ON PHILIP ROTH, AND FORGETTING

I'm not sure that, when I was an unpublished writer, I ever really wanted to be given the opportunity to pick the brains of published writers. First of all, I didn't know many published writers. There was the poet Brendan Kennelly, who taught me in Trinity College and came from my mother's village, but it never struck me to ask him anything about publishing, and I was long gone from university by the time it became an issue. Similarly, Dave Hegarty, the gentleman who owned the first gym I ever joined, published a novel while I was there, but I was only about eighteen or nineteen at that stage, and my being a novelist seemed about as likely then as my chances of becoming Mr. Universe.

But even when I began working on my first book, which became Every Dead Thing, I had no urge to seek the advice of those who were already published. I didn't want to take a writing course conducted by a novelist, or corner a writer at a book-signing. As a journalist, I attended a couple of book launches, and interviewed a writer or two, but I never mentioned to any of them that I was working on my own book. It wasn't that I was supremely self-confident, because I wasn't. It simply never crossed my mind that it was something I might bring up (like a hairball). If the writer's life is best suited to those who work alone and don't find solitude a burden, then I was halfway there before I ever set a word down on the page. Writing, like politics or religion, seemed to me to be best left undiscussed in polite conversation.

So it was with some interest that I read the description of a waiter-cum-writer's encounter with the great, but presumably somewhat glass-is-half-emptyish, Philip Roth. (Here's the link, in case you haven't seen it.) Basically, Julian Tepper, the waiter-cum-writer in question, presented Roth, who was minding his own business apart from attempting to order breakfast, with a copy of Tepper's recently published first book. Why Tepper chose to do this, I do not know. Philip Roth wasn't doing him any harm. He just wanted to have breakfast. It takes quite a degree of chutzpah to think that a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, who had recently announced that he didn't read fiction any more, would suddenly recant upon being presented with a first novel called - I kid you not - Balls. In fact, if someone tried to present me with a novel called Balls before - or even after - I'd eaten my breakfast, I might be tempted to express some unhappiness, and suggest there are more appropriate times to hand someone a novel called Balls, although none springs to mind at this moment.

Roth, it seems, told Tepper that Balls was a "great title," although he might have been kidding. It's probably hard to tell with Philip Roth. He then went on to share the following advice with Tepper:

“Yeah, this is great. But I would quit while you’re ahead. Really, it’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.”

Maybe it's just me, but I find it a little sad that Roth has presumably forgotten all of the joy and pleasure that attended the publication of his early work - and, indeed, possibly some of his later work too. After all, this is a man who enjoyed an astonishing second wind with the publication of American Pastoral and the novels that followed, and probably got something out of the first wind that attended the publication of Portnoy's Complaint. Yes, the pleasure that comes with the completion, and subsequent publication, of a book is fleeting. Doubt quickly sets in, and no sooner is a book published than the writer frequently wants to retrieve it from the shelves and set about rewriting it, but by then it's a little too late. We can never "unpublish" our books: they trail behind us, a series of experiments that we almost got right. We try to make each book better than the last. Sometimes we even succeed for a book or two. Inevitably, though, we will encounter a critical shrug, a passing remark from a reader or reviewer that suggests our best work was still our first book, and everything that followed has been downhill since then.

Then again, maybe all Roth ever got from writing was misery and unhappiness, but I doubt it. There are writers who wear the burden of being a writer very heavily, in part because they confuse taking what they do seriously with taking themselves seriously, but also because, if you make something look like hard work, and huff and puff a lot about it, then it will discourage the competition while possibly encouraging your publishers to pay you a bit more, and also make people believe, in passing, that you might be an artist, and that's halfway to being a genius. This pose gave Todd Rundgren one of his best album titles, The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect, and continues to be Standard Operating Procedure for would-be literary lions and lionesses the world over. This is not to say that Roth is not a great novelist: he is, but he'd still be a great novelist even if he could bring himself to be a little more gracious about fiction in general, and a little less Eeyore-ish in his pronouncements to young novelists, even ones who interfere with his digestion by presenting him with novels called Balls.

I like being a writer. Yes, it's often frustrating, and I worry about how the changes in publishing are going to affect what I do, and the possibility that I'm harming my career by experimenting too much, and the likelihood of being damned as a fraud and a blight on literature. I start each new book wondering if this is the one that I won't be able to finish, and if such a failure might mean that I will never be able to finish another book again. I've yet to write a book with which I'm entirely happy, but if I did, what then? Would there be any reason, any impetus, to continue? Failure is what impels us, and the paradox is that the very thing driving us forward is also the thing that slowly chips away at our ability to do what we do. "Try again," wrote Samuel Beckett. "Fail again. Fail better." We fail, and we try again, but are we eventually destined to drain our reserves of strength, and grow weary of the fight? Is that what happened to Roth?

