Why Are There So Many Books about Writers? (Plus: A Shameless Listicle)
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A photograph of American novelist William Dean Howells at his writing desk.
As I attempt to hack away at the dreaded work of turning my dissertation (HEY THANKS FOR ASKING IT’S ABOUT THE IMPACT OF SØREN KIERKEGAARD ON TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH LIT- HEY WAIT WHERE ARE YOU GOING???) into a book that some academic press might take a chance on publishing, I’ve been engaged in the thoroughly pleasurable work of reading a bunch of writing, both fiction and non-fiction, by the great British philosopher turned novelist Iris Murdoch. Currently I am reading her 1972 novel The Black Prince, whose protagonist, Bradley Pearson, is a commercially unsuccessful but artistically uncompromised novelist (in contrast to his protege, who has taken the route of going mainstream). This conceit of an aesthetic rivalry between novelists got me thinking about just how many great novels there are that feature writers as central characters.
It’s a little strange, if you stop to think about it, but from the beginning of “the novel” in the West, the form has been tied into concerns about reading and writing (see Quixote, Don). But while early examples of this concern seem to focus more on reading (again, DQ, but also novels like Northanger Abbey and Madame Bovary), many more recent novels explicitly revolve around writers and their worlds. Again, a bit strange, considering that writers hardly make for outwardly interesting characters, at least in their work. Is it mere vanity that brings authors back again and again to writers as characters? That could be part of the equation — certainly the stereotype of the (especially male) author reveling in his own sense of genius has at least some origin, however tenuous, in reality. But I think there’s more to the story. Despite the lack of activity that writers experience in their jobs, there’s a furious mental activity at play in the work of writing (unless your name is Dan Brown) that fits nicely in with the novelist’s concern with ideas. Though of course there are a million different ways of interacting with and incorporating “ideas” into literary work, most novelists who write what might be classified (in extreme short hand) as “literary fiction” have at least some interest in philosophical notions of one sort or another, which gets reflected in the tendency to read widely beyond the realm of fiction. Murdoch, as a philosopher-novelist, is perhaps exemplary in this, but it’s true to one degree or another of many writers.
This is perhaps why there are fewer novels that feature other types of artists as protagonists. Sure, you get the occasional book about painters or sculptors, even on very rare occasions books about composers, but these pale in comparison to books with author figures. Here’s my hunch (very much just that): visual and musical artists — whether this is fair or not — are seen as creating in a way more inscrutable than that of writers, almost a sort of ex nihilo, ecstatic genius creation. That is to say, you have to work harder to connect the dots between formal philosophical ideas and a painting, or a building, than with a work of literature where those ideas may become hashed out more explicitly. So, writer-characters become a way to work out not only the author’s thoughts about literary creation, but about ideas more broadly writ. (Side note: this might also explain why there are a decent number of novels which take as their focus professors, literary critics, and the like). In the wrong hands, this becomes dull mouthpiecery. With a real craftsman at the wheel, though, the results are more promising.
Here, then, is a roughly chronological list of a few favorite books of mine — in no way a comprehensive compendium — that focus, in one way or another, on writer figures. For the purposes of brevity, I’ve stuck to novels that feature fiction writers in primary or important roles (which leaves out great novels about journalists, like Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, or great novels about poets, like Nabokov’s Pale Fire, as well as great novels about sundry non-fiction writers, like several of Aldous Huxley’s novels). I’m also not commenting on the several books I’m currently reading that fit this mold. Also, to be completely arbitrary, I’m leaving off James Joyce, whose two Stephen Dedalus novels (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses) are exemplary, but who you can go read about anywhere.
New Grub Street, by George Gissing
New Grub Street is an oddity on my list for several reasons, the primary one being that it’s a book that actually focuses on the economic lives of authors as much as their interior, intellectual lives. Gissing, a late Victorian writer who never achieved the success he might have hoped for, writes in full venomous mode here as he dissects the cutthroat world of English letters. The first of several books on this list to feature rivalries between writers, New Grub Street focuses on the contrasting fates of Edwin Reardon, a principled but unsuccessful novelist, and Jasper Milvain, an opportunistic, shall we say money grubbing (sorry) journalist who succeeds by aiming firmly at the lowest common denominator in his writing. Gissing’s tale has its share of Victorian melodrama, but is especially notable for the acidic bitterness that threatens to corrode the very pages of the book.
