We have all abandoned writing projects. As we get older they multiply, trailing in our wake like the tail of a comet – no way to go back and pick them up again.

So it was reassuring to read an essay on this very subject by Dan Kois called “Burn Before Reading” (New York Times Book Review, March 6, 2011). Mr. Kois had the clever idea of chasing down well-known authors who would admit to having abandoned at least one book in their careers. He found plenty of them, including names you would never expect like Michael Chabon, Harper Lee, Truman Capote and John Updike. So we are not alone. Even the best writers give up from time to time.

The only disappointment in the essay was that not many of the writers Kois interviewed could give a really coherent reason for giving up on a book project. Bad reviews by friends were mentioned fairly often, which just shows that you should never give work in progress to your friends.

My own unfinished projects are legion, and I’ve been thinking about what happened to them. The first was a huge book manuscript, written at the age of eighteen, in which I set out to explain what was wrong with all the religions of the world. I called it Imaginary Friends, which was not plagiarism because Alison Lurie’s much better book of that name was still ten years in the future. This project was abandoned, almost complete, when I met a young philosopher who convinced me that all my brilliant new arguments had been around for two hundred years, and that I needed to spend five more years reading in order to finish this book properly.

So I naturally turned to fiction. I found it was much easier not to finish a novel. I have at least two incomplete novels lurking in the dark past of my writing life: Suicide Note Update and Action Replay.

Suicide Note Update begins like this:

“Harmon’s fourth suicide note was, from a literary point of view, a considerable improvement on his first three. The suicide itself was not.”

The plot is obvious. My hero Harmon survives a large number of incompetent and increasingly bizarre suicide attempts, each of which is carefully documented in his ever more elaborate and self-consciously literary suicide notes. He finally discovers that life is really worth living, at which point he is run over by the 47th Street cross-town bus.

I like realism in fiction.

Action Replay begins like this:

“After all these years the heart tattooed on Lorna’s breast looked more like a mango.”

The plot is also obvious. My unnamed hero, on reaching his 65th year and feeling the nasty onrush of time’s wing’d chariot, decides to seek out and, if possible, go to bed with all the women he has ever loved in his life, including his ex-wives. It was a kind of picaresque/comic/tragic Viagra fantasy, which also involved a lot of exotic travel.

In retrospect I think it was the obviousness of the plots that defeated me. Knowing exactly where I was going I had no energy left to go there, although I got a lot of amusement out of the plotting stage.

Later, in a more serious but equally inefficient stage of life, I abandoned two successive non-fiction books, including an ambitious project designed to be published before the Year 2000 called Pre-Millenial Syndrome (yes, I know, too cute). What killed this last one was very simply that no agent would touch it.

I could make a longer list, but that’s enough. My many unfinished and abandoned projects don’t oppress me, and I have no fantasies about finishing them some day. Life is a one way street, and it’s important to know when to give up. Dan Kois’s essay tells me that I’m not the only one. Thanks Dan.

Journalists write because they have
nothing to say, and have something to
say because they write.

Karl Kraus

For almost ten years, week in and week out, I wrote a column in a regional edition of The New York Times on Sunday. The column was titled “Out of Order” and was intended to be a humorous, quirky view of suburban life. It began in 1993 with an essay about powerless suburban men trying to use macho power tools, and ended in 2003 with a column about powerless suburban men trying to defeat clever squirrels.

Some of the subjects I chose to write about were irresistible, like the summer camp for junior magicians or the Weird Book Club, a discussion group run by eccentric Jewish lawyers. Others were small adventures that I deliberately sought out: sailing as crew on a tall ship, taking a flying lesson, being a librarian for a day, auditioning unsuccessfully for parts in several local amateur dramatic productions, and spending several painful hours with a cheerful young sadist who called himself a “Personal Trainer.” Each eight-hundred word column was illustrated with a large black and white cartoon by Peter Vey.

The Catholic novelist Andrew Greeley once said of himself: “I probably do not have an unpublished thought.” During those ten years I sometimes felt that I scarcely had an unpublished experience. People in the Post Office or the supermarket would stop me and say: “So your car broke down again,” or “Are the antibiotics fixing your problem?” We had no secrets, except those that were too dull to write about.

Having a newspaper column is a great privilege. We all love to bore our friends with our trivial anecdotes, silly jokes, and dumb opinions: I got to bore thousands of people with mine, year after year. Even though I often waxed satirical about semi-sacred aspects of our local suburban culture, such as golf and strip malls, the letters and e-mails I received were almost all positive. The tolerance (or the indifference) of my readers was astonishing.

