It Ain’t Work | Dave's Place

This Is How I Spend My Holidays

My family and I just spent a week in Pittsburgh. The purpose of the visit for me was to see my brother and his wife, to re-engage in the conversation that he and I have been having for the last sixty years or so, taking up where we left off. We spent every night but one at their place for dinner, though one night we brought the food. We also drove through my old neighborhoods, went to the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the Frick (we did Mt. Washington last year). My brother-in-law Louis is autistic and has Parkinson’s, so his mobility is limited and he uses a walker, but all of those places accommodated him.

We also went to a Pirate game, reserving special parking because of Louis, walking up the long winding ramp to the main floor, then going up an elevator to what is called the Club Level, where we more or less duplicated the box seat where I often sat as a kid, the season ticket that our next door neighbor sometimes gave us, if none of his clients wanted it. The view of the field and of the city skyline were magnificent. I have decided in my old age that baseball is once again my favorite sport, just as it was in the old days. Louis and I attended games in Asheville and Durham this summer, but the game in Pittsburgh was the apogee of our experience in every way (except that the Pirates lost. But what the hell; even that resembles my youth[1]).

Lest someone think that my old neighborhood of Point Breeze is boring, let me mention that within two blocks of my grandparents’ house, which was across the street from Sterrett School, there is a New Church, dedicated to the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg (a man studied by two such different people as William Blake and D.T. Suzuki) and the Frick Museum, on a large expanse of lawn which used to be empty (and where I once went to fly a kite), but now houses a beautiful small art museum that currently has an exhibit by Romare Bearden. The Frick also includes a coffee shop and an auto and carriage museum with vehicles once owned by the Fricks, including two Rolls Royces which are, as Louis noted, nearly a hundred years old and in mint condition. Louis was rather more interested in the cars than in the Bearden exhibit, and when we later went into the beautiful bookstore in Bloomfield[2], just a couple of blocks from the Airbnb where we were staying, Louis asked if they had any books an old cars. Alas, they did not. They did have a great backlist of fiction.

We drove back from Pittsburgh on Sunday, and Labor Day was Monday; I took a walk with my wife in the morning and also went out and stocked up on groceries. But in the afternoon, after I’d done all that, I had retreated to my study for a couple of hours in the afternoon when my wife burst in and said, What are you doing? Working? It’s a holiday! Why are you working? A remark I’ve heard from wives and other people for fifty years at least. To top it all off, somebody on Twitter posed the question, of the #WritingCommunity, what do you do when you finish a long stint of work? How do you reward yourself?

My answer: I don’t do anything. Writing is the reward.

When I was a young teacher in Winston-Salem, having taught at a secondary school for the first (extremely difficult) semester, the day the semester ended, when we all attended a Christmas program that the school put on, I came home in the afternoon, had lunch, and sat down at the dining room table to write a short story. At last, I thought. I was like a parched man who had found water in the desert. Two years later, I began awakening at 4:50 AM so that I’d have ninety or so minutes to write before I went off to work. The novel I spent two years writing didn’t get published, a huge disappointment, but that didn’t mean I regretted getting up to write it. I didn’t regret a moment of it. And when, at age 53, I finally got a job at Duke that would help pay the bills, teaching writing to grad students in Public Policy, I couldn’t wait for the summer to begin so I would have four months to write. I sometimes jumped the gun a little, writing in my office as I sat waiting for students to come in. And in my retirement, though I have sometimes done other things (volunteering at a homeless shelter and soup kitchen, and visiting people in prison), my happiest days have been when I sat at my desk writing.

I know there is a large company of people who insist that writing is hard work, the hardest work of all. I could quote any number of heavy hitters who say such things, and I thrilled to read them when I was young, perhaps no one more impressively than the great William Butler Yeats, in his poem “Adam’s Curse.”

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.

Yeats, I might note, never graded a batch of sixty policy memos, or sixty compositions by seventh graders. But he was hardly the only one to express such an opinion; William Styron—a Duke writer whom I idolized in my early years—said in the Paris Review, in an interview I read multiple times, “Let’s face it, writing is hell.” I was absolutely thrilled to hear those words. That’s right, Bill, I thought. And I don’t give a damn. I’m with you. I’ll go through hell to be a writer.

