Kenny Shovel said:
...so what do you think is the better situation to produce great literature?...the writer who is comfortably well off, and can write at leisure, with no pressure to conform to what is commercial...or the starving artist?...
...or is this a false question?...is the desire, the need, to write, and the ability to do so more important...
...the main character in
'Hunger' by
Knut Hamsun is driven by both literal hunger and another kind that comes from the mind rather than the body...does he have the perfect motivation?...
*gets feeling this may not be one line answer, makes space in diary to read reply*
I think your question is a very valid one.
I will answer, in part, by making reference to the collected letters of Wallace Stevens. Someone asked him about a certain published poet, and Wallace Stevens said of that poet, "He does not write as though he MUST write."
Now one might take that comment to mean that the poet does not write out of economic necessity. Yet in other letters Wallace Stevens pokes fun at Carl Sandburg for sitting and counting all the checks he received from his lecture/reading tour like a greedy Jack Benny or Scrooge, counting his coins. Wallace Stevens socialized at times with both Sandburg and Robert Frost.
Wallace Stevens was vice president of an insurance company in Hartford. Many of his business associates did not realize that Stevens was a world renowned poet. Stevens wrote because he "must" write not out of economic need but out of spiritual need.
Obviously, if one depends upon their writing for income, and one is successful in a certain genre, whether that be "chick" lit, or vampires, or murder mysteries, then they are not free to do as they please, but must conform to the tastes and expectations of their consumer audience.
If my memory serves me correctly (which it often does not), Hardy was so crushed by the publics rejection of "Jude the Obscure" that he withdrew from novel writing and confined himself to poetry.
When I heard that "Jude the Obscure" was considered spicy, and scandalous, I downloaded a text copy, and did a string search on every occurrence of the word "kiss" (reasoning that where there is smoke there is fire, and where there is sex, there must be a kiss or two) but the text was clean as a whistle from my debauched 20th century perspective.
As a child, I was told that Dickens was paid by the word, which accounted for his long books.
Hemingway relates, in
A Moveable Feast, how he scolded F. Scott Fitzgerald for "tweaking" short stories so they would sell better in magazines, calling him a harlot for doing so. Fitzgerald was something of a prodigal spendthrift party-boy and was always desperate for money. He made good money from magazines with the short stories. Sometimes, he would bat out a story overnight, and sell it to
The Saturday Evening Post for several thousand. But Fitzgerald desired literary immortality and realized that such enduring fame would only come from novels. So in Fitzgerald, we have an example of someone who wrote short stories out of economic necessity, and novels because he "must" write.
We might discuss at length the various "musts" which are other than money. Fame in one's own lifetime is certainly one "must."
But, consider Emily Dickenson. I don't think she wrote for money, or for lasting fame. I think she wrote out of some spiritual need to express herself. Perhaps I am wrong.
Annie Proulx is another example of someone who abandoned her PhD program, feeling that there was little market in her field, and supporting herself and her children for years by writing "How To" books, and pieces for magazines like Field and Stream, under male pen names.
Only when she was in her 50s did she commence to write short stories and novels.
There was some Portuguese poet who lived in poverty, wrote in obscurity, and was only discovered and made famous posthumously, when a trunk of his writings was discovered in his rented room.
I think this is a worthwhile discussion.
