I GOT A CHECK FOR $78.23 in the mail today, a reprint fee for an article I did twelve years ago on the way Charles Dickens uses names in David Copperfield. I’m sure you all saw it when it came out–even in those days, who missed an issue of the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature? But I didn’t receive any money for the article at the time, and I wrote it in a period when $78.23 would have made a difference. No, let’s be honest: I’m still in a period when $78.23 makes a difference. Back then, however, it felt a little more vital. Like, say, the difference between eating lunch and not, the last week of the month.
In fact, everything about writing felt more vital when I was starting out. The Dickens piece was the first I had an editor accept for publication, but academic journals have long lead times, and the earliest to appear in print was an essay called “Christians and Postmoderns,” in the magazine First Things. It began, “We are living at a time near the end of the world,” and I think I expected the world to tremble. The cover was a lemony kind of yellow-orange, and there was my name–my name!–like, you know, a real author’s, in dark print on that citrus cover, for God and everybody to see.
Do all beginning writers remember their first publication this way? I haunted the bookstore, day after day, waiting for the arrival of the issue I’d been told it was in. And when the magazine came, I bought two copies: one for me and one, yes, for my mother. That evening I read the article over and over. I’m not sure why: I hadn’t just written the thing; I’d practically memorized it. But there I was, reading it compulsively, wincing at the things I should have said differently, gloating over the things I liked, rising hours after I’d gone to bed to slip over to my desk and read it again, really just this one last time.
For days afterward I walked around the way I imagine celebrities do: expecting at any moment to be accosted by strangers on the street saying, “Aren’t you the one who wrote that fascinating article? I just loved the tricky bit in the third paragraph about the apocalyptic imagination of environmentalists.” And I would look down bashfully and reply, “Ah, no, it was really more of an occasional piece than anything important. Still, you know, we published authors like to keep our hand in.” Nothing like this has happened in twelve years of writing, although somewhere deep in the delusional heart that all writers have–why else write?–I still harbor a few dreams.
Some weeks after the article appeared, an editor named Midge Decter called and asked if I wanted to review Gertrude Himmelfarb’s new book on historical theory. What I knew then about historiography–what I know now about historiography, as far as that goes–would fit in a teacup, but I was afraid that if I turned the assignment down, no one would ever ask me to review again. So I said yes, and then Commentary magazine asked me for a review, and then National Review asked for another, and pretty soon I was reviewing for an in-flight airline magazine a book on scuba diving, which I’ve never done, in the South Pacific, where I’ve never been.
It all seemed so easy. I thought I would be the only writer in America publishing in both the Review of Metaphysics and TV Guide. I imagined–oh, I don’t know, perhaps that writing came from an infinite well, and it could be ladled out to measure. Want 5,000 words on the Roman Stoics’ use of Greek physics? Of course. Want 500 words on NBC’s latest crop of sitcoms? I can do that, too.
Except I couldn’t. The two most enjoyable topics to write about–or read about, for that matter–are gossip and metaphysics. But they need to be handled in slightly different ways, and I soon found myself trying to write about Aristotle with the breathlessness of Variety, and the cast of The X-Files with the ponderousness of the International Philosophical Quarterly. Even my reading started to get peculiar, and I discovered I was studying Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and the personality profiles in Parade magazine with roughly the same close attention to detail.
Someday–did I mention the delusional heart of writers?–I’ll solve this problem. Meanwhile, looking at my new check for that early article, I feel almost like an American success story: Go into magazine work, kids, and in only a dozen years you too can be banking $78.23! Of course, it’s also a story of decline, for nothing since has felt quite as exhilarating as that first time I held a magazine with something I’d written in it–the crisp cover I opened as carefully as I could so it wouldn’t crease, the inky smell of the paper inside, the bumpy feel of the lettering as I ran my finger gently over my name.
–Joseph Bottum
