Seducing the Demon (2 page)

Actually this was all advice to
myself
when I was petrified about putting one word on the page. I could have published this self-help book if I chose to. I had a publisher who wanted it, paid for it and scheduled it. But the more I looked at it, the more dismayed I became.

There were too damn many books on writing! We needed more
readers,
not more writers. We had a whole industry of writing workshops. I myself went to guest lecture at them and found myself encouraging people who would
never
be writers, who hadn’t the guts to be honest or hadn’t the talent for words or hadn’t the
Sitzfleisch.
They were good kids or earnest adults and I had the social worker’s instinct to help the needy. And I was paid those lecture fees to tide me over to the next book. Sometimes I even did it for free if a good friend or my daughter asked me. I love teaching; it was my first and only real job.

But writing is a god-awful profession. One year you get an advance and two years later you’ve spent it and the book is nowhere near finished. Most writers can’t make a living without teaching or editing or working in advertising or journalism or TV or writing movies that never get made.

Why was I recommending this purgatory to people? Only if you have
no other choice
should you be a writer. Publishers are getting leaner and meaner. Advances are going down and you’re only as good as your last sales figures. Even agents don’t want you if you’ve had a flop. Literary writers used to regularly make the best-seller list when I started. Now romance novels that were once luridly paperbacked in drugstores—or novels by committees using a brand name—mostly monopolize the list.

Not that I have a problem with syndicate-written books, if they announce their syndicate on the cover. Anything that gets people reading is good. The Nancy Drew mysteries were written by committee and I adored Nancy Drew when I was eight, nine and ten. Summers on Fire Island, I used to save my wagoning and babysitting money to buy the latest Nancy Drew and read it through in two hours. I loved boyfriend Ned Nickerson and Nancy’s red “roadster” and her “tomboy” friend George. I’m sorry they ever updated the series. It was both quaint and true—the perfect story of a motherless girl who loved her daddy. I felt it was the story of my life.

In contrast, my daughter, Molly, spent her whole childhood saying, “I’ll never be a writer! I don’t know why
anyone
would be! The first year we go to Europe and by the third year we’re totally broke and you’re hysterical and looking for teaching jobs.” Then she turned nineteen and sat down and wrote
Normal Girl.
Clearly, she had no choice. She published it at twenty-one and immediately wrote
Girl Maladjusted—
a book of satirical essays she published at twenty-six when she had a year-old baby. She was driven—just like her mother. She had no choice but to write. And she refused to let me help her. She found her own agent and her own publisher. Without that drivenness—and a trust fund or Grandpa paying the bills—who can write? Only people who can live in cold-water flats and like it.

So why was I going into the advice business? My job was to tell the truth as I saw it. I had always been a shit disturber. And I had never received unequivocal praise. In fact I had been proud of being controversial. The brickbats told me I was doing something right.

So tell the truth, I told myself. That’s your job, not advice and self-help.

And then I had a pivotal experience. Invited to speak at graduation for the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York (and be awarded my first honorary doctorate), I decided to tell the students the truth instead of mouthing hollow words of encouragement. I knew that Staten Island was a red borough in an otherwise blue city. I knew that my audience was likely to be composed of the sons and daughters of firefighters and cops who voted for George W. Bush. But what was the point of being chosen as commencement speaker if I was just going to soothe them and tell them what they wanted to hear?

What would
I
have wanted to hear at age twenty-one? What would my favorite authors—Jonathan Swift, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson—have talked about? They certainly wouldn’t say “Seize the day or be seized by it” or “Write your dream on an egg and watch it hatch” or “Follow your bliss”—which may have been fresh when Joseph Camp-bell first said it to Bill Moyers but was now tattered and shopworn from all the New Agers who had tried it on and paraded about in it.

There was only one way to tell the truth. And that was to tell the kids and their parents and professors why I was there. I was there because I was a writer and a writer is someone who takes the universal whore of language and turns her into a virgin again. I wasn’t going to coast on clichés. I was going to talk about the power of words—something I had been thinking a great deal about since the so-called war on terror dragged on and on, kidnapping the language and proliferating terrorists. Language, I thought, has never been more abused. And here’s what I said:

It was when I said this in my commencement speech that the faculty and some students started to cheer and others started to loudly boo while they passed various beach balls above their heads through the crowd.

My speech had started very late because three unannounced politicians had been limousined up to the outdoor podium and wedged in front of the other speakers—like the college president, the provost of City University, the dean of the faculty, the winner of the top student prize and me. The pols had been nowhere in evidence when the academic procession began at nine-thirty in the morning. So we all sat there in our gowns and hoods and mortarboards while some nameless nerd who was hopelessly running for mayor of New York City, Senator Charles Schumer and a hopeless would-be challenger to Senator Hillary Clinton talked on and on about their own triumphs.

Chuck Schumer was mercifully brief. He told the audience that he was the one they should thank for the deductibility of college tuition. I wistfully remembered those days in the sixties when I taught at CCNY and tuition was free. This generation of students probably didn’t even know about the great ideal of college education for all who were capable. They worked two or three jobs and incurred enormous tuition debts (or their parents did) and yet they kept voting for a President who thought only the rich should have college degrees. Their ignorance of history pained me. I am becoming an old fart, I thought, woolgathering about free college tuition at CUNY. Young people just assume they have no choice but to begin their adult lives deep in debt. Surely they would shoot the messenger if I talked about the antique ideal of free education. I decided I would keep my speech about language and telling the truth but cut it as short as I could.

Orwellian Newspeak is everywhere in the air, I said.

I have spent my life and my lucre supporting
Roe v. Wade,
yet now I understand the so-called pro-life activists. I hardly agree with them, but I do understand them. Roe, schmo. Privacy is an abstract concept compared to those little fingers and toes. We old lefty liberals didn’t know what hit us when the sonogram was invented. And “pro-life” is so much sexier than “pro-choice.” Never mind that many pro-lifers love the death penalty, they have the better slogan and we are stuck with the vagueness of “choice.”

Here the cheers from the faculty and students got louder and the boos of the parents increased. They didn’t want me in the CIA (or CIA, as insiders call it). They probably wanted me in Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib.