For a writer in today’s marketplace, moderation is an affliction. There’s something to be said for bourgeois respectability, of course, but nobody wants to read memoirs about heroic retirement saving, the Sturm und Drang of predawn carpooling, or the epic compromises that, strung together over the decades, produce an enduring marriage. All writers know this.
“The tranquil current of domestic happiness affords no materials for narrative,” Mary Brunton concluded two centuries ago in a didactic novel called Self-Control. “The joys that spring from chastened affection, tempered desires, useful employment, and devout meditation, must be felt—they cannot be described.” This is a truth universally acknowledged, which may be why Brunton has her heroine flee an evil boyfriend by tying herself to a birch-bark canoe and plunging over a Canadian waterfall. People made fun of that ending, but it sold books.
The same sort of thing sells nowadays, too, except it’s the writer’s hair-raising escape from his own demons that rings up the registers. A book about self-control today ought rightly to be about the author’s struggles (however embroidered) to conquer some fiendish addiction. The problem is that, despite my best efforts, nobody could lead a more humdrum life than I do. Although I check my e-mail a little too often, I am not addicted to anything. I do not even struggle with my weight, except—and this is embarrassing—for when it gets too low. I’ve had my excesses over the years, but the sad fact is that I never quite manage to take them to excess. Nor does religious fervor move me to ecstasy or wrath. In general I am deaf to spirituality; the main thing I do religiously is maintain our cars. I will admit that in Las Vegas once, on assignment, I developed a gambling problem. The problem was that I lost $10 on the Penn-Dartmouth football game, the sting of which is with me still. Some years after this youthful binge I married my dentist, compared to whom I am the long-lost twin of Amy Winehouse raised by wolves.
Yet even I have self-control problems. Do you have any idea how long it took me to buckle down to work on the paragraphs you just read? First, of course, I had to explore the vast discography of the pianist Paul Bley via the Internet, that accursed underminer of all our best intentions. In doing so I naturally worked up quite an appetite, which meant time out for food, followed by a restorative nap. While “working” on this same section I also found time to add to my remarkable e-mail oeuvre, dispatching messages of unparalleled artistry and wit to correspondents the world over. (As it is for most writers these days, e-mail is by far the form in which I am most prolific.) I did some laundry, went to the gym, and took measurements for various household repairs that I’m still putting off. I even kept a close eye on techbargains.com for—well, for some great tech bargains, the nature of which I haven’t yet imagined.
Now, during all this frantic self-distraction, I knew somewhere deep inside that sooner or later I really would have to write this preface— and that the longer it took the less money and self-regard I would have. As time went by I grew anxious, and finally even furious. After a while I was practically desperate to get going. Yet somehow, for days on end, I failed to yoke my actions to what I could have sworn all along was my will, leaving the necessary work undone. The question is, how can such a thing possibly happen? Why, in other words, is self-control so difficult?
And why does it seem to be so much harder for some people than for others? Is it a matter of circumstances? Or maybe it’s a matter of just a single circumstance—the circumstance of birth, in which our ancestors perform the function of the Fates, investing our DNA with our destiny. What if even your garden-variety, mild-mannered, house-maintaining dad is programmed to someday run amok like the Manchurian Candidate or the Malaysian pengamoks who gave us the term?
This book is the result of my attempt to find some answers. In searching for them, I discovered all sorts of interesting things—including the extent to which procrastination has been an enduring occupational hazard for writers. Victor Hugo, to cite a single example, supposedly ordered his valet to confiscate his clothes so he wouldn’t go off and waste time doing something—anything!—other than writing. Even the prolific Irving Wallace, who cranked out commercial fiction the way Ben Bernanke cranks out greenbacks in a crisis, had to face this problem, which he addressed in an academic paper called “Self-Control Techniques of Famous Novelists.”
What a relief to learn that, despite my boring rectitude, I share at least one of the characteristic failings of my scribbling brethren, for an excess of propriety is troubling in a writer. As a novelist familiar with the erratic history of my tribe, I’m all too aware of how often the lives of writers appear to be out of control, and after wallowing in the subject for a while, I came away afflicted with a worrisomely Calvinist perspective on my own feeble career. Think of Coleridge’s opium habit or Faulkner’s drinking. Alcoholism, debauchery, and other such excesses might not assure greatness, but what if they are God’s signs of literary grace—precious markers suggesting that you are, after so much doubt, really among the elect? And what if, despite filling in “writer” year after year on your tax returns, you had none of these markers whatsoever?
I console myself that obscurity likely beckons regardless of my excesses or any lack thereof. Meanwhile, we scribes without addictions can at least claim to be sensibly following Flaubert, who urged us to “be regular and orderly in your life . . . so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
The pages that follow are as violent and original as I could make them. Book buyers, take note.