by Jacob Bender. Reposted from Ships of Hagoth.
The BRIAN EVENSON controversy at BYU in the mid-1990s is one of those Rorschach tests that almost invariably reveals more about yourself than about Evenson. To those already predisposed to be critical of the Y, Evenson’s forced resignation from BYU after an anonymous grad student complained about his debut story-collection Altmann’s Tongue to Church higher-ups, is yet another stinging indictment against BYU’s lack of academic freedom, and of Church leadership’s hypocritical disrespect for free-agency generally. Evenson in this reading was a martyr, and that never-identified grad student a pernicious coward.
Among those more orthodox defenders of the Y, by contrast, the forced resignation of an author who published disturbing tales of murder, torture, animal abuse, pedophilia, and cannibalism is on balance a good thing, as something one would certainly hope a college representing Christ’s church would do. That he eventually left the Church entirely only betrays where his heart was all along. Evenson in this reading was a wolf in sheep’s clothing to be cast out, and that never-identified grad student an unsung hero.
For the longest time, whenever I did reflect on the Brian Evenson controversy, I tended to waffle between these two poles, viz: being critical of CES’s counterproductive and self-defeating policing of its faculty’s sacred free agency, while also acknowledging that a collection of graphic horror stories is, at best, a very odd fit at BYU.
Finally, however, I decided it was high-time during this Summer break to do what I’d always asked investigators on my mission to do about the Book of Mormon: actually read it before forming an opinion on it. So I checked out a copy of Altmann’s Tongue from my local library and began chugging my way through.
And I will be completely honest: I tapped out about half-way through. Well-written? Exceptionally. Imaginative? Very. Violent as reputed? Oh, yes. I like to think I have a high-tolerance for difficult and challenging literature, but these are indeed genuinely disturbing tales, even in their brevity. He is an excellent prose-stylist, yet he uses his talents to describe the most gut-wrenching acts. I actually better understand now why that anonymous grad student felt a duty to report Evenson to Church authorities, even if I still don’t agree with it (although in all honestly, I might have been tempted to do the same when I was a zealous young BYU student)–especially back in the 1990s, when there was such a massive rhetorical push against R-rated media in the Church.
Yet it is also important to emphasize that his stories obviously do not endorse the violence and depravity described therein. That much is clear (even if so much else about these narratives are not). The disturbed feelings you get from reading them are a feature, not a bug; you are supposed to feel disturbed, it would frankly be more worrisome if you weren’t. That anonymous grad student was either being hopelessly naive, willfully dishonest, or revealing their own latent sociopathy, when they argued that the book promoted the “enjoyment” of violence; Evenson, meanwhile, was by all available evidence completely sincere when he argued to school administrators that his fiction accentuated violence to show its horror and “thus allow it to be condemned.”
Now, whether describing violence graphically is the most effective way to condemn it is a different question. I am also unlikely to ever finish Altmann’s Tongue. Yet before returning the book to the library, I did still make sure to read the Afterword, to get Evenson’s own take on the whole BYU fracas. And what I learned was this: he wrote the majority of these stories while a Bishopric counselor in Seattle, whilst a grad student and new husband/father at the University of Washington.
As he describes it, he would frequently get calls in the middle of the night to go pick up “travelers who had gotten stranded, homeless people who wanted money or support, or marginalized people who had been left derelict by themselves or others” (269), and give them a lift to a shelter or somewhere else they could get help. As he drove these poor souls around, he would listen to them recount their absolutely harrowing personal stories. He swiftly learned to “not judge them or to react too strongly to what they told me, just listening, maintaining a neutral voice” (269), realizing that “my task was not only or not even primarily to decide whether to help them materially; my task was to allow them to vocalize what they needed to say about themselves” (270). Although his fictions are not based on the accounts of these transients he met in Seattle (he has the good sense to not steal other people’s stories), they are informed by this same impulse to not judge, to just listen, to let other people’s stories and actions speak for themselves.
Now, Evenson’s purpose in the Afterword is simply to explain how the stories in Altmann’s Tongue came into being, as writerly Afterwords tend to do. Yet as I read it, I could not help but observe: here we have a broke, exploited young grad student grinding out a PhD on a poverty stipend, struggling to financially support his young family whilst a sleep-deprived new father and an overworked, unpaid Bishop’s counselor–that is, absolutely slammed with school, work, Church, and family responsibilities–who nevertheless still always answered the call to help the poor and the needy and the stranger in our midst.
And suddenly I couldn’t care less about Altmann’s Tongue one way or the other: because isn’t this exactly the sort of generous person we want to keep in the reputed Church of Jesus Christ? More to the point: isn’t this exactly the sort of person we should avoid driving out?
I find myself exclaiming: let a thousand obscure horror stories be published before we drive a single generous, helpful person from the Church. Because what was most important here: that Brian Evenson’s stories were disturbing, or that he was in his personal actions generous, kindly, and non-judgmental? Which do you think was most important to those transients he would pick up at night? For that matter, which do you think was most important to his students, do you think? Honestly, did you ever read anything written by your professors in college, anyways? Was your professor’s publication record ever what was most important to you as a student? And which do you think is most important to Christ?
Indeed, I was a youth in the 1990s myself, and well remember what a big deal Church leaders made about avoiding R-rated movies and profanity and music with “bad lyrics” and etc.–things I am now long past caring about, since I have repeatedly had cause to observe that avoiding R-rated movies and swearing has not made one iota difference in whether one is generous, kind, and charitable–that is, whether or not they had charity, without which we could have the faith to move mountains, and yet would still be nothing (1 Corinthians 13; Moroni 7).
A poet I once home-taught said that the longer he lives, the more he’s convinced that God does not care about nearly as many things as we care about–but the things that He does care about, He cares about absolutely. The stories we create? I suspect the Creator of the whole universe could care less. But our capacity to be generous and thoughtful? I suspect God prizes that above the universe entire.
Editor’s note: Here are some links to articles about Brian Evenson and Altmann’s Tongue.
Susan Elizabeth Howe. “The Moral Imagination”. Sunstone, December 1995. It includes her reaction to Evenson’s short story, “The Munich Window”, and her poem, “To the Violent Literati”.
The December 1995 issue of Sunstone also contains the article, “Clipped and Controlled: A Contemporary Look at BYU”, which includes a long quotation from the AAUP report on Evenson’s treatment at BYU.
Michael Austin. “Review of Altmann’s Tongue”. AML-List, July 1995.
Michael Austin. “Two Cheers for the Violent Literati”. Sunstone, December 1997.
Brian Evenson Interview, by Todd Robert Peterson. Irreantum 3:2, Summer 2001.
“The Dark Work of an Ex-Mormon Writer”. The New Yorker, February 10, 2016.
I can’t speak to Evenson’s book. But I had a really terrible writing class from him at BYU. He did not come to class prepared to teach writing craft in a meaningful way. Instead, he asked us what we wanted to learn, and then when no one asked anything smart enough for him, he rambled about whatever he felt like, name dropping people along the way but few in the class knew enough to be impressed by the people he name dropped. We had writing groups but since he didn’t teach us much about actual craft they were just centered around the few people who were naturally gifted, not those of us who wanted to write but needed more guidance.
Even years later I’m appalled by the waste of it. It’s possible that this is how many literary writing classes are. However, I’ve attended multiple writing conferences since then and I have learned more at one good year of Storymakers (Martine Leavitt. Amazing, transformative, generous teacher) than I did in an entire semester in his class.
If BYU let him go because of his poor teaching, that would have been reason enough.