Authors: Shelly Fisher Fishkin

Silences (37 page)

It can assuage the bitterness of wrong.

—the scarcely-ever-now-quoted Longfellow

Yes.

In art, as in no other form of endeavour,

there is meaning apart from success.

—Conrad

(I believe that
to be true for all forms of human endeavor, but let it stand.)

The
rapture;
the saving comfort; the joyous energies, pride, love, audacity, reverence in wrestling with the angel, Art—

This dear old blessed healing

—James

I walk, making up phrases, sit, contriving scenes; am, in short, in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me.

—V. Woolf

One sentence
follows another, is born of the other, and I feel as I see it being born and growing within me, an almost physical rapture.

—Gide

The strange mysterious perhaps dangerous perhaps saving comfort there is in writing; it is a leap out of the murderers’ row; it is a seeing of what is really taking place.

—Kafka

Yes.

The American bards shall be marked for generosity and
affection and for encouraging competitors. They shall be Kosmos, without monopoly or secrecy, glad to pass anything to anyone—hungry for equals by night and by day.
^*

—Whitman

O yes.

The truth under the spume and corrosion. Literature is a place for generosity and affection and hunger for equals—not a prizefight ring. We are increased, confirmed in our medium, roused to do our best, by every
good writer, every fine achievement. Would we want one good writer or fine book less? The sense of writers being pitted against each other is bred primarily by the workings of the commercial marketplace, and by critics lauding one writer at the expense of another while ignoring the existence of nearly all. What—in addition to all the preceding—disheartens, weakens, can poison, is the existence, and
sometimes success, of the sleazy, the corrupt, the tricky.

Hungry for equals. The sustenance some writers are to each other personally, besides the help of doing their best work.

Hungry for equals. The spirit of those writers who have worked longer years, solved more, are more established; reaching out to the newer, the ones who must carry on the loved medium.

The small presses, magazines,
making work accessible.

Established writers trying to get unestablished ones known or
published. Or, a different form of concern; serving on committees for other writers.

Poets and Writers
(CODA) building a sense of community among writers through their
Newsletter,
directory, services.
Margins.

Even in the publishing world, those who are drawn there because of their love for literature, who
still do what they can.

The exceptional publisher, anthologist, critic, bookstore.

The teacher who incites to literature.

Our caring readers—co-partners.

The sustaining existence of writers whose work and lives we can respect—and love.

A little-known writer:

Some of what I know to be my best writing will never be published . . . many of my most cherished projects will never come
to fruition; many of my aspirations forever unfulfilled. I am always surprised when a stranger recognizes my name . . . but for more than half a century I had had my work published . . . at 77 I am busier with my writing than ever before and expect to continue until I die. . . . When I was young I was going to be a great poet . . . now I am happy that at long last I did get one volume [of poetry]
published . . . I was also going to be a famous short story writer and novelist. How many years of disappointment and rebellion and grief to realise that I was never going to be anything of the kind; [there are only] my dozen books, my moderate recognition in two or three specialized fields.

It is what you aspire to rather than what you attain that brings into being even what
you do attain. Never set your sights too low
. . . .

There is no disgrace in joining us Almosters. At least a little of what we had to say has been said and a few have heard and even listened.

—Miriam Allen De Ford, 1973

And a famous one:

I spent so much of my life teaching and lecturing and reading . . . that I had not time or energy to write the things that I
have really begun. I have 3 unfinished books which were the main objects of my life. I am 85 years old, I am working ferociously trying to
make a deadline, being a little late of course, but this time, thank God, my deadline is my own. I rather enjoy driving myself. It brings back the old times when I was like, not an ox, but a horse on a treadmill, being urged at a dead run always. And, without
seeming to grow roses on a past that was full of briars and cactus, it was not so bad; I did survive. I have enjoyed my work, it has been my only happiness. . . . It was worth living for and I still have what might seem a wild hope that I shall finish at least this book I am working on. And the other 2 are still alive and beginning to agitate for attention like very healthy children in an uncomfortable
cradle.

My dear fellow artists, I suggest that you go ahead and do your work and do it as you please and refuse to allow any force, any influence (that is to say, any editor or publisher) to tamper with your life or to debase your work. You are practicing an art and they are running a business and just keep this in mind.

—Katherine Anne Porter, 1976

“We are the
injured body. Let us not desert one another.”

The Literary Situation.

*
Title of a fine book by Malcolm Cowley, 1954. What follows confirms his earlier findings. It’s no better.

▴
SILENCES, P
. 13

*
Russell Lynes, “The Artist as Uneconomic Man,”
Saturday Review,
February 28, 1970.

*
. . . and to whom denial of circumstances is irremediable lessening of literature.

*
Re-affirmed newly in the 1974 National Book Awards, when prizewinner in Poetry Adrienne Rich “refused the terms of patriarchal competition,” rejecting the award as an individual, but accepting it in the name of all women (in a statement written with Audre Lord and Alice Walker, two other nominees): “We . . . together accept this award in the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go
unheard in a patriarchal world, and in the name of those who, like us, have been tolerated as token women in this culture, often at great cost and in great pain. . . . We symbolically join here in refusing the terms of patriarchal competition and declaring that we will share this prize among us, to be used as best we can for women. . . . We dedicate this occasion to the struggle for self-determination
of all women, of every color, identification or deprived class . . . the women who will understand what we are doing here and those who will not understand yet: the silent women whose voices have been denied us, the articulate women who have given us strength to do our work.”

Blight never does good to a tree . . . but if it still bear fruit, let none say that the fruit was in consequence of the blight.

—William Blake

THE WRITER-WOMAN: ONE OUT OF TWELVE—II

Acerbs, Asides, Amulets, Exhumations, Sources,

Deepenings, Roundings, Expansions

. . . And yet the tree did bear fruit.

BLIGHT: ITS EARLIEST EXPRESSION
^▴

(Early 1600s)

I never rested on the Muses bed,

Nor dipt my quill in the Thessalian fountaine,

My rustick Muse was rudely fostered

And flies too low to reach the double mountaine.