You can be a great writer without being an artist

An underappreciated fact about Gandhi is that he's an extremely good writer, on par with the greatest writers of the 20th century. It's not that people don't know this about him–if you asked anyone whether Gandhi was an exceptional writer, they'd say sure, of course that's true. But, as with Martin Luther King Jr., his political achievements so far overshadowed his literary achievements that it seems almost silly to praise him as a writer.

Nonetheless, Gandhi wrote a lot. His collected works run to 100 volumes! And his early reputation was largely driven by his own writings. Gandhi spent his first twenty years as an activist in South Africa. The people of India largely knew about Gandhi through the publication of articles and pamphlets that he wrote and disseminated in the Indian press. This formed a virtuous loop: when Gandhi’s voice was confined to a tiny corner of South Africa, it was easy for the South African government to ignore him. But once he developed a constituency in India, then the Indians started advocating for him in the metropole, and all that pressure filtered back down to the local government in the Transvaal.

I’m aware that I ought to be leavening this essay with nice heapings of Gandhi’s own words, but I don’t really want to. I’ve become a bit skeptical of quotation as a tool for truly giving you the sense of what it’s like to read an author. People see a quote, and then there’s a false feeling of confidence: “Oh, I see what you’re talking about. This is a certain kind of thing.”

But a quote doesn’t really convey what it’s like to live with a given voice for eight hours (I wrote this essay after finishing Satyagraha in South Africa, an account of his African years). When you read Gandhi you're reading words, but it doesn't feel like literature. And I mean that in the best possible way. Gandhi's writing transcends literature. It's very difficult to treat it as a piece of writing, making an argument, as something that you can analyze or use. His work is clearly art, just like the Bible is clearly art, but to analyze it like art simply feels silly.

I think because so much of our literature comes to us connected to these tidy creation-myths that make it palatable, we forget how weird it all is, both in our time and in its own. Like, Shakespeare wrote plays. We understand plays. But he wrote at the dawn of secular theater in England–there hadn't been any plays in England, besides Christian mystery plays, for a thousand years! Fifty years before Shakespeare, people in college in Elizabethan times were literally reading Seneca and saying to themselves, "What is this? Could we stage plays like this? Could we write our own plays?" It was very unformed. The rules weren't set yet.

In our imagination, literature only arises once there's a mature literary culture. The culture creates the form, and then a genius fills that form with content, stretching it to its limit, and creating the archetypal example of that form. The Aeneid is a great example. Because of Alexander's conquests, The Odyssey had spread across the Mediterranean world as an exemplar of Greek culture, which in turn gave rise to self-conscious imitations (most notably The Argonautica, composed in Hellenic Egypt). Then Rome conquered the world. And this idea already existed: a great civilization needs a great epic. The classical Greeks have The Odyssey, and the Ptolemids have The Argonautica, so we need something of our own! (Later on, a very similar impulse would make Ferdawsi compose the Shah-Nameh, Persia’s national epic.).

The Aeneid is a lot like modern literature. At the moment when it was composed, people understood what it was. We get this: it's an epic poem, it's like The Odyssey, but instead of being Greek, it's Roman. It's conscious of itself as literature. The Aeneid fits neatly into a world of hierarchies–is this a good poem or a bad poem? Did I enjoy reading it or not? Is it worthy of honor or not? (Vergil reputedly was unsatisfied with it and as he lay dying he asked his friends to burn the poem after he passed).

But most of the Great Books are not like The Aeneid! Most of them either arose in a legendary era or there's something otherwise inexplicable about their composition. Vergil writing The Aeneid accords with our understanding of how literature is composed. He sat down to write an epic poem, and he wrote one. But Shakespeare is baffling: what exactly did he think he was writing? What did his audiences think they were watching? Did they understand any of this to be literature or otherwise intended for the ages?

Similarly, in Gandhi, we see literature that's not really conscious of itself as an aesthetic object. When you read Gandhi, it's like you're not even reading words–you're directly communing with another person. He’s right there, speaking to you. After you’ve read enough Gandhi, you basically know how Gandhi would advise you in almost any situation. He has an extremely distinctive literary voice and personality and philosophy that’re all of a piece. Everything is integrated.

