The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  A child learns early how to pick up the facts he needs to make sense of the world and make a ‘story’ of it – his story. In the word-of-mouth world that is a family, storytelling is still part of the complex give and take of daily intercourse, a means of weaving the past into the present to create continuity, of holding the adult storyteller and the little wide-eyed listener in a single moment and on a single breath. Here children keep touch, through story, with their own past lives, and get living glimpses, as much through what a voice carries of feeling as through word-pictures or facts, into the lives of their parents and grandparents. Such formulae as ‘Tell me the time when’ renew a child’s contact with the reassuringly familiar, but always in the hope that this time round some new detail will emerge and give the story a different colour or dimension, or that he himself will catch something in it that he missed in other tellings and will this time take him ‘beyond’.

  The truth is that our experience, for all that we are the subject of it, is a mystery to us. We have no notion, amid the events and feelings and words and pictures that crowd in upon us, of the advent of our most secret understandings, the moments that will one day mean most to us, which image glimpsed, or word spoken, will occasion in us that sweet shock in which the whole ‘spider’s web of the finest silken threads’, to go back to Henry James’ image, will suddenly glow and tremble in the chamber of our consciousness.

  ‘We do not know today,’ Emerson tells us in a memorable passage, ‘whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have discovered afterwards that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our days are so uncomfortable while they pass, that ’tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this thing which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those that Hermes won with dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born.’

  WHEN THE WRITER SPEAKS

  THE REAL ENEMY OF writing is talk. There is something about the facility of talk, the ease with which ideas clothe themselves in the first available words, that is antithetical to the way a writer’s mind works when he is engaged in the slower, and, one wants to say deeper business of writing. And of course once the words have come in one form it is more difficult to discover them in another. The voice of easy speaking has already occupied the space that needs to be filled by that quieter, more interior, less sociable voice that belongs to solitude and to waiting – to waiting patiently for the writing itself to speak. That is why writers are so unwilling to talk about work in progress. They are afraid of speaking too soon and from the wrong place, with the wrong voice; of resolving too quickly, in talk, the tension whose energies they will need to draw on later, in solitary struggle and against the resistance of what has not yet been articulated. The writer needs both to trust words and to be wary of them. A writer, as Thomas Mann tells us, is someone who finds writing difficult.

  Silence: that is the natural state from which writing proceeds; a state in which the voice in our head, which only very reluctantly ceases to argue and assert, to hold forth on what it knows or to mull over old occasions and slights and controversies, falls still at last and allows that other, smaller voice to be heard that knows nothing of ‘issues’, has no opinions or convictions, is curious, doubtful, and interested in everything, eager to live inside each thing and to discover and recreate, so far as language allows, the life that is in it.

  The writer I have been evoking is what we loosely call the imaginative writer, the poet, the teller of tales whose business, as he would see it, is with discovery; not the articulation of some previously held view but the groping through words towards something only vaguely grasped and which he will recognise only when words have set it down on the page.

  There is, of course, another kind of writing, and if I make a distinction between the two it is not to create a hierarchy but to suggest that they are products of different states of consciousness.

  This other form of writing does belong to the world of moral or social or political issues; to argument, opinion, judgement. It is the product of a consciousness that is very active and alert and it needs these qualities to do what it must do, which is to challenge, question, turn received ideas on their heads; and the more it knows, and the more, at the very moment of writing, it can draw on what it knows, the richer the writing will be, the more focused, the more wide-ranging and convincing.

  This argumentative or expository sort of writing is too varied to have a single name. It would have to be a very loose term indeed that would contain say, Milton’s Areopagitica and the pamphlets on divorce, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Tom Paine and Burke, Thoreau’s ‘On Civil Disobedience’, Hazlitt and Emerson’s essays, Shaw’s musical criticism under the name of Cornetto di Basso, or such contemporary examples as the work of Janet Malcolm and Julian Barnes’ pieces for The New Yorker. The point of distinction, as I say, is not quality but the different attitudes of mind out of which the two forms of writing are produced. One is active and supremely self-conscious, grounded in reason but open to the spirit of play; the other, in the Keatsian sense, deeply passive, where the less conscious you are of what you already know, the more of previous knowledge, and the attitudes and opinions that go with it, has fallen out of your head, the more responsive you will be to what the writing itself is about to discover, the readier you will be to get on with the real business of attending – in both senses – on what you are about to be told.

  The novel, which for the past 150 years or so has been the major literary form in our culture, is an interesting case because it is mixed.

