When Bruce Ario’s literary executor, Dan Schneider, received Ario’s papers, he realized he had enough material to reconstruct his great American novel, Cityboy, to its legendary mid-90s edition. The book is now available through automachination press (cover design: Kristen Selak), complete with a major critical essay by Dan Schneider on the process of restoration, examining the ways in which Cityboy was slowly destroyed by a vanity press, and offering fresh insights into Ario’s life and work.
Bruce Ario (1955 – 2022) was a poet and novelist from Minneapolis. A car accident and traumatic brain injury in his mid-20s forced Bruce to drop out of law school, which was followed by a period of homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness. His health began to improve with a religious awakening, therapy, and, most importantly to Bruce and his legacy, a lifelong interest in art.
Our documentary film, From There To There: Bruce Ario, the Minneapolis Poet, is also available for streaming on Patreon. You can learn more about the film on FilmFreeway and watch the film’s latest trailer on our YouTube channel.
Bruce Ario’s Selected Poems is also available for purchase.
The first part of Dan Schneider’s critical essay on Bruce Ario’s Cityboy is reproduced below.
The Rape And Restoration Of Bruce Ario’s Cityboy: A Great American Novel
The Rape
Anyone who has read Bruce Ario’s Selected Poems and Final Poems, edited by me, will know that the poetic canon of Bruce’s is his main claim to literary import and greatness. In crafting the two books I scavenged through printed, handwritten (holographic) works, and even works written in crayon and magic marker, to eke out 596 publishable poems out of over 1000 or so poems (mostly in the ario form) sent to me, as Bruce’s literary executor, upon his death. There were likely dozens to hundreds more poems that Bruce, in his sloven way, lost, misplaced, or accidentally destroyed- in both digital and printed form, and they are likely forever lost.
But Bruce also engaged in prose, from more recent essays written for my website, Cosmoetica; and Alex Sheremet’s website, automachination; as well as work related articles for his job; other short prose works, fictive or not; as well as short stories; some novels; and a number of plays. Not a one of them is particularly worth reading, save as curios for those interested in arios, and Bruce Ario. The lone exception to that claim is Bruce’s novel Cityboy, written from the late 1980s through the late 1990s. As great as Bruce’s best poems were, Cityboy is not merely a side note to the man as poet, nor his poems. The only reason this novel works, and works so greatly, is because it is the only novel that Bruce could ever really write, at least with any literary success, as it is not based upon his imagination’s creation of memorable characters from naught, nor a narrative drafted from a vision of, to use the modern parlance, ‘worldbuilding.’ No, it hews closely to his own life, as a roman à clef; but it is most definitely not a memoir, as 15-20% of it is, according to Bruce’s claims to me, just some stuff made up to round out the story. Those parts are mostly to bridge the portions based upon Bruce’s real life love of the city of Minneapolis, and his struggles with addiction, mental ills, and a traumatic brain injury (TBI) suffered in a car crash when he was in his 20s.
I first read the novel in the late 1990s, when, after a meeting of the Uptown Poetry Group (UPG), Bruce gave me a print version of it. I read it and was amazed that the book held up so well, in fact- greatly, given all my knowledge of Bruce and his life to that point, and his extremely hit and miss pattern with the quality of his poems. Naturally, I realized this was due to what I mentioned- the fact that the novel was based on his life, not creatures from his actual imagination. As in his best poems, Bruce is more of a describer, than a conjurer, with words. Bruce lacked the facility to put a vividly imagined thing or scene to prose, unless it actually happened to him. It was almost as if his ills and accident destroyed his own ‘inner theater of the mind’; if he even really had a good one to start with.
My critical ‘approval’ of the ‘literary work’ led to a boost in Bruce’s confidence, as he had been loath to let others read it. No longer was this so. Bruce soon lent it out to others in the UPG, who similarly were impressed with its quality, as well as people not affiliated with the UPG. This group of mainly non-artists and bad writers were not as enthused, and thus began a decade or more of Bruce’s self bowdlerization of his own novel, based upon the idiocies and whims of people with little or no literary knowledge, who knowingly or not, preyed upon Bruce’s own lack of self confidence and desire to please them. This was likely Bruce’s worst personal trait- a lack of confidence which resulted in that uniquely sick people pleasing quality and pathology known as ‘Minnesota Nice.’
