The Great Unpublished
Before my first novel was accepted, I had more or less given up, and decided that all that remained for me was to accept failure and spend the rest of my days behaving with as much dignity and kindness as I could muster. Now that I’m a published novelist, I can embrace indignity and unkindness with a passion. It’s an enormous relief. But I haven’t forgotten what it feels like when you’ve put everything into writing something and the only response is a "while-we-found-much-to-admire" . . . absolute killer that ‘while’, a subtler, possibly kinder, but no less crushing version of ‘but’.
When I was languishing in the world of while-we-found-much-to-admire, I always resented writers, especially writers I admired like Gore Vidal and Edward Abbey, or those sacred beasts of the canon like Dr. Johnson, who said nobody but a big fool would write for anything but money. I don’t have any problem with being a fool. Indeed, if everyone accepted the simple fact that most of us are fools most of the time and consequently behaved with a little more humility, the world would be a far better place. If Erasmus hadn’t already done so, I’d even be tempted to write an essay In Praise of Folly, only it wouldn’t be satirical. No, I have no problem with being a fool, even a big one. But the implication that there is no other value to writing than gratifying the bank manager, that really riled me.
I wouldn’t go so far as our yoga teacher, who has since become a friend, but who shocked me badly early on in our relationship. A tad New Age and fond of anything prefixed by ‘alternative’, when she first heard I was writer, she observed that it was a good way of “working on oneself”, by which I believe she meant some sort of finding-the-inner-you baloney. Sod oneself! It’s working on the rest of the world that’s interesting. That and the ordering and reordering of experience, living lives you haven’t the time, talent or money to live otherwise, exploring the implications of your alleged values, the fabulous opportunities for pontificating, the unadulterated bliss of playing with words, the splendidly mindless pleasure of being able to sit in a room on your own telling yourself stories and not get carted off to the loony bin as a consequence . . . these are just a few of the many joys ignored by the gimme-the-money brigade.
Far worse than this reductivism, though, is the disdain implicit for people who have produced excellent pieces of fiction that, by mischance, fashion, or for want of determination never reach a professional printer, and so inevitably never earn a penny. There are literally thousands of excellent unpublished manuscripts out there, many of them infinitely superior to most of the stuff piled high in the publishers’ warehouses. True, there are many more thousands of unpublished manuscripts out there that richly deserve their unpublished status. I’ve written several of them myself. But there are others that ought to be in everybody’s library.
If you don’t believe me, check out the works of Bill Albert. Bill’s first two novels in English (there’s another that only ever saw the light of day in French) were Desert Blues, a dark farce that is a must for every R&B lover and also for anybody who doesn’t believe an old man dying can be as uproariously funny as it is painful, and Castle Garden, an admirable stab at the Great American Novel that had the sheer chutzpah to engineer a meeting between Buffalo Bill Cody and Big Bill Haywood. Cowboys and Wobblies in one book? You’ve got to admire a man who can pull that off. Yet the two sequels to Desert Blues (Desert Swing and Desert Requiem), never made it into print.
Obviously, it’s a bit bizarre citing a man who has published three novels and had at least two successful careers in academia and special rights campaigning as an example of the sadly neglected, but having read his unpublished work, I find it appalling that the further adventures of Harold and Edith aren’t being enjoyed by everybody. This is writing of a quality that perfectly illustrates my thesis that unpublished doesn’t mean rubbish. On the contrary. So buy his published books and download the others. You won’t regret it.
Meanwhile, I’m off to be undignified and unkind. Possibly to those who think the principal purpose of writing is filling your purse.
