to be a restless searcher

My Writers Studio colleague Lisa Bellamy often describes the “healthy jealousy” that arises when a writer encounters work that excites them. The writer feels inspired in their jealousy: I want to do that, too! Recently I observed to my husband that sometimes the line is slight between healthy jealousy and something more toxic; in my jealousy I sometimes feel a sort of paralyzing self-hatred: Why haven’t I done that already?

No surprise, I guess, that lately my feelings have tended toward the latter. I seem to be working all the time but not earning much money. Additionally, my executive functioning is poor to begin with, and now my mind is absolutely shredded by noon each day of remote schooling. And so these days my efforts at writing are at best haphazard, and anything to which I might aspire seems out of reach. When can I possibly find the time to make my way there?

In this state of mind I have been reading A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf, which I taught in The Writers Studio Craft Class this Tuesday. As I said in my opening remarks, when speaking of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, we simply must speak of ambition. In his 1954 review of A Writer’s Diary (which constitutes only a small part of her diaries and was edited for publication by her husband Leonard), W. H. Auden wrote:

I have never read any book that conveyed more truthfully what a writer’s life is like, what are its worries, its rewards, its day-by-day routine. Some readers, apparently, have been shocked to find how anxious and sensitive Virginia Woolf was about reviews, and how easily commendation of others could make her envious, but most writers, if they are honest, will recognize themselves in [what she wrote] . . . Some of us keep up an air of stoic indifference to reviews, some avoid distress by refusing to read them, but we all care, and for good reasons. Every writer who is original is often doubtful about the value of a work; praise from a critic whom he respects is a treasured reassurance, silence or blame a confirmation of his worst fears.

And, in addition to her concern about her reputation, it is impossible to miss when reading her diaries what enormous pressure Woolf put on herself, not just to produce, but to produce at the highest level at all times. But the source of this pressure wasn’t a desire for literary fame or recognition; it was a desire for achievement in the work itself. Her ambition was to find a way to get what is deepest and truest within the self, about humanity, and about the world on the page in a way that can be vividly experienced by readers.

The entry she wrote on Saturday, February 27, 1926 (while she was at work on To the Lighthouse) clearly expresses this ambition:

And the truth is, one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle [her dog], at the cheaper beasts in the Zoo which are exposed to walkers in Regent’s Park, and the soul slips in. It slipped in this afternoon. I will write that I said, staring at the bison: answering L. absentmindedly: but what was I going to write?

“No ideas but in things,” wrote William Carlos Williams in Paterson; how indeed can we either experience or express the soul, or consciousness, or the heart of the matter, except in things—such as the ceiling, a pet, the animals at the zoo, or, as Woolf describes in a later part of this entry, the clouds and the moon?

Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say ‘This is it’? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it—that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Square last night) I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is ‘it.’ It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; trotting along Russell Square with the moon up there and those mountain clouds. Who am I, what am I, and so on: these questions are always floating about in me: and then I bump against some exact fact—a letter, a person, and come to them again with a great sense of freshness. And so it goes on. But on this showing, which is true, I think, I do fairly frequently come upon this ‘it’; and then feel quite at rest.

Reading this passage, I feel only healthy jealousy, no toxicity. To be a restless searcher is in fact within my reach—is, in fact, all I really want. I advise my writing students (but often forget for myself!) to let go of their ideas about “success” and “failure”: it is far more interesting, and fruitful, to be curious. And it is crucial that the curiosity lead to active searching, and that the searching be restless. As another Writers Studio colleague, Scott Hunter, put it during Tuesday’s class: Imagine not being satisfied with “I don’t know,” and searching for an answer, or at least for a way. To which I would add: Imagine being restless enough to never be satisfied with thinking that you know. . . .

Me, elsewhere

For the Ploughshares blog I wrote about the 1910 novel The Dangerous Age by Danish author Karin Michaëlis.

I regularly teach an online writing workshop called Writing About Everyday Life, in which we seek ways to express the soul, or consciousness, or the heart of the matter through everyday things, and I will next be offering it later this spring, starting on Tuesday, May 25. Check it out!