And contemplating.

From Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation:

The requirements of a work to be done can be understood as the will of God. If I am supposed to hoe a garden or make a table, then I will be obeying God if I am true to the task I am performing. To do the work carefully and well, with love and respect for the nature of my task and with due attention to its purpose, is to unite myself to God’s will in my work. In this way I become His instrument. He works through me. When I act as His instrument, my labour cannot become an obstacle to contemplation, even though it may temporarily so occupy my mind that I cannot engage in it while I am actually doing my job. Yet my work itself will purify and pacify my mind and dispose me for contemplation.

Unnatural, frantic, anxious work, work done under pressure of greed or fear or any other inordinate passion, cannot properly speaking be dedicated to God, because God never wills such work directly. He may permit that through no fault of our own we may have to work madly and distractedly, due to our sins, and to the sins of the society in which we live. In that case we must tolerate it and make the best of what we cannot avoid. But let us not be blind to the distinction betwen sound, healthy work and unnatural toil.

*

I struck the board, and cry’d, No more ;
I will abroad.
What ? shall I ever sigh and pine ?
My lines and life are free ; free as the road,
Loose as the winde, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit ?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordiall fruit ?
Sure there was wine,
Before my sighs did dry it : there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the yeare only lost to me ?
Have I no bays to crown it ?
No flowers, no garlands gay ? all blasted ?
All wasted ?
Not so, my heart : but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures : leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away ; take heed :
I will abroad.
Call in thy death’s head there : tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load.
But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wild,
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Child :
And I reply’d, My Lord.

George Herbert, The Collar

So this morning at breakfast Lauren read me the following poem by Clive James, which is apparently being reprinted in a collected volume of James’s poems called Opal Sunset. According to the New York Times, the book is being put out by my own publisher, W. W. Norton, although I don’t yet see the book either on Amazon or on the Norton website.

In any case, here it is.

The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book -
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler’s War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee’s Promenades and Pierrots -
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
“My boobs will give everyone hours of fun.”

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error -
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

- Clive James

The promotional promises are down under the book cover. Let me decode just a little bit: “Major review attention” means that Norton will send pre-publication copies (“galleys”) out to the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and so on. “Author lectures” means I’ll be giving talks about the book. “National radio interviews” means that they’ll hire an outside publicity company to book me into dozens of five-minute drive-time snippet-interviews on radio stations all over the country, and with any luck I’ll get to do a few longer NPR and talk show spots as well. I have no idea what a web promotion is, but I guess I’ll find out.

Now begins a very tricky phase in a writer’s year: the beginning of the Marketing Push.

In one sense, this can be a satisfying phase because (after all) you’ve done the hardest bit: no more sitting down in front of a blank screen, wrestling with fifteen contradictory sources and three languages in order to pull an interesting story out of obscurity. No more all-night writing sessions or desperate research journies or frantic attempts to trim unwieldy chapters down into streamlined prose. You can sit back and watch the book take on its published form.

But in another sense, this is a dreadful time.

While you’re writing, you can get up from the table and walk away with unmixed satisfaction, after a long session, because you’ve managed to do exactly what you set out to accomplish. (To quote Dorothy Sayers in Gaudy Night: it makes you feel a bit like God on the seventh day. Don’t take that the wrong way, please). But once the book leaves your hard drive and travels to the publisher, it’s no longer just you and your work. Satisfaction is no longer dependent simply on your diligent labor. Instead, you only feel satisfied when the publisher seems to be giving your book the proper importance.

Which has never happened, for me, even once, after the first book (the one for which I had no expectations at all).

By way of comparison, have a look at THIS page from the same Norton catalog, for a business book by Robyn Meredith called The Elephant and the Dragon:

I don’t know Ms. Meredith at all, and I’ve never read any of her stuff. However, a quick search shows me that this is her first book. And at once, the writer’s eye goes to…a photo! (Hey, I didn’t get a photo. Why not?) And then the all-important promotional stuff: Author tour? Norton’s paying for her to go on a tour? (Actually I’d rather shoot myself than go on a tour, but that’s not the point just now.) National radio AND television? A twenty-city “radio satellite tour”? (Which means she stays at home and talks on the phone, just like I’m going to do, so I’m not quite sure what the difference is, but it sounds more impressive.) Off-the-book-page features? (That means Norton’s publicity people will pitch newspapers and magazines to interview Ms. Meredith and feature her book in articles which are NOT book reviews, but rather lifestyles, news reports, etc.)

Now, there are plenty of gradations in promotion. I don’t expect to be treated like…oh, Edmund Wilson, who after all has won the Pulitzer not one but twice, and has been doing this for fifty years or so. You’ll notice, in HIS catalog page below, the two promises that show you’ve really hit the big time: Norton is doing “national print advertising,” meaning that they’ll take out ads in magazines and major newspapers, and there is “co-op available,” meaning that the publisher will pay B&N and other chain stores to give the book a place in the front of the store. (You didn’t think those books got stacked right on the front table because of sheer merit, did you?)

No, I don’t expect co-op money or print advertising (or not yet). But still…

My agent points out that for my books, the catalog page is not actually as important as it is for a first-time author. I already do have readers; I basically book my own author tours by doing all those educational conventions every year, so Norton doesn’t have to do it for me; and my books tend to sell steadily along, rather than having a huge burst and then tailing off; they sell like reference books rather than trade books, in other words, so what they do in the first three months isn’t diagnostic of their success the way it might be for more topical titles.

But still…

And this is the point at which I have to rein myself in, or go nuts. Comparison is the death of contentment. Worse than that, it’s the death of the creative impulse. You CANNOT write well whilst fretting about your catalog page. Just stop.

Easier said than done, of course. My father had a golfing buddy who briefly hit the big time and later told him, “The best times you’ll ever have are when you’re struggling on the way up.” Now I know what he means. As soon as you’ve had even a modest bit of success, you have Expectations. And Expectations will always, in the end, disappoint. Even when you’re reached the very top–and you’re Sebastian Junger, or Michael Lewis, with a TWO-page catalog spread and a twenty-city tour, you can always find yourself slipping backwards.

Or so I assume, but I’ll let you know when I’ve got a two-page spread and a twenty-city tour.