What is that? Well, if one consults Wikipedia, it will state that Minnesota Nice is:
….a cultural stereotype applied to the behavior of people from Minnesota and Wisconsin implying residents are unusually courteous, reserved, and mild-mannered against people who are not like them. The phrase also implies polite friendliness, an aversion to open confrontation, a tendency toward understatement, a disinclination to make a direct fuss or stand out, apparent emotional restraint, and self-deprecation.
But a better and more accurate definition comes from the Urban Dictionary:
Fake, phony pretense of niceness toward someone for the purpose of avoiding confrontation or conflict but then proceeding to use sneaky, dirty, backstabbing tactics to attack the person behind their back. I grew up in other cities in the Midwest, where people were open and honest about disagreements and expressed them readily but then often remained friendly and respectful and ‘agreed to disagree.’ Here in Minnesota, where I have spent almost all of my adult life, I’ve never gotten used to the venomous subterfuge and lying hidden under a thick layer of phony ‘nice.’
The Wikipedia definition is actually a great example of Minnesota Nice, as it does not apply to Wisconsin, as that state is looked down upon by Minnesotans as mere ‘cheeseheads.’
But, back to Bruce and this novel, for Bruce’s submission to Minnesota Nice resulted in many terrible literary edits and alterations to that manuscript I first glimpsed in the 90s. Oh, how I wish, now, that I had made a Xerox copy of that first version of Cityboy that Bruce let me read because, naturally, as with many of his poems, it also seems to be lost to time and Bruce’s own lack of valuing his own seminal work and its literary excellence, as it was nowhere on Bruce’s personal PC, delivered to me after his death.
Now, when I say Cityboy is a great novel, I mean it, but that does not mean it is a Top 10 all time novel. Just as one can argue his 10 line great ario poems are not the equal to great longer poems by others, a similar thing can be said of Cityboy. Is it on par with great published novels as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (whose protagonist slips through and about time in a less subtle way than Cityboy’s John Argent, Jr.), John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath (a bildungsroman the way Cityboy is), Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (especially in the earlier sections with Argent as a child), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (with its themes of obsessiveness), or Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (with its main character looking to prove himself in a society in which he does not fit in)? Likely not. But it beats J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye (with its portrayal of teen angst and self-loathing), or many of the other claimed great 20th Century novels by folks like Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita– with its humor and sexuality), James Joyce (Ulysses and Finnegans Wake– with their increasing bent into fugue like states of mind, as well the focus on place- the cities of Dublin and Minneapolis for Joyce and Bruce), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man and the overlooking of minorities- blacks for Ellison and the mentally ill for Bruce). Even Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea is a good comparison as a summation of a life (even if Old Man was Hemingway’s last and only great work, while Cityboy was Bruce’s first and only great work, and Cityboy is over twice as long, at just over 58,000 words).
Simply put, Cityboy is a great, short, and focused work. It deserves its place in the pantheon of not only great American novels, but of great world literature. It is also far beyond the puerile work produced by someone like Henry Darger- also a mentally ill man and ‘artist,’ as I demonstrated in my essay on Bruce’s Selected Poems. Darger could never have balanced literary excellence with the great portrayal of how the mentally ill can think, much less how that illness infects and affects a life; especially one so rooted in the arts.
The downside to mental illness, of course, is the effect it has beyond just the sufferer, and in this case it led Bruce to defile his own best prose work, then allow others, paid and not, to complete the process of literarily raping Cityboy. Fortunately, in its just over 58,000 words, there was so much good and great that even the bowdlerizing of a few thousand words and key passages and other things, could not dislodge Cityboy’s firm grasp on the great. But, to be true, it did notch it down a bit.
Over the years, Bruce might email me, or others on the Cosmoetica e-list, revised versions of Cityboy, or portions thereof, and they were, to my recall, always worse than what had come before. An occasional change might be better than the change immediately before, but this process of eternal change and literary declension never got back to the original high of the first- the late 1990s- version of the work.
