April 14, 2020
NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 11
Dear All,
In our houses and apartments, we are being forced to learn new ways of being – with each other, with the outer world. There are love affairs, quarrels, reconciliations. There is solitude and introspection. There is death – and also, recovery.
Nearly a month into lock-down here, and I want to write about other writers this time, and the pleasure and inspiration they give me. Everybody I know is reading – when not watching Netflix or talking on the phone to families and friends – and the topic of what to read feels urgent these days. (We’re mostly the lucky ones not out there working in hospitals and grocery stores or teaching kids at home.) We exchange news of books as once people talked of new restaurants, the latest movie at the cinema, plans for trips. At a pause in writing myself, often discouraged, sometimes not, I go back to hours of reading as I did when I was a teenager and my cousin and I spent the summer vacations reading David Copperfield, Middlemarch, Vanity Fair.
Writers feed off other writers. Encouragement comes from all quarters – I read Emily Gould on LitHub on “How to write when writing seems pointless” and take heart. Thanks, Emily, that was timely. A friend in California tells me what he is reading and we agree to read the same books and discuss them. Our enterprising local bookshop, “Books and Books” will deliver a book in town by 4 pm if you order it by phone before noon. So I have Ocean Vuong and Ben Lerner waiting for me in shiny hardbacks (no restaurants, no cinema, no theater, no trips – so, books.) I have a vivid memory of when I was nine or ten and my grandmother bought me a subscription to the Harrods Library, so I got two books a fortnight - and I never discovered who chose them for me. The dark green van pulled up outside our house and two firm hardback books, two new authors – I remember Jack London and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings in particular – were there for me to discover. The only problem was that they had to go back, and I wanted to keep The Yearling forever, that story set in a state called Florida on the far side of an ocean I never thought I would cross.
“Books are like boxes of seed – the seeds are words, and the spaces between them where something miraculous happens are what carries them.”
Books are like boxes of seed – the seeds are words, and the spaces between them where something miraculous happens are what carries them. I’ve just finished Edna O’Brien’s collected short stories – what a stylist she is - and am in the middle of Anthony Doerr’s remarkable collection, Wall of Memory. These are writers who spin their words out like the whirling winged seeds of lime trees, to fly and take root. I read them, and want immediately to get back to writing myself. Yes, we can do this, yes, it is worth it, yes, it’s what matters – this description and interpretation of the world we’re in, these insights, these characters alive or dead, this magic.
You could say that the world is currently at a standstill. But fish are teeming, tides go in and out, plants grow and thicken, the mockingbirds here go on trilling and nesting. People are working harder than they ever have, in dangerous conditions, to help each other. In our houses and apartments, we are being forced to learn new ways of being – with each other, with the outer world. There are love affairs, quarrels, reconciliations. There is solitude and introspection. There is death – and also, recovery. There are hours shared with children – how I loved, and so did 7 million others – the singing of “One More Day” by the Marsh family of Faversham in England. There are all the things that we are capable of, going on everywhere, inside our heads and between those of us who are sequestered together. We wait like people in a Jane Austen novel for something to happen. (Will a stranger ever come to town again?) We are stuck with each other like people in Hardy’s rural villages. We are living through a revolution, as surely as people in Zola’s novels did, even if we don’t quite know what it is, or will be. I have wondered recently if novels will be written about this strange time; but of course they will be, because it is one of the most fascinating in history. It’s both crisis and transformation. It is part of us, and we, writers and readers, can all play our part.
Go well, be safe. Affectionately, Ros
The Great Changes
Nobody comes.
The streets are emptied, wide,
the sky is quiet.
Life – what we thought of as life –
is stopped. The life
that was always here goes on:
butterflies, lizards, birdsong.
We live in our singular days
waiting to hear – what?
That we are not, and never were the point?
When the great changes come,
they are like the lurch
of a missed step. An absence.
A waking in the night to know the fearful heart.
Is this how the world rights itself?
Quaking, silenced, is this how we learn?