Christine Smallwood has an essay in the Yale Review about being a freelance book reviewer which resonates with me on a number of levels. She starts by describing the magnificent top-floor duplex on West Sixty-Seventh Street where Elizabeth Hardwick did her own writing (“Next to the built-in bookshelves and requisite rolling ladder, swag curtains frame an enormous window, giving a theatrical effect”), then transitions to her own less than grand situation:
My own desk is wedged into one corner of the bedroom I share with my husband, behind the children’s trampoline, between a hulking armoire and an ugly IKEA thing exploding with file boxes and rolls of scribbled-on paper that I really ought to throw away. Cairns of books are at my feet. If I turn my head just so I can glimpse a cluster of grocery bags brimming with toys and still more books, which I plan, someday, to sell or give away. Sometimes I pile the bags on top of each other to reduce their footprint, and when they threaten to topple, spread them out again.
What interests me about the photographs of Hardwick’s living room is that they provide evidence of the environment in which a brilliant and original mind worked. The couch on which she sat when she thought about Donne or Melville expressed a sensibility, but it also incubated one. On my way to my own desk, I catch a glimpse of the bags filled with crap. Whether or not I acknowledge it, the crap is always buried in the piece. Sometimes it rises right to the top.
Criticism is an act of autobiography. The work of making an argument, coming to a judgment, or simply choosing which books or objects to give time and attention to is inevitably, helplessly, an expression of values—and an expression of self. Our tastes tell on us as much as our syntax and tone; that mysterious compound called sensibility is formed by some strange alchemy of innate tendencies, life experiences, and material circumstances. In the pursuit of explicating a text, observing its patterns and structure, how it works, what it means, I also explicate myself—revealing what catches my interest, where my attention lingers. I might do this more, or less, intentionally, but I always do it.
Whatever is going on in the life of the critic is going to show up in her reading; it can’t not. Reading, writing, and thinking have experiential texture. The place and context in which I do those activities shapes them. Whether we are informed by political events or everyday life, it is not always possible, or desirable, to block out the noise of the world. When I write criticism, then, I try to use this fact of myself in some way. I might openly acknowledge why I am so invested in some aspect of a work. I might try to think through myself, pushing to arrive at a point at the very far edge of what I can see. I am a passionate adherent of close reading, the practice of being carefully attentive to words that are not our own. But close reading always involves the critic layering her own point of view over or next to the text’s, even as she observes, explains, interprets, evaluates. What I should not do is pretend that my reading is definitive, neutral, objective, or somehow free of myself and my environment. I write criticism to encounter an object, and I read criticism to encounter another person encountering an object. If I wanted a randomized controlled trial, I would be in the sciences.
Of course, the money one is paid to write a piece is one of the material constraints that shapes the work of criticism. Word rates have not increased in decades, while the cost of living goes up every year. […] If you have a secure academic job and write reviews on the side, it’s nice work. For the freelancer—I am one—it’s a foolish undertaking. As Russell Jacoby noted nearly forty years ago, one reason there are not more full-time freelance writers is that most take staff writer positions or university jobs or quit writing altogether. It is impossible to know what ideas never came into the world because someone couldn’t or wouldn’t accept an hourly rate that barely covers the babysitter.
If the criticism I write is always limited by the fact that it is I who am writing it, bounded as I am by material constraints, it is also true that within that limit a profound freedom of thought persists. Sometimes when I read, I do have the sensation of blocking out the immediate physical world, journeying to an entirely different place, losing the sense of my body. It’s not just leaving myself behind that is freeing; it’s discovering myself. Writing a review is the best, maybe the only, way I can discover what I think. I don’t come to reviewing with my ideas already formed; I have to build them, sentence by sentence. For me, writing a review is a way of getting closer to an object, taking it apart to understand how it works. I get closer to and farther away from myself in the process, even as I know that I will inevitably ask questions that betray myself and my interests. The question I am most aware of asking has to do with point of view: I want to understand an object’s way of looking at the world. What would I have to believe about the world in order for this book to be true? This is the kind of question I get most excited about asking.
Criticism is a relationship with an object, and as such it involves all of the regular psychic drama—idealization and fantasy; avoidance, hostility, and disappointment; the desire to know and a fascination with what is unknown; displacement from our own life onto the object. The person writing criticism has to always be on guard that the irritations and frustrations of writing do not get taken out on the object under review. Even pieces that begin in love and admiration can end in resentment and hate. I have noticed that after writing a review, I often lose interest in the author or resist reading their next book. If reviewing is a way to know something deeply, it’s also a way to say goodbye.
Even though I don’t review for money (however derisory), I have experienced much of what she’s talking about, including that odd loss of interest after one has said what one set out to say. I like the way she thinks and writes enough that I may have to check out her novel The Life of the Mind — talk about a come-hither title!
