WHAT CAN MAILER — AND DICKINSON, ROUSSEAU, CONRAD AND GEISEL — TELL US ABOUT HOW TO EARN A LIVING AS A WRITER?

      William Warner

Once upon a time, decades ago, Norman Mailer came to speak to a class of Columbia MFA writing students, myself among them, not about how to earn a living, but about the craft, the art of writing. It was a sunny afternoon. The famous writer was smiling and leaning back in his chair, more than happy to share pearls of wisdom from what must have seemed that spring day — with

photo by Anne Fassotte

fresh-faced young writers waiting on his every word — a most successful career. And we students were happy too — happy to be in the presence of such evident success, and contentedly adrift in the fantasy that the challenges of earning a living and of great art had little to do with one another.
        Whereupon, out of the blue, one pesky student, a friend of mine asked: “How we can earn enough money to live and still have time to write?”
        There was an edge to the question, an undertone of “If you're so smart, Mr. Great Writer, tell us something that might actually be useful.” In 2007 many may have forgotten or not be aware of how long and hard Norman Mailer once worked to make himself a center of controversy and get his name in the papers. Among other things, with The Prisoner of Sex and other publications and public remarks he attacked feminism when feminism was at its height.[1] I suspect my friend Jackie was not disposed to think highly of a man who had made his living in part by attacking women and the women's movement. And she had a young child to raise and a husband who, like her, was struggling to make it as an artist. And, unlike Mailer, Jackie and her husband had not come of age right after World War II, during one of the great economic booms in the history of Western capitalism, but rather in the midst of 1970s stagflation, when jobs for “liberal arts graduates” just paid the rent. Jackie was far from starving — she was paying an Ivy League tuition, or taking student loans to pay it — but she had that great problem of the working classes, no matter how well paid: Time. Classes, husband, new-born child, copy-editing and writing scripts for video games to bring in money — she didn't have much time to think, let alone write.
        “Mr. Mailer,” Jackie said. “I would appreciate it if you could tell us, how we can earn enough money to live and still have time to write?”

(2)
In high school, when I began telling people I was going to be a writer, one of my teachers warned me that very few serious writers are able to make a living off their writing. The figure “50” has stuck in my mind. Our culture has room or resources for only 50 full-time serious writers? In high school the resolution of this problem came to me quickly and clearly: I would be one of the 50. (Probably next year.)
        I am struck now by the extent to which, in adulthood, not only I but my friend Jackie and Norman Mailer as well remained attached to this idea that literary success = being able to earn a good living from one's writing. Writers in so many other countries either cannot hope to make a living from their writing, do not hope to or both, but for American writers the primary challenge is not to speak truth to power, bathe in the wonder of language, stretch or undermine readers' sense of the possible or master the craft. Above all we want to become “real writers”: to be able to live reasonably well off royalties and rights sales and not have to work at another job.[2]
        In the days when I used to tell non-writer acquaintances (truthfully, it so happens) that I had published a novel, I was struck by how often their first question was “How many copies did it sell?” Or, “Is it a bestseller?” In the United States questions as to the integrity, depth, courage, wisdom, originality, goals and even subject of a writer's work are secondary. They may come to seem of interest, of great interest, but only as regards “real writers”, money makers.
        Among the fictions MFA students and other aspiring writers embrace is that a writer who can earn a comfortable living from her work is able to devote most all her time to “serious” writing, and approach this work with the free-est of minds. (We shall have no more luck defining serious writing than the Supreme Court has had defining pornography. Let's cling to the idea of stretching or undermining readers' sense of the possible.)
        In fact, writers who would live by selling books, no matter how “serious”, must spend a good deal of time promoting themselves and their work, networking, reading colleagues' and competitors' books.[3] If, like Mailer, one has a taste and talent for controversy, this may boost one's sales, but likely one will also get branded controversial and thus be expected to controverse year after year, book after book.[4] In later commenting on the fame and fortune he achieved at 25 with the publication of his first novel, Mailer wrote, “Never again would I know, in the dreary way one usually knows such things, what it was like to work at a dull job or take orders from a man one hated.”[5] As one who has worked at dull jobs and for narrow-minded, fully detestable bosses, I am well placed to appreciate the freedom the Mailers of the writing world enjoy. I can add, too, that having to work two jobs — one for money, one with one's words and ideas — can limit and add stress to one's romantic life. But I also appreciate, and know in a way that the Mailers of the world cannot, the luxury of anonymity, of a phone that doesn't ring; of being able to write in public places and go on vacation without attracting the attention of strangers. The luxury of being free of expectations that I write about this or that, fiction or philosophy, with footnotes or without. The luxury of no one depending on me for their 15 percent.
        But this is also to say that as an American writer I have failed. “Real writers” are free not only from dull jobs, but from the whole oppressive [and liberating] structure of working life. They make their own hours, wear what they want to wear, have sex when they're in the mood for sex, obey only their muse — and not even her much of the time. To the more artistically inclined members of the vast American working classes (be they employed in hospitals, investment houses, law firms, boutiques, academia), not having to have a job — and still being able to go out for sushi, mud treatments — seems like hitting the jackpot, being one of the elite.
        Was it for this reason that my high-school teacher did not think it important to call my attention to how hard it is to write well? (Or is it for this reason I did not hear what she said on this score?) One might also have asked a 16-year-old, “What is it exactly that you have to write about?” Was I intending to be a writer because I liked the sound of the title, because what I'd heard about the lifestyle sounded appealing, because my father wanted his son to be a writer, because I felt called to tell my compatriots something, because I enjoyed putting words together?

