ESSAYS

A Stranger to Them
By Robert McGowan

I wrote all I had to write and then suddenly I had nothing left to write about.

Which, though not quite commonplace, is hardly an unheard of occurrence among writers, or for that matter among artists of other stripes, painters, sculptors, composers… Be assured however that its having happened to others does not in the barest measure lessen the paralyzing shock of its happening in one’s own creative life. Thereby abruptly goddamnit ending one’s creative life. It felt like an annihilation.

I’d begun writing in my mid-thirties. The fiction, I’m talking about. I wrote for many years previous, and was well published too, but this in a strictly academic mode: papers on Armenian pre-history of all things, my specialty as a historian, although I’m of Swedish decent and have never known an Armenian. I shake my head in wonder. In time I gravitated away from the Armenians specifically and toward a more inclusive, and increasingly both sympathetic and horrified, consideration of Homo sapiens in general, which led to an equally conflicted view of myself as a member of this desperate and reckless species. I’d thus by this route entered into a personal introspection from which my former academic objectivity had I think functioned to shield me. I began to write novels, dark, introspective, brooding ones. For years I wrote and wrote and wrote. Passionately, devotedly, myopically.

And hopefully, trying all along to get the stuff into print.

With alas no success.

So that finally, despairing, I gave it up, the writing and the hope too.

A couple of decades later, nearing seventy, because I wanted my fiction to survive me in as decent a condition as I could manage, I pulled it out and went over it, the four novels and the story collection too that came after them and that had at last taught me to write. I went over all of it repeatedly and ruthlessly. My first novel I reduced from a hundred and ten thousand words to seventy-eight thousand. The others too were carved down, and by nearly as much. Over a period of more than two years I tightened them, I polished them, I re-worked them throughout. I was merciless, even brutal. I came to them as I’d long ago come to my articles about the Armenians I’d never known: distanced, like a passionless workman, cold-eyed and sober. But I made them better.

I sent some excerpts to agents. Why not?

One of them asked for a manuscript.

That was seven years ago. Two of the four novels now published, the stories as well, all of it to satisfying acclaim. The remaining two novels scheduled for later. I hope I live to see them out.

I’m pleased, naturally, after so much time and effort. Success at last is welcome.

But at readings, I have the sensation I’m turning someone else’s pages. These books that were written decades ago by a young man I barely remember and might no longer approve of, that were then long afterward torn into by a stranger to them, an old man grown far away from the ardor that made them, a technician eager only to make the books . . . acceptable.

At readings, at signings, I feel a fake.

I don’t know whose work this is.