Cynthia Ozick delivered the following speech as part of the 2008 Literary Awards Ceremony. Ozick is the winner of the 2008 PEN/Nabokov Award, which honors a living author for a lifetime of consummate craftsmanship and enduring originality.

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Thank you. I am grateful to the judges—Mary Gordon, Brian Boyd, and Richard Price—and to PEN, under whose wing the Nabokov commemoration is nestled; and like every reader born into the twentieth century, I am grateful for the sublime art of Vladimir Nabokov, whose energetic ghost is the author and engine of this moment. It is a moment of high visibility for a writer, since writers frequently tend to be invisible ghosts even while still encased in living flesh. Foremost among these, it goes without saying, are the writers who are made invisible, and also inaudible, by repressive regimes, whose voices PEN strives to liberate; or writers who write apart from the klieg lights of the lingua franca, and whose stories linger too often untranslated.

Nabokov himself was once an invisible writer suffering from both unhappy conditions. As an émigré fleeing the Bolshevik upheavals, and later as a refugee from the Nazis, he escaped not one but two tyrannies. And as an émigré writing in Russian in Berlin and Paris, he remained invisible to nearly all but his exiled compatriots. Only on his arrival in America did the marginalizing term “émigré” rapidly begin to vanish, replaced by “citizen,” and finally, to our glory, by “American writer.”

I say “to our glory”: it was here that the invisible became the invincible. But Brian Boyd recounts in his intimate and at the same time majestic biography the difficulties, even here, of invisible ink’s turning visible—not only in the protracted struggle for the publication of Lolita, but in the most liberal of literary journals. When we look back, how perplexing it is to learn that the New Yorker of the 1950s rejected a chapter of the delectable Pnin “because,” according to Boyd, “Nabokov refused to remove references—all historically accurate—to the regime of Lenin and Stalin,” phrases such as “medieval tortures in a Soviet jail,” “Bolshevik dictatorship,” and “hopeless injustice.” Certainly the politically expelled chapter did not languish in invisibility for very long, and Lolita, decades after its electrifying and enduring triumph, erupted dazzlingly once again in the title of a now famous memoir linking Lolita’s fate to the ruthless mullahs of Tehran. And even today, even in New York, one can find a distinguished liberal journal willing to make a political pariah of a writer: a case of ordinarily visible ink rendered parochially invisible.

All the foregoing touches on what might be termed public invisibility, rooted in external circumstance: the thuggish prejudices of gangsters who run governments, the foolish prejudices of the landlords of the current lingua franca, the idiosyncratic prejudices of some magazine editors. But my hope now, at this moment of visibility, is rather to address the condition of private invisibility—which is the inner condition of writers themselves. To begin with, writers are hidden beings—you have never actually met one. If you should ever believe you are seeing a writer, or having an argument with a writer, or going to lunch with a writer, or listening to a talk by a writer, then you can be sure it is all a mistake.

Henry James long ago made this clear. In a story called “The Private Life,” a writer burdened by one of those peculiar Jamesian names, one Clare Vawdrey, rhyming perhaps not accidentally with “tawdry,” is visible everywhere in every conceivable social situation. He is always available for a conversation or a stroll, always accessible, always pleasantly anecdotal, never remote or preoccupied. He has a light-minded bourgeois affability: “He talks, he circulates,” James’s narrator informs us, “he’s awfully popular, he flirts with you.” Yet his work is the very opposite of his visible character; his work is steeped in unalloyed greatness. One evening, while Vawdrey is loitering outdoors on a terrace, exchanging banalities with a companion, the narrator steals into Vawdrey’s room—only to discover him seated at his writing table in the dark, feverishly driving his pen. Since it is physically impossible for a material body to be in two places at the same time, the narrator concludes that the social Vawdrey is a phantom, while the writer working in the dark is the real Vawdrey. “One is the genius,” he explains, “the other’s the bourgeois, and it’s only the bourgeois whom we personally know.”

And lest we dismiss this as merely another one of James’s ghost stories, or simply as a comical parable, we had better recall that celebrated Jamesian credo, a declaration of private panic mixed with prayerful intuition, which so many writers secretly keep tacked over their desks: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task.” The statement ends memorably, “The rest is the madness of art.”

