by Tim Parks
III
The Writer’s World
THE WRITER’S JOB
WHEN WAS IT exactly that becoming a writer started to be seen as a career choice, with appropriate degree courses and pecking orders? Does this state of affairs make any difference to what gets written?
At school we were taught two opposing visions of the writer as artist. He might be a skilled craftsman bringing his talent to the service of the community, which rewarded him with recognition and possibly money. This, they told us, was the classical position, as might be found in the Greece of Sophocles, or Virgil’s Rome, or again in Pope’s Augustan Britain. Alternatively the writer might make his or, by now, her own life narrative into art, indifferent to the strictures and censure of society but admired by it precisely because of a refusal to kowtow. This was the Romantic position as it developed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Let’s leave aside how accurate this is historically; it’s what they taught us and it got stuck in our heads: on the one hand the writer as artisan whose personality was hardly important, the prevalent situation in preindustrial times, when writers were few and held subordinate roles in fairly rigid hierarchies (a Petrarch or a Chaucer); on the other the writer as a charismatic superman (the Byrons and Shelleys) whose refined sensibility and creative powers gave him the right to transgress and question his community’s rules. This vision suited a time of tension between individual and mechanized mass society. The Romantic writer helped the reader fight back against the homogenizing pressures of a modern industrialized world.
As we know, T.S. Eliot rather complicated matters by telling us that writers had to overcome their personalities and find a place in the literary tradition; their work would only be truly distinctive when it marked the next development in the natural unfolding of the collective imagination as manifested in “the canon.” To the perplexed adolescent I was when I read Eliot, this sophisticated consideration seemed to offer a compromise between the classical and Romantic positions. But only at first glance. Read carefully, Eliot was more Romantic than ever: only those who had real personality, special people like himself, would appreciate what a burden personality was and wish to shed it. For these special people, literature became the drama of the sublimation or sacrifice of self through exploration of the work of other equally special people who came before them, to whose achievements they then added their own individual contributions. There was something painful and noble about this endeavor that raised the writer to a pantheon worshiped by an elite. Above all Eliot stressed that the creation of literature would require endless hard work over many years and quite probably a degree in the classics and/or modern European literatures. The young aspirant now had a core curriculum to follow to become a writer, but knew that it would require many years of hard labor.
Still, none of this prepared us for the advent of creative writing as a “career.” In the last thirty or forty years, writers have had to become people who travel along a well-defined career track, like any other middle-class professionals, not, however, to become craftsmen serving the community, but to project an image of themselves (partly through published work, but also in dozens of other ways) as artists who embody the direction in which culture is headed. In short, the next big new thing. A Doris Lessing. Rushdie. A Pamuk.
It’s rather as if the spontaneous Romanticism of the nineteenth-century poets had become a job description; we know what a romantic is (the politics, the behavior patterns), we know that is the way to literary greatness, so let’s do it. Coetzee’s novel Youth captures with fine wryness the trials of a methodical young man seeking to make a career out of becoming the kind of writer he is not.
Let’s consider a few of the changes that led us to this state of affairs.
In the twentieth century people stopped just reading novels and poems and started studying them. It was a revolution. Suddenly everybody studied literature. At school it was obligatory. They did literature exams. They understood that when there are metaphors and patterns of symbolism and character development, etc., then you have “literature.” They supposed that if you could analyze it, you could very probably do it yourself. Since enormous prestige was afforded to writers, and since it was now accepted that nobody needed to be tied to dull careers by such accidents of birth as class, color, sex, or even IQ, large numbers of people (myself included!) began to write. These people felt they knew what literature was and how to make it.
In the second half of the century, the cost of publishing fell considerably, the number of fiction and poetry titles per annum shot up (about one hundred thousand English-language fiction titles are now published worldwide each year), profits were squeezed, discounting was savage. A situation was soon reached where a precious few authors sold vast numbers of books while vast numbers of writers sold precious few books. Such however was the now towering and indeed international celebrity of the former that the latter threw themselves even more eagerly into the fray, partly because they needed their shrinking advances more often, partly in the hope of achieving such celebrity themselves.
It became clear that the task of writers was not just to deliver books, but to promote themselves in every possible way. He, or let’s say she, launches a website, a Facebook page (I’m no exception), perhaps hires her own publicist. She attends literary festivals all over the world, for no payment. She sits on literary-prize juries for very little money, writes articles in return for a one-line mention of her recent publication, completes dozens of Internet interviews, offers endorsements for the books of fellow writers in the hope that the compliment will be returned. It would not be hard to add to this list.
In the first half of the twentieth century the decline of the gentleman publisher coincided with a rapid growth in the number of writers seeking to storm the citadel. Along with the increasing complexity of book contracts—hardbacks and paperbacks, bookclubs, bonuses, options, sliding scales of royalties, film rights, foreign rights, territorial divisions, remainders, and a host of other niceties—these conditions created and consolidated the figure of the literary agent.
