I mentioned in my last column that there are few books on writing talent, but as it turns out there’s a classic on anti-talent, published 80 years ago this spring and still worth reading and learning from: Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise.
No one ever understood better than Connolly what goes into making a novel a masterpiece; no critic ever rued more publicly his inability to write one. What makes for the book’s endurance is the fact that the enemies of talent he recognized in 1938 are still very much with us, plus two or three new threats he couldn’t have foreseen.
Many of Connolly’s epigrams have become famous. “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.” “The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece, and no other task is of any consequence.” “It is closing time in the gardens of the west and from now on an artist will be judged only by the quality of his despair.”
Good with one-liners, he’s even better when his paragraphs get rolling.
“To suppose that artists will muddle through without encouragement and without money because in the past there have been exceptions is to assume that salmon will find their way to the top of a river to spawn in spite of dams and pollution. ‘If it’s in you it’s bound to come out’ is fatuous wish-fulfillment. More often it stays in and goes bad.”
Has anyone, writing of talent, compiled an enemies list as fearsome as Connolly’s? Worst for him is journalism — the dangers of a writer hoping to write for the ages letting herself write ephemera for the day; the deadening press of work; the hazards of book reviewing (“A job in which the best of you is expended on the mediocre in others”), the temptation (he would add if he lived today) to blog.
Politics is on Connolly’s list, too. Writing in 1938, fascism on one side, communism on the other, the writer was pressed as never before to take sides, and write only that which would assure victory. Art was out; propaganda was in.
It’s a measure of how totally disenfranchised contemporary American writers have become that reading about this debate seems like reading about theological disputes from the Middle Ages. “Writers are politically minded when they are able to accomplish something,” Connolly asserts, and the opposite is equally true — that living in a culture like ours, where serious novelists have no political clout whatsoever, it’s difficult to be politically idealistic without sounding old-fashioned and naive.
Success is another threat. Connolly, who had much, dreamed of more, derived much amusement from watching its poisonous workings on others.
“Popular success is a palace built for writers by publishers, journalists, and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot, and death-watch beetles are tunneling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down.”
Writers who aren’t famous often resort to teaching to make their living, though Connolly warns against this. There was no way for him to anticipate today’s explosion in creative-writing programs, but even 80 years ago he worried about how teaching can impact the most important part of a writer’s talent: her longing. Having to commodify writing, grade it and read so much that is wretched can quickly deaden a novelist’s urge to write.
Connolly also advises against marrying. “There is a moment when the cult of home and happiness becomes harmful and domestic happiness one of those escapes from talent which we have deplored, for it replaces that necessary unhappiness without which writers perish.”
Bad enough to begin with, marriage becomes even worse with kids. “Children,” Connolly says, “dissipate the longing for immortality which is the compensation of the childless writer’s work. There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”
It’s easy to see where Connolly may have gone wrong here, overrating the amount of coziness that comes with marriage, ignoring the, uh, creative turmoil involved; he didn’t realize that, far from dissipating the longing for immortality, having children focuses an artist’s eye on the future.
And yet there’s much truth in Connolly’s warning, especially about putting too much energy into being a good citizen, not a good artist (he talks about writers being “hamstrung by respectability”), and writers, especially older ones, sometimes need to deaden the Boy Scout part of themselves, let the bohemian half have its day.
Home and happiness, success, hack writing, politics, teaching. These are Connolly’s heavy hitters — the dangers he worried about most. There are more threats on his list: Drink, promiscuity, conversation (“A good talker can talk away the substance of twenty books in as many evenings”) and sloth. The list also includes one of particular relevance in our own times: trendiness; wanting to write exactly like everyone else writes.
There were future dangers he had no way of anticipating, including overpopulation. We live in an era when everyone wants to be a writer, and work of quality is smothered in the lava flow of mediocrity. If everyone gets 15 minutes of fame, then everyone also gets a novel published — but only one, unless it’s an immediate bestseller.
Technology is a threat, too. Connolly wrote his book before television and computers. He could never have dreamed, even in his most pessimistic moments, that a time would come when writers would have to defend the very notion of words, books and language against the assaults of machines, and be faced with an audience that was bailing out from literature with silicon-chip parachutes.
He had a wise and ironic eye, Connolly did — he would have stared unblinking at Facebook and Twitter — but surely, when it comes to enemies of literary promise, computers would have seemed to him the invention of the anti-Christ.
An attendant threat would have worried him even more: The loss of confidence that writers now have to deal with, not in their own ability, but in the future of literature.
In 1938, the world of print was temporarily holding its own against a visual world that would soon conquer everything. Connolly wrote with the assumption that to be a writer, a good writer, was the best and hardest thing in the world to be. This was the idea behind Faulkner, Conrad, Cather and Mann — an idea that seems so distant now that we think of it as something in the history books, not a living notion that could have any inspirational value today. Writing as an art form? What dinosaurs still talk about that?
Talent (I think Connolly would say, if he wrote his book now) flourishes best if the person blessed with it remembers they’re part of a very long tradition. That artists have tried for eternity to make sense of the world. That there have been countless small successes in this endeavor and a few major triumphs. That writers have frequently been on the ropes in other eras. That we are at the apex of a literary tradition that even now, with hardly anyone noticing, is one of the glories of our species. All that should become part of a writer’s being, so they carry around a quiet cockiness that buoys them up at the worst of times and demands even better in those rare moments when, despite all the enemies of promise waiting to trip them, their talents come together and everything clicks.
W. D. Wetherell is a novelist, story writer and essayist who lives in Lyme.