The column ended not because I was fired, which was always possible, nor because I ran out of humorous subjects to write about in the American suburbs, which is impossible. It ended because of a kind of psychic exhaustion. I use the word “exhaustion” deliberately. I wasn’t just tired of the column, I was enervated by it. My editor was a very agreeable and talented young man, but he wanted me to write about funny experiences – which meant that I had to spent large chunks of my week searching for funny (and usually pointless) experiences, persuading people to let me join in their activities and write about them. At some point I thought: “I’m just too old for this.” It may have been when I was taking a Yoga class with twelve women, and was sitting in an excruciating position on the floor of a cold room.

The style of the column also got on my nerves. I had two editors during the ten years that the column ran, and both of them enjoyed a kind of sub-Dave Barry farcical style of humor. I can do it, but it’s not my style. So I never enjoyed the actual process of writing, and I was never proud of the result, although I must say that the column had a lot of enthusiastic readers, and a few passionate fans. When I began to feel real dread at the approach the deadline, I knew it was time to get out.

When I got off the treadmill, I found that a columnist needs deprogramming. I couldn’t stop collecting stories and writing them in my head. If anybody knows about a twelve-step program for this addiction, I’d like to hear about it. I kept obsessing about the columns I almost wrote, like my ride with the local biker gang that was frustrated at the last minute by what might be called “legal complications.”

I kept looking over the dozens of unused ideas still in the file, especially a big fat folder full of material about the famous Long Island landmark and symbol, The Big Duck of Flanders. The more I consider my unwritten column about The Big Duck, the more I’m convinced that it was my lost chord, my uncreated work of genius, my Proustian epic, now never to be seen in print. It’s tragic, really. Or perhaps it’s a sign that this particular assignment ended not a moment too soon.

My parents read a London newspaper called the Daily Mirror. This was an embarrassment, because the Mirror was a tabloid and not a quality paper. It was full of bathing beauties, murder stories and sports reports, and featured huge, shouting headlines. As a snobbish teenager I refused to read it, except for one columnist who went under the nom de plume “Cassandra.” His real name, I believe, was William Neil Connor.

Cassandra was an attack columnist. He said all the things that should not be said, and told all the truths that nobody wanted to hear. But he was always on the side of truth and justice, and I took him as a kind of role model. Later in life when I started writing newspaper columns myself the ghost of Cassandra was always in the back of my mind.

Somewhere along the way, but much too late, I looked up the name Cassandra. My sketchy classical education had failed to teach me that she was a Trojan princess who was punished by the god Apollo for refusing his advances. He put an unusual curse on the poor woman. She was doomed to become a prophetess whose prophecies would always be true but would never be believed.

So it seems that I myself had been doomed without knowing it. My early fascination with that column in the Daily Mirror must have warped my brain, and I have spent half a century churning out prophecies that are always true but never believed. I can’t quite figure out whether this is funny or tragic.

“It’s like having Alzheimer’s Disease.
You don’t know anybody, but they all know you.”
Tony Curtis

“You must know David Bouchier, he’s famous.” This introduction, delivered without much irony at a party, struck me like a thunderbolt. I had never been described as famous before. Even my wife sometimes forgets who I am, and my cats fail to recognize me for days at a time. But now, when it’s almost too late, I find myself the center of attention at social events. When I walk into a concert, people whisper and look around. When I give a lecture, the hall is filled. When I arrange a book-signing, people actually come and buy my books. There’s a catch, of course: this “fame” only reaches as far as the boundaries of Long Island, Connecticut, and a few other National Public Radio territories that carry my programs.

I never planned to be almost famous on Long Island, or anywhere else. Twenty years ago, when I had achieved the age of discretion, and at least the superficial appearance of respectability (I bought a suit in 1983), my path towards the grave seemed smooth and predictable. I would teach my courses at the university, turn out articles and books that nobody would ever read, collect my pension, and fade away into a decent oblivion. I quite enjoyed writing obscure books that were respectfully reviewed and went nowhere. One of them was listed by Choice Magazine among the ten best non-fiction books of long-ago 1984. It sold fewer than 2,000 copies. Nobody could accuse me of self-promotion.

But marriage and Murphy’s Law tore me away from this safe destiny and brought me to Long Island. This is a suburb of New York, built on the terminal moraine of an ancient glacier that extends a hundred miles eastwards from the city. Three million people have built their homes on this particular sandbank. Because of the peculiar elongated geography of the place, we spend most of our lives in our cars, moving slowly through the glutinous traffic from one shopping mall to the next.

The great English comic writer P.G.Wodehouse came to live here in 1959, in the pretty village of Remsenburg, a few miles from our present Long Island home. He loved his suburban retreat, which was informally known as Blandings Castle, and stayed there for sixteen years, turning out his apparently inexhaustible series of Edwardian comedies. “Wodehouse has found his niche,” he said.