Ms. Smallwood’s website indicates she lives in Brooklyn, w/o specifying a neighborhood but let’s assume one of the ones that’s broadly culturally simpatico with being the holder of a Ph.D. from Columbia who currently teaches creative writing as an adjunct to Columbia undergrads. As I’m sure hat knows full well, real estate is notably more expensive per square foot, ceteris paribus, in NYC than in many other parts of the U.S.
The choice not to live somewhere where a large if beat-up old house with enough rooms to hold all the kids plus at least one extra that can be used as a dedicated home office costs less than a typical two-bedroom in hipsterized Bushwick or wherever is a choice with consequences. To be sure this is a choice she made jointly with, at a minimum, her husband and perhaps he is not a novelist and freelance book reviewer and has a different set of tradeoffs to make about where to live or not to live.
The point about losing interest in an author after reviewing their work reminds me of C S Lewis’ observation that one of the perils of Christian apologetics is that, after you have defended some doctrine to the best of your ability, it actually seems less plausible to yourself, if only temporarily.
Well, talking is a way of getting things off your chest. When you’ve done that, it’s only natural that relief and lassitude set in. As in childbirth: “For the mother, said Tetty, the feeling is one of relief, of great relief, as when the guests depart.”
If reviewing is a way to know something deeply, it’s also a way to say goodbye.
It would have been around 1976. The professor in a course on management of foreign exchange risk suggested we subscribe to The Economist. That “newspaper” as it called itself was still aimed at a British readership in those days, and the journalists enjoyed wordplay.
There was a book review of an autobiography by some not very famous member of the House of Lords who had served in various Tory governments and offered insider tales of many people like himself. The final lines of the review offered mild praise for the book, and then—I paraphrase here—said something like, ‘this book, however, suffers from a mortal flaw-choice of subject matter.’
In one of his books, Anthony Burgess reminisced about how, as a young writer still trying to make his way, he would take the train from his rural hovel to London and come back with a suitcase full of books to review for various magazines and papers. The fees for doing this, along with selling the books afterwards to a local bookseller, were just about enough to keep him going. This would have been in the 1950s, I guess, and by the time he recounted the story some decades later he lamented that it was already impossible for a young writer of recent days to survive in such a manner.
Nowadays, of course, you can make a splendid living by posting book reviews on TikTok.
Its fascinating that she does not seem to know about the very many freelance writers who make a living by producing lots of whatever pays least badly eg. novels, grant applications, or online copy. Neil Stephenson once said that someone from a milieu like hers had not heard of him because he was famous, so not teaching at a community college while attending academic conferences and applying for grants.
J.W. – Are you shaming her real estate choice? Clearly she is somewhat disappointed that the world no longer allows novelist/critics to live the way Hardwick did. I get it.
@Vanya: I have no interest in shaming her choices, I just don’t want her to whine in print about the trade-offs inherent in the choices she has made. Granted that once upon a time nice apartments on W. 72nd St. were cheaper inflation-adjusted than they are now and book reviewing paid better inflation-adjusted that it does now, I am still skeptical about any implicature that Hardwick actually supported herself in that style exclusively from what she earned as a freelance book reviewer. (One might, for example, note that she was married to a celebrity who was a scion of a wealthy family, and one piece I googled up says that she was uncharacteristically stressed out about finances when he abandoned her but relaxed on that front once the financial arrangements of the divorce were finalized in a satisfactory manner.)
I certainly don’t want to pick on Ms. Smallwood in particular, but I do think that we have a cultural problem arising from the fact that: a) our literati tend to come from similar class and educational backgrounds as our investment bankers; and b) many of our literati seem vaguely confused and/or envious that they are not being afforded the a standard of living in middle life anything like that enjoyed by that philistine bozo who lived in their dorm freshman year who went on to become an investment banker. Not for them the raffish bohemian voluntary poverty of the Beats; not for them the willingness of a Wallace Stevens to hold down a boring-sounding day job in the insurance industry in order to fund his creative endeavors. And New York City is a particularly horrible place for these sort of genteel-poverty vocations, because the whole culture and psychology of the city is obsessed with money and material success, and it’s chock-full of self-awareness-deficient people making a half-million bucks a year who are consumed with envy and resentment toward those making a million a year, and so on and so on all the way up the scale.
JWB: Boy, you’re really giving her a hard time for perfectly natural feelings. And she’s not “whining,” she’s just discussing a difference in circumstances. Can you point to a place where she says it’s unfair that she doesn’t get to live like Hardwick?
Its fascinating that she does not seem to know about the very many freelance writers who make a living by producing lots of whatever pays least badly eg. novels, grant applications, or online copy.
