March 23, 2023 Writers' Houses At William Faulkner’s House By Benjamin Nugent Photograph by Gary Bridgman. courtesy of wikimedia commons, licensed under CCO 2.5. “That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long,” William Faulkner wrote of his native Mississippi in his novel As I Lay Dying. “Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.” There came a day when, as a reader of Faulkner, I wanted to see what he was talking about. If the tendency of things in Mississippi was to hang on too long, as Faulkner claimed, maybe the populace and the landscape would be more or less the same as they’d been when he wrote those lines in 1930. The drive from Brooklyn to his house, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi, was seventeen hours. Read More
August 27, 2020 Postcards The Rager By Benjamin Nugent Benjamin Nugent sends a postcard from the fraternity scene. Last week, I drove to my hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, to see if the frat boys were following the university’s social distancing rules. It was a breezy Thursday evening, cool enough that you could sit out on a porch without pouring sweat. In a normal year, on a mild, late-August night like this one, I would have seen dense crowds of hundreds of UMass Greeks, happy to be reunited, milling through the streets surrounding the Alpha Sig fraternity and the Iota Gamma Epsilon sorority. I would have seen them scream greetings and profanities at each other, spill down the steps of the wooden porticos, stumble to the ground, sip from Solo cups, and dance to music blasted from weatherproof speakers, while cops monitored the scene from their cruisers, blue lights spinning as the mob flowed around them. It’s a harvest-season ritual familiar to anyone who grew up here, a marker of the end of summer. This year is different, of course. All over the country, local authorities have traced COVID-19 outbreaks to fraternity parties, and colleges that have tried to resume in-person classes have struggled with students’ refusal to observe protocol. Over at Syracuse, the day before I arrived, hundreds of newly arrived first years had gathered on the quad and roved the campus in open mockery of the required safety measures. Through July, UMass had insisted it was going to bring its twenty-one thousand undergrads back to campus, even though most classes would be taught online, only to meet stiff resistance from locals and staff; the RA union called the plan “suicidal.” In early August the administration reversed course and instructed the students not to come back after all, unless they were taking studio, lab or captstone classes, the only courses that would be taught face-to-face. That meant that only a little more than a thousand kids would be allowed to live in the dorms. Those who lived off-campus—like frat boys and sorority girls—were discouraged from returning to Amherst. And if that wasn’t enough to put Greek life on pause, a movement to ban fraternities, driven by former members, Black students, and students of color, had gained followers through the summer. But nobody could force the Greeks to stay home with their parents. Would they come back to Amherst and try to throw the usual back-to-school rager, despite its potential lethality and despite the political headwinds? The only way to find out was to stalk them after nightfall. Read More
January 6, 2020 Arts & Culture How to Imitate George Saunders By Benjamin Nugent The first time I met George Saunders, I got shivers of déjà vu. I’d driven to his house in upstate New York, to interview him for this magazine, and he’d come out to his driveway to shake my hand. It was a crisp fall day in the wooded hills south of Oneonta, with a hard wind and bright blue skies, and the trees cast sharp, waving shadows on the hood of his Prius. There was something about the way he swung open his front door and ushered me into his mud room, wearing his wide Midwestern grin, that felt eerily familiar. Then I realized why: I was living out a fantasy I’d indulged a hundred times. For much of my twenties, what I’d wanted, more than almost anything else, was to get inside Saunders’s mind, learn how it worked, and steal his secrets, so that I could write short stories that were as good as his short stories. My dream had been to sit down with him and ask him whatever I wanted. I couldn’t do that in my twenties, but I could make the surfaces of my stories resemble the surfaces of his stories. Present tense, first person, short declarative sentences, frequent jokes. Characters whose thoughts and speech were peppered with euphemistic neologisms. A working-class American suburb in a troubled near-future, a naïve narrator with a good heart, a shopping mall. I could assemble those parts, but the result was never George Saunders. There was something else he was doing. He had a technique whose effects I could feel but whose workings were mysterious to me. After I had written a stack of bad stories in a fake-Saunders mode—security guard finds gateway to hell in fountain of food court, et cetera—I stopped trying to write the way he did, feeling I had wasted two years trying to pull it off. When I applied to M.F.A. programs, I got into the one at Syracuse, where he taught. He even called me and encouraged me to come, a great moment of my life. But I’d decided he was dangerous, for me. Given how Saunders-derivative I was, the last thing I needed was more Saunders in my head. I went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, hoping it would whip the Saunders out of me. A couple of times, my classmates submitted Saunders-y stories, and in workshop I enumerated everything that was imitative about them, surprising myself with my own prosecutorial zeal. I had expected Iowa to be mean at times; I just hadn’t expected that the source of meanness would be me. Now I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger self, It’s okay to imitate Saunders, just not in the hapless, superficial way you’re doing it. What you need is more Saunders in your head, not less, in the sense that what you need is a deeper understanding of what Saunders does. The interesting, generative way to imitate Saunders is to imitate what he does with the bones of a short story, not what he does with setting, dialogue, or prose. Read More
August 19, 2016 Arts & Culture Men Go to Battle By Benjamin Nugent A small-budget film dramatizes the passive motives of Civil War enlistees. Still from Men Go to Battle. The following are reasons that Henry Mellon, the protagonist of the film Men Go to Battle, volunteers to leave his home and fight for the Union in the Civil War: his brother, Francis, has thrown an ax at him in a spirit of fun; one of his mules has run into the woods; the local rich girl has spurned his advances; his arable land is choked with weeds; Francis is taller and more confident than he is; a rainstorm has drowned six of his chickens. The following are not evident reasons for his enlistment: patriotism, abolitionism. Henry can neither read nor write, and he shows no interest in the world beyond his town, Small’s Corner, Kentucky. The rich girl he likes is waited on by enslaved maids. He slips off to the army on a winter night. Weeks later, he composes a letter home, dictating to a literate comrade: “I have all the beef and salted pork I want.” Read More