James Joyce

Dear Reader, today we mark a solemn anniversary. On this day in 1942, William Faulkner, whose works to date (The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!) were not lucrative enough to keep body and soul knit together, embarked upon his screenwriting career. Yes. This happened.

Humphrey Bogart was the biggest box-office draw of the day and Warner Brothers thought the two would be unstoppable. But consider: Bogart was a chain smoker (hence, the eponymous rude habit of “bogarting” [don’t act like you don’t know what I mean]). How was he ever going to make it to the end of a Faulknerian sentence? In a phrase no one has ever used before: Hemingway to the rescue! WB put Faulkner to work doing film treatments of To Have and Have Not and then Chandler’s The Big Sleep. This was a boon for folks like me, who would otherwise never have endured Faulkner’s work in any form.

Surely, though, this was an aberration. Our society does not hold the written word in so light esteem that we’d make authors work for a living. Right? The sad truth follows:

1. Herman Melville, bank clerk

Whether he would prefer not to or no, Melville toiled at a bank in Albany, New York, beginning in 1832. Subsequent stints as English teacher and cabin boy proved equally unsatisfactory, so he boarded a merchant ship and went properly to sea. During his five-year voyage, he explored strange new worlds (including living with some cannibals in the Marquesas), sought out new life and new life forms (literally selling sea shells by the seashore in Tahiti), and was boldly imprisoned by mutineers.

Look how happy he is in this photo. Wearing a tie. Sitting in a chair. Having a table at elbow. He has landed the white whale of Indoorland. Well done, Herman.

2. George Orwell, policeman

The man TIME magazine would awkwardly hail as “Big Brother’s Father” one day enlisted (yes, that’s the correct word) in the Imperial Police at the age of 19 and went off to merry Mandalay, where he would be haunted by Mister de Winter’s first wife, Rebecca, (not true) and eventually catch a nice whiff of dengue fever (sadly, true).

Known for perfectly serviceable works such as 1984, Orwell most importantly crafted the definitive guide on the making of tea, lauded (properly) as among the mainstays of civilization. He was also a linguist and spoke 9 languages, including the Tibeto-Burman tonal language, Shaw-Karen.

So cruel was life to this man that he retreated to an abandoned building in the Inner Hebrides after the death of his wife (and after many unsuccessful attempts to replace her). Fortunately, he eventually contracted tuberculosis, which was extremely fashionable at the time. Do it to Julia, indeed.

In this photo, he is doubtless wondering why he was not posted to Japan, where he might have picked up the proper technique for hara-kiri.

3. Kurt Vonnegut, car salesman

Did you really think these would get better? No Disney ads on this blog, Friend. (Dear Mr. Iger, I can make you a competitive offer.)

Kurt Vonnegut opened (not just sauntered into one Saturday morning, but opened) a Saab dealership in Barnstable, Massachusetts, five years after his first novel, Player Piano, was launched. He credited his lack of success at selling Saabs with the prejudice the Swedes displayed in withholding the Nobel.

This is a photo of Kurt visiting the air-raid shelter where he waited out the fire-bombing of Dresden as a POW, trying mightily to catch a little of Orwell’s complaint.

4. J.D. Salinger, your activities director

Nobody’s fool, J.D. tried to go about things the right way. But when his relationship with Oona O’Neill (daughter of Eugene O’Neill) went south, he had to get an honest job. I’m not sure he had to go whole hog and become the activities director for the MS Kungsholm, but it was a Swedish ship (seems he and Kurt were working the same angle).

Hard to imagine this fellow setting up the shuffleboard tourney. I’m seeing swaths of rye around the courts. And then, then, ohmygosh, people are just running off the edge of the ship! And no one can catch them, because J.D. has been so busy with the pinochle seatings that Holden Caulfield hasn’t been written yet. The horror!

