I have been a teacher now for thirty-five years and when people ask me why I love the job (which I do) I sometimes lie—or at least I leave the main motive out. I tell them how much I like students (and I do) and how much I love the feel of colleges (they often seem like ideal cities to me) and how well I get along with my colleagues (true, most all the time). But what I leave out is that I love teaching because it is the only way I’ve ever found to learn anything that mattered to me. When I want to know more about something—philosophy, religion, movies, books—I arrange to teach a course about it. I’m a passive reader (half the time I’m dreaming away) and when I go to a lecture I one-third listen at best. But when I have to give a lecture or present a class, the mental beams (such as they are) go on high (or as high as they get) and I actually learn what I am supposed to teach.
There are writers who write to learn not what they already know (on some level) but those who write to discover new aspects of the world outside themselves. (They write for much the same reason that I, and many others like me I’ll bet, go into teaching: without what we taught ourselves teaching others, we’d be dopes.) I love writers who are perpetual students, the sorts of people who become hungrily curious about one thing or another and go to work to learn all they can about it. What they write for is to discover something new. The writing can almost be an excuse for the learning. A person suddenly becomes possessed by the idea of learning about gardening or fly fishing or architecture or the way Wall Street works (and doesn’t) and then goes to work, chugging down facts and metabolizing them at a velocity that often leaves me stunned. I’m the archetypal slow learner and I’m pleased and grateful when a quick learner comes along and dives headfirst into a fascinating subject and acquires triple time what would take me years to capture, and then serves it all up in sterling silver prose. Such writers find pleasure themselves and yield it in no small measure to their readers.
Such writers tend to be optimists. They tend to love the world. Though they are often critics of what they consider (Wall Street!), they have an abiding faith that change will soon be tinting the horizon. “If winter comes,” says the poet, “can spring be far behind?” They write slashing exposés like Fast Food Nation and they do hyper-overtime research and holler expertly at the banks. And then they pop up two or three years later working on some only partially related subject having gorged themselves again on facts, facts, and more facts. They are the servants of humanity and they are perpetual students.
Walter Benjamin says the correct attitude toward life (which means it is surely the correct attitude toward writing) is that of children in fairy tales—cheerful, confident, and resourceful, ready to take on whatever comes. Anyone who has read the Oz books (the movie is a slightly different matter) knows that Dorothy is a wonder. Weird things are always happening to this American Alice in Wonderland, but unlike perpetually nonplussed Alice, the polite English girl, Dorothy is never taken completely by surprise and always knows what to do. She’s curious, warm, and ready for anything, a perpetual student of the bizarre world of Oz. Writers who learn and teach are students of our own often Oz-like world of marvels and they often lack nothing of Dorothy’s doughty spirit.
A certain sort of writer is a perpetual student. Writing is his excuse to educate himself. Where other men and women are satisfied to go off and read a book about the president or the latest war or the way we eat now, this kind of writer goes out and writes one. He travels and he reads and he interviews and he researches. He spends as much time away from his desk gathering materials as he does sitting down and composing the book. He’s a sociable sort of person, the educating writer, and he has the very rare capacity of being equally at home with people and at his desk. Hannah Arendt said that to be a politician you had to be able to spend protracted periods of time with people you fundamentally do not like. Many writers—I’d even say most—don’t like much of anyone and live a sort of self-imposed internal exile. This kind of writer, the writer who writes to learn and teach, has a gift for liking everyone, or at least everyone who can help him enlarge his base of knowledge. He can cruise a cocktail party to find the staffer who’ll tell him what’s up in Congress, or cold-call a scientist to learn all about nuclear fission (or fusion), but then he can repair to his home, turn off the phone, recede from the Internet, and get working. Unlike other writers, who often spend the three hours of a dinner party watching their hands, the educating writer can chat nimbly with all comers. Norman Mailer saw this quality in his contemporary Dwight Macdonald, who, Mailer said, could immerse himself in deep discourse with an Eskimo making his first visit from the tundra within five minutes of being introduced. Most sociable people can’t write; most writers can’t schmooze. This kind does both.
The persona of the student is one of the most attractive of human identities and one of the most pleasure yielding. Not only does it often yield much-praised literary results, but it also feels good to inhabit. You can roll through life like a feisty cub, asking questions, smiling, and doing the dance of deference, which people naturally love you for. You can be a terrific listener because a little like old Rumpelstiltskin, you’ll soon be spinning the conversational straw into gold. People love to hold forth, especially insecure intellectual types, male types in particular. And there you are to catch their words in a pearl basin. Then back to the office and the desk and the Herman Miller Aeron Chair to kick back and put it all in order.
