AN EYE OUT FOR THE READER
Knowing within myself the manner in which this Poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret
that I make it public. – John Keats, from the Preface of Endymion
Interviewer: Do you have a reader in your mind when you write?
James Baldwin: No, you can’t have that.
After Anne Bradstreet left her Northampton home in 1630, crossed the Atlantic and settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, she wrote not only the first book of English poems in the New World but also the first “writerly” poem. The poem, pointedly titled “The Author to Her Book,” addresses Bradstreet’s supposed inadequacies as a writer while hedging her bet with her readers. The book it refers to, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America had been published in London in 1650 and was, wrote an uneasy Bradstreet, the “ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain.” She, the book’s “Mother… alas is poor/ Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.”
Another Anne, 21st century’s Carson, has no push-pull qualms about authors and their books, about authors and their readers. “It’s a funny thing about works of art,” says Carson. “When you make a thing, all the way through you’re thinking, ‘What’s to become of it?’ I’m not the kind of person who can write a book and put it in a drawer and say, ‘Well, that’s an accomplishment…. It doesn’t matter if it ever gets published.’ I have to think of where it will go.”
But, freed from the author’s hand or let out of its dark drawer, to what ghostly reader should a work “go”? And how much should that ghostly reader matter? That is, I’m curious, even as I write this essay, why I, or anyone, wants to publish their work. By what clever argument do writers convince themselves that their private obsessions, proudly signed at the bottom of the page, should make it out the front door to join the larger and necessary conversation a culture is having with itself? The paintings inside the Lascaux caves, some of the most exquisite art in the history of the world have, I remind myself, no signatures at the bottom of their walls. Those paintings too were left in their own dark drawer, unseen for countless millennia until four teenage boys rediscovered them in 1940 just in time for a post-modernist viewership to appreciate their sublime combination of the real and the abstract. Timing, Timing, often trumps Location, Location.
Emily Dickinson famously put her poems in a chest-of-drawers. The 10 published in her lifetime were submitted by others without her knowledge, as was Bradstreet’s book. Unlike Bradstreet, Dickinson’s name was attached to none of her publications.[1] Even so, Dickinson, despite her reluctance to appear in public (her quizzical behavior spoken of even in her own time by other Amherst citizens), still felt compelled to show her work to sister-in-law Sue who lived in the Evergreens across the lot from Emily’s Homestead. Dickinson also mailed some 500 of her poems to various friends and correspondents including an 1862 letter to potential mentor Colonel Thomas Higginson. Dickinson, who apparently needed a chosen someone to tell her, asks the essential question; she wants to know “if my Verse is alive?” (Her verse was, as we know, very much alive, the poems as magnificent today as when her sister Vinnie opened the drawers after Emily’s death.)
Yet even while Dickinson disappeared into the security of the Homestead and reached out to others by mail, she also sought an encouraging mentor in herself by enlisting from her imaginary and unknown readership a fellow edifying “Nobody” (F260, J288) comprising a community of two that could then turn its back as one to the croaking bog beyond. This is the sort of alliance Zadie Smith describes when reading the works of Toni Morrison and Seamus Heaney who “both keep me rigorous company on the page, not begging for my comprehension but always open to the possibility of it, for no writer would break a silence if they did not want someone—some always unknowable someone—to overhear. I am describing a model reader-writer relationship.”[2]
Kay Ryan calls her unknowable reader a “co-conspirator,” though this reader/writer partnership might simply be a projection of the longed-for partnership within the writer. “[M]y cousin,” as Ryan calls her split, audience-craving self,
seeks good journals for the poems and good presses for the books, accepts reading
dates and agrees to interviews, so that the poet might gain name recognition, by means
of which the poet’s poems might reach an audience and rise or fall fairly, based upon
their merit instead of simply resting upon the bottom [of an editor’s pile] because
nobody ever saw them.”
