Literature, craft and (f)art

We can generalise a little by stating that writers write for two
primary reasons: the first is money, pure and simple; the second is
more elusive; something akin to 'fame' and if one is very lucky, the
respect and esteem of one's peers. Failing this second goal (and
sometimes in a vain attempt to achieve the first), the writer can often
very happily (and lucratively) settle for 'notoriety'. The desire for
respect lies very deep in the writers' soul and motivates practically
all of us with any pretentions to serious, thought-provoking
literature. This is a common tendency, yet it is often a failing and
can be emblematic of missing the creative bulls-eye - the real crux of
why writing exists as recreation - in quite spectacular fashion.

Vincent Gallo is a case in point. He is simultaneously a writer, actor
and director, yet one gets the impression that this is somehow not due
to some over-boiling multiplicity of natural talent. The man is
unhappy, and wants his audience simply to witness his creations without
sneering. In short, he wishes to be liked by his public. As an
overriding motivation he has also spoken of his fear of annihilation,
of departing the Earth without leaving some kind of artistic document
as a testament of his life. Yet his writings and films exist; they are
real. It is the absence of respect from the informed public that
continues to torment him. The fact that his attempt to please the
Cannes film festival featured a graphic depiction of oral sex is a
telling one. Gallo had clearly detected that the vacant postmodern
mindset demanded some form of public and gratuitous depravity, but in
this case he had clearly misjudged it, and in trying to please had
produced something out of step with his own sensibilities and
fore-doomed to failure in every sense.

I have known this kind of creative panic first hand. A lazy writer, I
tried to branch out into painting, producing one second-rate landscape
before destroying it in a drunken fit of pique. The activity had been a
useless waste of time; I possess neither the creative talent nor the
patience to sustain life as a painter. Without any kind of objective
criteria to measure our individual worth; we flounder attempting to
imbue our lives with artificial meaning. If money and material ephemera
will not do, the recognition of one's creative faculties must provide
sustenance to the fragile, yearning ego, forever beset by the
metaphysical implications of a seemingly godless universe.

Relative poverty is in reality no great hardship for the dedicated
writer. Indeed, the likes of Orwell and Hemingway chose poverty almost
deliberately in their refusal to compromise creative vision to the
needs of the money power. It is the absence of recognition that causes
so much anger and misery in the writer's heart. In pursuing our
artistic goals we sacrifice the key forgotten point of the entire
literary project - that it must be accompanied by happiness and a sense
of real accomplishment. To write instrumentally, for some kind of
external and artificial purpose outside our own spiritual needs, quite
misses the point. The crux of the argument is that we should depart
wholesale from the conception that writing is an 'art' form at all.
Remove the need for 'artistic' commendation and one removes the key
impediment to good writing. Orwell's protagonist in Keep the Aspidistra
Flying suffered writer's block primarily because as a bookseller he was
daily in the company of such fine 'artists'. Gordon Comstock was
emblematic of a kind of slimy, hypocritical misanthropy, pretending to
loathe the literary establishment while simultaneously aching to join
it. We should not seek to emulate him.

Writing is rather a craft, pursued diligently and patiently, employing
the technical tools familiar to the vocation, much like a joiner
building a table. What does one fundamentally need to write? The simple
answer is a vocabulary. With this tool one can go about creating
structures that may or not appeal to false 'artistic' sensibilities.
One must remove the pointless mystique from one's activity. Essays,
poems and stories are constructions, built from their component parts
like complex machines. We can readily recognise the most impressive
constructions, but we must not forget that they are made by worker's
hands and are merely a more protracted and involved form of writing
than their close relatives; an e-mail to a friend, a letter to the bank
or a report filed by a clerk.

Closely linked to the false 'artistic' sensibility is the apparent need
for the creative individual to suffer, or to somehow be caught up in
the complex and discouraging problems of post-modernity. A victim of
abuse or injustice must write, and conversely any writer worth the name
must bear the scars of the west's spiritual and industrial decline.
Henry Miller was one of the groundbreaking writers who saw through this
as transparent nonsense; the seeking out of pain and discomfort in the
name of 'art' a foolish and pointless exercise. We are all worthy
autobiographers; the stories of a Krakow taxi driver, a Bristol war
veteran and a Japanese English teacher are in their own ways richly
compelling and often overdue for recording and dissemination, even if
it is only for the benefit of the man and his family.

In making a table, we learn with experience. If we are temperamentally
sound, we do not allow rejection on 'artistic' grounds to deter us. The
key is perseverance. Some writers are severely restricted - sometimes
paralysed - by the self-imposed limitations of chronology and literary
'rules'. When one considers writing not as art but as craft, this
feeling is completely dissipated. Consider certain events that must
take place in your work - their place in the article or story is
immaterial. Before insertion in a peace of continuous prose they must
first be recorded, modified and calibrated; as thorough a technical
preparation and exercise of tools and components as that undertaken by
any skilled worker. In the first instance concentrate on these events
and these events alone. In the same spirit, the tyranny of chronology
and compartmentalisation should not torment us. Work on many projects
at once; if the literary juices run dry on one story or essay, abandon
it temporarily. The beginning, the middle, the ending, the message or
the hook will occur to you one day, as you commute to the office.

