My Life of Words
I do not remember the moment of clarity when I first knew, absolutely, that I wanted to be a writer. My mother, a sharp-witted Englishwoman with high standards who was raising me, her English-born child, in California during the 1950s, frequently showed annoyance at the rough, primitive variation of the English language that was spoken by most Americans, and she took pride in teaching me to speak her native tongue properly. I displayed a nimble facility with words from the beginning of my childhood (which entertained the grownups who knew me), and I was prone to occupying myself by making up fanciful stories in my head. I also enjoyed drawing and painting, which hinted at me becoming an artist, and I briefly toyed with being a musician (meaning that I clumsily strove to approximate the rock 'n' roll of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, and The Who by inexpertly strumming three or four elementary chords on a cheap guitar), but the lure of writing soon took precedence.
I found that whenever I was moved by life, whenever I was roused or daunted, experiencing either peaks of happiness or valleys of sadness, I was driven to put my thoughts and my feelings into words. It was, for me, the same as looking at my reflection in a mirror. Writing was a tool that I could use to look closely at myself, to reliably confirm, and to thoroughly examine, the essence of my own distinct being. It also offered the tempting potential of being able to convey that essence (which was, admittedly, of meager proportions) to other people, allowing me to make myself known to them on my own terms, without recourse to compromise, falseness, or servility.
During my teen years, the ambition of being a writer stealthily began to form itself, taking unalterable hold of my mentality. The act of writing, the act of using written words to put what I was thinking and what I was feeling into a definitive shape, held a singular appeal for me. It seemed utterly presumptuous that I should want to be a writer, but it also seemed the most fitting thing for me to do with my life. What else could I be? I knew that I loved to work with words, finding endless magic in the task of diligently arranging nouns, verbs, and adjectives into readable patterns of direct expression. The study of grammar was akin to a sacred obligation for me, and I never tired of plumbing its diverse conventions. I also knew that I was strongly inclined toward solitude (having already picked up, among my family and friends, a reputation as a teenage hermit in the making), and that I had the ability to sustain a careful undertaking for an extended period, qualities that, I was given to suppose, would be decidedly advantageous for someone who aspired to be a writer.
• • •
As is common with most people who have dreams of being a writer, I was an eager bookworm. Even as a child, I read everything that came within my reach, being especially fond of fables, fairy tales, and comic books. I derived lasting delight from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie, Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne, and Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers. From the age of twelve onward, I spent much of my time reading one book after another, mostly fiction and poetry. In addition, I was a keen reader of daily newspapers and weekly magazines, and I enjoyed looking through dictionaries and encyclopedias, happily roaming, for hours at a time, through their definitions and descriptions.
I continued to devour book after book as I grew, discovering one writer after another. I enjoyed the horror tales of Edgar Allan Poe ("The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Tell-Tale Heart"), the science fiction of H. G. Wells (The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon), and the detective stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (featuring his immortal characters, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, of 221B Baker Street, renowned partners in gentlemanly detection). I read nearly every book by Charles Dickens, having a special fondness for The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations, and I was agreeably excited by Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped.
Other books that cast a spell upon me were Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Washington Square and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Peter Ibbetson and Trilby by George du Maurier, Dracula by Bram Stoker, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton, The Crock of Gold by James Stephens, The Moon and Sixpence and The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, The Mouse That Roared by Leonard Wibberley, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote. I was also drawn to books by authors who had a light, playful touch, particularly Stephen Leacock, P. G. Wodehouse, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker.
I became interested in the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare after seeing a production of Hamlet on television when I was seventeen. I was enthralled by the lively elements of truth that Shakespeare depicted, and enchanted by the graceful beauty of his words. Every strength and every weakness of humanity could be seen in his characters. When I heard a soliloquy from one of Shakespeare's plays, or read one of his sonnets, it provided me with a glorious insight as to what could be accomplished through the masterly use of the English language. Aside from the works of Shakespeare, other plays that impressed me were Major Barbara and Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, Night Must Fall and The Corn Is Green by Emlyn Williams, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, The Winslow Boy by Terrence Rattigan, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, The Quare Fellow by Brendan Behan, A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt, and A Thousand Clowns by Herb Gardner.
I first encountered the poems of Dylan Thomas in a secondhand anthology of English literature that my mother had purchased for me at a rummage sale, and quickly felt an unusually fervent connection to them. I was stunned by the power and the daring of their imagery. I studied his poems for hours at a time, steeping myself in the dense texture of his style. Later I delved into the poetry of John Donne, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, A. E. Housman, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, and Allen Ginsberg, but I always came back to Dylan Thomas. Taken as a whole, his striking, vigorous poems constituted an unforgettable world in themselves, a world that has never ceased to seize my curiosity and elevate my spirit.
