Why We Must Keep Writing
Despite the Inadequacy of Language and Our Skill in Using It
During the past few years, I’ve been increasingly aware of the inadequacy of language to convey experience.
Let me illustrate by evoking two scenes from my recent life.
On a Friday night a few weeks ago, a friend of mine from college, an extremely austere and quiet professor of Chinese who has been dividing his time between Princeton and the Hebrew University for the past fifteen years or more, brought another classmate of ours, as effusive and ebullient as the professor is withdrawn, to our home. Though we had been friends in college, I hadn’t seen this other man since we graduated in 1966. I knew that he was born in 1943 on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where his mother was hiding, and that he and his parents survived and got to New York in the early 1950s. I also recalled that they had scratched out a living selling brassieres on the Lower East Side. That much I remembered about my friend – but I knew next to nothing about what had happened to him since then.
For about an hour and a half, with frenetic energy, which came in part from the excitement of seeing an old friend after so many years, he spoke to us about his life. It was like a private stand-up performance – and I realize that I don’t possess the literary skills to convey the scene, which was hilarious, with deep tragic dimensions, and heightened by the coincidence that at that Sabbath meal we happened to have volunteered to host two Christian visitors from Michigan, kind, intelligent people – but absolutely bland compared to the brilliant, entertaining, energetic man who had dropped in on us! If they were hoping for exposure to authentic Jewish people, they sure got some.
Then last Shabbat, my wife and I participated in the Bat-Mitzvah celebration of my second cousin’s husband’s grand-daughter – the kind of tenuous family connection that somehow can matter here in Israel. During a small luncheon for family and close friends, I noted the huge variety of people assembled there: from a demented retired Conservative rabbi to a Korean convert to Judaism, and I realized how much literary skill it would take just to convey everyone’s background – forget about a plot!
My third lesson in the inadequacy of language is painful. Quite a few of you know me personally, so you know that I suffered a tragic loss last year, when my twenty-eight year old son Asher fell to his death while hiking in the Colca Canyon in Peru. During the past year, almost all of the personal writing that I’ve done has been connected with this loss. I kept a blog about it to share my feelings and experiences with our friends. But of course the words came nowhere close to expressing what I was feeling – and still feel.
I had number of reasons for writing about our loss in the public form of a blog. It was a way to make my writing available to family and friends without imposing on them by sending them individual emails, for example, which they may have felt required to read. With the blog, if they didn’t want to read, they didn’t have to. And if a stranger somehow stumbled on the blog and benefited by sharing my feelings, that would please me, though I have no idea how many strangers actually logged onto it and read it. I wasn’t even tempted to put a guest counting widget on the blog, because I didn’t want to get caught up in wondering whether or not I had an audience, or in feeling disappointed if I wasn’t reaching more than a handful of readers. If my wife and children read it, and some other people close to me, that was enough. Nevertheless, it was important for me to make it at least semi-public, and that’s a point I’ll return to.
I managed to attain a degree of self-revelation in the blog, and it has had some unexpected and heartwarming personal consequences. For example, a few weeks ago a Hebrew author whom I admire and once interviewed for the Jerusalem Post found me on the Internet and got in touch with me by email. She was looking for a translator and wanted to know if I was still in that business. She’s been abroad for the past ten years, so we’ve been out of contact.
I decided to tell her about what had happened in our family by referring her to my blog. (I don’t do that with everybody I am in contact with: it depends on how personal I feel about them.) This writer is a clinical psychologist, and, as she told me in an intense correspondence, she also lost a child – her first one, a son who died of an illness when he was six. She encouraged me to write – not the blog, but fiction. Writing should be my way of coping with grief. With the blog, that has been the case – but as to writing fiction ... I don’t know. I’m not ready yet.
I began by saying that life has made be acutely aware of the inadequacy of language to convey experience – but I should add that life has made me equally aware of the marvelous ability of language to stimulate the imagination and thus enlarge our experience. And that is why we should keep on writing, even if we’re not as successful at it as we could wish.
I engage in two main expressive activities aside from writing: music and ceramics. I have been an active amateur musician for many years, and I’ve kept up with that almost obsessively during this year of bereavement. By contrast, pottery is new for me. Last spring, spontaneously, without brooding about it or planning it, I looked for ceramics classes on the Web, found one within walking distance of my house, enrolled, and have been happily messing about with clay ever since. For my psychological health, I knew it would be useful to do something new, something not laden with memories of my son (although he was a very talented artist), and something non-verbal – as music is non-verbal. And I was right.
If I’m suspicious of language and glad to spend time in non-verbal activities, that’s because I’ve always been excessively verbal. Silence troubles me. My working hours consist mainly in translating Hebrew to English and occasionally editing English, so words are always reverberating in my head, and I’m constantly involved in the technicalities of writing. It’s also a craft I’ve come to know a good deal about, so I’d like to move toward a conclusion by being bluntly honest with this group about our writing.
I think it’s safe to say that no one in this room, no contributor to ARC, is ever going to be recognized as a major writer, and I hope I haven’t offended anyone by saying that. It’s even safer to say that none of us is going to get rich and/or famous by writing. If we go on writing, it’s because the activity of writing is important to us, not because what we write is important to a large outside audience, waiting breathlessly for our next magnum opus.
However, though we don’t have a large outside audience, we do have a small inside community, and our writing lives and matters in that community – essentially the people in this room and the people outside it whose lives we touch.
There are many bad reasons for writing, mainly connected with excessive egotism. But there are also a lot of good reasons for it, even if one can’t approach the level of the writers one admires (here I speak for myself). After all, I’m not terribly surprised or upset that I can’t play tenor saxophone as well as a professional who started off with more talent than I have and has devoted his or her whole life to music. I don’t expect ever to be more than a decent amateur player, but I do appreciate great musicians because I know how hard it is to play at their level. As for my pottery, I’m not aiming to exhibit in the next biennale or to sell my work in the lovely shops in Nahalat Shiv’a. But my friends seem to be pleased when I bring a misshapen little bowl as a house present when I come for dinner. So, I also don’t kick myself for not being as successful (both in terms of gaining recognition and in terms of mastery of the art) a writer as Bellow, Updike, Nabokov, or Borges – or some of the people I have translated, like Appelfeld and Agnon. Trying makes me appreciate their greatness and their devotion to the art.
Aware that I am not a great or important literary artist, I still want to share my words, to get them out into the world, because publishing gives our work reality, just as playing music for an audience makes it count in a way that it doesn’t have when you’re only playing by yourself in your room. The imaginative depth I spoke of before can exist in isolation, but it’s stronger when it’s shared. Our task as Israeli writers in English is to create a public space for our writing, a public space tolerant of our shortcomings, patient with our limitations, and appreciative of what we do achieve. We should all be grateful to one another for providing enough of a public to make our writing live.
