"It Was Just Boys Walking" (2004)

When "It Was Just Boys Walking" -- Dave Eggers' three-part nonfiction account of Valentino Deng (aka Dominic Arou), one of the "Lost Boys" of the Sudan -- first appeared in the successive March through May 2004 issues of The Believer, it may have felt to readers like a significant shift in direction for his work. And it was an overt shift -- but also one that had been gathering steam for some time.

Field reportage  had long been an element of the publications that Eggers edited or published, not least in The Believer itself. Although much of the popular conception of The Believer understandably focuses on its arts writing and long-form interviews, it's always had a strong element of reportage and political writing too.  The April issue that ran Eggers' second installment also included reports by Joshua Bearman and Stephen Elliot from the primaries in Iowa and Wisconsin. Even Issue 1 of the magazine, in March 2003, featured Marc Herman -- who also contributed some of the most cutting political field reporting to Might magazine -- turning in a sharp critique on how the antiwar protests that spring might have proved to be "more about voicing opposition for the record than actually affecting the chances for a war."

But "It Was Just Boys Walking" represented a new commitment to that form by Eggers himself in his work. It's written very much in the vein of modern longform journalism: a sharply described opening in a deafeningly loud cargo plane, followed by a section of back-story about the Sudan exodus, and then a journey back into Sudan with a nominally first-person reportorial presence. Like a John McPhee piece, you don't really learn anything about Eggers himself through that first-person -- he's really more of a stand-in for the inquiring reader.

The first and third installments are essentially straight-up "New New Journalism" -- something that would be perfectly at home in the New Yorker.  The second installment, curiously, is an oral history by Deng -- also a well-established form itself, and one that we'll soon see taking particular significance here in the McSweeney's subsequent Voice of Witness publications.

What's structurally interesting about this piece, though, is that Eggers inserted an oral history squarely into the middle of a modern longform journalistic narrative -- a unusual merging of two forms that are in themselves now fairly conventional.  It's a combination that takes advantage of the cycle of a monthly magazine, and of the now rarely-used installment structure. The two forms and POVs don't really clash, because you're reading each them a month apart from each other -- and they give a fascinating pair of perspectives on the story.

"How We Are Hungry" (2004)

"How We Are Hungry" (at left in its original McSweeney's hardcover) concludes of a trio of works of fiction (or memoir that is ostensibly fiction) by Dave Eggers -- including A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and You Shall Know Our Velocity! -- and because it collects short stories written across various years, it is in its own way a fitting capstone to roughly the first decade of Eggers' work in periodicals and books alike.

Its move away from first-person narrative, its range of characters, and (typically enough in modern literary short fiction) its occasional eschewing of overt resolution, How We Are Hungry in its own way it represents a growth in the ambitions of Eggers' work in fiction. But in this excellent 2005 interview with Onion A.V. Club, Eggers notes his discomfort with its artifice -- "I've always been interested in the form itself, so I always feel like I've never been good at going ahead with the artifice and not acknowledging the self in the artistic process, and not acknowledging the absurdity of pretending that's required in fiction. I always had a hard time with fiction. It does feel like driving a car in a clown suit. You're going somewhere, but you're in costume, and you're not really fooling anybody. " -- and also he reflects on his wariness of the personality-centered "hoopla" of the book trade:

O: The decision to initially market You Shall Know Our Velocity solely through your website and through independent bookstores caused a significant ripple in the publishing industry. What are your thoughts now about how that situation played out? 

DE: We thought it was great. I wanted to write and publish a book, but I didn't want any of the hoopla that came with the first book. I didn't do any interviews, but I did tour. I was like, "Is it possible to write a book without everything else that comes with it? Can I just go out and meet my peers, sign books, and go home?" .... I never wanted that kind of [bestseller] attention. I'm not good at that kind of thing. I had come from Might magazine, which had 10,000 readers, tops, any given month, and that was very nice and comfortable for me. This sort of mainstream-whatever is really uncomfortable, and I didn't realize what it would do.

That wariness perhaps another reason why How We Are Hungry seems to marks the end of one era of his work.  In the years and works that will follow, we'll see a shift in both form and subject matter for  work under Eggers' own books -- into nonfiction, and towards themes of social justice and the place of America and Americans adrift in a globalized world economy. These are concerns that had always been operating at least in the margins dating back to Might, but which will now move much more towards the center of his body of work. 

His fiction and playful literary experimentation, though, don't actually disappear: they migrate more fully into his publishing work and, as we'll later see, into what will become his more recent novels. 

