A missing ingredient

Last year I watched a PBS special on Woody Allen that, for some reason, they were running instead of Masterpiece Theatre. With the Soon-Yi scandal of 1992 (and can you believe it's been 20 years?) Woody Allen fell sharply out of favor with me (and a lot of other people), though I'd always been a fan of his movies, his humorous writings (from Without Feathers: "I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me..."), his comedy routines. But I felt he had proven himself a dirty old man with an off-kilter moral compass, and couldn't bring myself to see any of his more recent movies.

The program was very interesting; Allen is, after all, an interesting man, as well as a very talented one. They showed clips of some of his comedy routines -- or even just his response to interview questions on late night talk shows -- and I could hear myself shouting with laughter. I had thought that he started out as a standup comedian who branched out into movie-making, but was surprised to learn that he started out, in his teens yet, as a writer of jokes. He'd submit them to newspaper columnists like Walter Winchell and Earl Wilson, who would include them in their columns. He continued as a comic writer for years, graduating to writing for people like Sid Caesar. Then his managers convinced him to do the thing that I had thought was his "beginning," perform his own material. And apparently he actually hated doing that! Hated facing a live audience. But, as I said above, the T.V. clips demonstrate that he was really funny. However, he was not successful at all to begin with; his managers had to keep after him, to keep it up. Which, note, he did.

And eventually Allen became successful enough, well-known enough, for him to become involved with film-making, which led to his becoming rich, famous and much admired for his body of work. After his first couple of films he was on his way, knew he wanted to be doing this, and was, amazingly, able to get the kind of artistic freedom he needed.

O.K., O.K., this is all very interesting, but isn't my main point. Here's my main point. Allen was never in a position of not knowing what he wanted to do with his life. He started writing jokes -- it came easily to him, he liked doing it -- and right away he was able to make money doing it. He assumed he would keep on doing it, and that was fine with him. And he did that, in one way or another, for years. Even when he moved into films, first of all he wrote the film. Which, especially in the early years, was intended to be, essentially, one big joke, full of smaller jokes. He was still in the same ball park as the teenager churning out the jokes for the newspaper columnists.

I find this kind of single-mindedness of purpose both admirable, and enviable. I remember wanting to be a nurse when I grew up -- then going to the hospital to have my tonsils removed, at the age of 11, seeing what nurses had to do (like change bed pans!), and deciding that was not for me, after all. Then I wanted to be an interior decorator, because I'd discovered some interior design books at my local library, and had fallen in love with all those beautiful houses, beautiful rooms. I don't recall exactly what disabused me of that ambition -- perhaps it was my belief that you needed artistic ability to be an interior decorator, and I knew I had absolutely none -- but the next thing I wanted to be was an actress. "The greatest actress the legitimate stage has ever known," as I grandiosely announced to my ninth grade English class, when making a "personal speech." That ambition was behind my original college major, drama. But the courses I took that first semester -- or, perhaps more to the point, some of the things said by some of my instructors -- suggested to me that I didn't really have what it took to be a great actress. And I realized I lacked the burning intensity needed to reach this goal over all obstacles.

I had by that time been writing for some time -- for the most part not-very-good poetry -- and "being a writer" had also been a possible ambition, hovering there at the edge of my thinking. Now it moved front and center. But here's the thing. In the intervening 44 years, though I have never stopped wanting to "be a writer," and in fact have never stopped writing, I never thought: o.k., I want to be a writer, which really means be a published writer, and I'm not going to let anything get in my way, or discourage me. I am going to make my living as a writer. Instead, I spent years in deadly dull dead-end jobs -- none of which had anything to do with writing -- in order to keep a roof over my head and food in the belly. I lived in New York City -- the hub of the publishing industry in America -- for a year and a half and it never occurred to me to try to get a job in that industry...and this was the early 70s, when it might actually have been possible for a bright, determined girl to get her foot in the door at some publishing house, even with just a high school diploma.

My decision to go back to college and get a teaching degree was the result of being sick unto death of all the unsatisfying, low-paying jobs. I had thought about what I might like to do, and came up with teaching. But why didn't I come up with writing? Admittedly at that time I hadn't written my first novel, or even my first short story; I was still doing poetry, and philosophical ramblings (which it hadn't occurred to me to try to turn into articles that I might be able to sell). But in college I did start writing short stories, and shortly after I graduated I started my first novel. The short stories I did eventually try to get published, in a literary review or two or three...which really is about how many times I would send something out, before getting discouraged by the rejections. My novel took a ridiculous number of years to finish, ten! Ultimately I wrote two other novels, as well as two travel books, and a number of plays; all of these I would try for a while to get published (or produced), then give up, discouraged.

After graduation, when I had trouble finding a teaching job, (1975 was a very bad year for teachers), I found myself again taking boring, low-paying jobs -- despite the college degree! -- and finally wondering what else I might go into, that was similar to teaching, but perhaps would provide me with greater opportunity for work. And I settled on librarianship, which I've been engaged in ever since. Writing in my spare time, as I always had. And producing a sizable body of work which, alas, I failed to try to market in a consistently never-give-up manner.

So at this point in my life I am looking around and saying o.k., I've been a responsible, hard-working citizen for most of my adult life, but the thing I derive the most satisfaction from, the thing I arguably do best of all the things I can do, I was not single-minded enough to pursue as a career, or even a serious avocation. Although I write I am not really a writer. I am a librarian, and one who feels she has never been more than a passable one of those, and in her most recent job, barely that. Well, darn.

Lucky are the souls like Woody Allen, who have always done what they were meant to be doing.