(continued from previous article)
When one stands as you do in so intensely personal a relationship to one’s lifework, one cannot really expect to keep one’s friends. … Friends are an expensive luxury.
-Henrik Ibsen
Are you feeling compassion yet? Can you understand that the writer’s psychosis is a more or less healthy reaction to a decidedly unnatural act? Would you like to hear more? If I could see some dim glint of pity in your eye (the writer’s curse: not only can I not read your eye, I cannot detect if you’re still reading this!), I could tell you so very much more.
Reach for a Kleenex. Would you like to hear of the writer’s internal strife? In an odd inversion of nature, each of us must bear a mother and a father in our creative womb. We need the warm, supportive, forgiving mother who encourages us to make it through the first draft no matter how lousy it reads; yet we cannot succeed without the harsh authoritarian father who makes us go over and over the manuscript until we get it right.
And let me tell you about the life of a disembodied observer. You are who you are, one hopes; but a writer dare not attain such normalcy. We cannot freely project our own personalities onto the world, for that would interfere with our craft. Listen to Thomas Mann on this particular dilemma:
As a man, you might be well-disposed, patient, loving, positive, and have a wholly uncritical inclination to look upon everything as all right, but as artist your daemon constrains you to “observe,” to take note, lightning fast and with hurtful malice, of every detail that in the literary sense would be characteristic, distinctive, significant, opening insights, typifying the race, the social or the psychological mode, recording all as mercilessly as though you had no human relationship to the observed object whatever.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the flip side of this self-repressive syndrome. Serving time in a minimum-security prison, he found himself thrust in with a despicable roommate, a kleptomaniac former KGB colonel who now acted as a stoolpigeon for the guards. Solzhenitsyn got himself transferred to another room, only to regret it mightily-he realized that he needed exactly that kind of slimy character for a novel he was working on (The First Circle). He had just forfeited his best chance to observe a human slimeball at close range.
The Christian writer may find that this posture of merciless observation troubles the conscience. French playwright Jean Baptiste Racine wrote wicked dramas about the deviance of his worldly friends until contact with the pious Jansenists persuaded him to change his friends. Abruptly, he quit writing, unable to combine his art and faith. Most critics view T.S. Eliot’s plays a failure, in contrast to his poetry, and one of them speculates why: Eliot fell for one of the occupational hazards of the Christian artist. His harsh, cynical laughter at human stupidity and pride gave way to compassion. Eliot felt too much compassion for his characters, and good drama can only be forged from conflict.
Even as I write about this stance of a “neutral observer,” a voice inside me-my conscience?-reminds me that the whole attempt is delusional. I am by no means neutral. Though I may cast myself as objective, the very I who does the casting is blinded by prejudice and subjectivity. John Cheever the alcoholic writes about his alcoholism; clinically depressed William Styron writes about his depression. And I, as a Christian, write about sin and doubt. How do I keep from sinning and doubting as I do so? How would I know?
The writer, according to Shusaku Endo, must “look at things that are best left unseen.” Yes, that is why I write about my sin and my doubts. This process takes a toll, however. The artist who gives himself wholly to his work may end up robbed and poor. When I write about myself, I feel as if I am donating body parts in advance, before death. Yet I cannot stop the donations. That which cuts most deeply into myself is what the readers want and also, perversely, what I want.
“All sorrows can be borne, if you put them into a story or tell a story about them,” said Isak Dinesen. Everything that happens-and remember, not much does happen to a writer-becomes subject material. Bernard Malamud was asked about suffering. He said, “I’m against it but when it occurs why waste the experience?” After reading that sentence I recalled with a start that I have written three books about pain.
We would-be novelists have a reach as shallow as our skins. We walk through volumes of the unexpressed and like snails leave behind a faint thread excreted out of ourselves.
-John Updike
I used to be normal. For eight years I worked as an editor in a magazine office. I went to work and collected a paycheck in exchange for shuffling papers from a box labeled in to a box labeled out. People surrounded me, some of whom reported to me, and some of whom supervised me. Never did I go home tormented by ultimate questions about my identity. I knew who I was: the title on the door declared it to the world. I measured my daily productivity by how many papers I transferred from one box to the other.
Now, as a full-time writer, I must invent my identity anew each day. I see plenty of birds and a few chipmunks, but no people other than the Fed Ex driver. No one sees what I do until months after the fact. Only I can measure my productivity, and that is a daunting task: If it takes me two years to write a book, I must gauge whether or not I fulfilled 1/730th of my task on a given day.
