In one of my classes we’re reading Balzac’s extraordinary novel Lost Illusions, which focuses largely, though not exclusively, on a young man named Lucien Chardon who moves from the provinces to Paris to make his name and fortune. It is one of the most contemporary novels imaginable. Picture someone who puts himself and his family into debt to pay for the MFA he needs in order to become a great writer, who then decides that he can’t succeed unless he moves to Brooklyn, who then discovers that it’s impossible to make a living as a poet or novelist but that it’s just possible to make ends meet as a “content creator,” and who gradually discovers that he never really wanted to be a writer at all, but wanted to be … well, an influencer: someone people pay attention to. Someone people pay money to out of sheer admiration; someone who doesn’t need or even want the approval of the intellectual elite as long as he can mingle with the rich and famous. That is Lucien Chardon.
I very much want to write something extensive about this book … but at the moment I just don’t have the wherewithal. “Wherewithal” is a funny word, but an appropriate one: if you lack wherewithal you lack whatever it takes to do something you want to do. The elderly Harold Bloom wrote to the elderly Ursula K. Le Guin to plead with her to write another novel as great as The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness and she replied that at her stage of life “there just isn’t the wherewithal.”
I’m feeling that way, though not because of old age: I’m still a spring chicken. My wherewithal deficiency is, I’m sure, only temporary, but it is real. Now that my mother has died and my wife has fully recovered from the surgeries she had last spring, this is the first time in five years that I have not been dealing with serious illness in someone near and dear to me. I ought to be feeling refreshed, I tell myself, but instead I feel like going to bed for six months.
Therefore, while small things are still happening on my blogs, and essays will in the coming month be appearing, and my Sayers biography will come out in just a few days, things will be slow for a while more. I am so grateful for your support and always want to be worthy of it, but sometimes the spirit is willing but the wherewithal is weak.