music without the words

...When I was a young man, growing up in the South, if you did ugly to a girl, his brother would shoot you...

...The one question you didn't ask Ralph Ellison was, "Hey, kiddo, how's the new novel going...

...Best, when thinking about writing, to keep the pretension level as low as possible...

...I met each man once, felt I had made a friend, and afterwards never had another contact with either of them...

...Miss Green had been working on a second book for the last twenty-five years when she died at the age of sixty-nine...

...Mitchell was fortunate to live long enough to see his own reputation revived in 1992, when Up in the Old Hotel, a compendium of all his earlier books, appeared with heavy jeroboams of praise...

...And—yippee ti yo!—I did...

...A month or so later, I wrote again, this time proposing an essay for him to write for the American Scholar...

...You have to imagine a young Joan Didion, but smarter, more amusing, without the depression...

...Straightforward expression of views was never part of Mitchell's own modus operandi, at least not as a writer...

...He must have been among those perhaps fortunate people who can write, and write extremely well, but can get through life quite nicely without having to write...

...The four of them seemed to have a perfectly lovely time...

...Friends may have been fine things, but it was the consequences of friendship that he couldn't afford, the consequence of time above all—time that would have to be taken from that damn unfinished novel to be a friend...

...He wrote to me, who was nobody if not one of the boys on the quarterlies, and said that he had read me over the years in Encounter, Commentary, the New Criterion, the TLS, and elsewhere...

...I suppose that every writer for whom writing is not the painful drama it is often made out to be, but is instead an intense delight, worries a little about exhibiting this delight too frequently in public...

...More than 30 years in the business, say I with merely a grin and a great thumping knock on wood, and I have had the good luck to write pretty much what I have wanted without any hint of block...

...Perhaps to a fine athlete, still in his prime, banned from playing the game he most loves...

...Yet when they returned to the United States, Ellison failed to answer any of this man's letters...

...When I told him that the art critic Hilton Kramer was a dear friend, he expressed admiration for him, especially for the courageousness of his views...

...He made writing seem altogether too mechanical an activity...

...The condition can last a week, a month, a year, a lifetime...

...writers who are blocked long before they hit their peak quite another...

...The actual writing is what you live for...

...I have stopped writing...

...That the novel wasn't getting written anyhow still didn't mean that one could take time from it...

...As the author of eleven books, with a twelfth in press, I often wonder if I would have written less if I had got it right on the first try—or, for that matter, on the eleventh...

...I thought I had a friend for life...

...For a writer stuck with perfectionism, writer's block just about comes with the territory, and such a writer figures to be blocked fully half the time...

...Sometimes he simply cannot bring the introspection and honesty to the job that it requires, and sometimes contemplating the serious consequences of what he is writing—in loss of friendships, status, or future earnings—may be more than he can bear...

...How immensely frustrating...

...All very strange...

...Roberts and Raintree County...

...Perfectionism is yet another important reason for writer's block...

...Five or six years later, I corresponded with a man who, in the course of one of his letters, asked me if I knew Ralph Ellison...

...On another occasion, when a letter she sent to me failed to arrive, she all but groaned and said, "God, talk about being blocked—now even my letters aren't getting through...

...He turned out to be greatly interested in visual art and apparently spent much time going to exhibitions and galleries...

...When inquiries are made of people who know them, one learns that they are blocked...

...One of the signs of a real writer is the need to write almost all the time...

...she rejoined by telling me that if I knew what effort went into it, I would never call it "little...

...I made the mistake of complimenting her by calling that piece "a nice little review...

...She straightaway had a style and a point of view—perhaps they are the same thing—and could, as they say about the best infielders, really pick it...

...So endemic was writer's block in New York in the '50s and early '60s that there was a shrink named Edmund Bergler, one of whose specialties was unblocking writers...

...But I doubt that pleasure had much to do with it...

...Sometimes a writer may be blocked because he really isn't prepared to write what he has promised to write...

...The first rule in avoiding writer's block is never to think of writing as in any way a creative activity, with its own dramas and tensions...

...I once had an essay reprinted in a college reader, and the editor offered me an additional $600 if I would write a thousand or so words explaining any difficulty encountered along the way of composing the original essay...

...Marion began brilliantly, in her twenties, writing winningly about such varied subjects as Tennessee Williams for Commentary and hippie life in Amsterdam for Esquire...

