Silences

by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

  What if there is not that fullness of time, let alone totality of self?—The situation for most writers:

  The dissatisfaction about bad work, the failure of things, the difficulties of technique . . . and then to swallow that despair and that melancholy, to bear oneself as one is, not in order to sit down and rest, but to struggle on notwithstanding thousands of shortcomings and faults and the uncertainty of conquering them. Then this struggle with one’s self, the trying to better one’s self, the cry for energy—all this complicated by material difficulties. . . . One works hard, but still one cannot make ends meet.

  —Vincent Van Gogh

  I am absolutely going to pot. What a fine form of torture, the objective impossibility of thinking and consequently of writing can be, for here we work the whole day, for seven deadly hours on end, and afterward I walk, and then I eat, and at dessert I fall fast asleep from fatigue.

  —Paul Valéry

  Material anxieties frighten me because I feel how mysteriously independent of myself is my power of expression. v. . . I am not as the workmen who can take up and lay down their tools. I am, so to speak, only the agent of an unreliable master.

  —Joseph Conrad

  . . . I know that I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates. And even if I had all the powers in the world, I would have to give all my powers to the important thing in me: it has a right to that. . . . I know I am not exhausted; but the little and continual thoughts of every day and its most unimportant things confuse me so that I can no longer recollect my own. . . . Before I used to hear all my voices in me; now it is as if someone had closed the window toward the garden in which my poems live; far, far away I hear something and listen and can no longer distinguish it. My head is full of ridiculous additions. And hardly have I been paid for one job and am thinking that I may now collect myself for my own work, when it is already time again to think of the next and of where it is to be found and by what efforts obtained and my nervous strength is slipping away; my time, my courage, and I fail to catch up with myself day after day and am somewhere out of reach, full of flowers past their bloom, whose fading scents fill me with dead weight.

  . . . But now I scarcely have plans any more; now it seems to me an infinite presumption to have plans when the very next stage is so dismaying, so dark, and so full of the tiniest questions. It seems as if I were in the midst of nets; I feel these nets on my hands with every gesture that would arise freely.

  . . . I look for some person who will understand my need without taking me for a beggar. . . .

  It is clear to me that I need help in order to continue on my way. . . .

  What can one who wants a great deal say of this wanting (that deep wanting which goes toward my work and toward its continuous realization) without betraying it and becoming a boaster? Here every word involves a false note and an affront to what it means. One can only say that one comes more and more to protect this wanting which goes toward deep and important things, that one longs more and more sincerely and wholeheartedly to give it all one’s strength and all one’s love and to experience worries through it and not through the little harassing accidents of which life in poverty is full. . . . This winter, for the first time, it [poverty] stood before me for months like a specter, and I lost myself and all my beloved aims and all the light out of my heart and came near taking some little official post that would have meant dying and setting out on a spiritual transmigration full of homelessness and madness.

  I am indeed no longer a beginner who throws himself at random into the future. I have worked for years, and if I have worked out anything for myself, it is the belief in the right to raise the best I have in me and the awareness of the treasures in the sesame of my soul which I can no longer forget. And after all, I know that my pen will be strong enough to carry me: only I may not misuse it too early and must give it time to attain its full growth.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke, from two letters, 1903 and 1902

  Always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, while that one gift which it was death to hide (my writing powers), perishing, and with it, myself. A rust eating away the bloom of spring, destroying the tree at its heart.

  —Virginia Woolf

  Eight hours a day I have paid, working as an advertising writer the last five years while trying to save nerve force and courage enough to admit other writing. It has cost me dearly in rare projects gone wrong.

  —Sherwood Anderson

  I have done nothing as far as serious literature for a year—must stop—go someplace—straighten out my burdened spirit and do some real writing. Above all the fact that my only hope for salvation lies in my not having to earn money . . . I need help to get myself out of this snare. . . .

  Money that I can get only for work, the wrong work, and right now I’m so worn out and distracted I can’t work.

  —Isaac Babel

  I am not getting the needful hours to ripen anything in myself. . . .

  . . . I have had very little time left over from the day’s work to give to it [poetry]. . . .

  But a long poem like that [“The Bridge”] needs unbroken time and extensive concentration and my present routine of life permits me only fragments. (There are days when I simply have to ‘sit on myself’ at my desk to shut out rhythms and melodies that belong to that poem and have never been written because I have succeeded only too well during the course of the day’s work in excluding and stifling such a train of thoughts . . . & then there are periods when the whole world couldn’t shut out the plans and beauties of that work—& I get a little of it on paper.)

  —Hart Crane

  I think I’ve only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water.

  —Katherine Anne Porter

  When the Claims of Creation Cannot be Primary: The Literary Situation

  It is the great quantity of what is not done that lies with all its weight on what wants to come out of the soil.

  Money that I can get only for work, the wrong work.

  I know that I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.