But that’s not the final word on the subject. In an interview some years later, Styron’s friend Irwin Shaw said, “Writing is finally play, and there’s no reason why you should get paid for playing. If you’re a real writer, you’ll write no matter what.”

His interviewers objected, mentioning all the writers who lamented the agonies of creation, but Shaw said, “What do they do it for, then? Writing is like a contact sport, like football. Why do kids play football? They can get hurt on any play, can’t they? Yet they can’t wait until Saturday comes around so they can play on the high-school team, or the college team, and get smashed around. Writing is like that. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.”

Yeats was a far greater writer than Shaw, of course, and most people would argue that Styron was better[3]. Maybe I’d be a better and more successful writer if I felt more tortured about it. But ever since I was eleven years old and saw something amazing about language—that it was somehow alive, infinitely pliable, that in a way the language did the writing, not the writer—I’ve loved to write. I’ve worked hard at it but have never thought of it as work. So when Labor Day came around this year, I’d been away from my beloved study for ten days, and longed to get back to it. Who cares if it was a holiday? There’s nothing I’d rather do than write.

He’s hardly a role model, as a writer or as anything else, but I often find myself these days thinking about Charles Bukowski, whom I’ve written about before. He famously worked at the Post Office, and wrote a terrifying novel about those days, terrifying in particular if you’re hoping to receive some important piece of mail. He never could seem to find a way to make money; at one point he seriously believed he could make a living betting on horses, an activity in which he was already fully engaged. But in the evening, at the end of his work day, he would come home, put on classical music, start hitting the booze, and sit down to write. Nobody’s writing seems more off the cuff and thrown down on the page than Bukowski’s, even the poetry, yet there is an undeniable power to much of it, at least to me, and the poetry is like nobody else’s in the world. He didn’t “articulate sweet sounds together,” exactly, but he wrote a hell of a lot of verse.

Two facts about his life are puzzling and intriguing to me. One is that, at the end of his life, when he had leukemia and had given up smoking and drinking, he began to attend the local Transcendental Meditation temple. I don’t think that was a new activity for him; I think he had been practicing meditation, or simple presence, for his whole life (though he often seemed to need booze to face things. Some people need booze to bring them back to normal). One of his women friends said as much.

“’You’re all there,’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I mean, I never met a man like you.’ ‘Oh yeah?’ ‘The others are only ten per cent there or twenty per cent, you’re all there, all of you is very there, it’s so different.’ ‘I don’t know anything about it.’”

On his gravestone he inscribed the words that exemplified his life. They hearken back to the Taoists thousands of years earlier. They embody a deep wisdom.

Don’t try.

Writing is hard work if you’re trying to make it good, to make it other than you are. But why should it be hard if you’re just trying to make it you? You are you.

[1] I have always thought of myself as a perpetual loser because the baseball team I first followed, the Pirates of the mid-and late-fifties, was a cellar dweller, almost a joke when I began following them. That changed in 1960, when they miraculously turned everything around and won not only the pennant but the World Series. I attended the seventh game as a twelve-year-old sitting in the bleachers with my fourteen-year-old brother, and watched Mazeroski’s homer go over the left field wall as Yogi Berra stood there in vain. In my sixty-plus years as a baseball fan, my team has won three World Series. How many fans can say that? In between, though, the Pirates have had some dry years, and they seem to be stuck in a dry spot now. I noted that their infield is young and quite talented, and that they’ll be good someday if the team can just hold on to them. To do that they’ll have to pay. Let’s hope they do that.

[2] White Whale

[3] I’m not sure I agree, though Styron’s reputation is much higher. I find a lot of Styron’s writing to be labored and tortured—it reflects his attitude to the process—while I’d stack Shaw’s Collected Stories, most of which were published in the New Yorker, with nearly any collection. There’s something to be said for having a lighter touch.