Yesterday, Jane Davis, Director of The Reader Organisation, gave us the benefit of her views on reading in Free Thoughts, a feature on BBC Radio 3 in which various writers and thinkers (are they separate beings?) each have been giving two minutes’ worth of their own precious distilled experience. Jane spoke of the importance of “an amazing technology" which people have "to explore and record the nature of the human condition”. It comprises “complex grammatical structures, highly flexible metaphors and syntax, and innumerable permutations of form.” She is talking about written language, which “more than any other form represents the sense, the structure, the smell, as it were, of experience itself.” The words on the page move into our brains, altering its chemistry. Reading, she argues, is second only to sex and eating in its primal significance and pleasure. Good writing, she says, is hard to achieve, and hard reading is “so temptingly easy to avoid.” The mental workout of reading Paradise Lost is equivalent to that of going to the gym – seen as good for us, if only we have the time, the energy, the inclination. 

We live frenetic, fragmented lives, into which we fit bits of experience, imagining they make up a whole. Reading hard demands a different pace. It is a paradox that we often assign reading to the last few moments of the day, a throwback to our childhoods, perhaps, when we listened to a bed-time story, or even further when we gathered around the camp fire at night to hear stories that gave sense and significance to our fears and helped to allay them. If nothing else, this should confirm the importance of stories for us. Though it is reassuring that we also choose to use reading as the preferred way to fill time when we are obliged to sit still, on the train or the aeroplane. The need to read is there, always; but if Jane is right, and I think she is, we have lost sight of how much it can do for us and of how much we can do for it.

Like many people, I commute to work, where I spend long hours, and arrive home tired and with the feeling that I’ve done what is necessary, but not what is significant. But I have lately discovered a new found land, my America, in the shape of audio books, easily and cheaply downloadable from the Internet. My drive to work drive lasts 75 minutes each way; enough time to get deep into a good book. So far I have listened to three volumes of In Search of Lost Time, most of Ulysses, most of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Anna Karenina, as well as more recent stuff such as Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, and Hanif Kureishi’s Intimacy. Often I have found myself so engrossed in what I am listening to that I have no recollection of having travelled at all. They may say of me one day that he died of literature!

Useful though audio books are in providing access to ‘difficult’ literature they do not provide quite the same experience as reading it. It is true that they offer fast, direct access to the story, and in a good reading, many of the aural qualities of the text. But because one is swept along by the flow of the actor’s reading one can also miss many of the details that make reading seriously both hard and rewarding.

I wonder how many people who say they aspire to write do not in practice give equal weight to reading? How much is lost if, as an aspiring writer of fiction, one reads Shakespeare with less assiduity than, say, Zadie Smith? or J.K Rowling (I mean, of course, no disrespect to Ms Smith or Ms Rowling).

Jane Davis has devoted much of her life to bringing literature “down from the shelf”, as she puts it, and “into the hands of people who need it.” She states in her Free Thought that we need “the added brain power and meditative reflection that reading can bring”. To do so I think we need to learn to regard and accept classics such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, to which she refers in her Thought and which was written down 4000 years ago, as being at least as s important to our everyday life as any modern novel or story in the press. Not that they’re the same, but I think that neither should be shrouded in mystery. Gilgamesh is a great read, and its eponymous hero a complex character, full of recognisable virtues and vices, dealing with a problem we can easily identify with.

Thanks to Jane Davis for her insight and her enthusiasm.

 

In the Guardian Review of August 2nd 2008, Gao Xingjian, the exiled Chinese writer and Nobel laureate makes a remark that has been said in one way or another by many writers. Reflecting on his years in China under a Communist government that banned his work and drove him into exile he remarks it was “impossible to say freely what you thought, even in your family…Everything people say in those circumstances is false; everybody is wearing a mask. It’s in literature that true life can be found. It’s under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.”

This week, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, died. He too had spoken out against his government, and had been imprisoned and sent into exile for it. I remember I read eagerly his books when I was in my early twenties: Cancer Ward and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; and also a book of shorter fiction: We Never Make Mistakes. One story in this book, Incident at Kretchetovka Station struck me very powerfully at the tme. As far as I can recall, it concerns the arrival of a train full of Russian soldiers at a remote railway station somewhere in the Soviet Union at the end of WWII. The soldiers had spent much of the war as prisoners of the Germans. They are returning home now, but not to a hero’s welcome. They are all destined for the labour camps or execution. In the logic of the regime it was impossible for a Soviet soldier to have surrendered: all such men had to be deserters. The story itself, as far as I can recall, involved a Red Army soldier whose humanity and loyalty to the party is tested when he confronts one of the men on the train. I can’t remember the action or the ending. I do remember I wrote a one-act play about it, called, The Eyes of the State. It was probably dreadful. But I’m sure there was something about the sense of injustice which ran through the story that appealed to me. I found I could identify with the oppressed and betrayed heroes in the play. No doubt I associated my own experience of being an 'oppressed' teenager with that of the returning soldiers.

