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From my initial reading of several posts here, I have been inspired to write the following as my first contribution of a post. I shall also post this at my personal website at the following URL:
It is my intention to add to an modify this essay as my thoughts evolve. I like the lonely feeling of freedom. Loneliness is the price of freedom.
The skyscraper is the cathedral of the Industrial Revolution. But where have all the Cathedrals and their architects gone? And what is there to scrape from the sky, other than God and pie? The genius of the Industrial Revolution was the identification of a process and interchangeable parts. Before that great Revolution, there were artists and artisans, apprentices, aspirations and inspirations. After the Revolution, there are blue collar workers and unions, exasperation and collective bargaining. Photography becomes the artist’s canvas, paint-by-number sets make every child an artist, and if you are a below-average photographer than you can purchase Adobe Photoshop. The dream of the Renaissance, and science, and their offspring, the Industrial Revolution, is to find a formula, a procedure, an algorithm, a process, which empowers anyone and everyone to solve a quadratic equation, or diagnose a medical condition, or be a hero in combat. With the invention of the rifle, every tailor becomes an Achilles. It is only natural that the search for heuristic methodology be extended to the craft of creative writing as well. One certainly sees the beginnings of such a technology in the novel factories of Balzac, with his crew of ghost writers, and, in more recent automations like the “Nancy Drew” children’s mysteries.
Lately I have begun to read and study a lot of Virginia Woolf. Her own personal diary is now carefully studied by scholars because she documented in it the progress of her work and spoke at times explicitly about the creative process itself. Scholars also study things like the galley sheets of F. Scott Fitzgerald to gain insight into the creative process. Fitzgerald’s publisher contracted an artist to paint a cover for “The Great Gatsby.” The jacket art was finished before the novel was ready. Fitzgerald did a major rewrite of the novel while it was still in the galley stage; a time when there should only be minor editing corrections.
We study diaries and first drafts and authors notes and corrections precisely because we seek, not to merely to unlock the mystery of the creative process and bring it into the full view of our understanding, but to construct, if possible, a step-by-step recipe for producing fiction which will be appealing.
The methodical and analytical approach which I see people taking here in this forum impresses me greatly. It is good to be methodical, disciplined and analytical in what one does. Perhaps if F. Scott Fitzgerald had been more methodical and disciplined, he would not have been frantically rewriting in the galley stage.
The comments I am about to make may seem at first as some criticism of this analytical diary process for creativity, and that is not at all my intention. One must of necessity erect a scaffolding in order to construct a Cathedral, but at the end of the work, the scaffolding is dismantled. My intention is to dwell on the long term effect which the literary analytical process has had upon certain writers which causes them to leave the scaffolding as part of the finished structure, or, I suppose in some cases, to in the end dismantle the Cathedral and leave only the scaffolding as the finished work.
Over the centuries, in the history of fiction, the process of writing became increasingly self-conscious and analytical, even to the point where the author began to step out from behind the curtains and speak directly to the reader about the process of writing as well as the process of reading. The “Wizard” in the Oz story was quite upset when Dorothy and her entourage peeked behind the curtains and discovered him. Postmodern artists step out from behind the curtains intentionally and do a stand-up monologue.
I was shocked, several years ago, when someone read something I had written and commented that it was quite Postmodern. At that time, I did not understand anything about Postmodernism, other than I had seen the term occasionally fly past my field of vision during casual reading. As I come to understand more and more about Postmodernism, and come to admire writers such as Pynchon and Vonnegut, I find that I want to be Postmodern in my style. Perhaps it is a great mistake for me to consciously want to be anything in particular. Perhaps I should just be me. People understandably worry whether it will be lucrative to “be me.” Since I have no plans to sell my work, I do not have to worry about popularity contests from the point of view of editors or reviewers or sales. I do worry about popularity in the sense that I desire readership.
In “The Moveable Feast”, Hemingway relates how Fitzgerald would “tweak” his stories so that they would be suitable for magazine publication. Hemingway saw such “tweaking” as harlotry. Hemingway walked a fine line between making a living and remaining true to a style which he saw as a principle and standard. Faulkner and Hemingway were always having battles. Faulkner once stated that Hemingway was superb in the niche of genre which he founded, but, once in that niche, and excelling, Hemingway never ventured to move out of it into something else. Obviously, Faulkner felt that his own career did demonstrate an effort to “step outside” of one thing, something comfortable and successful, and “move on” to something else, unknown and risky.
Perhaps the only sincere form of popularity is posthumous. Emily Dickenson felt, I am sure, as an outcast in exile. I doubt if she crafted a single phrase with an eye towards public opinion.
