Neither famous, nor good, nor tough

Alexander Chee, whom I knew when he lived in SF in the 90s and a poem of whose I published in Frighten the Horses, is now a gainfully employed novelist and creative writing teacher at real colleges. He wrote in his blog a couple days ago about his early efforts at writing and working at magazines and how he came to take himself seriously enough to apply to MFA programs. Along the way he drops some names of people who are now famous, or at least terrific writers -- Dale Peck, K.M. Soehnlein, Deborah Eisenberg. (I find these names impressive; I guess if you live in New York and are involved with the literary scene there you get to know people who are more famous than you do in San Francisco. The writers I know here are not as famous; this is more a measure of my own lack of success than of the relative importance of San Francisco writers. In any case, I would not dream of throwing around the names of the people I know, but perhaps if they were more famous, I might not be so scrupulous.) But anyway, the point is not that he knows these famous people nor that he feels no compunction about mentioning them, or even that he is a published novelist and successful teacher and can speak authoritatively about both, but that in his early days he seems not to have been as afraid as I was.

There was a very, very brief moment when I considered going to a writing program. I had graduated from the Univ. of Texas with a degree in film criticism and was trying to figure out how to escape from Austin, which I knew even as a 21-year-old to be a cultural sinkhole. (It was ten years before Richard Linklater made the film Slackers, but the fuck-it-all-let's-just-get-stoned Austin ethos was just as, if not more, pervasive.) I was a fan of the Beat writers -- what young American would-be writer isn't? -- and had heard of the newly formed writing program at Naropa University in Boulder, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. I believe I even got their catalog, but never got very close to deciding that going to a writing program would be something I was actually entitled to do.

For decades now I've been trying to capture in writing the self-abnegating attitude I had then about myself and my talent -- an attitude I still have, since it's hard for me even to write the phrase "my talent" without being embarrassed and looking for another, less pretentious word. I was convinced that to even apply for a special program for writers would be to pretend I was more special than I knew myself to be. And this was less about my writing or my creativity than it was about my personhood. I just didn't think I deserved to go to a writing program; no one was urging me to, and I could not, as the pop-pyschology phrase goes, "give myself permission" to do it.

But I think the word "entitled" is also relevant, in the sense that some people whom we all know behave with what we call "a sense of entitlement" -- they feel they somehow deserve special consideration everywhere they go, and they never feel as if they are automatically disqualified from doing anything. By contrast, my view of myself when I was in my 20s was the exact opposite: I did not think I was entitled to do anything out of the ordinary.

I now realize this is just internalized self-hatred. It was if I were a one-person minority group whom society needed to repress, and had figured out a way to make me do it to myself so it wouldn't have to bother. My view of myself as undeserving became self-fulfilling. It took me about twenty years longer than Chee or his cohort -- the thousands of graduates of writing programs who were strangely lacking in the compunctions I felt -- to take my writing seriously.

During those years I distracted myself with a great many things, pouring my creative energy into performance art, theater and music -- realms I knew I would never be particularly good or successful at, but which I pursued because they were fun to do. And I knew at the time that those things would be a dead end, and they were. That's twenty years I can never get back.

Finally I found a medium that would permit me to, at least, develop a little craft; so I did that for years. Finally I figured out a way to write straight fiction; it took me until I was 47 to finish a first novel; it didn't sell. Now I'm 50; it'll take me another year to finish my second novel, and even if that sells... You get the point. I'm like a pitcher who didn't have the courage to even try out for a minor league team until his early 30s -- no matter how talented he may originally have been, his career prospects are extremely limited.

Despite knowing that I will probably never have time to become a great writer,or even to have a successful career as one, I have to keep trying. Because finally I have faith that it is what I should be doing. I'm sorry it took me twenty extra years to get to this point; if I had followed my instincts and gone to Naropa or to New York in 1979, I would have become a better writer sooner. This faith I finally have in my writing basically boils down to a hope that my self-hatred did not wipe everything out -- that somewhere inside me, underneath the layers of repression and cliche and cultural garbage there is at least one original thing I might say. And that I might still have time to uncover it.