ON WRITER'S BLOCK: A MEDITATION ON SADISM

5 2 Y O N W R I T E R ’ S B L O C K A M E D I T A T I O N O N S A D I S M J E A N M c G A R R Y About a year ago, I was reading two writers who stand at the antipodes of the spectrum known as writer’s block: at the south end is M. F. K. Fisher, whose masterly style was applied to such ‘‘leisure’’ subjects as food, wine, and travel, but who also aimed her sharp pen on her own childhood, friends, and family. In her spare minutes, she composed fifteen-page, almost daily letters and kept a journal. Fisher was not a victim of glossolalia, or graphomania – much less of logorrhea – but she was a very fluid composer. In her lifetime, she produced twenty-four books, most still in print. By coincidence , I was reading almost at the same time the first novel of the Italian modernist Italo Svevo. Simply called A Life, it unspools the toilsome days of a would-be writer forced to work in a bank. Selfpublished in 1892, the novel was a flop, but its author (whose real name was Ettore Schmidt) went on to write a second, Senility. This book, once again self-published, also tanked, and Svevo stopped writing and became the businessman his father wanted him to be. Twenty-five years passed, a quarter-century of silence – a great chunk of life and valuable artistic time lost forever. Nonetheless, after that long gap, he did, once again, take up the pen to write The Confessions of Zeno, a novel now closely identified with his name, 5 3 R though it also failed in the marketplace until its rescue by the timely intervention of Svevo’s friend and English tutor James Joyce, whose sponsorship made all the di√erence. The Confessions of Zeno is written in the form of letters to a psychoanalyst, written as an attempt at digging out the roots of Zeno Cosini’s addiction to smoking. How Zeno starts smoking and what smoking means to him serve as the opening salvo to the stages in his long life: his father’s death, his marriage to his boss’s daughter, his a√airs, his partnership with the man who married the love of Zeno’s life, and so on, and so on. Everything is telling, everything is significant, not least his father’s last living act: slapping his son in the face. These are the issues Zeno tries to work out in long letters to his shrink. At the time Svevo was writing the novel, the works of Freud were circulating in Trieste. Svevo read them, apparently with interest. The Confessions of Zeno is a very funny book, and a sad book as well. Perhaps if Leopold Bloom had had the chance to write his own story, it would have sounded like this. Confessions, of course, made Svevo’s literary reputation. Today it’s seen as a modernist classic, not quite on a par, but almost, with its near-coevals, Ulysses , To the Lighthouse, and The Metamorphosis. The book’s success must have been highly gratifying to its author, for he had a sequel in mind, but he died in a car accident before its completion. It’s hard, thus, to see that twenty-five-year silence – the block – as anything less than a disaster, not just for the writer but for literature itself. What seemed almost too perfect, though, was that I couldn’t finish reading Svevo’s first book, A Life. And by contrast, I couldn’t stop reading M. F. K. Fisher’s vast output, rereading those volumes I’d read years ago, and even barreling through the five-hundredplus pages of letters. It made me think that writer’s block might be a contagious disease, spreading from writer to reader. Did Fisher’s serene word flow make her easier to read? Could productive mania evoke a manic response? Because Fisher, be assured, was as elegant and serious a writer (at least, in her own mind) as was the Italian modernist. These are not...