All the while, Ryan keeps an eye out not only for her immediate readers but for the faraway gods of her pantheon: “I am at the table of the gods and I want them to like me. There I’ve said it. I want the great masters to enjoy what I write. The noble dead are my readers and, if what I write might jostle them a little, if there were a tiny bit of scooting and shifting along the benches, this would be my thrill.” (How those gods might convey their approval to Ryan, or to any living writer, is unclear, infinite patience with the unknown—along with timing—perhaps as necessary as talent for a writer.) In the meantime, Ryan’s co-conspiring cousin-self, like all humans, enjoys, as she puts it, “la gloire, which comes by way of the audience. This spotlight hog trades eagerly upon the poems (which she didn’t write and only partially understands…). Her only ambition is to hold the audience. I often see her as a betrayer of the poet, but she isn’t. Secretly they are best friends.” Best friend or betrayer, or whether the poem is in the drawer or out the door, most writers, as Anne Carson noted for herself, fervently hope their well-wrought urns (to use Cleanth Brooks’ phrase) will soon be held in the admiring hands of loved ones and strangers alike.
Whoa! not so fast, counsel both Horace and Alexander Pope, at least make sure your urns have dried. The two poets, some 1700 years apart, advise the eager writer to keep one’s pages in a drawer for nine years before seeking publication, (a particularly daunting admonition when so many were denied their promised three score and ten years). And, indeed, Jeanette Winterson, would save us from a Horace-Pope decade. “Don’t hold on to poor work,” she says. “If it was bad when it went in the drawer it will be just as bad when it comes out.” But despite Winterson’s sober advice, Dickinson’s question remains unanswered: Early or late, how to know if one’s work is alive?
One frightening answer is that we can’t know. Despite our wishes for a pre-mortem nod from the
gods, John Berryman in W. S. Merwin’s poem, “Berryman,” says that it’s impossible to know:
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good.[3]
Nor, sadly, will time settle the matter. Robert P. Tristram, Marya Zaturenska, and Leonard
Bacon, each of whom won Pulitzer Prizes for poetry in 1936, 1938, and 1941, respectively, are little read (or heard of) today. Yet, future decades, or centuries, could insist that their poems be praised again. This, after all, is what happened to John Donne who might have been relegated to the dustbin of poetry but for T. S. Eliot’s essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” published 290 years after Donne’s death. “Metaphysical poet,” Samuel Johnson’s intended pejorative, was, says Eliot, “a term of abuse, or as the label of a quaint and pleasant taste. We must consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable, which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared.” [4]
Still, if “[t]he poet, every artist, is a maker, a maker whose aim is to make something supremely worthwhile, to make something inherently valuable in itself,” as William Gass insists, then the question behind Dickinson’s question remains: If one can convince oneself, by whatever means, that one’s poems are alive (whether, in fact, they are very good or very bad – and, again, how is this determined?), why not then, a job well done, put them quietly back into the drawer and leave strangers, editors, and one’s long-suffering loved ones out of it? [5]
There seems to be no satisfying position between the two poles: diligent art-making for its own sake – Eudora Welty: “I write for it, for the pleasure of it,”[6] – or the possible ‘Look Ma, no hands!’ hubris of showing one’s handiwork to others (whether they wish to look or not). The length between these two attitudes strikes me as the same distance between the bedroom where a poem is written and the admiring bog beyond. In her letter to Colonel Higginson, Dickinson Russian-dolled her name, signing it only on a card which she then placed within its own smaller envelope within the larger envelope, a psychic safe-space several removes from the world’s unsanctioned, unnerving, and unavoidable ambiguities out of which she created her poems. The bountiful evidence (the poems) indicates that the disquiet she found there might also serve as an expansive in-betweenness where she (and the reader) might dwell in possibility. Of course, the chutzpah of initialing one’s work directly on the page may be in direct ratio to the chutzpah of staring at the empty page in the first place. Vast, without internal borders or landmarks, that page demands that only someone with a wrinkled lip and a sneer of cold command place their name at its bottom. Lauren Groff sums it up neatly: “[T]he compulsion to make art tends to contradict any impulse toward self-effacement.” There seems to be no getting out of the way.
