April, 1970
portrait of a writer
When the writer was young, she felt guilty about writing. She didn’t know why. Writing was what she had wanted and intended to do from earliest childhood. And yet she felt guilty. She thought, in her confusion, that she ought to be studying and improving her mind, in order to write more serious things. She didn’t study, but spent her time thinking she ought to be studying. The hours she spent writing felt like stolen hours.
Whenever she wrote, she felt she ought to be hurrying along to the end. Often in the past she hadn’t finished what she began, and so finishing was her essential goal. Maybe then she would get over her sense of guilt. She was like a boy stealing grapes: in his whirlwind flight, troubling thoughts assail him; his head feels enveloped by a cloud of wasps. He has to bring his grapes to unknown people, remote, mysterious people he imagines as utterly different from himself and everyone around him. He’s afraid of them. He’s also afraid that avalanches and earthquakes will bar his path; he’s afraid that when he gets there he’ll find everyone vanished, the earth under their feet blown to bits.
She gave up writing, spent long years not writing at all. She got lost and forgot the paths that led to writing. Her hands were rusty, her thoughts muddled. Occasionally, amid her muddled thoughts, she would remember how she once used to write, and she felt she had betrayed her early goals. Then she would tell herself it was her duty to write again. And that stern resolution cast a sense of guilt over her life, which was now otherwise occupied. She often thinks she has found a way to feel guilty her entire life, for contrary reasons.
Old now, she writes very slowly. She stops a dozen times to do and undo. She has developed an extraordinary patience. Every so often she thinks that before she dies she must dredge up everything inside her. Yet the idea fails to rouse her. At times she thinks she has nothing left to dredge up, or has only very complex, tangled, contorted things. She has never enjoyed plunging into complexities. Now, however, her mind can get tangled in bizarre knots. Slowly, she tries to extricate herself. This slowness and patience are new and disagreeable—it would be far better to run like a thief.
She no longer feels she must offer her writing to remote, mysterious people. What she writes is meant for three or four people she sees often. In spells of depression, she imagines these three or four people understand nothing, and she asks fate to send her new people, or to give the old ones back their former insight. Even as she asks, she recalls that fate does not usually heed her requests.
She no longer fears earthquakes. She has gotten used to writing in harsh, inhospitable circumstances, oppressed by crushing misery, like someone who has learned to breathe under the weight of a heap of rubble.
In her youth she was blessed with imagination. Not much, but she did have a little. It worried her to have so little. Considering that since childhood she had resolved and expected to be a writer, a novelist, she found it quite odd to have so little imagination. She also seemed to lack the power of observation. She would seize on a number of tiny details from the world around her and keep them scrupulously in mind, but she perceived the whole as shrouded in a vaporous mist. She was very absentminded. Now and then she wondered what her characteristics as a writer were, and could find none. Sometimes she thought she wrote simply because she had decided to do so back in the distant past. Deep inside her was a dark whirling turmoil, like a subterranean river, and she felt her writing ought to spring from those waters. But she could not draw it to the surface.
Her imagination was neither daring nor lavish. It was an arid, grudging, frail imagination. She regarded it as a frail, delicate, precious possession: she was pulling a few sad, languishing flowers out of barren soil, while she would have liked a vast landscape of meadows and woods. So she felt impoverished. She must use her resources frugally. She was cautious, impetuous, and frugal all at once—impetuous especially because she felt that if she slackened, even her will might fail her.
Her frugality was actually more a form of avarice. She made up a few things and told them in swift, dry words. Since she wanted to love what she was writing, she gave her avarice the name of restraint. She was strongly determined to disregard her own weaknesses, or else to transform them into something noble, appealing, and praiseworthy.
But there were times when she was honest with herself. She admitted she didn’t like her avarice. She felt she was prodigal by nature. She would have liked to write streams of whirling, tumultuous pages that were limpid and faultless as well. Instead her pages possessed a clarity that was swift, orderly, neat, and miserly. This clarity was deceptive, for in truth she saw the world around her as veiled in mist. Thus besides being a miser she was also a liar. Her avarice arose from the fear of revealing her barren, misty wasteland of a world. Through the stingy little crack opening onto that world, she would grasp and number its arid flowers. And all this in great haste, because of her sense of guilt. She felt like a thief, a stingy, nervous, calculating thief. In lucid moments, she found herself despicable.
Yet she lulled herself with the idea that later on, in the future, she would suddenly be endowed with great powers of invention and observation. She would have a green, boundless imagination, a wild expanse of woods. She would also enjoy a vast harvest of ideas. And then she would be assiduous and generous in bestowing her wealth.
Now her future is just a cracked, rutted stretch of road where no grass grows. Her imagination has disappeared. She no longer feels guilty; she’s in no hurry. She has grown patient, and spends her time doing and undoing. She feels self-contempt rather than guilt—merely contempt, her patience being so disagreeable. Along with her imagination, her avarice has disappeared too: she has become generous and would give away all she has, only at times she suspects there is nothing left to give.
