“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

Saint Quentin la Poterie
Gard, France

We are back in France again to spend a few months in the village where we have established a kind of tenuous residence. Sometimes friends ask with concern: do you feel “at home” there? It all depends what they mean by “at home.” It seems to means “Do you feel you belong there”? Obviously the answer is no. An outsider never belongs in a place like this. But then I don’t “belong” in Long Island either (nobody does), and still less in London, the city where I was born but that I now detest. Perhaps the closest I came to a feeling of belonging was in a riverside village called Wivenhoe in the English county of Essex where I lived for about ten years. But I have no nostalgia for the place.

It is rather nice not to “belong” anywhere, to be a comfortable refugee on the face of the planet. When you belong to a place it possesses you, and imposes all kinds of obligations. There are far too many people who feel stuck in the town of their birth, or in some anonymous suburb where they happened to buy a home forty years ago. That’s a kind of geographical slavery. I’m very happy to inhabit this village like an agreeable rented house until it doesn’t suit my needs any more.

This may sound like a prescription for rootless irresponsibility. But in all the places I’ve lived I have made friends, paid my taxes, and tried to contribute to the community – which was often more than could be said for people who had lived there all their lives. My excuse, if I need one, is that a writer must have regular changes of scene if s/he is not to go stale. When I find a better excuse I will let you know.

I could while away the hours
Conferrin’ with the flowers
Consultin’ with the rain,
And my head I’d be scratchin’
While my thoughts were busy hatchin’
If I only had a brain.

The Scarecrow’s song: The Wizard of Oz

This is a tough one. A student in one of my workshops raised the unmentionable question. Here it is, in her words.

“Aren’t some people just too dumb or too poorly educated ever to make it as writers? Should they be encouraged?”

I’m tempted to say that George W. Bush became President, and Madonna published a book, and leave it at that. This is America. We are all created equal. No case is hopeless. Anything is possible.

But it won’t do. I can hear the voice of my mother saying: “You may not be able to tell the truth all the time, but you should tell the truth sometimes, just for the exercise.”

Yes, it does take some brains to be a writer. If you have a lot of brains you should obviously be in a profession that pays better, such as computer programming or nuclear physics or running a phony corporation. If you have very little in the way of brains, like that charming bear Winnie the Pooh, you should probably consider something less mentally demanding such as garbage disposal or fast food service – or you can write for television.

The majority of writers are somewhere in between – not smart enough to be rich but smart enough to join in the great public dialogue of the printed word. A writer has had the nerve to set him or herself up as an interpreter, a storyteller, an entertainer or a critic – to create a mirror of the world for the benefit of their readers. By definition s/he must be at least as intelligent as those readers, and probably more so: just a bit above the average.

The question: “How smart must a writer be?” therefore comes right back to the question “How smart are his/her readers?” If you are planning to go head to head with the intellectuals who write literary novels, or whose work appears in places like Harpers or The Atlantic or Partisan Review, then you are playing in the big league. You must be an intellectual yourself, or a brilliant amateur. If your chosen market is the local newspaper, or consumer magazines, or mass market fiction then your readers will be much more average in terms of education and brain power. You don’t need to be too smart to stay ahead of them.

All the professional writers I know are very intelligent people. Most of them have postgraduate degrees, they read a lot, and they have informed opinions about all kinds of issues. The degrees may be the least important part – we mustn’t confuse “smart” with “educated.” Many PhDs are idiots. Plenty of superb writers have flunked out of school. Shakespeare (if he wasn’t really the Earl of Oxford) had almost no education at all. Mark Twain’s education ended when he was twelve. Hemmingway left school at sixteen (as I did, but I went back later.) Higher education is useful because it gives or should give fluency in writing, familiarity with wide range ideas, arguments, and books. But it can also be a strait jacket. Certificates are not important for a writer, except insofar as they signal a certain basic level of competence and determination, and the ability to sit at a desk being bored for long periods of time.

