I love this passage from an essay on Miles Davis by the critic Clive James, from his wonderful essay collection Cultural Amnesia, a big book in which he tells the story of the 20th century through profiles of outstanding cultural figures. It’s an essay about Miles, but it turns into a reflection on the risks to artists of being so successful they don’t have to be accountable to the public, or anybody else — opening the door to their self-destruction. It starts with a quote from Miles saying that if he doesn’t like the questions he’s being asked, he can get into his Ferrari and drive away. James writes:

Ellington was appalled by the very thought that jazz might “develop” to the point where people could no longer dance to it. When he said “jitterbugs are always above you,” he wasn’t really complaining. They might have kept him awake, but he wanted them to be there. He was recalling the sights and sounds of New York life that he got into “Harlem Airshaft,” one of his three-minute symphonies from the early 1940s. If he had put the sounds in literally, one of his most richly textured numbers would have been just a piece of ­literal-­minded program music like Strauss’ Sinfonia Domestica. But Ellington put them in creatively, as a concrete transference from his power of noticing to his power of imagining. Ellington was always a noticer, and in the early 1940s, he had already noticed what was happening to the ­art form that he had helped to invent. He put his doubts and fears into a single funny line. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” Characteristically, he set the line to music, and it swung superbly. But under the exultation, there is foreboding. Ellington could see the writing on the wall, in musical notation. His seemingly flippant remark goes to the heart of a long crisis in the arts in the 20th century, and whether or not the crisis was a birth pang is still in dispute.

For Ellington, it was a death knell. The ­art form he had done so much to enrich depended, in his view, on its entertainment value. But for the next generation of musicians, the ­art form depended on sounding like art, with entertainment a secondary consideration at best, and at worst a cowardly concession to be avoided. In a few short years, the most talented of the new jazz musicians succeeded in proving that they were deadly serious. Where there had been ease and joy, now there was difficulty and desperation. Scholars of jazz who take a developmental view would like to call the hiatus a transition, but the word the bebop literati used at the time was all too accurate: It was a revolution.

James compares the saxophonist Ben Webster, who played with Ellington, to John Coltrane — and the comparison is extremely unfavorable to Coltrane, of whose cacaphonous work James writes:

Supreme mastery of technique has led him to this charmless demonstration of what he can do that nobody else can. The likelihood that nobody else would want to is not considered.

James continues:

Here made manifest is the difference between the authoritarian and the authoritative. Coltrane made listening compulsory; Webster made listening irresistible. But such enchantment was bound to be suspect for a new generation that was determined not to be patronized. The alleged progression from mainstream to modern jazz, with bebop as the intermediary, had a political component as well an aesthetic one and it was the political component that made it impossible to argue against at the time, and makes it difficult even now. The aesthetic component was standard for all the arts in the 20th century: One after another they tried to move beyond mere enjoyment as a criterion, a move that put a premium on technique, turned technique into subject matter, and eventually made professional expertise a requirement not just for participation but even for appreciation. The political component, however, was unique to jazz. It had to do with black dignity, a cause well worth making sacrifices for. Unfortunately, the joy of the music was one of the sacrifices. Dignity saw enjoyment as its enemy.

That passage sent me back to my undergraduate years. LSU’s English Department put on a thing every spring called “A Gathering Of Poets,” in which they would bring in four poets for a couple of days of readings and workshops. My best friend at the time was a graduate student in comparative literature, and was put in charge of publicizing the Gathering of Poets one spring. The poets were three white people, all literature teachers, and an old black African. I can’t remember the names of any of them today, but boy, what a difference between the African’s poetry and the white people’s poetry! The white people delivered verses that were molto precioso, lifeless, paralyzed by anxiety — just the kind of thing you’d expect from the faculty. The old African — man, his verse had swing. It was poetry that was meant to be recited. It was the first time I had ever heard a poetry reading that really moved me. That old man was an outsider at this gathering. He looked and dressed like a janitor going to a funeral, and he kept a pint of whiskey in his coat pocket, out of which he nipped. But that man was a real poet, an artist who could take you to a different place with his words. I’m sure if I read all those poets’ work today, I would find more to like about the white poets’ work than I did back then. To my undergraduate ears, though, the elderly African’s verses were irresistible; the academic poets’ verses were compulsory.

Dignity saw enjoyment as its enemy. Clive James was talking about artists; I’m talking about opinion journalism. Still, there are things for writers at my level to learn.

One of them is that you can’t be no fun to read. I tend to write about cultural decline, which is not a bright, upbeat subject area. But there are ways to do it. Chris Hedges is a left-wing Christian writer who writes about the same thing, from the other side. He’s an extremely vivid stylist, but he’s exhausting. You get the sense that he writes his books while standing on a box in Hyde Park. I don’t think Hedges has a sense of humor about anything. When I write about what y’all have taken to calling “Dreherbait,” it really does reflect my fatalistic amusement about the human comedy. I don’t know if that’s any kind of saving grace, but there it is.