Long Island is a perfect place for a writer, because it offers no distractions of any kind. The last even faintly interesting event was the Battle of Long Island in 1776, when the local militias were routed by the British army in a single day. The Island subsequently became a rest and recreation area for British troops during the War of Independence, although it is hard to imagine what they did for recreation.

My original plan (self-help note: “ original plans” are always a waste of time) was to pursue the noble calling of higher education in America. I saw myself, with fatal hubris, as a missionary, bringing civilization to this semi-barbaric landscape of expressways and nail boutiques. As an undistinguished newcomer to the university faculty, I was assigned to teach a multi-ethnic class of three hundred “students” in a bizarre course called Sex and Gender. The students, who had more sex by the age of fifteen than I have had in my entire life, were not impressed by my expertise in this subject. They were undisciplined, obnoxious, and functionally illiterate. I was given one graduate student as a teaching assistant to help me with this mob. She was intelligent and highly literate, but unfortunately only in Korean.

My blood pressure shot up, and I soon joined the growing ranks of defeated educators who live like refugees around the fringes of every college campus. I did what all teachers must do when we hit rock bottom: I went back to my former occupation and started writing columns for newspapers. For a while I wrote regularly for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, although I had never been to Atlanta. The columns were gently ironic at first, using a simpleminded version of the Socratic method to zap all the obvious targets. (“But tell me Crito, in all seriousness, how ignorance comes to be celebrated in the Temple of Knowledge…..”)

The material for a foreign columnist was rich: ghastly pagan festivals like Halloween, the great plastic necropolis called Florida, the many varieties of religious hysteria, and the suburban wilderness of Long Island itself. I kept clear of American politics, which are beyond the reach of irony. The amazing thing was that readers loved it. “Hit us some more,” they said, and eventually the local edition of the New York Times adopted my little satire as a weekly feature. Then it went on to the local stations of National Public Radio, as a Monday Morning wake-up call, and I was nakedly revealed as a foreigner by my accent. But the fan mail continued to come in.

I must give Americans due credit. Under a weekly barrage of cruel satire about their beliefs and lifestyles – from a foreigner at that, and for year after relentless year – their only response has been to be absolutely charming to me, and claim me as a local celebrity. Nobody has offered to shoot me (well, just one person made the suggestion, but didn’t follow through), and e-mails run at least twenty to one on the positive side.

American public radio is a ramshackle but creative organization. So, in spite of my superficial knowledge of classical music I was able to add a quirky music program to my repertoire. This allowed me to assault the wealthy suburbanites of Long Island and Connecticut with five hours of good music, interspersed with bad music criticism and scurrilous commentary, every Sunday afternoon.

Radio creates a strange, elusive identity for the person behind the microphone, at the same time intimate and remote. I’ve lost count of the times that women (mostly women) have called the radio station to say that they love me, and occasionally to propose marriage or other arrangements. I know that their interest would never survive a real meeting, but it’s fun just the same – like having a whole host of imaginary friends and phantom lovers.

It had never occurred to me that radio might have this effect. Television yes – it creates instant fame. That’s why idiotic “Reality TV” shows are so popular. They make their victims into instant ephemeral celebrities. The fatuous equation between fame and happiness guarantees a steady flow of people ready and willing to be humiliated.

My local fame spread, helped by the New York Times column. It seems that Long Island has a rich (in every sense) population of disconnected souls, who just want to hear a different voice no matter what it says. They mistake my accent for something classy. I almost hesitate to write this in case my British friends read it and laugh themselves into a heart attack. Professor Higgins would instantly detect the edgy sound of east London under the thin veneer of Oxbridge.

Fame is almost entirely based on repetition and familiarity. How often do you see someone’s byline, or his/her name on a book? How often do you hear them mentioned, or hear their voice on radio, or see them on TV? From this point of view, the highly productive, regularly published writer is likely to achieve a degree of fame, no matter what the quality of his/her output.

It worked for me. Invitations to speak poured in, plus lunches, TV appearances (a big mistake, because they bring face-recognition as well as name-recognition), graduation addresses, and even theatrical gigs with the local symphony orchestras. I became a regular performer on the rubber chicken circuit. Rotary clubs, literary circles and libraries found me both cheap and amusing. I spoke at business dinners, non-profit fundraisers, and retirement communities. Some of these events are so bizarre that they are actually memorable. I got to preach to the Unitarians one Sunday morning (my text, taken from Krishnamurti, was “Truth is a liquid, not a solid) and performed the recitative part of Abraham Lincoln in Aaron Copland’s patriotic celebration, “Lincoln Portrait.” No satirist could ask for more.