(3)
That day at Columbia Mailer might have raised similar questions in response to Jackie's mercenary question.[6] Alternatively, he might have helped students think about all the various ways writers do in fact support themselves. (See section 6 of this essay for my attempt.) He might have discussed the use of controversy, and of current events, to sell books, or one of Mark Twain's insights: the reading public finds thick books more worthy of serious consideration and of buying than thin ones. He could have reminded us of how many of the greatest writers — Twain, Dickens, Dostoevsky and Balzac, for starters — wrote for money, voluminously, on deadline, with little time to think or revise, driven not a little by creditors or hunger for status and luxuries. We might have been led to conclude in many of these cases — perhaps in Mailer's as well — that part of such writers' success was owing to the fact that they had little time to reflect, little time to entertain their critical faculties. They were forced to give their inspirations free rein. (A significant subset of this group is made up of writers who have more or less limited themselves to recording their bursts of inspiration, leaving the right-brain work — the winnowing and shaping — to a spouse, agent or editor. Cf., some of Maxwell Perkins' more prominent clients.)
        That day at Columbia, though, we did not talk about any of this. What I remember is a sense in the room that Jackie's was an inappropriate question, which indeed is what it was meant to be and why I liked it at the time. There was a reminder that Mailer had been summoned to talk not about the business, but about the craft of writing, the art. I remember, after the conversation had moved on, he told us how some things are hell to write and in other cases it's like a little bird is sitting on your shoulder, dictating. (Would that my bird were not so flighty.)

(4)
Since that day, I have often recalled my friend's question. Not because of its temporary inappropriateness, but because of its appropriateness, because of the important practical issue to which it calls attention and for the deeper issues it touches on. For example —

        Exegi monumentum aere perennius
        Regalique situ pyramidum altius,
        Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
        Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis
        Annorum series et fuga temporum.[7]

Or —

        O fearful meditation! Where, alack,
        Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?
        Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
        Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
        O, none, unless this miracle have might,
        That in black ink my love may still shine bright.[8]

