'Among Those Who Read There is Great Variety'

Writing is famously the most narcissistic of professions, even worse than acting or being a politician. We’re forever carrying on about ourselves and our precious insights, like the kid in class who raises his hand and goes “Ooh! Ooh!” each time the teacher asks a question. That’s the nature of what we do. Writing in some public fashion is a way of inflicting ourselves on others – “Ooh! Ooh!” - which accounts for some of the stupid, offensive things we write. We like the attention, positive or otherwise. Ironworkers and tax clerks can’t do that, at least as part of their jobs, or if they do there’s a good chance they’ll be reprimanded or canned. In a sense, you can’t fire a writer.  

The late Spanish novelist Javier Marias participated in “A Symposium on the Dead” published in the Winter 2004 issue of The Threepenny Review. He writes of a friend he never met in person, a phenomenon subsequently made familiar by the internet. I’m unlikely ever to meet in person some of the people whose company I prize. For eight months in 1999, Marias carried on an epistolary friendship with Francis Haskell, the English art historian, who died of liver cancer in 2000. Haskell told Marias of his fatal disease less than a month before his death. The Spaniard refers to Haskell as “the ephemeral friend I never saw.”

 

Marias reminds us that most writers can’t claim to know their audience with any precision. I was always amused by newspaper editors who confidently identified our readers and told us to write specifically for them. No one has “an audience.” We have “audiences.” Marias reflects on writing to a friend he didn’t know was dying:

 

“Those of us who write tend to forget that among those who read there is great variety, and that behind each reader there is a personal history that carries on after the rapid perusal of our insubstantial columns, and that many of these histories are dominated by despair or grief.”

 

What impact would such knowledge have on the way we write? Probably little or none. I’ve written things that have been needlessly hurtful or dismissive. There’s plenty out there that needs to be hurt or dismissed. I’m not recommending trigger warnings or self-censorship. Just pick your targets carefully. There’s nothing wrong with hurting those who deserve it. Marias says of the last letter he received from Haskell: “It was not easy to reply to it: one fears in such cases that one’s every word might wound the one who reads.”

 

[The Marias essay was translated from the Spanish by Eric Southworth.]