Writers!
This essay was originally published on 12 March 2022 for subscribers to our newsletter.
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Writers are like every other profession – a mixed bunch – perhaps even more so than others. What has always fascinated me is how our work shapes who we are. One of those little paradoxes is that the identities that mould us most sharply are our metiers and our languages, and yet we are less likely to kill each other over these identities. Scottish and Polish shipyard welders have a great deal in common even if they can’t communicate with each other verbally. Conversely people who speak the same language have all the more reason to hate each other (the conflict between Croats and Serbs was primarily religious, but it was exacerbated by the shared language, because the Catholic Slovenes were allowed to go their own way with little more than a skirmish).
I approach this task with a degree of trepidation, because of what happened to me around 1990 when teaching at Sussex University. I was in the bookshop when I bumped into someone in the English department, and he was a name – an intellectual celebrity that the university had been very pleased to catch. He also knew Italian (although to what level I do not know). Not without a touch of regal condescension he paused to enquire after my progress in the hallowed circles of academe, and – I am ashamed to say – I decided to show off my erudition to the great man by quoting Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce, “You mean amongst ‘the innocuous and beneficial toads’.” His face immediately clouded and gradually an expression of stunned outrage emerged through the tense silence. “What are you trying to say?” he growled. “It was a joke; it’s only a joke,” I stammered and then restated the offending words in their original Italian (innocui e benefici rospi) hoping that it would jog his memory (Croce’s words were actually directed at “philological historians”, but some people have widened them to the whole of academe. Besides, Croce was dismissive of universities as he never attended one). There followed some excruciating moments in which I was obliged to take a telling and then he marched out of the shop still so agitated that he had to display his dismay by waving his arms. I told myself that it would all sort out, but it didn’t. A few days later I saw a close friend of mine having an argument with this partner, and when I greeted him he cut me dead. I didn’t think anything of it because no one wants to be interrupted in the midst of heated exchanges with someone close to them, but gradually I came to notice that attitudes towards me had changed dramatically. Our lives are made of these little misunderstandings, and perhaps in the long run they lead to more interesting lives. Academe – I thought then, as I do now – is a world of intellectual freedom and tolerance, eccentricity and rigour, ambitions and rivalries in which the very best who are superb eschew academic politics and go where their passion drives them.
Still, once I had thought of writing about writers (as writers do perhaps too often), I could not hold back. A writer has to be bold not only in order to speak the oft-mentioned truth to power but also and more importantly to speak truth to the powerless who are mesmerised by power’s lies and sleights of hand. The powerful are unlikely to read anything that challenges them as they are in the business of certainties and even manufacturing them. What are we here for if not to make people sit up and think? So here goes and I take some solace from the fact that after my newsletter on coming out of the political closet, only two people unsubscribed (contrary to expectations) and a higher figure unsubscribed after my one on poetry. Writers and readers should be congratulated for their unpredictability, and all those efforts at defining customer demographics don’t really count for anything in publishing or at least in the world of small publishers.
When I organised a book festival in Pitigliano in 2006, I also invited musicians to perform at the opening event in the castle square, which was very successful. For the rest of the festival they designated their favourite bar (in the square just outside the medieval gate) and proceeded to play their instruments and sing their songs, while a semicircle of admiring Italians constituted their almost permanent audience. All the musicians were Gaelic-speakers, and I doubt that the people of Pitigliano had ever heard such music before. I noted that the musicians insisted on travelling together and the writers turned up on their own itineraries, and this perhaps underscored the solitude of authors. Still, we cannot deny that music is essentially a collaborative art and writing is perhaps the most solitary of arts. Writers are masters of their own imaginations, and perhaps the characters that populate their minds are more real to them than the two-dimensional people who populate the streets outside. Could it be that writers are a little misanthropic, partly because evil or even mildly flawed characters are so much easier to write about than good or saintly ones? Goodness in reality is complex, and evil, as Hannah Arendt so famously said, is banal. On the other hand it could also be that America has spent such huge sums of money since the war in keeping authors with humanity out of print and those without it in the public eye (see Frances Stonor Saunders’s Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Granta: 1999). I cannot confirm either hypothesis, because we simply don’t know. The novel is an ancient genre, but only in the eighteenth century did it become the most important literary form, and since then it has generally had a humanistic edge to it. In spite of being considered by many European thinkers to be a quintessentially bourgeois and even Anglo-Saxon form, it has often denounced the evils of modern society (not necessarily based on some political credo, but rather, as in the case of Dickens, on the observation of how society was developing).
