Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou (7 page)

THE PROFITS OF PROSE

“Fiction is a lie, with which we tell the truth.”

—
Robert Flynn

I’m a writer. In something more than a manner of speaking, I suppose I’ve always been a writer. I didn’t realize that for a long time. Indeed, what angers me most when I consider the point is that I was nearly four decades into my life before I could accept the fact of what I was. I seem to have wasted a lot of time. I spent almost half my life working toward being a scholar. My scholarship is still important to me, but it took a while for me to realize that what thrilled me about publishing research and criticism was less the content of what I had to say than the thrill of having people read my words and comment on the way I said it. Then I managed to publish some fiction; and although my success, such as it has been, is modest by any standard, I found myself at middle age and beginning a second career without having satisfactorily completed the first one.

I feel the pressure of time on me always. My biggest worry is whether I can tell all the stories I want to tell in the time I have left.

Of course, none of us really knows how much time he has left. Preston Jones was a writer, and a very good one in my opinion, but he didn’t find out that he was a writer until he was only a couple of beers shy of the ulcer that killed him. It’s fun to speculate on what he might have done had he relocated from a beer joint to a fern bar and switched from Bud to Perrier. I suspect, though, that he wouldn’t have been a writer anymore. Writers are notoriously self-destructive, and it’s their habit to find their inspiration in the very elements that threaten them. I think it’s part of their mystique.

Some writers discover or at least decide that they are writers early in life. In fact, their careers actually start before they have written or published anything. The world is full of writers who have never published. When I was in graduate school, I met a man named Ben. He handed me his business card. It had his name, and beneath the name, it said “Writer.”

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed that I had never heard of him (English graduate students are supposed to know about writers.) “What have you written?”

“Nothing yet,” he smiled at me. “I’m working on a couple of novels, though.”

A couple of novels. It’s like someone saying, “I’m not six-foot-five yet, but I’m working on a couple of inches.” I decided right then that I would never call myself a writer until I had written—and published—something. I recognize that publication doesn’t necessarily make a person a writer, but it’s the only real validation I can understand. Without it, I am merely playing at writing, practicing well and hard, perhaps, but not yet in the game.

Then there are the writers who have instant—and young—success. That is, they have published their work. I don’t like these writers very much. They tend to be cocky, overconfident, arrogant. They often write a lot about other writers, usually men, who are middle-aged and frightened of growing older. What do they know? They haven’t faced impotence or a shortness of breath from a moderately high staircase. They don’t have to watch what they eat or worry about the distance from their office to the john. They haven’t looked into the mirror one morning and discovered that their hair is thinning as rapidly as their hips are making rain-gutters for their waists. They haven’t found the value of comfortable shoes or that sleep is more fun than watching late-night TV. They are ignorant of ordered priorities that put nightclubs and skiing vacations beneath a trip to the dentist or socking money away for retirement. They haven’t come to terms with the notion that no matter how successful they are, they will never own a Porsche convertible, because such a car is impractical and silly for people their age.

Why don’t they write about what they know? Why don’t they write about buying their first legal drink? Their first sexual encounter? Their first vote? I know one young writer I met right after his book came out. He was wearing a jeans jacket and dusty boots. He wrote a book about an artist—not a writer—who was middle-aged and frightened of growing older. I tried to like him even so, and I bought his book, had him sign it. We had a couple of beers together. He drank his slowly, and I determined that he didn’t much like beer. He was very young, I thought. He worked out and had clear skin and a full head of curly hair. His teeth were white and he didn’t smoke, and he switched from beer to white wine on the second round. He drove a Porsche convertible. He lived with a twenty-two-year-old symphony orchestra cellist, who had legs that went from her well-shaped calves all the way up to her long, thin neck. Her mouth was gorgeous, and she had long, graceful fingers. She was without a doubt the sexiest woman I’d ever seen. And she was in awe of him and of his role as a writer. She announced that they had no intention of marrying, because she and he each had their own lives to live. She looked at him with a doe’s eyes, though. “He’s a wonderful writer,” she assured me. When she looked at me, I felt like a “funny uncle.”