...Writing cannot be done in one's sleep, but for Trollope it could be done on the edge of sleep: "A man to whom writing well has become a habit may write well though he be fatigued...

...I once asked the critic F. W. Dupee, at that time freshly retired from the English department at Columbia and a finely polished prose writer, to write for the American Scholar...

...As for Joseph Mitchell, he represented, at its highest power, the urban tradition at the New Yorker, the tradition of John McNulty and A.J...

...If in the course of a year these people wrote a single book review, or an essay, or short story, or two or three poems, it seemed production enough...

...In private he was sly, opinionated, witty in a way that his writing didn't quite reveal...

...Liebling, as opposed to the small-town tradition of James Thurber and E. B. White...

...This appears to have been not only Ellison's problem...

...Joe Gould today would be viewed as a slightly menacing homeless person...

...Many of his admirers, myself among them, longed for more such sentences, though they were never to come...

...My guess is that Dupee, good as he was, didn't really have to write...

...Not only was this gratifying in itself, but I could now tell myself that I was a $600-an-hour writer...

...Iwrite all this in trepidation, lest I incur the wrath of the furies and they strike me with a block of my own...

...Sometimes quite good writers, usually highly productive ones, will suddenly go silent...

...More likely one has only had a lucky good day...

...Mitchell's last book, Joe Gould's Secret, was published in 1965, and its first sentence shows his perfect touch: "Joe Gould was an odd and penniless and unemployable little man who came to the city in 1916 and ducked and dodged and held on as hard as he could for over thirty-five years...

...Such is the nightmare of a writer's block— one can't for more than a moment take pleasure in the leisure it imposes or think of anything except the writing one cannot do...

...he just doesn't have the knowledge, experience, or wit to carry out the job...

...The book seemed one of the purest of "enchanted cigarettes," the term Balzac gave to those books one dreams about but almost are certain never to get written...

...Block is the supreme torture for a writer...

...Perhaps a year later, I wrote yet again, and again no response...

...A writer, Trollope believed, must approach his task as if he were working at the post office, which Trollope, in fact, for many years did: "He should sit down at his desk at a certain hour...

...Unfortunately, the next thing I wrote, a long essay on the Austrian writer Robert Musil, took me so long to write that it returned me to thinking of myself as a minimum-wage man...

...And then, for no good explanation I ever heard, the flame went out...

...Both men had enormous commercial successes and each killed himself before producing a second work...

...In print, Mitchell was all cool objectivity, without opinionation, self-effacing, benevolent in his views of human nature...

...There were stories about his having lost nearly an entire manuscript to a fire...

...It is a condition that seems inexplicable, and is painful in the extreme...

...Did ugly to a girl is a phrase I am not soon likely to forget...

...It was as if you had gone out with a very attractive woman, and thought you had both had a swell time, except that she refused afterward to take any of your calls...

...A true writer, for better and worse, needs to write...

...All that I can remember her publishing those many years was a single review, in Commentary, of a book about American communism by a woman named Vivian Gornick...

...Mitchell was left as bereft of a subject as Hogarth might have been under communism...

...Invisible Man, published in 1952, may well be the most solidly made and most intelligent novel produced by an American in the past half century...

...Writers who have written something substantial and then are blocked are one thing...

...Perhaps a few people who have felt themselves unkindly treated by me are even now sticking pins in my books and ringing their own ever-so-slight change on the old football chant, "Block that kick...

...Edith Wharton coined the term "magazine bore" for those writers who appear too often in too many magazines...

...Wallace Markfield, in his novel To an Early Grave, captures the spirit of the blocked writer in a character, a literary critic named Holly Levine, whom he shows moving the word "certainly" in about six or seven recastings of the same sentence, until he is saved by a phone call that allows him to abandon the effort...

...Our conversation was desulto-ry—we told jokes, he told Depression stories, we discussed literature, personalities, politics—and unre-lievedly wonderful...

...Again no answer...

...How can you hate the actual writing...

...the amiable drunks at McSorley's, the "wonderful saloon" which is still there on East 6th Street owing in good part to the fame Mitchell gave it in various New Yorker essays, would now just seem hopelessly lost...

...I believe most cases of writer's block do have an explanation, and one not necessarily to be found down in that dark psychic disco where the superego is doing the tango with the id...