"You Shall Know Our Velocity!" (2002) & "Sacrament" (2003)

Although we take revision for granted in non-narrative books -- reference works are regularly updated, and some pass through yearly revisions -- it's something of an unspoken assumption among readers that revisions in narrative works are supposed to happen before publication. Pre-publication revisions can be utterly radical in nature -- take, for instance, Gordon Lish's absolutely staggering edits on Raymond Carver (pictured below, from the New York Times -- click the image for a larger version):

... but they still largely become accepted as the "real" book. Upon publication, their identity becomes fixed: once the story's told, we don't want it to change from underneath us.

This makes a certain commercial sense: a revised reference work can be sold again and again to the same buyer, but probably not the same story. Publishers are generally not overly fond of revised editions of stories, because it involves the expense and trouble of repagination and a whole new copyediting process, and all for what is (for most narratives) a diminishing pool of new readers.

There are some workarounds, in practice: writers can quietly amend their text in a minor way when a paperback edition comes out, particularly if it doesn't alter the pagination. Errors belatedly discovered while reading aloud on tour then magically vanish; and the paragraph where you inadvertently used the same word three times gets fixed.  There's a similar opportunity, less often taken advantage of, when a foreign edition comes out.

But it's the rare author that really ventures further.  Mary Shelley changed Frankenstein in 1831; in 1977 John Fowles added 70 pages and altered the ending of his 1965 novel The Magus.  And if you look beyond prose storytelling, Walt Whitman famously turned Leaves of Grass into a lifelong revision project. 

In theory, the advent of e-books should have made texts more fluid and mutable; something like Leaves of Grass can be expressed in all its multiplicity.  And yet authors and readers still generally leave stories alone.  Maybe the authors just want to move on to the next thing; and most readers, like music listeners, don't seem to want that Phil Spector production stripped out of Let It Be. And maybe, god forbid, the first editor was actually right: A Moveable Feast, by many accounts, did not necessarily benefit from from its very posthumous 2009 "restoration" by Hemingway's grandson.  

For better or worse, the first published version largely becomes the artwork's identity.

So when a novel is revised, as in the 2002 novel You Shall Know Our Velocity!, it stands out. In a 2003 variant titled Sacrament, Eggers made a significant change to the midsection of the book, as he noted in the McSweeney's promo text for the book: "This one is about 60 pages longer, the added pages having been written by the book's other primary character, Hand. His insertion, which occurs two-thirds of the way through the book, in many ways refutes the way the story was originally told. The new version of the book has a new title and many more photographs, all in color."

When Vintage put out the paperback (left), Hand's counter-text was gone again -- as were the color photos inside -- but other smaller revisions had been worked in.

Not only does the variant version mess with the reader's sense of the book's editions having a stable text, it also questions -- two-thirds of the way in -- whether the narrator and the premise you've just spent a couple hundred pages getting to know is in fact trustworthy. It becomes, in effect, a different book -- and, maybe suitably enough, briefly gains a new title as a result. 

"A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (2000)

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a book that is, in an odd way, both in conflict with itself and with its own author.  It's a dazzling take on the memoir, but strictly speaking is listed as a novel -- though understood (and characterized by Eggers himself in his introduction) as an only somewhat fictionalized memoir. Along with allowing certain narrative conveniences, the fictionalizing of memoir allows a commentary on the expectations and absurdities of memoir itself.

Tim Parks noted this aspect of the book in a 2012 New York Review of Books piece:

Dave is given to wild exaggeration. He loves to tell tales, forgivable because hilarious, endearing because so obviously the product of a youthful desperation to achieve. The exaggeration seeps into the memoir itself; an interview where Dave explains to a TV producer why he should be on a reality show becomes a fifty-page tour-de-force. Much of what he tells the producer beggars belief, while the length and elaborate nature of the interview suggest that Eggers is exaggerating for us what exaggeration there may have been at this encounter, assuming it took place. 

Despite our amused skepticism, the technique works as memoir; this is the kind of person Dave is. We have not so much his life as his constant retelling of it. All is performance and persuasion with the present state of Dave’s mind the only topic on offer. Long conversations with Toph, for example, allow the younger boy to deconstruct, with sophistication beyond his years, the self-serving, pseudoethical positions Dave takes in his magazine. Rather than giving an accurate picture of Toph, it seems Dave is aware of his brother mostly insofar as he offers a foil to explore his own misgivings. After Toph lands one particularly eloquent blow, Dave protests: “You’re breaking out of character again.”

There's also, as maybe fits the book's own self-critique, Eggers' own subsequent distance from AHSWOG itself; after an extensive retrospective commentary in the first paperback edition, titled "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making" (excerpted here and here at the Guardian), he has rarely discussed the book since.

Part of that might be an understandable exhaustion with the subject; for all the astounding range of Eggers' subsequent work, AHWOSG is the first book that many people will mention.  (The fascinating Open Syllabus Project, which rounds up information from over a million syllabi to see what books colleges actually assign, shows AHWOSG way out in the lead among his works.)