I remember as a teenager, reading something by Lawrence Durrell, possibly the Alexandrian Quartet, or the Labyrinth, and on the very first page, Durrell suddenly, shamelessly steps out from behind the curtains and veils of authorship and says to the reader something like, "I'm doing pretty good, huh?". I am paraphrasing from memory something that I read 40 years ago, but at the time, I was quite shocked that the puppeteer should stick his head into the scenery and say anything at all. I was shocked and also disapproving.
Now, as I look back on that experience with Durrell, I begin to see it as my own personal first brush with what is now called Postmodernism.
As a very young teenager, I was obsessed with reading everything that Ernest Hemingway ever wrote. For me, at that age, Hemingway was the ultimate novelist. I wanted to BE a Hemingway and sit in a café writing manly stories and then sell them to magazines to pay my bar bill. “Moveable Feast” is a kind of romantic diary of the process of writing.
I suppose each writer must decide why they are writing what they are trying to achieve by such writing. If writing is one’s sole source of income, then certain answers present themselves immediately. Such an author must publish regularly enough to maintain their income. They must bring to the market place something that the consumer will demand. It is not difficult to look about the publishing business and see who is writing the best sellers and what the public is demanding.
My father is, at this moment as I am writing, a healthy and vigorous 88 years old. He was in the landing at Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. For a period of several weeks, he would see Ernest Hemingway walk into his tent/office where Dad worked as supply sergeant. Hemingway was very friendly and would chat with everyone. My father emphasized that Hemingway never discussed with him the art of writing. The fact that my father briefly knew Hemingway personally, if only casually, contributed to my youthful enthusiasm for reading everything Hemingway ever wrote.
My father mentioned to me that in high school, in the early 1930’s, he was required to read “Return of the Native” by Thomas Hardy. He also chose on his own to read “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”. I commented to him that Hardy died in 1928, and only several years later his book was required reading in a public school. On hearing this, he began to reminisce about the very first time in his life that he became conscious of there being such a thing as a “best seller.” The novel was “Anthony Adverse” by Hervey Allen. Dad said that everyone was talking about that book and reading it. I was shocked that there could be such a best seller in the 1930s but that no one would ever even mention the title or author during my adolescence in the 1960’s, a mere 30 years later. How can something be so popular and in demand at one moment, and a few years later be virtually unknown?
How am I writing this very essay? What is the process which is taking place between my mind and the blank paper (or screen in the case of Microsoft Word) and you the reader (which at the moment I invent as part of the fiction, and then watch as my fictive reader reacts?) I write as a series of interruptions. I move to the kitchen to do something needful, and a thought enters my mind, so I randomly add it to the “blank page” of this bricolage patchwork quilt that I am constructing. I think of how alienated I have come to feel over the years, of all the rejections I have faced, and my vane search for some “kindred spirit” which is satisfied only in the dead poets’ society of library shelves.
A vessel is a container for something. A Ming vase, a crystal goblet, a plastic tumbler and a Styrofoam cup are all vessels. Though each container has a share in the same Platonic, eidetic, form of vessel-hood; yet each vessel has a different lifespan and a different value and is used in different ways. The Ming Vase is never used at all but simply gazed upon in some museum, except for those rare exciting moments in its existence when it sits on the auction block. The goblet is perhaps drunk from on special occasions, and handed down as an heirloom. The plastic tumbler is used daily for a year or so, and then is unceremoniously discarded. And we all know the lifespan of a Styrofoam cup. One does not see many subway riders reading “Finnegans Wake.”
Obviously, if you are dependent upon your writing for regular income then your writing must of necessity be market driven. The book-buying populace is your boss; your employer. I do not mean this as a criticism. This is neither good nor bad, but is simply a fact of life. Like it says in the lyrics of “Piano-man” by Billy Joel, “they put bread in my jar and say, ‘Man’ what are you doing here?”
Someone has to “put bread in our jar.” If we do not make it by writing, then we take some other job and write in our spare time. Or, perhaps, we write full time, and work at a job in our spare time.
I can easily see the possibility of a novel about an author who is torn between the harlotry of writing “best sellers”, and the nobility of writing something which shall one day be classic and enduring.
Mark Twain once defined a “classic” as something which everyone what to claim they have read but which no one wants to actually take the time to read.
I suppose the best of both worlds is if one can be fortunate enough to write a best seller which not only becomes an enduring classic but which defines an era or establishes a new genre. But each epoch knows only a handful of Newtons, Einsteins, Whitmans, Wallace Stevens.
The world is transformed with words, one person at a time.
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