James Hynes

Nothing's more unseemly in a writer than whining in public about how unfamous and unsuccessful he or she is. You know the drill—often it's disguised as a rant about the sorry state of literary fiction, or about the rampant commercialization of publishing, but the clear subtext (and the real reason for writing the piece in the first place) is, "Why aren't I Jonathan Franzen?" Franzen, of course, being the author of such a piece himself, years ago, in Harper's, where under the guise of bemoaning the fact that ambitious realist novels about Big Themes (specifically his) didn't get the attention they deserved, he was really asking, "Why aren't I Don DeLillo?" Another example was an anonymous piece in Salon a few years back, in which (as I recall) Ms. Anonymous bemoaned the fact that her subsequent novels didn't have the sales of her bestselling first one.

Relax: this isn't a preface to me pulling a Franzen and wondering why world ignores brilliant authors who write novels that mix horror and satire. (Not that I don't whine early and often to my friends; it's just that I'm trying to exercise the minimum of self-control necessary to keep from doing it in public.) Rather, it's just preface to my linking to an interview with Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift, in the Los Angeles Times. I read the book years ago, and remember it fondly (though not especially clearly), and now I discover it's been a kind of scripture for writers ever since its publication. According to the introduction to the interview (by LA Times staff writer Scott Timberg), the book is a favorite of David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Jonathan Lethem. (We'll overlook the obvious here, namely that Wallace, Smith, and Lethem aren't likely to be whining anytime soon about how unfamous and unsuccessful they are.)

You can read the interview itself to get a sense of what the book's about and why it's important to writers and artists, but mainly, reading the interview this morning, it made me feel better about my relative place in the universe in general, not just the hothouse, pocket universe of American arts and letters. This exchange in particular, between Timberg and Hyde, strikes me as the most sensible thing I've read about the writer's life in a very long time. Timberg is first:

It does seem that artists and novelists have lost some of their distance from the marketplace, some of their disdain for it. We know that Tom Wolfe, for instance, just left his longtime publisher for one that's given him a bigger advance. It seems much more common these days to talk about art and literature with a dollar sign attached. Does this seem different from when you were writing the book in the '70s?

Probably not. I think there's always been a star system that has that kind of element. But the thing to realize when you're talking about a writer like Tom Wolfe is that this is like talking about the very best baseball or basketball players in the world, and there are 100,000 people who are not at that level, who I'm thinking about.

Most of the fiction writers I know struggle to make a living from their writing and have to take second jobs. And for those people it's important to remember that it's not a failure on their part: It's a structural problem that comes with the practice of art.

It's a little alarming that a cultural reporter would assume that Tom Wolfe's experience has anything in common with the average fiction writer's, but Hyde's answer gently sets him straight, telling him something utterly commonsensical, but also something that few people really seem to understand. Even well-read, highly literate people seem to think that the mere fact of having been published puts you in a higher tax bracket, and sometimes it seems like it's only other writers who understand what a dodgy existence the writing life is for the vast majority of writers. The old phrase "shabby genteel" doesn't even come close to describing it. My books have a more exciting social life than I do.

It's Hyde's next remark, though, that I found so reassuring. The sort of article I was talking about at the start of this post is often just an externalization of the writer's own self-laceration. "Why doesn't the world recognize my genius?" is usually just a disguise for "What am I doing wrong?" or "Why am I such a loser?" And Hyde's answer—namely, you're not doing anything wrong, it's how the world treats writers and artists—is oddly reassuring, if only because it makes clear that no matter what you write or how you market it, it's probably not going to make you famous and rich.

I haven't read Hyde's book in 20 years, but as I recall, the main thrust of it is this: a work of art is a gift the artist gives to the world, and the important thing to remember about a gift is that it's something you offer to someone else with no expectation of reward or reciprocation. Out of this, ideally, comes a gift economy, in Hyde's phrase, whereby eventually the artist gets something back without having to ask for it. Or to put it another way: you put your gift out there with no expectation of reward, but sometimes, you get what you need. (Cue the Rolling Stones.) And in Hyde's version of things, what's important is not so much what the individual gets out of the gift economy, but how the community is strengthened by the exchanging and re-exchanging of gifts. (He backs all this up, as I recall, with folk tales and anthropological accounts.) Hyde makes a difference between the eros of a community of gift givers, where wealth is measured in the strength of the bonds between individuals, and the logos of capitalist economy, where wealth is a measurement of how much an individual can hoard.

This is, to say the least, a reassuring account of how artists function in relation to each other and to the community at large. It doesn't always work like this in practice (obviously), and in a writer's darker moments—the day you find used copies of your book selling for a penny on eBay, for example—it isn't necessarily all that reassuring to know that, hey, I'm a member of a community of artists, and we're all more or less in the same boat. But it does lessen the loneliness somewhat to know that the work of art you create all by yourself comes to mean something greater than what you intended when it's shared with other people.