“Seeing how many great writers have been total jerks in their personal lives,” I can picture a young novelist reasoning, “then clearly as a writer I have to be a total jerk myself. Take Hemingway, for example. Surely it can’t be a coincidence that the man some consider the best American novelist of the last 100 years was also, hands down, American literature’s biggest s.o.b.”
A good day for Hemingway, a really good day, consisted of cheating on his wife, planting a bullet between the eyes of an African lion, mocking F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, uh, “hand” size, getting obnoxiously drunk, punching out some friends, watching bulls die, killing trout, cheating on his new wife, ignoring his children, machine-gunning tuna, challenging to a fight anyone who dared give a negative review, shooting some pheasants, quail and antelope, then, as a kind of chaser, shooting himself.
An s.o.b. in the old style all right, the kind they just don’t make anymore. Writer bad boys have gone out of fashion in this new century. Whereas in the Romantic era the artist was supposed to do the amoral high living for all of us, now everyone takes part, and the writer as boozer, womanizer, dope fiend, and all around jerk-butt just doesn’t cut it anymore, since we’re all committing these sins ourselves.
Even the sin of self-promotion — which hasn’t been considered a sin in decades — isn’t what it used to be. Where are the young up-and-coming self-canonizers to compare with Lord Byron (“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know”), Oscar Wilde, Truman Capote or Norman Mailer? With the decline in interest in literature, writers have to be prima donnas in private now; they’re no longer granted a stage, rock stars and celebrities having long since shoved them off.
But I’m having fun here, glibly sidestepping my original conundrum: Do you have to be bad to be a writer or does being a writer make you bad?
It’s easy to understand how the same traits that drive a person to writing could easily turn sour. There’s the original wound that made us want to be novelists in the first place — assuaged by writing, but only partly, meaning there’s still a lot of hurt needing to be smothered. And there are elevated levels of ego — the kind of self-regard needed to believe that what you have to say is of great importance.
Add to these the constant, frightening pressure of having to fill up a blank page with words — a pressure that can do surprisingly nasty things to the soul. And competition — publishing’s always been a dog-eat-dog world. The pressure, for some, of celebrity; the pressure, for most, of obscurity. The strain, for those who consider writing an art form, of having to swim against the cultural tide. If writers are looking for reasons/excuses to turn sour, there are plenty at hand, including the fact that so many writerly strengths are perilously close to moral failings. Our courage can easily turn to pugnacity, our endurance to stubbornness, our isolation to misanthropy.
Given all this, it’s a wonder more writers aren’t sociopaths, spiritual cripples, outright bums.
But, in our defense, many traits deemed vices by the rest of the world are virtues in a writing career. Selfishness, for example. The percentage of writers born selfish is probably no higher than in any other cross section of the population, but the percentage of writers who become selfish is extraordinarily high.
The reasons are obvious enough, revolving around protection of our writing time. The twins are crying down the hall, the Honda needs servicing, in-laws drop in for an unannounced visit. It’s hard, for a person who the rest of the world thinks has unlimited free time, to say no.
But you do say no, if you’re serious. We have to defend our space, the “room of our own.” As the notoriously anti-social Rainer Maria Rilke once put it, “If I have any responsibility, I mean it to be responsibility to the deepest, innermost essence of my writing.”
Great. But try explaining this to the ones you shut out.
The selfish, the egotists, the arrogant. It’s no wonder that many novelists, faced with these kinds of colleagues, take pride in saying “None of my friends are writers, of course.”
Perhaps in meeting other writers they see themselves reflected too closely for comfort; perhaps their disdain is another part of their self-protection — or perhaps they’re right, that a novelist is the last person you’d want as a bro. “I avoid writers very carefully, because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said, probably remembering his pal Hemingway.
I’m begging the obvious question: Does the fact that a novelist was a world-class s.o.b. have anything to do with our appreciation of their work? The literarily correct answer, of course, is that it doesn’t — that A Farewell to Arms is a great novel no matter that a bully wrote it; that Death on the Installment Plan is a remarkable book despite the fact that Louis-Ferdinand Celine was an obnoxious anti-Semite. Indeed, it might even add to the impact of a dark novel like Naked Lunch, knowing that William Burroughs was evil enough to murder his wife.
And while I subscribe to the correct literary doctrine, I can’t help thinking that sometimes it does matter, for example in instances where we’re asked to swallow, not just the words, but the whole cult of personality, i.e., Hemingway as the macho tough guy, the legend, as an enticement to continue reading his books, despite a talent that seems increasingly thin. We’re free to judge a writer’s public persona like we judge any persona, and thereby are free to reject it.
“What disheartens,” Tillie Olsen once said, in examining which writers gain reputations and which ones do not, “is the existence and success of the sleazy, the corrupt, the tricky.”
Literary nastiness has taken several forms over the years. Political bigotry? Think Ezra Pound. Mean old rotten drunkenness? Sinclair Lewis. Serial lying? Lillian Hellman. Sadism? The Marquis de Sade. Dostoevsky was a compulsive gambler. Dickens left his wife for a trophy mistress. O. Henry went to prison for embezzling; Nelson Algren — poor man! — served time for stealing a typewriter.
To put against these sinners, we have the saints, writers like Jane Austen, Chekhov, Conrad, Eudora Welty, and — to mention two who just recently left us — William Trevor and Howard Frank Mosher. These are the ones who damped down their egos and quietly concentrated on their work, leading a life that demonstrates that the responsibility and dignity (yes, dignity) we feel as artists has a direct and vital correspondence to the responsibility and dignity we feel as human beings.
Serious young writers should keep them in mind, if they’re ever tempted to let their talent serve as a license for jerkdom. As the wise Cyril Connolly once pointed out, “By far the most favorable circumstances for the artist comes with living snug in the heart of the bourgeoise,” meaning that the most adventurous, the biggest risk-takers, the most committed to their work, may well be that polite, boringly well-behaved novelist who lives right next door.
W.D. Wetherell is a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist who lives in Lyme.