I was envious of anyone whose career blossomed so quickly, who could use his talent to acquire a fine sports car and a beautiful, talented companion. Then I read his book. I didn’t think it was very good. In fact, I wondered how it was ever published. Publication is hard, and this book was hard to read, for it was trite and badly written. He wrote things like “extend out” and “center around” and used “impact” as a verb when he wasn’t talking about infected wisdom teeth. He had characters with names like “Lance” and “Marsha,” and everyone drove Porches and BMWs and had .38 revolvers handy and spent summers in the South of France and went to the opera and ate escargot and knew the differences between airliners. There was a lot of talk about stocks and bonds, and the main character was a Republican. There was a lot of sex, but none of it was normal, and everyone did drugs. I read several reviews of the book, and no one seemed to like it. I spoke to a number of people whose opinions I respected. They hated it. He made close to a quarter of a million dollars in residual sales, though, and he got a movie contract for nearly a hundred thousand more. I understand he traded his Porsche for a Ferrari.

I saw the young writer a few months later in New York. He was no longer wearing a jeans jacket and dusty boots. He had on a rag-wool turtleneck and ostrich-skin boots all under a Brooks Brothers trench coat that was worn fashionably open with a silk scarf hanging loose around his shoulders. His hair was carefully mussed, and I noticed that he was trying with no success whatsoever to grow a beard. The cellist was with him. She still adored him. She looked at me as if I were a leper.

“How’s it going?” I asked him.

“How do I get to Rockerfeller Center?” he replied. I was confused. Then I realized he was looking right through me. He was talking to the doorman. He didn’t hear me, although we weren’t but five feet apart. I heard later through a mutual friend that he was unhappy with me because he heard, correctly, that I refused to review his book. He said he thought I was jealous of him, of his success. He was right. Had I reviewed it, though, I wouldn’t have let my jealousy color my opinion. It might have improved it, in fact.

###

Not all writers are young, and not all writers are published, and not all writers are successful. I know of several writers who have been working on manuscripts since before they were young and who will never be published; if they ever are, they will likely fail. I don’t always know what keeps them going. They’re good writers. They’ve studied the art and craft of writing, and they work hard at it. They attend all the workshops and read all the “how to” manuals. As they grow older and collect a compost pile of rejection slips, they refuse to be discouraged. They aren’t quixotic. They aren’t foolish dreamers. They want to write, and publication is only one part of their ambition. This isn’t to say they don’t want to be published. It’s only to say that their priorities are on writing. It’s what they do, and it’s the only thing they want to do. In a way, any measure of success might spoil them.

I empathize with them terribly. It’s awful to do anything without recognition. It’s particularly awful to write something no one will ever read. But then again, if a writer starts believing that people may actually read everything he writes, he might not write at all, or at least he might not write honestly.

I know other writers who will never be writers. They call me up and write letters to me. They say, “I’ve got a story here that just won’t quit. It’s about my grandfather. He was a pig farmer who came to Texas in a Model-T Ford. His wife had a wooden leg and raised twenty-two children, all of whom became doctors and went to South America to cure dysentery. Two of them returned and became governors, and one bought an island in the Pacific and invaded Australia. It’s got everything. It’ll practically write itself.”

“How much have you written on it?” I ask.

“Oh, I’ve roughed it out,” they say, “but most of it’s on tape.” Then they offer to let me “finish” it for them. They tell me it’s a best seller. They are sure of it. They are probably pleased to think so, but it never will be a best seller. That’s because it will never be a book. It’s their story, but they can’t tell it. I can’t tell it either. I have my own stories to tell, my own failure to worry about. They don’t really want to be writers. They want to be authors. They have an idea that all they have to do is speak into a microphone and then let someone write it up. That’s all there is to it, after all, that and fixing their grammar and cashing the royalty checks.

