'The Most Natural Thing in the World'

Why write? Indulge my glibness: Why not? Still in high school, I learned I had little understanding of a given subject until I tried to express it in a precise selection of words, words that corresponded not to my feelings or theories but to what I could perceive. Not gushing – a real temptation when young – but a self-critical striving after articulation. In other words, writing as a seemingly contradictory mingling of audacity and humility before the world as we experience it. Begin stupid; with luck, finish at least dimly enlightened. 

A young reader asks why I do what I do and should he do it too. His background resembles mine – working class, first in his family to attend university (and first to soon drop out). W. Somerset Maugham in The Summing Up (1938) rather uncannily describes our inclinations:

 

“When I began to write I did so as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I took to it as a duck takes to water. I have never quite got over my astonishment at being a writer; there seems no reason for my having become one except an irresistible inclination, and I do not see why such an inclination should have arisen in me.”

 

My reader and I had no close-at-hand models to work from. Literacy in our world meant a sort of entry-level ability to fill out tax forms and read traffic signs. Anything else was an irrelevant nuisance, and probably showing off. Books filled your head with pretentious silliness. School, in general, didn’t help. I had a high-school English teacher who talked up Rod McKuen and “the poetry of rock.” Fortunately, I had another who introduced me to Yeats and Nathaneal West. I listened to critics and for decades ignored Maugham, foolishness I’ve corrected in recent decades. For readers and writers, the present is a dispiriting time for literature. The culture finds pleasure in repudiating our inheritance, even the best of it, like Shakespeare and Conrad. We must look mostly to the past for worthy models. As Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) has written of Maugham:

 

“Even if he were a despicably bad writer, why should he evoke such contumely? No other writer known to me does so in quite the same fashion. A bad writer is best forgotten rather than hated or despised.”