‘That’s the writer’s life. The aspiration starts now, at around fifteen, and if you become a writer your life never really changes. I’m still doing it half a century later, all day long. Writers are stalled adolescents, but contentedly stalled; they enjoy their house arrest…To you the world seems strange: the adult world that you’re now contemplating, with inevitable anxiety but still from a fairly safe distance. Like the stories Othello tells Desdemona, the stories that won her heart, the adult world seems “strange, passing strange”; it also seems “pitiful, wondrous pitiful”. A writer never moves on from that premise. Don’t forget that the adolescent is still a child; and a child sees things without presuppositions, and unreassured by experience.’
In closing I suggested that literature essentially concerned itself with love and with death. I didn’t elaborate. At fifteen, what do you know about love, about erotic love? At fifteen, what do you know about death? You know that it happens to gerbils and budgies; maybe you know already that it happens to older relatives, including your parents’ parents. But you don’t yet know that it’s going to happen to you, too, and you won’t know for another thirty years. And not for another thirty will you personally face the really hard problem; only then will you be required to assume the most difficult position…
‘And why are you sure’, asked Nat in due course, ‘that Eliza wasn’t embarrassed?’
‘Yeah, Dad,’ asked Gus, ‘and how can you prove it?’
I said, ‘Because when it came to question time, Eliza wasn’t the first to speak but she wasn’t the last. She did speak, clearly and sensibly…So she didn’t disown me. She owned me, I’m proud to say. She claimed me, I’m proud to say, as her own.’
Oh, and when I asked my listeners how many of them had ever thought about being a writer? What proportion raised their hands? At least two-thirds. Making me suspect, for the first time ever, that the urge to write is almost universal. As it would be, wouldn’t it, don’t you think? How else can you begin to come to terms with the fact of your existence on Earth?
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Now you’re a close reader, and you’re still very young. That in itself would mean that you too have thought about being a writer. And perhaps you have a work in progress? It’s a sensitive subject, and it deserves to be sensitive. Novels, especially, are sensitive, because you’re exposing who you really are. No other written form does this, not even a Collected Poems and certainly not an autobiography or even an impressionistic memoir like Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. If you’ve read my novels, you already know absolutely everything about me. So this book is just another instalment, and detail is often welcome…
My father Kingsley had a nice introductory formula on sensitive subjects. It was: ‘Talk about it as much as you like or as little as you like.’ Very civilised, that, and yes, very sensitive. Perhaps you’ll want to talk about your stuff, perhaps you won’t. But you needn’t feel shy. You said in your remarkably pithy note, I don’t want this to be about me. Well I don’t want this to be about me either; but that’s my task.
In any case I’ll be giving you some good tips about technique – for instance, about how to compose a sentence that will please the reader’s ear. But you should take any advice I might give you very lightly. Take all advice about writing very lightly. It’s expected of you. Writers must find their own way to their own voice.
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I attempted this book more than a decade ago. And I failed. At that point it was provisionally and pretentiously entitled Life (and coyly subtitled A Novel). One weekend, in Uruguay in 2005, I strong-armed myself into reading the whole thing, from the first word to the last: there were about 100,000 of them. And Life was dead.
That I’d apparently wasted about thirty months (thirty months spent plodding around a muddy graveyard) was the least of it. I thought I was finished. I really did. As if seeking confirmation – this was in Uruguay, in the northerly village of José Ignacio, near Maldonado, not far from the Brazilian border – I walked down to the shore and sat on a rock with my notebook, as I quite often did: the inrushing South Atlantic, the boulders the size and shape of slumbering dinosaurs, the lighthouse solid against the babyish pale blue of the sky. And I wrote not a syllable. The scene prompted nothing in me. I thought I was finished.
A horribly unfamiliar sensation, a kind of anti-afflatus. When a novel comes to you there is a familiar but always surprising sense of calorific infusion; you feel blessed, strengthened, and gorgeously reassured. But now the tide was going the other way. Something within me appeared to be subtracted; it was receding – with its hand at its lips, bidding adieu…
Naturally I confessed to Elena about the demise of Life: A Novel. But I confessed to no one about being finished. And I wasn’t finished. It was just Life I couldn’t write. Still. I’ll never forget that feeling – the outsurge of essence. Writers die twice. And on the beach I was thinking, Ah, here it comes. The first death.
Any minute now I’ll tell you about a perverse mental period I went through in early middle age. And I often wonder whether it had much to do with that nadir or climacteric, on the shore, that vertiginous plunge in self-belief. I think not. Because the perversity predated it, and went on beyond
