Rafael Yglesias - The Work Is Innocent

He cleared his throat and said, “Leo didn’t pay much attention to it—” Mark looked up, startled. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“No, go ahead.”

“You know, in the woods. Leo didn’t relate to what I was saying. About the Buddhist stuff. But you did.”

“Oh yeah. That’s heavy stuff. I’ve really been into that. Have you read Castaneda?” Richard shook his head no. “Don Juan?” Mark described the book, telling Richard of the giant dog that plays with Castaneda while he is on Peyote. The idea that there were gods of drugs that came to either kill or help the taker frightened Richard, because if they existed, they surely meant to kill him.

Richard learned something from Mark’s description of Castaneda’s books: Mark wanted to handle life with perfect control. He said that it was amazing to think of life noncompetitively. You allow things to master you rather than trying to master them. We make things difficult, he said, by putting our egos between our consciousness and our acts.

“That’s really amazing that you say that,” Richard responded. He was sincere in his remarks but conscious of their formality. “Because I’ve been worried by my egotism”—he laughed to deprecate the contradiction—“but I decided it was a strength and not a weakness.”

“Egotism?” Mark’s worried shifting of his eyes reminded Richard of Mark’s reactions to his jokes at breakfast.

“Yeah,” Richard said. “I mean I realize that sounds adolescent but I’m not doing what I used to—trying to get over my embarrassment of feeling unappreciated by emphasizing my great opinion of myself. I just don’t believe in modesty. I think it’s strengthening to admit that you think you’re great.”

Mark seemed lost. “Well, I think you should feel good about yourself.”

“I don’t mean just that,” Richard said. “I think ambition is a vital part of great acts.”

“Oh no. I think that’s wrong. Geniuses aren’t aware of their genius.”

“Oh, come on. Balzac, when he was fixing up his first study, had a bust of Napoleon, and he stuck a piece of paper under it. He had written on it, ‘What he did not achieve by the sword I shall achieve by the pen.’ ” Richard’s enjoyment of this quote returned to him. He laughed, he realized, the way Mark ought to have. Mark’s lack of appreciation made him uncomfortable. “I mean Tolstoy,” Richard continued, “considered himself grand enough to start a new religion, to maintain Shakespeare was a lousy playwright. They were all like that. And I can’t believe it’s a coincidence.”

Mark smiled with gentle contempt. “Yeah, but everybody thinks he’s a genius. You’re not including the thousands of people who thought so and were totally forgotten.”

“I agree with that. But then you’ll admit that, for a genius, their ego doesn’t get in the way of their acts.” Richard looked at him triumphantly.

Mark shifted in his chair and when he spoke his voice lost its tone of distance. “I think there’s an organic process that a genius goes through that isn’t complicated by worrying over fame.”

“Look, I love geniuses as much as the next guy, but I can show you a copy of the first page of the Père Goriot manuscript. Balzac has a flamboyant and large title, a crossed out paragraph, and the rest is scribblings of his optimistic estimates of how much money he expected to make on it. And that’s one of his most respected novels. It’s a classic. Do you think Edmund Wilson is a genius?” Mark nodded reluctantly. “Well, he describes getting up late at night to read the reviews of his books. Thomas Mann called writers charlatans because of all this. But I don’t think so. It’s just a middle-class attitude that there’s something refined and great about the personality of genius.”

“All your examples are writers.”

Richard was puzzled by this, but he saw that Mark considered it a clever point. “So?”

“Well—” Mark held the edge of the table with the tips of his fingers, as if balancing himself. “It really may be true of novelists, but I was thinking more of the way, say, that Che relates to life.”

“Che!” Richard gestured to the ceiling scornfully. “That’s ridiculous. There’s no more egotistical an act—”

“Oh, that’s fucked up. You can’t call dying to free oppressed people an act of egotism.”

“I’m not saying that!” Richard yelled. Mark looked at him with mild shock at his vehemence. “How else would one sustain oneself through guerrilla warfare not once, but many times, except by believing that you embody the will of mankind? It’s a lovely egotism. Selfless and great.”

“That’s just an intellectual concept. When you’re a revolutionary you understand that that’s like the kind of thinking in liberal history books. Being a revolutionary isn’t romantic. That’s why Don Juan is so heavy. Through action you lose all sense of guilt and self-consciousness. Writing is very alienating, and I’m sure that’s why egotism is an important part of it. But the opposite is true of political action.” Mark’s moon face was kindly though patronizing. Richard wanted to jeer at him for his pretense of being revolutionary—he couldn’t hit a tree from ten paces. But Richard felt that was an unfair point. Yet he was hurt by Mark’s implication that he was alienated and that Mark had somehow transcended this common fate of middle- class kids.

“Listen. Writers may be alienated, but good writing is not. I mean, despite the fact that it is a Freudian cliché, one writes to break through alienation, not to reinforce it. You have far too little respect for writing.”

Mark made a sound of surprise. “That’s not true.”

“Oh, you think they’re important, but you hate them for it.” Richard was returning Mark’s open, matter-of-fact manner. As he had guessed, it was effective. Mark was nonplused. “The other day you discussed them politically and my impression was that you thought they were all counterrevolutionary, and now you think they’re alienated and don’t have the mystical calm of revolutionaries. What writer do you think avoids these things?”

Neither of them concealed their hostility at this moment. Richard’s adoption of Mark’s condescending malice was provoking. Mark said, “Well, like I do think the only correct way of living is to be a revolutionary. Anything else supports the bourgeois world.”

“Okay, so let’s say the bourgeois world doesn’t exist any more. Would you be satisfied with me just being a novelist?” Richard was amused by this turn of their discussion. His family had taught him that such utopian hypotheses were considered foolishness by political activists.

Mark was solemn about this grave matter. “You would have to do socially useful labor.”

Richard was unable to dismiss Mark as a crude and silly young man because Richard was so much younger. “That’s just Stalinism!” he yelled, convinced that Mark couldn’t ignore the truth of that label and its implied moral judgment.

“Richard, you shouldn’t react defensively to what I’m saying. Part of me really understands what you’re into about writing. You know? Really. I felt the same way in college. I wanted to be another Camus—”

“How do you know what I’m into about writing? How do you know anything—”

“Well, I know you’ve written a novel and your family’s very literary.” Mark paused and Richard couldn’t deny it. “If everybody felt the way your family does about society we wouldn’t have to have a revolution. For me I’ve gone through a lot of changes about the values that like I had in college. In terms of the Vietnam War and what’s happening to black people I couldn’t really feel good about myself as an intellectual or an artist.”