I get it. I got it then and I get it now. In fact, it's the same discussion I get into with my wife from time to time. It's a disagreement worth looking at more closely.
With regard to the editor, I was on his girlfriend's side. I considered him a success. He had done terrific things in his career. His resume was impressive. At the same time, I knew where he was coming from: he had failed in some regard on his own terms. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he was referring to his lost visibility, compared to his youth. I understood this, too.,
Both the editor and I had had early success. The disadvantage to this is that one gets used to a certain place in the literary universe. A lot of nonsense comes with success, and one even gets used to this, too. For example, some 25 or 30 years ago my phone rang and it was a reporter wanting to know what my favorite ten films were. They were doing a feature on the favorite films of "famous people." I was on the list. (Today, I can't imagine a reporter calling me to ask my opinion on anything. What I've learned is, this is a blessing.)
In this star-oriented, youth-oriented culture, early success can be very misleading. I think it conditioned both the editor and I into unrealistic expectations for the rest of our careers. In my case, the death warrant was formal: a theater season dedicated to a retrospective of my work. At the time, I thought this was a great honor. What I didn't know was that it marked The End of my run here at home. It was over ten years before anyone here did a play of mine again. And this despite the fact that in the larger world at large, my new work was winning international awards. The retrospective was my funeral here. Fascinating!
When I tell my wife I feel like a failure, I say so in a specific context. I no longer have a sense of having an audience. I feel invisible. So I feel like a failure in a social sense but not in a personal sense. My writing has changed over the years, I realize, and perhaps my earlier work will outlive later work. As Albee says, a writer considers the current work his best, otherwise why write? But earlier my work had a reckless abandon that I don't often capture in later years. Indeed, one of the joys of the current novel I'm working on is its unusual form, the "reckless abandon" suggested by the way I'm telling the story. Not all stories improve with this approach, but this one does.
But I write in a vacuum. I write for my archive, not for an audience. I actually have a small audience, still, or at least get email from fans now and again, so it's not complete invisibility I experience. I am comparing this, of course, to my extraordinary, if often silly, visibility a quarter century ago when almost anything I did was news. I bought into all the bullshit of the star-driven culture. If I'd missed it, today I'd still be longing for it, I'd be wondering what I'd missed. Now I know most of it is bullshit.
But there's another kind of success that's important to me: the respect of my peers. I have that, by and large, the downside being that many of my colleagues are gone and more are passing away all the time. If I get occassional "good press" even today, it's only because the editors have been in town as long as I have. It's a younger generation of writers making the local waves today, and few of them have the slightest idea who I am or what my work is about. This is an old story, and it helps me understand the body language of some of my older writer friends and teachers when I was younger (and making waves) myself. A big circle. An oft-repeated tale.
When I had early success, I assumed greater success would follow -- public success. It didn't, at least not locally, even though the work was better. Interesting. Today I hope to capture, when appropriate, some of the reckless abandon of my youth. I hope to write something that will interest someone a long ways down the road.
And I've already had the best success, the best experience, I can have. The perfect image is a young writer in a basement taking a dusty journal off a library shelf and finding my essay, being inspired by it, and later writing a book in homage to it. Passing the baton. That's what it's really about. Finding the right reader now and again. The guy who yells as the lights come down on a play of mine, "This play has balls!" No one has ever given my dramatic work a greater compliment. Or the poet who told me my short story The Idaho Jacket was as good as any fiction ever written for capturing the soul of the Pacific Northwest. Wow. I don't agree but I'll take it.
We can't all be rich and famous, but a lot more of us can be successful, on our own terms, than we're given credit for.
But it cuts both ways. I'm reminded of a poem by my brother, Bill Deemer:
Oblivion, greatest of gods,
even Death is your servant.
My scraps of paper all for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment