For number nine in my series of passages about writing in literature, that have stuck with me through the years, I give you James Joyce from a short story in Dubliners. The story is “A Little Cloud,” and the main character is thinking about his desire to write, to capture in verse something that wells up inside him.
9. “There were so many different moods and impressions that he wished to express in verse. He felt them within him. He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simply joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen. He would never be popular: he saw that. He could not sway the crowd but he might appeal to a little circle of kindred minds.”
Perhaps every writer has felt the way at some point before they truly started writing. I know I did. I remember in ninth grade walking home from school one day. I walked past Evening Street Elementary School (for those of you who might know) and down Evening Street where I took a left on Highgate and then followed that all the way down to Masefield and home. For the duration of the walk, I had Tolkien in my brain, and I just kept thinking how awesome it would be to write for a living, to live on creativity and the telling of stories, to write something that lasted beyond my years. I felt I had all that within me, and even though I had not yet read any Joyce, I thought in terms of the exact same phrase, the melancholy temperament. I just needed to get it down.
When I read Dubliners just after college, that walk in ninth grade, forgotten for many years, came back to me, and I’ve been left to wonder ever since if I would never have remembered that walk without the book, without that passage and that melancholy temperament, the idea to capture it all in verse. It goes the other way too. If I hadn’t had that walk, if I hadn’t been so struck on that particular day by the idea of writing that I thought of nothing else the whole way home, would the Joyce passage have meant anything to me? Would I have thought it nice but then moved on to other things, to other non-writing things?
I suppose it’s impossible to know, but it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that eventually I did write. I’ve had a few things published, and there are more on the way. I haven’t written a best seller, but I’ve sold a few books. I’ve received emails from people I know and people I don’t know saying how much they loved the books, the stories, the writing. People have quoted phrases from my books to me, have told me how much it’s meant to them, have thanked me for the effort. So it’s true so far. Just like the Joyce passage, I am not popular, but I have appealed to a little circle of kindred minds.