...My one meeting with Joe Mitchell was less lengthy but no less enjoyable...

...Renata Adler, a key writer at the New Yorker and at the New York Review of Books, also has a block that has caused her to close up shop for the better part of a decade...

...Needs to—and, despite all the widely advertised agonies, loves to...

...The only argument I would have with that passage is the use of the word "creation...

...He had earlier published a fine essay in the American Scholar, the magazine I edit, called "The Little Man from Chehaw Station," which I had read in its first-draft form as a commencement address and which he added onto and greatly improved for publication...

...Writing quickly does have its own odd satisfactions, among them the delusion that one has mastered one's craft...

...having gotten it right the first time, perhaps he felt there was no rush...

...I had no sense that Mitchell suffered greatly from not writing...

...When I returned to Chicago, I wrote Ellison a brief note, thanking him for the lunch and for the fine afternoon...

...Much better, I have always found, to demystify writing as completely as possible...

...No answer...

...She was the real thing, a true writer, and the early evidence shows a brilliant one, but unable to work at the trade she loved above all others...

...When a writer is "blocked," he cannot write...

...After Invisible Man, forty years passed, during which Ellison produced two books of essays, collected a vast number of honorary degrees, served on endless editorial and other boards, and kept his cool and courage at a time when it was easy for a black writer to make a serious jerk of himself...

...The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at that point...

...But the thing he was put on earth to do, write more beautiful novels, was precisely what he was unable to do...

...It has to be hellacious...

...I told myself I would do it if I could complete the job in less than an hour...

...He nicely broke through this formal manner by using the phrase, ten or so minutes into our lunch, "f—ing distinguished" to refer to a pompous figure in publishing who came up to our table...

...That is the admission that Ellison could not make, nor Mitchell, who went into his office at the New Yorker every day for thirty years before his death without ever submitting a word to his editors...

...He was critical of E. B. White, the preachiness of whose writing he couldn't abide...

...Mitchell once described to me, in his deep North Carolinian accent, the book he said he was working on...

...He was a naturally friendly, happily gregarious man, I think, and yet he must have worried about the cost of his sweet openness of spirit...

...He should eliminate the Sturm und Drang aspect of writing: "He need tie no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,—as men have sat, or said that they have sat...

...Usually, one hasn't...

...I frequently remind myself that formulating sentences remains one of the most amusing of all pastimes— and, besides (though I shouldn't want this to get around) it beats working all to hell...

...When I knew him, Conroy seemed in no hurry to produce a second book...

...One never truly finishes a poem, Paul Valery said, one merely abandons it...

...Or sometimes, midway through a lengthy piece of writing, he discerns the falsity of all that he has written up to now and hasn't the stomach or stamina to return and begin again...

...Wildly comic, philosophically deep, socially significant, it is a book of a kind that, if one had written nothing else, would be enough to give one a strong reputation for the rest of one's life, and perhaps beyond...

...Another of the things Ellison and Mitchell had in common is that each treated me to a single memorable afternoon, the better part of both of which I spent in the same chair on the second floor in the ample room facing onto 43rd Street at the Century Club in New York...

...Ellison and Mitchell both had famous—perhaps the country's most famous—cases of writer's block...

...I don't think I can hope to understand the suffering Marion Magid went through...

...Did I have any idea what was going on...

...The real wonder, her husband tossed in, was that she finished a book at all...

...When I lived in New York, in the early 1960s, a time when psychotherapy was a dominant force among artists and intellectuals, lots of writers seemed, if not altogether blocked, then highly costive...

...My journal entry for the day notes: "He is a smaller man than I had imagined him to be, though, as I had imagined, well turned out sartorially (the only flaw here being too large a wristwatch) and with the manner of a courtly gent...

...It is probably a mistake to make writing look too easy...

...I arrived at 12:30 and left, in the dark of a Manhattan evening, at 5:00...

...The saddest case of writer's block I know was that of my friend, the late Marion Magid, for many years the managing editor of Commentary...

...Frank Conroy took nearly twenty years between Stop-Time, his fine autobiographical book, and his next work, a collection of stories not many people remember...

...This apparently is the case with Michael J. Arlen, who wrote some excellent television criticism for the New Yorker and a fine book about his Armenian forebears and who hasn't been in print for a number of years...

...Fifty years in the business, Zero Mostel moaned in The Producers, and I'm wearing a cardboard belt...