Jessica, my wife, or I would rail at him for his lack of standing up for himself and his art, and Bruce would sheepishly claim he just wanted to do good, satisfy readers, or some nice Granny at a poetry or playwriting group he had joined (post-UPG), or that he had read something about some other shitty novel and/or author, who gave some idiotic advice on writing, and Bruce eagerly took in such dubious claims; even as he would then admit that I or Jess were right in railing. Yet…. regardless of the many ways and forms this played out, Bruce still did the same over and again. His desire to please those incapable of understanding art of any merit became an addiction, the last addiction of Bruce’s addicted life. He also, naturally, mutilated parts of the novel upon the moronic comments of agents or editors (the few that gave more than a form rejection letter/email)- not a one of whom ever seemed to have represented works of any real quality, much less a track record of even being able to recoup the time, energy, and money put into their terrible roll call of bad books brought to the table.
Bruce then, to my recall, entertained the possibility of self-publishing- and did so with his own Amazon account, where in 2012 he published a bowdlerized version of the novel. In it, he had added a ridiculous opening that basically gave away the main point of the book- a man’s merger of identity with a city, or something larger than himself. The ending was also trashed, as were some minor points, and some key scenes. The text was a Swiss Cheese version, with 2 Chapter 17s, his losing count of 4 or 5 other chapters up to 23, and assorted other minor errors. In short, it was a mess, and Jess and I lamented all the rapes of a great text.
Then, in 2015, Bruce stated that he had looked into a few vanity/subsidy presses, after traditional publishers- in their zeal to dumb down literature and culture- again passed over a great book- his. Only in literature/publishing and filmmaking do people with no ability in those fields get to make decisions on the works of art put forth. Nonetheless, Bruce settled on a vanity press, but neither Jess nor I were told the name of the press- of course, it did not matter, as we knew it would just finish the rape of the book that Bruce and his band of non-literary acquaintances had started. In fact, it wasn’t until the summer of 2022, upon Bruce’s death, that we learnt of who the vanity press was, and what they had done to Bruce’s book.
First, some definitions of what a vanity press is and why they have traditionally been anathema to real writers of quality and substance.
From Wikipedia’s page on the matter:
A vanity press or vanity publisher, sometimes also subsidy publisher, is a publishing house where anyone can pay to have a book published. The term ‘vanity press’ is often used pejoratively, implying that an author who uses such a service is publishing out of vanity.
In the mid-1980s, I used a vanity press- a now defunct one called Carlton Press, to publish a long juvenile poem I wrote, called Od Infinitum. I, and my mom, paid several thousand dollars for the book, as I believed I was following in the footsteps of Walt Whitman, who self published; but self publishing and vanity publishing are different things, and the 1980s were far different from the 1850s, and all I got for my money was 100 copies of the book, and a check for a few books sold- likely no more than $20.
A few years later some vanity presses started billing themselves as hybrid publishers, following a hybrid publishing model– wherein writers and the publisher jointly financed the publishing.
Per Wikipedia:
Hybrid publishing is the source of lively debate in the publishing industry, with many viewing hybrid publishers as vanity presses in disguise. However a true hybrid publisher is selective in what they publish and will share the costs (and therefore the risks) with the author, whereas with a vanity press, the author pays the full cost of production and therefore carries all the risk. The vanity press then has absolutely no interest in whether the book is suitable for publication or good enough to sell.
Given the bad reputation of vanity publishing, many vanity presses are rebranding themselves as hybrids, leading to exploitation of writers. The Society of Authors (SoA) and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB) have called for reform of the ‘hybrid’/paid-for publishing sector. The trade unions, who together represent 14,800 authors, have jointly published ‘Is it a steal? An investigation into ‘hybrid’/paid-for publishing services’ ‘to expose widespread bad practice among companies that charge writers to publish their work while taking their rights.
This brings me to the vanity press that Bruce used, who seem to be an even newer form of the hybrid press. Unlike other hybrid publishers, they seem to not bear any shared costs, have no contracts signed by them nor the authors, but instead claim to sell ‘publishing services,’ which authors can mix and match, pick and choose, from. This is a new little spin, as ‘selling services’ seems much less predatory than the old vanity and hybrid models. It allows a potential author to feel like they have more control of their own book, but the so called services then seem superfluous, as there ends up being no real expertise being imparted for the sale of services.