A better example is Wendell Berry, who is not just a polemicist, but a true artist. As you know, I think he is one of the greatest living Americans, and a writer whose work I esteem massively. I noticed something about reading him, though: that he doesn’t have a sense of humor. Well, prophets aren’t known for their bonhomie, and anyway, the worst thing Wendell Berry has ever written is better than my best. Still, I couldn’t figure out why I could love the man’s writing so much, yet find it hard to take in long stretches (I’m talking about his non-fiction essays). I’m not a big reader of fiction, but I’ve read enough Berry to know that he expresses his deep love of life in his novels, short stories, and poetry. Nobody can read Wendell Berry and think for a second that this man despises the world. But if you only read his essays, you may think of him as more unhappy with life than he really is.

As longtime readers are aware, I am frequently mystified in my travels, when I meet people who have been following me for years, and they express surprise that I am a lot more lighthearted and funny in real life than I am in my blogging. This is my fault, but it’s partly the fault of the medium. I write a blog dedicated to commenting on news and current events, with a particular focus on religion and culture. The news is often pretty lousy for religious and social conservatives! But I often fail to convey the fact that I share Russell Kirk’s view: that the world is sunlit, despite its vices. My problem is the same one that I had when I was a professional movie critic: the bad movies are always much easier, and more fun, to review than the good ones.

I don’t want to overthink this. My point is just that writers need to be in touch with their readers to keep them from going off the deep end into their own obsessions, or getting stuck in a mood. Writers need to be in touch with their readers to help them keep their work (even dark work!) more on the side of irresistible, not compulsory. I really do take some of you seriously when you criticize me in the comboxes. It’s easy to know who are the serious critics who really do want me to do better, and who are the cranks throwing popcorn from the balcony. Whether you’re a liberal or a conservative, I want to thank you for your praise and your criticism. Sometimes I will pop off about something in this space, and not realize that I’ve made a bad judgment, until you tell me. So, thanks.

Another lesson: the market imposes necessary discipline. This is the entire point of James’s essay about Miles Davis. When he got so rich and famous he didn’t have to care about his audience, he began to decline artistically and personally. A decade ago, when Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards published a memoir in which he took some hard shots at Mick Jagger, the rock journalist Bill Wyman (not the original Stones bass player!) published an imaginary letter from Mick to bass player Wyman, in which Mick — himself a sybarite, but also a good business manager — unloaded on Keith, who spent most of the Stones’ career wasted. Excerpts:

In the book we get the stories.

Oh, the stories. The rock, the girls. The car wrecks, the arrests. You read them on the printed page, delivered in what, I must admit, is a pretty fair written representation of Keith’s slightly tangential, drawling, effeminate delivery, resting charmingly just this side of the incomprehensible.

I was generally made familiar with the stories in a different context. They were generally related by an assistant or a lawyer, tour manager or a publicist, poking their head into a room. Keith’s disappeared. Keith’s asleep backstage and can’t be roused for the show. No one will wake him because he keeps a loaded gun under his pillow and grabs it and points when riled. Keith fell asleep in the studio again. No, Keith isn’t mixing the album. He flew off to Jamaica, and, no, we don’t know when he will be back. Keith’s asleep. Keith’s asleep. Keith’s asleep.

The scamp. Those are but one tier, and a fairly innocuous one, of the many times I was vouchsafed news of my partner. The next tier is more colorful. Keith (or his favorite sax player/drug runner/drug buddy/hanger-on) has slugged a photographer/destroyed a hotel room/gotten into a fistfight with the locals/fallen into a coma. Oh, yes, and the police are here. (Because police are whom you want backstage at a rock concert or at a recording studio.)

Or: The bandmate Keith personally vouched for is freebasing again. This last was of some interest to me, because it meant that I got to sing at a stadium backed by not one but two guitarists falling over onstage. Keith likes to talk a lot about his getting clean from heroin. It is not correspondingly apprehended that he replaced the heroin comprehensively with liquor. Given a choice I select the slurring alcoholic over the comatose junkie as a lifelong professional partner, and I say this with some knowledge of the two alternatives. But neither is strictly desirable.

And, yes, they do fall over onstage. (Or asleep on a chair in the studio.) I laugh at it now and blame no one but myself. Why, Keith gave me his “personal guarantee” Woody would not be freebasing on tour.

And yet I was surprised when it happened. I take the point that professionalism, one’s word, rock ’n’ roll merriment … these are fungible things in our world. It is a fair charge that I have become less tolerant in these matters over the decades. In our organization, inside this rather unusual floating circus we call home, I am forced into the role of martinet, the one who gets blamed for silly arbitrary rules. (Like, for a show in front of 60,000 people for which we are being paid some $6 or $7 million for a few hours’ work, I like to suggest to everyone that we start on time, and that we each have in place a personal plan, in whatever way suits us best, to stay conscious for the duration of the show.)

