A writer in midlife

The UP Institute of Creative Writing is composed of "associates" – some of the university’s most senior and accomplished writers – who help conduct workshops and oversee the ICW’s many projects and publications. Occasionally, the associates themselves give lectures on topics of their choice having to do with the writing life. It was my turn last week, and here’s an abridged version of what I said:

Four months from today, I will be turning 50. From early youth I had always tried to imagine what turning 50 would be like. I remember thinking, sometime before my teens, what kind of life we would be living by 2004, which seemed an eternity and indeed a lifetime away. The boy I was imagined a sci-fi utopia, with cars flying in the air and rocket ships making regular round trips to the moon, the untroubled earth twinkling far below.

Now that Jan. 15, 2004 is just around the corner, I find both my imagination and my memory dulled by the wear and tear of over three decades of almost non-stop writing and by the sheer strain of surviving from Monday to Tuesday as wholly and as handsomely as one can. The marvel of turning 50 might hit me on the day itself, but today the reality of 2004 is like a big dirty wall six inches from my face – very large and very solid, with all the grimy little cracks showing in dreadful focus. Hardly the view from Mars or the Crab Nebula.

It is, of course, a generous fiction to think of 50 as mid-life. There’s no way on earth, the way I feast on chicharon bulaklak, that I’m going to reach a hundred, and if I did I would mostly likely be so debilitated and so bored that I wouldn’t mind it too much if someone put a gun to my head and an end to my misery. An overripe old age can be cruel to the writer who understands what is happening – or worse, what is not. The brilliant but underrated writer Djuna Barnes, who was a contemporary of T.S. Eliot and who lived to be 90, once said that "For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish."

I have no cause yet to complain as Djuna Barnes did; if I died tomorrow I would be very happy with the life I had, and sad that I could not live a little longer. There are a few more things in life that I would like to do: write about five or six more books, hopefully novels; see my grandchild (no big hurry, there); visit Brazil, or stay there a couple of years as Philippine ambassador; revisit the British Library and the British Museum, and spend whole days in them, to comfort myself with the fact that one’s work can survive, and that people can be curious about what came before them.

But not even to speak of old age, midlife itself for most people is a scary thing. For Tolstoy, it meant a long dark bout with clinical depression – a fear of death, a gnawing sense that his work was worthless, a fascination with suicide. Midlife is when you stop and ask if you have indeed already done something worthwhile. That’s bad enough, but worse is asking yourself if you can yet do something better – or something more, period.

Scientific research tells us that midlife really isn’t all that bad, and is, in fact, better in most respects that being 25. "The good news," according to a study by psychologist Sherry Willis, "is that people at midlife score higher on almost every measure of cognitive functioning than they did when they were 25. Verbal ability, numerical ability, reasoning and verbal memory all improve by midlife. The only ability that declines between 25 and midlife is perceptual speed – the ability to quickly and accurately perform such tasks as deciding whether two ZIP codes are identical."

Interestingly enough, for non-writers, creative writing is often offered as a mid-life alternative, the kind of thing a 40-ish or 50-ish person, hitherto embroiled in the corporate or professional wars, might do as a form of spiritual rest and recreation, along with bonsai growing and Chinese calisthenics. Good for them.

But for the lifelong creative writer, on the other hand, midlife is full of time-consuming distractions – meaning, things we would rather do than write a story or a poem. A few of us have yielded to the lure of an administrative job, which I suppose plays into the artistic conceit of absolute mastery and control over life and society. I am convinced that many artists are fascists or at least managers at heart, and the urge to impose one’s view of order on the universe can be irresistible. We can also be notoriously impatient, and cannot wait too long for the ameliorative ministrations of art to produce their effects around us; and so we take a direct hand, trading poetry for Powerpoint, and metaphor for memos.

And then there are the claims of teaching, research, public relations, and journalism. All of these are also ways of making a living, which creative writing – with few notable exceptions, such as screenwriting – is not. Some of us have discovered that writing books for others can be easier and more remunerative than writing for oneself. Journalism or even column writing can be especially engrossing, because of the element of instant gratification – the thing is out the next day, with a readership of hundreds of thousands. God knows how much material and energy for fiction I’ve expended on a column – not a waste, I’d like to think, but notes in passing, a halfway storage and processing point.

Nonfiction is especially seductive, because you work with less than the rigor of the professional historian, with fewer choices than the novelist has to make, and with more room for storytelling than the journalist. And the result can be as compelling as any novel, with the added bonus, important to Filipinos, that "it really happened."

For all that, many of our senior writers continue to produce and publish new work – Rio Alma, Jing Hidalgo, Krip Yuson, and Jimmy Abad can be counted on to come out with a new book every other year or so, if not more often. I envy them their focus – although I daresay that some of them (well, perhaps not Krip) might envy me the riotous variety of my passions.

I, on the other hand, have ground to a near-halt as far as fiction is concerned, pecking away at a few desultory lines of my novel now and then, and jotting down notes for stories to be written hopefully on some beachside balcony in Brazil. Call it fiction fatigue: a temporary loss of appetite perhaps brought on as much by overwork in the everyday world as by the gradual accumulation of body fat. I wish I could say that this was caused by prosperity, but no: rather, at age 49, I’m still chasing after the good life, churning out reams of commercial prose to pay for the rent and buy the occasional toy.

Let me make what may seem to be an outrageous claim: in terms of volume and variety of material, there can’t be too many people in this country who write more than I do – and I have nearly a gigabyte of text files on my laptop to prove it. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t write a few pages of something and anything; I used to write as many as four speeches a day, on topics as diverse as higher education, the PMA, the East ASEAN Economic Growth Area, and the AIDS crisis. Then I would go home and work on a script for Sharon Cuneta, aside from my newspaper column. Thankfully the worst of those days are over, but like Muhammad Ali, you can get hit once too often, and some of the scars are in your brain.

But at least I can proudly say that I am a professional writer, someone who has made his living from writing, which my father might have done had he been given similar breaks and opportunities. And it is important to me to prove that I can be good if not the best in this profession, whoever my clients may be. I want to grow old and still to be called on the phone by people who can’t write for themselves.

At the same time I would like to reserve the privilege of springing the surprise of a new story or a new novel on my friends, at my own leisure. I have two contractual obligations to complete – my novel, Soledad’s Sister, and a textbook on writing the Filipino short story in English. I have told myself that I will apply for no new grants or join no new competitions until these are done. My professional pride, if anything, will get them done, but I cannot say when, because I will not let them out until and unless I am satisfied that they have been done as well as they could be.

The only reason to write fiction should be the pleasure and the wonder of the word on the page. The word must be special; it cannot mean the same thing as it will mean in a speech or a corporate brochure. When I have remembered or recovered that sense, the fiction will resume, the novel will get done, and midlife will be a more hopeful place to be.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.