As writers, almost all of our thought and attention is directed towards self-conscious literature, because that's what we're trying to write. When we think of other literary forms, we often think of it as 'naive' or 'outsider' art. We say, oh, this is art that's great because it doesn't know the rules.

But Gandhi wasn't naive. He wasn't an outsider. He lived for several years in London. He corresponded with Tolstoy. Satyagraha in South Africa came out within about a year of The Sun Also Rises and To The Lighthouse. Within the book, Gandhi frequently mentions his friendship with Olive Schreiner, the first well-known white South African writer: her novel Story of a South African Farm is still in print and widely read. Moreover, there are some literary antecedents for this pamphlet: Gandhi mentions (in his other memoir) being inspired as a college student by Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of Heaven Is Within You and Ruskin’s Unto The Last, and his work bears the clear influence of this strand of messianic politico-philosophical writing.

He’s very much influenced by contemporary literature, but it’s not at all clear that he is trying to write literature. I don't know if he has a sense of himself as a literary figure or as a writer at all! If anything, I think he thought of himself mostly as a prophet. Gandhi shows the typical prophet’s disregard of tradition—he’s willing to break taboos against Untouchability, for instance. He displays a monomaniacal belief in his own abilities: he believes, for instance, that he cured a man’s typhoid using mud poultices. I think over time some of this arrogance abated, especially as he aged and his body grew weaker. Writing only fifteen years later, he writes with disbelief about some of his dietary, educational, and medical experiments while he was in South Africa. For instance, during his South Africa years he thought he could trust adolescent boys and girls to ignore their sexual desire:

The boys and girls met freely. My experiment of co-education on Tolstoy Farm was the most fearless of its type. I dare not today allow, or train children to enjoy, the liberty which I had granted the Tolstoy Farm class. I have often felt that my mind then used to be more innocent than it is now, and that was due perhaps to my ignorance. Since then I have had bitter experiences, and have sometimes burnt my fingers badly. Persons whom I took to be thoroughly innocent have turned out corrupt. I have observed the roots of evil deep down in my own nature; and timidity has claimed me for its own.

He also writes disapprovingly of his attempts at practicing medicine:

I was proud enough to believe that illness for me was out of the question. I held that all kinds of diseases could be cured by earth and water treatment, fasting or changes in diet. There was not a single case of illness on the Farm, in which we used drugs or called in a doctor. There was an old man from North India 70 years of age who suffered from asthma and cough, but whom I cured simply by changes in diet and water treatment. But I have now lost the courage, and in view of my two serious illnesses I feel that I have forfeited even the right, to make such experiments.

Underappreciated by most, I think, is the degree to which Gandhi was influenced by Western and non-Hindu ideas. Many of his dietary and medical ideas, for instance, came from English vegetarians and new-age quacks. His religious ideas, too, show a strong influence from outside Hinduism: he was heavily influenced by theosophy (a new-age religion positing that all religions ultimately worship the same God), which shows when he, for instance, elides the question, in the oath under God, of which God they’re swearing to. Or when the Hindus at his commune fast in solidarity with the Muslims during Ramadan.

Gandhi’s stock has fallen quite a bit lately in India. Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, was a Hindu nationalist who belonged to a party, the RSS, that’s closely allied to the one that’s been in power in India for twenty of the last thirty years. Gandhi’s birthday is still a holiday and his image is on all the currency, but he’s rarely mentioned in political speeches—he’s like Thomas Jefferson in America. Respected, admired, and celebrated, but also vaguely embarrassing.

I think people will still be reading Gandhi in a thousand years, but it’s also possible he’ll be forgotten. With a writer like Gandhi, so much depends on luck. Look at St. Augustine—if he’d written in Greek rather than Latin, Augustine would’ve been forgotten by the Western Church and his influence would’ve been heavily circumscribed. Similarly, Gandhi’s influence depends entirely on the fortunes of Hinduism and of India.

