Ghostwriters

Last weekend, a friend sent me a message that contained what must be the most potent and enticing combination of words it is possible to send in my direction. It was a "job" listing from Craigslist, and its pitch was simple. "Ghostwriters wanted," it read. "No experience necessary." Seldom have I responded to any summons with such alacrity. An email was off within fifteen minutes, followed by obsessive re-checking of my inbox every couple of seconds.

For those who do not suffer from exactly my combination of personality traits, it may not be immediately obvious why this would be the response. For me, however, becoming a ghostwriter for some faceless online entity was one of the most dream-fulfilling ambitions I could contemplate. Had I not just a few days previous been talking with another friend, who expressed aloud our shared thought: "I wish being a hack writer was still more of a professional option."

Being condemned to "churn out content"; being doomed to miserable "hack work" - while one's true genius and potential were squandered... Is this not every aspiring writer's fondest wish? Is this not -- here, at last, in the flesh -- the fulfillment of the visions of one's pre-authorial adolescence, when one assumed that one's adulthood would be led in some tubercular attic, some consumptive garret, bleeding out one's life force at the beck and call of publishers and creditors alike?

All the warnings I found online about responding to these kinds of postings on Craigslist only served to sharpen my desire. They spoke of the low pay, the exploitation, the sense of signing one's rights away to disappear behind the invisible role of ghostwriter. Yes, yes, precisely! I thought. My friend -- the one who had sent me the job posting -- understood my reaction. "It's this recognized thing in our culture," she said. "The hack writer. It's iconic."

Here at last was my shot at romance, mystery. Or perhaps Romance. And Mystery. The only thing that did give me pause was a conversation with my sister, who reminded me to think about what sort of books would actually be going begging for writers on such under-the-counter marketplaces as this. I might be expected to shill for, say, diet pills. Or real estate scams.

Oh, right, I said. I had been prepared to be exploited. The thought that I might exploit someone else was more concerning. It had momentarily escaped me that "hack work," in its truest form, can be a drain on the conscience as well as on the artistic potential...

Before I knew it, however, I was told I was in the door -- digitally speaking, that is. They were willing to give me a trial book to see how it went. I had apparently met their professional requirements of having no experience, failing to blink at the announcement of the size of the pay, being able to write sentences in the English language, and understanding that I was not supposed to plagiarize.

Soon, the friend who had sent me the posting had also applied. She received the exact same message in response that I did, announcing in apparently personal terms that they had loved the submitted writing sample. I felt betrayed, for an instant. I thought that praise had been intended specially for me. Said my friend: "It seems I passed the rigorous screening process."

But even better news was on the way. Once I was inside the portal where one could select one's preferred project, I saw no reference to diet pills or pyramid schemes. Instead, the projects had a range of greater and lesser degrees of seediness. I was able to find one that I thought could not trouble my conscience too badly.

By the end of the day on Memorial Day, therefore, I had confirmed in a late-night email exchange that I would turn in my finished project by the deadline, within the week. I drifted off into a contented sleep.

At least twice during the night, I was jolted awake. It was like my brain was insisting on forcing me to contemplate something I had not reckoned with fully while conscious. What, what was it, I asked?

It was this. I had just promised to write a book. In one week. While spending five days of that week at the full-time job where I work.

"It's fine," I told my brain. "I've basically written book-length things before."

True. What I had not fully considered was that there is a big difference between writing book-length things that one cares about and writing book-length things in someone else's voice, following an outline they, rather than you, created.

There is also a big difference between writing book-length things at one's own pace, whenever one feels like it, or spread over innumerable blog posts, and what I had offered to do here.

I had in short committed myself to writing 25,000 words in a period of seven days, in the interstices between the work hours of a 9 to 5 office job, Monday through Friday. The monumentality of this suddenly confronted me.

I had not mentally prepared for this. The artist was supposed to approach the hack work with contempt. It was supposed to be so easy compared to the artist's true potential that it was demeaning and dulling to the mind.

At no point had it occurred to me that it might actually be hard.

Of course, that doesn't mean I couldn't possibly do it. More extraordinary things have been accomplished in this world.

It would have helped in my case, however, if those times when I was not at work had been devoted to my ghostwriting assignment. Instead, I seemed to continue with my other ordinary leisure activities, and to expect to get to the assignment during the interstices of the interstices of the seven days remaining before the deadline.