One nice thing about being a writer is that we usually don’t have to work fast. So, whatever other qualities of intelligence we need, it doesn’t have to be the proverbial lighting intelligence. A brain surgeon or a fighter pilot needs to think fast. A writer can think as slowly as s/he likes. This is a great luxury.

The quality that makes a good writer is intelligent curiosity. This omnivorous, almost neurotic interest in everything, plus the desire to make one’s observations into some kind of art, is the distinguishing characteristic of all the successful writers I have met. Let’s dissect that term.

Curiousity: My observation at writers’ conferences has been this: the real divide is not between the educated and the less educated, nor even between the obviously smart and the obviously dumb. It is between the people who are self-absorbed and those who are interested in the wider world.

I know that this distinction won’t stand up to close examination. The modern market for writers seems biased towards self-absorption and the obsessive recycling of personal experience. But I like to think this is just a phase. The whole history of literature has been about opening up the world, exploring, moving outwards, thinking new thoughts – not endlessly retelling personal stories that were boring even when they were happening. The great autobiographers and diarists, from Pepys to Henry Adams and Malcolm X, were much more interested in other people than they were in themselves.

Intelligent: This word is harder to parse. We all like to think that we are intelligent. If we are dumb we will be the last to know. Once again, it’s not a matter of formal qualifications. In my years teaching at a university I met a few professors who were virtually half-witted. I’ve also met many people with no formal education at all who were very smart indeed. IQ tests are virtually meaningless. So what is this quality of “intelligence” that a writer should have?

It seems like a cop-out to say that there are many different kinds of intelligence, but it’s true: converging and diverging; artistic and scientific; visual and verbal; poetical and analytical – there’s no end to this list. This is not to say, as self-help books often do, that “Everyone has a special gift.” I can think of a dozen people right off the top of my head who have no gifts of any kind whatsoever. It’s just that the possession of certain kinds of mental gifts will make you a better writer.

These are (dare I say?) probably innate, or acquired very early in life. They show up in school. In my schooldays, generally speaking, the more often you were beaten up by other kids the more intelligent you were, and vice versa. They show up in habits like omnivorous reading, exploration, experiment, asking questions, and building theories and fantasies. Perhaps the key phrase is “asking questions” – and, of course, listening to the answers, and asking more questions. Writers ask a lot of questions. Their whole profession consists of asking questions and providing the answers, whether anyone wants to hear them or not.

A writer’s intelligence also shows in a love of ideas and argument. Good writers love to grab an idea, toss it into the air and smash it back across the net – just to see if someone will or can return it.

An intelligent writer knows his or her limitations. Once you have had some success it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you can write about things that demand more brains than you actually possess. I’ve fallen into this trap many times, usually when tackling complicated topics that I imagine I understand, but don’t. Every now and again I re-read some of the essays of Montaigne, one of the greatest essayists who ever lived. This gives me a sense of proportion. I could never be Montaigne, I just don’t have the mind.

So we need to figure out what mental gifts (if any) we have. The only way to do this is to try many different kinds of writing, and see what happens. Over the years I have learned, much to my chagrin, that I have no gift for fiction, although I enjoy writing it. On the other hand my brain works quite well with arguments, ideas, word games and metaphors. So other people can tell wonderful stories, but I am happier with essays, commentaries, criticism and so on. There’s no alternative to finding out what you do best, and then doing it.

So, to return to the original question: are some people too dumb to be writers? Yes. Should they be told? Yes, absolutely. Truth, honesty and the American Way demand that they should be told. Simple humanity demands that they should be told. They must be told.

Any volunteers?

Copyright: David Bouchier

Broadbent….I find the world quite good enough for me, quite a jolly place in fact.
Kegan: (looking at him with quiet wonder): You feel at home in the world, then?
Broadbent: Of Course. Don’t you?
Kegan (from the very depths of his nature): No.
Bernard Shaw: One Man’s Other Island

Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider made a huge impact on me in 1956, perhaps because it began with the kind of subversive, sneaky sexual fantasy that substituted for actual sex in that era. The man is outsider to the woman, and she to him. This was not so much transgressive sex as regressive sex. Imagination was everything.

