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29 November 1998
I am leaving these words here because silence would be too clean. Clean endings are for people who still believe the world keeps accounts. It does not. The world eats the account book and asks whether you have considered a livelier first chapter.
Publishing is not a gate. A gate suggests hinges, a latch, a person on the other side who may one day open it. Publishing is a furnace wearing a receptionist's smile. It takes the envelopes, the stamps, the clean pages, the careful covering letters, the polite biographies, the years of discipline, and feeds them into the fire while thanking you for your interest.
I did the required rites. I bought the directories. I wrote the one-page letters. I enclosed the self-addressed envelopes like little surrender flags. I kept a ledger of submissions until the ledger looked less like professional diligence and more like a list of executions. Title, market, date sent, date returned, response. A cemetery with columns.
The successes were worse than the failures because they proved nothing except that the machinery can spit a spark before swallowing the whole room. A university magazine. A paperback anthology from a press that died like a match in rain. Two short pieces in an electronic review praised by people who apparently believed praise was a substitute for purchase. A chapbook that travelled from the printer to a box to a cupboard. Actual publication. Actual ash.
No one bought the work. No one came. The paper existed and the readers did not. That is the black joke under all the bright talk about persistence: the door can open onto a pit. You can be admitted and still fall forever.
The advice is a hydra. Cut off one stupid head and three more rise up, each speaking in a workshop voice. Be patient. Be fierce. Be marketable. Be original. Build a reputation. Do not chase fashion. Take criticism. Protect the work. Revise. Submit. Wait. Smile. Burn. Repeat. It is a theology of punishment with better stationery.
I used to think obscurity was a fog that might lift. It is not fog. It is bedrock. It is the floor of the world. Some people are born above it and call the view merit. The rest of us claw at stone until our hands are meat and are told, very kindly, that the list is full.
Meanwhile I have been made a director at Barclays Capital. There: the respectable tombstone. The title has weight. The salary has weight. The diary has weight. The rooms are bright and sealed and full of men who understand appetite without pretending it is art. Numbers move. Money moves. Nothing needs to be beautiful. Nothing needs to be true in the literary sense; it only needs to clear.
It means I cannot write anymore. Not because the hours are gone, though they are. Not because the mind is tired, though it is. Because the part of me that kept walking into the fire has finally learned what fire is. I can write lines in margins. I can wake with sentences like smoke in the throat. I can keep notebooks that accuse me from drawers. That is not a life in letters. That is a haunting.
Finance, at least, does not pretend to love you. It wants your labour and your nerve and the clean kill. I almost admire the honesty. Publishing wants your soul first and your gratitude afterwards. It kisses the condemned on the cheek and calls the burn marks experience.
I am angry past usefulness. I resent the kind editors for keeping the flame lit under the pot. I resent the cold editors for mistaking indifference for judgement. I resent the successful writers with their sainted patience and their useful suffering and their essays about perseverance delivered from the far side of luck. I resent the non-readers, the invisible public, the great open mouth that did not even bother to close.
Most of all I resent the young woman who thought talent was a warrant and oddness was a weapon. She was brave, and bravery is apparently just another form of tinder. She walked in smiling. I would warn her if warning changed anything. It does not. The fire needs believers.
So let this stand without consolation. No lesson. No blessing. No tidy turn toward hope. The work went out and mostly vanished. The life adjusted itself around the wound. I will go to the office, do well, come home late, and become legible to the world by ceasing to ask it for anything that mattered.
There is no moral. There is no hidden reward. There is only what burns, what survives burning, and what learns to stop calling the smoke a signal.
Janet
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