  In earlier novels, Hugo’s Notre-Dame for instance, or Moby-Dick, the two forms of writing may both be present but are kept distinct. The essayistic chapters that interrupt and expand the narrative in Notre-Dame are brilliantly argumentative, full of dazzlingly original speculations on the relationship between language and architecture – the idea, for instance, in the chapter called ‘Ceci Tuera Cela’ that the printing-press killed architecture – or on the social changes behind different architectural styles. But however playful and imaginative they may be, however full of poetic flare, these chapters belong to a different mode, a different form of thinking, from the bold language-act by which Hugo appropriates a neglected and half-ruined building and raises it out of the realm of stone into that of language, makes of it a verbal artefact, a text that is literally written all over with multilingual graffiti, or from the descent into the world of folk-tale, and dream or nightmare, that creates Quasimodo as a living extension of the cathedral, one of its gargoyles made flesh. And we might make the same distinction between the various parts of Moby-Dick, where the essays on every aspect of whaling – precise, poetic, self-consciously playful, sceptical and subversive even, in the manner of the French Encyclopaedists – belong to a different world of invention from that of Ahab and the others, which dives down deep into a form of poetic thinking that is continuous with dreaming, and demands a different and more ‘poetic’, that is allusive and reverberative, language.

  A century later this essayistic quality gets integrated into the main narrative, and Thomas Mann, for instance, goes to considerable lengths to insist that the philosophical arguments and political exchanges in The Magic Mountain are as much a product of the poetic spirit as the complex imagery of disease that makes the rest of the book so clearly a work of the imagination.

  Mann recognises a crisis here. What he has to say about the novel reflects on his own position in the earlier part of the last century but points to something generally true that we need to take account of. The novel, he tells us, ‘because of its analytical spirit, its consciousness, its innate critical attitudes, can no longer remain undisturbed and sweetly oblivious of the world’.

  That ‘no longer’ suggests that the situation is new, and in some ways it is. Mann is speaking of an age in which the novelist too, as he sees it, ‘can no longer remain undisturbed and sweetly oblivio
us of the world’.

  Mann had not always taken this line. Before he began the long investigation of his social and aesthetic attitudes that he called Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, which kept him occupied for four whole years from September 1914 till the end of the war, he would have taken it for granted that his purely imaginative work, Death in Venice, say, or Tristan, stood apart from his political writings and that ‘to think and judge humanly is to think and judge unpolitically’. But the events of those years, and the writing of the book, changed him. When he began he was a conservative nationalist, anti-democratic in the tradition of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Too much the ‘writer’, that is, too eager to live in contraries and contradictions, too ironical, too aware of the need to qualify, to be a true polemicist, Mann found himself, as he emerged from his four-year ordeal and transformation, no longer on one side of the political line but on the other, a social democrat no less, and a committed supporter of the new republic. By the mid-thirties he could claim that he did not ‘rank the socio-political sphere lower than that of the inner life’.

  This business of the writer discovering, as he writes, what he really thinks, which may run counter to what he believes he thinks, comes close to the heart of what I want to say.

  This is when the writer speaks: out of his activity as a writer rather than as a good citizen or as a holder of this or that set of views. What he finds himself saying then may surprise and even shock him – and the writing will please him most perhaps when it does. It will be his assurance that a real act of writing has occurred. But it can happen only if he is prepared to go lax and empty. To give up what he thinks he knows and allows some other faculty to take over. Hugo may have been the earliest writer to recognise this phenomenon and put it into words. ‘All great writers,’ he tells us, ‘create two oeuvres, one deliberate, the other involuntary.’ And again: ‘As a person, one is sometimes a stranger to what one writes as a poet.’

  Hugo’s first proposition is wonderfully illustrated in his great contemporary Balzac. Balzac was by conviction a conservative. Catholic and Royalist, he speaks with contempt, even as late as the revolutionary year of 1848, in the preface to his last-published book, The Peasants, of ‘the democratic vertigo to which so many blind writers succumb’. He must have despised the woolly liberalism and drum-banging about Progress, and the sentimentality about peasants and workers (Balzac actually knew his peasants) that is at the damp centre of Hugo’s writing.

  But what the books themselves dramatise is not a right-wing view, or any view at all in that sense, but a series of radical insights into a phenomenon that Balzac found more fascinating than any other and which he approaches with the excited detachment of the naturalist who has discovered another form of Nature, nineteenth-century entrepreneurial capitalism; the way it corrupts private and public values, divides families, hardens the heart, and makes of the mind an instrument that can be deadly in its excessiveness and blind determination. The drive to success, the beating down of others in order to prevail – that is what animates Balzac’s characters, and, as a writer, living in the phenomenon as he observes and recreates it, what animates him. Even sex is either something to be manipulated and traded, or money-making becomes the expression of sexual energy in another form. The Market, whose working for Balzac is like the mysterious working of the universe, is a machine in which all his characters are caught, a contemporary version of what older writers, and writers like Hugo, called Fate, or Providence.

  It is as if these novels were written by the left hand of a man whose convictions they entirely violate. Even his own religious affiliations are not sacred. In one of the finest comic scenes he ever wrote, Madame Marneffe in Cousin Bette does a devastating imitation of poor Baroness Hulot’s virtuous piety as she pleads for mercy from her seducer Crevel, and the malicious delight Balzac takes in it, the energy it generates in him, is impersonal, has nothing to do with his own loyalties, and allows nothing to the fact that Baroness Hulot is genuinely virtuous and also helpless. He enters fully into the comic inventiveness of his creation, Madame Marneffe, and exploits it with a savagery that even Diderot, at his most anti-clerical, does not match.

