WRITING HAPPENS
by the Editor
When on trial in the Soviet Union for ‘parasitism’, the poet Joseph Brodsky (according to fellow poet Michael Davidson) was asked by his accusers on whose authority he wrote poetry. He considered the question seriously for a moment and then replied, “I suppose — God’s.” I’ve thought about this story quite a bit during the last month, when a handful of EAP writers have worried aloud about where their authority to write what they write comes from. I thought about it when a fellow writer referred to me as ‘difficult’, and when I mildly asked her to explain what she had meant by that — as that’s one, among my many faults, I was rather startled to hear I possessed — she said: “It’s because you just write what you feel like, and you don’t think about what’s wanted in the marketplace.” Which was even more startling. I was difficult because I wrote what I wanted to? Because I wrote what I thought? Good heavens.
But now I can say, well, if that’s being difficult, then being difficult is an honorable state. And when the other writers worried about their credentials in saying what they, as honest, intelligent, thoughtful members of the polity actually saw and thought, I told them that a person who can say clearly what she or he thinks, no matter how unflattering to the audience or how uncongenial to the marketplace, is a valuable one to their society. That it’s the ideas and observations that are important, not the credits. That if something is true, then it should be said — it doesn’t have to be, nor should it be, vetted first by Time Warner or some functionary of Rupert Murdoch’s.
Someone once sent me the short publicity bio of a writer he thought EAP would want to pounce on, and that bio made me laugh out loud. It said he was a humble soul, this writer, who had been mentored by half a dozen of the most famous intellectuals of our generation. It said he was a hermit. The picture accompanying this was backlit with gold, the subject’s expression one of such intellectual purity as he grasped his pipe, that I could only think EAP wasn’t worthy to publish such a man’s work. I mean, we’re not big enough to hold a Voice of His Generation…if we even believed in such a thing. Which I kind of think we don’t. (Not to mention the fact that his photo made you think he spent his hermitic solitude thinking mainly about his publicity campaign.)
This month, one of my favorite EAP articles is John Merryman’s REVOLUTION HAPPENS . I admit it’s hard for most of us, me included, to work through some of the economic arguments — the state of our system of currency exchange being a subject a little tougher to take in than Britney’s breakdowns — but I think it’s worth it to read what a thoughtful, worried, well read person has to say about how our money should be a public commons, not private property after all. John’s not an economist, and if you asked him who gave him the authority to write such a thing, I think he’d be modestly aghast. No one gave him any authority. This is a subject he has pondered and wondered about and worried over, and he, as a citizen, is sharing the questions he has with us. In the end, that really is the best credential of all. I can’t, off hand, remember exactly what credentials Thomas Jefferson had to found a country, or even to try to start a wine industry in Virginia. But I do recall that, in the end, time proved the worth of what he had to say, not Time magazine after all.
(By the way, if anyone out there knows a real hermit who’d like to share her or his thoughts with us, I would be very pleased if you would put me in touch. Anyone these days who spends their lives in real solitude would have something very real to say.)
Welcome back.