A Commonplace Book

As it happens, his magnum opus, "Das Kapital," was not published until after 15 years of procrastination, fibbing and boasting about its progress. When the weighty tome failed to elicit the explosive response he anticipated, Marx compared himself to the hero of Balzac's "Unknown Masterpiece," an artist who spends years refining and retouching a portrait until it becomes nothing but a formless mass of color and random lines. "Nothing. Nothing. After 10 years of work," the artist cries.

Years ago, when I was young, I knew a man who was a doctor, and not a bad one either, but he didn't practise. He spent years burrowing away in the library of the British Museum and at long intervals produced a huge pseudo-scientific, pseudo-philosophical book that nobody read and that he had to publish at his own expense. He wrote four or five of them before he died and they were absolutely worthless.... It's a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. many are called but few are chosen.

I have just supervised a doctoral thesis in creative writing: this consists in the submission of a novel written by the candidate, together with a 35,000-word dissertation on the themes explored by that novel. My student, although having published several other genre works, and despite a number of ringing endorsements from his eminent creative-writing teachers, has been unable to find a publisher for this, his first serious novel. The novel isn't bad--although nor is it Turgenev. The dissertation is interesting--although it isn't a piece of original scholarship. Neither of them will, in all likelihood, ever be read again after he has been examined. The student wished to bring the date of his viva forward--why? Well, so he could use his qualification to apply for a post teaching--you guessed it--creative writing. Not that he's a neophyte: he already teaches creative writing, he just wants to be paid more highly for the midwifery of stillborn novels.