We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. —Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I had an unfortunate physical reaction to an article I read last summer in the Nation. The essay, by Scott Sherman, was an overview of the life and work of British novelist and critic Geoff Dyer, a writer whose work I greatly admire. I began to read with gusto, but I was only a paragraph or two into it when I started to feel sick. I thought at first that it must have been something I’d had for lunch. I pressed on. The essay begins with a portrait of an artist who has, against all odds, succeeded in living out his youthful fantasy of a carefree bohemian existence, unburdened by responsibility or specialization, and has been rewarded with fame, glamour, and the admiration of his peers. Apparently Dyer has found a way to live as free as a butterfly, and get paid to do so. Sherman keeps pounding on the word “freedom” as if it were a stubborn nail: “freedom to write what he pleases…freedom to ridicule academia, freedom to travel the world.” My head began to ache as it slowly dawned on me that my rising nausea had been brought on not by something I’d eaten, but rather by something I’d read. This was confirmed when Sherman quoted Dyer boasting, “As I grew older I came increasingly to feel that my working life should be virtually synonymous with living my life as I wanted.” My cheeks burned; my head swam. I felt as if I had been called out and publicly slapped in the face.

Few novelists set out aspiring to a career in the civil service. I was no exception. At twenty-two (roughly the same age as Dyer when he read the William Hazlitt essay that inspired his life of flânerie), I was safely ensconced on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, living out the full-blown bohemian template in a $180-a-month tenement apartment on East Twelfth Street. I scraped together a living reading manuscripts and screenplays and writing synopses for a talent agency, rarely working more than three or four hours a day. I spent the rest of the daylight hours translating French literature and writing fiction. My best friend and roommate distilled absinthe in the bathtub, which we broke out once a year at riotous all-night readings of René Daumal’s A Night of Serious Drinking. I roamed the streets of Alphabet City after midnight with my friends—dancers, poets, musicians, and directors—cadging free drinks and blackened bluefish from the waiters and bartenders we knew in every dive. (And they were real dives in those days.) It was the life I presumed I was born to live, and there was no reason to assume it need ever come to an end.

But then one day I met a guy at a party who did some freelance work for a large international organization. He said the work was easy and remunerative, and that freelancers were often paid a full day’s wage just to wait around for two or three hours for something to happen. It sounded right up my alley; I sat for an interview, passed an informal translation-editing test, and went to work. Everything I’d been told turned out to be true: While at times there was serious, challenging, and very interesting work to do, at others I could show up at the office, read or write the morning away, and be sent home with a handsome paycheck. I did this very happily for two years as I wrote what would become my first published novel.

And then the organization I worked for offered a competitive international exam for a staff position in my office; it was the first time such an exam had been given in ten years, and would probably be the last for many more. There was no reason not to take it. More than six hundred vetted candidates sat simultaneously for the exam in New York City, London, Nairobi, Bangkok, and, I think, Lima, Peru. Since the job is one that essentially exists nowhere else but at that particular organization, my two years’ experience gave me a superlative advantage; I aced the exam and was offered a job from which I could never be fired. I took it.

In the beginning, it was everything I’d hoped for—almost an old-fashioned sinecure of the kind you read about in Chekhov. With the exception of ten very busy weeks a year, I worked no more than a few hours a day and then went home to write. And they paid me much better than anyone with my qualifications had any right to expect! But over the course of the following decade, for a variety of reasons that I won’t get into, my workload gradually but inexorably increased, to the point where it is now full-time all the time. It happened so imperceptibly, however, that I was like the proverbial frog in the pot of slowly heating water. By the time it dawned on me that I was no longer a writer with an interesting part-time job but a full-time civil servant who wrote in his spare time, it was too late to jump the pot. I had two children, a nanny, a mortgage, and an old- fashioned pension waiting for me down the road. It was safe to say that the days of absinthe and Daumal were behind me for good.