Horace, Shakespeare — it is a grand tradition, writers complaining about time. It is also a bit ironic insofar as time is a major component of the human predicament and were this predicament — with that annoying time limitation first and foremost — not so grave, readers would not be so desirous of ruminating on it or escaping from it with the help of books.
        Let us also note the commonplace that each writer, no matter how many books she may have in her, has but one thing to say. Supposing the truth were that, in fact, the best of us had six times more — half a dozen things to say. How much time is really needed to get these things down on paper? Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a not atypical example, lived 66 years. Ten percent of this span, from 1755 to 1762, was all it took for him to write Héloise, Emile and Le Contrat social, plus the Discours sur l'inégalité — a work of such insight, vigorous expression and influence that a writer might well be satisfied to have written only this.
        As regards the practical issue, I have come to think that young writers pay insufficient attention to the fact that their “choice” of how to earn a living is going to affect not only how much time they have to write and reflect but also the kinds of writing they are going to do, the set of subjects, styles and ideas they are going to be able to explore. Think, for example, of the new genre of poetry that was created as a result of the proliferation of teaching jobs for poets, jobs that tended to offer the space, calm and quiet of rural settings rather than the big-city bumping and honking of different classes and tastes fighting for recognition. Think of the writing styles and subjects that have been promoted by the Internet, blogging, e-books.
        I put the word “choice” in quotes because my sense is that what we're talking about here is a kind of “only choice” or sequence of only choices. For all we may be ace ruminators, and make lists, set priorities and feel we are choosing between viable alternatives, we writers have no more control over the course of our lives than anyone else does. Rather, over time, we learn more and more about what our circumstances and character are allowing. Clearly Norman Mailer is someone who needed celebrity and controversy — at least as much for its psychological rewards as for its financial ones. And Emily Dickinson would have died of starvation before she tried to become a public figure.
        Although this must be the subject for another piece, I would note in passing the role that business considerations and politics play in our “only choosing”. In preparing the present essay I reviewed some of Mailer's political reporting, work which once inspired a whole generation of “new journalists”, myself among them. I must say that in 2007, at 52 years old, I found the work less appealing. It seemed to substitute poetic phrases and extravagant claims for identification of the basic conflicts and power relationships in American society. “Yes, this candidate,” Mailer wrote of John Kennedy, “for all his record, his good, sound, conventional liberal record, has a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz.” Such sentences seemed, on account of their verbosity above all, to be less about truth-telling and more about helping people fantasize and lose touch with what was really happening. (Mailer's claim in “The White Negro” — that the reason white Southerners were against integration was because they were afraid of Negroes' sexual superiority — was at once more to the point and equally distracting, diverting attention from the economic issues that underpin America's racial conflicts.[9]) I sensed, too, that the profusion of stuff (the neon, the highway, the jazz) in Mailer's political journalism dovetailed with the economic terms of the work. Book-length pieces are more profitable than concise articles, and highly commercial magazines (such as Esquire, which published his 14,000 words on the 1960 Democratic and Republican conventions, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”) are traditionally not in the business of political-consciousness-raising but of selling whiskey, cigarettes, stylish clothes and other jazzy things. I was also struck by how the aftershocks of McCarthyism and the catechism of the Cold War may have inspired, if not necessitated, the growth of a new, more entertaining, less analytical journalism.[10]

(5)
To counter-balance our contemporary American view, I want to offer the examples and commentary of two writers whose different only choices about how to earn their livings were part and parcel of their also writing quite different work than Mailer did. One, Emily Dickinson, while another American, is of another time and ethic, and of a different gender; the other, Rousseau, is from another time and culture. I will quote a Dickinson poem and a passage from Rousseau's Confessions that speak to the question of making one's living as a writer. The approaches they champion accord better than Mailer's (or Balzac's), with the values of the family in which I was raised, and thus, not surprisingly, they accord better with the approach I have pursued as a writer. I would stress, however, that this does not make superior Dickinson's or Rousseau's approaches. (For a counter-example, see the brief biography of Theodore Seuss Geisel at the end of this piece.)
        As regards Dickinson, let me begin by insisting that her accomplishment cannot be fully appreciated if one reads only the half-dozen poems regularly printed in textbooks and anthologies. She wrote almost 2,000 poems, and reading and rereading in her collected works I continue to encounter gems and shining moments. My shortest favorite, poem 1155 of The Complete Poems:

        Distance — is not the Realm of Fox
        Nor by Relay of Bird
        Abated — Distance is
        Until thyself, Beloved.

