Making of American: On Garielle Lutz’s Backwardness — Dan Irving

Garielle Lutz, poet laureate of alienation, self-proclaimed seer of trees but not forest, has created a remarkable thing called Backwardness, a memoir-in-miscellanea, a maximalist collection of minimalist elements, 932 pages of quotidian ephemera—lists (of discoveries, of questions, of varieties of aunts, of foods and drinks ingested the day after her third colonoscopy), overheard comments, teaching evaluations, syllabically-labored descriptions, receipts, report cards, remembrances, aphorisms, excerpts of daily goings-on clipped from letters to old friends and notebook entries typed and strewn—published last year by Short Flight/Long Drive. Her near-thirty-year legacy is lately, suddenly, becoming more complex.

First there’s that infamous moniker, complimentary in one sense and senseless in another, of “the only untranslatable American writer,” so dubbed by Brian Evenson in his introduction to The Complete Gary Lutz (2019). Evenson, an accomplished translator from the French, initially proposed the question to other translators, some of whom had attempted renderings of Lutz’s prose, to no avail, though the comment has, over the last few years, broken containment, moving from shop talk to dutiful, if frequently unattributed, paraphrase in reviews of Worsted, Lutz’s 2021 collection (also published by Short Flight/Long Drive), a pocket-sized book made up of pieces left unfinished from the Stories in the Worst Way days. That first offering, along with its follow-up, I Looked Alive, have now been translated into German by Christophe Fricker, an Associate Professor at the University of Bristol, and published by Weissbooks as Geschichten der übelsten Sorte (2022) and Ich wirkte lebendig (forthcoming March 2025).

“Untranslatable” is, following Natalia Cecire’s critique of “experimental,” a clumsily odd if well-meaning descriptor for a text we find “interesting.” It is, for David Bellos, “a variant of the folkish nostrum that a translation is no substitute for the original.” La Disparition was untranslatable, until Gilbert Adair (A Void), Ian Monk (A Vanishing), John Lee (Vanish’d!), and translators to the German, Swedish, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Turkish, Russian, and Japanese came along to show readers of languages other than French what a scamp Georges Perec could be; Zettels Traum was untranslatable, for a time, and now some 2000 people are busily not-reading Bottom’s Dream. That is to say: texts are untranslatable only until they are, as they tend to eventually be, translated; the claim holds complimentary weight from a translator but, really, what even vaguely literary work isn’t untranslatable to someone who isn’t a translator? Terminological quibbles aside, we are to the point that Lutz’s sentences are, empirically speaking, translatable, though no less phonematically interesting.

Of how she came to construct such sentences, this much we know: Lutz “came to language only late and only peculiarly,” she tells us in “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” her manifesto on that grammatical unit as “the one true theater of endeavor” and one of the greatest literary essays of this century, and grew into a taste for “narratives of steep verbal topography”—a wonderful phrase!—“in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude,” such as those composed by writers like Barry Hannah, Sam Lipsyte, Diane Williams, and Christine Schutt.

Other things we know: Around 1982, Lutz started a half-time gig in the writing center at the College of Wooster, moving on two years later to her first full-time job, at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where, she writes, “for thirty-seven years I taught English Composition and never advanced, and always earned a low salary, and never mixed with any of the other teachers, and always felt I was about to get fired for incompetence.” Lutz rarely travels; what we’re told of her trips sticks to the banal mundanities: we read, in sections hundreds of pages apart, that she “left town for a semester” to spend time in Syracuse—“I often ate at buffets”; “I lived in a basement efficiency apartment in a high-rise building that was a little fancy”—and Lawrence, Kansas, where she “once lived for a few months … without ever eating any Chinese food.” That she taught in MFA programs in these cities is, for Lutz, beside the point.

There is, too, an oft-remarked upon stylistic fully-formedness across Lutz’s oeuvre that this new work complicates. In an interview with Hobart upon the book’s publication, Lutz explained that she “didn’t see much point in arranging things to suggest that there has been some sort of progression in life, other than the lateral move from birth to death.” Backwardness covers fifty years—from 1973 through 2023—illustrating Lutz’s development and progression as a writer, giving glimpses of the years of hours spent in her furniture-less workshop. Stories are told and retold multiple times, across decades, pulled from letters and notebooks, and what emerges is a kaleidoscopic tour through a life. In the opening section, “A First Love (From a 1990s Notebook),” we’re met with a pared-down style in a piece that, were Lutz chic and French, might be a big success as a slight, standalone volume. Two sections of letters begin, as does “A First Love,” in Lutz’s freshman year at Kutztown State College. Many entries have an I-do-this, I-do-that focus on everyday life that wouldn’t be out of place in a Frank O’Hara poem:

I’ve got a big Cadbury bar, fixings for a hot-fudge sundae, and Jiffy Pop. (The last one burst into flames, and I had to throw it into the sink and douse it.) Maybe these cries will reach a hypothetical reader who’ll say, “I know exactly what you’re talking about! Why don’t we get together and chat for a couple of years?” When Sam calls, he says, “Did I get you out of bed?” I tell him I’ve been up all night. I tell him I that I’ve just opened another bottle of Coke and the way the morning light is hitting it, the soda at the bottom looks fiery red. I walk to Kentucky Fried Chicken for an all-white-meat lunch ($2.25).

Lutz likes to walk, regularly busing into Pittsburgh to hoof it a dozen-plus miles, the book—from stories to letters to notebook excerpts—reads like a long ramble: here’s a list of cities; here’s what’s happening at the good Burger King and the bad one; here’s something called a candy poem; here’s a spot-on Lutz story written, somehow, in 1978.

The “notebooks” excerpted here are, fittingly enough for Lutz’s shambolic-seeming living arrangement, not bound books but pages typed, after a day’s teaching and grading (student papers, we learn, do not enter her home), tossed to the floor, and eventually gathered into a box, resulting in a loose chronology (reasonably annual, though the months are haphazard), ostensibly covering the two-decade period from 1977-1998 though actually running through 2019 or so, the later entries reflecting Lutz’s then-immersion in Joe Brainard’s I Remember, memories spurred from the third anniversary of her mother’s death, mentioned here but not explored for another 200 pages. The entries flow freely from frustratedly frittering about work, to the working-out of sentences, exercises in style, experiments with a poetics which would come to foreground shape and sound; in entries from the late-1970s through the late-1980s, we find runs of sentences that are identifiably Lutzian, sentences that, set next to each other, are primarily paratactic, hardly storyful, sentences stacked and swerving:

“You grabble for anything fitful, furtive, futureproof in life. Actually, though, no you don’t.”

“Twenty-eight years old, and I’m down on all fours, scrabbling for a thin mint or a homemade vocabulary card (gleet, hand-minded, aerate). Sleep-besotted, I wamble to the bathroom, open the window.”

“This was to be a new year. No turn of events was to be tolerated or encouraged. Everything was to be handled as a matter without facts.”

“So we rattle around in our balky, balking selves. Sleep-swollen, we sniff out each other’s littlenesses. We sough in dark bedrooms, imprint our sorrows on one another.”

We read in an early-1990s notebook entry: “Once in a while, somebody is interested in what I might have to say. This somebody says, ‘I want to hear you out. I want to hear you out until there’s nothing left. I want you to tell me everything about yourself except the information. I want you to leave the information out. Can you do it like that? It will do us both a world of good.’” While the somebody isn’t identified, their advice sounds a lot like that of Gordon Lish from Tetman Callis’s transcribed notes from the editor-guru’s classes circa 1990-91: “Be patient in the giving of the information … information is entropic … Ask yourself, when you start to give information, ‘Is this necessary?’ … ‘In lieu of information, what goes on the page?’ … The more information you give them, the less meaning you give them.” Lutz attended Lish’s famous workshops in a run of Junes, 1992 through 1997, the same years she wrote the material that later became “A First Love,” the opening section of Backwardness. A core element of Lish’s poetics is what he calls consecution, “a recursive procedure by which one word pursues itself into its successor by discharging something from deep within itself into what follows.” It’s a near-mystical idea, maybe, and one that’s easier experienced than explained. The couple-dozen pages that follow this notebook entry read like consecution camp, a student doing their homework, building ever-chewier sentences, constructions that require full-bodily effort and are, if not best, at least most fun read aloud:

“How much longer will I have been having had to live here, not knowing whether to suck the lozenge all the way down, dragging it out, or go ahead and start chewing the thing only halfway through? People are too quick to live and learn.”

“There was little else to go on in life. I was writing cubbyhole histories of everybody I knew. Everybody knows whose wife my sister became none too soon. I’d doted over the wrong things I was made of. They were nothing on our earth.”

“People generally can’t wait to get well along in whatever things might smell like anywhere else. The thing is to get yourself spoken to by whatever’s closest.”

“Somewhere under the lotions was a person who must have known the other way to get from now to then.”