The question here is simply this: does novel-writing negatively affect the writer’s own psyche (we’ll examine the effect on the reader later). Some time ago, an interesting programme on James Joyce which interviewed a large number of authors, mainly Irish, asked the question, “Do you have to be ruthless and selfish” to be a successful author, and everyone seemed to answer in the affirmative. This probably says more about where we are now than the reality of literary careers over the centuries. I believe that none of the above causes have had a significant influence in changes to literary output and how writers behave. The principal cause in my opinion is another, and I don’t see that there is much we can do about it. For two or three hundred years, the novel was not only the dominant literary form but also the dominant cultural force in European cultures across the board (although arriving later in some European countries). With the arrival of cinema but more particularly the television in the post-war era, the novel lost its dominant position and now is itself influenced by these other artforms. In the nineties I attended a lecture by Ian McEwan who said that every generation of writers has to have more scabrous and violent content than the previous one, which I considered to be an unsavoury arms race. In other words, the reader has to be entertained and perhaps even titillated at a pace and in a manner that Neil Postman defined as “amusing ourselves to death” (see his book with that title, first published in 1985 and now by Penguin). His problem is that television – particularly American television with its frequent advertisements – is incapable of depth and continuity. It cannot take serious subjects seriously, and the task is not to inform but to present striking and even horrifying images without necessarily explaining why they are occurring. “Although the American public,” he said in an interview, “knows of many things, it knows about very little. The Americans may be the most ill-informed people in the Western world.” I would argue that where America went in the seventies and eighties, Europe went in the nineties and twenty-zeros. America is not unique. Information provided by TV is varied in subject matter and the time devoted to each subject is so limited that it is meaningless. The rise of the smartphone with its social media has taken this process further than Postman, who died in 2003, could ever have imagined. This amounts to what Jacques Ellul has defined as “the humiliation of the word” (another quote taken from the title of a book).
The modern novel, if it is going to compete with this culture, feels that it has to move away from the examination of the familiar viewed from unusual standpoints (defamiliarization) and go in search of the bizarre (such as rare psychological disorders). If you want to know about such things, I would have thought that a medical non-fiction work would be more helpful. The author cannot have a genuine understanding of such conditions, and neither can the reader. And where does it leave us readers? Are we to feel superior because we are not so unfortunate? Of course human misery is a proper subject for novels, because it is always around us and we can fall into its grasp at any moment. My own title for a collection of short stories, On the Heroism of Mortals, expresses my respect for the everyday unfortunates who are remarkably resilient. We should not forget that literature can wake us up and make us think about the injustices of this world – both natural and man-made.
I’m of the opinion that writers are probably the most indefinable of all professional groups because of their unique individualism made possible by the infinite permutations languages provide, and whoever they are, the most important thing about them is the work they produce. I have said on several occasions – probably also in these newsletters – that reading novels is an exercise in empathy. The reader is introduced to various fictional characters and invited to think about the reasons for their behaviour and how they interact socially. They are of course mere characters and nothing that happens to them is of any importance, except for the psychological modifications they may achieve within the readers’ heads. The ability to understand other people’s point of view is a learnt skill, and the novel does teach those skills better than anything else because it can do it in youth. As we grow through life, we learn from our setbacks and real lived associations with other people to understand that behaviours and motivations differ and that is not something we should be fearful of. Surely, though, books and in particular novels can accelerate that process, and the younger the reader, the greater the influence the books will have.
Some novels may do this less and others more. And I, like everyone else, have my own particular prejudices. In fact, I am out of my generation as I watched almost no television as child because I was at boarding school from the age of six, and I spent my holidays abroad in countries that had no television. It came to Bangladesh right at the end of my time there, and I was stunned to see on the one occasion I saw one that they were speaking in English (television has been defined as cultural nerve-gas by one German sociolinguist). The word has not been humiliated for me, and I refuse to buy a smartphone, because I know that I would become addicted. The word sculpts the world and explains it, as nothing else can. It requires consistency but does not deny the presence of competing narratives that have a right to be heard. I know very well that I am not alone, but I recognise that there are less of us now than there were thirty or forty years ago. Literature will continue to have a significant role, but it will also become more of an elitist pastime, and this will damage literature and society irreparably. As I am on this slightly personal note and because I cannot speak for other writers, I should add that the opportunity to lead this life is an enormous pleasure and a liberation. I am a jack of all trades and probably a master of none, but I enjoy writing and translating, and because of that I consider myself to be uniquely privileged. I quite like publishing, but I also find it a little stressful, full as it is of deadlines and financial risk, but these remind me of the world I live in and strip away the ivory tower. There is also a little of that collaborative element musicians take to such great heights.
Allan Cameron, Glasgow, March 2022
Header image: Woman Writing, 1898 by Lesser Ury.