When Art Demurs

But hunger remembered is not the same as hunger felt. Indeed, for some that’s the final cruel joke — that hard-won mastery of craft coincides almost to the minute with passion’s ebb. Art, offered shoulders to stand on, often as not demurs.

— Richard Russo, “Getting Good”

I always figured I was a capable enough writer to write a book if I really put my mind to it.

Not Pulitzer Prize-winning Richard Russo good. Not as good as a moderately successful but frequently tipsy mystery novelist like Agatha Christie’s alter ego, Mrs. Ariadne Oliver. Not able to hold a candle to Paul Sheldon, the protagonist of Stephen King’s novel 1987 Misery, who has made a fortune by churning out a string of formulaic Victorian-era romance novels even Sheldon considers to be egregious exemplars of hack fiction.

But still.

According to what I just read on the internet, which is never wrong:

Estimating the number of English books published annually is difficult, but figures suggest between 4 to 10 million new titles are published each year, a number that includes both traditional and self-published works. Of these, 500,000 to one million are traditionally published, while self-published books account for the vast majority of titles, with at least 2.3 million new self-published titles in the U.S. alone in 2021. 

Objectively speaking, I mean ... couldn’t I slip one more title under the door when no one is looking?

If you count all the time I spent typing away to the meditative hum of IBM Selectrics in the 1970s and the glow of a tangled skein of ever more cluttered computer screens ever since, I’ve made my own strong case for “the ten-thousand-hour rule” presented by garfunkelly coiffed Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success.

Although the authors of the study upon which Gladwell based the rule have disputed his use of it, the gist is better encapsulated anyway by Russo in his essay “Getting Good,” which first appeared in The Sewanee Review in 2017:

Apparently, (10,000 hours) is about how long it takes for most people to get really good at anything difficult and complicated. One of (Gladwell’s) examples is the Beatles, who went to Hamburg, Germany, and were contractually obligated to play all night long in strip clubs. Thanks to that incredibly gruelling schedule — they played seven nights a week — Gladwell argues that the band that returned to Liverpool at the end of this stint simply wasn’t the same as the one that had left. His conclusion: put in the time because genius isn’t nearly enough.

That wisdom certainly squares with the experience of my own lengthy apprenticeship. I and my fellow aspirants were all reasonably talented, some brilliantly so, but by and large those who logged the hours were the ones who got good. I was far from brilliant, but I was dogged and came to understand that doggedness will do if it has to do.

The Achilles heel of mere tenacity and persistence — to return to Russo’s observation with which this all began — is that hard-won mastery of a craft (or in my case, hard-won mediocrity) is not infrequently eclipsed by the ebbing of the drive that led you to the practice in the first place.

So what happens when you reach an age where you finally have the free time and the conviction that you have the skill to at least attempt to fulfil a lifelong ambition … and then find you no longer have the ambition or energy to do whatever it was that once excited you? I know I am not alone in this. The same dynamic is unfolding in the lives of many of my friends.

Cue Grace Slick:

When the truth is found to be lies And all the joy within you dies …

Which is maybe the whole awful, unsexy truth hiding in Russo’s elegant little aperçu: that you can arrive at the trailhead of the thing you thought you wanted — decades late, maybe limping a little, maybe with orthopaedic inserts — and find the trail itself has quietly packed up and moved on. Or worse, that it’s still right there, switch-backing up the mountain exactly as advertised, except now you realize the whole bucket-list fantasy depended on some early-life hormonal cocktail you can no longer manufacture without a doctor’s note and a pharmacy co-pay.

To tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth where all the joy within you dies (which at this point, with the actuarial tables tsk-tsking in the background, seems like the only point), the fear isn’t just that the ambition’s gone. It’s that maybe the ambition was never quite what I thought it was.

Maybe you can relate.

Maybe all those adolescent hours spent hunched over Selectrics and later those flickery CRTs weren’t in service of “Art” or “Voice” or any capital-letter abstraction but something shabbier and far more common: the vaguely theological hope that writing would one day reveal itself as the thing I was meant to do in the same way people claim newborns instinctively know how to root for milk.

I kept waiting for the thunderbolt of Purpose. Kept clocking in, stacking up the hours like loyalty points, convinced that if I just stayed dogged — with Gladwellian, Russo-sanctioned doggedness (doggacity?) — eventually the skies would part and the vocation would descend upon me like a dove in a Renaissance painting.

But no.

The skies are still the same unhelpful colour they’ve always been: that bland Midwestern noncommittal November grey into which I was born. And instead of a dove I’ve got, at best, a shivering daddy long-legs on the windowsill, puffed up against the draft, looking like he (not being a mummy long-legs) regrets all his life choices. Boy, would he ever like to come inside and veg out beside me over a full menu of U.S. Thanksgiving football.

And here — this is the truly uncomfortable part, the part that David Foster Wallace, who was in the next generation of writers to go through the same University of Arizona MFA program as Russo, would inevitably spiral around for twelve ornate footnoted pages — I have to entertain the possibility, spidey tenses tingling, that my passion didn’t ebb so much as cool into a more honest shape.

