The Brazen Author of the Book of Gold
I have written on this topic erenow, but it bears repeating.
A fine reader wrote it with a kind compliment. He was thanking me for his new scarf. He said I had dashed his hopes of being a writer by my undue excess of skill, that his writing was so inferior in comparison, so he had burned his computer, and now had free time to take up knitting.
I felt I had to write back. I know he was making a joke, but there was a serious point behind the joke, a willingness to surrender, which I hope, if I fed, I could also starve.
I know you mean it as a compliment, but my prose appeals, and is only meant to appeal, to a narrow audience.
If you are in that audience, I am very grateful.
But I will tell you my version of your story [about the scarf]. I was a bookish child, friendless, unhappy. In my youth, I read a book by David Lindsay.
If an adult read it, he would say that this book was written in an awkward, tin-eared fashion, with a main character who is a cipher without personality, on an adventure that makes no sense. There is no plot to the book: the hero travels through strange landscapes meeting stiff and highly symbolic figures, committing apparently pointless murders.
The book was not well regarded then or now. It sold less than 200 copies in its first printing. The writer Lindsay, who has been largely forgotten, died young in utter poverty of a disease caused by improper dentistry, that is, something that could have been easily prevented.
The book is A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS and it is one of the most important books in my life.
It shaped my youthful and hence my lifelong idea of what life was for and what reality was about.
It was magical to me, the very wine of the gods.
And yet, to everyone else, even perhaps to the man who wrote it, it is an incomprehensible, opaque, meandering, pointless book. In the eyes of the world, it is a worthless book.
Now, imagine that you are Lindsay and some child who will not be born for 40 years after your death is the only one who will read and understand and treasure your book — the book you think is lousy — is in my position.
Myself, I have more pity for that child, yet unborn, who will be your greatest fan, than I have for Lindsay, had he burned his computer, and decided not to write.
Do you understand? I cannot write the book that one child needs. You can.
And if there is more than one fan you can serve, all the better.
If you wish not to be a writer, then don’t write. If you wish to be a writer, don’t give up, don’t show weakness, and don’t compare yourself to other writers.
Writing is not like a beauty contest, with one winner, it is like a Shakespeare comedy, with five marriages at the end, and each swain swears his bride is his true love, for so she is.
Again, I thank you for the compliment. You do me honor I do not merit. But if you burn your computer, that means you do not understand the point of the four stories whose artistry you so admire.
No one in the Night Land burns his computer. They do not open the door and invite the dark things inside. They resist without hope. You, who have hope should not be less than they, even if you are saying it as a joke.
Who is going to write that terrible and untalented book for that unknown and unborn reader who will praise and remember it with lifelong gratitude if you do not?
Let me add a comment on a related topic. Someone complained that I adore as editors most skilled in their craft both Theodore Beale of Castalia House fame, and the energetic and imaginative Mike Allen of Clockwork Phoenix fame.
Someone pointed out that these men are antithetical politically. Perhaps they also use different brands of saddle soap: I have no idea why their soap preferences or political musings would interest me. Ayn Rand was an atheist and an adultress; and yet her novels are among the best crafted I have ever seen. I know the art of how to hate the writer and love the writing.
It is because I do not think art is human.
I do not believe any man is a genius. I believe some men, from time to time, at the inscrutable will of heaven, are visited by genius.
In ancient Rome, the genius (plural genii) was the tutelary deity of a man, clan, or location (genius loci), the spirit of a family, or the spirit of a city. The genius guided the man or clan or folk, and the poet had a particular strange genius all his own, letting him see visions of Olympus or Tartarus, Arcadia or the Antipodes, and mysteries hidden from common eyes.
There are one or two authors I can name who had only one good book in him, and wrote nothing else, or nothing else worth reading. Their muse came but once.
There are other authors (Milton among them) who were visited nightly by the muse and dictated to him.
For some of us, the voice is clear; and for others, it is dim, and, to be sure, when we write we put what we hear in our own words, so the voice of the writer is mingled oddly with the voice of the muse.
But her voice is there, or the story is merely words without spirit.
For this reason, I care nothing for the personal inborn traits of the author, race or sex or bloodline. I do not care that Leigh Brackett was a lady or Lord Dunsany a lord. I also care very little what the author thinks in his private life when he is speaking for himself. This is why I prefer the juveniles of Robert Heinlein over his seniles. His later books were too much Bob and not enough Bob’s muse.
When the Holy Father speaks ex cathedra, he speaks in the person of Christ and as the official voice of the Magisterium: but when Jorge Bergoglio or Joseph Ratzinger gives his private opinion, his voice is that of a private person.
Likewise, when Robert Heinlein writes about freedom and slavery in CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY, to my ear, that sounds like the voice of the muse of outer space. (Which that is, I cannot say: Urania or Clio or Polyhymnia?) But when he rants about sexual freedom, freedom from reality, in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, I can tell the muse’s voice is silent, and Heinlein is merely speaking for himself.
The poor mystics of the philosophy called materialism, or modernism, or atheism (It ever changes its name, being a slave to fashion) believe in some foolishness by Freud that creative genius comes from an allegedly unconscious part of your consciousnesses.
How this alleged part is wiser than the conscious part, even though it itself is not conscious, is one of the mysteries of the faith for the allegedly skeptical cult of modernism.
Even if their faith were true, it would be antisocial and uncivilized, on the grounds that any man who believes in the muses can compliment, purchase, and even adore the writings of an author whose personal opinions and personal life he abhors.
But for the narrow skeptic, there is nothing aside from the writer: a poor mortal using a lump of grey tissue shaped like a cauliflower by some unwitting unconscious process makes all the beauty of literature and poetry.
And if the writer disagrees with you on some matter of paramount political significance to you, let us say bimetallism or the Caledonian War, or whatever trivial trash you have in the empty pedestal where love of God is supposed to stand, then, as a poor and narrow believer in nothing, you must answer in a poor and narrow way, and foreswear the works you love, and hate the writer who offends you, because there is nothing else.
The world is small and gray for them, the nothing people, and the walls are closing in, and so they must turn on each other like rats in a cage.
Large-heartedness is for souls who know themselves to be immortal, for whom the cage of life is open, and who see the lamp by the open door, and who live in a larger world than what nothing people preach.
Even if it turns out to be false, it is more civilized to believe in muses, for neither the author gets a swollen head, nor the reader narrow tastes.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
