Like many people my age (hmm, someone’s turning 50 this week!), I’d grown old believing the story – often added as a footnote to the posterized poem – that the "Desiderata" was found in a Baltimore churchyard in 1692. Well, whaddya know – it turns out that the piece was penned by a lawyer from Indiana named Max Ehrmann sometime in 1926.
According to the (strangely named) Businessballs website, "Max Ehrmann originally copyrighted ‘Desiderata’ in 1927 as ‘Go Placidly Amid The Noise And Haste.’ The copyright number was 962402, dated 3rd January.... The ‘Desiderata’ myth began after Reverend Frederick Kates reproduced the ‘Desiderata’ poem in a collection of inspirational works for his congregation in 1959 on church notepaper, headed: ‘The Old St. Paul’s Church, Baltimore, AD 1692' (the year the church was founded). Copies of the ‘Desiderata’ page were circulated among friends, and the myth grew, accelerated particularly when a copy of the erroneously attributed ‘Desiderata’ was found at the bedside of deceased Democratic politician Adlai Stevenson in 1965."
Singer Les Crane even won a Grammy for his spoken version of the piece – which he must have imagined to be in the public domain – only to have to deal later with the copyright owner, a fellow by the name of Robert Bell. In 1971, Bell found himself embroiled in a messy lawsuit against the Combined Registry Company over the poem’s publication in Success Unlimited magazine, published by CRC. CRC won that round, but Bell later managed to affirm his ownership of the copyright in other cases. "The world is full of trickery," Bell must have muttered, as he tried his best to go placidly amid the noise and haste of litigation.
Of course, who really wrote what when won’t matter all that much to real "Desiderata" fans – or should we call them children of the universe, which we may have to become as May approaches, with all of its "loud and aggressive persons", and the "vexations to the spirit" they will surely bring.
What, give away my trade secrets? Just kidding, Nora. I’ll try to answer you as best as I can – with the disclaimer that I may be guilty of shamelessly flouting the very rules or suggestions I’ll be spouting.
Consistency in good writing is a function of skill and attitude. First, you have to have the language, and you have to master it, in terms of grammar, mechanics, and style – there’s just no getting around that basic requirement. Presuming that’s no longer a problem, how do you sustain clear, sharp, and fresh writing from one project to the next?
Not without difficulty, and not without diligence. The key word here is "standards" – the standards of the job, and your own; you’ll want yours to be higher than theirs, even if they don’t seem to know any better, and insist on low-grade prose. It’s very easy – and very tempting – to let go of your standards, and there will be times when all you can do is to execute and deliver what the client wants, not what you had in mind.
The final decision will always be with the client (except that truly final one, which is for you to go out the door and look for a job that will make better use of your talents), but at the point when you’re about to start that speech for the wannabe-Honorable and that brochure for fire extinguishers, you have a choice between producing just the bare minimum or going for the best that anyone can possibly achieve in that situation. I always try to go for the latter – again, I don’t always succeed, with fatigue, boredom, and antipathy as my constant companions – but I do my best to turn every assignment into a game, a learning experience, a quest for my personal best, even if nobody else knows about it.
Without a client in the picture and only yourself to please, you have even less reason not to want or not to try to write well. In this case, I’d advise writers to review their manuscripts – treat each one as a draft, no matter how perfect it looks at first glance – and to edit themselves mercilessly (especially before someone else does). We improve so much not by writing new things as by perfecting old ones.
Have you put something as clearly and as effectively as you can? Is that the best possible way to express that idea? That long, impressively Latinate phrase in the middle of that sentence makes you sound like Shakespeare’s reincarnation – but does it belong there? Does it belong to the piece at all? Are you sure that’s what that word means? Can that paragraph be cut in half?
Another way of looking at this is good workmanship – that hallmark of quality that distinguishes a pro from a weekend dabbler. You’ll want to finish every job, whether it’s a story for yourself or a feature for someone else, with a visual check of the product, as it were, from every angle, running your figurative hand over the surface to catch any burrs, rapping and flexing it on all sides for sturdiness. You may not always get the chance to be this thorough, but it’s a good habit to pick up.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of workmanship, let me share a reminder I heard from someone who must’ve heard me complain too loudly and too often about how the lack of a certain shiny new laptop was keeping me from writing well (it was true, too, if only because thinking about that laptop kept me from thinking about anything else, like feeding the cat and tying my shoelaces). This is what I recite like a mantra in the throes of techno-lust: "A good workman never blames his tools." Right.
And let’s not forget that what is essential is invisible to the eye – but some of those non-essentials sure look good.
I’ll answer Nora’s question about column-writing some other time, once I figure out what on earth I’m doing.
A few years ago, I had occasion to introduce a collection of the year’s best Filipino short stories in English. By way of answering Arthur’s question, here’s what I said in part:
"I had never heard of Charles E. May until I idly picked up a copy of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on a recent visit to the United States, and I doubt if our paths will ever cross again. In fact I know next to nothing about him, except that he reviews books for that paper, and on the Sunday I decided to pick up that paper he had a piece on a short story writer so obscure (and, May implied, fairly forgettable) that I can’t even remember his name.
"But something that May said in that review leapt out at me – so strongly and so emphatically that I wrote it down, to share with my students in some future workshop: ‘We don’t go to the short story for simple reality. We go to sense our secrets suggested. The short story writer, like the poet, must restrain language and intensify experience until it is almost unbearably loaded with significance.’ Yes! – I roared inaudibly – that’s what a good story should achieve! Farther down, May became even more precise about what he meant by this. He was looking, he said, for the ‘uneasy magic, mysterious motivation, and confounding inevitability that characterize truly great stories.’ Another resounding ‘Yes!’ escaped my parched throat; he’d put a finger on those qualities – so infuriatingly ambiguous to the quasi-scientific kind of criticism that’s now in vogue in literature departments everywhere, yet so perfectly logical to the creative writer – that elevate a superior story from the chaff."