Chapter 40
October 19
Hardly Working
The artist, even if he has been relegated to the position of a buffoon, tries to assume — even at the price of an apparent, momentary abnegation of the self — an ambiguous stance, to place himself on a shaky seesaw, to transform the loss into a later gain.
Norman Manea, On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist
WITH THE GENERATORS supplying the power, I was able to get Memoirs While You Wait off the ground. I printed a stack of flyers on my Little Giant LG-6000 laser printer and wrote an advertisement for the classified sections of popular magazines that I thought were likely to reach the segments of the population most likely to yield clients: magazines intended for the aged but still compos mentis and magazines intended for egotists of all ages.
Then I placed the flyer and the advertisement on the keyboard in front of me and sat there for a while, reading them, imagining people responding to them, and imagining what the work of ghostwriting other people’s memoirs would be like, as a way of deciding whether I really wanted to do it.
I found — somewhat to my surprise — that I could imagine myself being happy as a professional aide-mémoire. For one thing, I could see that there would be a certain satisfaction at the textual level, simply making the words work, but I could also see that most of the pleasure would come from insinuating myself into the lives of others. In the written versions of the lives of my clients, I would be everywhere and nowhere, a ghost, a wispy bit of ectoplasm, but ghosts materialize sometimes, and I would find a way to show myself here and there in the words of the work, to anagrammatize myself beyond a simple retype role, appearing in the background, in a bar scene, as a leery toper, even popping up as a skittish lapdog or leery pet, or, if it came to that, I could try to rope an eel, but such tricks are a little crude and obvious, I think. I’d want something subtler, something that would not only do the trick but satisfy the trickster. I would make myself a man of convenience, a not-at-all mysterious man who would drift through all the memoirs I aided, that handy man who turns a corner in a narrative, collides with the narrator, nudges the story in the direction it ought to take, then disappears into the crowd. I would become that unknown man: what’s-his-name, no-man, nobody, everybody, anybody. In aiding and abetting the writing of other lives, I could find a way to relieve my obsession with my own, a way to step aside from myself for a while, to absent myself from myself, and a way to make some money.
“I could enjoy this,” I said aloud, to try the sound of it and see whether Albertine would believe it. Was I trying to talk myself into it? Perhaps. Would the work become tedious, sooner or later? Probably, but I could postpone that, possibly for a very long time, by focusing on the craft of it, and executing it well enough to allow myself to be proud of the craftsmanship. If I did those two things — turned in a creditable job and insinuated myself into the life that I was supposed to be writing so that every one of the books I ghosted became mine — then I could make something more of this memoir business than just ghosting or hackwork or making a living. In fact, it would hardly be working at all.
Little by little, the satisfied clients would amplify my advertising through word of mouth, and that would bring more clients, and they would bring more clients, and almost before I knew it I would have become the mogul of memoirs, with a staff of writers and a personal assistant. I already had one client, Ray. That was Step One. Now I needed the next client — no, the next two clients. If I got two clients in the next step, I’d have a growing business on my hands — and if I could get four clients in the next step, and if I went through twenty steps like that, doubling the number of clients in each step, I’d have — let’s see — 1,048,576 clients. Wow. We’d be rich. Where would I find all the writers? I told myself not to worry about that now — I would cope with it somehow when the time came. For now, the important thing was to move on to Step Two and find the next two clients.
[to be continued]
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