I want to state for the record that my job is in no way Dickensian. After twenty years in the civil service, I still find it daunting, intellectually rewarding, and occasionally even exhilarating. My colleagues are top-tier linguists from all over the world, each with a unique but equally sinewy story to tell, who take justifiable pride in having conquered a very competitive profession. I count myself lucky to work among them, earning a good living in an environment of tireless intellectual inquiry and international solidarity. Still, according to Scott Sherman, Geoff Dyer spends his days “wandering through Paris with a joint in one hand and a desirable woman in the other; enjoying himself on the beaches of Mexico and Thailand; reading a book on the waterfront of New Orleans; strolling through the Pushkin Museum in search of works by Gauguin; or taking the bus to Franco’s ‘Valley of the Fallen’ near Madrid.” And the reason I had felt so ill when I read this was that my gut reaction was “That could have been me! I wanted to wander, and stroll, and enjoy myself, and take buses!” But I hadn’t done any of those things. Instead, I had made a choice to live a different way and am now a civil servant with a very happy family and a dog, both of which I would be loath to give up.

It is true that I am a civil servant who recently published his fifth book; it is also true that Sherman believes that Dyer has spread himself too thin and has written only one “first-rate” book. But I take little satisfaction in any of that because I am not sure that I have written even one first-rate book, and it is just possible that I might have if I had spent a little more time wandering Paris stoned and sexually depleted, instead of getting up at four every morning to squeeze in two hours of writing before walking the dog, making breakfast for my daughters, seeing them to school, and striding briskly off to the office, where I was recently promoted to chief and where I keep a money tree on the bookshelf.

It is at this point that a more ambitious intellectual than I—someone like Dyer, actually—would begin trotting out all sorts of learned sages, from Montaigne to Lewis Hyde, to back up an eloquent and stylish apologia. The Hazlitt quote that jump-started Dyer’s wanderlust might do the trick: “I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best.” But if any young writer were to ask me the best way to live and work, I would have to shrug my shoulders and say, “Don’t ask me.” As a matter of fact, the young hero of my latest novel has a favorite aphorism to which he turns at just such a moment of existential doubt: “I cannot accept myself as I am but, ultimately, I am resigned to accepting this inability to accept myself as I am.” I am not entirely sure what it means, but it sounds like something I might say to any aspiring author foolish enough to come to me for advice. (Dyer wrote that, by the way, in Out of Sheer Rage.)

I did not start out with the intention of writing this essay as a sort of capsule Dr. Browner and Mr. Dyer, in which I vacillate schizophrenically between veneration and execration of my inner Geoff, but it seems to be turning out that way because ultimately, it would appear that there is no getting around the question: What is the best way for an artist to live? I did not invent the question and so cannot be blamed for asking it; it was thrust upon me, as it was thrust upon Dyer, when aristocratic patronage went the way of the Ptolemaic model of the universe. I don’t even need to ask it; it asks itself, like an oversensitive car alarm set off by the flimsiest of stimuli—when I find myself still at the office at 9 PM, when I’m helping my daughters with their homework, when I’m sorting out a year’s worth of tax-deductible receipts every March, when I rest my forehead gently on my desk and long for a millennial sleep. Could there be a better way? I know there must be, and despise myself for being unable to fix it. It makes me feel weak, lazy, undisciplined, fearful—ordinary.

Worst of all is the self-pity, when I know that I should wake up every day with a song of gratitude on my lips for all that I have been given, and bless the unearned good fortune that puts healthy food on my plate, keeps my children comfortably sheltered and superbly educated, and persuades my wife to love me despite all my failings, at the negligible cost of making it slightly more inconvenient to sit down and type out my thoughts once a day for a world that awaits my every epiphany with bated breath. Could it be true that, beyond the “to thine own self be true” platitudes, my life as a hard-working civil servant—refracted through the prism of Dyer’s international adventures as a witty, chiseled, dimple-chinned, Oxford-educated playboy—may in fact offer some reasonably valuable object lessons?

