Essay by Ptolemy's daughter

The Road by Which the Writer Perishes

By Alexandra Subramanian

The publishing industry is currently undergoing technologically- induced transformations that provide terrific challenges and opportunities both for writers and people within the industry. One can read about the evolution of these changes within the publishing world daily in articles and blogs, if one chooses to keep up with this sort of thing. I subscribe to the Shatzkin Files, a blog about publishing, as well as to Publishers Marketplace, which keeps its members up to date on every book that is sold to a publisher or any news happening in the publishing world, for that matter. I can’t say that it’s a cheery pastime, and I often choose not to read these updates, but my consciousness about what is happening in the world of publishing prompts me to contemplate some of the challenges for the solitary writer in all of this. What are the implications for the individual authors who are serious about their craft and wish to get published? Should there be some signposts for writers? Some “writer beware” signs erected in some key spots in online universe where thoughtful people roam?

It is difficult to imagine during these times a writer living quietly, unmolested by the outside world, as Eudora Welty did for years in her home in Jackson, Mississippi. Throughout her long career, Eudora Welty never once tailored her writing to suit the demands of publishers; rather, she was protected from the ever-increasing commercialism of the literary marketplace by her beloved agent, Diarmuid Russell, who understood his role to be that of “intermediary or buffer between the artist and the marketplace” (see Micheal Kreyling’s Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell).

Likewise, we can look back with nostalgia upon the life of an eccentric genius like William Faulkner, who drank too much, fell off horses, and depended upon his publishers at Random House to nurse him through love affairs and hangovers, to fill his pockets when needed, and to keep his books in print when nobody wanted to buy them. Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer of Random House indulged Faulkner’s unruly habits and whims for years before their firm eventually profited from his novels because Faulkner was a genius, of course, and his publishers were willing to empty their own pockets to support him without any insurance whatsoever that he would become the profitable backlist author that he eventually became.

We cannot begin to count the number of hours that the legendary Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins spent pruning Thomas Wolfe’s prose to prepare books like Look Homeward, Angel for publication. And let’s not forget the hours the editor spent with his client over drinks, incorporating the young man into his life in such a way that the writer became nothing less than the son Perkins never had.

A new era in publishing has dawned, and what writers confront more than ever is the business of publishing, the business of authorship. The commercialism of the literary marketplace that Eudora Welty’s agent resisted has arrived with a vengeance, and there is no going back.

How many editors at major publishing houses today have the time or the leeway to take the kinds of risks that the editors and publishers of old considered to be part of their job description? Thankfully, there are numerous editors who do consider quality of writing as paramount and who will give first-time authors a try, but it is difficult to believe this as an aspiring writer.

The online universe is flooded with information about how to find and agent and how to get published. The prescriptions are daunting and apt to leave the most sensitive and self-effacing of writers (often the most talented) with terrible case of the jitters, as if aspiring writers really need anything more than their own over-charged imaginations to contribute to their feelings of failure, anxiety, and insecurity.

But just how is a person supposed to react when informed, oh so casually, that a writer, especially of a book of non-fiction (to get published by a commercial press) must either be a celebrity already or make oneself into one in a jiffy? An aspiring writer could go insane even contemplating the requirements necessary to get on the bandwagon of self-promotion.

How not to fall into a depression at the thought of having to merely sell one’s soul?

Recently, I read a book about how authors can build an online platform, only to discover that all the authors interviewed were using writing as means of growing their businesses. One of the authors interviewed put it succinctly. “In short,” he said, “I view books as an advertising media.” Gulp.

On another occasion, I sat at my computer dutifully listening to one agent’s prescriptions for writers who, to his mind, undoubtedly needed to become wise to the realities of the commercialized marketplace. One audience member had the temerity to bring the word art, or the desire to be an artist, into the discussion, at which point she was abruptly silenced and told that she should have no illusions. Thinking about oneself as an artist is quaint and sentimental, she was told, but really now. How might she expect to find an agent with those kinds of outdated notions milling around in her head?

I’m embarrassed to say now that after listening to that lecture I spent some time weeping in the bathtub. Honestly, though, it was demoralizing and a depressing sign of the times, and I did not miss the opportunity to indulge in a cathartic moment.

I realize now that there is a way to distance all of this, to treat it with a grain of salt. What helps me the most is my interest in literary history. We can learn from the artists who have preceded us. We can read their fiction and their rich correspondence, if it has been published, and we can read literary biographies.

We can remember that we do not have to be seduced or misled by all the information floating about somewhere “out there” in the online universe. Indeed, what are the consequences of succumbing to the hype, to the pressure to transform oneself into what we are not? It is worth contemplating.

People who are truly driven to write will do so quietly, in their own time and in their own way, because they are propelled by an inner determination and direction that has set them on a path that they must follow, for better or for worse. These are our artists, those people without whom our world would be impoverished.

These artists face enormous challenges, and contemplating their fate inspires me to invoke the wisdom of one of my favorite writers, Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), who won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter in 1964, and who published a bestselling novel, Ship of Fools, in 1962, after thirty years of trying to write a full length novel.

There is something simultaneously inspiring and comforting about invoking the wisdom of a literary master who lived well before the age of platforms and brands. She is one of the writers who can help us to get back to the nuts and bolts of thinking about what it means to be a writer.

Throughout writing life, Porter proclaimed her pure, unadulterated dedication to art and literature, and her words put this business of reducing writers to creators of advertising media into perspective.

In a letter to her sister penned in 1949, Porter summed up her dedication to craft this way:

“I know well that if I were not a writer, if I did not have that profound solid ground of life-long love and interest to stand on, I would not take the trouble to live another day. But that gives meaning and hope to everything, it is quite literally WHY I have lived and what I live FOR.”

Art for Porter, quite simply, meant life.

