I’ve been reading through James Joyce’s early collected letters. So far I’m around the start of 1905, when he was just 23 and living—with Nora Barnacle—in Pola, Austria, teaching English to military personnel and trying to write Stephen Hero, which would of course become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He’d not long before left Dublin, Ireland, home of his childhood. He’d actually left Ireland earlier and had lived solo in Paris—very literally as a starving artist (he often fasted for 24-48 hours or more)—but had had to return sooner than anticipated to care for his mother who was dying of cancer. Four months after he arrived she perished. During that time he’d met Nora, and then they eloped to Zurich so Joyce could teach English at the Berlitz School, and then switched to the school in Pola.
All through the letters one is struck by how isolated, lonely, insecure, deeply driven to write, and unconventional Joyce is. This character trait had made itself felt and seen in his teens while in high school. Even then he had literary talent, and he was questioning his forced-upon-him Catholic faith. He knew, young, that he had to escape Ireland. He knew that he was a writer, meaning sensitive, different, unconventional, desirous of his own path.
I, too, have always felt this way. Alone. Isolated. Unconventional. And strangely, even more specifically, I had a similar experience as Joyce when it came to my father. I’d fled—not in my early twenties but in my mid-thirties—the Bay Area for New York City, and then had had to return early (after only 2.3 years) to care for my cancer-sick, dying father. It took 23 months—just shy of two years—for Dad to die. Just like Joyce meeting Nora Barnacle, I met Britney, who became my fiancée. Now we’re married. We’d originally considered eloping in Morocco but in the end settled for marrying at the Santa Barbara courthouse and then traveling in Morocco after for our honeymoon and doing a wedding reception a month later.
There’s a lot of hubbub nowadays—one of the major contributors here is Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, which I like a lot but disagree with on much—about how the starving artist and the alcoholic writer are old myths which it’s time to put to rest. The idea seems to be now that anyone—and I mean anyone—can “be a writer,” and that to think otherwise, to think there’s such a separate thing as The Artist is not only arcane and old fashioned but ignorant and pretentious. Further, said writer (aka, the Democratic Everyman) should be part of a “community.” And this general writer doesn’t need to know anything about the craft. They don’t need to read, even. (How pretentious, to think a so-called writer needs to read!) And they certainly don’t have to isolate, be alone, do drugs or drink, etc.
The fundamental problem here seems to be obvious: Art, as a concept, is clearly no longer taken seriously by society. It once was. Back in the 19th century, and even up until probably the cultural explosions of the lurid, wild 1960s, and even beyond, into perhaps the 1990s, Art (writing, in this case) was still seen as relevant, revelatory, meaningful, crucial, even, depending on your class and milieu.
That time is long-gone. The first two decades of the 21st century have obliterated Art. The internet, speaking in general terms, killed it. More specifically: Social Media. The iPhone. YouTube. Streaming. Podcasts. TikTok. Facebook. Etc. The internet, and social media more narrowly, toppled the old foundations and created a new one. The new idea was the most democratic, in theory: Everyone is a writer. You write posts online? You’re a writer! Reading books is way, way down now as far as capturing American minds. All the other tech distractions have risen to the top. Just like everything else in our contemporary culture—including the subtle art of critical thinking—writing has gone the way of the dinosaurs. If everyone’s a writer then really no one is a writer. Or, to the extent that anyone really is a writer—an “artist”—they’re ruthlessly ignored by the culture.