I’ve been a little afraid lately to say what I really feel(I know me, right?) because I don’t know if people will mistake what I say as arrogance(like that has ever bothered me in the past). Or maybe not mistake, but judge it accurately. But recently I heard from a literary publisher that they want to bring out an edition of a previously unpublished novel I wrote a few years back, and it brought me back to the time when I was working on the book, the feeling of what I was hoping to accomplish. Why I write in the first place. I want to write literature. I want to write work that matters. I want to write stories and poems and novels and plays that now and 100 years from now will be seen as important. So why am I afraid to say that? No one would question it if I said I want to read at an open mic and entertain people, or make them laugh. Or publish a book that sells X copies and pays me Y dollars. I am not criticizing those goals, they’re legitimate too. But somehow if you say you’re writing for posterity it seems…unclean? I know, we all know, many people who are frank about the fact they enjoy reading their own poems in front of an audience. They write for an audience response, and that’s fine. But if you say you want to write literature that finds an audience over time – people act like you’re covered with excrement. Ambition like that is treated as if it’s unseemly, undemocratic. UnAmerican. Which it might be. While most people remember Virginia Woolf’s dictum that a woman must have a room of her own if she is to write, nearly all of us forget the first part of that sentence “A woman must have money and a room of her own…” She wasn’t talking about comfort, luxury, but time and space. Novelist Mohsin Hamid says that when he tells a stranger in Pakistan he writes fiction, “the most common response is an expression of respect.” Especially among people who have never read him. In that country, where historically literacy rates have been low, poets are considered “spiritual, moral, and emotional guides.” But in the U.S. when people ask what he does and he answers that he’s a writer, the most common response “is a query about how my books have sold(A movie adaptation seems to reassure people).” Because in the U.S., writers are only important if they are celebrities. Isn’t that often what is happening on our literary scene? People are seeking to be known? Their persons more important than their work? I wonder if our desire to connect is a type of tribalism that precludes ambition. I hear people talk about ‘that’s my tribe’ when referring to gatherings of writers. But are they tribes that will work on a book for 5 years, stuff it in a drawer for 1 or 2, then go back to it to see if it’s good enough, if it measures up to the best work of those writers we admire? No, because that type of writing, it seems, requires one to remove oneself from the world. The tribalism of local writing communities doesn’t necessarily foster that sort of dedicated focus. I am NOT making a value judgment here. I am merely talking about different characteristics. I have heard friends read the same poem 3 or 4 times in public, never once changing a single word. To applause and laughter each time. That poet has achieved what he set out to accomplish. He has found his tribe. The type of writing that seeks permanence requires, it seems, belonging to a tribe of ghosts. I want to be in the tribe with Zora Neale Hurston and Charles Dickens and Mahmoud Darwish and Sylvia Plath and Camus and many many others. But it’s a tribe I can’t join until after I’m gone, when someone else decides I belong in it. Truth be told, the odds of writing anything worthy of that tribe is miniscule. But at least I can try. If I fail, which I surely will, that’s okay, too. In his essay Hamid quoted Rumi If you want money more than anything you’ll be bought and sold if you have a greed for food you’ll be a loaf of bread this is a subtle truth whatever you love, you are
Posted on: Sun, 18 May 2014 12:28:58 +0000
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