Useless Business
They might have ranch-sized egos, but a lot of writers also feel sick at heart about what they do, especially, it often seems, the men. They find it agony, this business of being all alone, nothing but a white page for company, and ache at the thought of it. ‘A solitary, joyless occupation,’ is how poet and critic Al Alvarez describes it. ‘For five or six days each week, I sit at my desk and try to get the sentences right. If I make a mistake, I can rewrite it the following day or the next or catch it in proof. And if I fail to do so, who cares? Who even notices?’ Worse yet is the sense that, as Frederic Raphael once put it: ‘Real men do things. They don’t just write about them.’
Ejem…
