testifies: substantial creative work demands time, and with rare exceptions only full-time workers have achieved it.
*
Where the claims of creation cannot be primary, the results are atrophy; unfinished work; minor effort and accomplishments; silences. (Desperation which accounts for the mountains of applications to the foundations for grantsundivided timein the strange bread-line system we have worked out for our artists.)
|
Twenty years went by on the writing of
Ship of Fools,
while Katherine Anne Porter, who needed only two, was ''trying to get to that table, to that typewriter, away from my jobs of teaching and trooping this country and of keeping house." "Your subconscious needed that time to grow the layers of pearl," she was told. Perhaps, perhaps, but I doubt it. Subterranean forces can make you wait, but they are very finicky about the kind of waiting it has to be. Before they will feed the creator back, they must be fed, passionately fed, what needs to be worked on. "We hold up our desire as one places a magnet over a composite dust from which the particle of iron will suddenly jump up," says Paul Valéry. A receptive waiting, that means, not demands which prevent "an undistracted center of being." And when the response comes, availability to work must be immediate. If not used at once, all may vanish as a dream; worse, future creation be endangeredfor only the removal and development of the material frees the forces for further work.
|
There is a life in which all this is documented: Franz Kafka's. For every one entry from his diaries here, there are fifty others
|
 | | *This does not mean that these full-time writers were hermetic or denied themselves social or personal life (think of James, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Balzac, Joyce, Gide, Colette, Yeats, Woolf, etc. etc.); nor did they, except perhaps at the flood, put in as many hours daily as those doing more usual kinds of work. Three to six hours daily have been the norm ("the quiet, patient, generous mornings will bring it") Zola and Trollope are famous last-century examples of the four hours; the
Paris Review
interviews disclose many contemporary ones.
|
| | Full-timeness consists not in the actual number of hours at one's desk, but in that writing is one's major profession, practiced habitually, in freed, protected, undistracted time as needed, when it is needed.
|
|
