Every Weirdo in the World Is on My Wavelength

From The Point:

A writer is a creature of solitude: Has there ever been a bigger lie?

And yet the myth persists. We treat writers as individuals, but only in precisely those ways that melt their individuality down, the better to recast it in more agreeable forms. Neglected, misunderstood or vaguely despised by most, writers—the “best” ones, anyway—are said to be largely companionless in their striving: they’re in it by and for themselves from start to finish. Their only social redemption is to be recognized as having been all along a lone genius. So our culture gives the writers trinkets and trophies to fight over—fellowships, teaching positions, agents, advances, columns, prizes—the struggle over which only becomes fiercer as year by year they grow scarcer. Each writer must market themselves by having, in fact by being, a brand; one acquires what might once have been called a readership by pandering to a fandom. When occasionally we still choose to trot out some approximation of an eminent writer for an interview, we expect them to play-act a role halfway between a celebrity and a sage. And if a writer has been particularly well-behaved in the eyes of the institutions, then as they hobble into retirement we hand them that especially embarrassing Swedish trophy, which is the shiniest trinket of them all. With this gesture our writer, who has struggled in isolation to reach this pinnacle, is admitted at last into that frosty pantheon that has loomed over the institutions this whole time: the roll call of dead writers whose names have grown prestigious even as their works go unread, more huge than human, imposing as monoliths, unreachable as stars.

You can take comfort in the fact that none of this has much to do with actual literature—neither with what it is nor with how it’s made. Our work is not the loneliest but among the most gregarious of the arts.

Writers not only don’t work alone: they can’t. The key proxy for a vibrant book culture is the little packs they form when things are going well. A literary work of art begins long before the fateful confrontation with the blank page, in the whole life we’ve lived to know what to put upon it. And only a life full of friends among the living and the dead is conducive to the production of real art. Of course a writer is always their irreducibly individual voice—but how do you think they first learned to sing with it? In honing it against the voices of others just as invested in questions of beauty, in histories of forms; in digging up the neglected works that always ought to have been classics, and treating them as such amongst ourselves; in ruthless mutual critique, becoming accountable to one another as editors and collaborators; in mockery and contempt for what’s bad, and throwing the occasional wrench into the machinery of the establishment.

Link to the rest at The Point