Answering ‘Why do I write?’ means exploring deep dimensions of being

For Zio Pietro Bonventre

When I saw an essay by Joan Didion in the Dec. 5, 1976 New York Times Book Review called “Why I Write,” I was taken in right away.

It was because years earlier I read a piece by the grand master of the just phrase, George Orwell, with the same title. His piece appeared in the Summer 1946 issue of the British quarterly “Gangrel.”

Toward the end of my Sept. 24 column last year, I alluded to the importance of the essay.  

The topic is forever compelling because, by looking at what a writer has to say — even a novice in the dock — about the spark that projects him to sit with pen and pad and share his musings with the world, well, it’s a look into the person’s psyche, like overhearing him speak from the couch in his therapist’s office.

And whoever seeks in earnest to answer “Why do I write?” or maybe just “Why do I speak the way I do?” soon finds himself in the deepest dimensions of his being.  

Finding the right words — right as in exact — is not an easy task because words begin as neurons sparked by an electrical impulse — instigated by protoplasm — each impulse containing a message.

And taking down the messages without interfering is the work of the writer — the poet does it directly — and requires the discipline of being a good listener. 

The poet must have the patience of a person waiting in a long line at the supermarket that’s hardly moving and not suffer a jot of irritation.

The great American composer John Cage used to say waiting in line was an opportunity to practice (the virtue of) patience, a dharma I adopted long ago. 

The protocol of listening requires that the first thing the writer/poet/speaker does is go to the thesaurus of his soul — the deep state of subconsciousness and receive the symbols as they are being ignited, hopefully confirming what the person’s eyes are saying is in front of them.

 And as the words form, they express, reveal, the message the electrical impulse was sent to say, and, when caught right off the hoof, as it were, they speak to a collective dream every person in humankind shares.

Those who embrace politically conservative ideologies never go near this level of being because “collective” is anathema — especially after John Wayne rode his horse across the American landscape — and thus they reject all conversation having to do with what people and communities need to thrive.

It might seem strange that, while Orwell was writing “Why I Write” he was also composing “1984,” the quintessential story about what it’s like to live in a world controlled by a fascist dictator — a Big Brother, a King, or a Tsar — what the people in the United States are experiencing now.

The connection is understandable because in the novel Orwell was talking about the radical pain and suffering Big-Brother-types cause while in the essay he was telling people what they have to do to stop being shat upon. Like a loving uncle.

For starters, he says he’s like any other writer because all writers seek to “push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s ideas of the kind of society they should strive after.”

From 1922 to 1927, he served as a policeman in Burma, which he wrote about in “Burmese Days,” having come away knowing that people sell other people out when trapped inside a system that undermines the better side of human nature.

Those who know Orwell’s life know he garnered the courage to go to Spain in 1936 to fight in the Spanish Civil War to halt the fascist invasion of Big Brother Francisco Franco and, while on the front lines fighting side by side with his comrades, took a bullet in the throat.

The war experience he says “turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood.” 

Thus “Every line of serious work I have written since 1836,” he says, “has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.”

And he knew “it [was] invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

Gandhi-like, he spent his waking moments waking people up to the importance of creating, living in, celebrating a society — convivial communities — that are designed to meet the needs of every one of its members; that’s what he meant by democratic socialism not the party-line spiel of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist politburo of Putin.

In Orwell’s democracy, leaders and citizens create institutions and programs to help reduce the pain and suffering of all by taking into account what people need, listening to the stories of others as a principal part of their ethical protocol.  

Thus, when I read what Joan Didion said in her “Why I Write” about the messages her neuronic impulses sent to her, I was chagrined. She sounds like an adolescent schoolgirl.  

She starts out with: “Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell.” 

And “One reason I stole it,” she adds “was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:

“I 

“I 

“I.”

Is that not adolescent schoolgirl talk?

Like Orwell, she too writes, Didion says, because, “In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.” 

But then she goes off the rails belying Orwell’s empathy. 

The writer, she says, is engaged in “an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating — but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

Secret bully? Invader of the “private space” of someone searching the thesaurus of his soul for meaning? Is she equating the writer with Big Brother?

I’ve read nearly every word Orwell wrote and I’ve never seen him as anything other than an empathetic seanchaí speaking in behalf of universal happiness.

And then, when we turn to the writer Janet Malcolm, we see kerosene poured on Didion’s fire. Malcolm says: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”  

She says every writer is “a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns — when the article or book appears — his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public’s right to know’; the least talented talk about Art, the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”

Orwell never failed the test of humility; he said, “And it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.” 

You can see why he’s my main mensch.

More about “1984” coming next in The Altamont Enterprise available at your favorite newsstand. 

It’ll address the Big Brother stressing the world out now.