RESPONSIBILITY OF THE WRITER TO THE READER

RESPONSIBILITY OF THE WRITER TO THE READER

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 28, 2006
Friends of the Temple Terrace Library
Annual Luncheon
Temple Terrace Country Club
Temple Terrace, Florida


All of us here are book readers. That suggests to me that we have an attraction to stories. I submit that all authors, whatever their discipline or subject matter, are storytellers.

Einstein’s story on relativity or e = mc2 is perhaps the most compelling story of our time. He deduced as a low paying employee in a patent office that mass and energy were forms of the same thing. Then with the help of his wife, who was a mathematician, a person, incidentally, that has never gotten much credit, he worked out his famous equation.

Like many of you here, who could have gone many different ways in your life and careers, Einstein could have been an Itzhah Perlman, the famous violinist, but his fascination for mathematics and physics won out.

His special theory of relativity was published in 1905, but it was actually an elaboration and mathematical proof of an embryonic paper that he had written in 1995 when he was sixteen. The theory showed that in the case of rapid relative motion involving velocities approaching the speed of light, puzzling phenomena occur such as decreased size and mass.

We can date to within a month when he first saw this equation. He was rocking Hans Albert, his one-year-old son in his bassinet, when he realized all his work pointed to one fact, that mass and energy were one. He came to this conclusion with the irrelevant fact that no one could ever catch up to the speed of light. That led to the insight that energy pouring into a moving object could end up making an outside observer see its mass swell. The argument could also apply in reverse: under the right circumstances an object should be able to pour out energy, generating it from its own mass.

Consequence of this theory, of course, is the atomic age, and all the opportunities and problems associated with this story.

For example, take this small pencil in my hand. It is seemingly an insignificant mass but with enough compressed energy, should it be released by splitting its atoms, to completely destroy Temple Terrace and everyone in it. Conversely, it has enough energy to maintain the electrical power of Temple Terrace for many years. Thus the paradox.

Now, this book, "E = mc2, A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation," written by David Bodanis (2000), I have in my hand, purchased at the Friends of the Temple Terrace Book Nook, has a 337 page story of this theory.

Would you have to be a scientist to understand it? No. Would you have to be a college graduate to understand it? No, again. Would you have to be especially interested in science to understand it? Again, I say no.

The primary responsibility of a writer, whatever his or her subject, is to tell an interesting story that is designed to make connection with the reader. Now, we don’t have to all like the same story. The irony is that all stories, whatever their genre, are connected because they come out of the same component, our brain.

I opened with Einstein because many would not think an equation could be such an interesting story. Yet, it is one of the most compelling of all stories. The author opens in the introduction with a line about the actress Cameron Diaz who was asked after an interview if there was anything else she would like to know, and she said, “I’d like someone to explain to me the theory of e=mc2.” The interviewer thought she was kidding, but she wasn’t. I would recommend this book to her.

How many of you here read bestsellers? Most of us do of course. How many of you read the classics, say of the “Great Books” series, or some discussion group? A few of you do.

Now, the paradox between bestsellers and classics is what?

Usually people say the content of the classics is more difficult to understand. Why is that? Do you think it is because the authors are poorer storytellers? Have less of the readers’ best interest at heart? No, I don’t think so.

The problem often with the classics is that they remain written in the vernacular of their time. Take Shakespeare. It takes a bit of getting used to the language and its cadence to understand the psychology and seeing how relevant it is to our time, even though written more than 500 years ago. Then too, some authors, such as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine were writing for a very small literary audience as most of those in authority could not read, and so they were writing in code to their own exclusive group. Power was in the church and power was in the word.

How many here read Henry James? James is considered one of America’s greatest writers, yet he never won the Nobel Prize, and indeed, few other prizes. Also, he often wrote in convoluted sentences that were a paragraph long in which he told the reader everything the reader wanted to know, and more. James's audience was mostly that of the late nineteenth century when less than ten percent of his American audience finished grammar school. He was writing primarily for his leisure class and Europeans, where he spent a good deal of his adult life. He never was comfortable in America, or with his equally famous brother, the psychologist William James.

The fact that the books of Henry James are still being published more than one hundred years after they were written indicate that he is still making connection with his readers. And why? Themes of love, betrayal, revenge, and redemption connect people of every age.

My wonder is whether writers today are being responsible to the reader, or instead are being more responsive to their ephemeral appetites?