These public events are hard work. There’s always an Ancient Mariner type, who stoppeth one of me, and holds me in a corner for interminable minutes. There are always the greatest fans, whose enthusiasm is charming but embarrassing. My personality is all wrong for this. I envy the politician’s instinct to plunge joyfully into a crowd of supporters. When I see a crowd of supporters my instinct is to run the other way.

One of my loyal but critical students from Iowa wrote: “The occupational hazard of your kind of writing is that readers soon think they know you.” She shares this experience from writing a newspaper column herself. It’s a very mixed blessing. Public recognition, however local, raises the dreaded “Who am I?” question. And who wants to think about that? Am I the enthusiastic public speaker, or the person who would rather hide with a typewriter in a deep hole in the ground? It’s best not to know.

There’s a vast difference between local and national celebrity. You could write a few articles or columns for a national magazine, and almost never meet anyone who knew your name. But a local column or broadcast on a regular schedule has a much more dramatic impact on your name recognition – but only within your circulation area.

The real and practical appeal of national fame for a writer is that it will provide a platform. Several times in previous chapters I have mentioned this fairly recent phenomenon. Agents and publishers are immediately interested in a writer with a platform – meaning ready-made name recognition. The source of the recognition scarcely matters. It could be a career in show business or a career in crime. The main thing is that potential readers already know your name.

It’s hard for ordinary writers to break into this celebrity culture. It’s galling to see semi-literate sportsmen and popular singers posing as the authors of books that have been written for them by somebody else, and that immediately hit the bestseller lists.

But writers who hope to become famous should think hard about it, because it may happen. If you love the attention of strangers then even the smallest amount of fame will make you very happy. If not, then it’s never too late to start writing under a pseudonym.

In my brief career as a minor local celebrity, I discovered first-hand what all major celebrities know. People react to one with an odd mixture of deference, familiarity and resentment. There’s nothing personal in it, but it’s quite unlike a normal human interaction. In everyday life, the potential for embarrassment is enormous. Strangers peer curiously into my shopping basket at the local supermarket, and I’ve taken to driving several miles to a pharmacy where nobody knows who I am. Whenever I go out, I feel I must shave and take a shower, which I resent extremely. It must be hell to be really famous. Years ago I had a lady friend who appeared in a daily TV soap opera called Crossroads. She was very famous in that small world, and we couldn’t even go into a pub without being harassed by her pathetic fans.

Andy Warhol remarked that, in the future, everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes. That’s about enough. Fran Lebowitz said an even better thing: the right amount of fame is just enough to get you the best table in a restaurant, but not so much that you get interrupted during the meal.

So I can live with my modest level of local fame – just enough to get us the table beside the fireplace in the local French restaurant, enough to be greeted by friendly strangers in unexpected places, enough to have my name sometimes recognized by the local politicians and media people, and supermarket checkout clerks. But it’s reassuring to know that all I have to do to become a total nonentity is to leave Long Island and travel to my alternative home in an unfashionable corner of the south of France. “There goes that crazy Englishman,” say the villagers. I never stop to argue with them.

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world.
The point, however, is to change it.”
Karl Marx

Marx succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. His polemical newspaper articles, his political pamphlets, his propaganda masterpiece The Communist Manifesto, and his vast theoretical book Das Kapital, between them changed the world. We haven’t recovered from the effects of Marx’s literary efforts yet. Whatever you think of his theories, and however you hate the appalling uses to which they were put, you have to admit that Karl Marx’s writing made a difference. The only comparable example that springs to mind is Tom Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, which also changed the world. We haven’t recovered from that yet, either.

I never dreamed of being a Karl Marx (well, perhaps just occasionally when I was very young – but then it was the beard I envied). But I have always hoped and imagined that my writing would make a difference, that it would change the way readers would think and act. It was and is a big ambition.

When I started writing I wasn’t interested in being an entertainer (just as well), or making money (just as well), or even “being a writer.” I wanted things to happen because of my writing. I wanted people to be more aware, more active, more concerned with truth and justice, and above all more rational. I saw myself as an activist with a typewriter. On good days I still see myself this way.

Norman Mailer, in The Spooky Art, expressed it like this:

“People don’t become authors solely to benefit humanity. They’re in the same position as priests. Part of them wants to be good to others; the other side wants, one way or another, to have some sort of acquaintance with power.”

I’m glad that I am not the only scribbler who nurtures this egotistical power fantasy. Lots of writers want to have influence, which is just a polite word for power. Prominent among these are the writers of religious, spiritual and self-help books. They aim to help their readers to discover god, or some metaphysical substitute for god, or to discover themselves. This “comfort writing” is a major and growing sector of the publishing industry, and a sad commentary on the human condition. Almost three centuries after the Enlightenment we have made very little progress towards rational thought.

