Three Books to Read to Understand "The Writing Life"

I have often criticized the lousy job writers do of portraying what writers do, and what they go through in the course of their careers. Of course, a certain sort of idiot automatically dismisses such criticism. ("It's only a novel!" "It's only a movie!") But the fact remains that in this case writers are writing about their own profession rather than someone else's, often with no better reason than that they feel driven to write about "what they know," and in the process not only imply that they know nothing about what they think they no, but promote a great many pernicious illusions--all of which seems to me to warrant at least a little special attention.

Additionally other writers have done better than they on this score in the past. A lot better.

Here are three books I recommend as doing just that, not only "getting it right" in different and important ways, but which together give the reader a comprehensive understanding of the reality of "the writing life."

1. Lost Illusions (1837-1843) by Honoré de Balzac.
In Balzac's Lost Illusions, especially its middle part (A Great Man of the Provinces in Paris), we see poet Lucien de Rubempre get many a shock--not least in regard to how publishing really works. It is a banality that "publishing is a business," but few rarely think about what it really means for it to be a business, namely that it is a capitalist enterprise devoted to money-making, a motivation which only the stupidest market-worshipper would imagine harmonizes with a devotion to letters. Indeed, in Balzac's novel publishers care nothing at all for literature, have absolutely no interest in encouraging any newcomer no matter how talented they show themselves to be or how fine the work they bring them, traffic in printed paper bearing "Names" rather than "content," and buy the rave reviews that the gullible think are meaningful praise because "everyone does it" --with the result that it is a very naive person who thinks that there is any sort of meritocracy in literature, any sort of opportunity for the aspirant approaching the business with just their skill and their work, any justification in assuming that the reason something is not published must be that it is "just not very good." (Quite the contrary, the publishers will always prefer highly salable trash to the masterpiece that will only slowly win its way to acclaim, because the acclaim is genuine rather than purchased for cash or secured through string-pulling.)

So it goes today. And for the would-be writer it is such a dreary prospect that, after the king of the publishing business himself throws all the hard facts in his face in a vulnerable moment Lucien thinks less and less of trying to make it as a poet and more of ways of advancing himself in the world than working on his craft for a publishing business which wants nothing to do with a nobody simply because he is a nobody. As a result he became involved in journalistic and other intrigues by which he hopes to make a Name in which scum such as Dauriat would be willing to traffic--but thwarted in this way as well ends up going home in defeat, with that defeat determining the ultimate destiny of his all too short life. If that destiny ends up having its wildly melodramatic touches, the fact of frustration and defeat is all too realistic, the infinitely more common fate than we get in all those execrable movies where at story's end our protagonist is sitting in a bookshop signing copies for lined-up, eager, buyers.

2. Martin Eden (1909) by Jack London.
In Lost Illusions our writer hero, demoralized by the reality of publishing, increasingly occupied himself with other activities besides the writing that was supposed to be his principal activity. However, in Martin Eden Jack London's protagonist stuck by his writing, and by trying to sell it, without getting caught up in the sorts of intrigues and would-be flanking maneuvers that nearly bring Lucien success before he ends up destroyed. Moreover, if in Balzac's Dauriat we get a glimpse of the beginnings of modern publishing in the story of Martin Eden we see a world where all this has developed to the point of more obviously and fully looking like our own, such that Eden need not take himself off from the provinces to a cultural capital like New York, but instead, while never going further from his hometown of San Francisco than Oakland, embarks upon his quest. Indeed, I suspect no one else has depicted what it means for a writer to start out as he did, all alone, without guidance, remote from the centers of the publishing world, with the fullness of attention and emotional intensity that London did. The fumbling, stumbling, blundering beginning. (At the start Eden did not even know that he had to type his submissions.) The grim death march through the slush pile--not only the sense of waste and futility involved in writing material that has no takers, but the hassle and expense in time as well as money of sending it out and getting in reply only form rejection letters that feel as if they came out of a machine. (No, we do not "excuse the impersonal nature of your reply.") The sense of just what an isolating and lonely activity it is, with the writer embarked on it apt to get no support from their nearest and dearest even when they are in their lives. And of what sheer drivel the glib talk of "day jobs" is, given the sacrifices of the writer's quest they unavoidably entail.

Of course, at story's end Eden really does "make it," becoming "rich and famous" (as Jack London, who based Eden on himself, became rich and famous), and that is exceedingly unrepresentative of how this story goes. But all the same the strains and disillusionments involved in getting to his goal take their toll. "Perhaps it is impossible to attain to success until the heart is seared and callous in every most sensitive spot," Lucien says in Balzac's book--but never does attain success, and so can only speculate. By contrast this outcome is dramatized in London's book, because Eden does achieve success, while suffering that searing and callousness that deprives victory of its savor. Indeed, it seems notable that, if in quite different circumstances, Lucien and Martin Eden both end the same way, dying by their own hand--as, alas, Jack London may have died, the fate of the autobiographically-inspired Eden seeming to darkly anticipate London's own death.

3. Money Writes! (1927) by Upton Sinclair.
In contrast with Lost Illusions and Martin Eden--Sinclair's Money Writes! is not a novel, but a work of nonfiction, part of his Dead Hand series offering an "economic interpretation" of contemporary literature covering what gets produced, and on what terms. If London shared Sinclair's political views, indeed had presented such views in novels like The Iron Heel while having been important in helping Sinclair early in his career, Martin Eden did not deal with the political side of the publishing business in the way that Sinclair did in his study of how the "bourgeois point of view" defined what could and could not be published, how those who shared it or accommodated themselves to it had careers, how those who could not so accommodate themselves were driven to the margins, if they were published at all, as he showed how the principles he described in his historical study Mammonart remained very much operative in twentieth century America--and with characteristic brilliance. (Once again, success has its price, and so does failure, with really attractive outcomes pretty much implausible for any thinking and feeling human being, as they end up torn between writing what is meaningful and true--what could be great--and the slop the publishers would be willing to take.)

Sinclair also dealt with something else not yet quite so developed when London published Martin Eden almost two decades earlier--the cult of celebrity, and the pursuit of celebrity as a way out of the deprivations and miseries of ordinary, everyday, working life. If there are far, far more people genuinely possessed of the talent and the desire to become novelists, even great novelists, than there are places for them, that desire to escape a dead-end, lower-class life is indisputably what makes so many desperate to embark on a career as a novelist that, in spite of all the obstacles, and the depressingly low odds of success, that they put so much effort into it--and few have dealt with the matter so forthrightly and insightfully as Sinclair as ever.

Reviewing this list I am of course reminded that even the most recent of the books on it is almost a century old, and that much has changed in that time. However, for the most part we still live in the world that the nineteenth century created, because the twentieth century's attempt to move beyond that, depending on how one looks at it, has either been defeated or remains unfinished, such that in this case these writers give us far more truth about the publishing world, about contemporary letters, about what it is to try and get into and make a living in that world than a library of more recently written books. This is because so much of what is written about publishing is designed to pick the pockets of would-be writers, because even to the limited extent to which they may be allowed to do so few writers with access to any sort of mainstream audience at all these days ever dare to really look at the world around them, and really cognize it, and tell us what they have seen--and because in this world the Dauriats of Big Media still sneer cruelly, as today's counterparts to Lucien de Rubempre and Martin Eden can expect to face similar miseries, and those who pick up a new release from the Big Five can still expect to see between the covers what "Money writes," and nothing else.