There are more, many more: Agatha Christie as druggist’s assistant, James Joyce running a movie theater, Kerouac washing dishes and Burroughs killing bugs. Virginia Woolf may have had it worst of all. She became a publisher and it made her so cranky she rejected James Joyce. Not a date with Joyce, mind you, but Ulysses. She sold out eventually and killed herself three years later. Dangerous work, this writing life.

So, next time you breezily bypass some Great Work and think, “I’ll get it at the library,” remember: You are a party to this grave injustice. Writing is hard and writers need to eat—dust and cocaine, at a minimum. Go treat yourself, some lucky author, and the world and support your local bookstore (or massive online retailer).

The weekend’s coming. What will you read?

Caveat: Not all who are alone are lonely. So all you extroverts who somehow stumbled on a book blog, just take a deep breath before you sneak up on some “poor” loner with his nose in a book. However, if you see a forlorn face behind the pages of one of these, maybe smile and say hello.

1. The Bell Jar

belljar Sylvia Plath seems like a person with a truckload of problems unless you learn something about Ted Hughes. It’s easy to point the finger at mental illness, but when both your wives opt out? There’s a dark, dark Sesame Street jingle waiting to be composed.

A person carrying this book is likely an English major. This is OK, because the life of an English major is riddled with disappointments, but he can always fall back on “At least I’m not Sylvia Plath” and feel pretty good about things.

An otherwise happy person who picks this up (due to an interest in the French intensive method, let’s say) will face one of two results: Either the book will be put down or the reader will wish he were.

Sad people, people going through breakups, people dating people named Ted, and all teenagers should avoid this book.

2. The Remains of the Day

remains This Ishiguro fellow is going to get a post all his own one day. He does loneliness like Phelps does water—effortless, smooth, and really fast. He wrote this one in four weeks. If you’ve seen the film, you may be thinking this is one where the book can’t possibly be better. Oh, but it is.

“I try to write unfilmable novels,” Ishiguro told the Economist. I would swear he succeeds, but there are filmmakers afoot who seem equal to the challenge.

If you don’t know the book or the film, imagine what it’s like to live a life of such structure and rigor that you never reveal your feelings, even to yourself.

Then you’re old.

Bam.

3. White Nights

whitenights If you ever see a non-Russian person under the age of 80 reading Dostoevsky, you should do your best to separate the two of them. I was working on a Russian minor (as in secondary course of study, not as in underaged Belarusian) when the Russian realists drew into my crosshairs. “Do your worst!” I spat at the spectre of their chill threat. I powered through Karamazov. I held firm through Karenina. Dead Souls was just a bit of bureaucratic fluff. Rounding third and heading for home, I dusted off some of Fyodor’s short stories. “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” hurt. It hurt bad, I won’t lie. Then this. I thought our man was tackling the same project, with a gentler hand. I thought I heard the distant strains of human resilience. Was that…hope?

No. It wasn’t.

Still today, I react to every disappointment—traumatic or trivial—with this line in my head:

“My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?”

Extra tip for world leaders: Need to get the upper hand on Putin? Whip this line out on him. There’s no way he can stand the army of regrets that will rise to defeat him on that day. It’s his own personal Polonium-210.

4. The Dead

dead

Feeling uncontrollably chipper? Need to take that spring out of your step before you hurt your back? Is your day just too dang sunny and there are no Russians about? James Joyce to the rescue!

This, too, is a short story because it is, apparently, too easy to depress humans. Take Victorian Dublin, a snowy feast of the Epiphany, a man named Gabriel, and his wife Regretta…er, Gretta, that is. Blend thoroughly, decant into a shotglass, and then plunge the whole thing into a foamy pint of “September 1913” and you get an exploding car bomb named the Death of Romantic Ireland.

Joyce plucks your innards out so beautifully, you’ll think you hear angels singing to the airs of a harp strung with your own catgut. Yes, Furey is buried, but the snow is never very deep on the old sod, is it?

Crime Doesn’t Pay; Neither Does Writing