BE A DAMNED AUTHOR?

There’s a temptation almost every novelist gives into eventually: making one of their characters be a novelist, too.

From the author’s perspective, it’s the most natural thing in the world. Writing is the profession about which they know most—they may know little about any other. And—a nice bonus—it gives the character, their alter ego, the chance to speculate on all kinds of things, ruminate, ponder, brood, say out loud what the invisible author can’t say explicitly in their own voice.

A double layer gets going; a novelist pulling the strings of a novelist pulling the strings opens up all kinds of metafictional possibilities, calling into question the philosophic assumptions of fiction itself.

Writer characters appear in several guises. The first is in autobiographical novels where the main character is a thinly-disguised stand-in for the author himself. These are often set in the author’s youth, their apprenticeship years, Joyces Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man being a well-known example.

Sometimes novelists give their autobiographical novels a character who is explicitly struggling to become a writer, so the challenges are fought out right there on the page. Jack London’s Martin Eden inspired a whole generation of ardent young writers back in the early 1900’s, and Remembrance of Things Past can be read as an extended meditation on the precarious relationship between a novelist’s work and a novelist’s life.

Another way to do it is have your main character—usually the novel’s first-person narrator—be a writer, then say nothing more about it than that; David Copperfield comes to mind here.

And then there’s the metafictional approach—writer characters speculating about writing on behalf of their authors. Nabokov’s Pale Fire plays around with this, as does Phillip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, wherein he introduces his novelist stand-in Nathan Zuckerman.

So it’s a genre with a long history, novelists making their characters be novelists. Interesting stuff—but, to me, not as interesting as a sub-genre that’s never received much notice: Novelists Making Their Characters Be Novelists Who HATE Being Novelists.

In all the novels I’ve mentioned so far, the assumption is that a writer is a fine thing to be, never mind the challenges. In the sub-genre I’m talking about, the vexations of a writing and publishing cross a line into real torture, and the irony that someone like Roth brings to his descriptions of the writing life tips over into actual bitterness and even disgust.

Let’s start with a genius who had every right to be bitter: Herman Melville.

Melville, having for a short time been a bestselling author thanks to his autobiographical tales of the South Seas, lost his audience when he turned Moby Dick into an extended allegorical search for “the ungraspable phantom of life.” Immediately upon finishing his masterpiece, with no rest after the stupendous labor, he turned to Pierre, and a subject genteel nineteenth-century readers had even less interest in than metaphoric white whales: incest, or something very much like it.

The plot is Romantic in the extreme.A young man named Pierre Glendinning, from an old, proud upstate New York family, becomes engaged to Lucy Tartan, who comes from an even more respectable family than his. Before their marriage can take place, he accidentally meets the beautiful and mysterious Isabel, discovering that she is his illegitimate half-sister. To rescue her reputation, he pretends to marry her, then falls in love for real; Lucy and Isabel follow him to New York, where they live together in a cold apartment in the poor part of town.

Threatened by Lucy’s brother and his own cousin, Pierre kills the cousin, then commits suicide with Isabel in his prison cell. The theme seems to be that it’s possible to be entirely undone by the very ideals that burn brightest in the soul; Pierre becomes “the fool of Truth, the fool of Virtue, the fool of Fate.”

(Multi-layered masterpiece or wretched fiasco—readers have never quite decided which—Pierre is still worth reading, if only for typical Melvillian insights like this: “There is nothing so slipperily alluring as sadness; we become sad in the first place by having nothing stirring to do; we continue in it because we have found a snug sofa at last.”)

The turgid plot churns along at its own ghastly/fascinating pace, at least until page 286, where, with no prior hint, we learn that Pierre is actually a promising young author, having scored a popular success with a sonnet called “The Tropical Summer.” He doesn’t make much from these poems; what earnings they bring in go to buying cigars which he lights with sonnets he can’t get published.

At first, Melville keeps his own feelings in check. Pierre’s writing career, the publishing world of that day, is treated wryly, satirically, and and it’s only when—like Melville himself—that Pierre begins writing deeper, more obscure works that the tone suddenly changes, from half-amused tizzy fit to something perilously close to a meltdown right there on the page.

“This wonderful, disdainful genius—only a life amateur as yet—is now soon to appear in a different guise. He shall now learn, and very bitterly learn, that though the world worship Mediocrity and Common Place, it hath fire and sword for all contemporary Grandeur.”

And then, widening the focus in the very next paragraph, Melville senses a time (our time?) when the serious literature Pierre is attempting will be a thing of the past.

“And though this state of things, united with the very multiplying freshet of new books, seems inevitably to point to a coming time when the mass of humanity, reduced to one level of dotage, authors shall be as scarce as alchemists are today, and the printing press be reckoned a small invention.”

Chapter Twenty-two includes as searing a description of a writer’s working day as can be found in literature, concluding:

“Pierre is young; heaven gave him the divinest, freshest form of a man, put light into his eye and fire into his blood, and brawn into his arm, and a joyous, overflowing, up-bubbling universal life in him everywhere. Now look around in that most miserable room, and at that most miserable of all the pursuits of a man, and say if here be the place and this be the trade that God intended him for. Unutterable, that a man should be thus!”

The most miserable of all the pursuits of a man—this from a novelist whose pursuits included, just a few months previously, writing Moby Dick.

Pierre/Melville’s bitterness is partially redeemed by the courage of their writing effort; in George Gissing’s 1891 autobiographical novel New Grub Street the only thing on offer beside bitterness is drabness, as second-rate novelists, facing poverty try desperately to churn out yet another novel they don’t believe in.

