Monday, May 16, 2005 :::
A good (but not great) writer
The gift of honest self analysis is not something creative types are known to possess. And perhaps that is the design of the thing, the benefit of blindness to one’s own follies or shortcomings. And it seems the more creative the individual the more out of touch with reality that person’s perception of their own work becomes. I would venture to guess that a great many of these artists, whatever the art, tend to overstate the importance, or originality, or the relevance of their work. Others simply toil away in vain, ridiculing their works with detestation that can only come from an unyielding self-loathing. No matter what the polish or of the fix, it will never be good enough. Somewhere between idea and birth the genius of genuine art was aborted while the horrid remnants of left over inspiration were scraped out onto the canvas, or the page, or into the stale air.
So far it has been my fortune to be a good writer. I am not a great writer. Being good is good enough. Being great, I fear, might be tortuous.
I read a story yesterday about Tristan Egolf, a writer of some repute that killed himself at the age of 33. Whether or not you have heard of him doesn’t matter to my point. In fact, I have never heard of him. Apparently he had written some critically acclaimed books, the first of which was published when he was 27. He was an activist and a musician. And by the admission of his close friends, he was a tortured soul.
Honestly, I don’t know what parts of the story are hype and which are fact. Am I to believe that this guy was so smart and so creative he just couldn’t stand living in his own head? Or perhaps a better (and slightly more dramatic) explanation for his suicide is that he looked down the intimidating timeline that was the rest of his life and knew he would never have the strength to be as good as he was supposed to be. Or maybe it was marketing. Not self-serving marketing, but legacy building.
They are a melancholy fraternity, these Suicide Writers. And there is certain publicity to being inducted into their number. Book sales increase. Notoriety is almost automatic. And alas, there is that intrigue. You become morbidly sexy and maybe just a little bit cooler than if you died of complications from an inoperable brain tumor.
Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, John Kennedy O’Toole, Edgar Allen Poe, more recently Hunter S. Thompson: all famous writers who chose the express train to lapsed mortality. And these are just the ones we’ve heard about. How many more never published a word?
My thoughts are not crystallized on the subject but I can tell you there is no pressure in only being good. No one is ever going to accuse me of being the shining beacon of prose-form truth of my generation or country. The Noble Prize for literature… not something I will probably have on my mantle any time soon. But that’s O.K., right? To be at ease that I can, on some days, string together words that could make a person weep, or laugh, or think and NEVER have to prove it to anyone but myself.
The greatest burden a writer can feel is the significance of his own ideas. It’s sad when that burden crushes the messenger beneath. It’s tragic when those ideas were never really all that heavy to begin with.
::: posted by Mike at 3:22 PM
