A Song for the Unsung

– Destiny is the finest incentive –

Recently I read a New York Times Book Review article that discussed books solely in terms of the amount each author was paid. To my eyes, this is not a valid or worthwhile way to talk about literature, or other art for that matter. According to the specious logic of such a discussion, culture is little more than a byproduct of commerce — the better-paid a book, the more worthy of attention.

I believe passionately that young writers — or old, still-struggling ones — ought to be championed in their wildly impractical, unlucrative pursuits, even if the dominant discourse is all about cash, film deals, and bestseller lists, so I promptly wrote the following letter to the editor. It appeared in the paper’s May 3^rd edition.

I reprise the letter here for any reader engaged in an as yet unacknowledged creative enterprise.

Michael Meyer’s piece “About That Book Advance…” (Sunday, April 12, 2009) discusses fiction publishing in terms that hardly ever apply in reality, or terms more relevant to the publishing of non-fiction. While advance payment is the rule for memoirs or informational books, only the minutest fraction of published fiction writers command up-front cash for work still unfinished.

Wildly lucky name-grade authors notwithstanding, most fiction writers — even those with one or more novels to their credit — must labor, often for years, sans payment. What’s more, in our increasingly doctrinaire publishing climate, even the finest among them labor sans all guarantees of eventual publication or income; one could argue — and demonstrate persuasively — that the greater number of literature’s real practitioners (those who have not let cynicism and status anxiety eat away their gifts) work under such conditions. Laboring slowly, unhonored and unpaid and bound toward an immaterial prize far more meaningful than “success” as New York parlance would have it, these writers have destiny for incentive — and perhaps the exemplars of bygone literary gods for inspiration. Unsung, they sing, and reap rewards that more than mitigate the annoyances of obscurity. Quietly, faithfully, their late-paid, ill-paid or altogether unpaid works go into the world untrumpeted, unreviewed and unbought, to give the lie to the fallacy decried by Annie Dillard a quarter-century ago: “that the novelists of whom we have heard are the novelists we have.”

In the likes of Whitman, Dickinson, Proust — and more recently Cormac McCarthy and the late Andre Dubus — these unsung have their forebears. It shall be said we did not know them at first. Meanwhile, they worked.

Rather than discuss contemporary literature or even contemporary publishing, Mr. Meyer’s article does little more than survey the New York Cult of Success. The art of language and story lives elsewhere, sustained by the unwavering economics of the spirit.

You may also enjoy:

“You Don’t Have to Be An Insider”

“Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation”

“What We Worship”

“A Message to Those Aspiring to Blend Money and Meaning“