The book opens with this passage from the novel L’Enfer (Hell) by Henri Barbusse

“In the air, on top of the tram, a girl is sitting. Her dress, lifted a little, blows out. But then a block in the traffic separates us. The tramcar glides away, fading like a nightmare. Moving in both directions the street is full of dresses which sway, offering themselves airily, the skirts lifting; dresses that lift and do not lift.”

This tells us at once who the Outsider is. He is the voyeur, the fantasist, the hole-in-the corner man. The world does not seem quite real to him, but he watches it avidly like a movie.

Colin Wilson’s book caught me at exactly the right age. All teenagers feel that they have been kidnapped by aliens and forced to live on a strange planet, and I was absolutely convinced of it. The Outsider gave my condition a name and, better still, a literary and philosophical justification. The names that echo through its pages are a catalog of creative genius: Wells, Sartre, Camus, Hesse, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Eliot. Nobody could call it an adolescent book.

Wilson himself was very young when he wrote The Outsider. He led a romantically free and intellectual lifestyle outside the university, sometimes sleeping rough, and working in the library of the British Museum. I thought he was very deep, but that may have been simply a reflection of my own shallowness. However, almost half a century later, I’m still half-convinced that the book is a masterpiece. Wilson never again wrote anything remotely up to that standard. His later preoccupation with the supernatural has, from my point of view, disqualified him as a writer to be taken seriously.

Who or what is the Outsider, and what does he have to do with sensible, well-balanced writers like us?

He is the stranger who comes and stays, but always remains a stranger. America is full of strangers. It is the most mobile society in the world, and has more immigrants than any other country. This doesn’t make us a nation of Outsiders, even though some of us speak different languages, or different versions of the same language, and live within different cultures. The essence of the Outsider is that he always remains a stranger. He is not integrated, assimilated, acculturated or absorbed. He doesn’t feel at home in this world.

(I use the generic “he” partly because Wilson’s examples are all male. But there are plenty of female writers who fit the description – Virginia Woolf springs to mind, and the fine young British/Bangladeshi novelist Monica Ali. Can we take it for granted that this is about both sexes, to avoid the awkwardness of “s/he” and “he or she” etc. all the way through?)

Being an Outsider, then, is a habit of mind, a way of dealing with the world by being not quite in it. In fact it is a habit of mind common to many writers. Consider, for example, T.C.Boyle’s East is East which uses an Outsider (a stranded Japanese sailor) to comment on a bunch of other Outsiders (the members of a writing community). This plot could never have been imagined and carried off so brilliantly by an author who felt thoroughly at home in the ordinary world.

The Outsider is an observer by avocation, rather than a planner or an actor. He concentrates on what he can see. He watches and asks questions, but he doesn’t do much. Seeing is enough, careful observation can resolve almost any human question. There’s no need to get involved. L’enfer, c’est les autres said Sartre, summing up the Outsider philosophy. Hell is other people.

The Outsider is therefore necessarily innocent, or wants to be. “I’m not responsible, I didn’t make the world like this!” The Outsider does not make a good military officer or business leader. He would rather watch others do it, and let them take the blame for the results. For the outsider, life is one continuous escape attempt, and writing is one form of escape.

The Outsider is often a foreigner, like me. I carry a little card with the title “Resident Alien.” It is a liberating identity. I love the way the American government defines foreign nationals as “aliens” as if we are not quite human. Aliens see things differently – we can’t help it. Almost everything in America seems a little odd to us, just as things in England or Eritrea seem a little odd to traveling Americans. Many foreign-born writers have made superb use of this psychic disconnection – think of Naipaul, Malamud or Nabokov. The alien viewpoint is not necessarily more accurate or more objective. But it is an important source of humor. Social scientists call it the “anthropological viewpoint.” The rest of humanity is seen as a rather peculiar tribe with inexplicable customs and habits. The writer’s job, like the anthropologist’s, is to describe and explain what is going on.

First year students of anthropology are often given an article to read titled “Body Ritual Among the Nacerima” by Horace Miner It describes the freakish personal habits of the Nacerima tribe. “The fundamental belief underlying the whole system appears to be that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease…. Man’s only hope is to avert these characteristics through the use of powerful influences of ritual and ceremony.”

The article then goes on to describe American bathroom habits. Some students get it, some don’t.

Science fiction writers from Wells to Vonnegut have used the device of the literal alien from outer space to highlight the strangeness of humanity. Jonathan Swift used the same device with a different spin in Gulliver’s Travels. The lands visited by Gulliver seem bizarre at first, but then we realize that they are only slightly distorted images of his own society. It’s a sneaky trick, but it works.

The Outsider finds other people’s lives much more interesting and indeed more real than his own. It’s a pleasure to live them at second hand. Their passionate enthusiasms, plans, faiths and certainties, none of which he (the Outsider) can share, seem like a wonderful show put on for his benefit. Perhaps it is.

This is not a recommendation for a personality change. The Outsider viewpoint can produce powerful and disturbing writing, but it’s not a point of view that you can just choose, like first or third person. Some writers are so profoundly embedded into their world – their families, their work, their times, their culture, their religion – that they can’t and don’t want to write outside that box. A lot of fine writing depends on the intense involvement of the author in the world as it is, although a little irony adds the necessary spice: think of Austen, Trollope, James, Wolfe, Updike, Tan, Tyler, and Welty as examples.

The Outsider, when he chooses to write, raises the stakes in a dramatic way. The ordinary world evaporates, empathy vanishes, and ironic distance turns into an almost pathological separation. Camus, Sartre, Barbusse, Hesse and the later writings of H.G.Wells are not comforting bedtime reading. But ever since I was introduced to them in 1956 I have admired writers like these. They may not be nice, but they are necessary. They may have taken a step towards the light outside Plato’s cave. The rest of us may be writing about shadows.

Copyright: David Bouchier

People who insist on telling their dreams
are among the terrors of the breakfast table.
Max Beerbohm

At a dinner party I was seated next to a charming lady who had a professional interest in fantasies and fairy stories. This intrigued me at once because I really admire authors who can conjure up fantastic worlds, stories, and characters. Some storytellers have this gift of imagination, all poets must have it, and most of us prose writers simply envy it. The real world is prosaic.

Consider the explosive inventiveness of a book like Alice in Wonderland, or of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series that held me enthralled when I was a teenager, or of Rowling’s highly successful Harry Potter books, or for that matter of Shakespeare’s magical Midsummer Night’s Dream. Could you imagine any of that? I couldn’t.

So I asked my neighbor where such strange inspirations come from. She said: “It’s mostly dream material.”

I was afraid of that.

It’s not that I am dream-deprived: I have an intense dream life. Some people have accused me of dreaming all the time even when I am awake, but that’s unkind. Every night I have long and complicated dreams, some of which I remember for a few minutes when I get up. Like you I have been advised to keep a dream diary so that the acrobatics of the sleeping brain can be recaptured for later use. When I tried this I got a notebook full of slightly disturbing nonsense.

Robert Louis Stevenson tells the story of waking up in the night after a powerful dream. He was convinced that the most profound secret of the universe had been revealed to him. Half asleep, he scribbled it down.

When he woke up in the morning he read: “The whole world is pervaded by a strong odor of turpentine.”

Some African cultures make an important distinction between “Big Dreams” and “Little Dreams.” The latter are the ordinary nighttime dramas: erotic dreams, anxiety dreams, frustration dreams, and so on.

Big Dreams on the other hand come like revelations from another world. They are usually about the meaning of life and death, and appear as vast adventures of the imagination – as in the visions of the old-time prophets. Big Dreams are rare, and highly valued in those cultures.

