The damp hand of melancholy

There is a direct line that connects the overall apprehension with which I approach the world and the hopelessness and disaster that often seems to accompany my attempts at writing anything at all about it. It's the pits, but in a careening world, the words simply do not come.

This is no great epiphany. It's more like stating the obvious. For hamstrung situations like mine, there's never any assuaging this apprehension. Honestly, I've never asked for anything of the sort. The greatest comfort is realizing that this is normal and probably encouraged. Terribly confusing, often exhausting, but normal and encouraged all the same. Sometimes I forget that, though.

Probably the best -- yet frankly jerk-offy -- advice about writing I've ever heard is, Tell the truth. I'm often accused of stating the obvious, so again, pardon me for pointing this out, but this doesn't mean "never lie." Writing truthfully has nothing to do with proof. Think of it as having true aim. Accuracy. Pointedness. If you can write like you're splitting arrows on a bullseye, you will come back to the words years later and they will continue to ring true.

For instance, all this so far? Probably not the truth. That's the tricky part because I don't know yet. The snappy three-word aphorism fails to tell you that truth takes time. For the writer, anyway. You? You can usually tell right away. In fact, perhaps you can save me a few years and a lot of grief and let me know if what I say ever rings true right away. Thanks.

There is a point. If James Thurber's My Life and Hard Times were a sandwich, it'd be one made infinitely better by the gourmet roll surrounding what's inside. The nine short, autobiographical essays are bookended by the brief "Preface to a Life" and "A Note at the End." Although the biography-proper is swell to read in itself, I found these two writings to be especially entertaining and -- to use our term -- true.

You can likely find a copy of the book for less than a dollar at a used book store. I got mine for 75-cents. The entire thing weighs in at just over a hundred pages. Nearly ten percent of that is devoted to an introduction by John Hutchens, so perhaps it seems gratuitous to transcribe roughly the same amount here. The internet is a big place, though, and I've seen some of the crap we've been filling it up with, so I don't feel the least bit shamed.

In the Preface, Thurber defends his decision to write his memoirs before the age of 40 because by then he says, "my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher's."

He adds that writers like him -- those of shorter, lighter pieces -- are often misinterpreted and experience a sort of apprehension about the world. It's this second half of the Preface that I specifically enjoyed.

The notion that such persons are gay of heart and carefree is curiously untrue. They lead, as a matter of fact, an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats. Afraid of losing themselves in the larger flight of the two-volume novel, or even the one-volume novel, they stick to short accounts of their misadventures because they never get so deep into them but that they feel they can get out. This type of writing is not a joyous form of self-expression but the manifestation of a twitchiness at once cosmic and mundane. Authors of such pieces have, nobody knows why, a genius for getting into minor difficulties: they walk into the wrong apartments, they drink furniture polish for stomach bitters, they drive their cars into the prize tulip beds of haughty neighbors, they playfully slap gangsters, mistaking them for old school friends. To call such persons "humorists," a loose-fitting and ugly word, is to miss the nature of their dilemma and the dilemma of their nature. The little wheels of their invention are set in motion by the damp hand of melancholy.

Such a writer moves about restlessly wherever he goes, ready to get the hell out at the drop of a pie-pan or the lift of a skirt. [...] He pulls the blinds against the morning and creeps into smoky corners at night. He talks largely about small matters and smally about great affairs. His ears are shut to the ominous rumblings of the dynasties of the world moving toward a cloudier chaos than ever before, but he hears with an acute perception the startling sounds that rabbits make twisting in the bushes along a country road at night[.] He can sleep while the commonwealth crumbles but a strange sound in the pantry at three in the morning will strike terror into his stomach. He is not afraid, or much aware, of the menaces of empire but he keeps looking behind him as he walks along darkening streets out of the fear that he is being softly followed by little men padding along in single file, about a foot and a half high, large-eyed, and whiskered.

It is difficult for such a person to conform to what Ford Madox Ford in his book of recollections has called the sole reason for writing one's memoirs: namely, to paint a picture of one's time. Your short-piece writer's time is [...] his own personal time, circumscribed by the short boundaries of his pain and his embarrassment, in which what happens to his digestion, the rear axle of his car, and the confused flow of his relationships with six or eight persons and two or three buildings is of greater importance than what goes on in the nation or in the universe. He knows vaguely that the nation is not much good any more; he has read that the crust of the earth is shrinking alarmingly and that the universe is growing steadily colder, but he does not believe that any of the three is in half as bad shape as he is.

[...] The "time" of such a writer, then, is hardly worth reading about if the reader wishes to find out what was going on in the world while the writer in question was alive and at what might be laughingly called "his best." All that the reader is going to find out is what happened to the writer. The compensation, I suppose, must lie in the comforting feeling that one has had, after all, a pretty sensible and peaceful life, by comparison. It is unfortunate, however, that even a well-ordered life can not lead anybody safely around the inevitable doom that waits in the skies. As F. Hopkinson Smith long ago pointed out, the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.