Literary Legacies, Vocational Faithfulness, & Being Someone Else’s Best Advocate
Appreciating the words and works that have shaped us, and the authors who wrote them
Last week, Joel Miller wrote about “the authors we forget along the way” – and the ones we don’t. Why are we still reading some authors and not others? His answer intrigued me.
The Legacy of CS Lewis
“C.S. Lewis never imagined the lasting influence he would have. ‘After I’ve been dead five years,’ he told his friend Owen Barfield, ‘no one will read anything I’ve written.’ Proving the old don wrong, this year marks the sixtieth year of his passing, and Lewis is read today perhaps more than ever,” writes Miller
Why was Lewis wrong? Because his popularity did not depend on exclusively on him, personally.
Of course, the content and scope of Lewis’s writings were excellent – something most of us seek to emulate in one way or another. He wrote with imagination, clarity, conviction, and humility – a rare blend. He wrote widely, too: scholarly manuscripts, reflections on the psalms, children’s literature, personal journals, works of apologetics, and more.
Miller explains, “When he died, Lewis possessed what we would today call a successful brand and a decently managed literary enterprise. But, critically, he also had advocates—in his case, his secretary Walter Hooper, who managed the posthumous publication of his books, and legions of fans for his fiction and religious work.”
In 2001, HarperCollins acquired the whole of Lewis’ canon and issued each work in a unified style. According to Miller “the concerted editorial, marketing, and merchandising efforts did nothing but expand Lewis’ reach and ensure his glum prediction would prove spectacularly false.”
“That speaks not only to the power of Lewis’s writing, but more besides: no successful author shoulders his or her legacy alone. It’s held aloft by a host of readers, critics, advocates, and publishers—without whom the authors we love would simply, inevitably disappear.”
What About Our Legacies?
If you’re a writer aspiring to be a traditionally published author, maybe you’ve {I’ve} been intimidated or discouraged by the industry’s turn towards publishing only those who already have a “large following” of some kind. Maybe you’ve read books that you know were ghost written, or books that weren’t but should’ve been. Maybe you’ve wondered how such piffle is getting published when you’re churning out poignant pieces on the regular.
I don’t have an answer for you {for me.}
What I do know is this: the older I get, the more I realize how quickly in history I will be forgotten. Do you know the names of your great-great grandparents? Or great-great aunts and uncles? Or the 3rd cousins twice removed? I don’t. I don’t know the stories of most of the people in human history, especially the regular ones, the ones who earned their bread and said their prayers and loved their babies and mourned their lost ones. And that’s ok. God knows their stories, intimately. He knows them.
The writers in history – in eternity, now – who have reached out and touched me from the page also didn’t know my name or my story or how their words would delight me and distract me and console me and comfort me.
How could they? It wasn’t only up to them. It was up to the One who knows us all, who moves in us between joint and marrow.
When I look at “successful” authors, I try to remember this. {I don’t always succeed.} God the Word knows which words I need to encounter, and when. God the Word knows who needs to encounter my words, and when.
My job is to read; my job is to write.
And this struck me most of all: my job also is to share the words of others in addition to my own. Lewis had advocates.
Becoming an Advocate
Do you remember who gave you your first beloved copy of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe? They were Lewis’s advocate – and yours too, inviting you into a world of magic and deep truth.
What about the other authors, living and dead, that you’ve come to love?
I don’t know who first introduced me to Mary Oliver. Was it a blog post somewhere, now lost to the internet recesses? Was it a friend who mentioned her work? Was it a quote on Instagram? Whoever Oliver’s advocate was, I am grateful to them, because now I have the joy and comfort of her words in my life.
I’m indebted to my teachers who advocated for Dostoyevsky, Austen, Greene, Waugh, and countless others whose works have become beloved companions. I’m thankful that my parents encouraged a love of reading, and I’m glad for friends and colleagues and strangers on the internet who have made life-changing recommendations.
I am grateful to the writers who were faithful to their hidden work: putting pen to paper with no inspiration, hopeless hours staring at ugly drafts, weeks and months eagerly awaiting a reply from publishers, enduring negative reviews, family criticism, and poor public reception. They wrote anyway, and went on writing, and here I am, decades and centuries later, benefitting from their work and still advocating for them now.
Some of us have a lot of trouble becoming “our own best advocate” as we’re advised to do. We might not mind sharing our words, but becoming the marketer par excellence of our own works? It just doesn’t sit right. And while there may be all sorts of interior growth to be had in that area, maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t sit right because it isn’t our job. Maybe our job as writers is to be faithful to our hidden work and allow others to be our advocates. Maybe our job is to advocate for others.
And maybe, above all, our job is to trust the Advocate to carry our words through time and space to the people who need them most.
Let’s be advocates for the authors we love! Share in the comments some writers and works, both ancient and new, that have changed your life.