*
Father was good company — funny, talkative, curious, nosy and gossipy. He was always on the look-out for stories. We would work out the plots together. Recently I found one of his stories, which concerns the Indian servant of an English couple living in Madras before the Second World War. The story soon makes it clear that the servant is having an affair with his Mistress. Towards the end we learn that he is also having an affair with the Master. If I was surprised by this fertile story of bisexuality, I always knew he had an instinct for ironies, links, parallels, twists.
He liked other people and would talk with the neighbours as they dug their gardens and washed their cars, and while they stood together on the station in the morning. He would give them nicknames and speculate about their lives until I couldn’t tell the difference between what he’d heard and what he’d imagined he’d heard. ‘Suppose, one day,’ he’d say, ‘that man over there decided to …’ And off he would go. As Maupassant wrote, ‘You can never feel comfortable with a novelist, never be sure that he will not put you into bed one day, quite naked, between the pages of a book.’
It amused Father, and amazed me — it seemed like a kind of magic — to see how experience could be converted into stories, and how the monotony and dullness of an ordinary day could contain meaning, symbolism and even beauty. The invention and telling of stories — that most indispensable human transaction — brought us together. There was amusement, contact, entertainment. Whether this act of conversion engaged Father more closely with life, or whether it provided a necessary distance, or both, I don’t know. Nevertheless, Father understood that in the suburbs, where concealment is often the only art, but where there is so much aspiration, dreaming and disappointment — as John Cheever illustrated — there is a lot for a writer.
Perhaps after a certain age father couldn’t progress. Yet he remained faithful to this idea of writing. It was his religion, his reason for living, the God he couldn’t betray and the God who wouldn’t let him down. Father’s art involved a long fidelity and a great commitment. Like many lives in the suburbs, it was also a long deferral. One day in the future — when his work was published and he was recognized as a writer — good things would happen to him and everything would change. But for the time being everything remained the same. He was fixed, and, from a certain point of view, stuck.
Writers are often asked — and they certainly ask themselves — what they would do if they were not published. I suspect that most writers would like to think that they would continue as they do already, writing to the best of their ability without thought of an audience. Yet even if this is true — that most of the satisfactions are private — you might still need to feel that someone is responding, even if you have no idea who they are. Until you are published it might be difficult to move on; you could easily feel that nothing had been achieved, and that by failing to reach another person — the reader — the circle had not been completed, the letter posted but not received. Perhaps without such completion a writer is destined to repeat himself, as people do when having conversations with themselves, conversations never heard by anyone.
Yet Father would not stop writing. It was crucial to him that these stories be told. Like Scheherazade, he was writing for his life.
*
Where do stories come from? What is there to write about? Where do you get material? How do you start? And: why are writers asked these questions so often?
It isn’t as if you can go shopping for experience. Or is it? Such an idea suggests that experience is somehow outside yourself, and must be gathered. But in fact, it is a question of seeing what is there. Experience is what has already happened. Experience, like love and hate, starts at home: in the bedroom, in the kitchen. It happens the moment people are together, or apart, when they want one another and when they realise they don’t like their lover’s ears.
Stories are everywhere, and they can be made from the simplest things. Preferably from the simplest things, as Father would have said, if they are the right, the precise, the correct things, and if the chosen material is profitable, useful and sufficiently malleable. I say chosen, but if the writer is attentive the stories she needs to shape her urgent concerns will occur unbidden. There are certain ideas, like certain people, that the writer will be drawn to. She only has to wait and look. She cannot expect to know why this idea has been preferred to that until the story has been written, if then.
There is a sense — there has to be a sense — in which most writers do not entirely understand what they are doing. You suspect there might be something you can use. But you don’t know what it is. You have to find out by beginning. And what you discover probably will not be what you originally imagined or hoped for. Some surprises can be discomfiting. But this useful ignorance, or tension with the unknown, can be fruitful, if not a little unreliable at times.
*
The master Chekhov taught that it is in the ordinary, the everyday, the unremarkable — and in the usually unremarked — that the deepest, most extraordinary and affecting events occur. These observations of the ordinary are bound up with everyone else’s experience — the universal — and with what it is to be a child, parent, husband, lover. Most of the significant moments of one’s life are ‘insignificant’ to other people. It is showing how and why they are significant and also why they may seem absurd, that is art.
The aged Tolstoy thought he had to solve all the problems of life. Chekhov saw that these problems could only be put, not answered, at least by the part of yourself that was an artist. Perhaps as a man you could be effective in the world; and Chekhov was. As a writer, though, scepticism was preferable to a didacticism or advocacy that seemed to settle everything but which, in reality, closed everything off. Political or spiritual solutions rendered the world less interesting. Rather than reminding you of its baffling strangeness, they flattened it out.
In the end there is only one subject for an artist. What is the nature of human experience? What is it to be alive, suffer and feel? What is it to love or need another person? To what extent can we know anyone else? Or ourselves? In other words, what it is to be a human being. These are questions that can never be answered satisfactorily but they have to be put again and again by each generation and by each person. The writer trades in dissatisfaction.
*
How, then, can the novel, the subtlest and most flexible form of human expression, die? Literature is concerned with the self-conscious exploration of the lives of men, women and children in society. Even when it is comic, it sees life as something worth talking about. This is why airport fiction, or ‘blockbusters’, books which are all plot, can never be considered literature, and why, in the end, they are of little value. It is not only that the language in which they are written lacks bounce and poignancy, but that they don’t return the reader to the multifariousness and complication of existence. This, too, is why journalism and literature are opposed to one another, rather than being allies. Most journalism is about erasing personality in favour of the facts, or the ‘story’. The personality of the journalist is unimportant. In literature personality is all, and the exploration of character — or portraiture, the human subject — is central to it.
*
Writers are often asked if their work is autobiographical. If it seems to me to be an odd, somewhat redundant question — where else could the work come from, except from the self? — I wonder whether it is because there remains something mysterious about the conversion of experience into representation. Yet this is something we do all the time. We work over our lives continuously; our minds generate and invent in night-dreaming, day-dreaming and in fantasy. In these modes we can see that the most fantastic and absurd ideas can contain human truth. Or perhaps we can see how it is that important truths require a strange shape in order to be made acceptable. Or perhaps it is simply true that the facts of life are just very strange.