As fragile human beings we all fear being on the receiving end of
Aldous Huxley's criticism of the poet Spenser - 'random words drawn
from an empty mind'. But elsewhere Huxley himself is guilty of
significant errors of judgement. Perhaps one has become prejudiced
through prior exposure to his works, but Huxley's lapse into
disjointed, imagistic, modernistic writing in his travel piece on Los
Angeles (from Jesting Pilate) did not work successfully. This method
rings true for the likes of John Dos Passos or William Burroughs, but
for Huxley it sounded like a man purely trying to keep pace with
fashion, and looking like an uncle on the pull in doing so. This is a
consequence of looking at which type of literature is generally
'successful' with too keen an eye, and departing from one's own style
in doing so.

Wyndham Lewis' vitriol often appeared as the manifestation of some deep
personal neurosis and attendant political extremism. Critics are wrong
to respectfully neglect works like Hitler (1931) or his contributions
to the British Union Quarterly as some kind of nervous lapse, a kind of
literary brain-freeze. In The Caliph's Design and earlier in Blast! we
see the clear undercurrent of surgical severity that runs through all
his work. He appears as a man who loves 'art' a thousand times more
than he loves humanity. Why would Lewis not sympathise with fascism? In
The Apes of God we see I think more than a challenge to his cultural
contemporaries and rivals. In his innermost fantasies, Lewis is signing
their death warrants and leading them to the firing squad. Even he,
then, is guilty of painting his innermost neuroses onto the literary
canvas. We can also point to Tarr or the Childermass, into which Lewis
inserts himself as a character, born as a political and cultural animal
and empowered himself to make utterances he can find nowhere else in
his work for, and furthermore things that would never be said in
ordinary impromptu political debate.

From Arthur Koestler's Arrival and Departure it is clearly identifiable
that he and I share a fondness for certain literary devices. In Arrival
and Departure the fascist Bernard is not a character in the
conventional literary sense - he appears purely for the purpose of
acting as a catalyst for the debate between fascism and communism. This
is of course no bad thing in itself, and the conversation makes
compelling reading, but it does serve to make one's own fictional
endeavours, the often transparent devices one employs, appear all the
more satisfactory. These works appear, then, as the product of a
particular human mind, not some godlike legendary 'artist'. In
detecting the craftsman's frailties and errors of judgement as well as
the meticulous care (and carelessness) with which his work is pursued,
we are imbued with the daring ability to criticise, these literary
deities become accessible human beings to us and their writing loses
entirely its mystique.

Art is primarily and necessarily a visual and aural medium not closely
related to the everyday activity of simple writing. The visual and
musical artefacts of art are sublime, emotional and often breathtaking
in their majesty. The same cannot be said of works of literature.
Perhaps the collective cultural brain perceives these things
differently. In any case it rings true that to imbue literature with
the deistic epithet of 'art' is misleading and far from furthering its
cause in society, restricts individual attempts at literary endeavour
and limits the appeal of literature to a relatively small
self-satisfied bourgeois clique that would-be 'writers' struggle in
misery to join. This last point is important. It is faintly ridiculous
for individuals to 'aspire' to be a writer. As soon as one sets pen to
paper one is a writer. All endeavour in this regard is relevant. One
should not dream of publishing a collection of works purely to emulate
DH Lawrence or GK Chesterton. In time and with the work of the patient
craftsman, one can produce ones own collections; the only difference
with the master craftsmen of the past is its absence from the shelves
of public consumption. To avoid annihilation among ones immediate peers
and family is an achievement in itself.

The less gifted cousin of Art is photography, which hampers and
belittles itself in trying to compete with Duhrer and Picasso. It is
true that some photographs are awe-inspiring, but this is surely a
result of the photographer as technician employing his skills to more
perfectly capture moments in social or natural life. It is rather the
moment itself that is awe-inspiring and probably more acutely
descriptive than even literature can manage. It is not the photograph
that is 'art', it is life itself. The converse can be said of
breathtaking, awe-inspiring music. One can say that any writer is only
five steps from becoming either Dickens or Jackie Collins and similarly
that most photographers can with application emulate Man Ray or David
Bailey; it is merely a honing and perfecting of one particular craft.
The same cannot be said of music. To argue that by playing the organ we
are eminently capable of composing the likes of Toccata and Fugue is
patent nonsense. The word 'hobby' is horribly twee, but it is an
approximation of what writing should be.

We can argue furthermore that to earn any kind of living by writing can
be regarded as a bonus, a pleasing and ego-enhancing by-product of the
craft, not its main purpose. Nor even should the feverish fantasy of
publication be permitted to clip at the individual's creative vision. I
have produced some of my best work (at least I like it) since I stopped
particularly caring about fame and money. True, we could all do with a
holiday in Mexico, and recognition by more experienced and socially
eminent contemporaries is nice, but in the last analysis these things
surely matter not. In any event one is usually forced into writing
either for money or for some kind of 'artistic' reknown, inevitably
losing half the quality of one's work in the process.

Revolt against at least some of the accepted rules of grammar if it
suits your style. One should be permitted as a craftsman to stretch the
concept of willing disbelief to its very limits. Hark back to the
revolutionary proponents of modernism such as Lewis and Pound, the
erotic qualities of Cleland, the romantic pulp of Barbara Cartland, the
humour of Pratchett or Sharpe or the diverse poetic joys from Auden to
Harrison if you need them for your own creations. Do not be frightened,
try not to worry, and remember always that there is no 'genius'; there
is only work.