Collaborating with the Sphinx

Collaborating with the Sphinx:On Strom James R. Kincaid (bio) I find myself peculiarly placed to address the issue at hand, whatever that may be, since both the creative (certainly) and the scholarly (even) are so often personalized, made a matter of temperament or capacity. You know. Sam Johnson is a terrific critic (The Lives of the Poets) and an indifferent creative writer (Irene); Wordsworth is just the opposite, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," as Northrop Frye says, being no more than a C- commentary on the poems. Some got one ability, some the other. Many, of course, have neither, which in a post-Romantic culture, allows the critic/scholar to hold onto some shred of self-respect. For usually critics and scholars are looked upon as sad or ridiculous or annoying wannabe creative writers. This allows creative writers, who have almost no cultural relevance that anyone can see, to evade that fact by exercising the skill that seems always to lie readiest to hand, sneering. Not so much a skill as an indulgence masking as a responsibility. As a pleasure. Perhaps it is the only pleasure allowed them; perhaps it is simply part of the costume of the creative. Critics sneer too, but mostly at one another and at easy cultural targets, not at creative writers. People who have been assigned important work by their culture never sneer: merchant bankers, basketball players, criminals, underwear models. My thesis, then, is that, as far as personal attributes go, the critic and the creative writer are one and the same. My other thesis is that personal attributes have as little to do with the matter as the notion of a "calling." The idea of "creativity" is as immensely inflated; the idea of "the critic" is misplaced and misleading, though probably not too modest. Nothing is created and there is nothing to criticize or do scholarly work on. Dots on a page. From one point of view empty; from another, entirely conventional and artificial. We might talk more usefully about "invention," if we can scale that word down and see it as more or less impersonal and disinterested. Creativity, criticism, scholarship, action-movie scripts, memo-writing, cheers, hymns, mating calls, are all entries into the pre-existing field of language. Goethe said it, "Language speaks, not the poet." So we fiddle and rearrange and hope for effects that are within a disconnected field entirely removed from us. Distinctions between critics and creators are like distinctions between elves and færies, pretty fictions that will never dig a ditch or feed a mouth. So now, let me tell a story that grounds all this in true and raw experience, the experience of writing a novel, which I, a critic, did with Percival Everett, a novelist. I'll make it brief, as our experience doubtless is exactly the same as that of every other team of critic-writer setting out to do a novel. [End Page 369] We came upon the idea by way of Percival thinking of it. He called me and said he had this idea, a novel called A HISTORY OF THE AFRICAN AMERICAN PEOPLE BY STROM THURMOND AS TOLD TO PERCIVAL EVERETT AND JAMES KINCAID. We talked ever so long (ten minutes) about it and decided to take a hiking trip to the Grand Canyon to consult further. Before going, we both read whatever books we could on Strom. As there are only 5 or 6, that was easy going, especially for me, the critic. Critics are accustomed to reading, which is often hard work for writers. Percival said he had read them too, but who knows? In any case, it was a waste of time, since we found our version of Strom better than anything written by those who knew him and had studied the record. We decided, while hiking, that Strom is best understood as a person encased within a very narrow but intense mental geography. We decided to take him at his word when he says he is baffled at his reputation as Reigning Racist. Our Strom was so effective politically—he won more elections, we figure, than any man or woman who ever lived—because he could not

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