Tucked into other entries are early versions of several pieces—“Slops,” “Street Map of the Continent,” “SMTWTFS”—that later found their calling in Stories in the Worst Way, Lutz’s debut, about a quarter of which was edited by Lish.

In “Letters to Keith Jones (1973-1996),” an early section of Backwardness, Lutz writes of her attachment to “a reel-to-reel tape recorder on which I taped family conversations and TV shows and movies, then listened to the tapes over and over.” 650 pages later the tape recorder returns as we read Lutz reminiscing on listening to clipped dialogue: “if you’re anything like me, when you listen to something repeatedly like that, something sooner or later happens to the words: their limitive communicational properties, the gunk and slop of meaning, somehow get rinsed away, and what you’re left with is no longer speech but instead a bare human bleat or coo (or maybe it’s even just barely human), an onrushing current of undifferentiated sound that nonetheless becomes more and more orderly and consolingly predictable the more you listen to it.” Lutz describes her engagement with film as a narrative medium in similar terms, with structure, plot, dialogue—those old things—washing over, in favor of tone and mood. Even with printed text, Lutz recalls to Keith Jones her futile attempts at trying to read The Red Badge of Courage in high school, writing of “getting lost between one sentence and the next … for no reason other than that the words on the page didn’t seem to fit together at all,” and in college reading the shape and physicality of the text—“the look of it, its sheen, the trunks and shanks of the capital letters … a keen sense of the spacing”—while casting aside meaning. This all seems to prefigure the perspective Lutz makes clearer in “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” a call-to-arms for sentences with “an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words.” Lish’s impact on Lutz’s prose is evident, on-and-off, across sections here, though we can trace out an apparent penchant for a mouthy, sound-driven poetics years before working with the legendary editor.

If, as Lutz has suggested, Backwardness may be her final book, she will go out on an affective high-water mark with “Sixtier,” the only newly-composed material and the longest section of the book. Play with structural elements continues in this final section, from a 45-page paragraph, largely relationship memories, to a 3-page story about getting the wrong change at Arby’s, but Lutz’s writing about her mother’s decline and death from dementia, related early in the section, set the tone and stage for other incidents, brief accounts, which we might read in light of Lutz’s perceived isolation: interactions with a former student, financially strapped, struggling, but making their way; observing the elation—“some sort of bliss”—of a young girl, in line with her mother at a low-end supermarket, at the prospect of making a box of Little Debbie cakes, “six or eight to a package, for a dollar, I guess, in those days,” last for a week; encountering interesting dogs (“and I find most dogs interesting”), chatting with them, making “salutatious eye contact,” sometimes amounting to “just about the only connection I felt with the world that day, but it felt like enough.”

If heart-wrenching at points, Lutz comes across in many of these entries as wryly funny about her starkly, strivingly minimal mode of existence: “I probably would have made out okay, at least on balance, as a household slave in ancient Greece.” Like fellow sentence artist Gerald Murnane, she doesn’t sleep in a traditional bed: while Murnane cozies up on a camping stretcher, Lutz slumbers, often poorly, “on a baby-blue, vaguely thermal mat about one-third of an inch thick and about six inches shy of the length of my outstretched obtuse self.” On her decision to live on 75% of her social security allotment—“A woman my age earns, on average, only seventy-five percent of what a man earns, so I need to adjust my standard of living accordingly”—Lutz admits a taste for “tonic hardship” and wonders if she’s engaging in “poverty tourism.” A few pages later, she recalls a college-aged self-comparison to Thoreau, “maybe apropos of some new household self-denials of mine,” to which a near-flame replied: “You’re not like Thoreau. Not even a little bit.” What shall Lutz learn of beans or beans of Lutz?

In U & I, his book on John Updike, Nicholson Baker formulates a test, a measure of suspense, one we might ask of any great work: the question “is not ‘What will happen next? but simply ‘Will I ever want to stop reading?’” The idea of a Garielle Lutz book nearly twice as long as the omnibus could make the most endurant and firm-of-constitution reader uneasy. Can a 900-page-book be a reasonably recommended entry point for a writer like Lutz? Maybe. Heft excepted, Backwardness is the most digestible and diverse form Lutz’s writing has taken, its linguistic-topographical intensity coming in waves. Musing on the genre label we might or might not tag Backwardness with, Lutz explained to Hobart, “Writing a memoir would require something from me that I am incapable of giving: a global view of a life.” One cannot overstate the degree to which this book cracks the Lutzian model, from micro to macro levels, whatever one might call it.

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Dan Irving lives in Connecticut and teaches literature and writing in New York.