The rise and fall of Alice Walker

3.27.2007

I read last week some of Alice Walker's more recent work and was extremely disappointed. It lacked any sense of plot, which I can handle, but the characters were so flat and two dimensional. These stories were, lets be honest here, terrible. There is no way they would have ever gotten published had they not been written by Alice Walker. Now, I love The Color Purple, which makes me wonder how an artist can go from such a beautiful, layered work to writing something that fails as propaganda let alone as literature. (I say this because at least one of the stories was written to make a point about pornography, while the others have that same feel--like she's trying too hard to make a point instead of writing a story.)


Is it laziness? My friend suggested that Walker may see herself as a brand name--thinking the quality exists because Alice Walker writes it. The focus here being on her and not on the text.

Is it happiness? Alice Walker lived a tortured life when she was writing her best work--is torment necessary for great work?


For me, this brings up so many questions about being a writer. Will I have to be in perpetual anguish to produce good work? Is it worth it? What do I have to sacrafice?

Annie Dillard (who has shown a similar decline, but that is for another day) writes in Holy the Firm, "How many of you, I asked the people in my class, which of you want to give your lives and be writers? I was trembling from coffee, or cigarettes, or the closeness of the faces all around me. (Is this what we live for? I thought; is this the only final beauty: the color of any skin in any light, and living, human eyes?) All hands rose to the question...And then I tried to tell them what the choice must mean: you can't be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax."

With a broadax. I've been devoting most of my time lately to writing. Eeking out little essays and poems, most of it not worth reading. Yet I somehow feel more sane for the process. The hours it takes me to complete something. Labor pains. All of the different analogies put out to try to make the process sensible. For me, its delphic. A flood of words, (a monkey at a typewriter, so to speak), that gradually begin to form some type of meaning. Some beginnings and ends. Some half evolved creature rising from the muck and cursing me or blessing me as I scribble away furiously. Cursing me. Or maybe that is me cursing myself.

Cursing myself and looking for a coherent way to end this post.