Things Written Randomly in Doubt Page 14
Waugh: I am, yes.
Black: Have you always been a Roman Catholic?
Waugh: No, for the last 25 or 30 years.
Black: You became converted to the Roman Catholic faith?
Waugh: Yes.
Black: Would you like to tell me something about the reasons for your conversion?
Waugh: Well you know, I don’t think I would. Because they aren’t interesting. There’s no human story in it. It was simply a fact of recognising a plausible rational system, of following the arguments with proof of the historic truth of Christianity.2
The first three questions are unnecessarily long-winded. Black could have simply reduced all four questions to: “Mr Waugh, could you tell me something about the reasons for your conversion to Catholicism?” The third question was idiotic, given that Waugh was in his fifties at the time of the interview. It is unsurprising that someone like Waugh was irritated by this line of questioning, which in its pointlessly slow developments of the basic facts, resembles a crossexamination in court. That it did more than simply irritate him demonstrates that Waugh’s relationship with the media was already damaging his psyche. The modern media world was knocking at the door, and Waugh was too old to adapt. He would not be alone in that. However, he seems to have coped well with the much more hostile interview by John Freeman, although the excerpt on Pinfold does suggest that it was not a happy experience.3
Waugh’s staccato answers give the impression of someone who has decided not to engage. His fourth one reveals a religiosity I find difficult to understand as the claim to “a plausible rational system” seems overstated and I, for one, would like to hear his reasoning, whether or not there’s “a human story in it”. But he is on firmer ground when it comes to his clear understanding of how the relationship between author and reader should work. “There’s no human story in it,” if applied to fiction alone, has some weight in it. Everything should have some relevance to the reader, whether or not the reader is aware of this before reading the book. All the rest is mere gossip and self-indulgence. He knows that his religious ideas are important to him, but not to anyone else, unless he can put them in a form that does become relevant, as he did in some of his books. His reticence is very sensible, however alien it might seem in the age of Facebook.
But how this reticence contrasts with Waugh’s willingness to expose the darkness and unpleasantness of his madness! His friends must have been horrified, although his wife may well have expected it and possibly even valued it for some therapeutic benefit. According to the introduction, his friend Christopher Hollis refused to categorise Pinfold as a novel in the bibliography he wrote for the British Council, commenting, “some have professed to find the chapters of near-madness amusing, … but a reader has to be hard-boiled indeed who finds madness funny… What remains odd is that one who has been through such experiences should be willing to tell the world of them in such a comparatively casual fashion, and, as it were, to lunch out on them.” There are some serious misunderstandings here: there is nothing casual about Pinfold, which was not easy to write, and has clearly been as worked on in a literary sense as any other novel by this author, which means a great deal. Consider the grandeur conflicting with self-irony in the sentence, “Mr Pinfold stood confounded, the only troubled thing in a world at peace” or simple irony in “A good officer knows the enormous ills that can arise from men brooding on imaginary grudges” with reference to events imagined through voices in Pinfold’s head – the imaginary grudges were his not the imaginary seamen’s. At one point, Pinfold imagines a mutinous situation met with threatening retorts which is resolved with an Indian seaman being entangled in machinery, and followed by the captain’s speech justifying the incident to the rest of the crew: “… a great quantity of valuable metal was sacrificed last night for the welfare of a single seaman. That metal was pure copper. One of the most valuable metals in the world. Mind you I don’t regret the sacrifice and I am sure that the Company will approve my action. But I want you all to appreciate that only in a British ship would such a thing be done. In the ship of any other nationality it would have been the seaman not the metal that was cut up. You know that as well as I do. Don’t forget it. And another thing …” Does this sound like madness or nightmare? It sounds to me like pure satire. This is a literary work, but it is also a hybrid, and it may be that in his drive to be honest to events, he slightly damages the literary value of the work. That is a fine point I leave to the critics; what is clear, and we can take his word on this, is that this book is not a verbatim of his troubled journey to the east. It is written for public consumption as a novel, and it must not be boring – his word not mine.