The theme of the book is right there in the title. Grub Street actually existed in eighteenth-century London, where the name became synonymous with “wretched authordom,” with hacks turning out page after page of padded garbage just to keep from starving.

Gissing updates it to nineteenth-century London, but his fictional alter ego, Edwin Reardon, a talent but unsuccessful novelist, faces the same kind of Grub Street fight for survival, and it soon robs him of any joy he’s ever taken in writing well.

“How I envy those clerks who go off to their offices in the morning,” he complains to his wife Amy. (Long-suffering wife, but faced with his inability to earn an income she doesn’t intend to suffer much longer; she’ll soon desert him to marry a novelist who’s much more successful.)

“There’s the day’s work cut out for them; no question of mood and feeling; they just have to work at something, and when the evening comes they have earned their wages, they are free to rest and enjoy themselves. What an insane thing it is to make literature ones only means of support! When the most trivial accident may at any time prove fatal to one’s power of work for weeks or months. No, that is the unpardonable sin! To make a trade of art! I am rightly served for attempting such brutal folly!”

As far as bitterness goes, Reardon is only getting started.

“As for a mediocrity like me—what ludicrous absurdity to fret myself in the hope that half a dozen folks will say I am above the average. Is there any sillier vanity than that? A year after I have published my last book I shall be practically forgotten; ten years later, I shall be absolutely forgotten. What fatuous posing!”

Gissing piles it on; the successful novelists in the book are cynical hacks who schmooze with critics to get their novels recognized; the unsuccessful ones spend long hours in the British Museum trying desperately to come up with plot ideas.

Reardon’s self-loathing continues.

“Think how often one hears of writers making a hopeful beginning, a new reputation, and then—you hear no more. Of course it generally means that the man has gone into a different career, but sometimes, sometimes—

‘What?’ his wife asks.

Reardon points downward.

‘The abyss. Penury and despair and a miserable death.’”

Penury and despair and a miserable death. This is a long way from Portrait of an Artist or David Copperfield.

This odd sub-genre, writers hating writing, has one perfect masterpiece or at least perfect revenge fantasy: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dark, little-known story “The Devil in Manuscript.”

On a bitterly cold New England night, the narrator visits a friend he calls Oberon, “one of those gifted youths who cultivate poetry and belles-lettres.” They sit and talk, a roaring fire on one side, a desk piled with unpublished manuscripts on the other. Oberon is working on a serious novel about witchcraft called The Fiend, but it’s going badly, and it’s been rejected by publisher after publisher.

“Novelist!” exclaims Oberon. “Then indeed the devil has a claw on me! I am gone! I cannot even pray for deliverance! But I will be the last and only victim, for this night I mean to burn this manuscript.”

“But your tales!” his friend says, startled.

“Even so,” says the author despondingly. “You cannot conceive what an effort the composition of those tales has had on me. I am surrounding myself with shadows, which bewilder me by aping the realities of life. They have drawn me aside from the beaten path of the world, and led me into a strange sort of solitude—a solitude in the midst of men—where nobody wishes for what I do, nor thinks nor feels as I do. The tales have done all this. When they are ashes, perhaps I shall be as before they had existence. Moreover, the sacrifice is less than you may suppose, since nobody will publish them.”

“What a voluminous mass the unpublished literature of American must be!” the friend cries.

“A fact!” says Oberon. “Of all the seventeen publishers, only one has even read my tales, and he had the impertinence to criticize them, proposing what he calls vast improvements. He tells me fairly that no American publisher will print an American work—seldom if by a known writer, never if by a new one.”

“The paltry rogues!” exclaims his friend. Then—with a taunt that echoes down the centuries—”Will they live by literature and yet risk nothing for its sake?”

Oberon isn’t done with his rant.

“Would you have me be a damned author? To undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, cold neglect, and faint praise? A hissing and a laughing stock to my own traitorous thoughts! An outlaw from the protection of the grave—one whose very ashes every careless foot might spurn, unhonored in life and remembered scornfully in death! Am I to bear this, when yonder fire will insure me from the whole? No! There go the tales! May my hand wither when it would write another!”

Melville’s Pierre and Gissing’s Reardon limit their bitterness to complaining, but Hawthorne gives Oberon his moment of revenge. As the manuscript burns in the fireplace—the novel the world ignores—sparks fly up the chimney and out into the night, finding a neighbor’s thatch roof, then setting the entire town ablaze.

The two men, with savage exultation, rush out to watch the flames, Oberon vowing:

“I will cry out the loudest in the uproar, and mingle my spirit with the wildest of the confusion, and be a bubble on top of the ferment! My tales! The chimney! The roof! The Fiend has gone forth by night and startled thousands in fear and wonder from their beds! Here I stand—a triumphant author! Huzza! Huzza! My brain has set the town on fire!”

Any contemporary novelist can identify with poor Oberon. And while a writer’s whine can be hard for an ordinary reader to take, what makes this odd sub-genre so memorable is the passion that Melville, Gissing, and Hawthorne pour into it.

In many novels about young people wanting to be writers, we see the torment of their youthful dreams, the idealism that drives them, but it’s only in books like New Grub Street and Pierre where we see what can happen when the dreams, realized, turn to ashes—and so we get self-portraits that are as searingly honest as Rembrandt’s, making us understand how much pain and suffering can go into making a novel, or at least a novel that matters.

No author complaints here, but instead a quick thank-you to the surge of new subscribers the New Year has brought in; several live and work in Scotland, one of my absolute favorite places in the world. Hopefully, 2025 will bring columns on a variety of subjects, ones, as always, dedicated to the notion writing, at its best, is one of the most demanding art forms; I hope there’s room for several surprises as well. Thanks to you all!