A friend of mine in China tells me that the “Great Firewall of China” appears to be blocking my blog. She can’t access it in Beijing.
I was just about to uncork some champagne at this honor–one of the highest accolades for writers in the free world–and was ruminating on which of my clearly insurrectionist blog posts might have deserved this compliment.
Alas, my friend now thinks that the Party (always such a party!) might be “batch-blocking” all WordPress blogs (but not Blogger for some reason) right now. What a bummer. I want them to ban me.
So, I had a witty comment from Helen under the elevator pitch for my book, where she humorously suggests some titles. Perhaps Digesting the Elephant of Success, followed by something (anything!) starting with How to….
🙂
That, shall we say, touched a nerve, because my agent and I only recently sold the book and, well, I found myself at the receiving end of the various publishers’ reactions. Self-help? Biography? History? Business? What, oh what, aisle at Barnes & Noble will it go in? That’s what they need to have answered.
In another and separate post I’ll sound cautiously optimistic about the industry (if I weren’t, I probably wouldn’t be able to write a book), but I want to share what Helen then wrote in a follow-up email. She is, I should say, the great niece of a great author, Rebecca West, as well as the the executor of her literary estate. Book publishers, says Helen, …
… seem to be in an utter state of denial that they’ve succumbed to Hollywoodization big time, and instead go on pretending that the average editor would still risk his life to smuggle the mss of “Dr. Zhivago” out of Russia. Editors don’t edit any more. Neither do agents. And the whole business is bungled by the guys in the marketing department who would be quite happy to have a book of empty pages, if only the cover and title attracted enough attention, including an interview on Oprah. In the spirit of full disclosure, I say this as a novelist who got run round the houses all different ways with my first, ultimately unpublished, novel….
As a journalist, I move in circles where everybody seems to be writing books all the time, so the topic comes up a lot. Helen’s view is par for the course, I would say.
Your views? Leave it in the comments, or email me through the form at the bottom of this page.
In my post on Steve Jobs, I suggested that his biggest failure in life turned out–certainly in his own opinion–to be a liberating event that made possible his subsequent success. In other words, his failure was an impostor, just as Rudyard Kipling would say. In this post, I want to suggest the exact same thing, with a different example: one that is female, creative, vulnerable, touching. The example of J.K. Rowling.
Rowling is one of the most successful book authors of all time, and the most successful by far of those alive today. Who knows? Her Harry Potter books may yet become classics that endure down the ages. Rowling herself would be thrilled, because she loves classics and studied them, to the distress of her poor (literally) parents, who wanted her to study something “useful”. As a classics fiend myself (in a world of blank stares whenever anything Greek or Roman comes up), I love her just for that.
But let’s get to her “failure”. Her commencement address at Harvard this year was, in its entirety, a paean to failure–its ability to help a young person navigate life and to liberate her imagination. For the first nine minutes, she reminds her audience of (mostly) successful Harvard graduates and parents of her own family’s crushing poverty when she went to university, but says that “What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.” Then failure came:
… by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
She did not see it at the time, but this turned out to be a liberating event, rather as Steve Jobs’ career disaster at the age of thirty had been for him:
Here are the key passages:
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
Back to the book: Remember, the whole book is a long story woven around Rudyard Kipling’s poetic insight that triumph and disaster are impostors. I want to lead up to the main character, Hannibal, with a few other examples, and today Steve Jobs comes to mind. I saw him on a stage last month, launching the new iPhone, and he looked as haggard and emaciated as death. He had had–and, he said, beaten–pancreatic cancer, and everybody in the audience must have been wondering whether it had come back. Now, people are beginning to discuss his mortality more openly, for instance here and here. Jobs talked about his encounter with cancer in a commencement address he gave at Stanford in 2005. I want to talk about that speech, but not about the part where he discusses cancer (which starts at about 8 minutes, 40 seconds), even though it lends my focus some poignancy.
What hit me were his thoughts (from minute 6 to about 8 ) on the biggest failure and disaster in his life (before cancer, that is). Watch:
Just to recap, he founded Apple and it was the passion and meaning of his life, and then, at age thirty, he fell victim to a boardroom coup and was fired from his own company. He was devastated. He spent over a decade drifting from one thing to another, thinking he was lost. But, he says:
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
Soon it turned out that the things he was dabbling in had a meaning that would become clear. In his exile, he founded NeXT, took over Pixar, fell in love and started a family. And then … Apple bought NeXT, and he was back where he belonged, only now changed. In his second coming, Apple would become more successful than he could have dreamed in his first coming, and:
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.
I highlighted the words lightness and freed me for a reason. That is because one theme I’m exploring in the book–again, I’m always in search of the wisdom behind Kipling’s impostors–is the potential of disaster or failure to liberate. Liberate from what? I’ll get to that.
Nothing deep today, just getting something off my chest and on the record (I heard that’s what blogs are for): It drives me nuts when people–dare I suggest that Americans are especially prone?–don’t know how (not) to use the words like and unlike.
Just to avoid the charge of snobbism, I’ll take an example from my very own (and very British) employer, The Economist, where an esteemed colleague this week let the following slip into the sub-headline (what we call the “rubric”) of an article: Unlike in America, terrorism in Europe is often home-grown
Yuck! Pfui!
Now the exegesis, which I will also take from my esteemed employer, since we happen to have an (in)famous style guide (memorizing it may be the best investment you ever make in your life; I’m still working on it):
Under the entry for Like, Unlike, Johnny Grimmond, the Style Guide’s author, writes in his genius style:
Like and unlike govern nouns and pronouns, not verbs and clauses. So as in America not like in America, as I was saying, not like I was saying, as Grandma used to make them, not like Grandma used to make them, etc. English has no unas equivalent to unlike, so you must rephrase the sentence if you are tempted to write unlike in this context, unlike at Christmas, or unlike when I was a child.
If you find yourself writing She looked like she had had enough or It seemed like he was running out of puff, you should replace like with as if or as though, and you probably need the subjunctive: She looked as if she had had enough, It seemed as if he were running out of puff.
Like the hart panteth for the water brooks I pant for a revival of Shakespeare’s “Like You Like It”. I can see tense draftees relax and purr/When the sergeant barks, “Like you were.”/And don’t try to tell me that our well has been defiled by immigration;/Like goes Madison Avenue, like so goes the nation. — Ogden Nash
Fine, so what could my colleague’s rubric have said instead? The easiest re-write would have been: Europe, unlike America, often suffers home-grown terrorism.
Nor is my original idea, The Hannibal Curse, the title. It’s been explained to me that American publishers are very wary about any book title that could sound remotely negative, and Curse apparently fell into that category. So no Curses. Hannibal’s Impostor, Eternal Hannibal,… Who knows? Riverhead and I will agree the final title when I deliver the book, in a bit less than a year. As I joked to my agent, Dan Mandel, that feels a bit like agreeing to let the midwife christen your child at birth, but hey, it’s the way the business works. They’re apparently good at picking titles at Riverhead–think A Thousand Splendid Suns and such.
Hannibal and Me: life lessons from history 