At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien
At Swim-Two-Birds, the loopy, brilliant debut novel of O’Brien, has too long existed in the shadow of Joyce, a hero of O’Brien’s. But the book, though it exhibits similar flashes of bravado as Ulysses, really exists in its own world of circular logic. The main character, a college student, lounges about, skipping classes, drinking stout, and working on his novel, a book about a novelist who aims at total control over his characters. When the characters, who include cast offs from genre novels (cowboys et al), refugees from Celtic myths, and a pooka, get wind of this dictatorial control, they revolt, and put the author on trial. Events only get more complicated from there, as the whole book bends back on itself like a (Gordian) Celtic knot. This is such a funny, complicated book that it’s hard to believe that O’Brien later disowned it as juvenile trash (but that’s a story for another day).
The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene
The capper on Greene’s “Catholic” period of novels (which started, with a bang, with Brighton Rock, which itself begins with the murder of a journalist), The End of the Affair is, I think, Greene’s greatest achievement as a novelist. Maurice Bendrix, the mildly successful novelist at the book’s heart, must sift through the evidence to find out why his deceased lover left him years before. The book becomes, despite its brief length, a twisted, complex exploration of suffering and faith, with enough literary flourishes to definitely show that Greene, far from a mere plotter of great plots, knew how to write beautiful sentences as well.
Memento Mori, by Muriel Spark
Spark has several novels that fit this list, and I almost went with her debut The Comforters, which is a bit more explicitly about writing, but I decided that that book was perhaps too similar to At Swim-Two-Birds in some of the metafictional moves it makes. So instead I went with my favorite Spark novel, which focuses on a group of elderly Brits who begin to receive strange phone calls reminding them that they must die. One of these characters, Charmian, is a former novelist whose memory has started to fail, and Spark peppers in many great lines about the novelist’s art of observation and writing, including one that might stand as a sort of maxim for her work as a whole: “The art of fiction is very like the practice of deception”.
Earthly Powers, by Anthony Burgess
There’s so much going on in the bonkers Earthly Powers that it’s a bit misleading to think of it as merely a book about writing, since it’s also about everything else in the world: cults, Catholicism, the post WWII political landscape, and so much more. But at its heart sits Kenneth Toomey (supposedly based on W. Somerset Maugham), a middlebrow novelist who lives through many of the most significant events of the twentieth century. With plenty of winks at other writers (including a great, dark in joke about Ulysses), Earthly Powers not only centers on a writer, it features an author, Burgess, writing at the height of his creative powers.
Mao II, by Don DeLillo
In comparison to some DeLillo novels, Mao II feels luxurious, almost decadent in its slower pace. But even though it lacks some of the kineticism of, say, White Noise, or the panoramic sprawl of Underworld, the novel is sharp in its observations of the life of a writer. Bill Gray, the ne plus ultra of the reclusive literary genius, must emerge from his self imposed exile to participate in the wider life of the world. DeLillo uses this emergence to think about what the value of literature is, exactly, and when writers must stop being merely writers and act as full human beings. The result is by turns wry and heartbreaking.
The Information, by Martin Amis
Amis is notable on this list because he also wrote one of the great novels about film, his earlier book Money, based loosely on his own failed stint in Hollywood. His novel London Fields also deftly explores the mind of the author, but I’m focusing here on his fullest exploration of the topic. In The Information Amis sets two characters against each other, the successful author Gwyn Barry and his less successful frenemy Richard Tull. Tull, whose consciousness centers the novel, gradually succumbs more and more to envy, and the book does an excellent job portraying both the agony of creation and the mind-warping effects of jealousy. Highly recommended.
This is, of course, a brief, preliminary list, and one that betrays my biases as a scholar of British literature. But it’s a start; I’d be happy to hear from others with their own items for the list.