That what I miss isn’t writing in earnest but being the kind of person who burns for something. The kind of person who could sit for six hours in a basement apartment with a mug of cold coffee and a manual typewriter and feel the whole universe funnel down through his fingertips. The kind of person who believed, fervently, that if he didn’t write he might actually die.

That is Russo. That was Wallace, who actually did die when depression overtook both his daimon and his discipline.

That’s just not me. Following Ms Slick’s sagacious advice, I found somebody to love. And I’m happy just to dance* with her. (* The verb “dance” should be hereby construed as meaning “to lie on a queen-size bed with the occasional involuntary leg twitch or intentional fluffing of pillows while watching The Big C on Netflix.”)

If the uncompromising credo laid down in a 1956 Paris Review interview by William Faulkner, deemed by many to be the finest American novelist of the 20th century, is the formula for becoming a great writer …

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honour, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

… then I’d rather dumpster dive behind Safeway.

Of course, most people don’t die from not writing. Or not painting. Or not gardening. Or not efflorescing at the prospect of doing whatever it was that once filled them with a sense of purpose. But there’s no shame in love’s labour lost if the love remains unconsummated and the labour undone. Who needs the aggro?

People die from other things — loneliness, untreated illness, bad wiring (metaphorical and literal), the slow unspooling of the mind under pressures no one else can quite see. And maybe that’s part of the guilt-shadow that trails behind any attempt to write in the vicinity of the Wallaces and the Hemingways and the Woolfs and the Plaths: the sense that passion, however incandescent, wasn’t enough to save them, so who am I to mourn the passing of my little candle-flame of ambition?

Fans of Kurt Vonnegut will have noticed, because he wrote about it in his savagely panned 1976 novel Slapstick and elsewhere, that he was disappointed his sister, Alice, didn’t make more use of her talents for drawing and sculpting. He once “bawled her out” for not doing more with her gifts and pursuing a professional career as an artist, to which she replied that having talent does not entail an obligation to use it.

“This was startling news to me,” Vonnegut wrote in his 1981 autobiographical collage Palm Sunday, adding that Alice, who died of cancer in 1957, two days after her husband was killed in a freak commuter train crash, was the one-person audience he had in mind whenever he wrote anything. “I thought people were supposed to grab their talents and run as far and fast as they could.”

Alice might have been a bit lackadaisical, as most of us are, but she was also right about our freedom to let skill and even genius languish and wither … to fall “stillborn from the press,” as the great David Hume put it in a different context.

It’s equally clear that we break no laws and commit no moral breach by resisting artistic hankerings, especially if born with middling ability. By allowing the flame that once burned so bright within to flicker and dwindle. By finally acknowledging the wisdom of Samuel Johnson’s cynical but pragmatic judgment, as valid today as in the 18th century when it was scribbled down by biographer James Boswell: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

If anything, this is even more the case in a digital, self-publishing, AI-steeped environment where most of the large publishers have merged and others have been purchased by multinational conglomerates interested only in commercially viable titles.

The age of editors and agents and book tours and reviews in failing newspapers is expiring in a palpable death rattle; the long dominant voice of heterosexual cisgender males — especially grizzled white ones — appears as unbidden and unwelcome as the last-call courage of good ol’ boys hooting and jibbering from the rolled-down windows of a 1975 Chevrolet Blazer. We’ve heard it all before.

And yet.

Maybe the question isn’t “What happens when the ambition goes?” but something less dramatic and more useful, like: “What small, stubborn ember remains?” Because there is one.

I know this because I am still here, typing sentences no one has asked for, under no contractual obligation to strip clubs or otherwise. (Mind you, I’m willing to give the buffet at Chez Parée a boo if anyone thinks it would provide a spark.)

Something still hums, faintly, insistently — something like curiosity, or muscle memory, or the hope that maybe the act of arranging words can still produce, if not passion, then at least a kind of quiet aliveness. Or a blog piece skimmed by 30 people scrolling through the internet till the real thing comes along.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe “good enough to slip one more title under the door when no one is looking” is exactly the right spirit in which to keep going. Not as a bid for immortality or mastery, but as a small daily defiance of entropy: a way to say, “Here I am, and here is what I’ve noticed,” even if the world only glances up for a second before turning back to its scrolling.

The beauty of writing a blog like this, like shovelling a sidewalk or mowing the lawn, is its delivery of instant gratification. You don’t have to sit around for six months waiting for your words to appear in print. You can reference American Thanksgiving in an essay and post it on American Thanksgiving. You can illustrate your piece with a syndicated cartoon from the same day’s newspaper. And you certainly don’t have to sit around fretting about making a living or ever getting paid.

If that’s all writing becomes — a modest, third-act gesture toward coherence — then maybe that’s OK. Maybe the joke isn’t so cruel after all. Maybe it’s just the universe clearing its throat, handing us the pen and saying: Scatter ye rosebuds, jaundiced and desiccated though they be, while ye may.

Time hath, my lords and ladies, a whirring Olivetti Lettera 36 on his desk, wherein he puts words for oblivion. There are no omniscient narrators in life.

And yet.

But still.