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The Row Boat

"Had we but world enough, and time..." *

Writer and City

12/29/2007 13:25:49

According to the plan it will be only a few days now before I move to New York. In order, among other things, to (learn to) write. That is a strange thing to say now, though it was never a strange thing a few years ago, when I was a freshman in college and could read Hemmingway's A Moveable Feast in such a way that Gertrude Stein began to feel like a surrogate mother (there is still a picture of her with two dogs in Paris scotch taped to a shelf a few feet from where I am writing). Is it possible to be "a writer" now, any more than it is to be Plato's elusive "philosopher"? This puzzle must be wrapped up intimately in what our cities have become. E. B. White wrote in 1948:

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here and takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York's high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. (Here is New York, 1999: 25-6)

Of course White, and myself apparently, was as a young man in the third category. He went for a reason, to do something, to become a writer, such as it is.

For a good long time in the twentieth century, the writer was something an enterprising person on the edge of society and existence could demonstrably be. By the end of the first world war, enough novels and books of poetry had been published and enough magazines were in existence that it could feel like people had been doing it forever and would never stop. A new immortal profession could exist. The twenties and thirties in Berlin, Paris, and New York were the heyday of writers. They set the tone for those who would follow after the second war, those who drove ambulances during it (Creeley, Hemmingway, etc.), or even those who fought. Whether or not people read (they did), writing was a tangible thing, like a biological function of the human race, a calling needing to be filled. It had its own economies of grace, money, pleasure, pain, and fame.

Writing was a second birth, a baptism, a new monasticism, usually into some measured, meticulously described (experienced-for-the-sake-of-description?) debauchery. I read this morning in The Tropic of Cancer, "Paris is the cradle of artificial births" (1934: 44). Possible only in the city, where the writer could come to be an exile, where experiencing-for-the-sake-of-description was possible and done. Where the native women were hungry to be described.

I'm not sure when I'd like to suggest that the writer ceased to exist. Maybe, for me, when Robert Creeley died (he was the only one I knew). Or the stroke of the millennium. Or several decades earlier, only I didn't know it, when the media of ordinary entertainment changed.

Writing still happens, flung onto book after book, website after website, and one needless magazine after another. Of course in newspapers. Novels exist and sell, and so sometimes do stories. These works have authors, and we call them such. But I cannot think but that the writer is a terrible anachronism, a flat impossibility, like a Caesar or a prophet. We just don't have them anymore.

Whatever I am then, going to New York City to work on writing and other things I'm sure, I will not mourn the writer for the tiniest part of a second. There are now unheard-of epithets to be had and I guess I'll go for one of those, somewhere on the edge of society and existence and so-forth.

re: Writer and City - 12/30/2007 16:32:56
Posted by nathan

This whole issue, and the way it reminds me so much of Robert Creeley, brings to mind something specific he once told us in the small class about the letters between his friends Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan I took with him at Brown.

He said, according to my notes, "I first publicly proclaimed myself a poet in jail." The story went, as I recall, he was a young man out West and had done a number of things with himself over some years and didn't know what to call it. So one day he gets pulled into jail briefly for some small reason, and they ask him what is occupation was. And his answer then and there, claims Creeley, was the first time he described himself a poet, and apparently it stuck.

In that class with him I would often find myself trying to write down as much of his wandering talk as I could. It was all over the place, and so soothing and undisciplined that one could fall asleep very easily to it. Writing down verbatim (next to pencil drawings), I found, was the best way to stay awake. Here is one passage. All I got, as usual, were scraps, for my hand wasn't fast enough to get it all. He did speak in scraps, though. It was only when I wrote them down that I realized just how stunningly beautiful his little statements could be.

but then it's interesting how long it takes for something to enter the language, takes time to conceptualize, to get in into heads, computers, I think of AIDS, and when the atomic bomb was dropped it took people a long time to realize what had happened and Bill Gates, how it happened, how did it all begin, did he wake up one morning and say computer? I don't think so, and Alexander Graham Bell, thinking everybody will be connected, just ring each other up well I don't think so, not unless you pay your bill and buy a phone and

Next to that I drew pictures of his arms and legs.

re: Writer and City - 1/07/2008 08:39:03
Posted by nathan

I just wrote the "An Honorific" section in thisWikipedia article on "Writer." It is along these lines, but focused on the relative views on the subject of modernism and postmodernism.

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