When I use a word . . . Why write? The cacoethes scribendi

The desire to write

What drives anyone to write?

In the summer of 1946, George Orwell contributed an essay titled “Why I Write,”1 to an issue, the fourth and final issue as it turned out, of a literary magazine called Gangrel, at the invitation of its editor John Barclay Pick and his associate editor Charles Neill. Three other authors had also been invited: Rayner Heppenstall, Neil M Gunn, and Alfred Perlès.

Rayner Heppenstall (1911–81) was an English novelist and poet, whose novels, such as The Blaze of Noon (1939), acclaimed at the time, are now largely forgotten.

Neil M Gunn (1891–1973) was a Scottish novelist and dramatist, one of a group of authors who initiated the so-called Scottish Literary Renaissance in the first half of the 20th century, along with James Bridie, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Eric Linklater, Hugh MacDiarmid, Naomi Mitchison, and Edwin Muir. Among his best novels are Butcher’s Broom (1934) and Highland River (1937).2

Alfred Perlès (1897–1990) was a Viennese author, best known through his friendship with Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, as described in their correspondence3 and his memoirs of them.45

Reasons for writing

Heppenstall began the sequence of essays by providing a list of 15 reasons, which he admitted rested “upon a complex, a Gestalt of motives, a large part of which are inaccessible to the writer’s conscious mind.” His conscious list was:

• to make money—but very rarely and only after I had married;

• to aid a cause—but very rarely and only before I had married;

• to be rid of a persistent image in my mind;

• to prove to myself that I could write a novel if I cared to;

• to remind others of my existence;

• [being paid to write] I would feel very sinful if I did not;

• to pass the time;

• to announce a discovery;

• to denounce another writer who seemed to me to be writing in the wrong way;

• to clarify my own state of mind;

• to please the person written about;

• to project myself into more agreeable surroundings;

• to enlist sympathy;

• to expose the over-clothed [and] to clothe the naked.

Only three of these reasons are altruistic, to aid a cause, to clothe the naked, and to please the person written about, and even the last is potentially selfish, in that it tends to ingratiate one with the target of intended pleasure. In the end Heppenstall’s summary supported selfishness as a driving force: “I write in order to be saved,” which he described as an over-riding metaphysical and religious reason.

Orwell was better organised. He identified what he called “four great motives for writing”:

1. Sheer egotism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death …

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. …

3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

Several of Heppenstall’s reasons could be slotted, or at least shoehorned, into Orwell’s categories. Conversely, Orwell expanded his motives with examples, such as anger that innocent men were being falsely accused [of collaboration with Franco during the Spanish Civil War] as a political driver.

Orwell admitted that some of his reasons for writing were inimical to the outcome. For example, he wrote that “one can write nothing readable unless one struggles to efface one’s own personality.” But if that were true, perhaps nobody would ever have produced anything readable.

Neil Gunn began by saying “Why do I write? I haven’t the foggiest notion.” But he then provided a variety of possible reasons: the enjoyment of making things; to make money; because being published is as good as sex; because it’s as good as wielding power. Each motive emerged in the course of the essay, supplanting the one before, but in the end he enunciated no real reason.

Like Gunn, Alfred Perlès began his essay by saying “Frankly, I don’t know. I thought I knew, but I don’t.” But a commissioned essay can’t end there. He had to write something and, like Gunn, meandered over a set of possibilities: to satisfy his ego; in order to clarify the workings of his mind; to be in control of the subject matter; to create something superb; and, finally, to give God a hand, since he must have had a good reason for making him. In the end, however, he gave up the task and confessed “I Still Do Not Know Why!”

The real reason

In the end, the real reason is one that each of the four essayists hinted at but didn’t articulate, although in two cases they came close. And the clues to the real reason that writers write are to be found in some of the words that the four essayists used:

“creative anxiety” (Heppenstall);

“[being] driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand” (Orwell);

“that primitive snake in the grass (Gunn);

“that itching discrepancy between inspiration and execution … the more it itches the more do I scratch myself, and the more I scratch myself the more does it itch” (Perlès).

Perlès came close, but it was Heppenstall who got it, or almost, when he also wrote that “it used to be supposed that there was a specific occupational disease called cacoethes scribendi or ‘writer’s itch.’” However, he treated it as if it was an obsolete affliction and, furthermore, “thought to be vaguely shameful” even when it was current.

