Steve Martin Tells the Story Before the Glory

— Here’s a good summer read that affirms the worth of obscurity, naïveté, and so-called “delusions.”—

I find myself at a semi-nascent period of my career as an earning writer—that is, earnings are no longer merely nascent. Each year, just enough wages come through to contribute a decent supplementary income to my household. That is something to be extremely grateful for—and grateful I am, everyday.

But keeping even the little checks coming continues to be a struggle week by week. And an optimistic outlook, rugged perseverance, and a brave belief in the worth of the work at hand all become more important as time goes by. For despite my many plans, ambitions, works-in-progress, and continuing commitment to my art, the future remains uncertain.

This is the story of many a working writer—and has been so for ages, as anyone can see by reading the correspondence or journals of any number of even our greatest authors. Henry James’ notebooks contain a fair share of biographical evidence to this point. In 1889 James anxiously writes:

I simply must try, and try seriously, to produce half a dozen—a dozen, five dozen—plays for the sake of my pocket, my material future. Of how little money the novel makes for me I needn’t discourse here.

(Perhaps a need to remind myself of this plight of penury—and affirm it as universal to most all writing lives—was in part what compelled me to publish a novel about the impoverished poet Rilke.)

Ultimately, most writers can only bend their heads, keep working, and strive to be their best. “Success” as the world knows it is wholly beyond our control, and anyway mostly irrelevant to the substance of our daily labors. “For us, there is only the trying,” said T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets.

But struggling as I am to keep the small checks coming, the mystery of success remains a natural subject for pondering, so I was primed recently to delight in the new book, Born Standing Up, by comedian Steve Martin. It’s an eloquent narrative of awkward beginnings, perseverance, and accidental fame.

Martin devotes his attention to the long struggles, the necessary obsession, the small and ill-paying—sometimes non-paying—triumphs that marked his journey to comedy dominance in the late 70s, and this sets his book apart from the standard celebrity memoir. There’s no gratuitous namedropping in Born Standing Up, not a bit of juicy insider gossip. Martin’s subject is his apprenticeship in—and his ultimate abandonment of—stand-up comedy. He begins:

I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.

This eighteen year period took him from youthful gigs at Kiwanis Clubs in his native Southern California, through employment at Disneyland during his teenage years and a repertory act at Knott’s Berry Farm during college, to eventual fame and fortune as a stand-up comedian who regularly sold-out giant stadiums.

Most fascinating about the book is Martin’s central confession: his complete lack of natural talent.

I had absolutely no gifts…Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.

That aphorism becomes Martin’s pervasive theme as he recounts his experience pursuing a lifelong passion—and finding himself subject to the incidental whims of fortune and success.

I was seeking comic originality, and fame fell on me as a by-product. The course was more plodding than heroic: I did not strive valiantly against doubters but took incremental steps studded with a few intuitive leaps. I was not naturally talented—I did not sing, dance, or act—though working around that minor detail made me inventive.

Martin has always had a serious streak. All comedians do, of course—their craft demands a rigorous personality infused with perfectionism (see the film Comedian, which follows Jerry Seinfeld through the grueling process of developing new stand-up material). But few comedians have incorporated their serious side into their public career as has Martin, who’s long expressed an interesting blend of zany and heartfelt. His play Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a perfect example of his rounded style, as are the films L.A. Story and Roxanne, both wonderful comedy/melodramas that originated as Martin authored screenplays.

Like his best movie moments, Martin’s book is a refreshing blend of the breezy and the thoughtful. His motive here is not to produce a work of chuckle-inducing comic writing (see his earlier book, Pure Drivel, for that). In Born Standing Up, Martin provides a longer-lasting service to his reader. The memoir engages, entertains, and instructs. It will resonate emotionally with anyone who longs to bring their passion and a pursuit of excellence to convergence in hopes of earning a living.

Martin has a knack for quotable insights. Born Standing Up is jeweled with them. He writes:

I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you’re about to do.

And later on:

Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

The book repeatedly affirms the worth of obscurity, naïveté, and these so-called “delusions.” And that’s a marvelously unique perspective to take as a basis for what, as we all know, becomes a tale of staggering worldly success.

What comes through in Martin’s story perhaps most palpably, most movingly, is the precious fleetingness of his apprenticeship period, before the arrival of mastery, before the glories of success or the rewards of fame, when the sole significant payoff of performing was the pure and resonant joy it brought. Here Born Standing Up, which at first appears to be a chronicle of a much-coveted pinnacle gained and abandoned, becomes an allegory of the importance of living life and cherishing one’s work each and every instant. Whatever our circumstances may be, however far from the ideal our careers may seem to run, there is always the work at hand to be nurtured with passion and delight. Recognizing and cherishing that reward—that we are doing exactly the thing we most wish to be doing, that we are learning daily—is the essential task of a fulfilled life.

In 1981, the year Steve Martin quit stand-up comedy forever, he was 36 years old, and he had become far more famous than he really wanted to be.

Though the audiences continued to grow, I experienced a concomitant depression caused by exhaustion, isolation, and creative ennui… This was, as the cliché goes, the loneliest period of my life.

I was caught and I could not quit, because this multizeroed income might last only a moment. I couldn’t imagine abandoning something I had worked so hard to craft. I knew about the flash in the pan, I had seen it happen to others, and I worried about it happening to me.

But it’s in freedom that the passing of time is sweetest—the freedom to learn, experiment, and make useful mistakes. And Martin had grown to understand that he was no longer free to do the thing he most wanted to do. He had striven to become a performer, but now he found himself merely rehashing prior achievements in hopes of staying rich. He was no longer growing, and the joy was disappearing.

Toward the close of Born Standing Up, he tells of an impulsive visit he paid to the Bird Cage Theater at Knott’s Berry Farm some twenty-odd years after his early employment there. The theater is no longer in use. Martin lets himself in and stands alone in the musty dimness. In this space, which is still unchanged, he had learned some of his most enduring lessons about performance. Daily, with a troupe of performers, he entertained small audiences, experimented, played around onstage, and now and then failed freely—with no ill consequences, but immense lessons learned.

Light filtered in from the canvas roof, giving the Bird Cage a dim, golden hue. There I was, standing in a memory frozen in amber, and I experienced an overwhelming rush of sadness… [I] looked out at the empty theater and was overcome by the feeling of today being pressed into yesterday. I didn’t realize how much this place had meant to me.

Driving home along the Santa Ana freeway, I was still unnerved. I asked myself what it was that had made this place capable of inducing in me such a powerful nostalgic shock. The answer floated clearly into my consciousness as though I had asked the question of a Magic-8 Ball: I wanted to be there again, if only for a day, indulging in high spirits and hi jinks, before I turned professional, before comedy became serious.

The journey itself, the learning itself, the apprenticeship, the obscurity and marvelous naïveté—the struggle itself—is the beautiful thing, a freedom to be cherished. Many long for such freedom from the heights of whatever professional pinnacles they have reached.

Here again is Henry James writing in that notebook:

To accept the circumstances, in their extreme humility, and do the best I can in them: this is the moral of my present situation. They are the reverse of ideal—but there is this great fact that for myself at least I may make them better. To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived—to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that—this doubtless is the right way to live.

You might also enjoy: “Measures of Success,” and “Fulfillment: A Work in Progress”