According
to Wikipedia, Middleton was a creative powerhouse – he was a talented church
organist and a gifted water-colourist too. He wrote 45 novels, twelve of them
before he wrote Holiday. His first novel was published in 1958, the last
one in 2010 (a year after his death). He was an English teacher at High
Pavement Grammar School in Nottingham for many years. And apparently he turned
down an OBE due to believing he shouldn’t be rewarded for doing what he saw as
simply his job *.
I have
never read Holiday but it was clearly sufficiently accomplished to be
awarded a prestigious literary prize. This was a man of great ability, a man
whose literary life was, by most people’s standards, a successful one. Yet I
have never heard of him or his most famous novel, and neither have any of the
people I have asked.
I tell
you this because it has made me think long and hard about this weird activity
in which we engage our energies, we writers.
For most of us, whether we are any good or not, and even successful and
talented people like Middleton, it is an unrewarding activity, at least in
terms of the way most people judge ‘rewards’. Middleton was able to publish his
novels, win a Booker and be offered an OBE, but he presumably never achieved
the wealth or fame of the handful of contemporary novelists most people have
heard of – J.K.Rowling, Robert Harris, Terry Pratchett, etc. Now, around a
decade after his death, I suspect that he is generally forgotten, except by
those who knew him and those who know his books. Who knows? His reputation
might be revitalised in years to come – there have been many creative artists
in different fields who were quickly forgotten after their deaths but later
‘rediscovered’. But, for now, Middleton seems to be a relatively forgotten
author, despite his success during his lifetime.
Writers
like myself, who have had some things published but nothing that has made them
any money or given them any fame, would love to achieve Middleton’s success.
Forty-five published novels! A Booker Prize! An OBE! Yet most people I speak to
who aren’t writers and readers (and that is, in fact, most people) would
consider such success to be relatively unimpressive. More obvious worldly
achievement is generally better-respected these days (and perhaps always has
been) – massive wealth, a name and a face that everyone recognises, books that
top the bestseller lists, novels that are picked up by Hollywood and made into
movies. There are novelists who have these things even though they are dreadful
writers and will probably be forgotten forever after their deaths. There are also,
of course, extremely talented writers in this category of the super-successful
who will be remembered fondly for many years by many people. But, in today’s
publishing world, achieving Middleton’s level of quiet success is a major feat
in itself – hell, getting a novel published in the first place is like winning
the lottery, and having further novels published if your first one isn’t as
successful as your publishers hoped is virtually an impossibility.
In 2006,
The Times pulled a stunt that produced some interesting results. They
circulated the first chapters of Holiday, and also of a novel by
V.S.Naipaul, to numerous agents and publishing houses, presumably using false
names. All rejected Naipaul’s novel, and only one agent accepted
Middleton’s. From this, we can assume
that publishers in the twenty-first century have different tastes, or know that
their readers have different tastes, or are simply unwilling to invest in
‘literary’ novels.
What
lessons can we learn from this? Do we give up writing? Is it a pointless waste
of time? I have two thoughts. One is
that, if you are a writer, you can’t stop yourself writing – writing is your
greatest pleasure (which isn’t to suggest that it isn’t often difficult,
painful and stressful) and a writer is who you are, published or not. Earning
your living through writing is another thing entirely. The second is that we
need to see the rewards of writing, just as we see the rewards of reading, as being
different in kind from the rewards of, say, being a solicitor, or a surgeon, or
Kim Kardashian, or the founder of Google or Amazon. The rewards are intrinsic,
not instrumental. There is something inexpressible that every writer who is
serious about their craft has experienced – a feeling of satisfaction in having
successfully translated what existed inside your head into something that
others can understand if they want to. It is nice if people read what you have
written, even nicer if they enjoy it – nicer still if they take the time to
tell you they enjoyed it – but, even if no one ever reads it, you still have
that profound sense of having achieved something worthwhile, however flawed you
feel it is.
The joy
of becoming better at something you find intrinsically enjoyable is in itself
one of the rewards of taking yourself seriously as a writer. And I’m not even
mentioning the myriad rewards of the actual writing itself – the pleasure to be
had from putting the best words in the best order, of exploring new worlds,
constructing lives, creating characters, getting inside their heads, telling their
stories, examining ideas and philosophies and what ifs. The act of attempting
to entertain others is profoundly enjoyable. There is a therapeutic quality to
writing at times – self-expression, creative contentment – and sometimes a
performative element too, a showing off. Few writers are rich and famous, and
in fact many barely make a living at all from their writing. Many never give up
the day job. But no one would do this activity, which is hard and
time-consuming and exhausting, if they didn’t get some sort of deep-seated
intrinsic reward.
Some of
us might manage to write the novels or stories or poems or scripts that fill our
imaginations. Being published, read, performed, admired, or paid – well, that’s
the icing on the cake. The sad fact is that most of us are lucky to get even
the cake, but sometimes it’s enough just to smell the batter rising in the oven...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Middleton
No comments:
Post a Comment