A BODY OF WORK
A body of work is the sum total of what a writer can produce over a lifetime. It took me decades to realize that even a person who considers her or himself to be a talented writer, it’s not a reality unless one actually writes and it is recognized by others. It has taken far too many decades for me to produce a body of work, partly because of lack of time and energy; partly because of not having developed a thought-world worth recording. It may be that my writing is never recognized by others, just being a point of pride for myself.
But lately people — probably because of the isolation and anxiety of the pandemic and partly because of direct cyber-access to writers — have tried to pull me into relationship, trivial stuff, the kind of shared passing of time together that makes people feel more confident, as though they matter, as though in a bar because they need to be a little drunk to assert that. I avoid it as though it were a plague in itself.
When Bob Scriver died and his bronzes went to the Montana Historical Society, there were almost a thousand separate works. This is not a “try” but an achievement and I helped to make it so and I am proud. But that decade-long investment in his work delayed my own work even as it became a basic element of his. An abiding question is whether my devotion was worth it in terms of the quality of his work. Was he good enough to justify my time?
The irony of writing is that no one thinks you are doing anything. Most people don’t write and the print they see is done, published. Most people have not understood the deep changes wrought by the internet. They only see the computer screen and have not understood that books have been produced by a system that advanced money to secure rights, printed as many copies as they thought they could sell, sent salesmen to promote them in media and bookstores, stored the unsold books in a warehouse until the cost of storage exceeded possible sales, then pulped the paper the “book” is printed on.
Second layer businesses like used books or “remainders” either didn’t exist or were small, hard-to-find. These days books are pirated to the internet, bought and sold online or in catalogues, and might not be in print at all but rather in sound. One can find them if one knows what to ask for.
People will ask, “how long did it take you to write this”? referring to a book or article, as though it were chopping wood or doing bookkeeping. (That says “book” doesn’t it?) But the truth is that a writer like me is writing all the time in my head, turning ideas over, making connections, remembering events and people. Anything else steals my time. Yet people don’t think I’m doing anything and have no worries unless I’m writing like in the movies: sitting at a desk obsessing and throwing wads of discards around the room. This is particularly a problem for a retired person, who is assumed to be doing nothing, though most of the retired people I know are busier than if they had a job.
Another aspect of the kind of writing I’m doing is resisted by family, which is in part inquiry about why my brothers hated my father so much, who among my relatives suffered from the ubiquitous abuse that statistics assure us that at least a third of children receive, why no one rose through jobs to real money, whether being proud of a European ethnic origin is realistic, and whether it smart to even consider all this stuff. Why do I worry about not having enough to eat? I don’t mean having enough money, I mean food in the cupboard. Rationing or poor planning or no money?
Most of the people I know would say “just move on” the way they talk about the Jan 6 attack on the US Capitol. But the kind of education I have says this is what’s vital to human beings, understanding it all — even the embarrassing and wicked parts. How else can we learn from it, share it, and truly move on in a new way?
One constraint is that of stigma. Not the big ones, though the taint of being female is pretty big. But even the little ones like red hair or family prejudices. Besides suppressing some things, other innocent things are seen as offenses and attacked. For instance, it dawned on me that my parents did not plan to have three children, that the third one was attended with enormous emotion which at age 4 I remembered but didn’t really understand. The condom contraception strategy failed, abortion was out of the question, and from then on there was never quite enough money.
Some relatives thought that pointing this out was a failure to appreciate the joy of babies and an attack on my brother for existing. My mother went back to the hospital after the third baby for “repairs.” It must have been to have her tubes tied. Did my father have a vasectomy as well? He had been so vocal and boasting about condoms, which were illegal and came in the mail in a plain brown wrapper, thus seeming gallantly defiant of restrictions.
So many things have happened that I didn’t really understand but managed to mark for memory, assuming — since everyone said that I would understand when I was older — that it would untie the knots. What I know now is that the knots need compassion because the untying can be nearly unbearable. Also, some things must wait until people have died and cannot be hurt or fired from their jobs or shunned by their friends. I tend to err on the side of too early.
Working on this material is like doing work with a therapist, not so much a effort to heal neurosis as a psychoanalysis that tries to understand psychic structure and what created it. But a writer does not usually have a helper who keeps them from terror and despair, from blaming and attacking oneself — a helper who could suggest options and alternatives. We used to have older relatives who could do such a thing. Maybe an agent. Without a helper it is no wonder that writers sometimes despair or go wild.
A man asked me what I did. “I’m a writer,” I said. “Oh, then do you sit at a typewriter with whisky and a cigar, snarling at the world?” I snarl. I sometimes wish I were a drinker but there is no cigar. No Book-of the Month designation or best-sellerdom exists. These things are of a period that is by-gone now. Now the idea is to be oppressed, scarred and indignant but recognized by dedicated organizations as brilliant. I’m not that, either.
I’d say I was timeless except that I need my time. I do not need fans or neighbors or other limpets who suck my energy (I don’t have a dick) and try to make me write what pleases them. I’d say something even more rude, but it might just intrigue them. I’m creating a body of work and — if I don’t run out of toner terminally — it might at least be in print.
