The Weekly Screed (#632)

The proof is in the proving
By David Benjamin

PARIS — In a casual e-mail exchange with Jerry, an old friend who lives Up North, I received a timely jolt.

Writing tongue-in-cheek to Jerry about a “Wall of Honor” that’s being erected at our old high school, I suggested that — since I might be the school’s most “significant author” — maybe I should get my name etched on the wall among the quarterbacks, aldermen and Homecoming queens. Jerry replied, tersely, that I'm so far beneath “significant” that a word like “supercilious” is a compliment.

For that, I owe old Jerry a debt of gratitude.

Lately, I’m surrounded by friends and classmates who are either retired or retiring — a fate I can’t imagine for myself, because, in many respects, I’m still at the entry level in my so-called career. I’m a novelist without a published novel.

In my defense, of course, there are numbers I could throw at Jerry, among them the roughly five million words I’ve written as a journalist and the awards I’ve received for a few of them. I’ve scribbled at least a thousand op-ed essays on subjects ranging from girls field hockey in Massachusetts to emperor worship in Japan, each time pretending to know what I was talking about. I’ve had bylines all over the place, from the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune to Shukan Bunshun.

I could boast to Jerry that I’ve actually gotten books into print (although one was as a ghostwriter), one of them published by Random House, an imprint I’ve revered since childhood.

But that’s all blood under the bridge and Jerry knows it. He’s not impressed. Nor am I. I’ve got manuscripts to publish and new, better books to write. I’ve got Jerry to convince and an ego to satisfy.

A writer, like a football coach, is only as good as his next game. If he’s serious about his craft, he doesn’t rest on his laurels, even if he has some, which I don’t. If he has laurels, he burns them to keep his typing finger warm and to show forth his contempt for conventional honors, like the Wall of Honor at his old high school. No writer, as Groucho might remark, would ever join a club that would tolerate his membership.

I take it as a badge of courage, for example, that I was banned from writing for the student newspaper at that old high school, and that — despite (well, because of) writing the bestselling book ever about sumo wrestling — I was denounced publicly by the Japan Sumo Association. Denounced! At a press conference. At the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan.

Jerry’s reminder of my wasted life is especially cogent since the death of my literary agent, Jack Scovil. Jack was a wonderful man whom I think of as the Last Gentleman in New York. But he threw a blood clot last year and left me stranded, naked and unconnected, in the Manhattan publishing jungle.

There’s not much difference between a homeless panhandler holding up a cardboard sign and a storyteller without an agent. My current count of “queries” sent to the agent community is 209. Among these, seventy-odd agents have replied with formal rejections. The remainder simply hit the “DELETE” key.

Among all the rejections, the only one that really stung was Jerry’s, because it was both knowledgeable and personal.

Jerry’s little jab reminded me that writing is a job — well, actually, it’s a compulsion which, if left untreated, develops into a pathology — that requires its practitioner to start all over at the bottom, every day. Forever. Past accomplishments — clippings, bylines, tearsheets, links, samples, URLs, books, editorial positions, whatever — they’re all yesterday’s news and today’s birdcage liner. The only relevant question is: Can you do it again? Every day, every writer is as blank as the sheet of paper in his typewriter or the screen on her Mac.

As Jerry pointed out pointedly, you don’t get — or deserve — credit for calling yourself a writer, or “author,” or mounting a stump and claiming to be an “artist.” It doesn’t even come down to just writing. It comes own to words in print, and getting words into print mostly means proving yourself to people who are weary of words in print, who’ve read so much — good and bad — that they hate to read anything and resent, if not hate, the people who send them more stuff to read. Success means getting the approval of the same prose-fatigued cynics who turned down Joseph Heller, Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, repeatedly and emphatically. Today, in New York, on Broadway, Shakespeare would be roadkill.

So, I owe thanks to Jerry, for reminding me that while I’m auditioning, over and over, for fussy little gatekeepers in Manhattan who call themselves literary associates but are really salesmen and salesgirls, I still have to prove myself to my friends, many of whom must be wondering why I never hot a haircut and got a real job, and what the hell I’m trying to accomplish at my age, writing stories that are seemingly not good enough to pass inspection with a lot of cloistered cynics who call themselves literary while all belonging to the Romance Writers of America.

Jerry’s truest act of friendship was to tell me that whatever I’ve done, it’s not enough. If I haven’t convinced him, who’s an old drinking buddy inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt, I’ve got a lot of work to do. This is Day One — again — and I’d better get moving.

Jerry made me think: When you’re everybody’s retirement age, and you think you’ve worked at least as hard as everyone else but you can’t impress your best friends with your life’s work so far, well… It either kills you or lights a fire.

I guess the fire is there, or I wouldn’t be halfway through a new short story and starting out my 210th letter to another snob in New York City.

So, Jerry. Go to hell.