So you may be tempted to assume that reader response and a varied subsequent career is at the root of this.  But there's a deeper ambivalence about the genre itself at work -- the very one expressed in the book itself, and in its paperback addendum. And it's one that Eggers laid out quite clearly in this NY Magazine profile before AHWOSG's release -- before that subsequent onslaught of publicity and reader reception:

He thinks all the postmodern reflexiveness will keep unwanted readers away. "I don't like the idea of it being a popular book; I think it would creep me out," he says. "Nobody likes the self-conscious stuff too much. I don't think the average Angela's Ashes reader will take to this. And the word motherfucker appears like 60 or 70 times." 

Tucked into one corner of the living room, there's a small shrine to the Eggers and McSweeney (his mother's maiden name) families -- just a few old photos and framed documents. And Eggers has no plans to write another memoir. "Never again," he says sharply. "It's one of those things where you completely get it out of your system and that's it." Now he's working on a novel written in the third person, with a woman as the main character. "I've gotten all that self-consciousness out of my system," he says. "Also, you get tired of using the word I. At least, I do."

One of his most extensive commentaries on memoir since then might be in his foreword to The Autobiographer's Handbook (2008), where he lauds the simple value of a familial record -- in his case, an account written by his great-great grandfather T.S. Hawkins, a founder of the California town of Hollister.  After his recent New Yorker piece on Hollister, Eggers has in fact just reissued Hawkins' Some Recollections of a Busy Life.

McSweeney's Issue #4 (2000)

McSweeney's Issue 4 arrived in early 2000 to raised expectations; it was the first issue to come out after the coverage in the New Yorker, and within weeks of the release of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It was fortuitous that this, then, was the number that they now describe as their "breakthrough issue." That breakthrough was not so much because of the content -- interesting in itself, and of a piece with previous issues -- but because of its presentation. Namely, Issue 4 eschewed a conventional binding and was printed as a series of pamphlets within a box:

In some ways, the heart of this issue is probably somewhere between Eggers' editorial pamphlet -- which includes a "Bill of Rights" on book design, asserting that writers should have a clear and unambiguous role in the design of their own work -- and Paul Maliszewski's pamphlet "Paperback Nabokov," which details the author's struggle to control the design of his book jackets. In short, it's about a writer-centered control of aesthetics, which is not quite how book publishing typically works.

The pamphlets themselves reflect that idea: rather than being grouped together and sequenced into a single binding, each is its own little kingdom, so to speak -- to be taken in whatever order the reader chooses.  The whole thing is defiantly impractical, in its own way. It's a challenging format to publish in, and a surprisingly challenging one to read in, not least because it forces you to slow down and encounter the works individually, rather than simply flipping through sections.

The box is an unusual enough format that the only direct predecessor I can find is a French arts publication from 1937, Verve -- described in this 1988 NY Times appreciation -- that used a box designed by Matisse to enclosed both a regular print issue and for both text and lithographs.

McSweeney's revisited the format in 2006 with Issue 19, designed as a series of both new and historical pamphlets -- packed in a cigar box, as if one had found it in an old attic:

My favorite example, though, might be Dancing Star #26 (2002), which shows the direct influence of McSweeney's #4. While touring for Banvard's Folly in 2001, I included random odd Victorian finds in my readings, and at one event an Indiana University college student approached me afterwards. Could he use one of those old excerpts in a magazine he was editing for his dorm? Sure, I said.  Some months later, this extraordinary production arrived in the mail:

Inside was a set of pamphlets....

And beneath those was a figurine...

And if you pulled apart the box, hidden under that was a folded up poster:

(This is only 2 panels: the poster's much bigger when fully unfolded.)

That student, as it happens, was none other than Brian McMullen. Ten years after Dancing Star 26, he created this boxed Issue 36 of McSweeney's:

McSweeney's Internet Tendency

Along with looking at McSweeney's Issue #4 next week, we'll also be glimpsing at its website from that era, and some of the immediate predecessors to both.

Some of the earliest manifestations of Eggers' aesthetic -- the playfulness with visual formats, near-performance art gestures, and in addressing readers directly -- can be seen in Smarter Feller!, a comic strip he co-wrote (and then became sole author of) at SF Weekly in the 1990s.  In particular, have a look at the comics dated 11/13/96, 2/19/97, 3/19/97, and 7/23/97.

The issue of Might magazine that I passed around in last week's class also dates from this same period; the posthumous collection Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp captures the general feel of the magazine, though there's really no substitute for an actual issue. (To the right: a cache of them, found by local favorites Green Apple Books.)

The launch of McSweeney's is well covered in The Art of McSweeney's, but it received a huge boost in attention about a year in, with its coverage in a "Next Generation" themed issue in the October 18th 1999 issue of the New Yorker.  Here's an archived page of what a new reader would have then seen upon coming to the McSweeney's Internet Tendency website.

