Still Undressing (After All These Years)

I had a great year in 2013: rich and sane and productive, full of wonderful people, good work, and just enough adventure. But there’s one part of my life that didn’t go the way I hoped. I really, really, really thought that ’13 would be the year I finally finished The Undressing of America. And yet, here I am, even as I’m already starting my next book, still adding to it.

       This wasn’t due to a lack of work, nor to throwing it out and starting over (as I did more than once before). I wrote a good draft of a good book. But it became very clear at a certain point, as I was trying very hard to convince myself that it was good enough, that it had the potential to be a much better book. And having glimpsed that other book, I just couldn’t bear to let it never happen.

       I’m not usually a proponent of this kind of thinking. Clearly this kind of thing can lead straight into the treacherous bogs of perfectionism. There’s a saying going around out there, “Done is better than perfect.” I haven’t been able to find out who came up with it. Some have said Mark Zuckerberg, others Sheryl Sandberg; give it a while and, the internet being what it is, I’m sure we’ll see it attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, and Nelson Mandela. But wherever it came from, I like it. Because I firmly believe, as another quote has it, that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” (Which I’m pretty sure was Voltaire. Or Abe Lincoln. Or Bill Gates.)

       But there’s a spectrum here, surely. Holding something up for months in order to finesse the last few details is neurotic, but banging something out overnight even though it’s a pile of junk isn’t a sane alternative. I presented the world with several piles of junk in my comics-writing days, when I took on too much work and not only didn’t have time to worry about perfection but didn’t have enough even to worry about coherence or originality. One of the hardest parts of any job in which we have to make our own calls about whether something’s done or not is finding that magical balance point where we’re neither excessively driven by a hunger to get it over with nor a mania to make it just right. 

       In the case of this current book, I’ve finally decided that I haven’t reached that point yet. There are downsides to that, professionally, financially, and psychologically. But the downsides to stopping now look bigger to me. Because I may never write about quite this subject again, and the pragmatic realities of my life may never give me this much flexibility again, and I believe there might be real value in the not-finished book I’m seeing.

       Basically, the deal is this: the book tells the story of America’s moral and legal wars over issues of the body, sex, and privacy as they helped shape our culture from the 19th century into the 20th. As conceived up ’til now, it began with Anthony Comstock’s ferocious assault on public discussions of private matters in art, literature, politics, and public health, starting at the end of the Civil War. But what became increasingly clear to me (with some editorial prodding) is that Comstock’s war doesn’t make enough sense without understanding the men who inspired and supported him, and their evangelical crusade to reform the nation in the decades leading up to the Civil War—especially given how deeply entwined that crusade was with abolitionism and the birth of feminism. Nor did the story of his opponents make enough sense without understanding the origins of the free-thinkers and free-speechers from whom they descended, and the way their crusade got all tangled up with the early days of vaudeville and pornography. And after a while it all became just too much to cover in quick backstory.

       So now the book begins at its proper beginning: in 1827, with the arrival of the first ballerina to New York and Samuel F. B. Morse’s public denunciation of her, with Fanny Wright’s flight from her collapsing interracial free-love commune in Nashoba, with the wildfire of Charles Finney’s revolutionary evangelism, and with Elijah Pierson’s mad, doomed mission to save the souls of prostitutes. It will be a long book, and it will be an even later book than it already is. But I believe it will be a good book. Anyway, I owe it the chance to find out. 
       (As for the next book, Lost Hero, about Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and the secret origin of comic books...that one I promise to finish on time. Because on that one I have a collaborator, and she’s not going to let me get away with anything else.)