But the writers I admired and still admire are those who engage directly with the human world and its all-too-human problems. The most influential of these are the editorial writers of the major newspapers of record, and also writers for public television and radio news. Their words are read or heard by the financial and political oligarchs who actually make the decisions in this country. Their opinions have weight. No politician can ignore a major editorial in The New York Times, and no business leader can ignore a commentary in The Wall Street Journal. The “News Hour” on public television and “Morning Edition” on public radio carry weight. Commercial channels can be powerful too, because they reach more people. You can make a good case that a few beautifully turned sentences written by Walter Cronkite and spoken by him on TV in 1968 effectively ended the war in Vietnam.

These national opinion-making jobs are few and far between, and not many of us qualify.

Next down the line, in terms of influence, are serious novelists like Tom Wolfe and scriptwriters/directors like Coppola or Kubrick, who reach large numbers of readers or moviegoers with a serious social message. Wolfe’s A Man in Full had impact, not only because it is a whopping 742 pages long, but also because it dealt head on with issues like race, immigration, greed, and sleazy commercial cultures.

Television scriptwriters have influence too, although their work bypasses the educated opinion makers, and speaks mainly to the uninfluencial masses. But influence is influence. If Archie Bunker made people think differently about race, or Sex in the City changed their minds about sex, the scriptwriters made a difference. It might be a negative difference, but that’s the deal we make when we embrace free speech.

The Worldwide Web is a newer forum for influencing others. There are literally thousands of web sites designed to change public opinion in one direction or another. More recently we’ve seen the phenomenon of “bloggers” pouring out their thoughts and opinions to an Internet audience. Some of these blogs have become famous, and many are stylish and interesting.

The rest of us – poets, essayists, short story writers and novelists – can join in the great Internet game, or we can make our points the traditional way, on paper. No writing is wasted.

It is difficult
To get the news from poems
Yet men die miserably every day
For lack
Of what is found there.

William Carlos Williams

In theory, at least, every writer can make a difference by presenting facts, expressing opinions, by providing entertainment with a message, or by changing hearts and minds. The question that gives sociologists a headache is: does anything really change because of what writers write? Or was Karl Marx’s influence a freakish accident, like the Lisbon earthquake?

Not many blogs or books will change the world, or even a small part of it. Simply writing is not enough. If we’re serious about social change we have to get involved in a political party, an activist group, or a social change organization. Idealistic intellectuals are important to a society, but they very seldom get involved in effective action. Given the example of Karl Marx, this is probably a good thing.

Most of us hope, more modestly, to influence a few individuals. Nothing makes me happier than messages saying: “I never thought of it like that before,” or “Your essay put everything in a new light.” I doubt if anyone’s life was changed, but even a slight change of mind is a vindication for a writer. I keep all these positive responses, and I’m proud to say that I now have five thick files full of them. I’ll read them all in my old age, if I remember.

There are any number of reasons to keep writing – to prevent life and memory from slipping away, to express our thoughts, ideas, and fantasies, and above all to change the world one reader at a time. It’s a tall order, but the alternative is silence. That’s why it is impossible, and even immoral, to stop trying.

Copyright: David Bouchier

“Of the making of many books there is no end.”
Ecclesiates

One Christmas we were wasting time in the English town of Rye, which is famous for its sellers of used and antique books. Half a dozen such establishments are scattered along its picturesque high street. One rainy day I decided to hit every used bookstore in town.

This is not my usual habit. Normally I avoid used bookstores because they make me feel inadequate. My former office was in the basement of an historic used bookstore, but I scarcely ever dared to go upstairs. There are so many tens of thousands, even millions of important and wonderful books that I should have read, that I haven’t read yet, and that I never will read. But on that particular day in Rye I was feeling reckless. It was raining, I was bored, and a bookstore orgy seemed like just the thing to fill in the hours before lunch.

I started at the east end, the forbidding Land Gate, constructed in 1369 and somewhat battered by wicked French invaders in later centuries, but still impressive. Right beside this ancient monument was the Land Gate Book Shop, its door firmly closed but its window displaying an eclectic selection of Audubon prints, nineteenth century romantic poetry, and modern thrillers.

Just up the hill was The Book Worm, where I might have picked up a rare first edition of Trilby by Daphne du Maurier, or a leather bound set of the complete works of Edward Bulwer Lytton – a great but almost forgotten Victorian writer – at a knock-down price. I was almost seduced by a long out-of-print biography of the French composer César Franck. But self-control is built into an expedition like this. The modern economy-class air traveler can’t afford to accumulate books. They’re just too heavy.