Elena Ferrante has, in her own way, gotten out of the way by not signing her name at the bottom of her works. Lauded for the four books of her Neapolitan Quartet (now an HBO series) and other novels (made into movies and a Netflix series), the actual Ferrante is known perhaps only to her agent and publisher and maybe to a few others. Coming of age, (I’m guessing – we don’t know her birth year), in the immediate wake of the New Criticism and its insistence on the work over its author, Ferrante, early in her career, addressed the onus of publicity and public appearances and with them authorship, readership, and fame. Boldly for a debut novelist – Troubling Love was her first book – Ferrante made it clear to her publisher that
“I do not intend to do anything for Troubling Love, anything that might involve the
public engagement of me personally. I’ve already done enough for this long story: I wrote it. If the book is worth anything, that should be sufficient. I won’t participate
in discussions and conferences, if I’m invited. I won’t go and accept prizes, if any are awarded to me. I will never promote the book…. I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner
or later find readers; if not, they won’t.”
Ferrante’s “disappearance,” a gambit to avoid the discomforts caused by modern definitions of authorship, including the unwanted spotlight into her every-day life, (including her writing life), may be a solution to a problem that would not have occurred to the ancients. Instead of the straight, author-sanctioned narrative we know today, their stories, a village affair, could expand or contract via members of the audience (most definitely audience), each adding to or subtracting from a potential multiverse of possibilities.
In The Iliad, and The Odyssey, for example, or in the great Indian epics The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, or in the multi-generational Mali Sundiata, or in the Arabian One Thousand and One Nights (the most storytelling story of them all), the potential for permanent shame or glory attaching itself to an author, as opposed to a heroine/ hero, does not arise. (The gathered adventures of The Iliad and The Odyssey – assigned to a Homer at some later date – become, accordingly, an example of the story creating the author.) And yet there is a hint within The Odyssey (a story rife with secreted and transformed identities) of a growing conflict between author and adventurer, between author and audience. This tension is evinced, in particular, in Book Eight as Odysseus narrates his travels and travails to King Alcinous and Queen Arete. While we previously marveled at brave Odysseus on the beaches of Troy, storyteller Odysseus is also, at various times, unseen: buried in leaves, veiled in a cloud, transformed into an unknown beggar, and later, of course, invisible to the blinded Cyclops. Even during Book Eight’s banquet scene when the proto-Homer/ Demodocus sings of the suffering hero sitting unknown among the guests, Odysseus again “disappears” covering his head with his cloak in order to hide his tears.
But, like Kay Ryan’s split selves and secret best friends, Odysseus, when prodded in Book Seven, is likewise eager to tell his tales (at least after a good meal) to the audience before him. Emblematically, in Book Nine during a failed escape by water, Odysseus goads the blind and raging Polyphemus: “Hey, you, Cyclops! Idiot!” he screams, his taunt nearly bringing him and his men back into the arms of their furious enemy when the Cyclops, guided by Odysseus’s own push-pull voice, hurls a boulder at the escaping boat and the overshot missile propels the boat back toward the shore. As Odysseus tells it, “My crew/ begged me to stop and pleaded with me. // “Please/ calm down. Why are you being so insistent/ and taunting this wild man?” [7]
But of course there is no “why,” as Odysseus cannot stop himself. Before him is a captive audience in the wild Cyclops, Odysseus’s immediate gloire so great that he temporarily loses sight of his ultimate goal of returning to his faraway Ithaka where dog and wife and bed know him for who he is. That Odysseus, focused, wielding his pen-like stake while captive in a cave, “transforms” himself from the anonymous “Nobody” to someone emboldened enough to “sign” his name to his work: “Cyclops!” he yells, now rowing away successfully from Polyphemus, “If any mortal asks how/ your eye was mutilated and made blind,/ say that Odysseus, the city-sacker,/ Laertes’ son, who lives in Ithika,/ destroyed your sight.” [8] Here Odysseus affirms his existence through his audience by charging Polyphemus with the mission of telling the world [9] of his, Odysseus’s story, now their joint story.