• • •
In my early twenties I chose writing as my vocation, without comprehending the overall effect that such a choice would have on my life. I truly believed that I was born to be a wordsmith. My dedication was deep and complete, but I had no illusions. I understood that having a fundamental skill in relation to the utility of words, as I apparently did, would not necessarily enable me to succeed as a writer, and could not be taken as being equivalent to possessing an undoubted talent. My feeble store of confidence was further undermined, harshly and repeatedly, by the ruthless, unshakable curse of my ingrained perfectionism, which made it painfully hard for me to overcome the glaring defects of my first drafts. Most of my early attempts at writing were hastily crumpled (or in the worst instances, angrily torn into small pieces) and thrown into a wastebasket, coming to naught after I had judged them to be fatally inferior.
At times I wondered if I would ever be able to write anything that did not instantly plunge me into a foul mood of bitter displeasure, but even when I was not satisfied by what I had written, I never abandoned the process of composition. It was my conviction that writing something was always better than writing nothing: fixing a misbegotten story or polishing an awkward essay was better than staring at a blank sheet of paper. Sometimes it was slow and tedious, an insuperable ordeal that frustrated me and strained my nerves to the utmost, defying my will to persevere, but at other times, the words tumbled forth impatiently, arriving in dizzy rush, pouring out of me faster than I could write them. I was happiest when I became profoundly engrossed in what I was writing, losing myself in a revelatory burst of inspiration. In those moments, my desire to write became even deeper, and I felt that I was doing what I was meant to do.
I had no intention of going after fame for its own sake (not that I ever had the audacity to perceive myself as being in the running for any kind of fame), and I was aware that writing, as a mode of living, rarely furnished a person with day-to-day stability. I soon discerned that, as a general rule, the goal of being a writer and the goal of being a well-off member of the community were in adamant opposition to each other. I could see how things would be if I kept writing, but I was not thinking of money or security. I was thinking only of how much I wanted to write. I constantly thought of what it would mean to me if something that I had written achieved publication. I imagined myself being in a bookstore or a library, scanning the shelves and finding a book that I had written. I could not conceive of a greater thrill than seeing my own book on a shelf.
My own approach to the practice of writing was probably somewhat immoderate, being intense and single-minded (perhaps even extreme and unreasonable), causing me to exclude all other considerations from my outlook, but I felt certain that it had to be so. I regularly elected to spend countless hours alone, shutting myself away from the usual distractions of everyday life, wrestling with words until my brain had worn itself out. I wanted to live as a writer to the fullest extent, without reservations or restraints. I did not want to be someone who merely went through the motions, someone who merely talked, or merely thought, about wanting to write. I vowed that if I failed as a writer, it would not result from a lack of application on my part. I was inflexible, and would not permit myself to be foiled, diverted, thwarted, or defeated.
The first manuscripts that I submitted to publishers, putting them into manila envelopes and sending them eastward from California to distant addresses in New York City when I was in my twenties, were stories for children, with line drawings that I had done myself added to the text. They were all rejected, which disappointed me, but at that stage of my young ambition, even receiving a rejection slip made me feel that I had accomplished something. I treasured those responses in which an editor offered helpful comments and asked me to submit other examples of my work, prompting me to believe (unduly and erroneously, in hindsight) that I was on the right track and getting a bit closer to being an actual writer.
I could have enhanced the likelihood of my work being accepted by a publisher, and also raised my standing as a person, by attending a university and earning a degree in English, with the dutiful aim of becoming a teacher, which was the safe, compliant route for someone with "literate" interests. I hated being in school, however, preferring to be self-educated, and I was quite determined to tread my own path at my own pace, even if doing so presented more of a challenge. In my view, the only authentic way to write was by unswervingly pledging oneself to the work at hand, avoiding all hindrances, excuses, and delays: in short, to sit down and set about writing. I wanted to be an active writer, a writer who wrote for an open readership, not a passive intellectual who dwelt in a passive realm and wrote only for other passive intellectuals.
