"Gaity, or Truth in Sheep's Clothing"

I got home from a reading a few hours ago. There were five readers: three fiction writers, one non-fiction writer, and one poet turned non-fiction-ist. The reading was fine--it was a little long, a little dry, and in a restaurant filled with smoke from an over-heated pizza oven--and only one writer really stuck out to me. She was one of the non-fiction writers, and she was writing about growing up as an evangelical Christian in a public high school.

In most ways, her writing was no different from her peers': her language flowed smoothly, her scenes were rife with clear imagery and distinct characters, and her prose felt polished and lively. But she differed from everyone else because she made the audience laugh, and not in a cruel way. Even though she was writing about the misadventures of an overeager young girl fumbling her way toward an identity outside of her religion, she was tender about her past self and her former friends. She acknowledged that her audience might not identify with her upbringing or her past beliefs, but she never sacrificed her past self cruelly, selling herself out for cheap satire. Her essay worked because she was unashamed of her past and because she treated her past self gently, with great kindness and great levity.

Her writing made me think of Dostoevsky, a little bit, and of Michel de Montaigne and Jane Austen in that she was capable of telling her story with both levity and compassion, something which is exceedingly rare. The other readers read very nicely crafted pieces, but they took themselves awful seriously. There was a lot of imagery and profound symbolism in their pieces, but not a lot of joy.

I've been thinking about the importance of gentle humor because of E.B. White's excellent One Man's Meat. Early in the book, White describes "a certain writer, appalled by the cruel events of the world" who has "pledged himself never to write anything that wasn't constructive and significant and liberty-loving."

"I have an idea that this, in its own way, is bad news. [. . .] Even in evil times, a writer should cultivate only what naturally absorbs his fancy, whether it be freedom or chinch bugs, and should write in the way that comes easy. [. . .] In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone. A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom--he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold. His gravest concern is lest gaiety, or truth in sheep's clothing, somewhere gain a foothold, lest joy in some unguarded moment be unconfined. I honestly don't believe that a humorist should take the veil today; he should wear his bells night and day, and squeeze the uttermost jape, even though he may feel that he should be writing a strong letter to the Herald Times."

 After a long stint in graduate school, where satire and self-deprecation often took the place of true gaiety and good-humoredness, I'm a little more appreciative of writers who, like E. B. White and tonight's reader, can combine humor and kindness to get to the heart of whatever they're after.