All Those Fanatical Writers

To decide to write isn’t also to decide that you’ll be the most loathsome dinner guest.

La Spezia 2019

In a 1950 letter to the publisher Jamie Hamilton, the always pugnacious Raymond Chandler took a moment to complain about writers.

Your Paris trip sounds like a typical publisher’s jaunt, every meal an interview, and authors crawling in and out of your pockets from morning till night. I don’t know how publishers stand these trips. One writer would exhaust me for a week. And you get one with every meal. There are things about the publishing business that I should like, but dealing with writers would not be one of them.

Of course there’s nothing inherent to writing that necessitates this tedium. To decide to write isn’t also to decide that you’ll be the most loathsome dinner guest. Yet there’s some elusive aspect of the craft which all too often leads to that outcome. Is there a trigger?

Their egos require too much petting. They live over-strained lives in which far too much humanity is sacrificed to far too little art. I think that’s why I decided years ago that I should never be anything but an amateur. If I had the talent to be first-class, I would still lack the hard core of selfishness which is necessary to exploit that talent to the full.

One timeworn complaint is that writers are never fully ‘present’ in a room. They seem to hold a little back from every interaction—there’s a slight reserve, or watchfulness, a lack of engagement. Even in those rare moments when writers do appear intense and enthusiastic and emotional, there’s still a sense that part of them is observing rather than participating. Behind every supposedly heartfelt statement is a homunculus that analyzes and judges and, perhaps worst of all, remembers. Because a writer is always ravenous for the material that comes from your most emotional moments. Or always looking for the apt phrase to describe your pain. And here is where we get the Czesław Miłosz observation that “when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Which means that your moral dilemma is their next novel.

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The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture. Even when he is not talking about his art, which is seldom, he is still thinking about it.

Of course this is clearly insufferable. It is crossing from purpose to obsession, from the romantic to the zealot, far beyond any link to what we might call reason. And this isn’t even a mentality that serves the reader—because this arrogant motive almost certainly leads to poor writing. Writers should have drive, a little teenage compulsion, even an edge to their passions, but there’s still a meaning in tone and proportion and ease, especially since the old rock that we’re all stuck on is spinning just fine.

To these people, literature is more or less the central fact of existence. Whereas, to vast numbers of reasonably intelligent people it is an unimportant sideline, a relaxation, an escape, sometimes even a source of inspiration. But they could do without it far more easily than they could do without coffee or whiskey.

What happens between the top and bottom of most pages is of little interest to most people, even though this is certainly inconceivable to those who spend their days scribbling words. Yet this truth should also be freeing for most writers, as it means that there’s no need to look silly while pretending to stand on a pedestal. Instead, while taking a bit of reader time, perhaps writers should offer sentences that resemble a warm meal with a cold drink and a comfortable chair. Nothing is wrong with passion. Nothing is wrong with intensity. But if writers offer sentences to the world, they should ensure that what lands on the page is truly for their readers.