It’s fascinating that you seem to think you know what she knows or doesn’t know and how she wants to make a living. Not everyone thinks “Just produce crap!” is a convincing life strategy.
There are all sorts of perfectly natural feelings (including but not limited to envy, resentment, and self-pity) that it is desirable for people to be somewhat reticent about expressing in public. The desirability of reticence is not because these feelings are unnatural – it’s because civilization depends on some degree of shared effort to overcome or at least mitigate our flawed nature. Of course, some talented writers can and do write self-deprecatingly and/or entertainingly about such feelings, and maybe that was her goal here although judgments might vary as to how well she succeeded.
And maybe this is about me more than her because after 32 years of living in/near NYC I have ended up with minimal tolerance for people who appear to be complaining about how hard the inherent and predictable side-effects of their choice to live in NYC are. So maybe I should work on consciously giving a maximally charitable reading of things that provoke that reaction in case I may be misreading what’s actually being said by the particular person in the particular instance.
language hat: she quotes with approval “As Russell Jacoby noted nearly forty years ago, one reason there are not more full-time freelance writers is that most take staff writer positions or university jobs or quit writing altogether.” That “most” is only true for a milieu on the edge of academia. If you have to write, you can generally choose what to write and for whom.
If you have to write, you can generally choose what to write and for whom.
And apparently, according to you, only a fool would choose to write ill-paid reviews rather than grant applications or online copy. (I presume you’re joking about novels.)
most take staff writer positions or university jobs or quit writing altogether
this is at best laughable, to anyone who’s paid any attention to either publications or universities over the past, well, forty years. those jobs were visibly on the way out when jacoby wrote, and simply haven’t existed for well over a decade. which, in turn, has meant that freelance writing has paid less and less, and been even less sustainable over the long term.
(and, parenthetically, to amplify our host’s welcome implication: grant-writing is just another kind of (often freelance) technical writing, though one where there are currently more possibilities for staff positions than for other kinds – after far too many years in the field, i can say that its pleasures and conundrums aren’t that different from review-writing in some ways.)
a choice with consequences
the idea that there are obvious and obtainable affordable places to live that people are simply choosing not to move to must be a comforting fantasy. leaving aside the fiction that calling work “freelance” magically makes it equally available and paid equally in all places – especially in industries like the adjunctified academy and the remnants of literary publishing, where workers are deeply dependent for even a semblance of steady employment on personal connections maintained primarily through face to face socializing – that simply doesn’t describe the reality of the past twenty years of life in the u.s. (as opposed to comforting statistics, which as always are more inaccurate than simple damned lies).
the people i know who’ve done as JWB advises over the past decade – left the Big Expensive City for the Inexpensive Simplicity of the Heartland (whether that means rural tennessee, pittsburgh, or the hudson valley – are the people in my life whose economic precariousness has increased most rapidly over that span of time. and these are mainly couples without kids, including quite a few people with far more stable employment than most people i know.
My advice is not so much that anyone should do any particular thing but that everyone should understand and be clear-eyed about the inevitable trade-offs that come with pretty much any choice available to them. I myself in my own economic life have when push came to shove arguably done the safe/risk-averse/bourgeois thing at almost every fork in the road, and I have some regrets about that but tempered with awareness about the risks and uncertainties of the paths not pursued.
Obviously there are career paths where despite the internet etc. and the theoretical possibility of doing the actual work anywhere it remains a practical necessity to develop and nurture personal connections in a way that requires near-continuous face-to-face interaction in the Big Expensive City. A potential career that requires that sort of physical presence in the BEC without any reasonable prospect of generating enough steady cash flow to cover the expenses of living in the BEC is a career that it may be foolhardy to pursue, absent some other factor that makes it work, the most obvious candidates for which are a) access to family wealth; and b) a significantly higher-earning (ideally in a stable and predictable way) spouse. One hears anecdotally that the overwhelming majority of entry-level employees in certain NYC “glamor” industries like literary publishing, art galleries, etc. are young people who are done with school but still being subsidized by indulgent and affluent parents, and starting salaries have thus equilibrated to a low level that basically presumes that sort of applicant pool.
One alternative possibility is trying to have that sort of critical mass necessary for a stable career in a Medium-Sized-Affordable-City. One interesting trend of the last few decades in the increasingly precarious rock and roll business has been the tendency for a number of aging cult/niche musicians to relocate to Nashville even though they don’t necessarily play in the C&W style that historically dominated Nashville. Nashville has the institutional infrastructure you need for a music career (recording studios, booking agents, song publishers, lawyers and accountants with the relevant expertise, etc.) and makes that infrastructure available to musicians working in not-traditionally-Nashville styles, and you also get a virtuous cycle where the more such people move there the easier it is to casually bump into someone in a social context who is useful to know in a professional context — and all of this in a city where housing and other living costs remain notably lower than in N.Y. or L.A. Although of course it’s easy (well, easy for me) to name aging punk-rock legends who have merely relocated from the gentrified BEC to the Hudson Valley or to hat’s locale in the Pioneer Valley.
