In my next incarnation, I may not choose again to be the daughter of a Famous Author. The pay is good, and there are fringe benefits, but the working conditions are too hazardous. People who live entirely by the fertility of their imaginations are fascinating, brilliant,and often charming, but they should be sat next to at dinner parties, not lived with. Imagine depending for your happiness upon a Bernard Shaw or a Somerset Maugham, not to mention such contemporary stars as Norman Mailer! I have the impression that the only people quite as insufferable as writers are painters.
I have much puzzled over the why of this, and have complied a few tentative answers. First, I suppose it is impossible to form the habit of inventing people, building them up, tearing them down, and moving them around like paper dolls, without doing somewhat the same thing with live ones. Good writers are essentially nutcrackers, exposing the scandalous condition of the human soul. It is their job to strip veneers from situations and personalities. The rest of us accept our fellow beings at face value, and swallow what we can’t accept. Writers can’t; they have to prod, poke, question, test, doubt, and challenge, which requires a constant flow of fresh victims and fresh experience.
Second, there is nothing anybody else can do to help a writer. A company president can take on an executive assistant; a lawyer can hire a clerk; even a housewife can unload up to seventy or eighty percent of her duties. The poor writer can turn to no one but himself until his work is finished, when he can take it to an editor who will show him how to start all over, by himself.
He can never say, “Here, Mary-you know this subject as as I do- be a dear and finish this paragraph for me, will you?”
Third, successful writers, like all successful people, are spoiled and indulged by everybody with whom the come in contact. They are, at the same time, spared the rod of discipline imposed by other occupations. A senator must face the press, greet thousands of constituents, sit through vistaless Saharas of banquets without the oasis of an entertaining word or a glass of wine. An actress must turn up at the theater or the movie set, take care of her looks, memorize her lines. The poor writer is free to do whatever he chooses; if he chooses to get drunk, who can fire him? Between himself and doom stands no one but his creditor.
Revered and pampered, he must sit down at his desk each day alone, without rules or guidelines, exactly as if he had preciously accomplished nothing, Small wonder he is not all sweetness and light when he emerges, often unvictoriously, from the battle.
