Nick Le Mesurier

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.