Sigmund Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) gave us a language to talk about this universal experience. He proposed that dreams are not meaningless brain static, but reflect our deepest fears and forbidden wishes. The theory caused outrage at the time, but it always made sense to me.

Once I started on this topic I realized that I should offer dream material of my own, so I went back to keeping a notebook beside the bed. Here’s a record of eight dreams I noted down from consecutive nights. Erotic dreams are omitted on grounds of good taste, and simple anxiety dreams are boring. These are some of the others. I admit in advance that these dreams make no sense. But they are all genuine according to my morning-after memory, allowing for the fact that the waking mind tends to edit and tidy things up in accordance with daytime rationality.

Dream 1: I have stolen a steamroller (a massive, heavy, noisy machine), but I cannot find a way to return it to its owners discreetly. There are many complications. (I often have dreams about odd forms of transportation).

Dream 2: I have solved Fermat’s Last Theorem. This mathematical paradox, proposed by Pierre de Fermat about 1630, states that: xn + yn = zn has no non-zero integer solutions for x, y and z when n > 2. Nobody has ever been able to solve it, but I solved it in my dream. Needless to say I could not remember the solution, and I don’t even understand the problem, so what was Fermat’s theorem doing in my brain?

Dream 3: I meet Fanny Mendelssohn and her brother Felix, the great German composer, at a party. They have both been dead since 1847, but I wasn’t surprised to see them. Fanny is really rather lovely with big, liquid eyes like her portrait. Felix is rather pompous. I feel sad because they are both so talented, and they will both die (have died) young. So I am especially kind to Fanny.

Dream 4: I am teaching at a third-rate theological college. All the other professors are gay priests, and I seem to be the token heterosexual atheist. All the students are older women who want to be priests, but act like radical feminists. One of the younger priests propositions me in a joking way. I reject him, citing religious differences.

Dream 5: (Another transport dream). I’m driving a huge black stretch limo into La Guardia airport in New York. I get stuck slantwise outside the departure building, blocking all lanes. My father – long dead – comes up to the driver’s window, riding a very sleek black Italian motorcycle. “Why are you driving that ridiculous car?” he asks, and rides off.

Dream 6: (Another dream with motorcycles). I am trying to buy a Dunkin’ Donut – something I almost never do. I am passionate about it. But every time I see the famous sign, something is wrong. One place is a hut half buried in the ground, full of sleeping Indians, the donuts covered in flies. The next is a combination donut shops and out-patient surgery center, I get on the wrong line and nearly get taken in for anesthesia. The third is like a biker bar, where female bikers are fighting with donuts. One of the bikers asks for my autograph.

Dream 7: (Another dream about music). In this dream I am obsessed by a simple tune from childhood – a sad melody with a hint of joy in it, origin unknown. I pick out the tune on my electronic keyboard, planning to write it down. Then I begin embroidering variations. They become very complicated (and to me) very beautiful. They seem to solve something. My hands just flow over the keyboard. I am a fine player, in my dreams. Then I wake up and realize that I never wrote down the basic melody. But it’s gone, and I can’t recall it.

Dream 8: I encounter my oldest friend Bob in a very strange place, like the ultra modern lobby of an airport hotel. He has been very ill but now looks much better, and amazes me by saying he is learning Latin. I begin to suspect he has died (he has), and we are both in a kind of limbo. Other people around are dressed ancient Roman style, and don’t recognize my existence. At last I meet a character who looks like the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. “Are we in hell?” I ask the Commendatore. “Why else is Bob learning Latin?” The Commendatore replies cheerfully: “Latin is just the beginning. Then he will learn history, psychology, literature, art, and all the rest of human knowledge. We are teaching him to understand himself. Then he will be in hell.”

Those are my dreams over a period of about a week, or at lease the ones I can remember. If you can make any sense of them, or see any way they could be used by a creative writer, let me know. If you can solve Fermat’s Last Theorem I’d like to know that too.

Copyright: David Bouchier