Perhaps all that can be learned from Tepper and his encounter is that, all things considered, it's probably better to give old writers a wide berth.

And maybe younger ones too.

THIS WEEK JOHN READ
Sit Down and Cheer: A History of Sport on TV by Martin Kelner  
The Fallen Angel by Daniel Silva

AND LISTENED TO  
Lux by Brian Eno

THE DOG IS IMMORTAL

I have come to accept that the affection of my readers for me, if it exists at all, is largely bound up with their fondness for my characters.  By this I mean that, if I died, they would be a bit troubled, but if I killed off, say, Charlie Parker, they would be very angry indeed.  I do not take this too personally.  If my readers choose to feel more strongly about a fictional character than they do about me, a living, breathing person with bills to pay and dogs to walk, then so be it.  I'm not saying it isn't hurtful, but I put it up there with my other half's continuing infatuation with Brad Pitt: if Brad Pitt should turn up on our doorstep to claim her then, reluctantly, I shall have to learn to live without my beloved, and there will be no hard feelings.  On the balance of probability, though, I suspect that she is going to have to make do with me for the foreseeable future.

The matter of a reader's affection for a series character was brought home to me by a recent article in The New Yorker.  (Yes, I have a subscription to The New Yorker, and it's the best $120 a year I've ever spent.  As my friend and fellow author Declan Hughes once put it, he feels better for just having it in the house.  I never read everything in it, and there is at least one cartoon in every issue that I fail to understand, but what I do read, and what I do understand, probably makes me a better person, or at least makes me feel like a better person, which is Declan's point.  I think.)  Anyway, in the July 2nd issue there is a lovely article by John McPhee about the editing process, and it should be required reading for every aspiring writer, not least because it illuminates the sometimes grey area between proof-reading and editing, which are two very different things.  Increasingly, in this heady age of self-publishing, the distinction between the two is being willfully blurred, and the result can only be work of inferior quality.  

A sidebar: with two new books about to be published, I'm already steeling myself for the inevitable e-mails, often written in a suitably harrumphing tone, pointing out the typos that have crept into the finished works.  These missives are, in the more ill-tempered cases, accompanied by the same question: doesn't anyone proof-read these books?  The answer, of course, is yes: I go over the manuscript and the typeset pages so often that I start to become depressed; my editors read them; their copy-editors read them; the proof-readers read them.  And you know what? Mistakes will always creep through, because that's the nature of all human endeavor.  The Wrath of Angels is almost 160,000 words long.  Even if one were to find 16 typos in that manuscript - which I hope is not the case - it would still only represent a margin of error of .01 %, which most scientists would accept as pretty good indeed.  Being an author has taught me to be forgiving of such matters.  Yes, it may be annoying to find typos or errors in a book, but the miracle is that there are not more.  Where errors are pointed out - preferably discreetly, which is the sign of good breeding - I'll always try to correct them for the next edition, but the triumphalism of a minority of correspondents is very wearing.  

Sorry, where was I?  Ah, yes, The New Yorker.  So, as a boy John McPhee was a fan of the Silver Chief series, written by one Jack O'Brien.  The series concerned the adventures of a sled dog in the "Great White North", and they were catnip to the young McPhee, which was why he was quite distraught when the author died.  Some years later, he happened to be visiting his Uncle Bob, who had published the Silver Chief novels under the imprint of the John C. Winston company.  He was quite surprised when a man arrived for an appointment with his uncle, and was introduced to McPhee as "Jack O'Brien, the author of 'Silver Chief.'"  The gentleman in question appeared to be in the fullest bloom of health, and when McPhee shook his hand it didn't fall off, as one might have expected of the hand of a man who had been deceased for some time.  When the man left, McPhee remarked to his uncle that he had been under the impression Jack O'Brien was dead.  Uncle Bob replied: "He did die.  He died.  Actually, we've had three or four Jack O'Briens.  Let me tell you something, John.  Authors are a dime a dozen.  The dog is immortal."

So there it is: authors are mortal.  Characters, if the authors are very fortunate, live forever.  

Although I'd like to be the first author to reverse that trend.