...You pick up a magazine and there they are, like the fellow in the orange fright-wig and the Jesus Saves T-shirt who used to show up at all major sporting events...

...It may well be that some blocked writers derive a perverse pleasure from their blocks...

...Joseph Mitchell's block was of a different order, though it lasted thirty years...

...The reason he asked was that he and his wife were once on a cruise with Ellison and his wife, and during that cruise they were nearly inseparable...

...The one a novelist, the other a journalist, each was thought by many people the best at his respective trade...

...He talked a good deal about missing his friend Liebling...

...With that uncompleted second novel hanging always before him, like surgery that he knew he couldn't postpone forever, though he somehow did, what he least needed was lots of new friends: insistent, responsibility-exacting, time-consuming friends...

...Anthony Trollope's having done so by recounting his writing regimen in his autobiography—he averaged 10,000 words a week, and some weeks wrote as many as 28,000 words—caused his reputation to suffer for many years...

...From his few letters to me, I was surprised to learn that Mitchell, whose specialty as a writer was observation of the common life, was a regular reader of intellectual journals and knew all about "the boys on the quarterlies," as his old friend Joe Liebling used to say...

...A one-book novelist named Hannah Green—her one book is a novel that she finished at the age of forty-six and that I have never read titled The Dead of the House—died a week or so ago, and her obituary in the New York Times noted "her almost obsessive pursuit of a perfection that always seemed just one rewrite away...

...How can you hate the magic which makes of a paragraph or a sentence or a line of dialogue or a description something in the nature of a new creation...

...his craft and talent and energy suddenly flee him...

...She could hear the music, but never find the words...

...Writing has given me pleasure like nothing else I have ever done, and I mean the very act of writing itself...

...I cannot imagine myself, short of a knock-out stroke or severe illness, ever saying that...

...The toughest trick, and one of the greatest causes of writer's block, may be that of following one's own strong opening act...

...To what can one compare the pain of the blocked writer...

...She never wanted to let go," he said...

...The great fear of a writer is that he will find himself locked into the kind of writer's block that afflicted both Ellison and Mitchell...

...And in the case of Ralph Ellison, who wrote no further novels, it did just that...

...and along with this need goes the feeling of self-loathing when one isn't writing...

...What was going on...

...That didn't mean he didn't have views, quite strong ones...

...The only reason I can come up with to explain Ralph Ellison's odd behavior is his writer's block...

...Raymond Chandler, when he learned that the detective-story writer John Dickson Carr disliked writing, speaks for me when he writes: A writer who hates the actual writing, who gets no joy out of the creation of magic by words, to me is simply not a writer at all...

...Trollope prided himself on having published twice as much as Carlyle and even more than Voltaire, and having accomplished this while holding a second job much of the time...

...Much in the current scene put him off, not least its liberationist tendencies...

...Mitchell had made his reputation writing about characters in New York, but characters, interesting idiosyncratic characters, had long since been replaced by cases, some of them quite dangerous...

...I spent the afternoon of January 26, 1978, with Ellison...

...Writing a good or financially successful book the first time out can be filled with peril...

...You know, Joe," he said, "I am of a generation that can never consider sex a trivial act...

...In a Teutonic accent, or so I have been told, he all but yelled at his patients, telling them that they were immature, they must knock off this nonsense, return to their typewriters, pay his fee...

...My best explanation for his writer's block is that his subject matter had disappeared on him, and my guess is that he knew it...

...We had corresponded years before, and had even spoken over the telephone a time or two...

...For as soon as one does think about writing as "creative"—a bogus word in any case—one thinks about all that can go wrong with it...

...And like inspiration, writer's block can show up utterly without warning...

...It was also, at a lower level of literary creation, the problem of Thomas Heggen and Ross Lockridge, the authors, respectively, of Mr...

...It was about "double exile," which, he went on to explain, was the peculiar condition of feeling a stranger wherever he was: In New York, he felt himself a southerner, while in the South he felt himself a pure New Yorker...

...For after the splendid success of Invisible Man, Ellison was never able to produce that novel...

...He wrote back to thank me for my invitation, but told me, in a sentence that sent a little chill through me, "I have stopped writing...

...Another day of nothing accomplished...

...Through her thirties, forties, fifties, up to her death at the age of sixty, Marion never really broke out of her block...