Silences (35 page)

What if there is not that fullness of time, let alone totality of self?
—The situation for most writers:

            
The dissatisfaction about bad work, the failure of things, the difficulties of technique . . . and then to swallow that despair and that melancholy, to bear oneself as one is, not in order to sit down and rest,
but to struggle on notwithstanding thousands of shortcomings and faults and the uncertainty of conquering them. Then this struggle with one’s self, the trying to better one’s self, the cry for energy—all this complicated by material difficulties. . . . One works hard, but still one cannot make ends meet.

—Vincent Van Gogh

            
I am absolutely going to pot. What a fine form of torture,
the objective impossibility of thinking and consequently of writing can be, for here we work the whole day, for seven deadly hours on end, and afterward I walk, and then I eat, and at dessert I fall fast asleep from fatigue.

—Paul Valéry

            
Material anxieties frighten me because I feel how mysteriously independent of myself is my power of expression. v. . . I am not as the workmen who
can take up and lay down their tools. I am, so to speak, only the agent of an unreliable master.

—Joseph Conrad

            
. . . I know that I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates. And even if I had all the powers in the world, I would have to give
all
my powers to the important
thing in me: it has a right to that. . . . I know I am not exhausted; but
the little and continual thoughts of every day and its most unimportant things confuse me so that I can no longer recollect my own. . . . Before I used to hear all my voices in me; now it is as if someone had closed the window toward the garden in which my poems live; far, far away I hear something and listen and can no longer distinguish it. My head is full of ridiculous additions. And hardly have
I been paid for one job and am thinking that I may now collect myself for my own work, when it is already time again to think of the
next
and of where it is to be found and by what efforts obtained and my nervous strength is slipping away; my time, my courage, and I fail to catch up with myself day after day and am somewhere out of reach, full of flowers past their bloom, whose fading scents fill
me with dead weight.

                  
. . . But now I scarcely have plans any more; now it seems to me an infinite presumption to have plans when the very next stage is so dismaying, so dark, and so full of the tiniest questions. It seems as if I were in the midst of nets; I feel these nets on my hands with every gesture that would arise freely.

                  
. . . I look for some person
who will understand my need without taking me for a beggar. . . .

            
It is clear to me that I need help in order to continue on my way. . . .

                  
What can one who wants a great deal say of this wanting (that deep wanting which goes toward my work and toward its continuous realization) without betraying it and becoming a boaster? Here every word involves a false note and
an affront to what it means. One can only say that one comes more and more to protect this wanting which goes toward deep and important things, that one longs more and more sincerely and wholeheartedly to give it all one’s strength and all one’s love and to experience worries through it and not through the little harassing accidents of which life in poverty is full. . . . This winter, for the first
time, it [poverty] stood before me for months like a specter, and I lost myself and all my beloved aims and all the light out of my heart and came near taking some little official post that would have meant dying and setting out on a spiritual transmigration full of homelessness and madness.

                  
I am indeed no longer a beginner who throws himself at random into the future. I have
worked for years, and if I have worked out anything for myself, it is the belief in the right to raise the best I have in me and the awareness of the treasures in the sesame of my soul which I can no longer forget. And after all, I know that my pen will
be strong enough to carry me: only I may not misuse it too early and must give it time to attain its full growth.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from two
letters, 1903 and 1902

            
Always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, while that one gift which it was death to hide (my writing powers), perishing, and with it, myself. A rust eating away the bloom of spring, destroying the tree at its heart.

—Virginia Woolf

            
Eight hours a day I have paid, working as an advertising writer the last five years while trying to save
nerve force and courage enough to admit other writing. It has cost me dearly in rare projects gone wrong.

—Sherwood Anderson

            
I have done nothing as far as serious literature for a year—must stop—go someplace—straighten out my burdened spirit and do some real writing. Above all the fact that my only hope for salvation lies in my not having to earn money . . . I need help to get myself
out of this snare. . . .

                  
Money that I can get only for work, the wrong work, and right now I’m so worn out and distracted I can’t work.

—Isaac Babel

            
I am not getting the needful hours to ripen anything in myself. . . .

                  
. . . I have had very little time left over from the day’s work to give to it [poetry]. . . .

                  
But a long poem
like that [“The Bridge”] needs unbroken time and extensive concentration and my present routine of life permits me only fragments. (There are days when I simply have to ‘sit on myself’ at my desk to shut out rhythms and melodies that belong to that poem and have never been written because I have succeeded only too well during the course of the day’s work in excluding and stifling such a train
of thoughts . . . & then there are periods when the whole world couldn’t shut out the plans and beauties of that work—& I get a little of it on paper.)

—Hart Crane

            
I think I’ve only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water.

—Katherine Anne Porter

When the Claims of Creation Cannot be Primary: The Literary Situation
^▴

It is the great quantity of what is not done that lies with all its weight on what wants to come out of the soil.

Money that I can get only for work, the wrong work.

I know that I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.

I could not live by literature if only to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.

The sacrifice of talent, in pieces, to preserve its essential value.

            
I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can’t suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted and completely crippled. . . . In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate.
We don’t really direct our lives unaided and unobstructed. Our being is subject to all the chances of life.

—Katherine Anne Porter

The cost to literature of its sporadic, occasional, week-end or sabbatical writers (it may take an entire sabbatical to undo damage and to recover power for work)
is
unfinished work, minor effort and accomplishment, silences—where might be a great flowering.

And
some writers are grated to pieces by the constant attrition. Lost forever. Others silenced grievously as Edwin Louis Wallant—early death from sheer overwork; a full time job
and
writing.

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SILENCES, P
. 13

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SILENCES, PP
. 9–14

THE LITERARY SITUATION
*
(1976)

            
John Leonard of the
New York Times
estimates that there are only 100 or so writers in this country who can actually make a living from their books. According to Leonard, 1,300 to 1,400 serious
novels are nevertheless published every year by trade publishers (2,000—if westerns, mysteries, science fiction and Gothics are counted).
A Directory of American Fiction Writers
(by no means all-inclusive) lists over 800 writers of serious fiction.