Less and More

I don't understand it: in the U.S., graduate programs in writing are thriving at the same time that the number of readers of literary fiction is plummeting. I read this in Poets & Writers magazine. I got my first issue in the mail this week. I had never read the magazine before and never thought seriously about the business of creative writing, which takes up a great portion of Poets & Writers.

The expression "the business of art" utterly baffles me. I use it but I don't know what it means. Who are the people involved in the business of art? Not the artists, surely; I hope it's not the artists, because that would mean that their art is driven into being by pecuniary reasons, and that, to me, is a troubling thought. And yet artists too have to earn a living; they need that room of their own, that good dinner that nourishes the body and the soul, and the certainty that the room and the dinner will be there no matter which way the winds of the market economy blow. Art cannot thrive in a market economy, cannot be produced or judged on the principles of supply and demand. It is so incredibly hard to produce something -- book or painting or song -- whose beauty will endure. It is even harder, I think, to recognize that kind of beauty, to see it when you come face to face with it, because to see in that way it's often necessary to step out of your habits of thinking. The market economy relies on habits of thinking and buying; it can't teach you to appreciate the ineffable.

Sometimes I glance around at the people in my drawing class and wonder that we are here, struggling so hard to teach our fingers to make marks that are not only accurate representations of the human body but that are also emotionally moving. I glanced around at the people in the writing classes I took and wondered the same thing. What drives them? They are young and old (a man in my drawing class is 85 and rides his bike to class), holding full-time jobs and retired, confident and full of doubts about what they're doing. And yet they keep doing it. That seems like a small miracle to me -- and also a necessary one. Beauty is such a rare and difficult thing to obtain that we need great numbers of people working earnestly to create it in order to squeeze out of our collective mind and soul the few precious beads that get passed on from one century to another. So there must be more writers than readers, more painters than art buyers, more musicians than listeners.

Perhaps all this is no more than an attempt to justify my decision to go on writing even though my chances of being read are statistically insignificant. At the same time, I have stumbled now more than once on the work of an obscure writer and have been thrilled and moved beyond my wildest expectations. My life is better for having read that obscure writer's work. I felt, no matter how arrogant that might sound, that that specific writer's book was written especially for me. Literally, of course, I'm wrong. But in a broader sense I think I'm right. One law of "the business of art" may be that there is one writer for every reader, one composer for every listener, and so on -- the perfect match. So maybe, in fact, there aren't more writers than there are readers; it appears so because they have not found one another yet.