I had come across just that sort of thing in a book about the West Indies by Anthony Trollope. It was a scene, like a scene in a novel, that took place in a shoe shop in Jamaica. It was all dialogue, it was comic, and it seemed to have nothing to do with Jamaica. But it was telling, it was Jamaican, and it mattered because it was memorable.
So far my writing had saved me. That was also how I had managed my trip. I saw it in the notebooks. I had been very lonely traveling. I had missed Jenny and Jack. I had always thought of myself as a homesick traveler. But by writing, and especially by not writing about the very thing that was bothering me — not indulging myself — I was able to make something new of my experience, and I created a mood of appreciation. In writing well and giving the experience order I gained a perspective and discovered my place in it.
On the trip I was less intense than I was now, because I had been heading home to my happy family, or so I had thought. I had been wrong, and I found myself in a truer, colder, more imprisoning Siberia than the one I had left. I could not rely on anyone’s help in getting me out of it. No one was waiting for me now — that was the worst of it, but it was also a spur. I saw that when I was writing I was not only changing my mood, I was actually using this solitude and loneliness and all the freezing indifference of the world to make a good thing; turning failure into its opposite, something sunny.
But Siberia remained. Siberia was the unfinished book; and Siberia was also the world around me every day when I stopped writing. Nothing depressed me so suddenly or made me doubt myself so swiftly than the question, “How’s your work going?”
Then I was reminded of my secret life — the room in which I both worked and slept. I was living far from the civilized world and trying to make sense of where I was. In the past I had written out of a different anxiety: I had been mocking ghosts to show I was not afraid. It had worked.
But now I was in Siberia and I was terrified. Hiding that terror in my writing — because I was determined not to freeze — made my writing breezy and gave it strange grace notes. In the best comedy, there is clearly something wrong, but it is secret and unstated — not even implied. Comedy is the public version of a private darkness. The funnier it is the more one must speculate on how much terror lies hidden. I had just discovered that simple truth. In writing, though, I was not trying to be funny; I was just trying not to be gloomy. Sometimes I was drowning and sometimes swimming, and I was often surprised I hadn’t died.
I was also taking the trip for the second time, and now I knew where to go and what to do. That was the beauty of a travel book. It was true of most other writing, too: it was a second chance. What looked like the gift of prophecy was no more than hindsight.
This time on the trip I was alone. I was an alien. I did not belong in this country and I had to face the fact that if I had died it would not have mattered. There was always someone else to take your place. There had been someone. From time to time, as fuel, I saw distinctly the scene in the warm, well-lighted room at Greville Lodge. The fearful faces. All the food. Wilkie trembling. “Eat it!” The man’s wrinkled lips as he swallowed, and then “My eyes!” I laughed. But though I was ashamed I would have done it again.
I was writing for my life, I was writing to prove that I existed. It was as though I was inventing a written language, innovating a book, originating a point of view; taking deep breaths and trying to come alive.
Each day when Jenny set off for work I crept into my room and I wrote. Some days I worked by candlelight. The miners’ strike caused these blackouts. I loved them — the sudden darkness, the helpless city lit by flashlights and candles; everything locked and closed, like a plague city. It was the way I felt — a big city lit by candles, only part of my mind engaged, muddling through. On the days that Jenny was home I hardly worked. I went out, and walked, and I realized what a foreigner I was, and how little I belonged. And so when I worked I worked with passion. It was like facing a blizzard and shouting into the wind. It didn’t affect the wind but it made me strong.
The days lengthened. At some point the miners’ strike ended, and both sides claimed victory. The light sharpened, and there was more of it. That helped. And spring came. Some evenings Jenny came home and said, “What do you do all day?” I did not say. Spring deepened and progressed. It was then I discovered the only predictable season in England. Summer was uncertain and often cold. Autumn was chilly and no sooner had the leaves changed color than they were gone. They did not fall as they did in Massachusetts. They were torn off the trees by the wind, or else soaked and splatted on the street. Winter was damp and dark; the dampness was colder than frost. But spring came on time, in overlapping phases and echoes; it was a feeling, then a suggestion of color, and a new temperature, and then it began to surge. It was like a song, with a chorus, a round perhaps, sung over and over again, growing louder and greener, becoming warmer; and the whole season came out of the ground.
I was making progress on my work. I needed the routine, and Jenny’s indifference and Jack’s demands were part of that same routine. I needed to make meals, I needed to wash the dishes, I needed to stop. It was necessary that I feel like a prisoner; it was crucial to my wishing to free myself. I had fitted my writing into all of this.
The trip had taken four and a half months. The book took exactly the same length of time to write. I now saw that it was a book. I had never found that an easy word to say.
On the day that I wrote the last page I left the house earlier than usual and went for a long walk before meeting Jack. I was an alien, a stranger, but this city did not frighten me anymore. The ugly brick houses did not depress me any longer. It did not matter that there were no vistas and that I could not see farther than the end of the road. I stopped dreaming about dying here and being buried in a muddy hole in Catford, beside the tracks. It had been a hard winter, but I had come through it. I was not afraid anymore. My work was done.
“How’s your work coming?”
“It’s a book,” I said. But I was too superstitious to claim that it was all finished. “Almost done.”
“I’m sure it’s good,” Jenny said.
She had not seen a word of it; no one had. That secrecy made me strong.
“I don’t know,” I said. I liked it for being a new thing, but I could not say it was good. And yet I was not worried.
8
It did not matter to me whether the book was good or not, though I was sure it was funny, and I knew there was merit in that. I believed that comedy was the highest expression of truth. This traveling would not say everything to everyone but it had something for some people, I was sure. They were people like me. In the course of writing I had stopped seeing myself as special or different and began to think: There are many people like me. I had written the book in order to lose myself, and they would read it for the same reason, to get through their own Siberian winter.
There was one thing more that satisfied me. This was precisely the book I had in mind, the one I had set out to write. I wasn’t looking for praise, only a way of ending the trip; and had done what I intended. When the book was finished the trip was over. Now I was really and truly home.