychic and lingual ambition, tells the tale of a belligerent logging clan in Oregon, and could be read, in the narrowest and most banal sense, as a withering critique of labor unions. It is, of course, much more than that, and Kesey himself had no public opposition to organized labor. Sometimes a Great Notion is a Faulknerian family saga, penned under the spell of Absalom, Absalom!, and it remains one of my foundational texts, what convinced me, in my late teen years, to pursue a path of literature, if only to somehow approach what is, at its finest, a work of shaggy, unrestrained genius. And the novel lives, thoroughly, inside of its characters, whether it’s Leland, the bookish, effete Stamper returned from the East or his older half-brother, Hank, whose bellicose individualism and defiance of a local logging strike threatens to unravel his own family. None of it is easily distilled, certainly not for a political protest or rally of the likes Kesey probably never belonged at in the first place.

I have written a novel from the perspective of a character thoroughly unlike myself: a powerful pastor and trailer park slumlord who lives in a small rural town in the Midwest. I hope to sell the novel this year and have it see the light of day sometime two years from now; that’s the pace of publishing, one I barely accept, but all I can do is nod along and do my best. The voice of the protagonist, Pastor Teddy Starr, was inspired by Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, who narrates a series of novels set chiefly in suburban New Jersey from the 1980s to the 2020s. Bascombe, a sportswriter who becomes a real estate agent, is reflexively liberal and his landlording is not so exploitative. He’s rambling, exquisitely verbose, and the novels carry John Updike’s adjectival flourishes and a greater, and welcome, heaping of humor. Independence Day, which won Ford a Pulitzer, spends dozens of pages on Bascombe’s peculiar odyssey with a fickle older couple trying to purchase a house. In my own novel, I imagined a Bascombe for the pulpit, and one with a darker edge; Pastor Teddy Starr has a secret, and he’ll do just about anything to keep it.

The joy of writing is inhabiting a character and a world of your own invention, even if it’s dug out from reality—it’s your New York, your New Jersey, your Midwest. It conforms to your own laws. And, in writing, you trust the reader to understand that a novel isn’t an instruction manual or an ideological screed, or shouldn’t be one, anyway. I, as an individual residing in New York who writes essays and commentary from a left perspective, am free to roam through the mind of a Trump-backing denizen of a small Michigan town. And the Trump-supporting Midwestern novelist is free to inhabit the mindspace of a New Yorker. The novel form should be predicated on this: the ultimate freedom to imagine and create, to commune with whatever forces prove most meaningful to the writer. The tide, at the minimum, does seem to be turning toward this viewpoint. In the 2010s and 2020, when art was conscripted into the performative fight against Trump’s performative fascism, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen’s dictum that “Trump destroyed the ability of white writers to dwell in the apolitical” carried the day. “Everyone had to make a choice, especially in the face of a pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, both of which brought the life-or-death costs of systemic racism and economic inequality into painful focus,” he wrote in the New York Times the end of 2020, shortly before Joe Biden’s election. “But in 2021, will writers, especially white writers, take a deep breath of relief and retreat back to the politics of the apolitical, which is to say a retreat back to white privilege?”

A belated rejoinder arrived this week from Phil Klay, a novelist and short story writer who won a National Book Award. Klay, also writing in the Times—one of the final macrocultural publications in America that carries the weight to host these kinds of debates—said out loud what some in the literary community were too terrified to even mutter privately for the last decade: artists and activists aren’t one in the same, and probably shouldn’t be. Klay is a liberal in good standing, but he can write a line like this: “Ideology is a butcher of reality, severing the muscle from bone, discarding the unsightly and inedible and delivering neatly wrapped, digestible steaks to its consumers.” He proceeds to remind some of the philistines reading—yes, you can be dreadfully middlebrow even as you consume a prestigious publication—that right-wingers and fascists like Ezra Pound, Wiliam Butler Yeats, Louis-Fernand Céline, Wyndham Lewis, and Knut Hamsun produced some of the world’s great literature. As did plenty of leftists. Art makes lousy political propaganda anyway—if you want to make policy change and elect a few more Democrats/Republicans to higher office, leave alone literature and cinema and music and stop trying to forcefully mangle the minds of artists who are, with very few exceptions, mediocre and ineffective political thinkers. If you want, so badly, run for office yourself—Nguyen, for a quick minute, sounds like a tedious candidate for Congress—go ahead and try to make your mark. Gore Vidal did, Norman Mailer did, and I did. Unlike the latter two, I was grateful to lose, and now draw far more comfort in the psychic landscape of the soul, and what art might emerge from it if I am joyfully laboring. The metric for success in politics is winning, and there’s no equivalent in literature, even when awards come into play. Did you win the seat? Did you secure the majority? Did you pass the bill? Art, thankfully, is far more fraught and nebulous and ultimately glorious, and operates on a time-scale that is incomprehensible to the political mind. There is no electoral cycle for the novel. This season of politics, or any season, means little against literature—or literature, at least, that’s meaningful.

As someone who writes on politics in a fashion that I hope is not overly trite or dull, I am always struck by the writers who badly want to do politics, who want to feel they are, as Teddy Roosevelt once brayed, “in the arena.” They must know their novels and poetry won’t, on their own, fulfill their political goals. They might feel politicized literature brings them closer or assuages their consciences. Or, they rightly perceive a value in speaking out, in lending their voice or platform to a cause. Fair enough! The world requires more earnestness, not less. But then there are those who have no political maturity of their own, who think in slogans and memes and fret often about their peers, their career, or their social standing. They see a Pulitzer Prize-winner like Ngyuen slash his line in the sand and they rush to make sure they are right behind it. They quake at the thought of having politics that are outré and so they hurry to whatever might be celebrated in the moment and forget about it soon after. One week, it’s Ukraine. Another, it’s Defunding the Police. And then maybe Palestine. The conservatives can snicker at all this, but they’ve yet to inculcate any literary culture to match the contemporary left’s. Rather than attempt to build, through novels and plays and poetry, their genuine counterculture, they whine about how mean the liberals are, and pray to their anti-woke gods for deliverance. Perhaps that is all too glib. But it’s what’s been coursing through me of late. I want to get back to writing fiction soon. That’s where freedom lies.