Now, before I go any further, I stated how Bruce did not mention whom he chose as his vanity publisher, and that is because, while I never had any financial entanglements with the publisher, I did, in the past, have some negative personal (not professional) experiences with one of the people involved with them. I state this fact just to be upfront about any claims of potential bias one might make regarding the professional criticisms of their work on Bruce’s manuscript to be detailed within this essay. That stated, my criticisms are so obvious, thorough, and manifold that it is clear that my take is on the money and eminently fair. However, this reality is why Bruce may have felt not mentioning the press was a way to protect me or perhaps not seem like he was ‘disloyal’ to me. Of course, that’s silly and nonsensical, but it was not until he was dead that I knew who he had entered into business with. Of course, he should have been far more worried over the whole business model he was entering into, rather than my potential feelings.
Per Wikipedia:
Vanity presses often engage in deceptive practices or offer costly, poor-quality services with limited recourse available to the writer. In the US, these practices have been cited by the Better Business Bureau as unfavorable reports by consumers.
One common (scam) model of a vanity press is described by Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum. The company pretends to operate a traditional publishing arm, (where the publishing house bears all the cost). However, when an author submits their work, they are always told it does not quite meet the standards required for traditional publishing. However, the company will publish it if the author pays for something, e.g. engages their professional editor, or commits to buying a large number of printed copies of the book, or some other excuse. The exorbitant fee charged for these services will, in fact, cover the entirety of the vanity publisher’s costs in producing the book.
Of course, this is not the model Bruce’s vanity press seems to claim nor follow- as they claim to eschew contracts; but there is still the pay for publication reality that defines them as a vanity/subsidy press, for while they do not have contracts, they still charge for many services that, at least in the ones I am able to critique, are quite poor, and well substandard of the already terrible traditional publishing model. I don’t know how much they actually charged Bruce for their ‘services,’ but when he told me he used a vanity press, I asked him how much he paid to them. Bruce seemed embarrassed. I asked if it was 5 thousand dollars. Bruce seemed more embarrassed and hung his head. I asked if it was more and, holding his eyes downward, he nodded in agreement. I asked if it was 20 grand? Bruce exhaled and smiled, and said, ‘Oh, no, no- not that much!’ He was gauging his folly to my statements of dollar figures. I asked if it was 10 grand. Bruce’s face turned a deep red, and his eyes darted about in shame.
‘Ten grand?’
Bruce exhaled and seemed near tears, as if he was a fool. I tried to comfort him and tell him it was alright. I felt anger at Bruce, but more so at the vanity press, still unknown to me, but advised him to make the best of it, and sell as many books as he could at the readings he’d give about town.
Over the next 7 or so years until his death, Bruce never told me the name of his vanity press and grew more and more embittered and outspoken by the whole thing.
As I wrote for the Selected Poems:
This brings me to the subject of the vanity press Bruce got involved with late in his life. They bowdlerized his great novel, Cityboy to such a degree that Jessica and I will have to restore the novel to its original state, as the second step in establishing Bruce’s literary merit and reputation, after the release of these Selected Poems. The mutilation starts with the novel’s title, which changed from Cityboy to City Boy, for no real reason, and which is especially egregious considering the main character’s identity is totally tied up in the city of Minneapolis, hence the merged word and title makes sense. Even the subtitle given the book, as A Memoir, is wrong, as the book is clearly a novel, a roman à clef, for the main character is named John Argent, not Bruce Ario, and while there are many parallels to Bruce’s real life in his novel, there are also significant parts- perhaps a third of the book, that are fiction, as told to me by Bruce himself. Then there is a bad opening paragraph added before the original ending, which utterly mutes the original version’s great, poetic, and gripping start- typical of the edits and additions that altered Bruce’s very vision of the work. There are numerous other additions that are typical MFA hackery- such as explaining too many things in the narrative to make obvious things painfully obvious, overdescriptions just for the need to ‘unpack’- an MFA weasel word- a work for the illiterate; things wholly added to the original great novel, things which often mute Bruce’s clarion voice and genericize the work, including, especially, the memorable beginnings and ends of many chapters. The book’s last page, mirroring the bowdlerized start, has even more larding on of unneeded and generic writing that makes the original version’s great ending something far less than it was.
Over the last few years of his life, Bruce, in talks and emails, often regretted letting the vanity press destroy his great novel. Jessica recalls that Bruce once said, ‘I don’t know how I let them talk me into changing my book,’ to which I comically replied, ‘They used words, Bruce, they used words;’ only to have Bruce sigh in disgust of himself and his people pleasing nature.
