By KURT VONNEGUT Jr.
ou can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do. Most bright people know that, but writers' conferences continue to multiply in the good old American summertime. Sixty-eight of them are listed in last April's issue of The Writer. Next year there will be more. They are harmless. They are shmoos.
I saw one horn five years ago--The Cape Cod Writers' conference in Craigville, Mass. It was more or less prayed into existence by three sweet preachers' wives. They were in middle life. They invited some Cape writers and English teachers to a meeting one winter night, and their spokeswoman said this: "We thought it would be nice if there were a writers' conference on Cape Cod next summer."
I remember another thing she said: "We thought established writers would probably enjoy helping beginners like us to break into the field."
And it came to pass. Isaac Asimov is the star this year. Stars of the past include Richard Kim and Jacques Barzun. Twenty-six students came the first year, forty-three the next, sixty-three the next, eighty-two the next, and nearly one hundred are expected this year-- in August. Most of the students are women. Several of them are preachers' wives in middle life.
So it goes.
I congratulated one of the founders recently, and she replied, "Well, it's been an awful lot of fun for all of us. Writers lead such lonely lives, you know, so they really enjoy getting together once a year to discuss matters of common interest."
That's the most delightful part of the game, of course: the pretense that everybody who comes to a writers' conference is a writer. Other forms of innocent summer recreation immediately suggest themselves: a doctors' conference, where everybody gets to pretend to be a doctor; a lawyer' conference, where everybody gets to pretend to be a lawyer; and so on--and maybe even a Kennedy conference, where everybody pretends to be somehow associated with the Kennedys.
"Who comes to writers' conferences?" you ask. A random sample of twenty students will contain six recent divorcees, three preachers' wives in middle life, five schoolteachers of no particular age or sex, two foxy grandmas, one sweet old widower with true tales to tell about railroading in Idaho, one real writer, one not merely angry but absolutely furious young man, and one physician with forty years' worth of privileged information that he wants to sell to the movies for a blue million.
"How much sex is there at writers' conferences?" you ask. The staff members, at any rate, don't come for sex. They hate conferences. They come for money. They are zombies. They want to collect their paychecks and go home. There are exceptions, who only prove the rule.
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
I saw another writers' conference born only this past June 18. I pick that date, since that was when the Student-Faculty Get-Acquainted Party was held. It was The West-Central Writers' Conference, sponsored by Western Illinois University, which is in Macomb, Ill. The party was held in the TraveLodge Motel in Macomb, in between the Coin-A-Wash and the A&W Rootbeer stand, because there was booze. There is a rule against booze on campus.
The founder and director wasn't a preacher's wife. He was a cigar-eating young English instructor named E. W. Johnson. In the conference brochure he claimed to have been a secondhand clothing salesman, a construction worker and a professional gambler. He is also a novelist and a writer of textbooks, and the only teacher at Western Illinois who has published a book. Johnson was sad at the party because he had sent out thousands of brochures and had advertised lavishly in Writer's Digest and Saturday Review and so on, and yet only 19 students had come. They were sitting around the room, rolling their eyes moonily, waiting for new friendships to begin.
"I can't understand it," he said above the Muzak and the sounds of drag races out on Route 136. "We have as good a staff as any conference in the country."
And the staff really was at least fair to middling. There was myself, described in the brochure as "the foremost black humorist in American fiction"; and there was Richard Yates, "perhaps the greatest living short story writer in America;" and there was John Clellon Holmes "the official biographer of the Beat Generation, who has recently completed a novel entitled ëPerfect Fools,' which is written from a ëwhite humor' point of view"; and there was Frederic Will, "one of the most versatile writers in America, having published extensively (eighteen books) in the fields of poetry, non-fiction and translation."
Johnson confessed that it had appeared for a while that only five students were coming, and he confessed too, that he had never been to a writers' conference before.
I asked him how he had come to found such a thing, and he said that he sure wasn't doing it for money. All he was getting as director was his regular instructor's pay. He honestly wanted to help writers.
The party died at midnight. Everybody had gone home by then except Johnson and a couple of staff members and a girl who had been recently divorced--from an Arab, she said. We were sitting around the swimming pool, breathing chlorine and carbon monoxide.
"You know why more people didn't come?" said the girl.
"Nope," said Jonson.
"Because ëMacomb, Illinois' sounds like such a hell-hole, and because "Western Illinois University' sounds like such a jerkwater school," she explained.
The Town isn't all that bad, I guess, and the University is handsome and booming. But there isn't any water there, and there aren't any mountains there, and there is no grand hotel. If you don't have water or mountains, and you want to fond a writer's conference, you had better have a grand hotel. Bloomington, Ind., is a hell-hole, God knows, but the Indiana University Writers' Conference takes place in the student union, which contains four restaurants, a pool hall, a barber shop, a bowling alley and a bookstore, and grown- ups can drink booze in their rooms.
I taught at Indiana's conference one summer. They're starring Jerome Weidman and Gerold Frank this year. The most touching thing that happened to me there was when Harry Mark Petrakis and I admitted to each other that we had never been published in The New Yorker, and probably never would be because we lacked that certain something. We thought it might be an ethnic thing, that they didn't like Greeks and Germans.
We have been brothers ever since.
We fours stars at Macomb had all taught at one time or another in the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. E. W. Johnson got his Master of Fine Arts degree there. I've quit after two years--not angrily, but feeling waterlogged. All the Workshop staffers were professional writers. Vance Bourjailly was the only one who ever got much writing done, probably because Iowa was his home. The rest of us were gypsies.
And one problem at Iowa, no problem at Macomb, was that the students were all very able writers. They were not committed to a silly week or two in the summertime. They were engaged in a two-year graduate program which was to end, ideally, with the completion of a novel of a short-story collection, or sometimes a play. They deserved help from their teachers, and there was time in which to give it to them.
"How did you help?" you ask.
Nothing is known about helping real writers to write better. I have discovered almost nothing about it during the past two years. I now make to my successor at Iowa a gift of the one rule that seemed to work for me: Leave real writers alone.
I haven't mentioned the poets in the Writers' Workshop because I don't know much about them. The poets talk all the time, like musicians, and this drives prose writers nuts. The poets are always between jobs, so to speak, and the prose writers are hung up on projects requiring months or years to complete.
The idea of a conference for prose writes is an absurdity. They don't confer, can't confer. It's all they can do to drag themselves past one another like great, wounded bears.
One thing I'm glad about: I got to see academic critics at Iowa. I had never seen academic critics before. They are felt to be tremendously creative people, and are paid like movie stars. I found that instructive.
When I saw my first academic critic, I said to a student, "Great God! Who was that?"
The student told me. Since I was so shaken, he asked me who I had thought the man was.
"The reincarnation of Beethoven," I said.
To return to the Macomb experiment one last time: I hope they get more people next year than came this year. If the conferences dies, it will be the first one that ever did. What they need to make things merrier is a sort of master of the revels, a graduate of some really great hotel school like Cornell University.
And they must stop telling staff members that they have to sign loyalty oaths or they won't get paid. Poor E. W. Johnson was humiliated when that happened in spite of all he tried to do to prevent it. A little touch like a loyalty oath can lead a visiting writer to suspect, rightly or wrongly, that his is employed by hicks.
Mr. Vonnegut is working on a new novel, "Slaughterhouse 5." A musical version of "Cat's Cradle," an earlier novel, will open on Broadway this year.
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