Notes On A Writing Life / 22
February 14 2021
Dear All,
There’s a new moon in Aquarius as I write this, and the mango blossoms are rushing out where I live (apologies to all of you who are snow-bound) and as we come up to Valentine’s Day I wish you all love and at least one loving human connection.
Writing and reading continue to organize my days for me, even if I’m distracted at present by the fascinating and awful details of the impeachment trial of the US’s last president.
My book of the month has been “Square Haunting” by Francesca Wade, a five-fold biography of five remarkable women who lived in Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury, London, at various times during and between the wars in the 20th century. They are: HD the American poet, Dorothy L. Sayers, crime writer, Virginia Woolf, Jane Harrison, classical scholar and linguist and Eileen Power, lecturer in medieval economics at the LSE. Together, they reminded me of the vital question of women’s lives – how to have both work and love, without one being sacrificed to the other. One after another, they struggled with love affairs with both men and women, babies both wanted and unwanted, miscarriages of both children and books, lack of money, public criticism, sudden fame, and one by one, as if drawn to the place, they came to Mecklenburgh Square – quiet, affordable, less rackety than Bloomsbury itself, houses in which a single person could rent a room.
After I had finished reading this book, I somehow managed to finish rewriting the novel I’m working on. Writing is rewriting; writing is revising; writing is also knowing what questions you want to ask, and even try to answer. What is the connection between these five women and the story I am trying, with difficulty, to tell? Is it too fanciful to imagine them lining up behind me, telling me – of course you know what to do? This is your subject: pick it up and run with it, as far as you can.
I thought about the geographical closeness of these women – two of them actually inhabited the same house, same bedroom, although not at the same time. (Two others even slept with the same man, who seemed to haunt the square from time to time.)
Here in Key West, writers live in close proximity, even though these days we don’t see each other all that often. How do we affect each other’s work? By a word exchanged in the grocery store, a question asked at the pool, on the way to the beach, in conversations in studios and back yards, masked and distanced now but still talking. Is there an atmosphere created in a certain place that makes creative work there more likely? How do we invisibly, secretly, as if by osmosis, egg each other on? These are all questions I don’t have answers for, except to say – who knows? Does the fact that Elizabeth Bishop lived two blocks away from my house help me in my day-to-day efforts? That I used to run into Jimmy Merrill in the grocery store? That Annie Dillard shared this studio space for years? That I know that Marie-Claire Blais is hard at work writing in her house today, just down the street? New writers come to town, and we pass on – something, perhaps. An expectation, a reminder that writing matters, that we don’t do it alone.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Affectionately, Ros