  What we see here is that joy in the phenomenon itself, for its own sake and outside moral judgement, that is the true characteristic of the artist: a delight in God’s creation but also in his own. To enter, in a spirit of exuberant play, into even what is reprehensible – that is the artist’s way; which is why satirists so often get into trouble for loving too clearly what they excoriate. But what else should they do? Delight in the thing itself, the taking into yourself of its energy, the giving of your own energy to the free expression of it, the letting it run its course – that is what constitutes the artist’s interest in things; in the otherness of things. Outside the work he might take a stand; but in so far as he does it inside the work, even if it is on the side of the angels, by so much the less is he an artist. The work as a delighting of the spirit in what is has nothing to do with consciousness-raising, or progress, or right religion or right thinking. Chaucer may make a deathbed renunciation of his works on the grounds of their immorality, their impiety, and poor Isaac Babel in the Lubianka his on the grounds of political incorrectness, but the works, in all their lively incorrectness, shine clear.

  Of course one can argue that there are more important things than art. But they are not what concern the writer while he is writing. If he wants to put his work at the service of a cause, that’s his choice. Time will make its own judgement, both on the cause and his attachment to it. When the writer speaks, when he most truly speaks, is when he allows the writing to speak.

  But given Mann’s statement that the novel, and by implication the novelist too, ‘can no longer remain undisturbed and sweetly oblivious of the world’, when should the writer speak up, speak out in propria persona, as a citizen, but also, unavoidably in his case, as one who comes invested with whatever authority the writing itself has won for him?

  Some writers, on some occasions, have always done so: Voltaire for example, when he took up the case of Calas, Zola when, in J’accuse, he spoke out in the Dreyfus affair; most of all Hugo who in his attack on Louis Napoleon in Napoléon le Petit, set himself up as the embodiment of an alternative France, the president in exile of a republic of the spirit that was the true France – and it is worth noting perhaps that all three cases are French.

  Hugo was also the first writer after Voltaire to have a universal celebrity – almost separate from his fame as a writer but growing out of it – that gave his name, on any petition, in any cause, real currency from Mexico to Vietnam. His is the earliest example of a phenomenon that has now become general; in which writers, in a world where virtually everything has been subsumed into the culture of advertising, are asked increasingly, like those fake housewives who used to promote the virtues of washing-powder on TV, to endorse anything that needs for its selling that little extra push; from one another’s books to every sort of appeal for funds or the support of this or that political party at an election, but also in protest against the horrors that, despite old Hugo’s optimism, show no sign of going away.

  Thomas Mann is perhaps the most significant example in our time of a writer drawn out of his role as pure writer into that of public adversary; driven to speak up, out of what he called the ‘spiritual confusion’ of his time, for reason, justice, humanity, but most of all for that humane culture without which these cannot be sustained.

  One of Mann’s most moving statements is one he made in 1931 in answer to a question from young people about how, in a period of intense political struggle, one could go on writing. We do it, Mann answered, ‘because we believe in play and its dignity. We believe in secrets, in the human secret of art.’

  What makes the statement so moving is that Mann is speaking up for what is deeply personal, for what is closest to his heart, and to the centre of his private world, at a moment when he is already moving, or being moved, on to the public stage: as the figurehead of t
he ‘other Germany’, much as Hugo had been of the ‘other France’.

  It was a role he accepted very unwillingly and after a good deal of vacillation; he knew in advance what it would cost him. Speaking in a diary entry of 1933 of the defection to the Nazis of the grand old man of German letters, Gerhart Hauptmann, he writes: ‘I hate this idol whom I helped to magnify, and who magnificently regrets a martyrdom that I also feel I was not born for, but which I am driven to embrace for the sake of intellectual integrity.’

  What tormented Mann was the fear that a role that had been forced upon him by an accident of history might also have driven him out of what he had always seen as his natural course: the one that ‘large-handed Nature’ had offered him, like Goethe, as one of her favoured sons. In a diary entry of March 1934, he writes: ‘The inner rejection of martyrdom, the feeling that it is not appropriate for me, continues to be strong. Just now it has been re-awakened, and was confirmed and reinforced, when Lion quoted a remark made by Gottfried Benn a long time ago, “Do you know Thomas Mann’s house in Munich? There is truly something Goethean about it” – The fact that I was driven away from that existence is a serious flaw in the destined pattern of my life, one which I am attempting to accommodate to – in vain, it appears; and the impossibility of setting it right, and re-establishing that existence, impresses itself upon me, no matter how I look at it, and gnaws at my heart.’ What these private diary entries reveal is how unnatural it is for the artist to enter the world of political action and to speak there rather than in his own place on the stillness of the page. Mann is deeply torn; his reactions, from day to day, are contradictory, he wants to save himself from all this. He does speak out at last, but, being Mann, is also aware of the irony of his position; of the unpolitical man’s having become after all, as he puts it, ‘an itinerant preacher for democracy – a role whose comic element was always plain’.