What is fact, what is fiction, what is for public consumption, and what is for self-justification, because no author is entirely unconcerned about what his public think of him, even when, as in Waugh’s case, he constantly denies this? In this labyrinth of unknowability we come to an element for which I have no reasonable explanation. The hostile voices that Pinfold/Waugh hears during his trip often express their prejudices against leftists, homosexuals and Jews. Like all such prejudices, they are not accompanied by any explanation, assuming as they do that such prejudices are almost universally agreed upon. Pinfold is accused of being a communist, a pansy and changing his name from Peinfeld to Pinfold. If I hadn’t read the appendices, I would have simply considered such prejudice to be typical of the time and the society Waugh moved in. I remember such common-places very well from the fifties and sixties. But it appears that these were the kind of quips that Waugh himself was in the habit of making against other people, particularly the anti-Semitic one about changing names. Two possible explanations occur to me. The first is that he was continuing in the satirical vein we have noted above. Waugh is a confusing and thus fascinating writer in part because he is quite capable of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. But the persistence of the remarks on name-changing suggests otherwise. The second possibility is that this really is what he heard in his madness, revealing perhaps a guilty conscience in his undoubtedly anguished soul about such base prejudices. The accusations are directed at him, and they cause some hurt. When asked by Freeman, “Were those the kind of hallucinations that you yourself felt?”, Waugh replied, “Oh yes, those were the voices exactly.” This is slightly more convincing, but not entirely. The episode, along with the information in some of the appendices, demonstrates that the text is somehow sealed off from us and will never be fully understood. This may have been intended or it may just be the inevitable product of mixing fact and fiction on such an Olympian scale.
Would I be testing your patience too far if I were also to suggest that it is not impossible that Waugh played up the exactness of his account in order to help sales? I think he was shrewder at projecting his literary personality than some might think. If he did, he did well because part of the book’s attraction is its backstory.
It would be an interesting experiment to have Pinfold read by two groups of readers of similar profile or sociological mix, one that knew nothing of the author’s background story and one that did. In this case, it would be like reading two very different books. But Pinfold is an exception, even amongst Waugh’s works, and we must be careful about the conclusions we draw.
A great roman-à-clef is usually a vehicle for the author’s ideas. The experience drawn on may or may not have been sought out: the naturalist authors of the nineteenth century made a point of carrying out research. When reading Tolstoy’s Resurrection, you feel that he has visited several prisons and you feel that the accounts of how the peasants reacted to his offer of giving them the land were drawn exactly from his own experience. No doubt these things are known, and can be found in any good biography of the author, but knowing these things would not change the book at all. It stands exactly as it is. That is its greatness.
A failed roman-à-clef is one that constantly feels like unprocessed experience of people and events from life – and in the worst cases motivated by a desire to offend. So
me such works offend incidentally, as authors might know that the material will be recognised and will offend, but cannot resist the material because it is funny or instructive or in some other way apparently essential to their purpose.
In between these two extremes, there are infinite varieties of mixing invented material with material based on real or perceived events.
The admission of characters and events being drawn from life can change the way a book is interpreted. Surely in many cases it could ruin a book – even a good book. But not in this case – or not entirely.
An author’s life, as described by Waugh, is a pretty miserable affair, and if we follow A.L. Kennedy’s life in her collection of blogs, it seems no better now. She is a talented writer – and a successful one. Hence there are two good reasons for expecting her to produce great wisdom on the subject of writing – although it would always only be an expectation, because not all good writers can. She is contributing womanfully to keeping what we now call the literary novel alive. Even her detractors will have to admit that. She strikes me (more so after reading this book) as an energetic woman and one of small needs – two factors very useful to a writer’s productivity and independence. The principal problem with this book is that three-quarters of it is a blog, and a blog composed over several months is not designed to be read in a couple of sittings. Blogging creates a relationship that has nothing to do with literature – it is a correspondence society with a lead correspondent, a group of internet friends, a forerunner of the social networks, with which it shares several features. So when, in Blog XXI, readers of the book encounter Kennedy’s intimate words, “We are, I think, all in this together,” they know that this is not directed at them, but at the original followers of the blog: a fan base interested in the immediacy of Kennedy’s movements, health and current activities. For the reader of the book, it is like chancing upon a round-robin sent to someone else three Christmases ago. And I was never an admirer of round-robins. It’s true that these blogs are by an accomplished writer and there are moments of brilliance, but far too few. Whose idea was this? You sense that a publisher was looking to exploit what is probably a very popular blog for a quick profit. The editor could at least have put the essays at the beginning, and deleted the many repetitions, including the endless apologies for not having posted a blog for some days (oddly the editor does not provide any dates, so you have to gauge the timing of the blogs by Kennedy’s shifting opinions on Nick Clegg).