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Afterword

Last week I wrote my critical post (“It’s okay to take a book seriously”) and my tale (“Editors don’t want male novelists”) as a kind of diptych, and they went over well, becoming the two most widely-read and widely-shared posts I’ve written. I gained maybe 150 new subscribers and received lots of highly-engaged comments. Thanks especially to John Pistelli for his critical engagement and to

Henry Oliver

for sharing, etc. Most importantly, I was happy that folks who subscribed after the first post weren’t too turned-off when they received a second post with such a radically different tone, length, form, and content.

A question nobody asked about my second post was, “How can we get editors to buy more (and different) books by men?” I think the answer, which I probably alluded to in the story, was that I don’t think they really need to? The kind of book I described doesn’t really have a readership in the modern world, and, if it does, that readership is largely amongst edgy, alternative, vaguely right-coded women. Editors are in business to advance their careers—there is no reason for them to publish books they don’t think will make lots of money or be well-received critically.

Similarly, with Substack it’s very clear that people only read or share stuff they actually like. Yes, there might be some log-rolling and virtue signalling, but by and large if someone’s spending their subway ride scrolling through your blog post, it’s because they enjoy reading it!

I don’t expect anyone to read my work just because it’s good for them or because it has some abstract literary quality. I expect they’ll read it primarily because they enjoy it! I don’t expect that what I’m doing will be the most popular, but I do think it’s worth doing, and I’m glad some people are choosing to read it.

To Gandhi the strength of Satyagraha comes from the fact that it’s worth doing in itself—success or failure is immaterial. So long as there’s even a single Satyagrahi, the struggle will continue. This flows from an intensely religious place: to Gandhi, death is not the end—it’s merely a change from one form to another. To lose your integrity is much worse, to him, than dying. Satyagraha is, above all else, a form of self-discipline.

Similarly, there’s writing that’s worth doing even if nobody reads or values it—I hadn’t realized how much my development as a writer was held back by the fact that I had no control over whether or not it would ever be published. I’ve written so much stuff over the years that I really believed in, but which nobody ever saw. Now the control is entirely in my hands. I can take something, like last Thursday’s story, that no editor in their right mind would ever publish, and I can, if I want, send it out into the world and test it in front of readers. As a result I’ve become bolder, and I’ve started holding my work to a higher standard.

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Further Reading

I expect virtually everyone has watched the Richard Attenborough Gandhi film, which is a masterpiece. Gandhi’s most popular book is My Experiments With Truth, his autobiography, which forms a general intro to his life and his philosophy. His crank side is also on full display, as he goes into long detail about his celibacy and interest in alternative medical treatments—there are long asides on how he subjected his family to these fads, including convincing his (illiterate) wife and his children to refuse medical treatments. Gandhi’s wife, like the wives of most prophets (Coretta Scott King and Sonia Tolstoy come to mind) is extremely long-suffering. At some point he decides that they ought to clean their own chamber pots, instead of leaving it to the servants, and when she balks, he tries to kick her out of the house. She fights back, and they have an argument at the front gate.

The tears were running down her cheeks in torrents, and she cried: ‘Have you no sense of shame? Must you so far forget yourself? Where am I to go? I have no parents or relatives here to harbor me. Being your wife, you think I must put up with your cuffs and kicks? For Heaven’s sake behave yourself, and shut the gate. Let us not be found making scenes like this!’

I doubt you’ll read Satyagraha in South Africa—it’s not exactly a Gandhi deep cut, but it’s pretty obscure, and I don’t think it’s even in print from a trade publisher (I’m reading a $1 ebook that I think was uploaded to Amazon by some cut-rate operator that scrapes public domain archives for content).

Gandhi’s writing and his life remind me quite a bit of Booker T. Washington. If you haven’t read it, I do recommend Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery. It’s been overshadowed in the 21st century by W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Colored Folk, but I think Up From Slavery is an equally valuable book. Washington comes across now as either naive or afraid of alienating white people (at one point he insists he’s never experienced racism from any white Southerner, even though the book opens with his childhood memories of being a slave!)—but as a literary document it’s extremely powerful. The book is beautiful and electrifying in its insistence (shared by Gandhi) on self-reliance, human dignity, and the ability to communicate across races and appeal to each other’s better nature. It was one of the first books I read when I started reading real ‘literature’, and at some point my Kindle crashed and I lost all my annotations, which I still regret—as I recall virtually every other page had an enthralling passage.