The short, and obvious, answer to the question is no, there is no right, prescribed way for the artist to live. Most of us are familiar enough with the lives of the artists to understand that between the extremes—Proust’s years confined to a cork-lined bedroom, say, or Boethius’s imprisonment, at one end; and Kerouac’s completion of On the Road in three weeks, at the other—lies a vast multitude of viable and less viable alternatives. Famous authors and poets have made livings as doctors, soldiers, diplomats, courtiers, academics, dentists, magazine editors, landed gentry, you name it. Some, like Kafka, Melville, and Flann O’Brien, have even been civil servants. There are very few conditions that are fundamentally essential to the composition of a novel. You no longer even need pen and paper. But you do need time and solitude, and I lack a sufficiency of both, so to that extent a career in the civil service is not one I would necessarily recommend to the young writer.

Yet what is the alternative? I am what some, including me, might describe as a B-list novelist. I am lucky enough to continue to publish, but to date my books have made little money for anyone, especially me. A few of my writer friends make a handsome living from their work; many more are like me, authors for whom an advance is just enough to pay off the debts accumulated in the course of writing the book; and the vast majority make nothing at all because they remain unpublished for years or even decades before things fall into place. We all need to eat, and many of us have children to feed, house, and clothe. A lot of us teach, but that avenue was cut off for me when I failed my very first course in grad school and dropped out after three months. With hard work, one can still patch together a modest income from freelance writing assignments—book reviews, food and travel pieces, translations, grant proposals, celebrity interviews, and whatnot—but that path has become increasingly precarious with the slow but accelerating ossification of the magazine industry. In any case, I know from personal experience that it is a very stressful way to make a living, and any freedom it wins you to devote yourself to your own projects is more than counterbalanced by the constant worry of nailing down the next assignment and paying the bills. It is very difficult to focus on your work when you are always stressed about money. And that, I have to remind myself, is one of the reasons I entered the civil service. I rarely take my work home with me, physically or figuratively, and when I do sit down before dawn to write, my mind is clouded by no such mundane concerns, and is free to roam. It is an odd but very concrete iteration of freedom, though one that Geoff Dyer might not recognize.

Still, even after all these years, I remain plagued by the fear that I have made the wrong choice. I have known since early adolescence that all I needed to do in this world was to write novels, and I carried that sense of entitlement with me deep into adulthood. My youthful infatuation with the Surrealists and the Beats had convinced me that artists were the true aristocrats of this world, and that the writing life was glorious, glamorous, and honorable. I was sincerely shocked when the first of my college friends opted out of bohemia to enroll in law school. I had thought we were all going to be artists together. As I drifted through my twenties, writing and discarding several manuscripts, and saw that this was not going to be the case, the thinning of our ranks only served to convince me that it was a good thing to be perpetually angry and contrary, because it was proof that I alone, among the lawyers and editors and promoters and other sellouts who had once called themselves artists, had kept the flame alive and been loyal to the dream.

I’m older now, and I don’t tend to make my wife and children as miserable as I once did by bitterly eulogizing that chimera. I am able to endure with reasonably straight-faced equanimity the fact that I have only very partially fulfilled any of my ambitions. Yes, I’ve published five books, but none has been as good as the masterpieces I admire or once imagined myself capable of writing. It is possible that I may yet write one that is, which is why I keep at it, but it is unlikely that my masterpiece will be written at four in the morning.

And what have I gained in the bargain? I have been a good father, but not a great one—never as patient, loving, or selfless as I might have been; I have been a good husband and companion to my wife, but have made her unhappy too often; I do not call my aging father as much as I might; I have not been as generous or empathetic with my friends in need as I should have been. I am not even the best dog owner; although I love my dog dearly, and often tell her she’s the best dog in the world, I find myself jerking at her leash whenever she loiters too long over some stain on the sidewalk. So did I give up the possibility of being a great novelist for the worldly pleasures of a life at which I have only been a modest success? Or have I sacrificed my capacity to be a really good person—beloved by those who know him but not admired by strangers—to a fancy that was always ill-advised at best, or neurotic and unattainable at worst?