Books are solid things. They don’t grow old. It’s the subject matter that ages. Today’s ephemeral celebrity biography or instant Iraq war analysis will be outdated and forgotten in a few months. Used bookstores preserve the good stuff, books that really tell us something about human nature, life and love – universal books. In these stores the literary connoisseur can discover marvelous, half-forgotten authors, biographers and poets, whose works are no less good to read for being in faded bindings without colored pictures; and they cost next to nothing. It’s the best bargain in the known universe.

But it’s not the undiscovered writers that make me feel guilty. It’s the sight of shelves and shelves of books by very famous authors whose works I know about, and should have read, and that are almost never read outside university literature departments – and sometimes not even there. Who has read all the works of Dickens for example, or Twain, or Poe? Who has read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas, or Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson – two of the best adventure tales ever written? They sit on the shelves, waiting for readers who never come.

My tour took me into the dusty recesses of half a dozen old bookstores, including one called Chapter and Verse which had the Latin motto Cave librum unum habentem engraved on its glass door (in my schoolboy Latin this translated as “Beware of a house with only one book.”) I leafed through a well-worn 1802 edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in three volumes, but decided that it’s message was too contemporary for my taste. The first volume alone contains enough material on the collapse of democracy, Caesarism, and the illusions of empire to keep us thinking for quite a while. After a couple of hundred pages we might realize that we’ve been there, done that, and we don’t want to do it again.

The last stop on my bibliophilic walk through Rye was the Martello Towers Bookshop, its name commemorating the round stone towers built all along this coast in the early 1800s to guard against yet another invasion by the naughty French. They failed. Nowadays the French come pouring through the Channel Tunnel, and the streets of Rye are full of French tourists. Napoleon would have been delighted.

The Martello Towers Bookshop sells only the latest new books, and there are plenty of those. The prophet in Ecclesiastes grumbled: “Of the making of many books there is no end.” He should see us now. Quite apart from all the millions of historic books we’ve never read there are thousands of new ones appearing every week, a total of 175,000 last year in the United States alone. A new book of fiction is published every thirty minutes. So even if we ever catch up with the good books of the past, we will never in several lifetimes catch up with the good books of the present.

Supply and demand – the brutal equation. Chain bookstores display new titles for two or three weeks, and then they’re gone. Most readers buy from the top end of the bestseller lists. Publishers are throwing the dice with increasing desperation.

I was struck by the thought, a horribly subversive and even wicked thought for a writer, that there are enough books already. We could spend the next hundred years reading our way through the used bookshops of the world, or even just the bookshops of Rye, and never exhaust the marvelous literary treasure house of the past two centuries. To save the drowning readers of the world I’m almost tempted to suggest a ten-year moratorium on all new books.

Or most new books.

Or, at least, other people’s new books.

I like to keep track of the birth anniversaries of famous and notorious people. It’s a hangover from my early days as a newspaper journalist, when a blank space on the page could always be filled by scribbling a short, badly-researched piece on Archimedes, the inventor of the bath plug, or Charles Dickens, the inventor of Christmas. When anniversaries coincide they provide even better material for the empty-headed writer.

Here is one such happy accident. On November 30 in 1835 Mark Twain was born in Florida, Missouri, and became one of the funniest writers who ever lived. Also on November 30, in 1667, Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. Like Twain he wrote under various pseudonyms, most famously Lemuel Gulliver. Here were two writers separated by an ocean of sea, and a metaphorical ocean of time and culture, and yet they seem strangely alike in having a superlative gift for comedy along with a dark view of human nature. Both used the device of a traveler in strange lands to satirize their own societies. Both had their major works bowdlerized as children’s books, although they were and are totally unsuitable for children. A child brought up on the works of Swift and Twain would be a cynical creature indeed.

The language of these comic classics is rather dated. The authors loved long, rolling sentences, obscure references, and clever multi-layered metaphors. They are a world away from our modern, high speed comedians, and their elaborate jokes are too ponderous for texting, let alone twittering. There is a prestigious Mark Twain Prize for humor, although usually it goes to entertainers rather than writers. Bill Cosby received the award this year. There is no Jonathan Swift Prize as far as I know, apart from some minor poetry awards. Swift is a bit too sharp in his satire to suit the modern taste, a very spiteful pen indeed, even if he was a clergyman

Their books are literary icons, and like most literary icons, they are largely ignored. As Mark Twain himself said, a classic is a book that everybody praises but nobody reads. Years ago we picked up a complete set of Twain’s works in twenty-five volumes at a yard sale, but they have gathered a lot of dust. There’s an ancient copy of Swift’s collected prose on the shelf too. So we have these books if we need them. But do we need them?

