Duty and Delight: A Century of Writing

As someone who has thought of himself as a writer since before he had really even published anything, I have always loved writing and hated it. Loved it because when one is in the rhythm of tapping out thoughts on the keyboard and the juices are flowing, there is nothing greater.

Okay, it’s not a century of years. But this is the one hundredth essay I’ve published at The Imaginative Conservative.

You may not be impressed, I realize.

“Dave, c’mon. Every six weeks Imaginative Conservative co-founder Brad Birzer publishes: one hundred essays, an award-winning work of American history, a sensitive reflection on the work of some famous twentieth-century Christian humanist, and a biography of a Progressive Rock drummer!”

All true, no doubt. Though I’ve been able to understand neither what the thought of Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey has to do with rock music nor why the former would make the latter so good (two negatives make a positive?), I too stand in awe of all Birzeriana. Nor would I dare compare myself to the man.

All the same, though, I still feel a bit of pride. After all, Dr. Birzer himself talked to me about the possibility of becoming a senior contributor at this publication a couple years ago after a conference. The conference was in Michigan. I had flown from Minnesota and he had driven over from Hillsdale. We were having, as we have had every time I have been able to spend time together with him, a fantastic conversation. At the end of the conference, wanting to keep talking, he offered to drive me to the airport. As he went, the conversation flew fast and furious. Though he was driving at the time, my distinct memory is that he was using about three different devices to look up important books and articles we were talking about. It was like riding in the passenger seat with a Phi Beta Kappa octopus. At the end of the ride, he popped the question: would I like to be a senior contributor and write regularly at The Imaginative Conservative?

I would, I said. And he would, he said, put me in contact with Winston Elliott, whom I had heard about but with whom I had never spoken. I stepped out of the Intellectual Octo-mobile and gave thanks for my safety. Then I gave thanks for what I thought was a great opportunity.

The thanksgiving was for the honor involved—I would be on the masthead with Dr. Birzer, Eva Brann, Lou Markos, Joseph Pearce, and another bunch of amazing writers. After a week or so I had my phone interview with Mr. Elliott, which I apparently passed, for I soon was writing and had my picture on the website with all these great people. The thanksgiving, however, was also for the opportunity to write regularly. Or, rather, it was for the obligation to write regularly. And in fact that obligation was more important to me.

As someone who has thought of himself as a writer since before he had really even published anything, I have always loved writing and hated it. Loved it because when one is in the rhythm of tapping out thoughts on the keyboard and the juices are flowing, there is nothing greater. There is hope that what is coming out will be beautiful. The sportswriter Roy Blount, Jr., once recalled that when he watched Larry Bird make “a completely unexpected but perfect pass on the run, I didn’t want to write about that, I wanted to write like that.”

Whether a basketball fan or not, everyone who has ever written anything thoughtfully understands this desire.

However, to make the perfect but completely unexpected pass—or paragraph—takes years of practice. So too to produce reliably good paragraphs. Times New Roman genius is not built in a day. Working at it is, let us say, difficult. That’s where the hate of writing comes in. To quote yet another sportswriter, the legendary twentieth-century figure Red Smith, “Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter, cut open a vein, and bleed.”  Those who have written a great deal and are used to producing words on deadline develop the capacity to power through those periods of writing nothing or writing things destined for the delete button and continue to build strength, but even they sometimes experience the difficulty of getting down good prose. Dr. Birzer once told me he finished a six-week period where only 75 essays and one book came out. Though perhaps the coma he suffered for three of those weeks after the accident can be partially blamed.

I am no Literary Larry Bird. But I want to be. And that is where this obligation has been so helpful. Too many would-be writers are, I believe, spoiled by their own desire to make every bit of work a Bird-like pass of perfection. They refuse to offer their work to the public until it is perfect in some ideal way. They spend the morning putting in a semicolon and the afternoon taking it out, as the writer Seán Ó Faoláin teasingly described J. F. Powers while introducing him to a friend. Powers was the type of writer who said he did not to want merely to get a book out but “make one count”—and he often spent long periods of time not opening that vein. Or, to return again to the Hick of French Lick, picking up the ball and dribbling.

In Suitable Accommodations, her collection of her father’s letters, Katherine A. Powers noted that her father spent six months in a rented office “reading newspapers, studying racing forms, fixing up his office, wandering around Dublin, attending estate auctions, and ministering to his purchases.” While Powers admitted in one letter to his old friend Harvey Egan that he was “lazy,” I really think it was more a fear of failure—or, worse, good but imperfect writing—than anything.

An obligation to write, even one freely made, frees one from this illusion that we should only birth perfect pieces. Or even that we can. It forces the writer to stop dreaming of perfection and start building up a piece word by word, line by line, and paragraph by paragraph. Many of the great nineteenth-century novelists published their works as serials in newspapers first. It did not hurt them and likely helped them. Emile Zola said of his experience, “One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.”

As I am no Larry Bird, I am no Zola either. (Nor, for the record, am I Spartacus.) But the invitation to write for The Imaginative Conservative was a duty that has become a delight and has helped, I hope, forge some style as well as get out thoughts that are not always original to me but to which I can add something.

Initially, most of my essays were on economic issues because that is what Dr. Birzer asked me to write about. But deadlines not only forge style but require matter. And I do not always have an economic thought at hand that needs to be expressed. But from week to week I am almost always focused on something that would make a good essay. A movie, a book, a political or public policy development, something in education, or theology, or the death of a figure of whom you may not have heard—but should have. The editors have given me leeway to write on all these topic and to write in different styles and tones, even when my views differed from theirs.

The essays have not always succeeded. But some of them have, and it is often the case that ones I thought were so-so were judged by readers to be moving or important. Some that I thought particularly clever or important have drawn forth only the response of, “Echo. . .echo. . .echo. . . .” That, too, has been a blessing. The prolific philosopher, novelist, and essayist Ralph McInerny had a sign above his writing desk with the legend: “Nobody owes you a reading.”

And you, dear readers, do not owe me a reading, either. Many of you have given it anyway, for which I am grateful. These are essays, a word derived from the French meaning to try or attempt. I have attempted in this century of writing to speak to you meaningfully, intelligently, seriously, and often playfully. I will continue, Deo volente, for another century.[*]

[*] Incidentally, I take consolation that, if none of these essays “counts” in some world literary-historical sense, at least I have the hope of becoming a footnote in the 2097 issue of The Annals of Birzerian Studies.

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The featured image is “A Man with Pen in Hand and a Maid-Servant” (1659) by Gabriël Metsu, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It has been brightened for clarity.