Art is a better agent of revitalization than sports or liquor establishments and just about anything else. But the arts are one of the last things cities encourage, and usually, that encouragement is limited to the visual arts. Cities want and encourage murals, concerts, the theater. Writers, as ever, are on their own. I suppose that makes for better writing but poorer revitalization.
None of the visionaries of revitalization will read this. I am betting it is because they don’t read.
What I am saying in this column is that small, mostly rural cities want revitalization, a fact that is self-evident. “Revitalization” literally means “re-life” or “life again.” The concept is the same as with the religious sense of “revival.” Bringing life back. Which is to say that cities want life again – a recovery from the errors and disasters of their own history – but they aren’t very good at studying the relevant historical issues as to why people want to frequent certain cities. Why do people want to go to Paris? New Orleans? New York?
People travel to destinations to see museums, the theater, statues, parks, shops, famous locales, restaurants, bars, etc., but these places aren’t the mechanism that caused people to go there. These are the things people want to see and do when they get there. The reason the outsiders, the tourists, and the dreamers want to go somewhere is because the writers wrote about it.
Time for a history lesson.
Every once in a while, the forces of history, poetry, geometry, and necessity converge on a place in that time, and for some reason that place/time becomes special. Think of Paris on the West Bank a hundred years ago when Hemingway and Picasso and Cole Porter and maybe Salvador Dali or Ezra Pound would trek to Gertrude Stein’s salon to see and be seen, to drink Absinthe or aperitifs, and to mingle with a diverse crowd of artists, geniuses, and miscreants. Whatever they were, they were interesting. Stein’s house was a historic “salon,” and that’s really the lesson for today.
The salon was a house or apartment where a diverse and eclectic mix of individuals would meet and talk, debate, connect, commune. Decide. Generally (almost universally) the salon was the house of a woman. Her job was more than just entertaining strangers. Her job was to serve as the filter for power and connections. She put people together. She was the glue that held the empire together. In Russia, the women of the salons ran the empire almost entire. Absolutely and unequivocally. If you wanted your son to get a commission as an officer in the Army so he could escape poverty and become a man of society, you had two routes: You could make an appointment to see a government official – which almost never worked. Or… you could get invited to a salon. The hostess would seat you or your son next to the appropriate official or dignitary, and the deal could get done. The salon mistress decided who got invited, who sat next to whom, what the topics of discussion were. If you were inappropriate, off-topic, or generally not sufficient to the conversation, you would be ushered by the hostess to another room and another conversation. People were plug-n-play and the hostess decided who got the ear of the people who made decisions.
Who someone was in society, how far they would rise, who would hold power… these things were determined more in the salons than in the government offices.
And anyone could get invited to a salon. Literally. You didn’t have to be rich… you could also be poor but interesting. Writers like Pushkin were in demand at the salons. Degenerates like Lord Byron were swarmed at the salons. A starving but talented artist could find a patron there. The problems of the world were discussed, and often political decisions that affected hundreds of millions were made at the salons.
In France, every element of government and culture was filtered through the salons. The idea that women were powerless under the patriarchy is nonsense. Cleverly, they hide the truth of things in books.
One of the things they learned in the salons was that society needed all of the arts, but mostly it needed its writers. How do we know about the salons of the great historic destinations? Because the writers have told us about them.
(Here is where I reveal to you the mystery of this article. In our metaphor, the SALON = The City. The Hosts = The Visionaries of Revitalization.) The hosts have invited the monied interests, the builders, the entrepreneurs, and the artists. Except the writers.
