“I have no idea whatsoever of the reason so many people have taken to reading my books. Years ago the books, the selfsame books, were there: the people were there. But the two sides did not come together until some quite unexplained catalyst came into play. As for “fame,” I quite like what I have of it, though at the same time it makes me feel uneasy, vaguely fraudulent; and then its consequences have a way of shattering old frugal values, making them artificial. I do not think it touches me much, or affects my self-esteem. When I sit down at this desk I am still as bashful before the virgin page as I was sixty years ago—perhaps more so, for in the interval I have acquired some notion of what very good writing can be.”
“The writers of fan letters: they fall into four main classes. One, those who say, I love your books and I wish to thank you. Two, poor lonely souls who just want to write to someone. Three, those whose ancestors went to sea and who would like information about their careers. And four, those who point out my errors, sometimes real (I am a left-handed man and when I am writing I easily confuse right and left, east and west; this does not happen aboard, however) but more often, I am glad to say, imaginary. All four classes have grown so numerous these last years that I have had to beg my publishers to sieve them, because I am a slow, indifferent letter-writer and even half a dozen eat all the cream of my morning work, the best time by far. Yet they are sometimes extraordinarily encouraging: I think primarily of sick people who have found some relief in my books, but also of that splendid admiral who, dating his letter from the North Atlantic, told me that after a strenuous day of exercising his submarines he would submerge, sinking to the calmness of deep water, and there, in the ocean’s bosom unespied, he would turn to my naval tales: or of that other gentleman whose thank you took the form of a wholly gratuitous offer of his one-hundred-and-fifty-four-foot yacht with a numerous crew (including an excellent chef) and room for ourselves and six of our friends, to cruise for a fortnight in the Mediterranean or the Caribbean this coming spring or summer, himself making no appearance whatever. And if you do not call that handsome you must be very, very hard to please.”
“INTERVIEWER How about the material about the sea. Have you ever had that wrong?
O’BRIAN No.
INTERVIEWER Well, that’s remarkable, isn’t it?
O’BRIAN Fairly remarkable, but I have observed a great deal and read an enormous amount.
INTERVIEWER You have total recall? O’BRIAN Absolutely not. I’m always forgetting where I’ve put keys to various padlocks.
”
INTERVIEWER Do readers ever find errors?
O’BRIAN A Cambridge don who interviewed me for the Times diffidently suggested in later conversation that I might be mistaken in having Sir Joseph Blaine attending a performance of Figaro at Covent Garden, for said he, there was no Mozart opera to be heard in London until (I think) 1832.
INTERVIEWER There’s nothing you can do about this?
O’BRIAN Wriggle.
(Source: theparisreview.org)
“When words are flowing faster than one’s pen can catch them, writing is a strong though wearing delight, but these splendid bursts are rare and they are paid for by many, many days of only a thousand words or so, and long periods of silent reflection. And for me the process works best with no interruption, no breaks in the steady application, no letters to be answered, very little social life, no holidays; it is therefore a form of happy imprisonment to which no man would submit without at least the hope of publication and its rewards, often dimly seen, often illusory.”
INTERVIEWER [Plimpton] How do you name your characters? I note that a Plimpton turns up—a seaman flogged for drunkenness.
O’BRIAN Names just float up, often with some remote suitability.
(Source: theparisreview.org)
“A freewheeling mind can conceive a virtually infinite number of sequences, but just how that mind picks out and stores those that may perhaps be used later to deal with a given tension, a given situation, is far beyond my understanding. Yet there is a certain analogy with conversation. When one is with friends, talking hard, maintaining a point against severe and well-informed opposition, one draws on resources scarcely to be imagined at ordinary times; and when they are exhausted—all hope gone—fresh reserves come to cheer one’s heart, apt quotations forgotten these forty years and more, fine strokes of scurrility. And after all a book can be represented as a conversation with one’s demon.”
“[O’Brian’s] work accomplishes nobly the three grand purposes of art: to entertain, to edify, and to awe.”
Earlier, in the wicious pride of my youth, I sometimes threw myself into postures, imitating writers I admired and producing a certain amount of Proust and water (the recipe for the Avignon lark pâté comes to mind: one lark, one horse) to Joyce and very…
Why I Moved My Blog From Wired
The best place I ever worked — a room in Leipzig.
