Any writer is more likely to believe this if she has had this experience before, if she has had a parent, teacher or carer who was convinced of the child’s usefulness, who found the child’s concerns appealing. If she lacks this, she will have to install or create this belief for herself, using others at workshops, for instance, as stand-ins for absent figures.
On the other hand, any sort of writer has to be able to bear the fact that other people will not be interested. They might be appalled, disgusted, indifferent. Then, like anyone facing criticism, the writer has to decide whether to continue in the same way, or modify what he does in order to suit the other.
To write seriously, then, a lot of things have to be in place and a lot will change as you go.
*
The question of who you write for can often be answered in this way. (In fact, you might as easily ask: who are you living for?) First of all you write for another part of yourself. And this other part of the self, this internal reader as it were, might be over-discriminating or have too confined a taste. There might be all kinds of possible work you could do (or possible lives you could lead) which are prohibited by the zealous internal reader. This scrutineer, who could become a tyrant or saboteur rather than an ally, might require an education — from others — in fruitful vulgarity. Workshop colleagues or a teacher might help you to be bolder.
*
Usually, at the beginning of each weekly workshop I ask what people have been reading or have seen. All the students watch films — commercial, American films mostly. Some of them go occasionally to the theatre. What shocks me is how little they read. While they mention some contemporary or fashionable novels, there are few ‘classics’ or philosophy, and little poetry.
I have always assumed that reading and imaginative writing go together. A writer’s originality can consist of how he distorts or uses someone else’s work. Even a failed plagiarist is an artist. What I’m trying to do, I guess, is get the students to read and look as writers, seeing how the author achieved an effect, being aware of what they can use or transform for themselves. If writing is the translation of feeling into language, I want to encourage a closer acquaintance with the language in order to increase the quantity and quality of expressed feeling. This is not reading for fun, and it is not literary criticism.
What I noticed as a young man at school — and it wasn’t difficult to see, it was drummed into us — was that the well-behaved, the conformists and the compliant were, and would be in life, the most rewarded. What was disturbing was not only that the less bright would go down, but that the dissenters, the ‘difficult’ pupils, often the funniest or liveliest, would not only fail, but be excluded from approval. I suppose I saw myself like that. Luckily there were the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Where I did belong, I discovered, was in ‘pop’, then a haven for non-conformists and the creatively odd. Around this time my friends and I began to use marijuana and take LSD regularly. Until then I’d been, I think, not unlike a lot of boys, educationally anorexic. Nothing would go in; I wouldn’t let it in. One day someone gave me De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. I went from this to Hunter S. Thompson and after that never stopped reading. The dissipated writers, Bukowski, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and then Roth, Salinger, Kerouac — artists who combined pleasure with art — seemed as self-destructive as pop stars. They were writers who eulogised wild, suffering young men in despair. This was both a picture of how I felt and a picture of who I wanted to be in certain parts of myself. I began to learn that literature was not respectable and didn’t only belong to the teachers or upholders of culture.
Between the ages of fourteen and thirty I read novels, non-fiction, magazines, newspapers. I went to the theatre or concerts at least once a week. I listened to pop, classical and jazz music constantly, tapes, the radio, anything that was around or had been recommended. Later, I lay on the sofa reading The Remembrance of Things Past in the afternoons, from three or six every day, until I finished it, making notes as I went. I read history, politics and philosophy too, in order to think about race, class and gender, notions which were being generally investigated at the time. There was a hunger or longing in me, during that confusing, semi-independent period after childhood and adolescence, for knowledge and comfort, for what I thought was wisdom, and for close contact with stories and writers. I was beginning to try to make sense of my childhood and parents; I required tools for understanding. At the same time I wanted the world but not too much of it. It was easier to bear mediated through books. Reader and writer meet but their bodies do not touch.
Later on I read to see what other writers were doing. This is still of interest to me, but less significant. I have my own voice and concerns as a writer. I’m less likely to learn from anyone else. I would like to read seriously and for long periods again, but there always seems to be something more important to do than remaining in close contact with the mind and feelings of a stranger.
*
My doubts about what I can offer as a teacher don’t diminish. Although I’ve received much incisive and necessarily ruthless assistance over the years from directors, literary managers, editors and friends, I’ve noticed in other writers who teach an inability to see why their students might find it painful. If a writer can write it does not follow that he can understand what the problems of writing might be, or why someone else might find it hard or almost impossible to do. A writer might not want to look at how he had made himself. There could be mutual incomprehension.
Nonetheless I decide to continue with the workshop as long as people come. Sometimes the pleasure of the group seems to be its sole justification. After all, why a group at all when writing is so personal, so private, and may be a way of protecting yourself from various kinds of community coercion? You’d think it was the last thing people would want to do communally.
I was thinking this the other night, after setting an exercise for the group. If I ever wondered what the point of all this might be — my pathological scepticism, you might call it — the students’ demands reminded me. They had come to the workshop in the cold winter rain believing there was something there for them. One man came from Exeter; another commuted weekly from Liverpool, and now fifteen people were working in a room next to the tube line. As I wrote, too, making these notes, I was aware of the quality of silence in the room, an extended, concentrated silence. The members of the group were lying on sofas, sitting on hard chairs, they were hunched in corners on the floor, but everyone was writing, separately but somehow together. I’d set a time limit for the exercise — so there would be time for a break, and then for participants to read work aloud — but it took me several attempts to interrupt them. Later we went to the bar for more talk about plays and writing, and some of the group exchanged email addresses in order to look at one another’s work.
This was, it seemed to me, a productive way to spend an evening.
*
‘Workshops’ were used for group therapy by the psychotherapist Carl Rogers in, of course, California. This ‘planned, intensive group experience’ was, in his judgement, ‘the most rapidly expanding social invention of the century’. Workshops were, in the jargon of the time, ‘training groups in human relations skills’. The idea was that individuals would be taught to observe their interactions with others.
Rogers and others with Freudian backgrounds, like Fritz Perls (a German exile and Gestaltist, who began the Esalen Institute in Big Sur), knew already of the powerful feelings stirred in the traditional psychoanalytic couple — patient and analyst. They were curious to see what would happen if more people were introduced into the room, if you could, according to the democratic impulses of the time, attempt some kind of therapy with a group. If the usual social defences of 1950s America, which had begun to seem unnecessarily constraining — politeness, good manners, small talk and alcohol — were removed, the current of feeling between people ran with extraordinary strength. The intimacy, the quality of honesty, and of ‘realisation’ possible, was more illuminating and pleasurable — and painful — than a thousand conventional conversations. New, temporary communities could be formed when the old ones didn’t work. These ‘encounter’ groups spread rapidly.