Instead of writing the book, in short, I found myself reading Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. 

Tonight, for instance, would have been an excellent night to get started on that ghostwriting assignment. Instead, I finished Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. 

And then, after finishing it would have been another excellent time to get started on the assignment. Instead, I am writing this blog post about failing to do so, and about Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. 

And as I read -- and so subconsciously evaded the assignment that I now understood I had never truly intended to finish anyways -- I began to see references to ghostwriters and false identities everywhere in Paul Auster's three utterly unique, interlacing, riveting, and mysterious novelettes.

In the first in the series, City of Glass, the private detective Quinn (actually, a writer of detective novels who has been mistaken for a private detective and decides to go with it) is mistaken for his creator, Paul Auster -- the author of the present book -- who is mistaken in turn for a private detective. And so Quinn performs his tasks in his (now true) role as a private detective, but under a false identity as Paul Auster.

In the second, Ghosts, two men spy on each other out of windows, and each writes down what the other one is doing, until it is not clear who is monitoring whom. Both are writers. And both are ghosts. They are ghostwriters. And in one scene, they even spell it out for us. All writers are ghosts, they reflect. The things they create proceed from them, but then assume an autonomous existence. Their creator disappears, vanishes in a spectral poof of plasma.

"In some sense," says one of the characters, "A writer has no life of his own. Even when he's there, he's not really there." "Another ghost," replies the other.

This becomes a central theme in The Locked Room, in which a writer named Fanshawe disappears, trying to flee the identity of being a successful writer that has been created for him by the fact that he has written great things. He leaves his work in the hands of an old friend -- a fellow, less gifted writer -- to dispose of as he will. This friend publishes the work to great acclaim. Rumors begin to circulate that perhaps he, the friend, is actually the author of Fanshawe's works, and that Fanshawe was simply an invented nom de plume.

Eventually, the friend is commissioned to write a biography of Fanshawe. An assignment he cannot bring himself to actually complete. He flees from commencing it. He disappears into endless research. He cannot put pen to paper. He is harried and haunted by it.

As I read, I realized: He was me! I was him! I too had not begun to write. I too was a ghost, a mysterious presence, in two places at once, neither here nor there.

There was, for instance, this passage - as if left there just for me, just in this one particular week in which I happened to be reading it -- a week in which I also happened to be trying my hand for the first time at being a ghostwriter:

"I realized once all of Fanshawe's manuscripts had been published," Auster's narrator notes, "it would be perfectly possible for me to write another book or two under his name -- to do the work myself and yet pass it off as his. [... T]he mere thought of it opened up certain bizarre and intriguing notions to me: what it means when a writer puts his name to a book, why some writers choose to hide behind a pseudonym, whether or not a writer has a real life anyway. It struck me that writing under another name might be something I would enjoy -- to invent a secret identity for myself -- and I wondered why I found this idea so attractive."

Or maybe I was Fanshawe.

Fanshawe has launched himself on a project of failure, only to be harassed by a persistent unwanted success. Fanshawe had discovered from a young age that he could fail at nothing -- unless possibly at failure. "As with many gifted people," notes Auster's narrator, "a moment came when Fanshawe was no longer satisfied with doing what came easily to him."

And what could come less easily to such a person than failure? Perhaps this is why he seeks it out, as the last remaining goal -- the last unconquered mountain (he tells us this is what he's after in the final scene). He is like the character in that mysterious Roethke poem -- the one who "was Fortune's child, a favorite son/ [...] And yet his happiness was not complete [...] he cried at enemies undone/ And longed to feel the impact of defeat."

And perhaps in Fanshawe's unravelling is a cautionary tale. The one who has achieved some measure of conventional success and normality in adult life should not hunger for the state of the hack writer. Artistic defeat -- like any other failure -- is avoided for a reason. Hack work occupies the dismal place it does in the biographies of the famous writers not because of its inherent romance, but because it was later transcended and escaped, and the contrast makes those later visions more shining.

To have escaped it already and long to go back and give it a try -- that is to suffer from Fanshawe's perversity. And, if one persists in it, perhaps to suffer his end.

And oh, by the way, Fanshawe held down a number of strange odd-jobs during the course of his life, as his not-quite-Boswell discovers. One of these -- we are told by Auster's narrator in at least two places -- was as a... yup... ghostwriter.