As the years passed and I gathered more rejection slips, I began to falter. I feared that I was not getting anywhere, and worse, I feared that I would never get anywhere. I had fallen behind my peers, most of whom owned houses and cars, were married, and had children, while I was single, childless, and evidently heading for a careworn future of abject destitution. I was haunted by a queasy burden of foreboding, which in turn gave rise to a relentless flow of distressing questions. What value could be attached to my writing, if everything that I submitted was rejected, and never seen by the reading public? Who was I to have ever presumed that I could be a writer? Was I wasting my time, and therefore wasting my life? Had I foolishly committed myself to chasing an unsupportable fantasy that had no chance of ever coming true? Was I becoming wearily trapped in a fruitless predicament for which there might be no beneficial solution? Was I going to end up in a pitiable state, branded as a total loser, with everyone looking down on me?
• • •
Entering my late thirties, my inability to get any of my writing published finally caused me to lose incentive, and for two years I wrote much less than I had before. During most of that dormant period, I was working full time (not merely as a temp, as I had been doing), Monday through Friday, as a file clerk at a credit reporting agency. When that situation ended with a sudden layoff, I began to work in a bookstore, and I also returned to action on my typewriter, declaring within myself that I needed to write, to the same degree that I needed to eat, to sleep, and to breathe. I privately affirmed that however difficult, or hopeless, it might prove for an unknown writer to gain a foothold, my lifelong desire to write could not be denied, could not be suppressed, and could not be forsaken. I had to keep writing, even if the odds were clearly stacked against me. No one else would care if I gave up, but I would care, and I would never forgive myself for being a quitter.
In my late forties I departed from California, moving north to Oregon in 2001 with the woman who had become the love of my life, and, in 2002, I got married after several decades of steadfast bachelorhood. Although becoming a husband did represent a major change for me, it did not bring any change in my ambition. Once we got ourselves settled in Oregon, my time was, again, divided between being a part-time worker in a bookstore and being a struggling writer (or, to put it less gently, being an unpaid writer whose work is perpetually unpublished). Regardless of what happened around me from day to day, I sought to stay as involved as I could with my writing. I wanted, above all, to keep faith with the honesty of my earliest motives.
Because I was getting older, my writing had to vie with new, trendy writing from people who were much younger than me. Most of the editors to whom I was now submitting my work were half my age. In the 21st century, when any person who is guilty of being more than forty (or even more than thirty) is in danger of being casually dismissed by those who are young, impetuous, and at the forefront of all up-and-coming culture, I projected the undisguised perspective of one who had attained maturity in the 20th century, a perspective that inevitably marked me as an elder figure in the eyes of anyone whose sensibilities were unassailably fresher than mine. Reaching my middle sixties, bereft of youthful ambition but still writing for my own purposes, I could see, unmistakably, that I was not advancing. The ship of opportunity had sailed without me.
When I started out, more than four decades ago, I wrote with a pencil and paper. Since then I have used a collection of devices: a manual typewriter, an electric typewriter, a word processor, a computer, a tablet, and currently, a smartphone. Many examples of my writing (both fiction and nonfiction, ranging from deliberately silly to unsparingly serious) are available on the Internet, where they sit, forlorn and unseen, quietly hidden amid all the other "content" that is profusely spread across the crowded topography of the digital wilderness. My ardent devotion to the goal of being a writer has, over the years, forced me to endure many slights and a few hardships, with my craving for plenty of free time in which to write ensuring that my income remained at the lowest end of the wage scale. (I believe that time is second only to talent as a precious necessity for the creation of good writing.)
I know, all too well, that when measured against the big picture of human tribilation, none of what I have described here matters (or, indeed, should matter) to anyone apart from me. Most people carry abiding troubles that are known only to themselves, so who am I to complain about my lot? Each of us (struggling writers included) is required to contend, as best as we can, with the inescapable bounds of our own fate (chosen or otherwise), and though it may not appear to be worthwhile for a person to go on with a pursuit as demanding as writing, for the duration of a lifetime, without ever being formally acknowledged and with no credible prospect of ever receiving a due amount of recompense, that is what I have done. Even today, as I am increasingly hampered by the mental decline that comes with being old, my restless mind is pushing me to write. In explanation of myself, I can only say that I did what I was compelled to do, what I was called to do, and what I had to do: I willingly embraced a life of words.
In spite of the discouraging outcome, I do know that I tried. To know that I had not tried at all would be far more unpalatable. My years of earnest toil notwithstanding, it is more than likely that my destiny as a writer has been subject, all along, to a host of conditions beyond my control, combined with my own guileless mistakes and an unremitting paucity of luck. Whether it has been entirely wise for me to keep at it for such a long time is, in itself, a fairly straightforward question, but is also a question that, I find, stubbornly resists being answered in a straightforward manner. I suspect that I kept writing mainly because I knew that no other activity would have suited me as much as writing did. In any case, entirely wise or not, I did keep at it.