The Hazards of a Career, The Rewards of a Vocation

– Maybe spiritual profits are enough. –

In response to last Monday’s post, How to Achieve Even While Losing, in which I described being rejected for a fellowship after laboring on the application for the better part of a year, the following comment came through:

I am just always wondering, why would someone spend so many months of time working and waiting — without a guarantee of success? Maybe I’m cynical, but while it’s good to do your best, it’s also helpful if it’s fruitful, no?

The reader poses a pertinent, entirely sensible question, the answering of which brings us home to the raison d’être of this blog — and certainly touches the heart of any enterprise driven more by inspiration than income.

In my own case, that enterprise is art (namely: literature), a thing of inestimable value defended powerfully by voices far more eloquent than mine. Here follow a few such defenses; their authority is emphasized by their longevity, each statement having endured for more than a century.

We are all condamnés as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve … We have an interval and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among ‘the children of this world,’ in art and song. … For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake. –Walter Pater (1868)

Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. --Oscar Wilde (1891)

The good [work of art] subsists and emits its light and stimulates our desire for perfection. — Henry James (1884)

If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. – Henry David Thoreau (1854)

Art, in these postulations, is held to be at one with life itself — or, perhaps, as today’s lingo would have it: Art is at one with “quality of life.”

Still, the practical hazards of art-making cannot be underestimated. Our reader’s comment addresses this fact directly.

Since the art of writing (in my case, fiction-writing) is perhaps the least lucrative of all, the writer or aspiring writer is often peculiarly charged to accept — and over time even affirm — a condition of impecuniousness.

“One has to be poor unto the tenth generation. … One has to be able at every moment to place one’s hand on the earth like the first human being.” Writing these unequivocal words in 1907, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke had already created some of the world’s most beautiful poetry. Still, he was and would remain mostly unknown and impoverished.

Why ever should a writer work for months on end — or years, for that matter — at something which holds no guarantee of success? Why voluntarily accept a life of Rilkean obscurity?

That’s a natural question considering the spirit of our age — an age in which, as cultural critic Lee Siegel points out in his book Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination:

It’s often the artists themselves — novelists, painters, filmmakers, television writers — who seem to believe that art is exploitable for nonartistic purposes. They seem to have given up on the idea of art as an autonomous end. Making art now serves as a means of advancement. … Art has become, as the people in the personnel department like to say, ‘goal-oriented.’

I addressed this very topic in my rejected fellowship application, where prompted to provide a brief narrative of my career. Here’s what I wrote:

At age twenty I packed a cardboard box with belongings and headed east by train to begin my artistic life in Massachusetts, 3,000 miles from my native California. A narrative of my career must start here, before my pen earned a dime, for, though today ‘literary success’ means seven figures and celebrity, the word sacrifice best describes the novelist’s vocation. To endure, one must abandon marketplace definitions of achievement. Yes, some writers deservingly rise in the world, but earnings, acclaim, and prestige have forever been remote from the essential, humbling work of sitting alone at a desk. As John Gardner observed, ‘For those who are authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough.‘

I continued:

It’s not high-level degrees, royalty checks, honors, or critical accolades that will here characterize my career, though I’ve attained the latter three. Rather, my early leap into a life devoted to literature for its own sake, a leap that left me little to lean on and promised few material rewards, best exemplifies my vocation. I’m a worker. Solitary commitment — and indeed sacrifice — are the truest attributes of my career course, and account for its successes.

After going on, my career narrative concluded:

Will my novels gain me wealth, honors, or social standing? My job is to think about other matters. I strive to lead a lifestyle that will allow me to write, and to write at the height of my powers.

This, I believe, is the bald truth about the life of the art-maker — and it’s a truth increasingly quashed in an era of all things careerist:

After most of a lifetime spent “scraping by,” as they say, secure retirement prospects are unlikely to await you. Meanwhile, moreover, you take the substantial psychological risk of being pegged the odd-ball in cocktail party discussions pertaining to ladders of success, moves up the wage scale, or acquisitions of second homes in vacation markets. You become somebody who does his/her own thing, and for that you earn fickle praise and more constant scorn. Maybe you even get good at your own thing and appear regularly in print or public exhibitions — still it’s unlikely to become a sustainable livelihood.

In short, you are unlikely to become what common parlance calls ‘a success.’

OK, but aspirants needn’t be cast down, for the perils described above are only the external vagaries of a life devoted to art-making. They eat away at the gifts of only those who approach art as career rather than vocation.

In an astonishing 2007 commencement address at Bellarmine University, the great (and largely unknown) writer and agrarian Wendell Berry sounded this note profoundly, urging the year’s graduates “toward responsible citizenship” in the following way:

You will have to avoid thinking of yourselves as employable minds equipped with a few digits useful for pushing buttons. You will have to recover for yourselves the old understanding that you are whole beings inextricably and mysteriously compounded of minds and bodies. You will have to understand that the logic of success is radically different from the logic of vocation. The logic of what our society means by ‘success’ supposedly leads you ever upward to any higher-paying job that can be done sitting down. The logic of vocation holds that there is an indispensable justice, to yourself and to others, in doing well the work that you are ‘called’ or prepared by your talents to do. And so you must refuse to accept the common delusion that a career is an adequate context for a life.

Here we return to the core matter: Life. And here I wish to suggest that art is not a career but a way of life.

Certainly it takes boldness of spirit (or call it dispassionate madness, if you like) to dispense with the most widely accepted ideas of “success” and to cultivate one’s own instead. But rewards flow back in the form of life enriched beyond measure.

In my senior year of high school I was blessed to enjoy the instruction of a brilliant teacher who knew how to make literature come alive and sing for his students. On a particular memorable day that year, while effusing about Wordsworth, the teacher paused to pose the question: Why read poetry? Why write it? Why value it?

The more eager amongst us flailed for a right-sounding answer: “Because it makes you a better person!” “Because reading makes you smart and helps you to think critically!” “Because being literate gives you political power.”

Such answers had grains of truth. But the teacher listened and smiled bemusedly. Then, in his impassioned manner, he lifted a finger and said, “Because literature and art are wonderfully impractical!”

We work in order to live. Our employment is often a pragmatic necessity. But most of what we live for is essentially impractical: falling in love, travel to far away lands, having a child, good music, fine dining, the reading of scripture. Life’s greatest joys provide us little or no material or economic advantages. These we might call The Wonderful Impractical.

Literature is one of these. It’s worth living for.

Unhonored and laboring slowly, late-paid, ill-paid, or altogether unpaid, the writer has destiny for incentive, and perhaps the exemplars of bygone literary gods for inspiration. Unsung, the writer sings, reaping an immaterial prize far more meaningful than “success” as society would have it, a prize that more than mitigates the annoyances of obscurity.

Men, such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because it is as good as money, — the “spoils,” so-called, “of office.” And why not? For they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them and they shall quit the false good and leap to the true. … This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1837)

You may also enjoy:

“How to Achieve Even While Losing”

“It Is Natural to Need Help”

“Fulfillment: a Work in Progress”

“In Defense of ‘Aimless’ Learning” (A.E. Housman on knowledge for knowledge’s sake)

“Measures of Success”

“The Heroic Journey”

“On Pilgrimage: The Ghosts Who Are My Teachers”

“The Ground Underfoot: Why Stories Matter“