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Tuesday, 16 August 2011

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The Writer’s Life

It’s funny that the subject I was faced with at the Galle Literary Festival this year was “The Writer’s Life.” I asked the audience whether this meant that I had to explain myself, and some said “yes” while others, who knew me too well, hastily said “no”.

Writers, I’ll have you know, lead all sorts of lives. Take Iris Murdoch (right). In 1995, her last novel, “Jackson’s Dilemma” was published, and the “New Scientist” journal said that she received a bad press - and for a very good reason. You see, Iris was already beginning to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease, and it had also begun to affect her creativity, not only as a writer but as a philosopher. Her two earlier novels, “Under the Net” and “The Sea, the Sea” had been works of grammatical complexity, but her textual analysis in “Jackson’s Dilemma” must have been her dilemma too. She had far fewer words and, in their usage, much simpler. Scientists even went to the extent of comparing her last novel with the earlier works I have mentioned. Even the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience of England got into the act, Certainly “Jackson’s Dilemma” was trod on heavily by the critics, but that is all part of the writer’s life, isn’t it? Her mind was not answering her the way it used to. Oh well, as any writer will tell you, is life!

Any writer likes to be quoted. These are the little bits that are like the icing on life’s cake. Virginia Woolf once said that nothing really happens until it has been described; but Samuel Butler made the observation that man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat, until he eats them. I have this vision of our broiler suppliers. They will feed their birds until they burst, then let off their heads because they are marketable.

C S Lewis once said that most people spend their lives doing neither what they want to be doing nor what they ought to be doing. Anyway, all these pert observations aside, what IS the writer’s life? So he or she is writing what is confidently thought to be a masterpiece and when the publisher is persuaded to give it a go, there is much dismay that the book is not popularly acclaimed. But there come the dry-mouthed critics who re full of congratulations.

The author is down in the mouth. “But it is not a popular read. My book is not moving. My publishers are unhappy.”

He or she is quickly assured that that is the way of all masterpieces. “If your book is unpopular, it is certainly a masterpiece!”

Can anyone make sense of that?

Someone will drop in, smile broadly and say, “How’s life?” How indeed! I had sat at the computer from midnight and had only broken my concentration when the wife plunked a cup of tea at my elbow. It’s six in the morning. That’s also a part of my writer’s life. I just can’t find the time or the inclination to sleep.

“There’s too much going on in your head,” the wife says and is rather taken aback when, sleepless as I am, I still have the energy to bring things to a head. But, come evening, I do feel tired. I’ve been to town, done the marketing, popped in at bookshops, argued over the price of pet food and had words with a traffic policeman. It is quite a long process of getting tired and I’m determined to have good night’s sleep, but that never seems to happen I’m awake and alert in a couple of hours and have a lot more to write.

My cousin, the late Ivor Milhuisen, once told me that I need to be fathomed. He thought he had me, hook, line and sinker, but if I cannot understand why there is something inside me that keeps getting younger while I grow older and older, how does anybody try to explain me?

I rarely pay attention to my health. I think that’s one of the greatest hindrances. If I have to keep worrying about what every complicated mess of tubes and lumps of this and that and nerves and tendons and veins and arteries are up to, I’ll never be able to do what I’m doing.

To talk about a writer’s life is for the writer to discuss him or herself. It is not a good thing, because you will find yourself lost in a maze of questions. If I were to say I’m just a poor hack who is trying to make headway in the literary world, everybody will believe me and some may even show some sympathy. If I were to praise myself nobody will wish to believe me and think I’m an egomaniac!

I have gone in to poetry. Never could understand why, but I found it a nice way of spoiling prose. Quite a challenge too for I have to try and make harmony out of plain sense. I keep debunking organised religion. Can’t stand the very thought of it. I don’t know why God gave us religion in the first place. For what? He got rid of our primogenitors, cursed them roundly, sweat of your brow stuff, die the death stuff, fiery swords, the works. And then he gives us religion. It’s enough to drive anybody up the bathroom wall.

Take John Updike. He’s getting old now and worries about the things he writes. His big grouse is that he has come to that age where every sentence he writes bumps into one he wrote thirty years ago. Is that becoming a round robin or what? But this is part of the writer’s life too. He has to produce and produce he must even if he’s falling back on things he has written before.

There’s another thing: We have more writers today than there ever was. This is not all that good because readers become indolent. They just reach for any book they think would be good while some shrug and go away because they cannot choose. If there’s a big publicity hoo-ha about a book, they press in to get a copy. They rely on the publicity that hints at all things bright and beautiful. They then get up close with the book and wonder where the brightness and beauty went. What happened? I’ll never know, but as a rule, I avoid books with rave reviews. If I must find that art is merely imitating life, I’d be better off letting my life imitate art.

Let’s look at the way Samuel Taylor Coleridge (right) shaped up. In 1804, he was living with Wordsworth (left) in England’s Lake District. What was Coleridge doing? Why, spending his days bingeing up on opium, drinking all the gin he could, screaming at night and relentlessly chasing Wordsworth’s sister-in-law. And people call me mad or bad or anything else they think I should be called. Wordsworth soon broke with Coleridge, calling him “an absolute nuisance” and was convinced that Coleridge’s “entrails were rotted out of intemperance.”

What did we think when Gunter Grass (right), the Nobel Laureate, admitted that he had served in Hitler’s Waffen SS towards the end of World War II? He had joined when he was 17. “If I had been older,” he said, “I would have probably been caught up in war crimes,” and had to plead that for a long time he had carried a “sense of shame!

Finally let me introduce you to a young woman who could be best described as a foul-mouthed, formidable writer who has spent her life with the idea that all laws are for idiots (oh, I do agree) and has continuous problems with authority. What is more, she’s an Iranian who now lives in Paris and says that Parisian women spend their whole life sobbing about this, that and the other. She is Marjane Satrupi (right) and she also says that Iranian women are a hundred times tougher. She is also a graphic novelist, but life to her is a boxing ring with no seconds and a referee she has clouted into submission. No one dares to tell her how she should behave.

“Women in Iran have to be tough,” she says. “I fought back against my second-class status by educating myself and where necessary, by physical force. Her memoir is terrific. When she first came to Paris, a man tried to grope her while she was travelling on the Metro. That was in 1994. “I punched him in the mouth. The whole carriage gawped as though I was crazy, but in Iran, if a man touches you, you hit him. It’s that simple.”

She says she’s not a feminist and if a woman touches her, she will hit that woman too.

Attagirl! Way to go! She has my admiration. Me? I’ve got a nine-inch scar down my stomach where a man pushed in a knife and jerked it upwards, tearing my abdomen open. I’ve got a seaman’s penknife into my right forearm that took away the first letter of a tattoo. It’s the name of a girl I wanted to remember for some reason or another, for sailors do like to keep some record of the girls in every port. I also carry a neat knife slice on my right wrist and can’t tell you how that happened. That’s part of this writer’s good old days.

Writers and their lives! I’m seriously thinking of getting it all into a book, but I wonder how many of our writers would open up to me. And, how many would be as openly defiant as Marjane?

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