Very few people know what it takes to be a writer, even fewer know what it takes to be an author. I didn’t know. I don’t know yet, but I’m trying hard to find out. I do know that only a very few writers are in danger of becoming authors, and even fewer are in danger of making a living from their writing. Most writers write because they have to, not because they have some idea about fame and fortune. It’s nice to be read—that’s all the fame I ever wanted, or so I lied to myself. It would be nice to be rich, but I’d settle for paying my American Express bill. And that’s not a lie.

###

Many people have the idea that writing a novel is a lot like building a boat in the basement or growing tomatoes in a window box. These people anger me. They make small of what I do, of what all writers do. Unlike unpublished writers, these people are smarmy about it. Once a physician came up to me and said, as all these types of people eventually do, “I’ve always wanted to write a novel. One of these days, when I have time, I’m going to do it.”

I was not in a good mood at the time, and I replied, “Well, you know, I’ve always wanted to take out an appendix. One of these days, when I have time, I’m going to do it.”

I had no such illusions about being a writer. I was from a small town in Texas, and writers lived in New York. They still do. But I had this yen to tell stories, so I wrote science fiction tales in high school. This was because of Mrs. McSpadden, my typing teacher during my junior year at Quanah High School. I was a crackerjack typist. It’s one of the few things involving manual dexterity I can do well. I’m fast and I’m accurate, for the most part. (I probably would have made a heck of a concert pianist if I had had the patience to study music. On the other hand, I play a lousy guitar.) In Mrs. McSpadden’s class, I could complete and check a half-hour’s exercise in about ten minutes. That left forty unfilled minutes. In any other class I would have read a book, but she insisted that we practice after we finished. I didn’t want to practice, so I wrote science fiction stories. They were pretty awful, but they were fun because I could make up anything I didn’t know. I invented “warp drive” years before Captain Kirk split his famous infinitive. But I wasn’t a writer.

When science fiction ran out, I wrote poetry. My poetry was pretty awful, too, but it gave me practice resetting margin stops and tabs. I did submit a poem for the yearbook my senior year, and it was published; but it was the only one submitted, so I had something of a lock on it. Still, it was the first time I ever thought about being a writer. But thinking about it didn’t make me a writer either.

I was never very good in English in high school or college. My senior English teacher in high school made me write “I will not be a wise ass in class” five thousand times because I kept putting jokes in my essays. They were funny jokes, she told me, but she couldn’t allow it. She was my first cousin, and I thought she was kidding. She wasn’t. She made me write all those sentences, and she checked to make sure I didn’t use carbons. It took me three weeks. I thought it would earn her forgiveness, and I put a joke or two in my next essay. She punished me by giving the Senior English award to someone else. “You’ll never be a writer,” she said.

In college, English mystified me. It didn’t seem to have much to do with literature. Instead, it had to do with books that had to do with literature, and it was boring. The professors made reading assignments, then they went through the works and told us what we had read, and then they talked about the criticism. I began to understand that writers weren’t very important. It was what was said
about
them that was important.

That’s still true, and no one knows it better than a writer. It isn’t whether people like a book or not that counts. It’s whether the reviewers and critics like it or not. People who would never say an unkind thing to Osama bin Laden will walk up to a writer whose book has just been published and say, “I saw a review of your novel. They didn’t like it much.”

That’s like saying to a parent, “I just heard some people talking about your son. They think he’s the ugliest thing ever to crawl out from under a rock.”

The grim reality is that the critics have all the power. They can decide with the stroke of a byte on a disk whether a book lives or dies. They will determine who will receive the next Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Nobel Prize. People think it’s the readers who determine a writer’s success, and in some cases that’s true, but not in many. Most people don’t read very many books. The average “voracious reader,” if I can use the phrase, probably reads fewer than a dozen books a year, and only about a third of those are new ones, books that depend on sales—and reviews—to stay in print. The average American doesn’t read any books at all. Even well-educated people don’t read many books. They read reviews. They read the critics. It’s pretty easy to see how powerful critics are. So, I abandoned any idle thoughts about being a writer. I became a critic.