Welcome to the Feckless Bellelettrist

This is an experiment.

I am not usually courageous; My attitude to almost all endeavors of the American bootstrapping self-help, self-improvement economy—from yoga to self-publishing—could be characterized as "anticipatorily discouraged." I feel keenly aware of my limitations.

When starting a Substack, I'm told, it helps if a person has a recognizable area of expertise: History and Philosophy of Science, say, or Renaissance Art History, or Jewish biography, or housing market economics; or good sources at the CIA.

Here's my first problem: My intelligence and knowledge of facts—as much I may claim to possess them—is resolutely social, almost pathologically so, and decidedly unexpert.

Once at a party — before he and I became close friends—I overheard DV talking to someone about the Battle of Poltava, "Where Peter the Great defeated King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden."

"It was Charles the Twelfth of Sweden," I said, interrupting.

"What?"

"Charles the Twelfth was the King of Sweden at the Battle of Poltava; Gustavus Adolphus was the Thirty Years War." I offered this correction with deep conviction almost amounting to certainty. But how on earth did I know this and where did this indeed correct piece of trivia emerge from?

This was before Russia had invaded Ukraine and Poltava had again became a battlefield. As much as I could remember, I knew this from having watched a 1980s TV miniseries on the life of Peter the Great with my father when it first aired. I was 10 or 11 years old. Maybe the fact stuck because watching that show was one of the few things my father and I did together before he died, one of our last truly shared experiences. Or maybe not. Whatever it was, I'd had almost no reason to think about the Battle of Poltava or Charles XII of Sweden since.

The problem is that my recall is almost wholly involuntary. Even to write up this anecdote for publication, I had to check google for fear of getting something wrong in conscious recollection when I had got it right in the moment. And sure enough, I'd got it wrong. I'd initially written Charles IV with the same conviction that I'd once correctly said "Charles the Twelfth." My knowledge archive apparently only works when I'm off-stage and offline. Likewise in my public life as a writer, mostly of book reviews, I am a serial misquoter, of poetry especially, but I even frequently make mistakes typing out quotations from books under review. The book is open on my lap and I look up to the screen as I'm transcribing and something glitches: I write the sentence I thought I'd read. I'm never more unreliable than when I am trying to stake a claim to some kind of useful knowledge in the public sphere.

What I know usually requires a catalyst, a situation in which I am asking nothing for myself.

For about fifteen years, this kind of knowing helped make me an effective editor of other people's writing. I could edit complicated essays about, say, the intersections of neuropsychology and religious experience [https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-22/essays/thin-places/], or Modernism and contemporary Indian novels [https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-36/reviews/adrift/], or Mexico City [https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/two-weeks-in-the-capital/], or, one of my all-time favorites by an actual expert in Renaissance poetry (and an unclassifiable genius) [https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/my-marine-counterpart/].

I could do this not because I knew a great deal about any of these subjects, but because I seemed to have just enough of a residual sense of each to ask good questions, at the right times, in ways that made the writers of such complicated pieces feel heard and want to keep going and work harder. I somehow knew enough to help these people see the ways their knowledge and understanding of these phenomena would be of interest and importance to a wider world of readers.

What magazines and book publishers now want from editors has changed. My friends tell me I should write more. So here I am on Substack, wondering what to add to this world of so many independently-contracted words.

One area where I might pretend to some expertise is in French language and culture. Thanks to some accidents of my education and a decent ear, I speak it fluently enough that I may sometimes pass as a kind of non-American francophone person of either North African or Eastern European descent. Those are the usual guesses thrown my way. The couple of times I've been asked to review for "respectable" publications like The New Yorker or The New York Times, or even BookForum, I'm always being asked to do French books. In my usual informal and sociable way, I've helped out friends on a few published literary translations. But, when it recently came time for me to translate a book under my own name, I made a handful of appalling basic grammatical mistakes, which were only caught thanks to the kind attention of the (mercifully) bi-lingual author. I have some kind of "expert" performance anxiety.

No, I could not write some "expert's" Substack, certainly not without a full-time editor or fact-checker of my own.

But wait, it gets worse.

Most successful Substacks appear to be written by people with a tendency to graphomania, or at least graphophilia. Here too I'm at a disadvantage. I don't derive great pleasure from the act of writing. Most of the time when writing, I feel like I'm speeding downhill on a rickety bicycle with jammed brakes and a seat that chafes at my groin. I might fly over the handlebars or veer off into a ditch or somehow emerge with a head of steam into the next paragraph, but always with a sickening and sometimes exhilarating sense of narrowly avoided disaster. Also itching.

To get over these feelings, I’ve discovered it helps to have a mask, someone who is both I and another, me and not me. So here I am, or here he is: the Feckless Bellelettrist: When new to social media, I developed this online avatar to describe myself, usually under "profession" or "about me." This persona is playful, flighty, non-threatening, a little pretentious, self-deprecating (to a fault, especially in this self-marketing age that correctly identifies self-deprecation as a symptom of painful vanity).

The bellelettrist is slapdash where others are meticulous, concerned with creating an impression where others are scholarly and diligent, amateur where others are "professional." The “feckless” is redundant, but I like how it sounds.

Above all, the bellelettrist is concerned with the beautiful in opposition to the useful, the "interested," or the ethical. Belle-lettrism—during the latter half of the 19th and early 20th century—was a mixture of aesthetic appreciation and aspirational ahistorical refinement. Dostoyevsky offers one of literature's finest caricatures of the type in the person of Stefan Trofimovich Verkhovensky in "The Possessed," a delicate superfluous man supposedly modeled on the novelist Ivan Turgenev. For Dostoyevsky and other—usually more Marxist or existentially engagé critics—Belle-lettrism thrives under conditions of political passivity, hopelessness, and stasis.

It's a morbid symptom, like self-deprecation, of a wound to the center of what a person believes to be possible or achievable. It can also be perversely heroic: belle-lettrists keep themselves open to the idea that the past is never really closed, never really even the past, and this also keeps them in a relationship to a different possible future. And the world needs seers, not necessarily more visionaries, just people who know how to look.

Here you will find small essays about books in my library, readings of photographs, noticings of daily life, what one of my professors in graduate school used to call my “shower thoughts,” guest posts from friends, the occasional interview, musings about language. Starting out here, I’m reminded of someone I once knew. She had experienced a spiritual awakening, a Buddhistic enlightenment so total she felt she could no longer practice the profession she'd trained for, even though she'd been extremely skilled at it. She had been following internet meditation gurus and one of them told her that she too possessed a gift for teaching meditation.

Under the influence of this teacher, and in an attempt to get past whatever lingering fears kept her attached to her old life, she went out one day with a blanket, a small brass bowl, and a cardboard sign to one of the central parks, really more of a great public square with some lawns, in the city where she then lived. She set herself up under one of the few old trees there, got into a comfortable lotus position, and began to breathe. The sign invited anyone to join her. The bowl was set down should anyone feel the few minutes spent in her company had been rewarding, asking them to contribute what they felt they could to keep her going.

I ask the same of you.