Ambition, again

I have a reasonably final draft of a book of rhymed verse ready for my wife, an excellent editor, to tweak the text.

Before me is a short article by Julian Baggini in the Guardian Weekly (27th March), talking about vanity and writers.  He points out that 150,000 books are published in England alone every year, the vast majority of which appear without fanfare and sink without trace.  To write a book, he says, is a piece of vanity, and to be successful requires you to be, not just vain but vainglorious, a good self-promoter.

It got me thinking, why am I doing this?  Is it just because I can?  When I was little my father, a dab hand at the rhymed couplet, would give my sister and I the first line of a poem and we would go round the room, one after another, adding more rhymed lines.  The funnier, the better.  So over the years, as I became older, I have built up a collection of my own rhymed verse.

I have no expectation, like most people, that it will have any considerable readership.  Rhyming is difficult, which explains why few people do it these days.  To rhyme and to deliver a coherent idea is out of fashion. So I would like to think this volume is a bow to my father and mental gymnastics performed at the dinner table.

If, however, I were to be truly honest, I would have to admit that it will be a vanity publication. As Baggini says, “Believing you have something special to offer is built in to every act of putting your work out into the world…….there is no reason not to do it. To strive to do most things of ambition …….requires some vanity, which is at root nothing more than daring to believe that there might be some significance in what we insignificant creatures do”.