The Functionary and the Madman

The Soviet dissident Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote: "True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics." In describing the double lives of authors in Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood offered up an immediately recognizable truth. Every serious aspiring author I have met at first resembles the apparatchiks and commissars of Zamyatin's nightmares. In order to be truly good at anything, after all, one must possess discipline and treat it like a craft to be honed. Moreover, while some authors, like Hemingway, manage to live very interesting and hectic lives, most don't. Sitting alone for lengths of time putting words on the page is not conducive to a life fit for the society pages.

And yet, within the author lives a madman too. Even choosing to be a writer is a rebellious choice. Choosing to retreat from the temporal world to play is irresponsible, when it so rarely sustains you and offers little practical and functional value. Mad. And the writing itself can be dangerous at times, when you plumb your relationships and personal life, and write in such a way that it cuts to the bone. When you denude yourself and invite people to leer. Madder.

I myself am no exception to this double life. There's the lawyer, the ultimate functionary. Diligently collecting shiny objects for the resume, lining up steady jobs and working hard to move up the ranks of perhaps one of the most conservative, prestige-oriented, hierarchical, risk-averse professions. Zamyatin's feared Bolsheviks were nothing if not lawyers.

But the madman inside seems content on disrupting the lawyer at his fancy. This is the writer, that great enemy of my even-handed and reasonable choices. The writer diverts the lawyer from networking and business development and all other manner of mundanities and replaces it all with delusions and dreams. The writer romanticizes life enough to create fodder for fiction, when he encounters those beautiful poetic moments out in the world that set him on fire, and he rushes back home to set them on paper.

I often describe myself as a lawyer and a writer. Atwood has identified why I haven't been saying lawyer or writer. Like most writers, I am a functionary and a madman. You need the former to feed yourself, and keep your home clean, and your family healthy. But I suppose what Zamyatin meant was that you cannot allow the former to overtake the latter. Only the latter makes art.

Underneath the laundry and the groceries, the madman must survive.