That is a rhetorical question, of course. Imagine a culture without satire, as some seem to be. Without mockery and self-mockery we are all potential fanatics. The great satirists of the past, from Aristophanes to Chaucer and Cervantes, Voltaire and Mencken, innoculate us against the dread disease of taking ourselves too seriously.

Quotations are also the writer’s friend. Here are two, the first from the Rev. Dean Swift:

“ Satire is a sort of mirror, in which beholders generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”

And from Mr. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the man behind Mark Twain:

“Irreverence is the champion of liberty, and its only sure defense.”

Nobody likes to get negative feedback on their work, but it comes with the territory. Since October this year I’ve been sending weekly essays from France to our local public radio station. The nature of an essay, it seems to me, is that it begins with the writer’s immediate experience. So my essays from France have all been about the experience of living in France. We did this for a whole year in 2001 and 2001, presenting the program as “Letters from France.” Nobody complained, and the resulting book sold well.

Now, for the first time, some listeners have objected. “Too much France,” they complain. Others have accused me of being satirical and cynical, and of comparing France favorably to the United States.

I can’t see satire and cynicism in my recent writing, although there is plenty of irony. Some people find it hard to tell the difference. These complaints may reflect the fact that the United States is in a jittery mood. A lot of people seem to be nervous, paranoid, and oversensitive. It certainly is true that the European media have been hammering the US over its economic and war policies. The great power has declined to the status of a sick (and perhaps dangerous) society. It’s hard to read French newspapers and watch French TV every day without being a little influenced by these attitudes.

So here, on a very small scale, is the dilemma faced by all media, commercial or not: how much can we afford to annoy the readers or listeners who pay the bills? Newspapers have an easier time because each one has its own style and viewpoint, so readers can choose the one that affirms their prejudices (this is certainly what I do). In the USA television is even more diverse, thanks to cable and satellite. With hundreds of channels to choose from, nobody ever needs to suffer the annoyance of contradiction. But local public radio is sui generis without a natural counterpoint in most communities. It has to be all things to all men (and women), and inevitably some of them get mad at us for being too right wing, too left wing, too religious, or too athiestic. It’s something that public radio news directors have to live with.

Fortunately I was not asked to change my subject matter or my point of view, so I can go ahead as before. But now I know that some listeners hate hearing about France, and hate even more hearing anything good about France, I can try to be sensitive to their feelings. So I’ve scrapped my essay for next week called “Fifty reasons why France is vastly superior to the United States” and substituted an essay about cooking at Thanksgiving. Please address your compaints to the chef.

Saint Quentin la Poterie
Gard, France

Sometimes you find yourself reading a book that exactly fits the moment. Today I started on a paperback that I bought for a few cents in a used book store in the nearby town. It is quite a famous work, at least in France: Lettres de Mon Moulin by Alphonse Daudet. The title means, literally, “Letters from my Mill.”

We are right now in the middle of the worst kind of weather that the south of France can produce: continuous torrential rain for the past twenty-four hours, with fierce gusts of wind up to eighty kilometers an hour. The sky not simply gray but black. This is the season of rain and wind, so it’s nothing unusual. But it is depressing. The wind especially has a threatening, haunting character, very appropriate for Halloween. There are three varieties of wind here, and they have poetic names. La Tramontane and Le Mistral are both bitter cold winds blowing from the north. Le Sirocco is an equally violent wind that blows up from Africa, and brings heat. Needless to say we have not felt Le Sirocco recently, but La Tramontane and Le Mistral have been blowing both at once.

Which brings me back to Aphonse Daudet, who was born in Nimes, just a few miles away from here, a city famous for its splendid Roman arena. Lettres de Mon Moulin began life as a series of picturesque tales from Provence that were originally published in Paris newspapers in the 1860s. They record the observations and adventures of a young man who has gone to live in a disused windmill in the remote countryside, in order to have solitude (it is never explained why he needs such extreme solitude). In one of the early letters he describes this autumnal season, the sound of the winds raging around his mill, and the feeling of being trapped. I understood his feelings completely. I hear the same winds that he heard, and feel trapped as he did – although with far more home comforts. Last week I was trapped by strikes, this week by storms. I can hardly wait to see what next week has in store.

This should be a good time for writing, but the roar of the wind scrambles the brain. It is impossible to concentrate. So we are reduced to blogging.

“That which we call sin in others is experiment for us.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The word “sin” has almost vanished from the language, except for a few preachers down there below the Mason Dixon line. Sin has become a psychological problem, a social pathology, or a mark of originality.

