"I Want to be Alone"

I've been reading a book called "I Want to be Alone" by Barry Stone. According to the cover this is about "Solitary lives: salvation seekers, celebrity recluses, hermit poets and survivalists from the Buddha to Greta Garbo". The first few chapters from 1500 BC up to 1800 AD talks about, principally, religious hermits and recluses, anchorites and ascetics, but the 'celebrity' people we have known about have lived from 1800 until now.

The first celebrity is Emily Dickson. Born in 1830 and writing from the 1850s, Dickinson pretty much stayed within her family home. We know her as a poet, but much of her written poetry wasn't published until after she died. "Locals thought of her as an 'eccentric recluse'", according to Stone.

A painting from Edvard Munch is attached the cover of this book. It was entitled The Scream, and was painted in 1893, and has been a hugely copied painting since then. He lived through his own anxiety, poor health and lifetime isolated existence.

Marcel Proust locked himself into his small apartment and, just before his death, was discovered having written a nine-million word book called The Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal. Do we know this? Many do. A few years after his death his writing soared him into fame - one of the "most popular histories of 'outsider art'".

Greta Garbo was so well known, and by most people still alive these days. Many people just know her for her quotes, which had started with "Gimme a whiskey with ginger ale and don't be stingy, baby". Yet she guarded her own privacy and never contacted anyone who wanted simply to meet her, even after her relocation to New York. She lived alone and walked alone, and became known as recluse. Whiskey, anyone?

J D Salinger lived in Manhattan in New York, and began to write after attending a writers' course in Columbia University in New York. His famous book, The Catcher in the Rye, took him 10 years and became very appealing to young readers whose future thoughts were brought out similarly in Salinger's book. He remained a recluse for 50 years; no-one really understands that.

Stone wrote of others - painters, chess players, movie stars - and the wealthy people in our world, from the 18th century until this era. He also included "secular hermits and recluses", most whom we wouldn't know of but who are now in Stone's book.

What has, for me, made this so readable is the existence of people throughout the life of this world who, for whatever reason, have become names and history on pages, written about by someone like Stone, and read into our minds. How we believe in these people becomes our own future. Why do we read this? Why do these people interest us? Why do we think they're pretty okay? And why do we believe that they were real?

What interested me principally was that people like Dickinson and Proust and Salinger wrote a lot... heaps... but weren't published until after they had died. They weren't, not because they were turned down but because they didn't seek publication. Any writer these days, 21st century, is told they should be looking at self-publishing, because so many publishers are far too busy and will not, ever, taken on Joe Blow who has written his own magni-novel. Sad, but true.

So, reading this book set me off on my own thoughts. Publication, for me, is very important. Perhaps two years ago I would have agreed with self publishing - it seemed pretty okay to me. Now, though, I have my own ABI from surgery last year, and have real problems to work out setting up my own self publication. I don't want to pay any publisher who demands making much more than I would. I don't want to toss my books into the draw and wait until I die before anyone would find them. Eureka? Aren't there a heap of people somewhere in the world who can either publish themselves or get their books published very cheap? Are they making any money, or are they simply doing it because they enjoy it?

These days - so many of these days - it's easy for me to write because I can't work as I used to. Will I find a publisher who will publish me when I don't really have any money? Will I be able to market, talk about, sell my books? I think I am becoming a recluse, whether or not I really choose to become one. That should make me famous!

Whiskey, anyone?