I am haunted by a sentence in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. Describing the single-mindedness that accompanied the creation of a book, she writes: “During that time, I let all the houseplants die.” Detail of course is added: “After the book was finished I noticed them; the plants hung completely black dead in their pots in the bay windows. For I had not only let them die, I had not moved them. . . . The fanaticism of my twenties shocks me now.”
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Let me tell you a secret. I know business executives who would be much happier burning the midnight oil than going home to dinner with their loved ones. I know lawyers who would gladly, till their eyes started going blind on them, follow the Muse of Briefs into the wee-small zircon hours of the morning. I know computer programmers who could happily let plants and marriages alike die–in fact they do, all the time–in pursuit of the perfect program. Self-aggrandizing romantic mythmaking to the contrary, writers aren’t the only people in town all wrapped up in themselves, with a monopoly on self-importance, on small-mindedness, on lack of civility, on a form of alienation like a low-grade infection that only those around them notice. But something else. I let all the houseplants die is not merely a perpetuation of the mystification of writing, of the creativity racket, but also, oddly, a degradation of that mystification. I let all the houseplants die is not, pace Dillard, “fanaticism.” I let my ten house cats die is fanaticism. I put six bullets in my husband’s skull, behind his left ear, because the son of a bitch turned the stereo on while I was going to the mat with that goddamn sentence for the hundredth time is fanaticism. I neglected eating and sleeping until like a mad monk subsisting on ergot on a rock island off Galway I started hallucinating is fanaticism. But I let all the houseplants die is merely bad faith.
“Now a June bug was knocking at my window. I was wrestling inside a sentence. I must have heard it a dozen times before it registered–before I noticed that I had been hearing a bug knock for half an hour. It made a hollow, bonking sound. Some people call the same fumbling, heavy insects ‘May beetles.’ It must have been attracted to my light–what little came between the slats of the blind. I dislike June bugs. Back to work. Knock again, knock again, and finally, to learn what monster of a fat, brown June bug could fly up to a second story and thump so insistently at my window as though it wanted admittance–at last, unthinkingly, I parted the venetian blind slats with my fingers, to look out.
This kind of magniloquence, so seductive if you don’t catch it early, can magic into a malignancy. I much prefer–but here is George Goethals, a classmate of Norman Mailer’s at Harvard, recalling Mailer for a biographer: “He was incredibly self-disciplined, but I never knew a more unenchanted writer in the making. To him it was work. He used to say, ‘George, this business of inspiration is shit.’ He would take a theme and sculpt it five or six different ways. He was going to be a writer, dammit.” Unenchanted! That’s the ticket.
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, Harper & Row, $15.95.
