Writers dream of duration. They can’t help it. So do lottery players fantasize fortunes, athletes victory, performers celebrity, and socialites éclat. Whatever tree we’re climbing, we pant for the top: even if the chance of getting there is zero, hey, stranger things have happened. Haven’t we an American pope?
I’ve always been a dreamer. The intensity of my ambition besotted me and blurred my common sense. A charter member of the Emily Dickinson Dream Club, I’d confide sotto voce how I’d get from here to there. Not only did she not sell, she did not publish in her lifetime, only a few scraps, and directed her trunk of poems to be deep-sixed after her death – speaking of longshots!
Age only grudgingly weans me from such nonsense. If I can’t read a bestseller, what makes me think I could write one! From college years I knew I wanted to be a writer – more than wanted, had to be – only vanity nixed that career. Avidity for victory, I sensed, might demolish any decency. Hadn’t I read Macbeth?
Lust cools – of the mind no less than the groin. Cool doesn’t mean vanish. In my dreams you may still observe me accepting my prize from the King of Sweden – humbly, of course – and no, I am not surprised.
George Santayana also suffered from this disease. Every writer does – especially, of such esoterica as poetry and thought. In his later years, he succumbed to temptation and produced a popular novel. It sold well, though it was not that good.
No matter Santayana denies his disease with aw-shucks deprecation, we can diagnose it from this (somewhat laborious) sentence in his autobiography: “That a man has preferences and can understand and do one thing better than another, follows from his inevitable limitations and definite gifts: but that which marks progress in his life is the purity of his art; I mean, the degree to which his art has become his life, so that the rest of his nature does not impede or corrupt his art, but only feeds it.”
Santayana mostly missed the duration jackpot. He survives today, a wisp of him, in quotation collections. He had genius as an aphorist – a lowly surly literary subspecialty. Few aphorists are happy with themselves: resentment concentrates their bitterness into darts. They sneer, snarl, snipe.
What is Santayana confessing in this writhing syntax? 1) No one can be blamed for their nature – what they desire, what they’re good at; but 2) success (“progress in life”) is not measured by prizes, but by “the purity of his art.” Since “purity of his art” sounds a lot like blather, he defines it as “the degree to which his art has become his life, so that the rest of his nature does not impede or corrupt his art, but only feeds it.” In other words, do what you love because you love it, do it better yet, and let that be your success.
He is talking to himself, of course – all writers do – counseling a contentment he can’t quite attain. Why can’t he just devote himself to excellence in thought and utterance and leave it at that! Why must this lust for eminence keep gnawing his gut? Why must he compose so competitively – with such finicky florid diction – while feigning simplicity! To prove a superiority few, if any, would appreciate?
His affliction explains my affection. We are drawn to fellow sufferers. Finally, age 73, I’m allowing myself to try to be a writer I admire. The glorious curse of vocation! Finally I am striving toward my true dream. How it hurts. How it glows.