Why Writers Belong Behind Bars
By TONY PERROTTET
While researching the
Marquis de Sade several years ago, I came across an intriguing biographical
tidbit: that crazed French libertine, whose string of luridly violent works
gave rise to the term “sadism,” actually began his literary career as a travel
writer. In 1775, Sade embarked on a yearlong grand tour of Italy, and wrote an
enormous (and enormously tedious) manuscript about the journey entitled “Voyage
d’Italie.” The rambling opus, filled with ruminations on Florentine museums and
Neapolitan customs, was never completed. Sade’s attention wandered to more
carnal pleasures, and in 1777, he was arrested for a long list of unsavory
imbroglios, including one that historians call the Little Girls Episode. Sade
was thrown into the prison of Vincennes, and would spend most of his remaining
life incarcerated. “Voyage d’Italie” soon joined a range of half-finished
manuscripts from his youth, scraps of verse and staid dramatic pieces, none of
which Sade ever had the discipline to bring to fruition.
From a strictly
literary point of view, prison was the best thing that ever happened to the marquis.
It was only behind bars that Sade was able to knuckle down and compose the
imaginative works upon which his enduring, if peculiar, reputation lies.
Sade’s most impressive
stint began after 1784, when he was transferred to the Bastille, which effectively
operated as a literary colony on a par with Yaddo today. From a suite decorated
with his own furniture and 600-book library (and tended by his valet), the
marquis entered a mind-boggling frenzy of writing, cranking out thousands of
manuscript pages at breakneck speed. As Francine du Plessix Gray describes in
her classic biography “At Home With the Marquis de Sade,” he completed the first draft of his pornographic novel
“Justine” in a single two-week-long burst, and knocked out the final
250,000-word draft of “The 120 Days of Sodom” in 37 days, transcribing
minuscule letters on five-inch-wide pages glued into a roll nearly 50 feet
long. By 1788, after only 11 years behind bars, Sade had churned out 8 novels
and story collections, 16 historical novellas, 2 volumes of essays, a diary and
some 20 plays. Whatever you make of Sade’s oeuvre, you have to envy his
productivity.
Literary distraction
seems a very modern problem. These days, distracted writers tend to blame the
Internet, whose constant temptations shred our attention spans, fragment every
minute and reduce us to a permanent state of anxiety, checking e-mail every 30
seconds — “like masturbating monkeys,” a writer friend once put it, a phrase of
which Sade himself might have approved. But history is filled with writers who,
like the marquis, could function only in extreme — and involuntary — isolation.
“A prison is indeed one
of the best workshops,” Colette declared. She wasn’t speaking metaphorically.
In the early 1900s, by her own account, her caddish first husband had stashed
her in a tiny room for four hours a day, refusing to let her out until she had
finished a requisite number of pages — a drastic measure, but one that resulted
in a novel a year for six years. “What I chiefly learned was how to enjoy,
between four walls, almost every secret flight,” she later recalled, sounding
almost sentimental.
The peripatetic Marco
Polo got around to recording his classic travels through China only because he
was captured in 1298 during a naval battle with Genoa and held in a lavish
palazzo. Five hundred years later, the playboy Giacomo Casanova found time for
his renowned erotic autobiography only after he had run out of money (and
libido) and retreated to Castle Dux in Bohemia, where he accepted a sinecure as
a librarian. Napoleon Bonaparte dictated his multivolume memoir — one of the
great best sellers of 19th-century France — thanks only to his long exile on
St. Helena. Even the harsh public jails could induce results. In 1897, Oscar
Wilde wrote the philosophical essay “De Profundis” while locked up in Reading
Gaol on charges of “unnatural acts.” And in 1942, Jean Genet wrote his first
novel, “Our Lady of the Flowers,” while in Fresnes prison, near Paris, for
petty theft, scrawling on scraps of paper.
Of course, few writers
seriously dream of a stay in a latter-day Bastille, though until recently it
still seemed relatively easy to recreate a kind of makeshift solitary
confinement. In 1992, in “The Writing Life,” Annie Dillard described pushing
her desk away from the windows in her tool shed study on Cape Cod, which looked
out on lovely pine forests, to face a blank wall. (“Appealing workplaces are to
be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in
the dark.”) John Cheever preferred his New York apartment building’s dark and
dismal basement, and the Algonquin Round Table wit Edna Ferber recommended
facing the “blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse.”
Today, however, being
chained to the desk, as the expression goes, is no longer a guarantee of
productivity. Who can stick with the blank page when the click of a mouse opens
up a cocktail party of chattering friends, a world-class library, an endless shopping
mall, a game center, a music festival and even a multiplex? At once-remote
literary colonies, writers can now be spotted wandering the fields with their
smartphones, searching for reception so they can shoot off a quick Facebook
update. These days, Walden Pond would have Wi-Fi, and Thoreau might spend his
days watching cute wildlife videos on YouTube. And God knows what X-rated Web
sites the Marquis de Sade would have unearthed.
It’s wonderful that
writers can access medieval manuscripts, Swahili dictionaries and collections
of 19th-century daguerreotypes at any moment. But the downside is that it’s
almost impossible to finish a sentence without interruption. I confess that
even those last 15 words were stalled by a detour, via Wikipedia, to various
health Web sites, where I learned that concern was aroused last year by a
report that Wi-Fi radiation was causing trees to shed their bark in a Dutch
town, and that our excessive Web browsing and e-mailing may also be having ill
effects on bees and British children. After an hour of this, I concluded that
perhaps an equally urgent scientific study might be conducted on the
devastation Wi-Fi has caused to world literature. The damage
is surely incalculable.
Although everyone I
know acknowledges the problem of digital distraction, there is surprisingly
little resistance. In New York literary circles, anyone who doesn’t have a
Twitter account qualifies as a radical Luddite. But some have made gestures
toward enforced self-denial. The novelist Jonathan Lethem has said he owns two
computers, one of which he had Internet-disabled to use for his fiction
writing. Dave Eggers, Nora Ephron and others have extolled the computer program
Freedom, which cuts off your computer’s Internet access for up to eight hours.
Jonathan Franzen wrote “The Corrections” in a dark room wearing earplugs,
earmuffs and a blindfold, and confessed to blocking his Ethernet port with
Super Glue while working on “Freedom” (not named, apparently, for the software
program).
Of course, there are even
simpler solutions. Another of France’s wildly prolific authors, Honoré de
Balzac, felt that the most effective spur to productivity was abject poverty.
As a best-selling writer in his early 30s, Balzac looked back fondly upon his
younger days as a bohemian, living in a garret and gnawing on a diet of bread,
nuts, fruit and water. (“I loved my prison,” he wrote, “for I had chosen it
myself.”) Even when successful, he would wake at midnight, symbolically don the
habit of a medieval monk, and write for eight hours straight, fueled by pots of
coffee. His biographer Graham Robb suggests that Balzac went so far as to
deliberately run up debts to force himself to churn out the pages. Given the
dwindling amounts writers are paid these days, the fear of bankruptcy — the
modern debtor’s prison — remains an inspiration to us all.
Tony Perrottet’s latest book is “The Sinner’s Grand Tour: A Journey
Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe.”
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