Would Hemingway have wasted his life and talent on booze if he hadn’t become Hemingway™? There is no chance of my becoming Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, or anybody like that. But the lesson is still an important one for anybody who makes his living through his creative work. You can’t jack around with indulgence when you have work to do. I rarely drink anymore, not because I don’t enjoy it (though honestly, I don’t, not as much), but because I’ve gotten old enough to where it’s not worth feeling crummy the next day. That, and writing gives me more pleasure than not writing. You can’t write through a headache.

There is the more complicated matter of the market imposing discipline in terms of what you write. I’ve written two books that made The New York Times bestseller list. They haven’t made me rich — people have a completely unrealistic view of how much money authors make — but they have given me a certain ability to get my ideas for future books taken seriously by editors. A couple of years ago, I really wanted to write a book about the connection between beauty and meaning. You know me: I’m no scholar, but I do know how to read what smart people have to say about these topics, and make it comprehensible to ordinary people. I was, and am, really interested in the topic.

But when I made my pitch, my agent, and my editor, said a book like that won’t sell. I did not want to hear it. But they were right, of course. I could sell some of them, because by now I have a dedicated readership, but not enough to make any kind of splash. Publishers are not in the business of publishing vanity books. The potential readership for a book like that would likely not be worth my while. It might have been a good idea, and I might have executed it well, but the publisher and my literary agent, just did not see it working. I trust their judgment — and I need to trust their judgment, because I support my family on what I write.

I did not write that book. I went back to the drawing board, and came up with Live Not By Lies, which will be published this fall. (And by the way, if you have a Wall Street Journal subscription that gets you past the paywall, you can read a short piece I did today based on the book’s research). I had been thinking about doing this book for a few years, and I came up with a way to match the theme to the times, and to write about it in a way that convinced my editor at the publishing house that they could sell more than a few books. We’ll see when it comes out this fall. Books — albums, movies, plays, etc. — are always a gamble.

Creative types tend to have an exaggerated sense of their own talent. A friend was an editorial assistant at a major intellectual magazine once upon a time. She told me that I would be amazed by what terrible writers some of the biggest intellectuals are. The editor for whom she worked was a genius at drawing gold from the dross. I’ve learned over the years that almost every editor I’ve worked with — I can only think of one who wasn’t like this — made my work better.

A while back, someone I know sent me a manuscript that he was determined to self-publish on Kindle. It desperately needed an editor. I read it as a favor to a friend. He had some really good ideas, but he needed someone to go in and cut away all the excess prose digressions, and do the normal work editors would do. He wouldn’t hear of it. He was free to publish without the heavy hand of an editor harming his words. I don’t know what happened to that book, in the end. I seem to recall that he published it, but I don’t think anything came of it. The thing is, he really could have had a book, and I was willing to help him as much as I could. But he was restless, and didn’t want to mess with the long, frustrating process of finding a publisher. He had it in his head that Kindle has freed artist to cut out the middleman. The problem is that this guy was not a good judge of his own work. He needed a middleman — a publisher and an editor — to help him understand what was good and what was not, and beyond that, what actual readers would pay actual money to read.

The publishing business is not fair. Nor is the movie business, or the music business. Think of all the gifted writers, actors, musicians, et alia, who never get a meeting with a publisher or a studio, and don’t have an agent. Capitalism is unfair! But what is the alternative? I’ve told in this space the story of interviewing the French film director Olivier Assayas back in the 1990s. I asked him if he thought the generous subsidies he received for his films by the French government was a burden on his creativity. It was a polite way of saying, “This movie of yours I’ve just had to sit through was arty and boring. Would you have made it if you had been compelled by the market to make a movie that was actually entertaining?” Assayas was sniffy about the question, of course, and said that he only made movies that his friends would like to watch. Of course he did — and it helps when those friends sit in the Culture Ministry, and hand out cash to their favorites.

It’s hard to find a comfortable space between being faithful to one’s own creative vision and to the demands of the marketplace (beyond the small community of critics and aficionados), but when has it ever been otherwise for artists? As James says, it’s easier to do your own thing artistically when your patron is neither prince, Pope, or  Politburo, but rather the public.

The last four books I’ve written — including the forthcoming one — began as topics on this blog that took off with its readership. It’s what told me that the ideas were worthwhile — that feedback. If I ever wrote a book that made a millionaire of me many times over, I would still write this blog, because it is a lifeline to readers. It is worth putting up with the drecky comments (some of which get the commenter permanently consigned to spam) to read the good ones — and by “good” I mean ones that are critical but also insightful.

Writing — even journalism — ought to swing. That, for me, was the most important lesson taught by Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and other practitioners of the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, whose work I began reading right out of college. But how are you going to know that your writing swings if you don’t look up to see if the people are dancing?