The Profits Of Eccentricity

( Originally Published 1944 )

Close by a brazier burn all shivering;

EVERY young writer ought thoroughly to look into himself at the outset to see what stimulus in his subconscious has caused the objective urge to write.

This is a nasty business. The guy who tells himself he wants to write for money often finds himself bogged down on the horrible fact that he doesn't at all want to write for money, but merely wants to shoot off his mouth.

Often the writer who has roseate thoughts of how much he yearns to inform humanity of the truths that are immutable finds that really all he wanted to do was to write for dough.

Out of every hundred or so of people who try to learn to write, either for glory or for money, a few succeed. These few it has been my observation are those who looked into themselves and got thoroughly oriented at the outset. This looking into oneself is a painful business. Also it is damned hard to do. It amounts to psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis is like heat lightning. It shimmers here and there but strikes nowhere.

Youngsters at a certain stage of their advancement in academics sometimes come afoul of some adored teacher who has tin-pot ideas about how the world should be run. To the youngsters this seems like a revelation of ultimate truth, if they like the teacher well enough, and they decide to dedicate their lives to smearing it around the world with a blunt stick. This is about as bad an excuse for writing as could be humanly conceived. Many ne'er-do-wells turn to writing as an easy way of escaping work.

Dozens of schizophrenics, morons, malcontents, and other physically disturbed people turn to it every day as an escape from something. I think it is a fore-gone conclusion that if one has psychological difficulties writing, or attempting to write, will merely aggravate them.

To my long observation the type of writer who succeeds as a commercial writer is the type who succeeds pretty well as a commercial anything. I am not forgetting that some of the greatest writers in the world were some of the most outlandish eccentrics the world ever knew. But please don't you forget that in this walloping welter of words we are talking exclusively about writing for cash.

Any man who makes money has to be smarter than the ordinary dolts around him who do not or, at least, do not make more than a bare living. This, I think, applies to commercial writing as closely as it applies to playing the races, running a religious racket, or gambling on the stock exchange. You often find men who have inherited money full of outlandish psychological quirks, and the Communists are fond of pointing out that any Big Shot who rolls in coin is a monster; but the plain fact of the matter is that successful men are men who have found out, first, how to live with themselves in a degree of peace; and second, how to circumnavigate society without foundering too often.

Most of the highly-successful commercial writers I know are super-Babbitts. Lots of them keep office hours. Most of them can even keep the stubs in their checking-account books straightened out. Viewed psychologically they are—well—not "normal" (who is?), but about as much so as the average man in business life who manages to squirm along in spite of any-thing Washington can do to prevent it.

I labor this point because I know from experience that psychoses, neuroses, and all sorts of mental infirmity lead the proprietors of such uncomfortable minds to think that writing will be their salvation. Except in the case of geniuses it never has been, to my observation. Most of the successful commercial writers I know went at it with a cold-bloodedness that would cause aesthetes to vomit green. They go at it much as a graduate of the Harvard School of Scientific Restaurant Engineering would approach a lunch counter.

They survey the markets. They sedulously read whatever sort of magazine they think they might be capable of marching upon. They analyze the stories in these magazines much as a sales executive would analyze a sales chart. They find out about agents and all this time they usually have a good income from something else. They do not wish to "escape" from this something else they usually have the idea that they can (at the start) make extra money by doodling away at short stories at night, instead of at bridge, or wangling the guy's wife next door. They fool around for a while, writing stories and tearing them up; and, finally, when they have one that looks like those they have read in the magazines they have picked they send it in. Most of them never had any expectation of doing anything but making a little extra dough. When they find that they have gone over big they usually wait a long time before they quit their jobs and go off the deep end into sheer free-lancing. Any other course into free-lancing is more than likely to get you freely lanced!

And what does all this point to? Simply to a well-balanced mind. It is really shocking (and when I have time I lament the fact a bit) that such people should take hold of and rule the literary life of a nation; but it is true. Myself, in my own reading, I like some mad-man who has at prose with a jammed mental machine gun. I like eccentric people, and idiosyncratic people, and I think a trifle of madnesss is becoming in a man. My favorite living American author (a writer of great literature) has so many complexes he practically revolves with them. In the short time I saw something of him personally I never knew him to have a normal reaction to anything. Another great American author, highly rated in a literary sense, with whom I spent some time, is dangerously insane. I sat on his porch with him one night while not less than forty people passed by and he confided to me that they were watching him and secretly persecuting him. But these men, despite their hugeness in literary circles, do not make money. Tyro writers think they do but they mostly have aces in the hole, like some old bag with money they married. (I reluctantly admit that there are a few honorable exceptions to this dishonorable rule.)

The money writer never has this sort of psycho-logical structure; he is almost invariably the sort of man who could go back to what he was doing before he became a writer and do just as well at it as ever he did before.

The profits of eccentricity, therefore, are a putative matter that could be discussed at great length, but certainly should be set up in an account and duly audited. For not only is my own mail box constantly stuffed tight with letters and manuscripts from every state of the Union which bespeak, from the first line, eccentricity, but so are the mail boxes of every literary agent, mail-order school, publisher, editor, and the other scores of allied parasites and associated public enemies.

The interesting question now poses itself as to when an eccentric per se ceases from being just that and becomes, simply, an idiot; and, conversely, when may we say of one of the many idiots we always thought were real idiots that he isn't (and wasn't) a real idiot at all, but merely an eccentric?

It's simple. If Stephen Foster had never written "Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair," or "Beautiful Dreamer," or "Oh Susannah," then Stephen Foster would have been nobody to you and would merely have been one more drunk in a world of drunks to those who suffered or enjoyed his inebriated proximity. Similarly with Edgar Allan Poe-"The Raven," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Bells," and all the rest of what Aldous Huxley calls Poe's literary vulgarity (but very resplendent and glossy and brilliant vulgarity, despite Mr. Huxley's too-too-sensitive nostrils) lifted Poe, too, up from the sidewalk-level of a mere drunk, and equally pulled him down from the cloudy heavens of delirium tremens to seat him firmly, albeit without comfort for Mr. Poe, on one of the few craggy peaks of American letters. O. Henry and Whitman are a couple more American authors who, because, and only be-cause, they bequeathed to following generations the fruits of towering genius, were removed by a grateful posterity from the ranks of nonentities who lived romantic and eccentric lives.

But you are not Poe, nor O. Henry, nor anybody but you. You will never be another O. Henry or an-another Poe. You are a Guy or a Dame who wants to make the Saturday Evening Post with a 6000 word short story, or the Grocers Gazette with an illustrated one-line gag, or the College Magazine with a string of quatrains in the manner of Omar Khayyam, with the mushy sententiousness of Gray's "Elegy," the meta-physics of Dr. Donne, the jewel-like clarity and poetic transparency of Ben Johnson, and the ponderous but sublime wisdom of John Milton.

If that is indeed you the Saturday Evening Post all the way down the dizzy path until you hit bottom with Storeb Magazine and Poetreh Magazine (Aht, you know) then read on. But if you are, or believe you are (and you may be!) another genius, then please waste no time of mine for I cannot help you one tittle. I might suggest equally that you do not allow me to waste any time of yours.

These people then, the geniuses, I mean, are eccentric. They are so for many valid reasons. First, they are so in fact, inescapably and incontrovertibly, from birth. Nature so fashioned them and there is nothing at all they can do about it even if they should wish there were (which they seldom do). Second, they can afford to be. The next ninety-eight reasons I have all ready to submit for your consideration are now demonstrated to be superfluous de natura rerum, for when a man is something by Act of God, and can afford to be it from like cause, what's the use of arguing about it any longer?