Naïve though I was in many aspects of my association, I certainly believed that literature provided the only true life. My experience of oppression was mainly through my familiy, who were in fact far from oppressive, though I didn't think so at the time. Young people think strongly of the need to break free of boundaries that are imposed by others. No doubt Solzhenitsyn's story seemed to reflect my own awareness of oppression and injustice enough to inspire me to engage with it through writing. And though the differences in scale were vast in terms of talent, experience and so on, perhaps that was when I first became aware of that paradoxical truth to which Gao Xingjiang alludes.

 

The Halt in the Desert, by Richard Dadd

At Tate Britain's current exhibition, The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting I discovered the work of Richard Dadd. Dadd was a young artist who, in 1842, went on the Grand Tour of the antiquities of the ancient world. There he developed an illness, possibly schizophrenia, though it was thought at first to be sunstroke, which led him to believe he was under the control of the Egyptian god, Osiris. He later murdered his father, fearing him to be inhabited by the devil, and was sentenced to detention for life in Bethlem Hospital, Bedlam, where he lived for twenty years before being moved to Broadmoor. He eventually died of tuberculosis at the age of 71. Dadd continued to paint all the time he was incarcerated, and is now recognised as one of the most unusual and original artists of the Victorian era. He specialised in pictures of fairies and of Oriental scenes, often painted in meticulous detail. His pictures, even those of actual scenes, combine acute observation with a sense of surreal fantasy. Many of his paintings describe images recalled in memory from his journey in 1842.

At the exhibition I came across a novel by Jennifer Higgie, called Bedlam, which evokes the fateful year in which Dadd developed his illness. The book describes it through Richard's eyes, using a series of short impressionistic chapters that slowly evolve to reveal the growing tensions within his mind. But while we experience Dadd's slow descent into paranoia, we also experience his artist's vision, which remains awed by the landscape and cities through which he passes. Higgie's writing is as poetic and as meticulously observed as Dadd's paintings, and through it we see, hear and feel the mind of Dadd struggling to maintain his powers of observation even while he loses his reason. It is a remarkable book, a great piece of writing, and I want to explore it more thoroughly in a review, which I shall begin as soon as I have finished reading it!

  I am reading The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner. What a novel! I’m intrigued by Faulkner’s evocation of character, memory and of the moral forces that drive them. And by the sheer courage and audacity of his writing! For all its difficulty it evokes a wonderfully rich portrait of a crumbling Southern family. Nothing is explained, no quarter is given. But if you want to get inside someone’s head, as he does his characters, why should you do so for nothing. The work you have o do is part of the experience.
  I like this extract from his address on receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950:
  “…Our tragedy today is a general and universal and physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the sprit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
  He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labours under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands…”
  I’m not sure if writers today have “forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.”  But I think that some ideas stand out as somehow more ‘right’ than others, and that no amount of forcing the bad ones can make them good. My own limited experience of writing has shown me that the bits and pieces that work have drawn somehow on a memory or two of mine that is felt. The memory doesn’t have to be very significant in itself but it helps enormously if it resonates with emotion. I’ve often tried to work up ideas that seem topical or rational, and so far not one has worked. It could be something to do with my skill, but it could also be something to do with the sort of idea from which it emerges. The knack, of course if one is not to wait for inspiration all the time is to find a connection with people who might not seem at first to offer it. Quite apart from technical ability, the writer's gift is walk in their shoes.

 

Susan Hill writes in The Guardian Review (12 July 2008) about the appeal of short stories, which she says is far greater for writers than it is for readers. She bemoans the fact that creative writing courses continue to teach “how to write short stories” (sic); even though she admits that when she needs a writing lesson she goes to a great short story. She warns that beginners begin with the short story at their peril. 

It is true, I think, that the short story form is, as she says, “unforgiving”. Yet there are good reasons why writers just starting out on their careers should think seriously about the short story form, even though they are very unlikely to make much money from selling them. Here are just a few that come to mind: 

The short story offers the opportunity to complete a first draft of something relatively quickly. Though the process of revision may be long and painstaking, it is much easier to revise something when you know the ending (even approximately) and the shape of a thing than when you don’t. It feels good to finish something.

A first draft of a novel, even if written at speed, takes weeks, or months, or maybe longer. I don’t know about you, but I take a little time to get into a writing mind. For whatever reasons (and I’m not proud of the fact) it usually takes me a couple of hours to get the juices going; and even then there’s no guarantee that what I write will be any good. More often than not it isn’t. If all I’ve got is a few hours a week, most of that time is going to be spent in setting up. Raymond Carver said he wrote short stories because he found the form suited his lifestyle, which for a long time included a full time job and a family. One has to be practical and work with what one has got. The process of initial composition is one I’m still learning to understand and work with. 

The short story form offers the writer the chance to experiment with many different styles, voices, and forms, without having to commit to any of them. This is extremely valuable practice. Readers expect and need a certain amount of consistency, and there are only so many styles etc one can employ in a single novel before it wobbles out of control. Managing a novel that employs many different styles and so on is a skill best left to the more experienced writer, perhaps. 

It is hard to write well. Morale is easily lost if one does not feel one has made some progress, some achievement. I think the reason short stories appeal to novice writers so much is the fact that the form offers the possibility of a complete creation, a world in miniature that can be brought within reach relatively quickly. And there are some wonderful examples to aspire to.