I was born in New York City but grew up in England, where my first name, Jesse, is given only to girls and can actually be used as a euphemism for wimpy or effeminate. As a result, I was always embarrassed to give my name when asked, and mumbled it under my breath. And then, one summer at sleepaway camp, someone thought I said “Chas,” and I jumped at it. For six glorious weeks I was known as “Chas” instead of “Jessie boy.”

Today, when people ask me what I do, which happens quite frequently in New York, I usually say something like “writer-translator,” because I know that if I said “novelist” they would ask me what I had written, and they would almost certainly never have read any of my books, and that would be embarrassing all around. I flirted for a time with “international civil servant,” but my wife thought it rang falsely humble, and it began sounding oddly aggressive in my mouth, too, like a challenge. When you say “writer-translator” or “translator-writer,” it’s easy to deflect the follow-up question by talking about your translations of twentieth-century French masters or your job at the heart of an international organization that everyone has an opinion about. After that, you can ask them what they do, and with a little deft bobbing and weaving you need never acknowledge that you’ve written five books they’ve never even heard of, let alone read.

My wife doesn’t understand this attitude at all. She’s a high-ranking editor at a major publishing house (which, because of conflict-of-interest issues, is of no help to me) and she knows how hard it is to get any kind of book published, especially in the current market. To her, my writing career has been a demonstrable success despite my inability to make a living at it, because all my books have been published by reputable, even prestigious, houses, and have enjoyed generous critical receptions; and also because, in principle, the financial rewards should be secondary, since I’m not supposed to be in it for the money. My friends, too, profess to admire and envy my publishing record. But being vain and insecure at the same time is like mixing two incompatible drugs, and praise filtered through the resulting haze tends to sound like condescension. I know objectively that they are being truthful and sincere, but no matter what they may say, what I inevitably hear is: “That is such an impressive accomplishment for a civil servant! I do admire a man with a passionate hobby!”

Yes, it would help if more people had read my books. I was raised on the moderns but do not write like them, so to me my books are paragons of stylistic transparency and heavy plotting, and should in theory appeal to a broader audience than they seem to attract. They may be modestly lyrical in places, but to my mind the judicious restraint of their lyricism only highlights the universality of the moral, social, and emotional quandaries they address. I certainly write them to be read and would like more people to read them, although with two daughters on their way to college in the coming years I have long abandoned the hope that my books will ever make me financially independent. I personally believe them to be very accessible, but even my most successful book has sold no more than six thousand copies—and that’s before returns, according to my wife’s reading of my royalty statements. She points out that many of the writers I admire don’t sell any better, but that is scant comfort, because I have read and admire them but they have not read or admired me.

Many writers, when confronting the unexpected failure of a project to which they have devoted several years of their lives, look outward for the cause, firing their agents or blaming their publicist or publisher. That is not my way, and would not be even if I did not adore my agent and my publicist. The first question I ask myself is what I did wrong; the second thing I tell myself is that the book is not as good as it should have or could have been because I wrote it at four in the morning. If I had devoted the time and attention it needed to become what it ought to have been, it would have taken twelve years to write instead of four. By that calendar, I would now be only in the middle of the first draft of my second book, but at least I would have assured myself that I had done everything possible to nurture the first to its full potential as a work of art—instead of wondering if I could have done a better job had I not been a civil servant.

My wife insists that my work has benefited from my immersion in the “real world” and its commonplace concerns. If I were locked away in some ivory tower, her argument goes, or—God forbid—free to write six or eight hours a day in a quiet office equipped with an espresso maker and a view of a pond, I would be isolated from all the frustrations, complexities, and bankable opportunities to observe human nature in action that make my writing uniquely mine. Perhaps she agrees with Milan Kundera that “the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.” They could be right, I suppose, but I can think of no writer of my acquaintance who would be willing to trade his eight-hour writing day for my eight-hour real-world day. He might be tempted by my pension, or my health care, or my six weeks’ paid vacation, but sharing my “real world” of writing productivity reports, attending management seminars, administering leave requests, and adjudicating staff disputes—on top of my bread-and-butter editing and translating—might be something he felt would add little to his artistic vision.