Cacoethes scribendi

The phrase “insanabile scribendi cacoethes” goes back to the Roman poet Juvenal (ca. 55–128 CE). Addressing his seventh Satire to another poet, Telesinus, Juvenal expressed his regret that their great Roman predecessors, apart from Julius Caesar, did not encourage learning, and neglected those who espoused liberal arts such as poetry. Even so, he said, a poet cannot help being a poet (lines 48–53):

Nos tamen hoc agimus tenuique in pulvere sulcos

Ducimus et litus sterili versamus aratro.

Nam si discedas, laqueo tenet ambitiosum

Consuetudo mali; tenet insanabile multos

Scribendi cacoethes et aegro in corde senescit.

Or in John Dryden’s translation (1692):

Yet still we scribble on, tho’ still we lose;

We drudge, and cultivate with care, a Ground

Where no return of Gain was ever found:

The Charms of Poetry our souls bewitch;

The Curse of Writing is an endless itch.

The Greek word κακόηθης literally meant ill disposed and malicious, primarily of temperament but also, by association, describing a malignant tumour, κᾰκοήθεια. In Latin this became cacoēthes, a malignant tumour and hence a character fault. Thus, cacoēthes scribendi was a malign itch to write. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED),6 the word cacoethes, as a shortened form of the complete phrase, entered English in 1570 in the revised edition of John Foxe’s book Actes and Monumentes7: “Such is the maladie and cacoethes of your pen, that it beginneth to barke, before it hath learned well to write. Which pen of yours notwithstanding I do not here reproch nor contemne, as neyther do I greatly feare the same.” John Foxe (1516–87) is better known as the author of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563).

The cause of the itch

If the itch to write is the pathology that needs to be scratched, what is its aetiology?

Again, Heppenstall and Perlès almost get there, using the same idea: “[I write] to clarify my own state of mind (Heppenstall) and “Writing, perhaps, is a form of clarification. The unconscious is the vast, the endless, the inexhaustible source” (Perlès).

Some have described the itch to write as proceeding from a desire to know what they think. Perhaps the earliest expression of this, in a slightly different way, was given by Alphonse Daudet in his novel Numa Roumestan (1881), with words put into the mouth of the title character: «Quand je ne parle pas, je ne pense pas,» disait-il trés naivement, et c’était vrai. La parole ne jaillissait pas chez lui par la force de la pensée, elle la devançait au contraire, l’éveillait à son bruit tout machinal. Il s’étonnait lui-méme, s’amusait de ces rencontres de mots, d’idées perdues dans un coin de sa mêmoire et que la parole retrouvait, ramassait, mettait en faisceau d’arguments. [“When I don’t speak, I don’t think,” he said, very naively. And it was true. Words did not spring from him through the force of thought; instead they preceded it, rousing him with their mechanical noise. He was himself surprised, amused by these encounters with words, with ideas lost in a corner of his memory that speech rediscovered, gathered, and formed into an assortment of arguments.]

Others have said much the same thing, albeit using different words, in relation to a need either to hear what they say or to read what they write before they can know what they think:

• Graham Wallas, in a book called The Art of Thought (1926): “The little girl had the making of a poet in her who, being told to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, said, ‘How can I know what I think till I see what I say?’”;

• E M Forster in Aspects of the Novel (1927): “that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of being illogical. … ‘Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!’ she exclaimed. ‘How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?’ Her nieces, educated young women, thought that she was passée; she was really more up to date than they were.”;

• Joan Didion, in a 1976 essay, “Why I Write,” a title that she admitted having stolen from George Orwell: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. … What is going on in these pictures in my mind? … The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene: It tells you. You don’t tell it.”8

• And in an afterword to his mystery novel The Colorado Kid (2005) Stephen King, in the simplest possible form: “I write to find out what I think.”9

I have verified all of these instances myself. Many others can be found elsewhere.10 And the fact that the idea has been so widely stated by so many people in so many different ways, suggests that it may be a universal truth.

Another reason

Today, however, the desire to write has another root cause, a non-pruritic ailment of its own: academic self-aggrandizement—the need to progress one’s career, summed up in the phrase “publish or perish.” A subject for another day.