I did an English degree in the 80′s. Or it did me. I don’t know which. This was the age of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Alex Keaton wore ties to the dinner table and poked fun at his hippie parents. I had thought I might go on with studies in literature or classics, but felt the conservative wave wash over me, so I went to law school instead. There, I found the lecture halls teeming with artists, musicians, and poets who, like me, had succumbed to this ineluctable drift to the right. If we went to the movies, it was only to hear Gordon Gekko tell us that greed is good. And if we read novels, it was only so we could fantasize with Tom Wolfe about being a “master of the universe”.
I suppressed my urges. I bought a brief case and wore preppy clothes. I ate sushi for lunch. And whenever I felt in myself the desire to read a novel or to write a poem, I submitted to the discipline of a chapter from Oosterhoff on Trusts. Be strong, I told myself. Don’t lapse. But people like me always lapse. Sooner or later there’s a chance encounter in a bathroom stall or in the back pew of a church. For me, the lapse came in the Bora Laskin Law Library in a remote corner on the second floor. I hid in a carrel by a west-facing window and there, in the pinkish hues of the setting sun, I leafed through back issues of the Texas Law Review, engrossed in the “Law As Literature” exchange between Ronald Dworkin and Stanley Fish. It was as if a whole new world had revealed itself to me. To think! Legal minds could openly display literary thoughts!
Not long afterwards, I discovered that my Torts professor liked to relax with the works of Plato—in the original Greek no less. My Intellectual Property prof had a thing for sampled music. My International Law prof devoted an entire lecture to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And my Labour Law prof channeled Jacques Derrida as he deconstructed the Ontario Labour Relations Act. I had felt so alone. It was a comfort to know there were others like me.
It was a comfort, yes, but it would be years before I acted on my desires. I had internalized a lifetime of social expectations about what a man like me is entitled to want. These expectations had wormed their way deep inside, like a spirochete in the brain, until they had subverted my very sense of entitlement. I fully believed that the best I could do for myself after graduating from law school was to buy a big house, marry a trophy wife, and park a Porsche in the driveway. It would be years before I discovered that I could have so much more. And it would be even more years before I could give myself permission to pursue that more.
I am an author. There! I’m out. You may already have suspected as much. You may already have read the signs. For years now, I have been acting out in subtle ways. You may have caught me reading David Foster Wallace or writing cryptic hints into my blog posts. I feel so relieved to be out now.
An author is not the same thing as a writer. A writer has a job or a profession or a calling. An author is an identity. A writer produces himself through what he does; an author, through what he is. A writer chooses to write; and author is born that way. You can try to change an author—and many have tried—by forcing him to read Oosterhoff on Trusts or the Tax Act, but that will only leave you with a twisted shell of a man whose first act on waking each morning is to tell himself a lie. The fact is: authors are incurable. The attempt to cure destroys the man.
I have spent years trying to pass. “What do you do?” they ask. And I offer an answer which I believe will satisfy their expectations for someone like me. I do my best not to raise suspicions. What I fear most are conversations that go like this:
“An author? Oh really. Nabokov was an author. He wrote Lolita, you know. About a pervert. Are you a pervert?”
Or
“The only authors with any credibility are the ones who kill themselves, like Hemingway and Woolf. Do you own a shotgun?”
But mostly I fear the accusation (which I read in so many looks) that I am a parasite, a person who makes no contribution to the social good. As the world turns, we revisit those days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher where the only good is the economic good and the only measure of that economic good is the wealth it produces. Such language has no value in conversations about identity. It is tempting to return squeamishly to my closet.
And then something marvellous happens—a chance sighting of my name online. I’m scrolling through the comments following an article in The Guardian and I stumble upon one which begins: “As author David Allan Barker observes…” Sometimes we need the opinions of others to affirm for us our identity. The closet is a lonely place.
My name is David Allan Barker. I am an author. I am loud. I am proud. And, as an economic player in this crazy world of ours, I remain utterly and defiantly useless.