It would have been sufficient, I’m very sure, to simply discard that fashionable quiver of limp arrows, as I have tried to do, avoiding any comparison to what constitutes ‘modern’ literature over the last few generations. My writing would likely have been just as easily dismissed as egotistical for not being in step in any case. But hubris has never been in short supply and I also wanted nothing less than to change the misdirection of modern literature that was already afoot. I wished to find something that might last a little longer than a memory of me. Arrogant, as I am, I did not want my work to mix with any of that. So, instead, I opened a bookshop to offer the work of others who had something in common with my cause, and I published some small works in that vein besides. Naturally, all of that was fairly much ignored as well.
Naive is not an adequate adjective. There is no time in my life that I was not aware of the disparities between myself, my work, and those ‘literary forces who controlled the Knopftian throne. I knew that I would not be welcomed with open arms, in any case. But the total dismissal of my existence was hard on that ego that drove me. What was being offered as an alternative to this culture without heroes? Was all myth to end in the ashes? Was the perfect grind of the machine really better than the rough imperfections of man?
In the meantime, all of this angst was supported by some precious jobs—jobs I hold dear now, in memory, for teaching me more and faster than the work I had envisioned for myself. For instance, I was a hotel desk clerk. The best job of all. Novels awash the bathrooms and abound the halls in hotels. A desk clerk is merely a scribe. Not overstated, playing fancy with words does not do this justice. My notebooks filled themselves and I got several novels out of that, but none as sad as the desiccated human suffering of our anti-hero, Homer Simpson, in Nathanael West’s Day of the Locusts. Still, West’s were published and mine were not. So that is that.
A point here is really that the ‘battle of the books’ was lost without me firing a single shot—lost before I was born. My efforts in the aftermath were futile. The King’s library had already been purged. The great classics were already relegated to pre-neutered departments in the universities that taught Nathanael West instead. There were no shoulders of giants left to stand upon, now, with the lifeless carcass of that most Swiftian hero, Gulliver, pinned to the earth. My role was proscribed. I must enter the battle on their terms or be ignored.
But my nature was opposite. I was too stupid to appreciate my own foolishness. I wallowed in the self-justifications of my own Dunning–Kruger effect before the syndrome was discovered.
I think, in retrospect, that my ignorance saved me. Had I been aware of the matter, I would have given it up, not as a lost cause, but as not worth the effort. No one really cared… I was that immature. But I was having so much fun, even in the various depths of the failures that I wrought. Not so brave; I shy from pain like everyone else. But the pleasures of writing and publishing and books themselves, must be like having delightful sex on your death bed. And I still wonder at that.
What is that great gratification all about? It is joy, certainly. But why? Is it something the Neanderthal knew from the first invention of language. Deep in the bone chilling cold of a dark cave, in the flicker of tallow light, where few might ever see, they wrote with depictions of what they saw. I suppose then, by comparison, being ignored by twits is not so bad. Their pleasure was not in fame but in the mental leap of thought to stone. Did they have a sense of their posterity even then, or just a stone-cold posterior.
I have nothing to complain about in that regard. Every moment I write is a pleasure. Even the failures. Of all the thousands of unfinished works that frustrated me with problems I could not solve, I can still read those pieces now and recall the thought I had. I am the Neanderthal reimagining his prey out of a few strokes of paint that I mixed myself. More got away than were caught in the web of words, but the memory of the thought alone is worth the disappointment.
Amidst the billions of us, the scatological Dream Life of Balso Snell does not define our efforts. The Iliad does. And the effort to accept West’s piece of masochism as a defining artifact of our culture is malicious. Destructive. Pointless unless the effort is meant to be harmful.
The nameless beauty of the cave paintings include child-like handprints that make me wonder about the dreams of those people who took the time to express their thoughts on stone. These were the first skirmishers in the battle of the books. They are our first heroes. It is easily imagined that parents once copied the hands of their children there, thinking not only of fun, but immortality. We wish such things for our children. That is our motive. That is the hubris of mankind.