I have been working at this strange career for almost 20 years. I have learned to live with the permanent state of discontent that plagues every writer, with the sense of alienation from people, with a terminal case of self-doubt about my identity and productivity. I have learned even to turn my paranoid self-reflection into material for my writing: witness this article.
Along the way, my writer’s life has taken over my real life. I sometimes wonder, If I did not write, would I even exist? My wife resents it when she learns something new about me in my writing; she has the quaint notion that a person should live actually and not vicariously, that two people should communicate through body language and conversation, not between the covers of a magazine or book. Intellectually, I agree with her, but often I find that my life takes on existence only as I write. How do I know what I think or feel unless I open my laptop and begin to write about it?
By journalistic background, I have a more eventful life than many writers. I have traveled to places like Somalia and Russia and India and New Zealand-always to collect material, of course. I stood in a refugee camp in Somalia at the height of the starvation crisis. Thirty thousand people lived in makeshift tents in that desert camp, and 40 to 50 babies were dying each day. I have never felt more helpless than during the time I spent there. Nurses were attaching iv’s, doctors were administering antibiotics, and chaplains were burying the dead. And I, a journalist who had flown 7,000 miles to be with them, stood alongside scribbling notes and taking photos. Never had my job seemed more vicarious, my existence more peripheral.
But vicariousness is, after all, a writer’s business. Although not everyone can visit a refugee camp in Somalia, if I do my job well enough you will have the sense of what it is like over there, and you may be motivated to give money to help the relief workers toiling there-or at least to pray. I spent ten days in Russia and wrote a short book about it. There, too, I felt helpless, as I first observed and then walked away from a nation in dire need at one of the most crucial moments in modern history. Since then, however, three people have written to tell me that they volunteered with mission organizations to Eastern Europe because of what I wrote.
“The aim of every artist,” said William Faulkner, “is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.”
Faulkner is eloquent, but I prefer John Updike’s image, of a snail excreting a faint thread of itself for others to come across and study-an image that certainly lowers the writer’s pretensions.
First of all, if you want to write, write. And second, don’t do it. It’s the loneliest, most depressing work you can do.
-Walker Percy
So why do we persist in this psychotic act? Updike and Faulkner have hinted at the existential reason, of leaving some trace of ourselves for others who will follow. I tend to think the reason is more primal: like any psychotic, we do it because we can’t help it. Psychotics think you’re the abnormal and deprived one because you cannot penetrate their hidden, private world.
“What is a Poet?” asked Kierkegaard. “A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music.” I would add that occasionally the very escaping of the sighs and cries can serve as balm for the poet himself or herself. Sometimes the disconnected act of writing allows the writer to connect fragments of childhood, shards of relationships, splinters of faith, and mend them together in a way that could not have been achieved apart from writing. Then writing can become a healing act.
We are all of us disconnected beings -from God, from each other, from ourselves. Writing does not cause the disconnection, it merely exposes it. As in medicine, diagnosis must precede any cure.
“Writing is a form of therapy,” said Graham Greene. “Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.” Now there’s a novel way of looking at it. Is not writing the truly psychotic act?
Ruined by Reading
Where does the writing psychosis begin? Almost always with reading. In fact, writers could be described as a subset of the much larger group consisting of obsessive readers. Writers are readers whose disease has taken a specialized form.
For a first-person narrative of the onset and development ofthis syndrome (which typically begins in childhood, and is a lifelong condition), see Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books (Beacon Press, 119 pp.; $18), by the novelist Lynn Sharon Schwartz. A very early reader, Schwartz began at three and a half:
The girl upstairs taught me. Late afternoons, we stood at the blackboard in her hallway and she drew signs that were the same, but in another sensory costume, as the words that came from our lips. Once I grasped the principle of conversion, that airy puffs of voice could have a visual counterpart, the rest, what teachers call ‘breaking the code,’ was routine.The world existed to be read and I read it. Diamond Crystal Kosher Coarse Salt on the cylindrical container my mother shook over simmering pots, and Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. on every box and can, had the rhythms of the pounding verses the bigger girls chanted out on the street, twirling their jump ropes.
This is a wonderful book, endlessly quotable. I imagine readers all over the country calling friends to say, Listen, I just have to read you this one passage. Of her inability to claim to have read books she has not, Schwartz writes, “I cannot lie about reading. A remnant of holiness still clings.” About her roaming in Reader’s Digest and the Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping, “My parents were people of the magazine as well as people of the book: the daily mail-dropped through a slot in our front door-held treasures in brown wrappers.” And finally, about reading and life: “Reading is not a disabling affliction. I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?”
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine
September/October 1996, Page 3
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