The emergence of the agent signaled an awareness of a clash between the idea of writing as a romantic, anti-establishment vocation and the need for the professional writer to mesh with a well-established industrial and promotional machine. Hopefully the agent would reconcile the two. Soon, however, agents found themselves so overwhelmed by pressure from would-be new arrivals and contract complications that they could no longer be seen either as a gateway into the world of publishing, or as middle men who could spare writers from getting their hands dirty. It was at this point, in the 1980s, that the creative writing course took off and the figure of the career writer began to assert itself.
One of the myths about creative writing programs is that students enter them to learn how to write. Such learning, when and if it takes place, is a felicitous by-product that may or may not have to do with the teaching; the process of settling down to write for a year would very probably yield results even without teachers. No, the students enter the program to show themselves to teachers who as writers are well placed (they imagine!) to help them present themselves to the publishers. Most creative writing programs now offer classes on approaching agents and publishers and promoting one’s work. In short, preparing for the job.
At the same time the perceived need for an expensive yearlong creative writing course on the part of thousands of would-be writers affords paid employment to those older writers who have trouble making ends meet but are nevertheless determined to keep at it. One of the problems of seeing creative writing as a career is that careers are things you go on with till retirement. The fact that creativity may not be co-extensive with one’s whole working life is not admitted. A disproportionate number of poets teach in these programs.
Creative writing programs are frequently blamed for a growing standardization and flattening in contemporary narrative. This is unfair. It is the anxiety of the writers about being excluded from thei
r chosen career, together with a shared belief that we know what literature is and can learn how to produce it that encourages people to write similar books. Nobody is actually expecting anything very new. Just new versions of the old. Again and again when reading for review, or doing jury service perhaps for a prize, I come across carefully written novels that “do literature” as it is known. Literary fiction has become a genre like any other, with a certain trajectory, a predictable pay-off, and a fairly limited and well-charted body of liberal Western wisdom to purvey. Much rarer is the sort of book (one thinks of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin, or Peter Stamm’s On a Day Like This, or going back a way, Letty Fox: Her Luck, by the marvelous Australian writer Christina Stead) where the writer appears, amazingly, to be working directly from experience and imagination, drawing on knowledge of past literature only insofar as it offers tools for having life happen on the page.
So then, a would-be anticonventional public enjoys the notion of the rebel, or at least admirably independent, writer, but more and more that same writer, to achieve success, has to tune in to the logic of an industrial machine, which in turn encourages the cultivation of an anticonventional image. This is an incitement to hypocrisy. Meantime the world opens up; books travel further and translate faster than they ever did in the past. A natural selection process favors those writers whose style and content cross borders easily. Success and celebrity breed imitators. Lots of them. Nobody can read everything. Nobody can read the hundredth part of everything. Nevertheless international prizes purport to tell us which is the best novel of the year, who the greatest writer.
The ultimate achievement of the career writer, after a lifetime of literary festivals, shortlists and prizes, readings, seminars, honorary degrees, lectures, and, of course, writing, is, or would be, to place oneself inside “the canon.” But in the publishing culture we have today, any idea that a process of slow sifting might produce a credible canon such as those we inherited from the distant past is nonsense. Whatever in the future masquerades as a canon for our own time will largely be the result of good marketing, self-promotion, and pure chance.
Is all this bad news? Only if one is attached to dreams of greatness. In a droll lecture entitled “Ten Thousand Poets” delivered at the annual conference of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics at Boston University last October, the excellent poet Mark Halliday reflected:
I think all of us who keep striving and striving to publish another and another book of poems are still in love with the ideas of GREATNESS and IMPORTANCE.
As Halliday concluded, such ideas were simply not compatible with the era of the career writer.
WRITING TO WIN
ONE OF THE great mysteries of the writer’s life is the transformation that occurs when he or she passes from being an unpublished to a published novelist. If you are looking for a textbook case, check out the career of Salman Rushdie. Here he is interviewed in The Paris Review in 2005:
Many people in that very gifted generation I was a part of had found their ways as writers at a much younger age. It was as if they were zooming past me. Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, Angela Carter, Bruce Chatwin—to name only a few. It was an extraordinary moment in English literature, and I was the one left in the starting gate, not knowing which way to run. That didn’t make it any easier.
It’s a competition. Pick up a copy of Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton (the pseudonym that aligns Rushdie with two of the greatest writers of modern times) and you find that almost every relationship, whether it be with friends and rivals at school, with his wives and partners, with fellow writers, and finally with the world of Islam, is seen in terms of winning and losing. And at the painful core of these struggles, at least early on, is “his repeated failures to be, or become, a decent publishable writer of fiction.” This is the competition of competitions. Publication. Eventually, Rushdie decides that this failure is tied up with an identity question and “slowly, from his ignominious place at the bottom of the literary barrel, he began to understand . . .”
