Writers and their Professions v14

The compulsion to write is a mysterious one. There is something suspect, something unattractive and childish about wanting to impose your thoughts on others, something tying childish and a bit disgusting about wanting to push your thoughts passing sensations to the alphabet and hearing your voice echoing in the room. In order to write, one needs a conviction of inevitability. That what one writes, had to be written. Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of humble justifications that writers employ to diminish this arrogance. Some try to make it sound like their writing was a mere by-product of their reading, a form of note-taking that got out of hand. 1 Jorge Luis Borges claimed that he was prouder of what he had read in his life, than of what he had written. 2

There are, of course, those who cheerfully tap away at their keyboard, who speak of “enjoying writing” or speak of it as a form of therapy. But the days of de Maistre and Chamfort are over, and it has been at least a century and a half since anyone has been comfortable to simply say that writing was the by-product of their leisure.

The first, and most obvious, justification would be for writers to claim that they write for the same reason that anyone else does their job—to earn a living. But even Samuel Johnson could not pull this off. When he uttered his famous defence of a pecuniary motivation for writing—“No one but a blockhead, ever wrote, except for money”—Boswell found it unconvincing. Although Johnson, and for that matter, Boswell, earned a good living out of his pen 3

The other ostensible motivation—“Because it’s the only thing I can do; because I am otherwise unemployable”—is also a gross affectation. There are easier, more pleasurable and less uncertain ways to earn a living. 4 If you can read and write—and many of our writers can—you can do most jobs in our service economy. If Goethe could work as a diplomat, Shakespeare as an actor, Dante as a schemer, Chekhov as a doctor, Eliot as a banker, Kafka as an insurance clerk, etc, then you can work as a project manager.

The advice, “Don’t write if you can do anything else” is a rewording of the same sentiment. You’re of course still expected to be there by the end of the article, or talk, or workshop. Still among those burdened by fate with this dreadful mission. This is merely the sergeant major calling his company’s bluff just before a foolishly heroic mission. Transforming his men from conscripts to volunteers, from chumps to heroes, by giving them the opportunity to withdraw.

To this end, publishers fashionably stack their writers’ biographical blurb with spoof jobs—chicken rouster in Malaysia, zoo caretaker 5—as if to reassure the reader about the preordained nature of the writer’s vocation—because surely no one was put on others. In order to write, one needs a conviction of inevitability. That what one writes, had to be written. Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of humble justifications that writers employ to diminish the arrogance. Some try to make it sound like their writing was a mere by-product of their reading, a form of note-taking that got out of hand. 1 Jorge Luis Borges claimed that he was prouder of what he had read in his life, than of what he had written. 2

The problem with the spoof jobs is that they are only full of pathos if the worker had no choice. 3 Although, inherent to this attitude is the unattractive assumption that, given the choice, people would always choose what we choose.

Thus writers try to say how disgusting the act of writing is. Not the ones that say how wonderful, or speak of it as therapy but the worldweary ones.

When Johnson uttered his famous defence of a pecuniary motivation for writing—“No one butt a blockhead, ever wrote, except for money”—even Boswell found it unconvincing.

The other ostensible motivation—“Because it’s the only thing I can do; because I am otherwise unemployable”—is also a gross affectation. There are easier, more pleasurable and less uncertain ways to earn a living. 4 If you can read and write—and many of our writers can—you can do most jobs in our service economy. If Goethe could work as a diplomat, Shakespeare as an actor, Dante as a schemer, Chekhov as a doctor, Eliot as a banker, Kafka as an insurance clerk, etc.

The advice, “Don’t write if you can do anything else” is a rewording of the same sentiment. You’re of course still expected to be there by the end of the article, or talk, or workshop. Still among those burdened by fate with this dreadful mission. This is merely the sergeant major calling his company’s bluff just before a foolishly heroic mission. Transforming his men from conscripts to volunteers by giving them the opportunity to withdraw.

To this end, publishers fashionably stack their writers’ biographical blurb with spoof jobs—chicken rouster in Malaysia, zoo caretaker 5—as if to reassure the reader about the preordained nature of the writer’s vocation—because surely no one was put on this earth to roust chickens in Malaysia. (What  is this “rousting”?) These jobs never reflect the social background of the writer. They are indirect Veblen jobs, the jobs of people so socially secure that they feel immune to what their job contributes to their identity. They are, in their own way, “free to wait tables and shine shoes”. That this writer did not simply take up the pen one day, but that there was a Marxian-Hegelian inevitability to their literary career.

Of course there are occasions when a writer comes to us after a lifetime of service in another profession. But it is this “rousting”?) These jobs never reflect the social background of the writer. They are indirect Veblen jobs, the jobs of people so socially secure that they feel immune to what their job contributes to their identity. They are, in their own way, “free to wait tables and shine shoes”. That this writer did not simply take up the pen one day, but that there was a Marxian-Hegelian inevitability to their literary career. 6

It’s like the writer saying, Look I tried to do a normal job, with hilarious consequences.

Just as children play with Bob the Builder, presumably in the same spirit that middle class children play with Bob the Builder. That the present volume was typed by hands unsullied by (manual) labour, just fashionably distressed, like designer jeans.

This is all to impress upon us the happy circumstance of the writer’s birth. That by a happy coincidence, thanks to a successful attorney father, or perhaps the welfare state, he enjoyed Florentine patronage; just as classical biographies first extolled the subject’s ancestors.