The madness of art? Maybe so. But more likely it is the logic of invisibility. James has it backwards. It’s not the social personality who is the ghost; it is the writer with shoulders bent over paper, the hazy simulacrum whom we will never personally know, the wraith who hides out in the dark while her palpable effigy walks abroad, talking and circulating and sometimes even flirting. Sightings of these ghost-writers are rare and few and unreliable, but there is extant a small accumulation of paranormal glimpses which can guide us, at least a little, to a proper taxonomy. For instance: this blustering, arrogant, self-assured, muscularly disdainful writer who belittles and brushes you aside, what is he really? When illicitly spotted facing the lonely glow of his computer screen, he is no more than a helpless milquetoast paralyzed by the prospect of having to begin a new sentence. And that apologetically obsequious, self-effacing, breathlessly diffident and deprecatory creature turns out, when in the trancelike grip of nocturnal ardor, to be a fiery furnace of unopposable authority and galloping certainty.

Writers are what they genuinely are only when they are at work in the silent and instinctual cell of ghostly solitude, and never when they are out industriously chatting on the terrace.

What is the true meaning of “the madness of art”? Imposture, impersonation, fakery, make-believe—but not the imposture, impersonation, fakery, or transporting make-believe of inventive story-telling. No: rather, art turns mad in pursuit of the false face of wishful distraction. The fraudulent writer is the visible one, the crowd-seeker, the crowd-speaker, the one who will go out to dinner with you with a motive in mind, or will stand and talk at you, or will discuss mutual writing habits with you, or will gossip with you about other novelists and their enviable good luck or their gratifying bad luck. The fraudulent writer is like Bellow’s Henderson: I want, I want, I want.

If all this is so—and it is so—then how might a young would-be writer aspire to join the company of the passionately ghostly invisibles? Or, to put it another way: though all writers are now and again unavoidably compelled to become visible, how to maintain a coveted clandestine authentic invisibility? Don’t all young would-be writers look to the precincts of visibility, where heated phalanxes of worn old writers march back and forth, fanning their brows with their favorable reviews? Isn’t that how it’s done, via models and mentors and the wise counsel of seasoned editors? “I beg you,” says Rilke, addressing one such young writer, “I beg you to give all that up. You are looking outwards, and of all things that is what you must now not do. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids you to write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the deepest places in your heart, confess to yourself whether you would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all: ask yourself in the quietest hour of the night: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with a strong and simple ‘I must,’ then build your life according to this necessity.”

Thus the poet Rilke, imploring the untried young to surrender all worldly reward, including the spur, and sometimes the romantic delusion, of fame, in order to succumb to a career in ectoplasm. Note that he speaks of “the quietest hour of the night,” which is also the darkest, where we do what we can and give what we have. The madness of art—and again I willingly contradict Henry James—is not in the art, but in the madding and maddening crowd, where all manner of visibilities elbow one another, while the ghosts at their writing tables sit alone, and write, and write, and write, as if the necessary transparency of their souls depended upon it.

And here for a moment I will give up the ghost, materialize into visibility, and tell a long-ago autobiographical tale. Like tricky though hapless Jacob in the Bible, I first wooed Leah while desiring Rachel. The wooing of Leah took seven years, the wooing of Rachel another seven years. Leah was my first first novel. Far too ambitious, it was abandoned after 300,000 words. Rachel was my second first novel, even more afflicted by ambition, and was completed at more than 800 pages. Ah, the wages of frenzied gluttony! Fourteen years had flown away. And then I submitted the second first novel to an editor in a publishing house. Back came the manuscript in the mail, with one hundred pages all marked up in red pencil, and a note. The note said, “If you do everything my red pencil suggests, and of course there will be more in this vein, we will accept your novel for publication. But if you decline to follow my red pencil’s indispensable advice, then we will decline to publish.” Fourteen years gone! Outrun by the cohort of my generation, I lusted for print as Jacob had panted after Rachel. To the editor I wrote: “Seven years have I labored for those words, and yet another seven years; so I say unto you, Nay, not one jot or tittle will I alter or undo.” To which the blessed editor replied, “O.K., we’ll take it anyway.” He died suddenly and young, at 42, and by then I had praised him a thousand times over. And a thousand times over he admonished me, “You think I’m a great editor because I never edited you.”

And that, fellow PEN members and amiable publishing pundits, and all other literary friends—that is how one diffident, obsequious, self-effacing writer became ferociously invisible, at home among the ghosts.

Copyright © 2008 by Cynthia Ozick. All rights reserved.