Is Self-Loathing a Requirement for Writers?

Re: Is Self-Loathing a Requirement for Writers?
Honestly, I have little or no interest in the creative impulse in the writers
I read. I am indifferent to their attitude toward themselves or to their family and friends. I am only concerned with what they produce. I consider interpreting a poem, a play, or a novel in the light of my knowledge of the writer's life the least interesting form of criticism. My kind of writer proceeds from this credo: "[T]here is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express." The writer of this quote is Samuel Beckett, for whom writing was a struggle for ever, because he didn't want to follow in the footsteps of other writers, not even those of James Joyce, his idol and compatriot, who also felt the obligation to write books uniquely his own. Their struggle with language to acquiesce in their rigorous demands has rendered what they have left for us eternally rewarding to read. I'll end with a familiar advice that Herbert Spencer gave a would-be poet: "Don't write poetry if you can help it," or words to that effect.

The other side of this coin is the self-loathing artist who nonetheless, craves the adoration of those he loathes even more.

I like Zadie Smith's comment, which was something like 'keeping a diary stops me from sleep walking through life'. Ive kept a diary since I was fifteen years old. I am now 75. I think my life, which began in a Japanese prison camp,has been pretty interesting. In fact, if I died tomorrow, preferably without pain, I would be ok with it. But I want people to know that my time here was not without meaning, suffering, or joy. So I've written about my first 20 years on the planet and self-published. Why? Because my memoir tells my family things about me that I would find hard to speak about but easier to write about. That's enough motivation for me.

Holmes says that when she switched to digital she found the writing much better, give us some examples please, otherwise I find data in doubt...

What exactly is Thomas Mallon implying by the term "self-professed writer"? I can understand the term self-professed doctor (someone whose never received a medical degree, but pretends to be one) or self-professed Savior of Mankind.

But a self-professed writer? Who and what exactly--how many critics, and how often, how many published books, how many books sold--decides when a self-professed writer becomes a writer? Either someone writes, or does not. Was Emily Dickinson less of a writer than some contemporary writer of pulp fiction who is now forgotten?

Or else, a self-professed writer could be a writer who was once had the label "writer" according to him/her by the Academy (which one?), but who, because subsequent lack of sales or fame, has been stripped of it, despite his/her maintaining that he/she a writer?

I do "get" what the Thomas Mallon is trying to impart--a weariness with people who completely lack an understanding of their own mediocrity, and won't be stopped from publishing their "drivel"--yet the term is freighted with a certain snobbish contempt for less privileged writers. And, as I suggest in at least two of my books ("The Killing of an Author" and "Impressing the Whites"), this privilege sometimes comes at a price.

Richard Crasta

With respect, to Anna Holmes' article following Thomas Mallon's, I would have preferred that the presentation order of these two essays. After what, Thomas Mallon wrote, continuing onto the second part of, I immediately sobered up. I would have preferred it the other way around. Something like eating the double, vanilla-and-chocolate ice-cream cones, I ate as a child. I loved the vanilla but the chocolate had that taste, missing in vanilla, that seemed to be somehow not as sweet, or something. I later learned to appreciate. When AH stated “...so much about who sells books...is the result of privilege — educational, economic, racial, gendered...I realized, probably had as much to do with luck and positioning as it did with talent...” The situation she points to in many cases, even the superiority of talented unknown writers also applies to designers and artists and musicians. It is largely who you know and get to know, chance and privilege. So too with (publishers, art museums, galleries), long overdue changes are underway; greater diversity of voices are to be heard, read, seen and appreciated. The Internet will evolve us all, and present talent heretofore overlooked and unappreciated. In such a win-win situation, as the scene unfolds, everyone will be duly blessed, no matter which way we may eat the ice cream cone.

If you want self-loathing, self-doubt, and self-everything else that's negative, read the diary that John Steinbeck kept while writing the Grapes of Wrath.

I think with this question it has become fairly evident that this 'point/counterpoint' feature has run its course. (It should have been evident a few columns ago.) Self-loathing? Say what? Speak for yourselves.
This is actually a variant of the common fallacy that (to borrow from Dryden) 'great wits to madness sure are near allied', that is, that artists must be in some way uniquely tormented, unbalanced, unhappy, addicted, or even mentally ill. Certainly the most floridly and flamboyantly maladjusted get the most attention - as Shakespeare's Ulysses points out, 'things in motion sooner catch the eye/than what stirs not.' If you were to write honest biographies of artists as opposed to us average folks, I think you'd find that the lives of us peons are every bit as colourful, and that we have our dark nights of the soul, our moments of acidic self-excoriation, our afternoons spent curled up under the bed, thumb in mouth and trembling. Self-loathing and self-love, conjoined twins - as Mr Mallon notes, the human condition; and hardly special to writers. I don't think you have any special degree of self-loathing/self-love conflict. You artists just make a big deal of it, whereas we peons accept it, slog along, and cope.

I laughed so much I choked, reading this first essay out loud to myself and my dog. So many punch lines, one after the other, thank you for this analysis. Some names flew over my head, (I studied Oriental philosophy) but no matter, I am long used to that. It's the overall impact of what is being discussed, that matters the most. The penultimate chapter is such perfection of illumined wit. I wish I could thank you enough for this, and I know my friends on social media, the whole round world will love reading your article. Many of my friends, and I too am similarly fueled on that nuclear fuel of plutonium fuel, the "I'll show them." They will love what you have written, because although most of my new media friends in cyberspace are fine artists and designers, each one has their rivals, competitors and enemies, and those who would love to hold them back. Thank you again for this, and God, fuel us all.

I very much appreciate Anna Holmes for her accurate and humble assessment of the writing profession.

From what I can tell, trauma and suffering appear to play a significant role in the writing life. In 1941 Edmund Wilson published an intriguing book on this subject called "The Wound and the Bow" which is based on the the figure of Philoctetes and Sophocles' play by that name. Too bad Wilson is long forgotten in literary history.

But yes, in my humble opinion great self-loathers and/or trauma can make for some powerful writing. See, for example, Thomas Bernhard, Schopenhauer, Cioran, Baudelaire, Twain, Dostoevsky, Samuel Johnson, Céline, Tacitus, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Osip Mandelstam, etc. Admittedly, this stuff isn't for everybody. But what is?

An admirable write with numerous well-taken points. Especially the one of keeping the bogey man away... unless it's a hot lady. The synopsis about self-loafing isn't all inclusive until one deals with loafing of the self... a must to expand one's self-loathing when experiencing a writer's block!