The Writer as Worker

Many well regarded books--Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” or Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep”--are the only completed novels that their authors have given us. Louis L’Amour, who died last week in Los Angeles, wrote 86 novels and 14 collections of short stories with combined sales of almost 200 million copies. A hundred books seem like too many, as if they were rushed and disposable. Yet no simple relationship links quantity and literary quality.

A romantic notion of art dies hard: The writer waits for inspiration--and waits and waits. Perhaps a writer harbors a single novel or 10; it is hardly a matter of choice. Moreover, when the muse finally strikes, the author watches, unwilling to tamper with pure creativity. This idea lay behind Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” which he typed on a continuous scroll of paper. Kerouac feared that pausing to insert individual sheets would damage the creative flow--whatever gushed forth was precious. He submitted the manuscript as a single paragraph on a 120-foot roll.

To view writing as work challenges this romantic notion. Authors like L’Amour don’t wait for inspiration or the perfect moment. He once remarked that he “could sit in the middle of Sunset Boulevard and write . . . temperamental I am not.” These writers put in their time, day after day; they do not value nurturing an unreliable creativity so much as relentless effort. L’Amour wrote five pages every single day. To the non-writer this might seem like few, but--the computation is simple--it multiplies out to 600 pages every four months, two or three books a year. Robert A. Caro, the biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson, recently reminisced about another productive biographer, the late Joseph P. Lash, who wrote on the Roosevelts, Dag Hammarskjold and others. Caro recalled staying at Lash’s vacation home. Although Lash was seriously ill, Caro heard him enter his study each morning at 5 to begin the day. In this fashion Lash published 11 substantial books in 25 years.

These writers see writing as work, a craft without sense unless there is a regular and finished product; for the professionals, books are to be sold and read, not stashed in a drawer. To be sure, numbers can be an end in themselves. The writer who counts only pages andsales may produce throw-away books, the equivalent of junk mail. Both in his immense productivity and in his Old American West themes of individual heroism, L’Amour recalls Jack London, an author obsessed with sales. While London published some fine novels like “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang,” he wrote too much too fast; much is forgettable. “He was writing for money,” concluded a contemporary critic of London, “and for little else, and he studied his market like a broker.”

No one can chastise writers if they keep an eye on the market. Since they no longer have patrons, the professionals rely on the market for sustenance. The market calls the shots; it also maims. Pure mercenary calculations undermine art. What sets some fiction apart is not an author’s purity beyond and outside commerce but a sweaty devotion to craft, a book finished in style and content. “Drops of our heart’s blood are visible in every letter we trace,” wrote Flaubert, a master craftsman. “We tear out a length of gut from our bellies and serve it up to the bourgeois.”

Today many novelists are based at universities. This eases the pain; in guaranteeing salaries the campus protects and insulates authors. Next to the gains, however, are the losses. The book flaps identify these authors as graduates of one university writing department teaching creative writing at another. Is it for that reason that they often write minimalist fiction with minimal characters and content? They successfully move from schools and grants to more schools and grants but evade raw life, the specialty of authors like L’Amour. While tame authors puff up their pasts--a writer’s conference in a mountain motel is listed as vagabonding through the West--L’Amour’s biographical tag breathes of another era: He was a one-time longshoreman, lumberjack, elephant handler, miner, professional boxer, officer on a tank destroyer and confrere of Tibetan bandits; he had been shipwrecked in the West Indies and stranded in the Mojave Desert.

Yet the belief that big experiences--the dramatic and exotic--automatically translate into good novels is simply a version of the American myth that bigger is better. In principle the quietest life offers sufficient material for sterling prose and stories. “As you have seen,” concludes Eudora Welty’s “One Writer’s Beginnings,” “I am a writer who came of a sheltered life.” This is not the same as a complacent or timid life. “A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.” For the writer who is a craftsman, dramatic experiences or numerous books matter less than boldness, talent and work.