October 14 2020
NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 18
Dear All,
And so we go on. I heard this week that my second novel A Virtual Image, published in 1971 is due out at the end of the year from Michael Walmer, whose wonderful mission in life is to re-discover ‘neglected authors,’ with a new introduction by the novelist Janet Burroway. Thoughts of return persist – the return of the virus, of course, and of our seemingly endless engagement with it, but also of returns in general: old friends reconnecting, lost manuscripts revived, old novels given a new lease of life, new work to be rewritten. I read Janet’s introduction to my book, written when I was 27 in another world, and marveled at what she had found in it. Did I write that, did I mean that, why was I telling this story? And then I returned to my current work in progress, re-working a novel intended to be a sequel to Without Her. (What happened to those people? What did they do next?) Rewriting, you discover depths in a work that you did not imagine were there. You re-cast, re-imagine, re-write, re-view. The characters are not quite who you thought they were. And so on. The whole idea of sequels (or prequels) testifies to the fact that an author could not let go of characters she had created, or did not want to. Something has to continue. Something further has to be solved. The end is not yet in view.
“Thoughts of return persist – the return of the virus, of course, and of our seemingly endless engagement with it, but also of returns in general: old friends reconnecting, lost manuscripts revived, old novels given a new lease of life, new work to be rewritten. I read Janet’s introduction to my book, written when I was 27 in another world, and marveled at what she had found in it. Did I write that, did I mean that, why was I telling this story? ”
This feeling of recommitment both to old work and new seems to me to fit the times in which we are living. Keep the old, if it works – if not, discard it. Find the true thing in amongst the obsolete, or false. Keep life alive. Looking at these two novels, one written when I was 27, the other – well, 50 years later – I find traces of the later book in the earlier one and hints of characters I was yet to develop. Two young women, setting out to discover the world, and themselves… It’s still the theme. And when one of them is left, what then?
I need continuity, at this time. We all do. But I also need to winnow out what matters from what doesn’t, what works at a deep level from what is purely anecdotal. That’s the challenge.
Meanwhile, the bees go on doing their work and my daughter Miranda writes to me of how they prepare for winter, how summer bees die off and winter bees are born. Several poets have written bee-poems – Sylvia Plath, Robert Bly, Antonio Machado among them. Bees are at the heart of what matters. But they also seem to be ruthless about discarding the old stuff, making way for the new. In the spring, she tells me, she will begin harvesting the honey they make from the heather on the hills of the Scottish Borders, but right now they are feeding themselves up for the winter.
Be well, be safe –
affectionately, Ros