Apologia: This is a bit inside-baseball, but as…
Among the evidence offered in a forthcoming book:
According to his biographer, W.A. Swanberg, the idea of a school of journalism first dawned on Pulitzer in 1892, while he was confined to a dark room, suffering from asthma, insomnia, exhaustion, diabetes, manic-depression and failing eyesight. By the time he actually composed his thoughts for the North American Review, his bed chart included rheumatism, dyspepsia, catarrh and a bad case of shame for the Spanish atrocities in Cuba deliberately invented by his reporters to goose the circulation of his newspapers. His wife, a few of his colleagues and the trustees of Harvard and Columbia, who initially declined the $2 million sack dangled before them, suspected that he was not quite in his right mind. A New York newspaper editor named Horace White suggested that one might as well set up a graduate school in swimming. It took Pulitzer more than a decade to persuade Columbia to accept his money. Even then, the critics’ main question was never really answered: What would they teach at the Columbia Journalism School? A few weeks ago I went to find out.
In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm’s meta-biography of Sylvia Plath, Malcolm at one point describes reading some letters that Ted Hughes, who was married to Plath when she killed herself in 1962, wrote in the 1980s to Anne Stevenson, who was then writing a biography of Sylvia Plath. Stevenson Malcolm read the letters during a visit Malcolm paid to Stevenson in England. Earlier, Stevenson had mentioned to Malcolm, as a way of explaining what it was like to be around Hughes, that “One thing you must understand about Ted is that he was and still is an electrically attractive man.”
The letters from Hughes immediately drew me, as if they were the electrically attractive man himself. As I looked at the pages of dense, single-paced typing, punctuated by x-ings-out and penned-in corrections, I had a nostalgic feeling. The clotted, irregular, unrepentantly messy pages brought back the letters we used to write one another in the 1950s and ’60s on our manual Olivettis and Smith Coronas, so different from the marmoreally cool and smooth letters young people write one another today on their Macintoshes and IBMs. Reading the letter giving Hughes’s response to the chapters Anne had sent him of her short biography, I felt my identification with its typing swell into a feeling of intense sympathy and affection for the writer. Other letters of Hughes’s that have come my way have had the same effect, and I gather that I am not alone in this reaction; other people have spoken to me with awe of Hughes’s letters. Someday, when they are published, critics will wrestle with the question of what gives them their peculiar power, why they are so deeply, mysteriously moving.
In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm’s meta-biography of Sylvia Plath, Malcolm structures the book around visits, mostly in and about London, with other writers who have written about Plath and encountered the hazards, both obvious and submerged, that await anyone writing about people live or recently alive. For the end of the book she saves a visit to one of the oddest Plath memoirists: Trevor Thomas, a man of many hats who happened to live in the flat below Plath’s in the last couple of months before she killed herself, and who in 1986 had been coaxed by the Independent to retail his memories of her. He was 79 then and a few years older when Malcolm visited him.
Thomas and a friend, Robbie, pick her up at the tube stop in London, pick up a pizza and some olives for dinner, and drive back to Thomas’s flat. The entire visit is searing, as Malcolm, a writer of incomparable intelligence, fierceness, and compassion, tries to give order to Thomas’s dense, cluttered existence in a house that is much the same way. Toward the end of this passage, which is just short of the end of the book — this is both a biography of biography as well as of Plath, so she’s trying to tie up one just before the other — Malcolm offers this extraordinary passage about the challenge facing any writer. It’s vintage Malcolm and an extraordinary view of the writer’s challenge:
We arrived at our destination: a small house on a silent street of narrow, rather bleak and pinched two-story brick row houses, the most common form of English domestic architecture.. But I was not prepared for what I saw what I entered to the house: a depository of bizarre clutter and disorder. We entered a narrow passageway, made almost impassable by sagging cardboard cartons stacked to the ceiling, which led to a small, square, dimly lit, windowless room. There was a round white plastic table in the center, surrounded by ruined chairs of various kinds, the largest of which faced a television set. Along the walls and on the floor and on every surface hundreds, perhaps thousands, of objects were piled, as if the place were a secondhand shop into which the contentns of ten other secondhand shops had been hurriedly crammed, and over everything there was a film of dust: not ordinary transient dust but dust that itself was overlaid with dust—dust that through the years had acquired a kind of objecthood, a sort of immanence. Through an archway near the entrance one could see into a dark bedroom with an unmade bed, on which rumpled bedding and vague piles of clothes lay, surrounded by shadowy stacks of more objects. One looked with relief to the daylit kitchen open off the living room. But one’s relief was short-lived. In its way, the kitchen was the most disturbing room of all. Here, too, every surface swarmed with objects—hundreds of utensils, appliances, gadgets, bottles of condiments, boxes, baskets, dishes, jars jostling one another—so that all the functions of the room had been canceled; the place was useless for the preparation of food and cleaning up afterward. There was nowhere to put anything down to work, or even to cook: the gas range was out of commission and had become another surface for objects to proliferate on.
