If I live to be 100 – make that 200 – I dare say I will never read a lead from a Pulitzer Prize-winning story as out there (or in there) as the one I am about to share.
The writer, book critic Andrea Long Chu for New York magazine, wrote the lead while trying to make sense of the scatological imagination of novelist Ottessa Moshfegh, known for her physical and metaphysical explorations of the human body and all the waste it produces.
Spoiler alert. Um, I mean trigger alert. Oh, never mind, just read this:
If you have ever worked with one, you’ll know that assholes don’t respond well to input.
As a lead, Chu’s sentence would have worked better if not attached to this 151-word paragraph:
Coaxing something up there, into the light, can take all day,” reports the narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Brom,” a 2017 short story about a shut-in feudal lord who spends his days easing foreign objects into his rectum. His name for this practice is illumination: “A few things I’ve managed to illuminate are worth noting: a small bottle of sherry, my sister’s confirmation crown which I snatched from its velveteen case and hammered down straight and flat, a rabbit’s foot, a brass corkscrew, an ivory penknife.” Brom, you see, believes his colon houses the light of God, safely concealed from his serfs, whom he torments, and his servant girl, whom he imprisons and feeds horse manure. But no man who lighteth a candle hideth it under a bushel, and in the end, hoping to work a miracle on his dying mother, Brom will demand his anus be cut open with a sword.
But wait, there’s more. In journalism terms, we might call it “supporting the lead”:
Moshfegh has dedicated her career to writing about assholes: cruel, pathetic people who do cruel, pathetic things. But the acclaimed author has also spent the last decade writing about the anus. Her early literary fiction is dotted with scatological detail: a smear of bird shit, an anal dildo, buckets for defecating in; ass-to-mouth play, sodomy with a broken bottle, a colostomy bag full of digested Mexican food. Moshfegh’s 2015 debut novel, the noirish Eileen, follows a laxative-abusing secretary at a boys’ prison who stumbles into a mystery involving nightly enemas and anal rape. The book won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; critics praised it for being a Trojan horse, a study in human depravity hiding in the bowels of a commercial thriller.
When it became known that I was about to launch the 2023 version of the annual Best Pulitzer Lead competition, at least a half-dozen folks pointed me to this work. Having now read it, I can say that Andrea Long Chu is a brilliant – and need I say daring – critic. Her lengthy proctological examination of Moshfegh’s work required extensive quotations from the author, who makes banned works like “Lolita” look like a Sunday school picnic.
Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Long Chu (Photo by DeSean McClinton-Holland)
That the Pulitzer Board, a traditionally cautious organization, would pin a gold star on such prose is probably encouraging. It confirms what my former editor Andy Barnes once told me: that in journalism you can say or write anything at any time — if you take into account the audience, the publication, the flexibility of language, and a legitimate public purpose.
From reading Chu’s review, it might feel as if the old-fashioned notions of good and bad taste have disappeared from the standards and practices of journalism. The new inhibitions involve race, ethnicity, religion and gender, violations of which can cost a person their job. Chu takes all of these into account.
I am not, however, honoring this lead as among the best of the Pulitzer leads (which will be revealed in a separate column) because I found it a bit loose and rambling compared to the most explosive scatological lead ever written, the one by Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic, the opening of a 2014 investigation on “The Dark Power of Fraternities.”
One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him – under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself – to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.
See what I mean? Compared to Chu’s opening, Flanagan’s seems – dare I say it – tighter.
I am an expert on such matters. It is now almost a half-century behind me, but I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation titled “Chaucer and Medieval Scatology,” a literary defense of the bawdiest of the poet’s works, such as the “Miller’s Tale” and “Summoner’s Tale.”
Years later, at a writing conference in Seattle, someone asked me to share the favorite lead that I had written. It was an easy one: “My butt could save your life.”
Those six words began a long feature in the Tampa Bay Times in which I chronicle my colonoscopy. It was written as a humorous/serious reflection on why that test is so important, especially for folks over 50. I had talked to a number of acquaintances who swore to me that they would never let a doctor “stick a camera up there.” One lady said she would rather die. I replied with the hope that she wouldn’t.
About two weeks after that piece was published, a woman carried a copy of it into the clinic that did my test. Her colonoscopy revealed cancer in the earliest stages. So maybe my butt did save her life.
At that Seattle conference, the great Jacqui Banaszynski, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for “AIDS in the Heartland,” asked me why I did not write “My butt could save your ass.” I told her I had rejected that option because both “butt” and “ass” were comic words. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted a funny word to lead the reader to the most serious point: taking action to save their life.
Cheers to Andrea Long Chu for winning a Pulitzer Prize and for taking such creative risks without alienating members of the Pulitzer jury.
These concerns are, of course, not new. Back in 1934, the great Cole Porter satirized a certain literary trend when he wrote: “Good authors too who once knew better words, now only use four-letter words writing prose. Anything goes.”
I feel moved to conclude these reflections with a list of habits for getting something “out there” into print:
- Don’t bother trying to sneak it in. Send up a flare.
- Be ready to defend the work: Why are you writing it this way?
- On an outrage scale from 1 to 10, most publications stop at 7. You don’t need an 11. Try shooting for an 8 or 9.
- If you have more than one editor, choose the one who might be most susceptible to the pitch.
- Make strategic choices as to which publication, or which section, might publish the work.
- Read it aloud, first to yourself, then to someone else. Notice when your listener might cringe.
- In early drafts say “In for a dime, in for a dollar.” But be ready, in collaboration with your editor, to tone it down to 75 cents.
Coming soon: The best Pulitzer leads of 2023