Fortunately, real sin is still very much with us. We just use different words to describe it. Writers need to understand and appreciate sin in themselves and in their subjects. If you feel that your life and your writing are insufficiently sinful, here are some practical suggestions for personal unimprovement.

The Seven Deadly Sins – envy, pride, coventousness, gluttony, sloth, lust and anger – were enumerated by St. Thomas Aquinas, as a warning to medieval monks and nuns. In their claustrophic religious environment, these sins were dynamite. In our own expansive age, where anything goes, the seven sins appear mainly as essay themes or plot devices.

Without a liberal dose of all these sins modern writing would be even more stale, flat and unprofitable than it is. In fact it would resemble that flabby genre called “childrens’ literature,” in which all human experience and human nature have been surgically removed and replaced with the verbal equivalent of maple syrup. Victorian children, by contrast, read stories that included these useful lessons in life, which is why many historic childrens’ books are now banned from the junior section of your local library.

But I digress. Here are some thoughts on the Seven Deadly Sins, and how to use them in your writing career.

Envy and its twin emotion of jealousy have been recycled in the modern world into the more acceptable “ambition”

If you lack ambition in your writing career, envy is the way to develop it. Choose a writer you especially admire (living or dead), and research their lifestyle. Focus on everything about him or her that you most desire: fame, money, freedom, literary reputation, movie deals, exotic lovers, cosmopolitan friends. At some point sheer envy should catapult you into action. Envy is a great motivator.

Pride is now recognized as the robust virtue called “self-esteem.” Who would attempt to write without a vast ego? The very act of writing involves the unpardonable assumption that other people will find our words interesting.

Pride is the chief among the sins, according to Saint Gregory, which suggests that it is worth cultivating. Humility never got a writer anywhere. Look at the authors in today’s bestseller lists and you will see a parade of flamboyant egos and (often unjustified) self-confidence.

Most writers are quiet, retiring folks. We need to work on our pride.

Covetousness is accepted and even encouraged today in the form of the benign phenomenon of consumerism – the desire to have lots of stuff, which in turn requires lots of money or credit. “Consumer confidence” is a code word for the level of covetousness in a society on a given day. This is George W. Bush’s favorite sin, and the driving force behind his economic recovery strategy. Writers should be as patriotic as anyone else. Don’t be like Henry David Thoreau and live a simple life in the woods. Help your country out and hammer those credit cards. The resulting bills will motivate your writing for years to come.

Gluttony in Saint Augustine’s time meant the excessive consumption of food. This also has become virtually a patriotic duty for Americans, who have more and cheaper food than anyone else on the planet, and have themselves become very much larger in consequence. Unfortunately a fat writer is neither sexy nor marketable. A slightly starved aesthetic appearance is to be preferred, especially for poets.

Here a little creative substitution is necessary. A determined writer should be able to sublimate his or her greed for food into a more general greed for life and experience (see “Lust” below). If this fails, write diet books.

Sloth is the most amiable of all weaknesses. Nowadays we refer to it as “relaxation” or “recharging the batteries” – both amiable vices forbidden to monks and nuns in Saint Augustine’s time. But the slothful do nobody any harm, and the sloth him (or her) self is a very agreeable and interesting animal.

Writing is a constant balancing act between the vita active and the vita contemplative (the active versus the contemplative life). If we never stop doing things, we can never think about them. If we do nothing but reflect, we have no experience to write about. Periods of sloth are absolutely essential to the creative process. “For oft when on my couch I lie, in vacant or in pensive mood…” wrote the poet Wordsworth, giving the game away. Nothing ever gets written by people who never do nothing.

Lust was discouraged in monastic communities, for obvious reasons. But our situation is more confusing. Everything in the media promotes lust. However, everything in our bourgeois suburban society works to snuff it out again. We get so much in the habit of damping down our passions that we know longer feel enough to write about them, any more than a person with chronic indigestion can write convincingly about gluttony

The rule: “Use it or lose it” applies to lust with special force. Just don’t tell your mother. She may follow your example. Don’t forget to write it all down afterwards.

Anger is a sin intimately familiar to all writers. We prefer to call it by gentler names, such as self-assertion or justified indignation. The theologians define it as a desire for vengeance, which it usually is. Most often we feel angry at editors. But publishers, booksellers, critics, unresponsive readers, disruptive families and other (more successful) writers all deserve their share.

Anger is the emotion that drives some of the best writing – outrage that the world is not what it should be, and the crusading spirit. Kindness makes the world a better place. Happiness makes it an easier place. Only anger changes things. We writers are lucky to have a verbal rather than a physical outlet for our anger. Write when you are angry and you will write well.

Copyright: David Bouchier