If a sufficient critical mass of poets and book reviewers and literary-publishing types would all somehow decide to relocate en masse to Des Moines or Albuquerque you could perhaps get a similar dynamic, but obviously there are collective action problems in making that happen. Visual art is trickier because galleries deal in physical objects and need to be near the critical mass of wealthy people they’re hoping to sell to, although the painters need not necessarily be in close physical proximity to their gallery – at least once they’re established enough to not to need to be constantly hustling and networking etc. Which is another conundrum, i.e. that maybe the economic necessity to be constantly working the crowd in the BEC decreases right at the point in a career where you’re finally making more money and the BEC is less unaffordable.
Of course, one factor driving down the economic returns to book reviewing in particular over the last 20-25 years has been the increasing prominence of thoughtful people with interesting things to say about interesting books who are willing to put those interesting things out for free on the internet w/ no expectation of receiving cash income in return. Like just for example the genial host of the hattery. Did the Wobblies have a theory about what to do with gentleman amateurs who take the bread out of the mouths of union members by sharing their skills for free?
Per JWB: our literati tend to come from similar class and educational backgrounds as our investment bankers
As they say on Wikipedia, citation needed.
Also “maybe the economic necessity to be constantly working the crowd in the BEC decreases right at the point in a career where you’re finally making more money”
Maybe JWB is basing this on some recording artists he knows, but I have not heard that this is a thing for freelance writers, unless they have a regular “gig”, e.g., column (or significant income from royalties, like Salinger). Similarly actors, unless they have a regular advertising, voiceover or television “gig”.
I just didn’t read Smallwood as whining or even particularly bitter. She presents a straightforward comparison of the living and working arrangements of two women doing similar work in the same city 60 years apart. Even if due to extenuating circumstances Hardwick lived better than most novelists at the time, the contrast still tells us something true and immediately tangible about the change in social status and cultural influence of literature in our society.
Exactly.
Languagehat, my comments seem to be triggering a lot of emotion in you. Christine Smallwood describes being a freelance writer in the literary world of a large city, which is very different from being a freelance novelist publishing a few hundred thousands words of year, or a grantwriter, or several other niches. People like Kris Rusch explain how you can make a living as a novelist if you can produce a lot of words in a popular genre. It requires luck and hard work, but so does becoming a college writing professor, or a staff writer with a popular magazine.
I agree with J.W. Brewer that very often the “writer living a luxurious life” is supported by a spouse or an inheritance (or a less glamorous day job which is carefully hidden from fans and colleagues).
Languagehat, my comments seem to be triggering a lot of emotion in you.
No, they’re annoying me because you seem to be assuming that writing is much like producing widgets, and the only sensible thing to do is to produce the kind of widgets that are in most demand in a low-cost location. You are welcome to your opinion, but I don’t think most writers would agree.
PlasticPaddy, I think it really depends on the type of freelance writer, but for forms like “magazine articles” and “trade books with a Big Five publisher” where there are many authors competing for the same few paying slots, face-to-face relationships really help. Some used to use Twitter as a substitute. Self-published novelists often live somewhere cheap and travel to events in their genre (but those events can be really important). Many of the well-paid Substack bloggers have dense connections in Southern California, NYC, or Boston and I can’t prove that this helped them get paid but I believe it helped.
Making a list of possibilities and their usual consequences is not the same as saying which possibility someone else should choose, but sometimes it can help them see that they had more choices then they thought.
I don’t think most writers would agree.
This reader wouldn’t agree either. I avoid like the plague any writing that smells of ” the kind of widgets that are in most demand in a low-cost location.”
There are two economic points which create this contrast: first, in Hardwick’s day, being a literary critic was a middle-class existence, upper ditto if you were successful. And, in her day, an apartment at 15 W 67, half a block to the park, was affordable to an upper-middle-class person.
Just two blocks from Hardwick’s apartment, and around her time, Robert Moses was erasing a neighborhood to create Lincoln Center. Which brings me to another critic, not of books but of cities, Jane Jacobs. She lived at 555 Hudson Street, and famously described the variegated working class life she had been observing on the street below her window. Jacobs was, roughly, of the same profession as Hardwick, and her economic and social class were, I imagine, comparable. But now the Village is no longer the Village. An essay I saw from ten years back was musing on how Jacobs’s apartment was now selling for $3 million, unaffordable to a social activist, not to mention that the neighborhood could no longer accommodate the life she had observed. (I checked Zillow; that apartment is now estimated to be worth $6 million.)