The website, particularly in its humor as edited by John Warner, carved out a distinct short-form niche of its own over the years. But the material on the site that most directly addressed McSweeney's itself was directed at potential writers -- both for and about.  For the former, in "To Submit: Some Guidelines," there's a playful but (over time) increasingly pragmatic page addressing how to submit to a journal that might have otherwise seemed a cipher.

For the latter, in "If You Are Going to Write About McSweeney's," there was -- well, mockery. McSweeney's satire of media coverage, media figures, and particularly public literary personas -- something that could already be seen in Might magazine -- came from both deep familiarity with and skepticism towards these media, especially in the hackery of reductive hot takes and cultural shorthand. Perhaps the most straightfaced of this brand of humor was in Marny Requa's "Recent Headlines Explained," which took the dull puns of lazy headline writing and painstakingly explained them in a way that underlined their sheer vacuity.

Another favorite tactic of this media satire was a gleeful deflating self-importance. It's not too surprising that those newly arriving readers in October 1999 found Todd Pruzan's sendup of anti-ironic jeremiadist Jedidiah Purdy on that front page; or that earlier that year, the site ran a "confession" that Times Book Review editor Michiko Kakutani was herself a fictional construct ("I Am Michiko Kakutani").  Neal Pollack -- who assumed the persona of the raging Maileresque id of "America's Greatest Living Writer" -- perhaps embodied this form most completely in his 1998 demolition of portentious white guilt, "I Am Friends With a Working Class Black Woman."

Through all this, the aesthetic of the website itself was (and has largely remained) almost defiantly plain.  It's probably worth remembering that in endlessly hyped Dotcom Bubble of the late 1990s -- let alone now -- this is exactly what websites were not supposed to be turning into.  And yet, that same month -- in October 1999 -- the experimental writer and hypertext pioneer (and later McSweeney's author) Robert Coover gave this address in San Francisco that sounded this similarly contrarian note about the development of web aesthetics:

IN TERMS OF NEW SERIOUS LITERATURE, the Web has not been very hospitable. It tends to be a noisy, restless, opportunistic, superficial, e-commerce-driven, chaotic realm, dominated by hacks, pitchmen, and pretenders, in which the quiet voice of literature cannot easily be heard or, if heard by chance, attended to for more than a moment or two. Literature is meditative and the Net is riven by ceaseless hype and chatter. Literature has a shape, and the Net is shapeless. The discrete object is gone, there’s only this vast disorderly sprawl, about as appealing as a scatter of old magazines on a table in the dentist’s lounge. Literature is traditionally slow and low-tech and thoughtful, the Net is fast and high-tech and actional.... 

Certainly, the world is full still of subversive and obstreperous writers, and they will not take being made redundant lying down. Text at the outset of this new millennium remains our traditional source of content, of meaning, imagination’s primary trigger, and writers will continue to use it as their tool of choice, if not their only one, even if readers do not. 

The Art of McSweeney's

The Art of McSweeney's is a curious document. Although the art itself (in a literal and categorical sense) is very much on display -- it's a classic coffee table book in some ways, right down to getting published by Chronicle Books, and there's a gratifying overview of the antiquarian book arts that have always been in McSweeney's DNA -- it's also perhaps the closest McSweeney's has ever come to actually explaining itself.

And that begins to happen right in the opening 1998 email from Eggers, in what amounts to the volume's preliminaries and copyright page. But, as Zara Dinnen points out in this review, it's the sense of the process behind McSweeney's work -- something that oral history is particularly good at conveying -- that maybe gives the most insight:

One of the highlights of Art of McSweeney's is the chapter on the publication of William T. Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down (2003), a seven-volume tome critiquing the history of political violence. The stories told by the editor, Eli Horowitz (at the time new to McSweeney's, now head of publishing), and the various interns-turned-fact-checkers, as well as Vollmann himself, weave a great tale of achievement against-all-odds (in a classic American way, but with a geeky bent). This section is only a few pages long, but the descriptions of fact-checking, of interns haunting the Berkley libraries all hours of the day, of whole volumes going missing, awry, or just going right before the deadline—these stories really convey the excitement, and the validation, of being part of an independent publishing house like McSweeney's. It is in this section, one that is only text and that is almost exclusively about text, that I experienced most strongly a connection with the book—with books.

I don't think it's accidental that it's RUARD in particular where the process resonates. In its own way, that book -- unwieldy, "unpublishable," wildly over the top -- reflects the notion of McSweeney's voiced in that first 1998 email, as "a place where odd things that one could never shoehorn into a mainstream periodical, and might be too quirky for other periodicals, might find a home."