A “signed” Odysseus can never know for sure about the life within his tale, or of its longevity, but when he sets off across the vast, discomfiting, and necessary in-betweenness of possible oblivion or fame, of possible swinehood or glory, he has the chance of becoming himself at last, a place on a map, a somewhere to return to.
And there are those other times, too, as it must have been for storyteller Scheherazade, when the getting it right – with your audience, with the gods, with yourself – is so immediate, so life-affirming and exhilarating that the world seems safe, at least for another day, until you must, of course, begin again.
[1] Some 35 years after Dickinson’s death, Marianne Moore would deal with her own surprise publication after T.S. Eliot, Pound, D.H, and others encouraged Moore to gather her poems into a book. Moore demurred, convinced that a collection was premature. Yet, suddenly, a volume of her work, titled simply Poems, appeared in 1921 from (ironically, after Moore’s modest refusal) The Egoist Press. In a mobius strip of logic, editor Harriet Shaw Weaver, recognizing that Moore’s talent (as had happened with Bradstreet and Dickinson) equaled that of men, proceeded to deny Moore agency over her own work. Modernist Weaver, who had an eye out for unsung talent, first serialized both James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses in The Egoist magazine and then went so far as to found the Egoist Press to publish Ulysses entire when no one else would. Still, Moore, ignorant of her own book’s preparation, was angered by its publication.
[2] Though Morrison herself, when asked whether she had an audience in mind when she sat down to write, replied, “Only me…. Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing.” Of course, anyone whose read Morrison understands that her “only me” somehow includes the entire world. Morrison further addressed her relation with her writer self and her audience. Praised in the New York Times for her second novel, 1973’s Sula, the review went on to admonish Morrison for focusing on “the black side of the American black provincial life…. If she is to maintain the large and serious audience she deserves she is going to have to address a riskier contemporary reality than this beautiful but nevertheless distanced novel.” A “serious audience” was, of course, a white audience which the reviewer assumed could not care about something so small, secular, and unserious as black people living their lives in relation to, even if fictional, other black people. In the documentary, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, Morrison sums up the issue of audience and of writing free of predominant societal expectations, “I didn’t want to speak for Black people and I wanted to speak to, and to be among them… it’s us. So the first thing I had to do was to eliminate the white gaze.”
[3] In his essay, “Slight Exaggeration,” Adam Zagajewski tells of a phone call from Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz: “I heard sorrow, deep melancholy in his voice … Finally he asked me, ‘Adam, please tell me honestly, have I ever in my life written a single good poem?’” Zagajewski adds about his own work, “I don’t know how my fellow poets live but I know perfectly well that I don’t usually believe in my own poems.”
[4] Even as postmodernism has demonstrated that “taste” is a function of education, class, and temporal social values, I am grateful that Eliot, a beneficiary of such reigning tastes, held that Donne’s virtue (Donne, himself, a beneficiary in his own time) should not disappear.
[5] One could disregard doors, drawers, and nine year embargoes on one’s art altogether, and simply make, as does Andy Goldsworthy, finely rendered structures of leaf and snow and stone and twig, and who has no illusion that his work is for the ages — that’s the point — but understands that wind, tide, or a summer’s day may destroy his intricate creations within months, or minutes. On the other hand, we know of Goldsworthy’s gorgeous fleeting work because it has been filmed and memorialized in books, giving it now, perhaps, the same chance of remembrance as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18.
[6] Of course, we know of Welty’s assertion because she published it after having become a famous writer by publishing her masterful short stories.
[7] Emily Wilson translation.
[8] It seems, as with the Old Testament God who sanctions both hot and cold but spews the lukewarm from his mouth, that The Odyssey will not tolerate half measures. One can be granted the greater vision of a blind Homer and Demodocus, or the bifocal acuity of Odysseus, but one-eyed Polyphemus’s lack of depth-perception is clearly unacceptable.
[9] We see this impulse no doubt again in Hamlet, (certainly a story about an artist trying to make his way through in-betweenness: take on the dreadful family business of swords and empires, or pursue the arts with his player buddies), when the dying prince’s last words to Horatio are not something like “It is a far, far better thing I do…” but the blunt charge of, “To tell my story.”
