How it is that the isolated writer will become more and more extreme
The Lonesome Pine is a term that I'm using to describe writers who do not write for publication or for any other reader than themselves. These writers are a breed apart from all the rest of us, even though I think almost all writers begin this way, and it's only later that they begin to get a glimmer of hope, aspiration, or intention to be published and widely known.
`Abandon all hope...'
There are some writers probably never have any idea that any other human soul will ever read or hear what they have written. The image that comes to my mind is of a person whose mind doesn't work the way most of our minds work: he might be called insane or mentally unbalanced. He might be schizophrenic. Or he might be compulsive. In any case, his writing tends to be more therapeutic than anything else – it serves as a sort of pressure valve to vent the excess thoughts and concerns that he carries with him at all times.
I think a lot of people go through this sort of experience at one time or another in their lives. I associate it mostly with adolescence and the ache of teenage years, also we love affairs, and intense love for someone with whom the writer cannot communicate, someone the writer dares not approach. For one reason or another, the writer believes that his feelings are too precious and too potent to be revealed to anyone. He feels cut off from other human society, or else he would be writing and speaking and expressing all his emotions to other people.
Adolescence and amorous heartache are temporary conditions, so most of us when we endure these phases do not do so for very long. Any flirtation that we might have with this state of being a Lonesome Pine, therefore, is brief, and we probably forget what it was like after a few years have passed.
But if we consider the difference between the infatuated loner and the person who is also infatuated but who has friends, then I think we begin to understand (or at least approach understanding) of the writer who writes for many years of his life all along without any hope or intention that anyone else will read what he has written.
This is where the connection with madness comes in.
When you're able to `vent' to other people (and the more the merrier), you are also forced to listen to them giving you advice, and commenting on your own complaints. Through this process you gain some deal notion of how other people see you and see your situation – and the way other people see your situation is never as extreme or hopeless or glorious or tragic or doomed as you yourself believe.
This process is related to the more general process of `socialization.' Anyone who is part of a community will come over time to reflect that community in all of its values, as well as its idiosyncratic modes of behavior, speech, and attitude. At the same time, every individual member of that community affects the general outlook of the community. This is a kind of dialogue. The people at the extremes and fringes of the community try to pull it towards themselves, while the people in the center try to resist this centrifugal motion and bring everyone closer to their common central ground.
The world of literature is a sort of community in itself – or maybe we should call it a collection of communities. For every genre and subcategory of literature makes its own community that might have very little commerce with other communities and genres. So-called `hard science fiction' devotees probably don't read many Regency romances, and vice versa.
The process of `socialization' in any given literary community results in certain styles coming to predominate, and the typical clichés of the genre. Styles come and go, and there is a lot of interactivity going on not only between the writers and readers but also amongst the writers themselves. This will vary according to how intensely the fans of the genre feel and how active the fans are into creating an ecosystem around this genre.
New writers for the genre will mostly come out of its own fans — people who know the history of the genre and like the genre for what it is and would like to keep it the way it is, albeit with some changes that usually reflect general social changes in the greater world as well as new generations coming onto the scene. All these new writers have a vested interest in the life and vitality and gradual, incremental evolution of the genre. As a body, the fans and writers within the genre's community will seek to maintain a coherence of form and content.
Another factor in the `socialization' of the writer in general has to do with simple mechanics. Publishing as an industrial concern gains greater efficiencies when it achieves and abides by standardization. This involves factors like the available consistency and a makeup of paper stock, page size, color of ink, binding processes to be used in books, and all the equipment that is used in manufacturing, distributing, and marketing the product — the books.
There is another factor in this socialization' that is probably more particularly a part of literature. This is a high number offussbudgets' that inevitably cling to words, grammar, dictionaries, and all things fusty and academic. These are the people who insist that everything be spelled the same way, and that all punctuation adhere to certain laws. These are also the people who seem to regard the definitions of words not as things that people have arbitrarily decided they mean, and can change at any time, but rather as items handed down from the All-High.
Against all this stands the Lonesome Pine. Since this writer never intends to be published or even to seek publication of his work, he never enters into a dialogue with the greater community of literature, or with any of the smaller communities of the genre. He never deals with a copy editor. In addition, there are other factors that have driven him into the state that we call the Lonesome Pine. He is probably not very adept at dealing with people in social situations. He probably resists all efforts of those around him (with whom he absolutely must deal) to bring him, as it were, `into the fold' and be like everybody else.
Therefore, the Lonesome Pine will probably relish spelling things differently and using a grammar system of all his own. Instead of trying to make his self printed and self-bound volumes look like any other commercial book, he will take delight in making it look very different. He will use colored paper — and many different colors — and he will use paper of different sizes. He will change fonts often. He will include illustration, and these too will be different as different as he can make them. He will not be bound by any literary conventions and since his work will never be touched by any editor's blue pencil, his stories will go all over the place, and he might even end up with different protagonists than the ones he began with.
All of these are the outer considerations of the work and life of the Lonesome Pine. The inner life remains out of bounds and beyond our imagining — or rather I should say, that the Lonesome Pine varies from individual to individual too widely for anyone to be able to describe one portrait and say with any confidence that it stands in for the class as a whole.
(Composed by dictation Monday 22 September 2008)
