[The following paragraphs are lifted from my most recent Substack newsletter. You can subscribe to it here: https://robertlong4man.substack.com/]
Lately I have been saying things like, “I don’t want to write anything ever again,” and, “I’m considering a drastic career change that will make it impossible for me to pursue working from my imagination in the future, as it has never done me any tangible good. Here I am, having written a lot of things, still as broke and full of grief as I was before I wrote them.”
That’s the kind of thing I’ve been saying. You know? That kind of thing?
I don’t think I really mean that stuff, but I do say it. Or I at least think it.
My writing life has had its ups and downs so far, and I’ve been grateful for the ups. I wish they came with more money, but I’m lucky to have merely had the time to write anything at all.
I know how fortunate I am. I’ve made good friends along the way, and friendship is worth more than gold.
Anyway, long story short, I’ve had a shitty attitude lately when it comes to writing. And all the while I’ve had on my shelf a paperback containing a few novels by the Nobel-Prizewinning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz.
Now, okay. First off, Toni Morrison aside, I don’t like it when Americans win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I like it when the Nobel goes, or has gone, to someone in another country whom I have never heard of. I never knew about this Mahfouz guy until I saw his book at a bookstore, and it said on the cover that he had won the Nobel Thing.
Isn’t that funny? As in, not funny at all? He won the biggest literary prize a human being can win, and for so many years I was unaware he existed.
Ambrose Bierce once said that war is how Americans learn geography. Well, the Nobel Prize for Literature is how I learn that writers exist outside the United States.
I’ve been reading the first novel in this volume, and it’s The Beggar, which is about a forty-five-year-old lawyer who is experiencing some undefined health problems. Physically he’s okay, but he has lost interest in everything—in the cases he’s tasked with handling, in being a husband to his wife, in being a father to his children. He is in a state of crisis.
Meanwhile, his daughter has begun writing poetry—and we learn, once that’s revealed, that the protagonist was himself a poet at one time. He wasn’t as successful as he wished he were, as his friend Mustapha has managed to be, and so he turned his back on poetry and pursued a life of lawyering. And now, it seems, his abandonment of an essential part of himself has caught up with him. It is tearing him apart from inside, and he has turned destructive.
I don’t think I was ever going to give up on writing completely. But now that I’ve read The Beggar I know how important it is I not do that, at least not entirely. And if you’re a creative person, it’s important that you not do it either. I’m serious.
I read a story, once, about Sherwood Anderson. I’ve looked it up, and I guess it’s a very well-known story, but I didn’t know about it until around ten years ago.
The story goes that Sherwood Anderson was in business someplace in Ohio, working hard and making money, providing for his family, until one day he lost it. Because he was neglecting his urge to write, to create, he had some kind of breakdown. He walked away, and was found sometime later wandering through the woods in what’s been described as a fugue state.
There appear to be several versions of the story, and I don’t know how true any of them are, but the point of it is clear, and I think it’s valid: it’s extremely dangerous to turn your back on those impulses that scream at you to take what’s burning in back of your mind and shape it as it cools into something other people can see. Even if what you make isn’t any good, even if no one but you likes it, it’s essential that you listen to the voice that tells you what you have to do in order to keep living in the world.
In the case of Sherwood Anderson, apparently, after his nervous breakdown he left his wife and family behind to pursue the life of a writer. Something like that.
I don’t want to do that. I like my wife and family. I don't want to leave them.
Doris Lessing, famously, for the sake of her literary career, left two children behind in what is now Zimbabwe. She sat the little ones on the front lawn, explained that she was leaving them for good, moved to London, pursued writing in earnest, and eventually won the (that’s right) Nobel Prize.
She didn’t have a breakdown, she was perfectly rational. But whether or not I’m in my right mind, I don’t want to alienate my family. I don’t want to be stretched to the point of breaking. I don't want to break. I want to keep writing things, and keep myself going as long as I can. I want to keep listening to the noise that clamors way back in my mind, and I want to make the people in my life as happy as I can, as hard as that can be sometimes, me being me, with my clumsiness and inability to make substantial sums of money. It’s like I’m cursed, or something.
It's not easy to love something that wants to hurt you more often than not, but that's what it is, to be a creative person. So go on and get to work, before that voice way in back of your mind starts to tell you things you don't ever want to hear.
