STOP THE PRESSES : Start your own

Commonweal, Feb 9, 2001 by Richard Alleva

A few centuries ago, most important writers were strictly local heroes. The future pillars of Western art and sensibility were guys (occasionally gals) from the neighborhood who stayed put, at least when they were allowed to. The ultimate ambition of an Aeschylus or a Euripides was to win first prize at the annual theater festival in hometown Athens. Though Dante didn't have to leave Italy during his political exile, this held no comfort for him because the Florence that drove him away was his real homeland, his political base, his world. Francois Villon didn't identify with his city, Paris, as much as with the neighborhood (Notre Dame and its environs), from which the poet-gallows bird drew his lice-ridden inspirations. The creator of the most wonderful of all British narrative poems, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, doomed himself to anonymity and a readership of scholars by never leaving his country estate in northwest England and by writing in a dialect that didn't become standard English. When Chaucer, the father of English poetry, was praised by a cultured foreigner, the historian Froisart, it was for his diplomacy, not The Canterbury Tales. And, of course, Shakespeare's idea of success was good box office in strictly one city, London.

Now let's fast-forward to America between the world wars, the era that exalted the idea of The Great American Novel, and that invested the successful young novelist with the glamour that only movie and pop music stars have nowadays.

From his home in the Midwest or his boarding house in Paris, the young genius has been summoned to New York and a booth in Sardi's by his publisher who is aglow at the first novel's critical reception and initial sales and is bursting to regale the young man with visions of the near future: foreign rights about to be sold, translations to be commissioned, a Broadway adaptation slated for next fall, the Pulitzer committee taking notice, Hollywood studio representatives preparing a generous contract, and...oh, by the way, can you make it to the Algonquin for lunch tomorrow? Dorothy and Bob Benchley are dying to meet you, and I understand GBS is in town...

Accepted. Published. Praised. Prized. And, most of all, removed. Physically removed by his improved finances, certainly, but also removed psychologically by his new celebrity. A cynosure cannot enjoy the sort of anonymity that once allowed him to dwell in a neighborhood and observe others surreptitiously while going unobserved himself. A true local hero--the high school football star, the prize-winning economics professor newly come onto campus for a guest lectureship, the mayor who's lured big business to town--gets friendly greetings from passing cars and pats on the back from pedestrians. But the world-famous writer, like the world-famous anyone, is in danger of being mobbed or stalked or killed if he tries to become part of a neighborhood. He or she must dwell apart in the semimythical land of Celebrityhood. And that is a place that knows no real locality at all.

There may always be writers who enjoy that sort of celebrity (J. K. Rowling is the latest) but their numbers will almost certainly decrease as time goes on and the reading of novels is enjoyed by a constantly shrinking audience. But since there will also always be writers who simply need to write out of the sheer hunger to arrange words, explore ideas, and create characters, and since computers now allow such would-be authors the small, neat pleasures of desktop publishing with its clean, professional looking scripts ready for handsome binding, a new, more modest image of the budding writer may someday emerge: not the brash tyro aiming to have Manhattan and, soon, the rest of the world at his feet, but someone who comes close to resembling the writer-as-local-hero of the distant past. Let me give an example of one such author whom I've observed in the flesh and up close.

I enter the Russell Public Library of Middletown, Connecticut, just around the corner from Wesleyan University. Walking past the circulation desk, I turn left and enter a publisher's office.

No, wait, it's not a publisher's office but the library's reference department. But, behold, in one corner, publishing is indeed in progress. Crouched over a computer keyboard is a middle-aged man with a pate appropriately monkish and a face appropriately gnomic, for like any good writer he coaxes his thoughts onto the page with the humble intensity of a monk decorating a manuscript or the greedy intensity of a gnome counting his gold. He has slipped his complete works onto some disks which he carries to and from the library. With the aid of a benevolent library computer technician, he has installed a wide variety of typefonts on the hard drive which not only he but any other library patron can employ (thereby making our writer not only the beneficiary but the benefactor of the library), and once he has written at least a couple of drafts in longhand, he chooses the most appropriate font for the story or essay in progress, types it, revises again and again until satisfied, prints, photocopies, turns the results over to a bindery, and winds up with the latest of several handsome booklets with blue or purple or red covers, puckishly decorated by their author. Presto, a twenty-first-century descendant of the Elizabethan chapbook.