  I could not live by literature if only to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.

  The sacrifice of talent, in pieces, to preserve its essential value.

  I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can’t suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted and completely crippled. . . . In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate. We don’t really direct our lives unaided and unobstructed. Our being is subject to all the chances of life.

  —Katherine Anne Porter

  The cost to literature of its sporadic, occasional, week-end or sabbatical writers (it may take an entire sabbatical to undo damage and to recover power for work) is unfinished work, minor effort and accomplishment, silences—where might be a great flowering.

  And some writers are grated to pieces by the constant attrition. Lost forever. Others silenced grievously as Edwin Louis Wallant—early death from sheer overwork; a full time job and writing.

  SILENCES, P. 13

  SILENCES, PP. 9–14

  (“What if writers must work regularly at something besides their own own work—as do nearly all in the arts in the United States today?”)

  THE LITERARY SITUATION* (1976)

  John Leonard of the New York Times estimates that there are only 100 or so writers in this country who can actually make a living from their books. According to Leonard, 1,300 to 1,400 serious novels are nevertheless published every year by trade publishers (2,000—if westerns, mysteries, science fiction and Gothics are counted). A Directory of American Fiction Writers (by no means all-inclusive) lists over 800 writers of serious fiction.

  —Poets & Writers Newsletter, 1976

  In 1971–
72, P.E.N. surveyed its membership. These were writers of professional status (biographers, poets, essayists, journalists, as well as fiction writers) of sufficient reputation to have been invited into P.E.N.

  In a year when $7,300 was the minimum adequate standard of living for a family of four, a third of these established writers had not earned $3,000; more than half earned less than $6,000. A third were able to earn $10,000 or over.

  An earlier survey (1969) of writers-in-residence at The MacDowell Colony (some demonstration of achievement is required for admission) showed half of the writers earned $1,000 a year or less from their writing; a quarter earned from $1,000 to $5,000, and only a fourth were able to bring in more than $5,000.*

  “The remarkable fact of the economics of the artist’s life is not how little he [she] earns, but how much he [she] manages to create in spite of the niggardly earnings,” the article comments. “ ‘Art,’ as one of the colonists [me!] accurately said, ‘is subsidized by artists’ ”—with their lives.

  As for foundation help, fewer than one in ten of the MacDowell writers had ever received grants of any sort, and half of the grants were for less than $2,500. One and a half percent got grants of $5,000 or more.

  Nearly all had, or answered that most of their artist friends had, been “habitually forced by pressure for adequate income to put aside their creative work.”

  Remember that the above figures are for writers accorded some recognition. What would a similar survey of the 800 writers listed in CODA’s Directory of American Fiction Writers (which requires only some kind of publication for listing), or of a cross-section of all writers reveal?

  It is the same with Individuals as Nations; works of Art can only be produc’d in Perfection where the Man is either in Affluence or is Above the Care of it. Poverty is the Fool’s Rod, which at last is turn’d on his own back; this is A Last Judgment—when Men of Real Art Govern & Pretenders Fall. Some People & not a few Artists have asserted that the Painter of this Picture would not have done so well if he had been properly Encourag’d. Let those who think so, reflect on the State of Nations under Poverty & their incapability of Art; tho’ Art is Above Either, the Argument is better for Affluence than Poverty; & tho’ he would not have been a greater Artist, yet he would have produc’d Greater works of Art in proportion to his means. A Last Judgment is not for the purpose of making Bad Men better, but for the Purpose of hindering them from oppressing the Good with Poverty & Pain by means of such Vile Arguments & Insinuations. . . .

  Who will Dare to Say that Polite Art is Encouraged or Either Wished or Tolerated in a Nation where The Society for the Encouragement of Art Suffer’d Barry to Give them his Labour for Nothing, A society composed of the Flower of the English Nobility & Gentry Suffering an Artist to Starve while he Supported Really what They, under Pretence of Encouraging, were suppressing. . . .

  Liberality! we want not Liberality. We want a Fair Price & proportionate Value & a General Demand for Art.

  Let not that Nation where Less than Nobility is the Reward, Pretend that Art is Encouraged by that Nation. Art is First in Intellectuals & Ought to be First in Nations.

  —William Blake, 175 years ago

  What follows is the blues. Writer, don’t read it. You know it anyway, you live it; and have probably read it in one way or place or another before and said better. This is for readers to whom it may be news. An unrevised draft is all I can bring myself to.

  When Van Gogh, quoted earlier, said:

  The dissatisfaction about bad work, the failure of things, the difficulties of technique . . . and then to swallow that despair and that melancholy . . . to struggle on notwithstanding thousands of shortcomings and faults and the uncertainty of conquering them. . . . All this complicated by material difficulties. . . . One works hard, but still one cannot make ends meet

  he was speaking for most dedicated writers. Ah, if that were all.

