reassurance is where you find it

I noted in a letter yesterday to Judith Clute that in my recreational reading I was alternating between Helen Vendler's Dickinson (about Emily, of course) and Scott Donaldson's Fitzgerald & Hemingway. I'm also dipping into the Dickinson part of Michael Schmidt's Lives of the Poets.

Judith knows about my creeping medical anxiety and answered "Hope your books on Dickinson and also Fitzgerald and Hemingway are still good for what you crave right now." I hadn't thought in those terms, but yes, I guess it's something I obscurely crave. This is what I answered her –

I hadn't thought about it, Judith, until you pointed it out, but maybe I'm reading these books about American writers' lives for reassurance of some kind. I'm really better off than any of them. And have already lived longer.

Dickinson had only a handful of poems published. She wrote them up neatly into booklets and stitched them together and hid them away. If a relative hadn't found them after her death, she'd be unknown.

Fitzgerald flared like a comet, early fame and wealth, and then burned out, with the help of a lunatic wife, and was slowly working toward a mature and thoughtful novel when a life of excess finally killed him, at 48.

Hemingway's talent burned out by the age of 40, and he consumed himself in a tragicomic display for twenty years of decay in the limelight.

In comparison, I guess I'm sort of an ordinary working artist, with ups and downs but a slow steady output of respectable work, well enough known to make a living, and content to wait for posterity to forget or reward me. I survived early fame and (I hope) haven't completely surrendered to respectability.

Joe