Book Review: The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield (2002)

The paperback cover of The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield, 2002.

Steven Pressfield’s 2002 book The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles is an interesting little book. It’s all about how to defeat resistance and embrace your creativity—whatever form your creativity might take. Pressfield is a former Marine who has written a series of successful historical fiction books.  

The War of Art feels quite dated in some regards—the macho language and the cover blurb from Esquire calling it “a kick in the ass” makes it seem even older than 2002. I’ve read a bunch of 2-star reviews of this book on Goodreads, and many of them are critical of points that Pressfield makes in the book, or opinions Pressfield states. Those reviews are missing the point. With any kind of self-help or advice books like this one, it’s best to simply take what works for you and chuck the rest aside. It’s extremely unlikely that every page of the book will provide a eureka moment.  

Pressfield is big on the distinction between the “amateur” and the “professional.” The amateur is the dreamer who never finishes the task, the professional is the one who sits down and churns it out. I think it’s a bit harsh to make such a rigid classification between the two types. But Pressfield’s larger point is that there is a power in just saying “I am an artist,” or “I am a writer.” If you say it long enough, it starts to feel real to you. I’ve found that in my own life—I’ve started to describe myself as a writer more often when people ask me. And no one has ever challenged me about whether I’m an amateur or a professional.  

Art of any kind is a discipline: you HAVE to sit down at the easel, or piano, or pad of paper or computer to create anything. But there’s also this mix of magic in it—I think every artist has had those moments where it just flows, and you can’t really answer “why did I pick that color, that note, that word?” It just happened. Pressfield is good at understanding this mixture of discipline and magic that goes into the act of creation.  

Something I wish Pressfield had expanded more about was how he made a daily living during the seventeen years before his writing made him any money.  

Pressfield got excellent advice from one of his friends after a movie he wrote the screenplay for tanked at the box office. His friend told him “So you’re taking a few blows. That’s the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines.” (p.72) It’s easier to say that when it’s your friend taking the blows and not yourself, of course, but I found this comforting—part of being an artist is taking the criticism that will inevitably come your way. The only way to not be critiqued is to exit the arena, and that doesn’t sound appealing.  

One of my favorite things that Pressfield writes in the book is this: “We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.” (p.161) I completely agree. Although I will gladly accept any fortune, attention, or applause about my work you throw my way. But he’s right—I do my writing because it pleases me. I hope my writing finds an audience and I hope that other people enjoy my writing as well. But I have limited control over that.  

The War of Art might help you if you’re trying to minimize resistance and take some concrete steps towards focusing on your art more. You’ll probably find something in it that speaks to you.

Book Review: The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, by Maya Jasanoff (2017)

The paperback cover of The Dawn Watch, by Maya Jasanoff. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Maya Jasanoff’s 2017 book The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, is a fascinating examination of Conrad’s major writings. Focusing on Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Lord Jim, and The Secret Agent, Jasanoff makes the argument that Conrad’s writings contain themes that speak deeply to our own era, as well as Conrad’s.  

Joseph Conrad had a fascinating life: born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Polish parents in Berdychiv, in what was then the Russian Empire, and is now part of Ukraine. His parents were staunch Polish nationalists and were sent into exile by the Russian government. Jozef was 7 when his mother died, and just 11 when his father died. Sent to live with his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, Jozef dreamed of becoming a sailor, and he joined the French merchant marine at age 16.  

Korzeniowski eventually moved to England and joined the British merchant marine, becoming a British citizen and passing the master mariner examination—the highest examination level—in 1886. It would be nine more years before he published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, written in English, his third language. It was not much of a change to go from Jozef Konrad to the Anglicized pen name Joseph Conrad.  

Conrad had a unique viewpoint through which to view the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His career in the merchant marine had taken him to Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Congo, to name just a few of his journeys. Conrad was better traveled than perhaps any other writer of his era, and his novels were set throughout the world.  

During his lifetime, Conrad’s world was becoming more interconnected. One of the major concerns of his fiction is what happens when different societies and cultures comes into contact with each other. You could argue that Conrad was not sufficiently attuned to indigenous peoples, but it’s clear that he was critical of European imperialism and colonialism.  