  “Who will read me, who will care?” It does not help the work to be done, that work already completed is surrounded by silence and indifference—if it is published at all. Few books ever have the attention of a review—good or bad. Fewer stay longer than a few weeks on bookstore shelves, if they get there at all. New books are always coming in. Quality or ephemera—if the three- or four-week-old one hasn’t yet made best-sellerdom or the book clubs (usually synonymous)—Out! Room must be made. It is always fall in the commercial literary world, and books are its seasonal leaves. Even fewer books (again, regardless of merit) are kept alive by critics or academics who could be doing so. “Works of art” (or at least books, stories, poems, meriting life) “disappear before our very eyes because of the absence of responsible attention,” Chekhov wrote nearly ninety years ago. Are they even seen? Out of the moveable feast, critics and academics tend to invoke the same dozen or so writers as if none else exist worthy of mention, or as if they’ve never troubled to read anyone else. Anthologies, textbooks, courses concerned with contemporary literature, tend to be made up of living writers whose names will immediately be recognized (usually coincident with writers whom publishers have promoted). A prize or good-foundation-fellowship seal of approval helps. Public libraries, starved for funds, buy less and less books. Published writers of good books, if their books haven’t been respectable money-makers, more and more find themselves without a publisher for their latest one. Younger writers (that is, new ones of any age) find that fewer and fewer first books are being published. The magazine market for fiction has shrunk—what? 75 percent?—in the last two decades.

  I see there is a lot of “fewer and fewer” and “less and less.”

  At a time when there is more reading and writing of imaginative literature than any time in the human past (and an indiscriminate glut of books on the market), and a greater potential audience than ever before, it is harder and harder for the serious writer to get published or get to readers once published.

  Another way of saying it:

  Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled. That happier schizophrenic time when publishers managed profit necessities in combination with some commitment to literature of quality and content, is less and less possible. Almost all publishing houses are now owned by conglomerates who bought them for investment purposes (oh, they knew about the high costs of printing, paper, mailing, etc.) and whose only concern (necessarily) is high profit return. Why diversify, take risks, settle for modest returns, take trouble—and literature is trouble. Salability—as maximum-profit defined—leads to, well too much of what has been said here already, and other ramifications there is no room or spirit to discuss here.

  The pressure to publish, “to keep before the public”

  Nowadays if you don’t want to be forgotten, you must produce a masterpiece a year.

  —Jules and Edmond Goncourt

  Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

  —Jules Renard

  The literary atmosphere

  This miserable bartering of fame, this coveting of it, fighting for it, tearing it from mouth to mouth . . . this continual talking about literature in ignorance as if it were some sort of commerce; this constant criticizing, denigrating, envying, self-praising, exalting people and writings that deserve contempt—all this depresses me to such a degree that if I had not got the refuge of posterity, and the certainty that in the course of time, everything does fall into its right place, I would send all literature to the devil a thousand times over.

  —Giacomo Leopardi, 1835

  The literary atmosphere that sets writers against one another, breeds the feeling that writers are in competition with each other. (In its extremest sense, Hemingway’s feeling that the measure of success would be “to knock Tolstoy out of the prize ring”: literature as prize ring!) The prize-givings that are barterings and tradings-off more often than true honorings. The foundation grants, starvingly few in number, for the ast
onishingly many demonstrably worthy* —grants now so associated with honor, status, credentials, that those who do not need them to get their work done, seek (and sometimes receive) them at the expense of those who do need them; the harm of the applyings, the trying not to feel the being passed over as condemnation of capacity. The “major/minor” pigeonholing. The judgings having nought to do with true criticism; the unjustified malignity and ignorance of much “reviewing,” its superior tone, its tendency to follow the leader: New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books.

  Disappointment and humiliations embitter the heart and make an aching in the very bones. . . .

  . . . There is a point with me in matters of any size when I must absolutely have encouragement as much as crops rain; afterwards I am independent. . . .

  . . . When I spoke of fame I was not thinking of the harm it does to men as artists: it may do them harm . . . but so, I think, may the want of it, if “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise To shun delights and live laborious days”—a spur very hard to find a substitute for or to do without.

  —Gerard Manley Hopkins

  Writer’s isolation, loneliness.

  The attitude: nobody owes you (the writer) anything; the world never asked you to write.

  My long ago and still instinctive response: What’s wrong with the world then, that it doesn’t ask—and make it possible—for people to raise and contribute the best that is in them.

  I can’t go on.

  I can’t leave it there either. I sound like certain established writers at forums and conferences (and sometimes even in classes) eagerly bringing the news to unestablished ones of how frightful and hard and impossible it is—not in an emboldening spirit of solidarity and resistance either—or even balancing it with the rest, the joys and rewards which keep writers going.

  (Writers, you can start reading again here.)

  O ye dead poets who are living still

  Immortal in your verse though life be fled,