On the Environmental and Philosophical Factors Behind Literary Creation

What do we think we mean when we say, “a writer’s space”? Is such a space different than, say, any other citizen’s space? Is the space of a writer a physical place—the place where the writing is done, the den, the office, the hotel room, the bar or café, the bedroom, upon a desk or table or any available flat and stable surface?

Or is the “writer’s space” an inner region of the mind? Or is it a psychological place deep within the recesses of the heart, a storehouse of emotions containing a jumble of neurological circuitry? Is it the place, whether physical or spiritual, where the writer tries to make sense of otherwise inchoate lives? In either case, is it a zone of safety that permits the writer to be vulnerable and daring and honest so as to find meaning and order in the service of story?

Perhaps it will be useful to begin at the very dawn of writing, when prehistory became history. Let’s think, for a moment, about the clay tablets that date from around 3200 BC on which were etched small, repetitive, impressed characters that look like wedge shaped footprints that we call cuneiform, the script language of ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia. Along with the other ancient civilizations of the Chinese and the Maya, the Babylonians put spoken language into material form, and for the first time people could store information, whether of lists of goods or taxes, and transmit it across time and space.

It would take two millennia for writing to become a carrier of narrative, of story, of epic, which arrives in the Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh. Writing was a secret code, the instrument of tax collectors and traders in the service of god kings. Preeminently, it was the province of priests and guardians of holy texts. With the arrival of monotheism, there was a great need to record the word of God, and the many subsequent commentaries on the ethical and spiritual obligations of faithfully adhering to a set of religious precepts. This task required special places where scribes could carry out their sanctified work. Think of the caves of Qumran, some natural and some artificial, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, or later the medieval monasteries where illuminated manuscripts were painstakingly created.

Illiteracy, it should be remembered, was commonplace. From the start, the creation of texts was bound up with a notion of the holy, of a place where experts—anointed by God—were tasked with making scripture palpable. They were the translators and custodians of the ineffable and the unknowable, and they spent their lives making it possible for ordinary people to partake of the wisdom to be had from the all seeing, all powerful deity, from whom meaning, sustenance, and life itself was derived.

We needn’t rehearse the religious quarrels and sectarian strife that bloodied the struggle between the Age of Superstition and the Age of Enlightenment, except perhaps to note that the world was often divided—as, alas, it still sadly is—between those who insist all answers are to be found in a single book and those who believe in two, three, many books.

The point is that the notion of a repository, where the writer (or religious shaman, adept, or priest) told or retold the parables and stories of God, was widely accepted. It meant that, from the start, a writer’s space was a space with a sacred aura. It was a place deemed to have special qualities—qualities that encouraged the communication of stories that in their detail and point conferred significance upon and gave importance to lives that otherwise might have seemed untethered and without meaning. The writer, by this measure, was a kind of oracle, with a special ability, by virtue of temperament and training, to pierce the veil of mystery and ignorance that was the usual lot of most people and to make sense of the past, parse the present, and even to predict the future.

This idea of the writer was powerful. It still is. By the time we enter the Romantic Age, the notion of a writer’s space has shed its religious origins without abandoning in the popular imagination the belief that writers have a special and enviable access to inner, truer worlds, often invisible to the rest of us. How to put it? That, by and large, artists generally, of which writers are a subset, are people whose epidermises, as it were, are more porous than most people’s. And thus they are more vulnerable, more open to the world around them, more alert, more perspicacious. Shelley put it well when he wrote that, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Think Virginia Woolf.

By the end of the nineteenth century, writers in their person and in their spaces are widely celebrated and revered, imbued with talents and special powers that arouse admiration bordering on worship. It is said that when Mark Twain came to London and strode down the gangplank as he disembarked from the ship that had brought him across the Atlantic, dockworkers that had never read a single word of his stunning stories burst into applause when the nimbus of white hair atop the head of the man in the white suit hove into view. Similarly, when Oscar Wilde was asked at the New York customs house if he had anything to declare when he arrived in America in 1882 to deliver his lectures on aesthetics, he is said to have replied, “Only my genius.”