The Dawn Watch is a good book, but it’s a little odd. It’s part biography, part literary examination, but it might not be enough of either part to satisfy readers. You’d better make sure you’ve read all four of the major works that Jasanoff discusses, as she will take you through painstakingly detailed plot summaries. Jasanoff spends too much time detailing the plot points, and not enough time analyzing what makes Conrad’s writing great. I suppose that I am the target audience for The Dawn Watch: I’ve read the four books by Conrad, but I haven’t read any biographies of him.  

The narrative is not chronological, which fits with Conrad’s own writings, as they often jump forwards and backwards in time, but in a biography, the non-linear approach is tricky. For example, The Secret Agent is discussed first in the book, when it actually comes last in the chronology of the four major works that Jasanoff discusses.  

Conrad did not write much about his own childhood, which makes sense, given how painful the losses of his parents must have been. While I was reading The Dawn Watch, I happened to page through a novel by Dick Francis, the British mystery writer. Francis wrote in the foreword to the novel that people often speculated about his relationship with his parents, because so often his characters had difficult family lives. Francis wrote that he had a good relationship with his parents and enjoyed a good relationship with his two sons. He wrote, and I’m paraphrasing here, that because he had such good family relationships, he was able to write about dysfunctional families in his fiction. If he would have had bad family relationships, it would have been too painful to write about. That made me think of Conrad: he probably didn’t write about his parents because it would have been difficult.  

Conrad’s sailing career bridged the time between sail and steam, and he clearly preferred the former, which was quickly becoming a relic of the past. Conrad lived his life in a middle zone: the Polish side of him pined for a country that did not exist, and the English part of him perhaps sensed that he would never be “truly” English. Perhaps it was this push and pull that made Conrad such a great writer—he understood the displacement that all of his characters in Nostromo felt, for example.  

Conrad’s trip as a captain up the Congo River in 1890 was awful, and it provided much of the inspiration for Heart of Darkness. After his return to England, Conrad was still plagued by nightmares and poor health. He wrote in a letter: “I am still plunged in densest night and my dreams are only nightmares.” (p.215)  

Jasanoff pinpoints Conrad’s clear vision about the horrors of colonialism and imperialism in this passage: “What made the difference between savagery and civilization, Conrad was saying, transcended skin color; it even transcended place. The issue for Conrad wasn’t that ‘savages’ were inhuman. It was that any human could be a savage.” (p.224-5) This is exactly the point of Heart of Darkness: that Kurtz has been corrupted, not by the Africans, but by power, by the whole corrupt system of colonialism and imperialism.   

The Dawn Watch is a fascinating glimpse into the life and times of Joseph Conrad. After I finished reading The Dawn Watch, I pulled out my old Encyclopedia Britannica to read the entry on Conrad. The end of the first paragraph struck me as a wonderful summation of his talents: “A writer of complex skill and striking insight, but above all of an intensely personal vision, he has been increasingly regarded as one of the greatest English novelists.”  

Book Review: Letters to His Daughter, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Introduction by Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan (Scottie Fitzgerald) (1965)

Letters to His Daughter, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Introduction by Scottie Fitzgerald, 1965. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letters give readers a glimpse of the man behind the beautiful sentences of his short stories and novels. The first collection of Fitzgerald’s letters appeared in 1963, and two years later Letters to His Daughter was published, featuring an introduction by Scottie Fitzgerald. (She’s referred to as “Francis Fitzgerald Lanahan” on the book jacket.) In his letters to Scottie, we see Fitzgerald in all his complexity. He is, by turns, pedantic, domineering, charming, funny, nostalgic, and sweet.  

The letters in this book date from Scottie’s teenage years. After Zelda’s third mental breakdown in 1934, Scott was coming to terms with the fact that Zelda would most likely never be “cured” of her mental illness. Fitzgerald spiraled for a while—the period covered in his “Crack-Up” essays of 1936, but he pulled himself together, got a job as a screenwriter for MGM, and moved to Hollywood in 1937. Scottie was at boarding school, and thus much of Fitzgerald’s parenting was done via letters. 

Scott wanted to guide Scottie through these years, as he knew from his own experience how difficult adolescence could be. Fitzgerald had struggled through school, flunking out of Princeton University, forcing him to repeat his junior year. Ultimately, Fitzgerald enlisted in the US Army in 1917 and never completed his college degree. 

While Scott is certainly overbearing, he’s also not totally crazy to be so worried about Scottie’s grades. She was kicked out of Ethel Walker’s School after she graduated, while studying for her college board exams.  

