47 Endings

A review of a book about Italian fascism published in the weekend Wall Street Journal contained the following sentence:  'a former mistress was locked up in an asylum with a diagnosis of "graphomania." '  The word 'graphomania' is catnip to me and I jumped on Google immediately after folding the newspaper.  But even Google, which we like to think knows everything,  couldn't help. I found that a woman named Ida Dalser, who persisted on claiming to be il Duce's wife (because the reference was about his mistress), was forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1926 where she died in 1937,  and there was a film titled Vincere made about her life, released in  2009 and directed by Marco Bellochio, but nothing in English about the diagnosis. (Whether the information about it comes from the reviewed book or from the reviewer's other sources is not clear.)

Imagine getting arrested and locked up for graphomania.  Who of current bestseller writers would remain free to continue peck at her keyboard? And who of us billion of Internet keyboard warriors?  But then, what is "graphomania"?  I have heard the word used most often by published writers and journalists, including such luminaries as Milan Kundera, referring to it without ever defining the term, and, frankly, sounding as if they were envious of the proliferation of writers and would-be writers.  The term is however seldom seen in the English speaking world, it is more of a European concept to separate the professionals from the hungry amateurs.  I have my own private definition of it, and recognize it when I see it - bad grammar, excessive use of adjectives, clichés,  received or conventional wisdom, muddled thinking, and similar sins, but I've no idea if all that is graphomania by anyone else's definition.

One long article I recently read, posited that the difference between professional writers and graphomaniacs was in the amount of effort that each put in his writing. As an example, the author cited Ernest Hemingway who considered 47 different endings to his novel A Farewell to Arms (it was initially thought the number was 39, but Hemingway's grandson recently discovered an additional eight.)  Thomas Mann said that writer is a man for whom writing is harder than for other people.  Marcel Proust would run out of his house during a German air raid to find out the correct pronunciation of an Italian word.  François-René de Chateaubriand could spend 12 to 15 hours crossing out what he had written.  The recent novel The Orphan Master's Son took Adam Johnson six years to complete.  Such examples abound.  Writers sweat each sentence, bleed it out, graphomaniacs in the meantime produce volumes, and what better outlet than the Internet.  Let it bleed!  (Always, those Rolling Stones' references.)

39 steps or 47 endings, graphomania or Nobel Prize in Literature, don't you miss the times when you could just run out of the house to find out the correct pronunciation of an Italian word?