I’m meeting friends for dinner tomorrow after the book fair and they were ready to make reservations for four until I told them Hania wasn’t coming. It would require her spending the entire day at the fair, and she finds gatherings of writers often pretentious.
I understand her. Just walking on a stage, or sitting at a dais, writers take on an air of superiority, like sages ready to enlighten the unwashed. It is the only time I feel like an imposter, looking down from my perch as the audience gathers. I know that many of them have higher IQs than I do, and often more knowledge. (Though the ones with really high IQs are probably off listening to somebody else.)
Writers by nature are riddled with self-doubt, but for many of them self-doubt vanishes when they become “authors.” Especially authors feted at a book fair and seated at a dais. When I’m in the act of writing, with all the self-doubt, I don’t question what I’m doing; I’ve been doing it so long that I now believe that it’s something (about the only thing) that I know how to do. But presenting what I’ve written, talking about it to an audience, is very different. I like what Kafka said: Before the work, the writer doesn’t exist. After the work, the writer is no longer there.
I was a fan of Frasier because of the smart writing and the deft depiction of the relationship between a working-class father and his more sophisticated offspring – a situation many people can relate to but rarely see presented in popular media. Also, it was the only TV show I ever saw that quoted Peter De Vries. Frasier and Miles are eating in a museum cafeteria and one asks the other: “Who was it who said ‘The food in museums is usually on a par with the murals in restaurants’?”
So of course last night I watched the first two episodes of the new Frasier. The first was silly and slapsticky, but the second seemed to get back to the old show’s strengths, this time with a sophisticated father and his Everyman son, who dropped out of Harvard and became a fireman. Per the old formula, they end up living together and there are predictable disagreements over home decoration. The son wants to display his glass cube containing dirt from Fenway Park. The father says it clashes with the piano. Relenting in the end, Frasier places it above the keyboard. “Fenway,” he says, “meet Steinway.”
As long as there are lines like that, I’ll keep watching.
Stephen King, in his book On Writing, says that he listens to music while writing, often hard rock. This surprised me. I can’t hear any music while I’m writing as it interferes with the rhythm – the music if you will – of my sentences.
Then recently I listened (not while writing) to an interview with Pico Iyer, who talked about reading his new book for an audio book. It was the first time he had done it, he said, and he was happy to do it because the exercise allowed him to give his sentences the rhythm they had had in his head when he wrote them. He pointed out that the rhythm the author has in his brain while writing his sentences is not the same as that which readers have when reading them. He noted that when others recorded his books, they gave the prose a rhythm that wasn’t the one that he had had in mind. And I realized that all my efforts to give my sentences a perfect rhythm – my search for a word containing two syllables instead of one, or for one containing three syllables instead of two – are probably all in vain. I may as well put on some music.
A recent starred review in Publishers’ Weekly of a work of fiction quoted two lines from the book: The first, a racist comment from a peripheral character and the second, another character’s statement about the prevalence of racial hatred. And I wondered: Do writers win points these days simply by citing the currently approved obsessions? Wouldn’t readers be more impressed by the sharing of some telling observation from the author, a brilliant apercu perhaps, or an unusual or interesting use of language?
I gave a talk at the book event on Sunday, which I had titled "The Importance, and Frequent Frustration, of Being Different." Long ago I concluded that there are two ways to stand out as a writer: by being brilliant or by being different. Since the first was unavailable to me, I chose the second. It always surprises me that more people don't.
I was at an event Sunday that featured authors sitting at tables filled with their books. One woman approached my table and said aloud "The joys of travel."
"Yes," I said hopefully. "There are seven."
"I'm sure there are," she said a bit dreamily, and then walked away.
I sat there thinking: Really? Why are you sure? Why couldn't there be 10, or 5?
Later, another woman approached, and opened the book.
"Oh," she said in a voice of profound disappointment,"I thought there'd be pictures."