I Write Therefore I Am
Response for the Essay Writing Challenge
It’s not easy to explain a compulsion. Usually, reason and nonsense get mixed. And for me, that’s true about writing.
I guess I write to clarify my thoughts. On the page, I can pick through the bits that make sense, spot connections, and eventually conclude: yeah, that’s what I mean. But then someone else reads it and responds, and I discover that my meaning was not crystal clear after all.
For example, I wrote a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.(Routledge: 2015 [second edition]). Critics noted that I spent more time than most biographers on 1966–1968, the last phase of King’s career, the period after Selma and the Voting Rights Act. This was when his efforts to end the Vietnam War and address the evils of racial injustice and inequality in America’s ghettos did not secure the same concessions as his earlier campaigns. Some have interpreted this as my saying that the later movements were more important. That’s not what I meant, and all I can do is try again. Between 1966 and 1968, King led campaigns that others warned him to avoid because he believed they were needed. That was brave and admirable. The evils he identified — militarism typified by Vietnam or inequality symbolized by ghetto poverty — needed to be addressed, and they still do. Thus, if you want to celebrate King, you should appreciate the nobility of some of his failures. They are important, just like the successful ones.
I guess that goes to show that I’m a historian. But I am a writer first. Sure, I enjoy going into archives and finding out things that hardly anyone else knows, but I enjoy even more the pleasure of placing words into a perfect pattern.
Words’ ability to carry both content and sensation fascinates me. They can communicate facts and then simultaneously elicit feelings. Like any work of art, they can excite wonder.
But writing history offers its own challenges. I remember when I was a college student. This was back when UK degree courses were taught primarily via the tutorial system. You wrote essays (lots of them) and received feedback via meetings with your tutor. My first year was not going well partly because, to my surprise, one tutor, in particular, disliked my writing style. Teachers had previously praised it. Fortunately, my tutor Roger Lockyer was sympathetic and gave me advice that has stayed with me. “Remember,” he said, “as a historian, it is always better to be clear than to be clever.” In practice, I learned you could try to be both. For instance, for the opening sentence of my biography of John F. Kennedy (Routledge, 2013), I wrote the line “The death defined the life.” This summed up an essential aspect of JFK’s fame and set up the idea that the JFK remembered was created in vital ways by his death. Not bad work for just five words!
I have to say that writing is not always enjoyable. I sometimes find it challenging and frustrating. Although there is a sensual aspect as well as an intellectual one to the pleasure that writing brings, there are equally times when it’s almost painful. Anyone who has tried to write will recognize those times. The words fall like vomit onto the page, and you scrub them away as fast as you can. Or you have an idea or thought, and each time you try to express it, it slips further and further away from you. Finally, you shake your head and wonder: why am I doing this?
Well, I also write for irrational reasons, I know. They can be grouped around what might be called the legend of the writer. In other words, the idea that being a writer is intrinsically a good thing, an occupation that has some status. Most people have singers, musicians, or athletes as their heroes, but writers rapidly came onto my list. I cannot recall precisely when I realized that the books I read were the product of specific people, but I can say for sure that I grew up in a house full of books. The weekly trip to the library was a family routine.
One of my first writing heroes was F. Scott Fitzgerald. In my late teens, I read everything he wrote, not just The Great Gatsby or his other novels, but all the collected short stories that Penguin published. I even read his correspondence with his editor Max Perkins. From provincial England in the Seventies, I was transported to the America of the Roaring Twenties. It fascinated me. My adolescent self was equally intrigued by Fitzgerald, his struggle with alcoholism, and faltering fortunes in Hollywood. You could learn about his life and judge him as a failure. You could hear about his conversations with Ernest Hemingway about sex and penis size and dismiss him as puerile, but then you could return to his prose and realize its greatness. Trust the tale and not the teller, as the saying goes.
Looking back on that time and my odd fixation on certain authors — I also read Kurt Vonnegut, keeping up with his output until the early 1980s — I recognize that I was self-identifying. I wanted to write as lyrically as Fitzgerald and as satirically as Vonnegut. When I edited an arts magazine at college, I even published a fiction piece under the pseudonym of Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut’s fictional sci-fi writer. Behind all this, I now recognize lay a belief that through writing, I could create an on-the-page persona that was the charming, witty chap I longed to be. Critics sometimes talk of authors ventriloquizing their characters, but authors are also performing themselves.
Authors have authority, and for most writers, this power can stand in contrast to how they feel about most other aspects of their lives. Writing can give you the power to elicit emotion. Your readers can be induced to laugh or to cry. I read a lot of crime novels, and I enjoy the way the writers manipulate their readers, laying false trails of plausibility so that the question of “whodunnit?” remains in suspense. Of course, I have been tempted to see if I could do the same and even took a writing class to develop a novel. The teacher challenged us to write about something abhorrent to test if we could render in words something that we would find repulsive in life. After all, crime and horror are popular genres. It wasn’t easy. I ended up writing something quite forensic, describing an attack on someone largely in terms of the wounds and injuries inflicted, which was my way of showing how the assailant had dehumanized his victim. But what was interesting was observing my classmates. There was a very quiet older woman who had joined the class to develop a romance novel, yet her scene of a child abduction haunts me still! I guess my point is that writing, like acting, is exploring the many ways to be human, even the inhumane ones.
And behind all of this lies the deeper superstition that writing can give you a certain immortality. The once famed and now forgotten Hilaire Belloc wrote: When I am dead, I hope it may be said/ His sins were scarlet, but his books were read. Belloc provides his own warning since his books are no longer read and he is largely forgotten. If celebrity status in your own time is ultimately illusory, immortal fame as set by the shifting literary canon is just as ephemeral. Shelley may have wanted his Ozymandias to signal that artistic achievement outlasts political dominion, but on a planet that may ultimately support no human life, and where publications, both digital and printed, may turn to dust, to imagine that the writer is remembered is a delusion.
One is left, therefore, with two converging paths. On the first, you write because you choose to do so, and you seek the rewards it can bring. On the second, you write because you feel compelled to do it. This is because, at some point in your life, it becomes part of who you are. And when you don’t write, you feel diminished. Hopefully, the writers among you will be nodding your heads, and if you are, my job is done!
Thanks to Ravyne Hawke for the challenge