The persona of writer-student doesn’t only work well in the research phase. People love to hang out with a literary learner. That’s what reading his books can feel like—hanging out with him or her. He doesn’t make them insecure or nervous. He doesn’t make them feel dumb, the way old-time writers like Milton and Spenser do. If anything, readers maybe feel a bit sharper than he is. He is so earnest, so modest, so solicitous of their attention, and so determined to feed them the material in tasty (and nutritious) bites. He puts himself in the readers’ place and asks all the questions they want to ask; he anticipates their feelings and addresses them in humane, nonstuffy ways. He writes profiles and features for the New Yorker and bestselling books for every outlet that pays. What he does is hard to do, and the world thanks him (if he does it well) with coins by the chestful and trophies and plaques.
But the peril is this: the writer who writes to learn often doesn’t write that well. He hasn’t had time to metabolize his material, so he writes out of the front of his brain and not out of the feelings in his gut. He goes off and finds subjects, rather than letting subjects find him, bubbling up from the bottom of the cauldron that is his creative source. Yeats, very late in his career, says he’s searching for a subject and can’t find one, just can’t. He pines and even grieves a bit, but he eventually comes to a solution. He’s going to go back down to where all of his work has always begun: “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” The business about his creative unconscious being foul seems to me to be simply Yeats’s everyday being—his selfhood—talking. He doesn’t want to descend into the mess of memories and dreams and fantasies. It’s damned embarrassing. But Yeats, great poet that he is, knows that true subjects are in you and have to be dived down after—or simply waited for.
Writing a book or an article about something you get interested in for the purpose of writing a book or an article is often going to result in thin gruel. People may read the book once for the information, and the timely buzz. But they won’t go back to it time after time. The best writers, I think, don’t only want to be read; they want to be reread.
The late Christopher Hitchens was a writer who could take the events of the day—even a particularly brutal or strange day—and spin them into sense overnight. Hours after the attacks of 9/11, Hitchens was churning out reasonably astute, reasonably thoughtful reactions. And Hitchens could write a book in a trice. He blazed into a subject, got a grip on it, and produced something lively and smart. He attacked religion; he attacked Bill Clinton and Hillary; he even went after Mother Teresa. He savaged Lord Elgin for stealing the marbles from the Parthenon. Hitch’s fires flared brightly, but they were often fed by paper and sticks. Try rereading any one of these books and you’ll see how glib they are. One feels he is in the hands of a man who wants to make his word count for the day, have a drink, and get paid. I loved Hitchens the journalist. When something of note happened, he was the one I wanted to read first. I just didn’t want to read it again the next day. Hitchens was a teacher and Hitchens was a student—glad to learn, glad to teach. But even in his memoir, you can’t say he wrote from the guts. That sort of thing just wasn’t in him. He was in a major hurry, always running like Alice simply to stay in the same place.
Yet there are days when I—and I suppose many others—would trade a good deal to be this sort of student-writer. Such people have a connection with readers that one envies. They really do work for their constituency. They find the subjects that will interest the public; they go at them in a direct way; they answer all questions and leave nothing unsaid. They are like literary lawyers and doctors, performing a service the world seems to need—and for which the world sometimes rewards them munificently.
Do they ever shape taste, or expand consciousness? Not very likely. When they hear the poet say that the writer must create the taste by which he will be appreciated, they nod dismissively. They don’t want to enlarge consciousness or question existing protocols of thought. They want to please and instruct, with the pleasing always coming first. They want their readers to feel hip, knowing, and at home in the world. They are all too often the equivalent of a warm blanket and a cup of tea, however insouciant they may pretend to be. And yet I have no doubt that without them the world of writing would be a far poorer place. Write to learn; write to teach. It brings pleasure (and yields pleasure), but it’s got its perils, too. It’s not the noblest way to butter one’s toast I suppose, but it’s far from the worst.
The midgame writer has to decide if he or she will go this route or not. Will she walk over the terrain of current culture with the equivalent of a divining rod, hoping to be drawn to the next big topic that’s just slightly buried but ready to surface? Or should she follow her heart, and write what she most wants to write? That way has perils, too. One knows what it is like when your interests simply do not line up with the existing interests of the world at large. One has had the experience of composing the right book at the wrong time. But insofar as you are free of the exigencies of your purse, I think it best to write about what you love, and leave the journalism, even the higher journalism, to the fast and the fluent, and those hoping to make the literary slot machine pay out with a hooting of whistles, a clanging of bells, and an avalanche of brass tokens. Love is hard to find—and harder as life goes on and one enters the middle distance. To be able to do something—anything—from the heart is a pleasure and a gift not to be denied.