Fitzgerald writes to Scottie about a dyed blonde streak in her hair, which seems like a ridiculous thing to be concerned about, but he also writes that three people have written him about her hair, which seems equally ridiculous. It’s possible he was exaggerating the number, but someone must have written him about Scottie’s hair, how else could he have known? Yes, he’s being slightly ridiculous, but other people are also being ridiculous by writing to him about Scottie’s hair.  

The key to the whole book is Scott’s admitting, “you are so much like me” (p.45). This is exactly why he is pedantic and pestering, because he knew Scottie was so similar to him. And he wanted her to avoid the same mistakes that he made. 

In October of 1937, Scott writes: “You have got to devote the best and freshest part of your energies to things that will give you a happy and profitable life. There is no other time but now.” (p.27) That might be a bit much for a 16-year-old to digest, but it’s fantastic advice for anyone, at any age.  

Fitzgerald hit upon one of the main themes in his work when he wrote “my generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.” (p.57) This theme reverberates throughout Fitzgerald’s work: he is eager to see the old Victorian morality die off, but he questions what values people will choose to live by now. Fitzgerald constructed a moral code for himself that did not come from organized religion. Fitzgerald also saw how people who had no moral code floundered without a clear direction.  

Even though Fitzgerald, who was raised Catholic, had no use for organized religion, he had high praise for the book of Ecclesiastes, encouraging Scottie to read it. “Remember when you’re reading it that it is one of the top pieces of writing in the world.” (p.64) This is notable as it’s one of the few positive mentions of anything related to religion in Fitzgerald’s writings.  

Fitzgerald’s erudition is on full display in his letters—it’s abundantly clear how well-read he was. He writes “certainly you will agree that Marxism does not concern itself with vague sophistries but weds itself to the most practical mechanics of material revolution.” (p.82) You might not expect the author of The Great Gatsby to be so well-versed in Communism, but Fitzgerald was a complicated fellow. That was part of the genius of Fitzgerald; he was able to describe the glittering surfaces and also the rot underneath.  

Fitzgerald was sympathetic to left-wing politics of the 1930’s, but he had no time for Communism as an ideology, finding it far too restrictive and rigid. He wrote to Scottie in 1940: “Communism has become an intensely dogmatic and almost mystical religion...”. (p.105)  

While reading the book, I was amazed at how much money Scottie was getting. Her weekly allowance of $13.85 would be $315 in 2024. That’s a good amount of money for a teenager at boarding school/college. Scott sent Scottie $350 for a trip, that would be $8,100 in 2024! I would love it if my parents had ever sent me $8,000 for a trip during college.  

Fitzgerald was always recommending books to Scottie. Fitzgerald was an admirer of Joseph Conrad’s writing, as evidenced from this 1939 letter: “Lord Jim is a great book—the first third at least and the conception, though it got lost a little bit in the law-courts of Calcutta or wherever it was. I wonder if you know why it is good?” (p.96) Having recently read Lord Jim, I was struck by Fitzgerald’s mentioning it, and I wonder if Conrad’s use of the partially involved narrator in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness influenced Fitzgerald’s use of Nick Carraway as a partially involved narrator in The Great Gatsby.  

A tidbit that I found especially fascinating was that Fitzgerald had promised to himself “I would never write anything about my own father and mother till they had been at least ten years dead...”. (p.118) Fitzgerald never made it past his self-imposed timeline: his father died in 1931, his mother died in 1936, and Fitzgerald died in 1940. For a writer who mined his own life as much as Fitzgerald did, it’s remarkable how little he wrote about his parents. Reading about his self-imposed timeline, I wonder if this is part of the reason why Fitzgerald wrote about his parents so little. Although I don’t think if Fitzgerald had lived longer he would have written some shocking novel about his parents. Fitzgerald had a reticence when it came to certain aspects of his private life. In his “Crack-Up” essays, for example, as much as he tells the reader about the problems and issues in his life, he doesn’t mention the two largest challenges of his private life: Zelda’s mental illness and his own alcoholism. For some reason, he kept those challenges to himself.  

Letters to His Daughter is a fascinating look at F. Scott Fitzgerald during what would be the last years of his life, and the reader cannot help but feel a sadness when Fitzgerald’s life was cut short by a heart attack at age 44.