He sets off to India to reinforce the Indian side of his identity because he perceives this will help him to become a successful writer, and indeed soon conceives “a gigantic, all or nothing project” in which “the risk of failure was far greater than the possibility of success.” After the publication of Midnight’s Children, “many things happened about which he had not even dared to dream, awards, bestsellerdom and on the whole, popularity.” Of the night when he was awarded the Booker he speaks of his pleasure in opening the “handsome, leatherbound presentation copy of Midnight’s Children” with “the bookplate inside that read WINNER.”
This is what it is about. One reads Rushdie’s novels and finds that the major characters, like their creator, tend to be locked into struggles about winning, losing, and general self-aggrandizement: Ormus Cama, for example, hero of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, is as desperate to become a rock star as Rushdie was to become a writer. He is also determined to win the beautiful and talented Vina, who despite affection for him sees acceptance of his offer of love as a form of capitulation, eager as she is to have a singing career at least as great as his. Meantime Rai Merchant, the narrator of the novel, competes with Ormus for Vina’s affections. The Satanic Verses also fields two protagonists both seeking success and celebrity, with the more Rushdie-like of them winning the day.
But more than the plots, Rushdie’s constantly crackling language, full of puns and games, and the unrelenting erudition, rapidly establishes a hierarchy that has the writer/narrator dominant and the reader reduced to supine admiration, or if not, irritated. These are the only two responses. On many occasions in Joseph Anton, Rushdie expresses genuine puzzlement as to why he has so many enemies among reviewers and fellow authors. More than other winners, he feels. Perhaps it is because he makes it so clear just how important being seen to be a winner is.
On this, alas, he is right. No one is treated with more patronizing condescension than the unpublished author or, in general, the would-be artist. At best he is commiserated. At worst mocked. He has presumed to rise above others and failed. I still recall a conversation around my father’s deathbed when the visiting doctor asked him what his three children were doing. When he arrived at the last and said young Timothy was writing a novel and wanted to become a writer, the good lady, unaware that I was entering the room, told my father not to worry, I would soon change my mind and find something sensible to do. Many years later, the same woman shook my hand with genuine respect and congratulated me on my career. She had not read my books.
Why do we have this uncritical reverence for the published writer? Why does the simple fact of publication suddenly make a person, hitherto almost derided, now a proper object of our admiration, a repository of special and important knowledge about the human condition? And more interestingly, what effect does this shift from derision to reverence have on the author and his work, and on literary fiction in general?
Every year, I teach creative writing to just a couple of students. These are people in their mid-twenties in a British graduate program who come to me in Italy as part of an exchange. The prospect of publication, the urgent need, as they see it, to publish as soon as possible, colors everything they do. Often they will drop an interesting line of exploration, something they have been working on, because they feel compelled to produce something that looks more “publishable,” which is to say, commercial. It will be hard for those who have never suffered this obsession to appreciate how all-conditioning and all-consuming it can be. These ambitious young people set deadlines for themselves. When the deadlines aren’t met, their self-esteem plummets; a growing bitterness with the crassness of modern culture and the mercenary nature, as they perceive it, of publishers and editors barely disguises a crushing sense of personal failure.
But we’re all aware of the woes of the wannabe. Less publicized is how the same mentality still feeds the world of fiction on the other side of the divide.
For the day comes when wannabes, or at least a small percentage of them, are published. The letter, or phone call, or email arrives. In an instant life is changed. All at once you’re being listened to with attention, you’re on stage at literary festivals, you’re under the spotlight at evening readings, being invited to be wise and solemn, to condemn this and applaud that, to speak of your next novel as a project of considerable significance, or indeed to pontificate on the future of the novel in general, or the future of civilization. Why not?
Neophytes are rarely unhappy with this. I have often been astonished how rapidly and ruthlessly young novelists, or simply first novelists, will sever themselves from the community of frustrated aspirants. After years of fearing oblivion, the published novelist now feels that success was inevitable, that at a very deep level he always knew he was one of the elect (something I remember V.S. Naipaul telling me at great length and with enviable conviction). They now live in a different dimension. Time is precious. Another book is required, because there is no point in establishing a reputation if it is not fed and exploited. Sure of their calling now, they buckle down to it. All too soon they will become exactly what the public wants them to be: persons apart; producers of that special thing, literature; artists.
It alters everything. The dynamic in his marriage shifts. Or her marriage. An unpublished wife is one thing and a published wife quite another. The relationship with the children is conditioned by it. A new circle of friends is acquired. Yet as over time the author explores and grows into the position society so readily and generously grants to the artist, embracing or rejecting the opportunity to play the moralist, or alternatively the rebel—but the two so often coincide—to be constantly visible, or to retreat into a provocative invisibility, there nevertheless remains one thing he or she must never do. He must never acknowledge, or if he does so only ironically, as if really this were a joke, the fierce ambition that is driving this writing, and beneath that the presumption of an insuperable hierarchy between writer and reader, or simply writer and nonwriter, such that the former is infinitely more important, and indeed somehow more real than the latter.