Probably, then, the core question raised by my career arc in the civil service is, Has it damaged or delayed my “development” as a writer? And if it has, what does that say about the artist’s obligation to clear the decks of worldly clutter and distraction in order to be dedicated exclusively, or as exclusively as possible, to the practice of art? Would it have been wiser of me to set all else aside, even at the risk of personal unhappiness, isolation, and loneliness, in pursuit of what I once believed to be a higher truth? Should I have quit my job because it might have made me a better writer, or at least given me the opportunity I have never had to work exclusively and compulsively on something that, until relatively recently, I claimed to be the only thing I had ever wanted?

I’m sorry to say that I am not yet ready to answer that question. I am, after all, in midcareer. If my next book, or the one after that, were successful enough to allow me to consider leaving the civil service, I suppose I would be compelled to consider it seriously. But the fact is, I just don’t know if I would be a better writer, or a more successful human being, if I had signed up for the Geoff Dyer school, and I never will know. Most of us spend our time making decisions the consequences of which we cannot predict and are helpless to undo. The potentially positive outcomes of the road not taken are as unknown to me as they are to everyone else. And when you have healthy, happy children and a good marriage, it’s all but impossible to ask that question anyway, because imagining a different path means fantasizing about a forbidden, alternate universe in which they don’t exist.

But say you are the kind of person who, unlike me, does not shrink from tilting at such taboos. Say you are brave enough to sit yourself down and ask, What would I rather have been doing? How would my life and/or my work have been better if I had chosen to live otherwise? Once you’ve dared to cross that threshold, you might as well try to posit an answer. Well, you would have spent more time writing, of course—not only the books, but maybe also the reviews, the essays, the scholarly articles at which you might have tried your hand had your life not been an ongoing exercise in triage, in which everything that is not absolutely essential has had to be jettisoned. And even then, you probably would have had more time than you do now for the other things you love, such as cooking, gardening, reading, traveling. Yes, having opened this can of worms, you’d have to acknowledge that having been able to do all this—to do anything you wanted to do, without reference to anyone else’s comfort or happiness—might have been a sweet way to live, and a lot closer to the ideal of the artist’s life that you’d outlined for yourself in the first flush of young adulthood. But wait, there’s more. If you had really gone ahead and done it, your writing would have benefited immensely, because all the love and energy you’ve spent half a lifetime devoting to lesser things—your family, your job, repairing the injuries of a difficult childhood—would have been invested in the only thing that matters in this life: your art. Think how happy you’d be now, and how good your books would be, if only you’d been more selfish.

Let’s face it, isn’t that what we’re really talking about? Most artists’ biographies fall short when trying to describe the creative process and the mind of a genius, but rise magisterially to the occasion of detailing every last opportunity seized by the artist to behave badly. Perhaps the vicarious thrill we get from reading these lives lies in the fact that, whereas genius is elusive and beyond the grasp of most of us, we can all imagine ourselves acting selfishly and irresponsibly, at least once, even if we are not in reality prepared to accept the consequences. The failed marriages and discarded children, the drug and alcohol abuse, the multiple mistresses, the dismissive gesture, the egotism, the haughty acceptance of glory as one’s due—setting aside the life’s work, you could identify the great artist by his foibles alone, the exceptions proving the rule. In this reading, the bohemian artist is elevated to the status of romantic hero who has sacrificed himself for a cause that is nobler, higher, and more enduring than the bourgeois comforts. We all know, or think we know, that the history of Western culture demonstrates the near perfect impossibility, especially in the modern age, of being a creative genius without devoting yourself immoderately, excessively, self-destructively to the muse. And if you fail to do so—as my fellow civil servants Kafka and Melville did—the muse will punish you with ignominy, crushing self-doubt, and oblivion in your own lifetime.