Furthermore, Bruce would complain, with increasing anger, not only of the money he pissed away, but over many aspects of the edits- even though he had accepted many of them, from the title to the ending.
Here is a typical exchange of that sort in email form:
On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 11:57 AM Bruce Ario Owner <ariowriter@centurylink.net> wrote:
I should have never let them talk me into that.
Their next step would have been to talk me out of the whole book.
From: “Dan Schneider” <cosmoetica@gmail.com>
To: “ariowrite” <ariowriter@centurylink.net>
Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2021 11:46:16 AM
Subject: Re: Cityboy
City Boy is a pedestrian title.
Cityboy merges man and place.
The latter is MUCH better.
DAN
On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 11:37 AM Bruce Ario Owner <ariowriter@centurylink.net> wrote:
Dan,
I don’t want to beat an old horse, but you said you liked Cityboy (your spelling), so
I was curious. Did you understand that Argent was using the characteristics of others and attributing to himself? That in the end he thought he was the city?
Please tell me that didn’t escape you?
Thanks,
Bruce
PS Sorry if this is tedious for you.
Bruce also stated he felt that the vanity press did not do enough to promote his book. He claimed that all he got were the books, and no help. I asked Bruce if he paid for help in promoting the book, and he could not recall. He seemed more and more confused over the process but, without a contract, he had no real recourse, legal nor otherwise, but even had he recourse he likely would have done nothing, as he was embarrassed by the whole need to use a vanity press, and wanted to put it in his past. Still, over phone and skype conversations, the ‘vanity press’- he still would not name them- became a sort of symbol for American capitalism in Bruce’s mind, as rarely would more than a single talk pass without his mention of them.
All in all, Bruce seemed to feel he was ripped off, paying around $10,000 to sell- according to him and the press- only 400 or so copies, copies that Bruce claimed he did all the legwork for. While none of what vanity presses- traditional, nor ‘hybrids’ like Bruce’s vanity press- do are technically illegal, there is a reason that if you Google the term ‘vanity press’ you get back tens of thousands of entries and articles decrying the practices as unethical, at worst, and unseemly, at best.
On a personal level, I felt for Bruce, not just as a man who desperately wanted to be an ‘author,’ as so many people who use vanity presses likewise do, but the fact that here was a mentally ill man trying to promote his work and cause of acceptance for the mentally ill, and he had fallen into a situation many a mentally sound person had, and- reading the book- the vanity press had to know the state of mind Bruce bore, yet still engaged in the practices so long decried by people who work in the traditional publishing industry- a business model that itself is very troubling; especially in the last 40 or so years.
But the very worst thing done to Cityboy– by Bruce, his acquaintances, and his vanity press- was doubtlessly the bad editing, the homogenizing of Bruce’s unique voice, and the utter genericizing of the whole novel. If humans and their society actually valued great art, none of this would have happened. There would be checks in place so that artists of quality could not be so preyed upon by vanity presses- and traditional presses, as well, for they also do more harm than good in works of literary import; the gallery system for visual artists; the outrageous expenses and other hurdles of the film industry; nor streaming services for musicians.
To reiterate what I earlier stated, ‘Only in literature/publishing and filmmaking do people with no ability in those fields get to make decisions on the works of art put forth.’ Generally, this is in prose, more than poetry, but how and why these non-artists get to vie for control of a work they had no part in creating is a problem that those in the future will have to solve.
Cityboy is thus in a long line of edited literature and films that have been raped by others. The list is too long for me to even get deeply into, but the most famed example that comes to my mind is Orson Welles’ 2nd Hollywood film, The Magnificent Ambersons; a work whose true quality is lost to time, it seems. The good thing, though, is that the fate of the Ambersons does not await Cityboy, as Bruce appointed me his literary executor, 20 years ago, and as I did with his Selected Poems and Final Poems. I have done as good a job at reconstructing and restoring Cityboy to its 1990s literary apex as is possible with the gaps in the timeline, as well as the lost versions intermediary to the assorted versions I had, and those others we both knew we had.
In short, it was up to me to reBrucefy Cityboy, and here is how I did it…
[Read the entirety of CITYBOY by purchasing the book here.]
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