After describing the preparation and presentation of the meal (a painful thing to watch; “But there’s no room,” Robbies cries) Malcolm gets to her biographer’s dilemma.
Later, as I thought about Thomas’s house (which I often did; one does not easily forget such a place), it appeared to me as a kind of monstrous allegory of truth. This is the way things are, the place says. This is unmediated actuality, in all its multiplicity, randomness, inconsistency, redundancy, authenticity. Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas’s house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless—as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own vastly overfilled mind. The problem is to clear out most of what is in it, to fill huge plastic garbage bags with a confused jumble of things that have accreted there over the days, months, years of being alive and taking things in through the eyes and ears and heart. The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that the reader will want to linger a while among them, rather than to flee, as I had wanted to flee from Thomas’s house. But this task of housecleaning (of narrating) is not merely arduous; it is dangerous. There is the danger of throwing the wrong things out and keeping the wrong things in; there is the danger of throwing too much out and being left too bare a house; there is the danger of throwing everything out. Once one starts throwing out, it may become hard to stop. It may be better not start. It may be better to hang onto everything, like Trevor Thomas, lest one be left with nothing. The fear that I felt in Thomas’s house is a cousin of the fear felt by the writer who cannot risk beginning to write.
Malcolm’s descriptions of the houses in this book are enough themselves to justify reading it. The whole book is like this — a delicious, riveting engagement of both senses and intellect. I don’t think I know a writer more simultaneously merciless and generous.
Until the digital age, content was scarce. It wasn’t scarce because people didn’t create it; it was scarce because it required an investment to distribute it. That’s no longer true. Anybody with an Internet connection can make anything they write (or snap or video or sing) available to anybody else with an Internet connection. For just about free. That’s just one reason — among many — why the amount of content choices available to everybody has mushroomed in the past 15 years.
When the supply of something goes up faster than demand, the price of the something drops. Or, put another way, money flows to scarcity. And content is anything but scarce. That, in a nutshell, is the inexorable problem publishers face. And every day it gets worse. More backlist and out of print and public domain and orphan books get digitized and made available. More bloggers blog. More commercial operations put content online to satisfy their own stakeholders. More videos are uploaded to YouTube and more documents are uploaded to Scribd. All of it is processed and made discoverable by Google and other search engines. And the cumulative effect of all this content being created as something other than new publications for sale is cutting into the market for content that is being created with the expectation of sale.
I understand the basic argument that Mike Shatzkin makes here (and others often elsewhere), but I have one fundamental doubt (hope?) about it:
Yes, there’s plenty of supply out there. But is the supply of really good stuff actually much much larger? Certainly not in the proportion that supply in general is.
Let’s assume for a minute that No, the supply of really good writing has not expanded immensely. (An arguable point, I know, but go with it for a moment.) If that’s the case, is there still a way that the best writing can be charged for profitably, whatever the medium — or will the robust supply of not-quite-as-good writing (or far-from-as-good writing) provide enough value for its low cost that no one will chip in extra for high value? And if there are readers willing to pay for good stuff (I certainly am), is there a business/publishing model that can, as it were, indulge them?
That’s the discussion that gets left out when people look at supply as monolithic. Think food. There’s LOTS of food available in the U.S., much of it very cheap compared to historical norms, because supply is great. But people still pay for especially good meals and even pretty good meals. Can we expect no equivalent regarding books and articles?