In her youth she was deeply envious of the books she had already written. She would study them, pore over them to figure out how she had managed to write them. Then she realized that any such quest was useless. She wasn’t learning anything from her own books: staring at them was like staring at a blank wall.
She couldn’t seem to maintain calm relationships with her books. Either she was too fond of them, or they made her sick. She never tired of reading them over and over, yearning to love them at any cost. She thought about them too much and too often. She thought they were written with admirable speed and restraint. What she now considers their basic flaw, their poverty of imagination and their short, nervous breath, used to seem beautiful and fill her with pride. Nonetheless, if anyone so much as ventured a critical word, she would suddenly detest those books and mentally rip them to shreds. Then for years they would inspire loathing, to the point of her never opening the cabinet where she had hidden them away. Now, on occasion these books come to mind; she may go to the cabinet, pick them up and leaf through them for a moment. She feels no envy, no loathing, only a slight disgust. Mostly they remind her of the periods when she wrote them, and how the places she invented mingled with fragments of the real places she was living in at the time—when she still had the imagination to invent and to mingle—places scattered through her memory and forming a geography where she alone can find her way about. She remembers how sad and lost she felt when she was finished and had to leave those places, like someone who has to leave a town whose every house and every alley is familiar, knowing for certain that he can never return; and recalling the great fury and speed of her writing back then, she wonders now what was her hurry, why she didn’t stay a little longer in those places invented with such avarice yet such precision.
There are words and expressions in her books which over the years she has come to hate. Yet it never occurs to her to get rid of them and rewrite them. Many people have already read those words; destroying them would be futile. And besides, she would be loath to touch a word in those books; their words and phrases seem frozen, written in stone. After all this time she still doesn’t have a calm relationship with her books. So she slams them shut and puts
them away, hoping others will love them, seeing that she herself, in the end, no longer does. What she feels for her books is a sort of vain tolerance that coexists, even blends, with disgust. And yet the tolerance and the disgust both seem directed not so much at the books but rather at what she herself was when she wrote them.
With all that, she sometimes thinks that in not caring for her books, in refusing to rewrite the parts that offend her, there is something unlovely, a weary renunciation of ever being, in her own eyes, the limpid, flawless writer she had hoped to become.
She has no more will to invent. She doesn’t know whether it’s because she is tired and her imagination is dead—always scanty, frail and sick, now it is dead—or because she understands that she wasn’t meant to invent but to tell what really happened, what she learned through others or on her own.
She doesn’t know if she should weep for the death of her imagination as a loss or welcome it as a liberation.
In the past she did use some elements of her real life, but she constructed her inventions around them, mixing the two, so that those few elements became unrecognizable to herself as well as to others. That process of mixing and kneading was so swift that almost immediately she would forget she had done it, though all the while she would be anxiously muttering her calculations and weighing every ingredient on her meticulous, secret scales. She didn’t feel like a thief but a cook, or better still, a pharmacist. At last she would have before her something in which the real had undergone a total and absolute metamorphosis.
Her spirit can no longer perform such a metamorphosis, or else refuses to perform it. Now when she wants to dredge up some fragment of her real life, knead it and manipulate it as she once did, each fragment seems to drag its whole context along with it. Her tiny scales have been knocked down and swept away. She no longer feels like a pharmacist or a cook. She doesn’t even feel like a thief—she has no urge to run away. Anyhow, she wouldn’t know where to run. She feels like herself. She’s not a miser anymore—she couldn’t possibly measure out the truth. And she needs to be slow and patient because what is before her is truth, sketching arabesques that are hard to decipher. Yet to decipher them is essential. Her mind can get tangled up in them and it’s difficult to extricate herself since her reason is quite hesitant and confused. Also, every so often the fear strikes her that these arabesques may have meaning only for her. She’s always hated the notion of writing only for herself. Even at her most miserly she couldn’t bear that notion. The three or four people she usually writes for express contradictory opinions and she can’t tell who’s right or wrong, nor can she see anyone coming along to take their place. There are times when she’s oppressed by the thought that maybe she is writing now simply to decipher herself, which seems a completely useless effort. She doesn’t feel guilty, since she doesn’t think she is capable of doing anything more useful. She has no plans or wishes to do anything else. She feels bound to this until death.
The truth brings home memories that make her suffer. Yes, she’s used to writing while weighed down by a heap of rubble, but she is afraid that touching so many memories may scorch her hands and eyes. She’s also afraid her memories may hurt others in her life, whom she loves. Compared to telling the truth, inventing was like playing with a litter of kittens. Telling the truth is like moving through a pack of tigers. She reminds herself that to a writer everything is permitted so long as she writes—even freeing tigers and taking them out for a stroll. But in fact she doesn’t believe writers have any special rights, any more than others do. So she faces a problem she cannot resolve. She doesn’t want to be a shepherd of tigers.
She thinks she has been on the wrong track from the very first moment she sat down to write as a child. She should have loved invention then as she loves truth now. But her love was small and cold. And in return, invention gave her only miserly, frozen images.
