WHY I WRITE, for my students
Why I Write
I want to write literature and because of that I will never be fashionable. Literature is sustaining -- it endures – but as a culture we no longer seem interested in sustainable goods. And I know this: writing is difficult, and I prefer difficult literature; and I write difficult books because I need to be involved in a complex and puzzling world; a world that reminds me of living. I want to think and feel in a complex way because as a human being I may change my mind: in fact, changing my mind is my prerogative.
This is how I know someone is really alive and kicking: they can change their mind; act precariously; behave whimsically; feel uncertain; hover between states of hesitation and doubt rather than always reaching after irritable facts and reason (Keats). I don’t want easy answers because they are never satisfying; like a bad poem they leave a nasty taste in your mouth. Artificial sweetness.
If I want to be entertained, I will watch a film on Netflix (I suppose); although I prefer black and whites, screen classics; because they are more like theatre and in theatre time passes in a different way, more elegantly. I like to watch Celia Johnson move across the room and really feel her body make the moves. I do not need to see her hips to see her; I can imagine them. I prefer to look at her stockings, her shoes, but most of all her eyes. I imagine I would like to be Celia Johnson, but that ship has sailed, and of course I know Trevor Howard is a let-down. My eyes are deep set but even I can’t look that sad, and I’m allergic to makeup.
I like films that remind me of theatre because time passes more slowly there, with a sense of epic gesture in the small. A passing of this and that over the table with a certain tragic look. I like tragic looks, and I prefer theatre because I like well-written, elegantly performed plays: one layer of conversation unfolding upon another leading to some form of action. What will it be? Let’s wait and see. Meanwhile, listen in to the conversation, the script is good; I can feel the words moving in my mouth. Silently, I speak them out.
I want to write books with words I can feel and hold; words that move, that move me. Books with sentences that get under my skin as the breeze gets under the door of my boat (I live on a boat because I like to be moved by wind and water); there she is, the breeze, and she catches the door making it bang. I want to be startled out of the present moment. I want to be adjusted and readjusted. By the end of my book I do not want my world view to remain the same -- I prefer to be altered --- and I do not want to be recruited to any mentality. Those attempts make me feel ‘mental’; or like a ‘mentalist’ as my students used to say (words are always shifting according to the fashions). I am not interested in identity politics because they do not seem real: too fabricated, too readymade for a predictably branded market whose only plot is anger and outrage, the victimised Me. I am herded through the script of homogenised anger (in the realm of anger and disappointment words appear all the same) and my imagination closes down. Real identity is constantly shifting, as are our hormones. We are by nature historic and organic. Through us time passes, and so female hormones alter every twenty seconds. This explains a lot.
When I write, I want to shed a skin, several. I want to feel frustrated, excited, challenged, puzzled, confused. I want to work something out, achieve my own clarity. Therefore I cannot write only of myself; instead, I must send myself away from myself and become someone new. These days I am no longer interested in myself. I never was, and I do solemnly declare I have never written memoirs although the marketing blurb will tell you I do. A more discerning reader will note that I am not really there; Someone Else stands in for me: Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Miss Marple, Betsy Trotwood, Perdita from Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. And that’s just for starters, the first book. Writing is a series of imaginative try-outs, and I am still trying out the role of Someone Else Instead of Me.
I do not want to write of myself; that ship sailed a long time ago when I realised (it was not a single moment but rather a series of dawning moments: let’s just say I was always wearing the wrong clothes, and this Wrong-Wearing began a long time ago) I was not as elegant or arresting as Celia Johnson. (Lingering thought: perhaps if I had the right eye makeup?) When I realised real life, observed life, the life of the artist, the writer, is not a matter of existing on screen but of dwelling in the darkness: behind the stage curtain, behind the camera, the place where I remain unseen. There, by dogged force of the imagination, the daily grind of worked-at inspiration and several cups of tea -- image after image collected, collated, edited and re-edited dozens and dozens and dozens of times -- I can make my own moving images from what I see around me. Send my gaze away from myself and towards others. Find a sustaining, life-enhancing subject. Forget myself, find relief, and perhaps even some tentative answers, from the mystery and muddle of life beyond the dwindling repository of Me.
(For my students)