Post #145: Vox Populi

23 Sep. 2024

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

—Samuel Johnson

     “What you write,” a friend of mine (a writer of a rather different bent) pointed out to me the other day, “is not meant to entertain; it doesn’t solve anyone’s problems; and you refuse to make any concessions to the popular style that readers expect. So why would you be surprised when you only attract a few of them? You should be amazed that you have any readers at all!”

     Ahem, yes, that’s what friends are for: telling you, in good faith let’s hope, things that an enemy might hold back for fear of giving undue offense. While you must grin and bear it, even if the grin is a grimace of pain. The fact that the bad news may be true (or at least that it is not easily answered) has rarely helped much with making the bitter pill go down any more smoothly…

     Let me concede the first point: I don’t mean to entertain. That’s true enough, and I would only add, by way of caveat, that it is often the straight man who, not wishing to amuse at all, ends up producing the most reliably comical effects. Not that I would dream of angling for such a thankless role.

     Solve anyone’s problems? Goodness me, what a thought! Maybe identify some of them, or make here and there an observation or suggestion that may help someone see his a little more clearly or address them a little more effectively. But solve? Absolutely not. Guilty as charged. Next!

     No concessions to popular tastes? Well, well, well. I don’t write with a thesaurus by my side, if that’s what you were thinking—or only for jogging my memory when I have, once again, forgotten the name of an old friend. When I revise my sentence structure, it is always to simplify, never to make it more elaborate. But yes, from a 21st-century perspective, my paragraphs and wording must seem very ornery indeed. The reason is more straightforward than wishing to make an impression: I learned to write not so much from my contemporaries as from reading old books, and I am not inclined to change my ways now that standards look more debased to me than ever.

     Set my paragraphs beside those of Hobbes or Hume, Gibbon or Burke, Conrad or Nabokov, Orwell or Huxley, and tell me that they don’t measure up. It would come as a great surprise to me if I were not found wanting beside the masters. By the same token, I am very little scared or embarrassed by the prospect of comparison with what gets churned out, online especially, in these blessed 2020s. If I might blush for shame, it would not be on my own behalf. Next.

     No next! Three strikes and you’re out, bucko!

     I see. So it appears that I am, beyond appeal, under sentence of not being a popular author. Apparently I don’t even deign to construct my texts around keywords dictated to me by some algorithm or other! Imagine!

     There is an element of irony at work here in that I feel no great affinity with, or fondness for, the academic writing that non-academics tend to associate me with. There’s a wide range of learned, scholarly, old-fashioned, or perhaps merely eccentric writing that is not academic in the strict sense at all, and I could furnish the reader with plenty of scathing reviews in which I have been found to stand on the wrong, that is, the non-academic side. What is more, for a professor in the Humanities especially, I give an almost comically free pass to commerce. I don’t demand that it be restricted or purged of its many impurities; I don’t call for government involvement or sponsorship by the state; I don’t bemoan or begrudge the rich rewards of those who march to a more lucrative tune than mine. Instead I congratulate them on their good fortune, though not always on their refined tastes and manners on the page.

     I do not often set out to denounce writers more popularly-minded, commercial, and materially successful than I—not unless I feel unusually provoked or put on the defensive. Instead I quietly do my thing, to no particular effect, and find myself only occasionally saddened by the solemn discovery that at the great high school prom that is popular culture and shiny success, I seem to be showing up unaccompanied in a black tie from my Oxford days that doesn’t pass for a “real” tuxedo because I know how to do the knot and must insist on wing collars.

     For the rest, may we not all dream of a little glamor and popularity, even if we would only have it on our own terms, not those prescribed for us by a fallen world? Adolescent antics? Hah, touché! But allow me to remind you that you are speaking to a writer: he among you scribblers who is not a wounded adolescent, let him cast the first stone!

     I am not keen on acting as a judge in my own case; so let others pass their verdicts on me, if they must. Meanwhile, let the big earners please be satisfied with their ample revenues and not claim the laurels of art as well, at least not by the over-simple expedient of equating the two. I don’t reach for any honors; they are never granted to our grasping, nor bestowed by our contemporaries (and that includes the certified notables congregating around Stockholm). It all comes down, ultimately, to an intimate conference between a writer and his gods, mirrored perhaps in literary history and the judgment of posterity to some uncertain extent.

     If it is mammon you worship, very well; it would not occur to me to call the divine wrath down upon anyone for bowing before the golden calf, even. I understand the temptation quite well; but I see the cost too. For what will it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his soul? That settles the matter for me, and for anyone whom the shoe fits. Beyond that circle, however big or small it may be, I don’t make it my business to fear for any other writer’s soul—at least not when it comes to something as venial as wishing to make money (producing something on the order, or rather disorder, of American Psycho may be a more worrisome matter).

     I do not itch, as some apparently do, to take away the keys to anyone’s rightfully earned pool of gold (#68). I like the stuff myself, though not to the extent of needing to swim in it. Have I said a single word against the legitimate demands of entertainment in this world? Do I begrudge anyone the fruits that come from solving other people’s problems, when it can be done? On the contrary, I have the most unfeigned and ungrudging admiration for real problem-solvers! Have I suggested, anywhere, that it is wrong or reprehensible to adjust one’s diction to the demands of the day and the capacities of the crowd? No, no, and no again.

     What I have said is that entertainment is not everything, and cannot be; that I have trouble enough with my own little corner to presume that I could unravel anyone else’s tangles; and that the demotic or culturally democratic mode (not to use the traditional v-word, lest I be taken to be more dismissive than I am) does not become true or good or beautiful because it has the imperious voice of the masses behind it. Vox populi vox dei originated as a popular proverb among the Romans, who were wise enough to worldly ways to recognize, as we moderns sometimes seem to forget, what a very fine line separates its use in earnest from the cadences of satire and scurrilous jest.

     We cannot, any of us, have it all. To be truly entertaining, or practically helpful, or graced with beauty of any kind in one’s doings, be it shaping words or thoughts or anything else—each such distinction, even all by itself, is a great blessing that should satisfy anyone if he found ourselves in so unlikely a possession. To hope that all three might ever come together in any one person is a pious dream, profoundly to be cherished when it does occur, but never to be expected, let alone to be arrogated to one’s own frail, fallible, and mortal self.