Part of me wishes that I could dismiss this as the bullshit it probably is, but I have drunk the Kool-Aid. Part of me really does believe that a great artist has to be selfish, or at least more protective of his gift than I have been. Part of me is convinced that, in addition to talent, hard work, tenacity, a thick skin, and conviction, selfishness is an integral attribute of greatness, while compromise is an insuperable indication of weakness, fear, and mediocrity. Part of me wants to acknowledge that, if I had not spent the past twenty years as a civil servant, I might have brought whatever talent I had to fuller fruition. But the rest of me knows full well and with utter certainty that if I have spent twenty years as a civil servant, it is because that is what I must have wanted to do—surely not exclusively or ideally, but in the balance. I have not always been happy, and have often come close to giving way to bitterness and despair, or been tempted to blame others for the wrong choices I have made, but of course every way of life—most especially including the one I did not choose—offers ample opportunity for anger and recrimination. I don’t and can’t know if my work would have been any better or more interesting; I strongly doubt that I, or my family, would have been better off. That might not matter to everyone, but it has turned out, twenty years later and to my great surprise, that it matters to me. So I get up every day at four and make the most of my two hours, and if it isn’t good enough, then so be it.

So let’s say a young writer, fresh out of college, does seek me out one day. “Do your best” is probably not the most inspiring send-off for a young artist at the dawn of her career, and not likely to be what she’d been hoping to hear. I’m not sure it’s very useful to someone who has passionate ambitions but no experience of the obstacles and distraction that the real world of rent, student loans, and rejection slips has in store. “Hold on to your dreams” might be more practical, and more in line with what she’d been gunning for, but I don’t think I could bring myself to suggest it. Perhaps, in coming to me for advice, she’d mistaken me for someone else—someone like Geoff Dyer, who, if Scott Sherman is to be believed, might tell her to flee all obligations and responsibilities, devote herself exclusively to her art, and, as he claims to have done for himself, find a way to get paid to live her life. That sounds like pretty good advice to me, and would be more likely to conform to what she’d expect from an established and respected author with a lifetime’s worth of wisdom to impart.

The truth is, I know nothing about Dyer and his life. I think I know someone who knows someone who knows him, so I suppose I could look into it if I were moved to, and confront him about the truth of his perfect bohemian existence, but I daresay that neither of us would emerge satisfied from such an encounter. I have no idea whether he is happy with the path he has chosen, or whether it has fulfilled his expectations, or whether he has a family and a job waiting for him at home that he is not telling anyone about. And to be fair to Dyer, there is nothing in the evidence to suggest that he has ever offered anyone a prescription for living on the basis of the course he has chosen to pursue for himself. On the surface, judging from the quality and rich variety of his work, it seems to have worked out very nicely for him, and if that’s true I am very happy for him.

But once the young writer to whom I have told, “Do your best” has rejected my advice with a wince of pity and disgust, and moved on to Dyer, I cannot predict what he might tell her. Maybe, if he honestly feels that he has successfully upheld his side of the bargain, he will suggest that she emulate his example. But it is also possible that in midcareer he, too, has come to entertain doubts and misgivings. Is he lonely, broke, alienated, rudderless? I sincerely hope not. When Sherman says that Dyer “has ranged too widely and written too much,” or that he “is extremely gifted, but he is also a writer in search of his ideal subject,” does Dyer experience a pang of self-recognition and regret? Again, I would be sorry if he did, because I don’t think it’s entirely true. But if he should, and should subsequently find himself speechless before the acolyte seeking wisdom at his feet, I hope he would think to come to me for comfort. I would know exactly what to tell him.

Jesse Browner is the author, most recently, of the novel Everything Happens Today (Europa Editions, 2011). He lives in New York City.