I’m Fixing to Find a New Line of Work
I’m fixing to find a new line of work.
I don’t seem to be making much progress at what I’m doing. They say that progress is remembering what was once forgotten. I can’t seem to remember anything I’ve forgotten. If I could remember what I forgot then there wouldn’t be any use of trying to remember it because I would still know it.
But before giving up my line of work, which is scribbling, I thought I would delve into the past and see what some of my fellow scribblers had to say about the matter. I don’t mean to compare myself with their work, but rather with our thoughts about our work.
One of my favorite masterpieces of literature is Madam Bovary, which was penned in 1857 by Gustave Flaubert, a French writer who is counted among the greatest novelists in Western literature. Even though the old boy died penniless and diseased when he was 58, what he said about his work was, “Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.”
Another scribbler, Mickey Spillane, viewed his work the same way as his hard-scrabble hero Mike Hammer looked at life. He felt that experience and age made him better at his work and that’s why he kept on doing it. He compared his line of work to others by saying, “If you’re a singer you lose your voice, and if you’re a baseball pitcher you lose your arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he’s good, the older he gets, the better he writes.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, who penned The Great Gatsby died in 1940, after he suffered several bouts of illness and financial ruin. But before he died he said, “You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.”
But my favorite scribbler, the late and great Larry Brown had the most to say about the calling. It wasn’t just his writing that made me admire him so much. I liked the fact that he never went to college, but that he did teach creative writing at several colleges and universities. And he wasn’t always a writer.
First he was a Marine and then he was a fireman. He also painted a few houses in between royalty checks. I knew I was going to like his work when I read that he said, “After a year of therapy my psychiatrist told me that maybe life wasn’t for everyone.”
In his last novel, A Miracle of Catfish, he summed up how it feels when the weekend comes to an end when he said, “Sunday just came down like a nine-pound hammer…it was tainted with the closing-in feeling of the loss of freedom. Because after the sun went down, it came up on Monday morning. And you had to go to work five more days. And it sucked.”
In his first novel, Big Bad Love, he summed up the feeling of love when he said, “I didn’t know why something that started off feeling so good had to wind up feeling so bad.”
In Facing the Music, he summed up life’s frustrations when he said, “I can understand why people jump off bridges.”
Mr. Brown died in 2004 at the young age of 57 from an apparent heart attack, but it was not before he also authored Father and Son, Dirty Work, Joe, The Rabbit Factory, Fay, and other works. How many stories did he leave untold?
After some digging around I discovered that before he died he addressed the scribbling line of work when he said, “I only had one life, and I’d be dammed if I’d live it in a way that would make me unhappy and please somebody else. I had already lived that kind of life, too much of it already.”
In view of the above, I reckon I’ll be fixing to keep on scribbling for awhile.