Now she asks that truth bring her what invention never gave. She realizes she is asking the impossible. As soon as she tries to tell the truth, she gets lost contemplating its violence and immensity.
She thinks she has done nothing but pile error upon error. How stupid she has been. She has also posed a great many stupid questions. She has asked whether writing, for her, was a duty or a pleasure. Stupid. It was neither. At the best of times it was, and is, her way of inhabiting the earth.
October, 1970
film
I saw at an art cinema a film written by Beckett and performed by Buster Keaton. It was called Film. It lasts less than half an hour and has no words. A man, in a room, puts an end to his life. We don’t see him die or kill himself, but it is clear that after these few moments it will be all over for him.
In the room are a bed, a blanket, a mirror, a large rocking chair, a cat and a dog in a basket, a fish in a tank, a parrot in a cage. Despite the furniture and animals, the room feels stripped and empty. The moment when the man placed the bed and the mirror, the basket, the tank and the cage there seems far, far away, lost in a time beyond memory.
With anxious, terrified movements, as if pursued by invisible tormentors, the man covers the mirror with a cloth, puts the dog and cat outside, shuts the door again, covers the tank and the cage. Then he sits on the rocker in the middle of the room and rocks. From time to time he takes his pulse, with the apprehensive solicitude for himself, for his own heartbeat, of a man who has no one else on earth, with the fear of death of a man who desires nothing more except death.
He takes some photographs out of a leather briefcase and studies them. They are ancient pictures of a person he once was. Childhood, his mother’s face, school holidays, athletic competitions, marriage, a woman, a child. Images of a life with breathing space, infused with a mild, warm affection. A life remote from that room and its desolate furnishings. For a moment, his thumb strokes the picture of the child. One by one, he tears all the photographs in half. He tears them in half one by one, with no hesitation and no anxiety now, but carefully, painstakingly. He lets them fall to the floor.
Until now we have not seen his face, just his hands, his shoulders, his scarf, the cracks in the wall, the folds of the blanket. At last we see his face: ravaged, hollowed out, a black patch over one eye. Only for an instant, then he quickly hides this face with his ravaged hands. A single, final gesture of compassion for himself; a single, final attempt to hide his own image, to sink beyond reason and memory; a single, final entreaty to darkness, nothingness and death.
This swift, silent tale could be enacted only by Buster Keaton. It is impossible to imagine any other person in that role. He is not acting: he is that man. I don’t know much about Buster Keaton’s life, only what may be common knowledge. He died some years ago, alone and penniless. His final days were probably very similar to those of the man in the room.
He suffered a cruel fate. He was a hugely famous comic actor in the era of silent films; with the advent of sound, he was no longer sought out and quickly forgotten. It was inconceivable in any case that words should ever escape his lips. His gaunt, parched face with its sealed lips, unfit for smiling, its rigid and tense jaws, was the very mask of silence. He was a great actor, a great comic actor. The comedy came from his deft movements, his silence, and his fixedness.
His photos would occasionally appear in the newspapers: a face on which time and obscurity had carved shadows and furrows. A face covered with a dense network of wrinkles, like a map. The lips always sealed up tight. He must have sealed himself in his silence as in a tomb, though still alive. He had just a few brief minor roles. He was the pianist in Limelight. Film must have been one of his last films if not the last, and I don’t think it had any distribution.
Chaplin had a very different fate. I believe they were friends in their youth. Chaplin possessed in abundance all that Keaton after a time no longer had. Once past the harshness of his early years as a poor orphan, Chaplin had glory, money, and honor and would have them for the rest of his life. His glory has long been indestructible.
He was,
no doubt, the greater actor. The world of his childhood, the dismal back alleys of the poor, very quickly became a distant memory, and for many years he drew his inspiration from that grim memory. He invented the immortal character we know so well, the darting, limping figure with the black curls framing a pale face, the meek, luminous smile. He too was speechless. He too knew well enough the pathetic inadequacy of human speech.
In old age Chaplin transformed himself into a person in some ways the exact opposite of that limping, wandering vagabond. He became a florid, white-haired old man, an optimist and millionaire. He lives in a villa in Switzerland with a pack of children. If by chance the long-gone limping vagabond and this shrewd, florid old gentleman were to meet, they would have nothing to say to each other. The aged Chaplin wrote and gave speeches, even published a memoir.
When we come across that former figure whom we love on the screen, we have to separate him from what we know of the person who created him, and then turned into someone so different. We have to dispel all memory of the thoughts expressed in his book, his cheery affirmations, his quite disingenuous vanity, the sturdy, robust person whose every instinct of flight has totally vanished. Whose every instinct of freedom has vanished too.
In old age Chaplin made a number of awful films. They did very well. The idea of having made awful films surely never even occurred to him, as he had grown too self-congratulatory by that time to address himself with any honesty. That in itself would be of no importance, however; his awful films cannot detract from his genius. When we see on the screen the immortal character he once created, we don’t think of his final awful films. We think rather of who he is now, on the far shore from what he once was.
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