November 14 2020
NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 19
Dear All,
This summer, I started writing a memoir. “From World War Two To Covid 19 With Some Light Relief In Between,” perhaps…
And here we are in November, so this present moment where I plunged in – literally - is already the past, even though during the long summer of our going nowhere, everything seemed to have stopped. Time, history, our lives have all moved on, as of course they always do.
This is how I began:
I’m in my friend P’s swimming-pool on a hot steamy Saturday afternoon in Key West. It’s July, a time of year when usually I try to be elsewhere to avoid the heat – but not this year. This year, we are going nowhere. This year, 2020, we are simply here. I’m lollygagging around in the nearly blood-heat water of the long blue pool partly shaded by palms and aurelias, and she’s perched in the shade of an umbrella, dressed in shorts, barefoot, telling me about her new writing project. I’m envious – she has a writing project, she sounds excited about it and knowing her, it will be a brilliant, witty and intensely readable book. She asks me if I’m writing, and I have to dredge up the old excuses – too hot, too old, too worried about what’s happening in the world, too lazy. “That doesn’t sound like you,” observes my lucid friend, and I have to admit, it doesn’t.
“Everything I write about in novels seems out of date,” I hear myself complain. “People having meals in restaurants, getting on planes, having sex – you know.”
“Why don’t you write a memoir? I’d love to read about your early life,” she says.
“You would?” I tread water, float, look at her. The thing about being an immigrant to another country is that nobody knows where you came from, or why, or what it was like to be - back there. I have close friends here who know very little about my former life, except for what leaks out as autobiographical from my novels. Unless somebody specifically asks, you don’t tell. And it’s mostly still true that people in the United States think that you came here to improve on your old life simply by being here.
My excuses wither. Too hot – well, yes, 96 degrees Fahrenheit most days, that’s in the high 30’s where I came from, and 95 per cent humidity with it. But there’s air conditioning, isn’t there? Too old – she’s exactly the same age as me, born in 1942, and here she is excited about her new book, so that won’t wash. Too worried about the state of the world – well, we do what we can, and apart from marching and voting and showing up to rallies and vigils from time to time, I am not really responsible for the future of the United States, or of the rest of the world. Perhaps I’m just responsible for what I do, or don’t do. For what I may write. Too lazy – yes, I sleep all night, then nap in the afternoon after lunch, and a lot of the time I spend swimming. I’m a pool slut, not having one of my own, and will jump in wherever and whenever I can. The beaches are closed – it’s the fourth of July weekend, tourists are down from Miami, so the bars, beaches and much of Duval Street have been closed to protect us from the coronavirus they are certainly bringing to town. Sometimes this summer I have been down there early, to have the beach to myself. Swimming has become a meditation and an addiction: I swim, therefore I am. This long pool at P’s house used to be my refuge during the many summers in Key West when the heat stung and sweat poured off me all day, before I began to escape to Europe for the summer months. As long as I’m swimming, I feel as if I’m doing something. My stroke has improved, my breathing is deeper and easier, my whole body is firmer as a result – but above all, it’s the pleasure of being in water, in that element. This isn’t laziness, I tell myself, it’s keeping fit, keeping sane. Then there’s the other reason I’m not writing – I’m waiting to hear from my agent about the last novel I sent her, so it’s quite normal that I’m not writing. I give my friend this extra piece of evidence as she peers down at me over her sunglasses. “That’s not an excuse,” she says firmly. Okay, touchée.
“ The photo I have found to go with this month’s letter is of a drawing my father made of me when I was one year old and he was on leave from the war. I found it after his death in 1991, and it now hangs on my studio wall.”
There are times in life when somebody tells you something so incontrovertible that you just have to gasp and accept it. I can remember several of these occasions, and exactly who said what to puncture some bubble of illusion I was in, and bring me down to earth. When that happens, you just have to swallow it and probably do a U-turn. It’s humbling, but also a relief.
So P. goes back into her cool house – “Enjoy your swim!” – and I push my body through the blue water, the blue an illusion made by the blue-painted pool’s bottom, and turn on my back to look up at vast white summer clouds poised like the barrage balloons of my childhood in the blue of the summer sky. A memoir. My life. What is there to discover here?
Since beginning on this ramble through my seventy-plus years, I’ve discovered a kind of form to my life, and as a result seen aspects of it that I’d not been aware of before. Several of my friends tell me they have also started memoirs; I wonder how many ‘Covid’-induced memoirs there will turn out to be. The great thing about memoir-writing, I discovered, is that you already have the story. It lives inside you; it always has.
The photo I have found to go with this month’s letter is of a drawing my father made of me when I was one year old and he was on leave from the war. I found it after his death in 1991, and it now hangs on my studio wall. While trying to take the photo I saw that of course I couldn’t avoid the reflection of my present self, shadowy but there, as if I’d been there all along.
Be well, stay safe -
Affectionately, Ros