ATTENTION MUST BE PAID

One of the things that attracted me about writing was that it seemed possible to have one's works known, and thus reach others with one's thoughts and feelings, without sacrificing one's personal privacy.

Alas, that is far from true, especialy today. To have one's works become known, one has to jump up an down in the crowd, shouting, "Over here. Look at me, Mom. Here I am. Look, look what I can do."

Some writers have always down that, and not always the most talented: Hemingway, Capote, Mailer, and Gertrude Stein, to name a few. Hemingway and Capote were alcoholics and never became adults; Mailer thought he was a novelist, but he can't create character; Stein said and wrote a few brilliant lines and stories, but the most of the rest of her stuff is top of the head babel.

Most of the rest of them have been unknown, until "discovered" by someone: Poe, Melville, Rimbaud, just to mention a few without giving it much thought. I admire most the people who simply write, and do the minimum required for self-publicity, authors like Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner (who was out of print in 1947 until Malcolm Cowley wrote his famous forward to a collection of Faulkner's work), Ian McEwen, whose not best novel, Saturday, finally received attention, and brought him the fame he deserved; Muriel Spark, whose outstanding first short story brought her attention, but who, at the end of her life, would still ask her admirers to "buy" my books; Thomas Mann is my ideal: impervious outside, the artist hidden inside. I don't like people to know me, to know all the clutter and strangeness that makes up an intellectual, neurotic, alcoholic, and artist; I reveal myself in my books. There is where I want you to find me.