Yet Porter, like most writers, had to struggle with financial strains and pressures, and she had to promote her writing when her publishers would not. She gave many public readings during her lifetime, and she brought a sense of flair and style to her public appearances that few today could hope to replicate. She presented herself to her audiences with hair beautifully coiffed, wearing robes long and swinging, and she read in her raspy, melodic, southern voice, seducing the audience with her charm. She promoted her work because she needed the money. But she knew well what most writers need, herself included, which is long unbroken hours of solitude and isolation, without distractions.


Porter thus cultivated a public persona, but this did not change her fundamental notion that, as an artist, she was a hardworking, humble craftsperson and not a self-promoting careerist.

In “My First Speech” (1934, see The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter), Porter explains: “Craftsmanship is a homely, workaday thing. It is a little like making shoes, or weaving cloth. A writer may be inspired occasionally: that’s his good luck; but he doesn’t learn to write by inspiration: he works at it. In that sense the writer is a worker, a workingman, a workingwoman. Writing is not an elegant pastime, it is a sober and hardworked trade, which gives great joy to the worker. The artist is first a worker. He must role up his sleeves and get to work like a bricklayer . . . [Writing] is not a career, it is a vocation; it is not a means to fame and glory—it is a discipline of living—and unless you think this, it is better not to take it up. It is not the sort of thing one “takes up” as one might take up knitting and put it down again.”

Writing is not the sort of thing one takes up, in short, as a road to fame and fortune, although of course, in the world of celebrity authors, one might begin to imagine that this is what it’s all about. Choose a genre that has some appeal—romance, chick lit, horror, how to make a million bucks and lose four hundred pounds in three weeks, you get the picture. Do the numbers on one’s potential audience and competition and start building that platform (meaning, begin the transformation of self into celebrity, if you have the misfortune of not being one already). Then, target an agent who will be interested in selling what you have to sell (I mean, write). Voila! You’re on your way.

Needless to say, this is all very discouraging for people who actually wish to write seriously.

Porter believed that a writer must be free, radically free, from worrying about what any outside party might have to say about her writing. The minute a writer begins to take the temperature of those in her midst in order to please, she has begun a journey down the road by which the artist in her will surely perish. In 1939, when asked if she thought of herself as writing for a definite audience, Porter said this:

“It is true that I place great value on certain kinds of perceptive criticism but neither praise nor blame affects my actual work, for I am under a compulsion to write as I do; when I am working I forget who approved and who dispraised and why. The worker in an art is dyed in his own color, it is useless to ask him to change his faults or his virtues; he must, rather more literally than most men, work out his own salvation. No novelist or poet could possibly ask himself, while working: “What will a certain critic think of this? Will this be acceptable to my publisher? Will this do for a certain magazine? Will my family and friends approve of this?” Imagine what that would lead to. . . . And how much worse, if he must be thinking, “What will my political cell block think of this? Am I hewing to the party line? Do I stand to lose my job, or head, on this? This is really the road by which the artist perishes.”

Writing, according to Porter, is thus a discipline, one that brings joy to the writer, as well as great discomfort, as painful, say, as “attempting to tap one’s spinal fluid.” An artist will take her own material and shape it into art: “No one else,” Porter advises, “can tell him what life is like to him, in what colors he sees the world . . . He cannot even worry about whether the publishers are going to accept his work or not; if he does, he is as good as done for: he may as well never have begun.”

Porter’s words, written or spoken not so very long ago, offer an implicit critique of today’s commercialized, technologically and profit-driven marketplace. Her wisdom is worth contemplating. It forces one to step back from reading all about what it takes to become a published author, and it commands one to investigate what kind of writer one aspires to become.

In April of 2010, I sat on a panel of biographers at the LA Times festival of books, and I listened to authors who had given over many years of their lives to writing the lives of their subjects. Through hard work and great perseverance, these authors had produced biographies that illuminated their subjects and that had the power to transform and educate their readers.

To write a full- length biography of a writer’s life requires years of work and sacrifice (from ten to twenty years is not unusual); it is a labor of love, one that brings the author a large measure of anguish, as well as pleasure, satisfaction and deep fulfillment. Biographers, unless they are very well known (or telling the lives of celebrities), are not motivated by fame or fortune, for that would be sheer folly.

In the same non-commercial vein, on the eve of World War II in 1940, Porter had this to say about the reprinting of her first, brilliant collection of short stories, Flowering Judas: “They were done with intention and in firm faith, though I had no plan for their future and no notion of what their meaning might be to such readers as they would find.” She had written the stories included in this slim book in between two world wars, during a period of “grotesque dislocations in a whole society when the world was heaving in the sickness of millennial change.” She celebrates their survival through “this crowded and slowly darkening decade.”

Everything in Porter’s being would have revolted at the idea of putting the individual artist in the same category as persons who view authorship as a vehicle for short-term gain, as an advertising media. I think we can all agree that the books that have changed our lives have nothing in common with the phenomenon of celebrities masquerading as writers. To my mind, aspiring writers with the bold intention of contributing something meaningful to the world, however humble the offering, should be true to themselves and block out the media noise.

Porter would have despaired if she could have seen how much of our written culture has been reduced to the level of quick entertainment and advertising. For Porter found stability and permanence in art, and her dedication to vocation was what gave her life meaning and made her life worth living:

“In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune,” she wrote in her introduction to Flowering Judas and Other Stories, “the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass; but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilizations that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.”

As early as the 1930s, Porter was already issuing warnings to her fellow writers about the pitfalls of writing to please others, about the dangers of selling one’s artistic soul in order to achieve the short-term goal of finding a publisher and gaining approval and recognition. Now more than ever we are barraged with prescriptions and advice on how to make our writing popular and salable.

But at what cost? Surely, this is “the road by which the artist perishes.”