To keep one's distance from life, to avoid organisations, the state and routine family life, to regard success and literary renown as objects of disdain...These are the indisputable moral principles of secular modern literary seclusion. That is, of literary modernism. First of all, if being experimental and giving voice to never-before expressed human experience in a new idiom doesn't entirely preclude literary acceptance and legibility, it can delay commercial success. A young writer who prepares himself for a difficult and trying literary life must sincerely believe in these principles, so that should success prove evasive (and sometimes never arrive), he will avoid immediate disappointment and be able to make do with little, to progress on the hard road of his convictions and to continue to write. I still believe that the modernist literary morality is something that all writers as a group from the mid-19th century to the present, especially today's young writers, must continue to believe in if they wish to resist the commercialisation of literature. Another victory of Flaubert's, in addition to the great success of his oeuvre, rests in having lived his life according to these principles, set out when he was only 29. 

Flaubert's letters demonstrate how this moral principle and the passion for good writing are one and the same. In the 1970s, when I read them, I too assumed and believed, like him, that it was possible to avoid engagement in life and to keep a distance from easy success, society and people with power and influence. In this respect, for me, Flaubert was a recluse and a sage, the first of the hermit-saints of modern literature who had turned their backs on life and on superficial success. Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Pessoa, Walter Benjamin and Borges are all figures in the same pantheon. 

My devotion to these authors arose as much from their ability to renounce easy success as from their literary discoveries and the new horizons they opened in the struggle to see the world through words. For writers to stand on their own feet and persevere, I still think that they must take reclusive authors like Flaubert as an example and even be able to identify with them, especially in non-Western countries where the culture of novels and modern literature and the habit of reading have been slow to develop. 

But this necessity brings with it certain problems that I now, 30 years later, must address. First, the manner in which we admire the recluse-author is similar to expressions of respect, adoration and devotion towards sages and folk saints in non-Western traditional cultures. This was how the adoption and experience of Western literary modernism happened. I remember in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s that the adoration a handful of young Turkish writers felt towards Kafka in many respects resembled traditional feelings of devotion and veneration towards late great Sufi masters and cloistered dervish sheikhs. Just as others had elevated Kafka's life story, I read Flaubert's letters in the 1970s as if reading the hagiography of a Sufi sheikh. This variety of traditional worship predicated on memorising the words and imitating the life of the venerated recluse-author, precisely because he was a Westerner, was infused with an aura of modernism rather than being subject to critical thought, analytical reasoning, or the stamp of blind devotion. 

An unintended result of this combination of traditional devotion and modernist literary ethics was that writers were evaluated through their lives rather than their works. All readers long for one thing: that the venerated writer should live an unsuccessful, unhappy and disquieting life. Of course, this desire takes different forms from country to country.