I say this because I doubt seriously if Stephen King or Tom Clancy will be read one hundred years from now, or indeed Dan Brown or other authors of various intrigues. Stated another way, I doubt seriously if most bestsellers are making true connection with their readers.

Let me test my theory now. How many of you here read mystery novels? I do as well. Okay, now how many of you can remember the story line of the novel a week later? I thought so. It finds me often buying a book I’ve already read because of this mysterious syndrome.

Now, that doesn’t make reading mystery novels bad, or romance novels, or adventure novels, or any other kind of book. Somerset Maughm once said, “A novel isn’t written for one’s edification but for one’s entertainment.” Shakespeare wrote for entertainment; so did Henry James, but they are still read. I wonder how many still read Maughm.

One of my favorite writers is James Joyce, mainly because he is Irish, and also because he struggled with his culture and his religion to find himself, as I have mine. Joyce is often found difficult to read with the comment that he has contempt for the reader. Closer to the truth, I believe, is that he tried to stretch language to reveal what is hidden within and inexpressible in language.

When I was a student at the University of Iowa, taking a core course in literature, and had to give an oral exam as make-up, my professor commented upon the completion of my account of A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, “How is it you understand Joyce?” I answered, “I am Joyce.” He was even more mystified when he learned I was a chemistry major. I guess a budding scientist was not supposed to have a literary bent.

When a reader and a writer make such a connection, as many of you know in your own reading, it is not soon forgotten. One day out of the blue, my granddaughter asked me to tell her the most important book I’d ever read. I was flummoxed. “Well,” she said impatiently, “don’t you know?”

She knew I liked to read. Suddenly, it came to me. I was in New York City to discuss with Prentice-Hall the publication of my first book. It was 1970. Only a year before I had resigned my corporate position with a chemical company after working in South Africa. Apartheid had been unsettling. Nothing made sense to me anymore, and I had no idea what I would do in the future, even though I had a wife and four small children to support.

Then I picked up a little book in a magazine shop on Park Avenue. The book’s title was THE BOOK: ON THE TABOO AGAINST KNOWING WHO YOU ARE. Alan W. Watts wrote it. I would thereafter read some twenty-two books by him, or everything he wrote for the rest of his life. We made connection, and he helped me find my way to where I am today. A book did that.

The longshoreman turned philosopher Eric Hoffer was once asked, “Why is it you are not a disciplined scholar? There is an eclectic sense to your musings, although I find the lyrical rhythm intoxicating if not all that reassuring.”

Hoffer took no offense. He said, “I am a reader. I lost my sight as a little boy, and didn’t regain it until I was nineteen. I went to the library and picked out the thickest book with the smallest print and read it cover to cover. It was THE ESSAYS OF MONTESQUIEU." He continued, "My reading since has been like the man at the street corner under the light. A book comes by and smiles at me and I smile back, and we make connection, and go off together as if married to each other.”

One of the miracles of publishing is the story of this author. He sent a handwritten manuscript to Harper & Row titled THE TRUE BELIEVER. The book had a small first printing, which I happened to read, finding the book interesting and verifying my own experience. Eric Severide, the commentator on CBS television with Walter Cronkite, apparently did the same, contacting the author conducting a series of television interviews with him. The rest as they say is history.

THE TRUE BELIEVER became a national bestseller as did every other one of his books such as TEMPER OF OUR TIME, THE ORDEAL OF CHANGE, and THE PASSIONATE STATE OF MIND.

There is a rather amusing story about Hoffer’s books. I had the three priests of St. Lawrence Parish to dinner one evening when I lived in Louisville. After dinner, my pastor was wandering through my library, and he saw six hardbound editions of Hoffer’s works and asked if he could borrow them. Well, I’m not a lending library, but him being a priest, and my pastor, I thought, I can trust he’ll return them. Wrong. After repeated entreaties, I finally gave up. He wasn’t going to return them. Now, I have only paperback copies of the same books in my library, whereas I’m sure they are prominently displayed in his bookcase in their splendid hard cover editions.

Having said all this, I must conclude that the responsibility of the writer is to write well enough to make connection with the reader. The reader, in turn, has a responsibility to the writer to search out and find those books that best connect to the reader. All authors will be storytellers, stories that have an interest to either large or small audiences. In the end, the connection is like a marriage as Hoffer points out: the writer with the reader. Be well and peace.

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Check out Dr. Fisher’s books and articles on his website: www.peripateticphilospher.com