        Living modestly, provincially off support provided by male relatives, Dickinson was able to ignore the literary marketplace, instead writing for the ages, angels and herself, and for a beloved sister-in-law who had little or no capacity to understand Emily's work. And thus, unlike Mailer, Twain, Dickens, Dostoevsky or Balzac, she was in a position to feel and to alert future writers, MFA students included:

        Publication — is the Auction
        Of the Mind of Man —
        Poverty — be justifying
        For so foul a thing

        Possibly — but We — would rather
        From Our Garret go
        White — Unto the White Creator —
        Than invest — Our Snow —

        Thought belong to Him who gave it —
        Then — to Him Who bear
        Its Corporeal illustration — Sell
        The Royal Air —

        In the Parcel — Be the Merchant
        Of the Heavenly Grace —
        But reduce no Human Spirit
        To Disgrace of Price —

        Rousseau offers another model, albeit a model more available to writers in an aristocratic society in which women served as the intermédiares and mécènes, the promoters and patrons of talented and ambitious men. In this context, and as the son of a wayward watchmaker, Rousseau's only choice involved using his talent for charming and pleasing well-to-do and well-connected women. Pleasing them intellectually, artistically and sexually. Of course Jean-Jacques, no more than Norman or Emily, did not care to reflect on how his means of support affected his work. More fun to indulge eloquently in fantasies of autonomy, freedom from social constraint.
        May I be excused for commenting that to read Rousseau in translation is no more to read Rousseau than reading Dickinson or “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” in French would be to read Dickinson or Mailer. Much of Rousseau's ideas may be communicated, but lost is the grace of his best prose and the opportunity it offers to appreciate the particular eloquence of the French language. (“Rien de vigoureux, rien de grand ne peut partir d'une plume toute vénale.” “Il est trop difficile de penser noblement quand on ne pense que pour vivre.”) Lost is the suggestion in Rousseau's work that the content of ideas may be less significant than the pleasure of ideas, of declamation and of writing. I mention this in part wondering if a Mailer fan might not say that this was akin to one of the virtues of Mailer's work — a flow of American language whose music transcends its meaning?
        Nonetheless, here in translation is Rousseau's answer to the question of how to earn enough money to live and still have time to write:

I might have embraced the most lucrative course and, instead of reducing my pen to copying [music], devoted it entirely to writings which I felt capable of continuing. And, given the flight I had taken [leaving Paris to live on a country estate], these writings might have enabled me to live richly, even opulently, if only I had been disposed to mix, even but a little, an author's tricks with my devotion to producing good books. But I felt that writing for bread would soon have stifled my genius and destroyed my talent, which lay more in my heart than my pen and which arose solely from an elevated and proud way of thinking and could only be sustained by it. Nothing vigorous, nothing great can come from an entirely venal pen. Necessity, and avarice perhaps, might have led me to write with greater speed than excellence. If the need to succeed had not gotten me caught up in cabals, it might have made me try to say things that pleased the multitude, rather than what was useful and true. Instead of the distinguished author that I might become, I would have been nothing but a mere scribbler. No, no, I have always felt that the role of author is not and cannot be illustrious or respectable except insofar as it is not a profession. It is too difficult to think nobly when one must think to live. To be able to speak great truths, to dare speak them, one must not be dependent upon success. I released my books to the public certain that I had spoken for the general good, without caring for anything else. If the work was rejected, it was too bad for those who did not want to learn from it. As for myself, I did not need their approval in order to live. If my books did not sell, my métier [as a copyist] would support me; and it was just this that made the books sell.