I’ve been having trouble writing. I don’t usually find it hard. Doing philosophy: that’s hard. Having good ideas, if and when I do, a miracle. But writing these short essays should be simple. I don’t need to have much to say, only to sluice the stream of consciousness into words, mopping up the spills. But my stream has been white water.
So I decided to write about that. An axiom attributed to Albert Camus: “Whatever prevents you from doing your work becomes your work.”
It’s axiomatic, too, that frustration and failure are endemic to writing and to creative life in general. John McNally’s The Promise of Failure is a very good book about writing, not about failure as such. More recently, Stephen Marche published a lovely essay, On Writing and Failure, in the Field Notes series of pamphlets from Biblioasis. Like Camus, Marche is an aphorist:
Failure is the body of a writer’s life. Success is only ever an attire.
Rejection is the river in which we swim.
As the second quote suggests, Marche is writing for those who exist in a state of submission—the word is apt, he finds—for whom failure is the failure to get their words into print.
For them, he has advice, in the form of further axioms:
All creative careers demand persistence because all creative careers require luck. Persistence is the siege you lay on fortune.
Writing may be a cosmic howl, the pursuit of humanity’s proper place in the universe and a glorious reckoning with the limits of meaning itself, but it’s also a job.
And he offers consolation, of a sort. Beyond rotten reviews, there are stories of those who were rejected, unrecognized, exiled, or killed themselves, despite their genius. “No whining,” Marche repeats, before telling us about the worst days of Nabokov, Austen, Joyce, Melville, Ovid, Li Bai, Du Fu, Anna Akhmatova, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, and others.
If failure was good enough for them, why not for us? “What I find strange,” Marche concludes, “is that anyone finds it strange that there’s so much rejection.”
The average telemarketer has to make eighteen calls before finding someone willing to talk with him or her. And that’s for shit people might need, like a vacuum cleaner… Nobody needs a manuscript.
No whining!
But I am going to whine, anyway. Because what Marche investigates is not my problem. The guy who edits Under the Net has many defects, but unlike other editors, he generally accepts my submissions. What troubles me is not rejection, it’s “writer’s block,” on which Marche has a single, demoralizing page. Maybe it’s a blessing, he muses: the writer’s brain saving her from herself. “Find something else to do,” it screams.
Thanks a lot.
Marche is brutally honest, but he isn’t always right. On artistic envy, he dissents from Jerry Saltz, who advised young artists: “make an enemy of envy or else it will eat you alive.” Against this, Marche contends:
Envy may be the soul-killer but it’s often the art-giver. The impulse right at the beginning of an art career is envy, an encounter with beauty and power that twists itself into the thought: I wish I could do that.
But what Marche has in mind is quite unlike the professional envy Saltz forswears—the rage of seeing someone you don’t rate in The New Yorker—and I wouldn’t call it “envy” at all. At least for me, the experience of reading someone write as well as Marche does sparks an eros that is non-competitive. It fuels the impression, not just the desire, that yes, I could do that, as though reading brilliant prose were at the same time a tutorial in how to write brilliant prose. What could stop me, after all? There’s no word in Marche’s book I couldn’t put down.
I know it’s an illusion—as though the fact that I can play one chord makes me Glenn Gould—and not everything I love to read sustains the myth. Sometimes I think: fair play; I couldn’t possibly do that—though I think this more with gratitude that someone can than resentment that I can’t.
Like others, I am moved to write by the desire for recognition, and by envy, as well as by other, more honourable motives. As Marche contends: “So much has been written in the spirit of ‘I’m going to show those motherfuckers.’” Perhaps the paragon is Karl Ove Knausgaard, who wrote about his creative nadir:
Almost the only thing left was the will, something forced and immovable, like a carapace, and perhaps more than anything I kept it up because it would be so humiliating to have gone all out to become a writer, and then fail.
But at its purest, my desire to write is not about pride or shame; it’s not a competition against others, or even against myself, against language or against time. It’s not a competition at all. The frustration of this desire is less like being rejected than having words on the tip of one’s tongue. The rapids foam, and the mist does not condense.
"having words on the tip of one’s tongue."
Clearly, you meant to write, 'having words on the tip of one's toupee'
You're welcome.
Envious of my genius? I would be.
I once had to make some comments at the memorial service for a close friend of mine. I told a Jesuit friend and co-author on many of my philosophical pieces (Mark Ravizza), that, although I've been thinking about the philosophical issues pertaining to death, and writing about them, for many years, I was at a loss for words in this situation. He said, "Say that."