Many writers were quickly enrolled in the service of nationalist movements of all kinds, even as many writers saw themselves as citizens in an international republic of letters, a far-flung fraternity of speakers of many diverse languages, but united in their fealty to story. Nonetheless, the space where they composed their work—their studies and offices and homes—quickly became tourist destinations, sites of pilgrimage where devoted readers could pay homage. The objects on the desk, writing instruments and inkwells, foolscap and notebooks, the arrangement of photographs and paintings on their walls, the pattern of wallpaper, the very furniture itself, and preeminently the desk and chair, favorite divan and reading sofa, lamps and carpets, all became invested with a sacredness and veneration previously reserved only for religious figures. Balzac’s home, Tolstoy’s dacha, Hemingway’s Cuban finca are but three of many possible examples. Writers were now our secular saints.

Somehow it was thought that by entering these spaces, the key to unlocking the secret of literary creation could be had, and that by inhaling the very atmosphere that celebrated authors once breathed, one could, by a strange alchemy or osmosis, absorb the essence that animated the writer’s imagination and made possible the realization of native talent.

This almost mystical space is not reserved to the worthy dead. Famous living authors are similarly regarded. How else to explain the palpably zealous efforts by many readers and aspiring writers to attend readings and book festivals, to be closer to the avatars of stories that give our lives meaning? The human desire, however understandable, to find oneself within the inner and invisible circle that surrounds celebrity, is accompanied by the conceit (or hope) that entering that space will provide a passport to a world more alive and more authentic, even wiser perhaps than the one most us know. And that some how the admired author’s mojo will rub off. Entering a writer’s space is seen as a near magical shortcut to the absorption of craft and insight.

Patti Smith, for one, has made such pilgrimages a central pillar of her lifelong quest for ecstatic and artistic inspiration. Traveling with her sister on her first visit to Paris in the spring of 1969, she arrived “with a handful of precious addresses of cafés and hotels” where the existentialists hung out and where Rimbaud and Verlaine presided over their circle of scruffy bohemians, and where Baudelaire “smoked hashish and penned the opening poems in Les feurs du mal.” Nearly fifty years later, she recalled how “the interiors of our imaginations glowed, as we walked back and forth before these places synonymous with poets. Just to be near where they had writ ten, sparred, and slept.”

I am myself not immune to such hocus-pocus. For a long time, I found myself under the spell of Susan Sontag. In a way, I still am. I confess:I wanted to be Susan Sontag when I grew up. Living as I did the entire summer of 1974 in her Manhattan apartment, the walls lined with her eight thousand books, I hoped that the space that was hers would be filled with molecules that would almost biologically enter my body, animate my circulatory system, awaken my brain, and spur an avid, even relentless curiosity about the world and about literature with a capital L. That space harbored the writer’s elixir that I believed could be mine if only I were to drink it all up at the Chez Sontag. I admired the way this girl from the San Fernando Valley and from the outskirts of Phoenix had invented herself, had read her way through the great books, and had become a fearless Joan of Arc of the Higher Seriousness. It was a space that I, too, wanted to inhabit.

Of course there isn’t only one writer’s space. There are many writers, and we must acknowledge their many varied gated spaces. Kafka sold insurance and wrote the stories that he instructed his best friend, Max Brod, to burn upon his demise. Fortunately, Brod betrayed him.

“Why is one compelled to write?” asks Patti Smith in her book Devotion. “To set oneself apart, cocooned, wrapped in solitude, despite the wants of others. Virginia Woolf had her room. Proust his shuttered windows. Marguerite Duras her muted house. Dylan Thomas his modest shed. All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words. The words that will penetrate virgin territory, crack unclaimed combinations, articulate the infinite.”

Every writer is different. The path to telling stories about our world is hard won, and the space that’s necessary to allow us to find our respective voices differs. The world we carry in our heads is arguably the most important space of all. It is a space whose suffocations and seductions compete for our attention. They shape the way we look at things, the way we shape the stories we tell.

In the end, a writer’s space is determined by the circumstances bestowed by geography and family, gender, ethnicity, culture and class and the goddesses of serendipity and fortune, and—not least—by the self inventions, temperament, and aspirations of those of us willing to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of our own arrogance—an arrogance that inevitably constructs a space that both welcomes the world and seals us off from it, leaving us prisoners in disguise, unacknowledged victims of the necessary conceit that we are authors of our own space.

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Excerpted from Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays by Steve Wasserman. Reprinted with permission from Heyday Books. Copyright © 2024 by Steve Wasserman.