Notes on a Writing Life 48
April 14 2023
Dear All,
I was asked recently in an interview how I started wanting to be a writer. The answer was, reading and being read to, as a child. There was a magic in books that I wanted to capture and pass on. This hasn’t changed. Robert Richardson’s seminal book “First We Read, Then We Write” backs me up on this – as do so many other writers. I see us now as connected to each other by a long series of links, this one to that one, passing on something of infinite value to humans for their life on earth. D.H.Lawrence said that the novel is “the one bright book of life.” And before the novel ever appeared, there were of course plays, poetry, going back over centuries, ever since humans began to speak.
I’m reading, and loving, a novel by the English writer Sarah Winman at present, called “Still Life.” I picked it at random off a library shelf – books somehow find us, even to the extent sometimes of falling on our heads or at our feet. It’s set in Florence, and it reaches out a hand to E.M. Forster in salutation, and carries his idea of “only connect” forward into the late 20th century (in the book) and onward into our time. It’s about people loving each other, forming community, in the face of war, heartbreak and a great flood that engulfed Florence in the 1960’s, and it warms my heart now in the 2020’s, an era Forster could hardly have imagined.
I’m also, this week, doing an interview at the Studios of Key West with the writer Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, whose memoir “Daughter of Spies” is newly published by Regal House. Alsop’s mother was English and came to the US pregnant and alone at 18, in a military convoy, towards the end of World War 2. Her story fascinates me – this incredibly brave young woman, who left everything behind her to join her new American husband, the first (and maybe the last) man she ever kissed. It sounds romantic, put like that, but I can easily imagine how hard it was for her. She was also, incidentally, a spy for MI 6 at the age of 17, when officially working in the Passport Office. Sarah Winman’s main character is also an ex-spy. What is it about spies and novelists? Perhaps we come from the same source… John le Carré thought so, as expressed in the volume of his marvelous letters, “A Secret Spy.”
A new novel, a new memoir – and with them come fresh images, old stories writ new, and above all, keys to how to live life. At a time when some people are trying once again to ban certain books and control what others read, I marvel once again at the power of the written word. It’s wonderfully subversive. It enters your mind privately, with never an outward sign. It’s like a message written in code, especially when you are young, to help you go forward in life. Of course the book banners are afraid of that.
Go well – go on reading!
Affectionately, Ros