It was at the art collector Gertrude Stein’s salon that Hemingway and Ezra Pound (who knew that all of the arts are important, but to the society and the community – the writer is life and death,) determined to take up funds to start a subscription service to “keep T.S. Eliot out of the bank.” The great Eliot was working as a bank clerk to make ends meet. The artists and creators of Paris realized that society… history… the world… needed Eliot writing and not working in the bank. Pound was the one who came up with the idea of the “Bel Esprit,” the subscription subsidy to help free Eliot to write more. “”I can’t come back too STRONGLY to the point that I do NOT consider this Eliot subsidy a pension,” he wrote to one donor. “I am puke sick of the idea of pensions, taking care of old crocks. … I put this money into him, as I wd. put into a shoe factory if I wanted shoes.” To Pound, Bel Esprit was an investment in poetry, and he expected it to yield dividends to all humanity.”
The artist and musician are critical to our souls, but the writer is necessary for our freedom. The artist and the actor and the painter and the musician entertain you when you get where you are going, but it is the writer who will let you know where you should go and why you should go there.
Stalin sent Solzhenitsyn to the Gulag for something he wrote, but the man wrote anyway and brought down the tyranny – first with A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, and later with The Gulag Archipelago. Once Solzhenitsyn put pen to paper, the days of the USSR were numbered. The communists, when they came to power, destroyed the salons, banned the music, destroyed the art, burned the furniture, scattered the intelligencia, and housed idea-less revolutionaries in the once great houses. But it was the old salon mistresses who became SAMIZDAT (the secret, indie publishing of forbidden books) and distributed the handwritten manuscripts that eventually brought the knowledge and reality of the gulags to the rest of the world. You can’t keep a good woman down.
Brownwood has all of the stuff a small, destination city should have. New and quirky shops, bars, and eateries. A strange alchemy of people who have become a cool and diverse community. The visual and performing arts are supported heavily, but only these for now. A great book like The Sun Also Rises can bring all the world to Paris or to Pamplona, but it would take a knowledge of literature and history to know that.
I think it was Mark Twain who said, “The man who doesn’t read has no advantage over the man who can’t read.” If the visionaries of revitalization don’t read, then they won’t know that people go to cool places because they read about them. Or maybe they hear about them from people who read about them. I am convinced that the visionaries of revitalization have no advantage over people who cannot read.
We have a bookshop that is everything that Shakespeare and Company was to Paris – run by a creative and passionate firebrand named Kim Bruton who does support writing and reading – as much as she can. She’s our Sylvia Beach. In 1920s Paris, it was Sylvia Beach who ran the bookshop. She supported Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound and a dozen other writers – lent them books always and money sometimes. She single-handedly published James Joyce’s epic Ulysses when no one else would. She carried on her back the literary legacy of the place and the world reaped the benefits. There is no Ulysses without her, but there is also no The Sun Also Rises without Sylvia Beach.
This town has it all and it is becoming that kind of place. Well… it has almost all of it. We’re still missing a piece.
This town has a theater – The Lyric – where theatrical plays are performed every month. Theatrical plays are acted on the stage, but someone wrote them. The plays we see here in town were written elsewhere. In Hollywood, or somewhere else. I have an idea for a play based on my story ALL I CAN BE that I’d like to see performed there someday. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a local writer’s work supported locally? I love the Lyric. We went to see a 1940s Swing Music concert the other day. It was fantastic. Sometime this month (I think) a local jazz pianist will have a concert at the Lyric. That’s fantastic too.
It’s cool to see Footloose or something by Tennessee Williams at the Lyric, but those things aren’t local. Everything doesn’t have to be local, but something should be. People make pilgrimages to Cross Plains, Texas to see the home of Robert E. Howard, and they go to Paris or Key West because of Hemingway and literature – not to see Hamilton.
I like the fact that we are developing all of the pillars of a great destination. Joints and bars and restaurants and a bookshop and all of the cool places you can walk to downtown. I like our café society and the quirky, weird community we’re developing here. It is awesome that the city supports some of the arts. I like that I can walk to see a theatrical play, a concert, or an art exhibit within blocks of my apartment, and I like that they close down Baker Street for music, or they have bands playing in the park. All of those things are great, but we need literature, or no one will ever know about it.
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.