On Vulnerability

and Bruce Springsteen

The lyrics I’ve been thinking about are —

You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much

Till you spend half your life just covering up

From ‘Born in the USA’.

There’s a lot to say about this song (in relation to America now), and about Bruce Springsteen generally (in relation to lots of things), but I’d like to focus on failure.

Self-confirming failure.

First, an aside —

Last week, I did not go and see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band live at Wembley Stadium.

I would very much have loved to, but my gig money had already gone on tickets for Bob Dylan in the Autumn.

And I did get to see Springsteen last summer in Copenhagen.

(And he was great.)

Longtime ambition fulfilled.

(Please don’t tell me you could have got me in at Wembley.)

Springsteen is now a billionaire. Anything but a self-confirmed failure — at least, as we look in at him from the outside.

He seems happy enough with where he’s at.

But those lines from ‘Born in the USA’ sum up better than anything I can think of what happens when you are hurt and hurt again.

When you write a novel, and it’s rejected everywhere, and you write another one, and that’s rejected, too. (This has happened to me. More than once.)

When you fail.

..you spend half your life covering up.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t need to have covering up explained to me.

When I’m doing it in writing, I know.

There are stories I look back on and wish I hadn’t written. Because, somehow, in the doing of them, I was trying to make them — and me — invulnerable.

This, I think, is fatal — making a piece of writing that is pre-defended (deliberately awful word).

They’re not going to be able to touch this, you think. This is strong. I’ve covered everything I need to cover. I’m safe from Them.

Whoever your They are.

This is where failure, artistic failure, becomes self-confirming. Because unless you offer vulnerability, you’re not giving any reader a point of access.

Even professional readers like agents and editors.

They may be reading with an eye to profit, but they also know that people — committed readers — don’t take kindly to spiky armour.

Nor do they like flinching.

Because covering up also involves going foetal.

That involuntary gesture, that wince away, suggests you no longer trust your audience, your readers, not to come back and hurt you.

I know you’re going to hate this, and me, so I’m going to factor hate in as a given. That way I won’t be wrong, when you reject me again. I’ll have predicted it.

Self-confirming failure.

Again, this harms the writing.

Somehow, to overcome this — despite the rejections, past and anticipated — you have to assume love. You have to speak as if what you say is going to be welcomed, heeded, treasured.

Which is extremely difficult, and painful, and exposing.

For most of us, us dogs, there’s only a certain amount of it we can do.

But we have to try.