'You Have Somehow Cheated Creation'

I’ve read yet another lengthy essay (lengthy at two and a half pages) about the hell of writing. It’s an onerous task, you know – thankless, laborious, hemorrhoidal. 

Self-pity is always repellent but especially so when the whine du jour is writing – after all, a self-imposed task with enormous rewards. Of course it’s hard work, but that too we learn to enjoy. I’m reminded of the times his colleagues at The New Yorker overheard A.J. Liebling laughing in his office as he typed one of his stories. Wisława Szymborska concludes her poem “The Joy of Writing” like this: “The joy of writing. / The power of preserving. / Revenge of a mortal hand.” Exactly: we are mortal but our words may survive us. In his poem “Rereading Old Writing,” David Ferry puts it even more pithily: “. . . writing / Is a way of being happy.” Best of all, think of Vladimir Nabokov in his 1965 interview with Robert Hughes:

 

“People writing to me to tell me how much they enjoyed the book, and picking up, deliberately or not, little things which show me that they not only understood the book, but that they liked it from the same point of view as I liked it when I was composing it. I think that’s a great joy. That’s another kind of joy that’s much more human than this first thrill of diabolical pleasure in discovering that you have somehow cheated creation by creating something yourself.”

 

[Szymborska’s poem can be found in View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, Faber and Faber, 1996). Ferry’s is in Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press, 1999). The Nabokov interview is collected in Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov (ed. Robert Golla, University Press of Mississippi, 2017).]