January 14 2021
NOTES ON A WRITING LIFE | 21
Dear All,
Welcome to 2021! In 2016, when Donald Trump was elected President of the US, I went to my local bookstore in search of sanity, as did many others that morning in November. No novel, no poetry could quite capture the anxiety of that day; I chose James Shapiro’s 1606: The Year of Lear. Now I come back again to that year when conspirators were being burned at the stake for having attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament, led by one Guido Fawkes; when the whole kingdom of England was in turmoil – and when Shakespeare finished King Lear and wrote Macbeth. Plague had been rampant in London and James I, the Scottish king, was newly on the throne. Lear portrays a crazed king, threatening revenge; Macbeth a good king, murdered by a couple mad for power. Shakespeare saw it all – and wrote. It does put things in perspective – a perspective of 500 years. Nothing, it seems, is new on the face of the earth.
I also go back gratefully in these turbulent days to Shakespeare’s contemporary, Michel de Montaigne, writing in his country house near the river Dordogne in the 1570’s and ‘80’s as hungry mercenaries roamed the French countryside looking for plunder. He who gave up public office after a near-fatal fall from a horse in 1569 to write his essays, all based on the question ‘How to live?’ These past times can tell us a lot about the chaos of the present – and I think, the role of a writer, who has to try to make sense not just of events, but of the human mind and soul.
Another good book for this moment is Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story in which she picks apart the difference between the raw material of the situation and the craft and nuance of the story to be told. Here, in the US at this moment, we have the situation, ongoing as I write, but we do not yet have the story – just the raw ingredients, to be sifted by time.
On a different and more personal note: my second novel, A Virtual Image, originally published by Macmillan, is to be re-published on January 25 by Michael Walmer. I look at it from the perspective of 50 years, and see my 27-year-old self, already married and with a baby, indulging in extreme nostalgia for earlier days when I ran around Europe all summer with a friend, doing exactly as I pleased. The narrator, who is also 27, now sounds to me drunk, or high on something for most of the novel – it’s a trip, in several senses of the word. I can’t remember anything about the political background at the time I wrote it, or even much about my daily life then. But I do remember the excitement of getting down that story, a remnant of days when we were young and carefree and thought we were the bee’s knees.
Affectionately, and with wishes for a good, safe, new year in 2021 - Ros