[Many of us are caught in the following predicament: we have tremendous pent-up wanderlust, but we don’t feel that it’s quite safe enough to travel yet. So, let me present you with some excerpts from my book A Writer’s Paris to help slake some of that wanderlust, while at the same time providing you with lessons of values to writers and all creatives. These essays also connect to my recent book Redesign Your Mind, as they present new ways of thinking about the creative process and the writing life.]
When we leave something out of a story, we lie—and we are always leaving something out. When we highlight something in a story, we lie—and we are always highlighting and underlining. It is therefore no paradox that writers are great liars and great truth-tellers. So be it!
While writers may lie incessantly, that is no justification for choosing to write insincerely. If we know that our argument is weak, it rests squarely on our shoulders to strengthen that argument or abandon it entirely. If we throw in a gratuitous scene to make fun of this or to rail aimlessly at that, we must edit out that scene when we revise. If we write in jargon so as to avoid saying what we mean or to disguise the fact that we haven’t much to say, our own voice should shout, “No! Don’t do that!” There is necessary lying; and there is old-fashioned, everyday lying.
Your time in Paris offers an opportunity to take your writing and your principles seriously. Gather up your integrity before you leave. Each of us can be clever, and if we only write cleverly, we’ve sacrificed that integrity. Each of us is capable of making fine distinctions, and if we only make fine distinctions we’ve acted indecently. We can create glittery edifices, pretty pictures, false idols—none of that will do. Our job is to write for humanity or against inhumanity. Then you can write with a microscope, focusing on a couple who live in close quarters in a cramped relationship, or with a telescope, about wars and the people who wage them.
Many writers pick up their pen with lesser agendas in mind. Take Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance. Sartre had it in mind to write for humanity, but his character failed him. He might have followed up a novel like Nausea, in which he made an honorable effort to wrestle with questions of meaning, with fiction or nonfiction that further articulated the meaning struggles of our species. He might have attempted the fine project he alluded to in an early essay, of constructing a coherent humanistic-atheistic philosophy. Instead, to use the language of the existentialist, he never became, he dodged the encounter.
He dodged the Resistance. He assiduously skipped that hardest job of all, writing with his conscience engaged. There is no better example of this dodging and long-term bad faith than his absurd last effort, the many years he spent writing an unreadable biography of Flaubert. Years on a biography of Flaubert when you haven’t articulated the principles of existentialism yet! That really won’t do.
Essayist John Sturrock explained in The Word From Paris: “Sartre refused to give up writing his obsessive study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, elitist in the extreme though he knew it to be, a barely accessible work of literary criticism that would never be read by more than a few people. It wasn’t reasonable, he complained to interviewers, to expect him to abandon this huge piece of work, and he set to wondering, a little pathetically, whether one day, by some unspecified process of ‘mediation,’ ‘this sort of book might serve the masses.’ Which, for those who have attempted, and been worsted by, the outrageous size and frequent obscurity of the unmediated Idiot, has to rank as the most Utopian of all of Sartre’s speculations.”
I hold Sartre accountable for his character and, in turn, his destiny. Like you and me, he could think, he could observe, he could intuit, he could analyze, he could synthesize. He just couldn’t look in the mirror. This ubiquitous character flaw, the unwillingness to engage in self-awareness, is so commonly known and understood that we must suppose that Sartre knew about it. He might, if he’d been interested, have demanded of himself, “Am I guilty of inauthenticity for continuing my Flaubert biography?” I credit him with the power to ask such questions and, crediting him with that power, find him guilty.
The Greek philosophers and poets honored fate. They observed that people rarely changed and announced, “Character is destiny.” The existentialist is not so ready to let man off the hook. We claim that man can look in the mirror and, if he is brave enough to stare, catch a glimpse of his own tricks. If you agree, then you also must agree that looking in the mirror is an integral part of your preparations for Paris. You have more than your pads and pencils to bring—you also have your courage and your conscience. Then, when you write in Paris, you will write authentically.
Intend well. You may fail in the execution but if your intentions are honorable you’ll be able to hold your head high. Is your intention to shed some light or to add to the darkness? Do you feel righteous or queasy when you begin a new piece? Do you respect your own writing motives? Ask these questions when, some sunny day in June, you sit in a Parisian café, your notebook open, and wonder, “What should I write next?” Do you want to spend a decade on a “biography of Flaubert for the masses”? Watch out! A writer is the last person on earth permitted to ignore the distinction between authentic and inauthentic.
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T1980 on Wikimedia under CC License