Among the author’s endless, punishing itineraries, her ulcer, her fear of flying and latterly her labyrinthitis (an inflammation of the inner ear that can cause distressing dizziness), Kennedy finally comes out with a coherent if arguable statement on writing: “Aiming yourself at a clique of pals, or a market, or up your own private right of way doesn’t make for particularly appetising prose. Viciously selfish, compulsive, obsessive and odd though many writers may be, we do everything we do for other people.” The first of these pronouncements is undoubtedly correct; here are the principal dangers for a writer: elitist hermeticism, subjugation of one’s own voice to fashionable concepts of “good writing”, and self-obsession, which is exacerbated by this kind of blogging. The second of them attempts with little or no explanation to present writers as Mother Teresas with bad manners. In my opinion, writers, more than any other artists, are a disparate lot, although, strangely for people who work with words, they are generally less sociable than the others, particularly the ever affable musicians and actors. They do what they do because they want to. Art is not an act of selflessness – more likely an act of useful arrogance. I have called the literary novel “an exercise in empathy”, and that is beneficial for the reader and, if enough copies are read, for society beyond. Outside the act of writing, the writer may display any of the human qualities or vices, and there may be entirely unrelated to their works. Ultimately fiction is a work of imagination, and even the most dedicated authors have to take a holiday from imagining.
Waugh seems to have always understood that he had to distance himself from his readers, although sometimes he was plain rude in how he described them. Pinfold was a departure, and he probably achieved what he set out to do, even though I’m not quite sure what that was. Here he is with Freeman again,
Waugh: …, I’m afraid that if someone praises me, I think what an ass, and if they abuse me, I think what an ass.
Freeman: And if they say nothing about you at all and take no notice of you?
Waugh: That’s the best I can hope for.
Freeman: You like that when it happens, do you?
Waugh: Yes.
Freeman: Why are you appearing in this programme?
Waugh: Poverty. We’ve both been hired to talk in this deliriously happy way.4
Waugh here is thoroughly unreliable. A writer who doesn’t want public interest in his private life is not unlikely and would also be a quite sensible person. There might be a financial loss in terms of sales, but there would also be a psychological gain. But a writer who doesn’t care at all about what critics and the public say about his books is not credible. Writing requires obsession, one that is often beyond the writer’s control. Writing is for a readership, without which there seems little purpose. Some of us, myself in lead position, are dangerously close to little purpose. Waugh was not, and an unsuccessful book would have hurt him profoundly, I’m sure.
There is a reason why Kennedy’s novels work and her blog doesn’t. In her novels as with all others, the author and reader enter into a contract involving, I suppose, that famous suspension of disbelief but also a willingness to accept the characters as the author has constructed them. The reader expects to gain as much information about the characters as the author is willing to provide. I feel that I now know more about Kennedy’s life than I do of many of my friends’ lives. She points out at one stage that her much interviewed friends reveal little of themselves in interviews, which suggests that newspaper and magazine interviews are a form that encourages interviewees to be defensive of their personal lives, whereas blogs and social media encourage not only Kennedy but many people to reveal sparse and sequential data similar to that of a personal diary.
“Since I last wrote I have, Dear Reader, been in Glasgow, Ullapool, Aberdeen, Oxford, London, Bakewell, Tissington and various bits of leafy Warwickshire.” Kennedy confesses to not always knowing which city she’s in, and if you read this book, you will not blame her. Her hyperactive lifestyle seems more suited to the pop star than the writer, and is founded in part on the mistaken Romantic belief that writing has to involve experience of life. And she herself has decried direct observation from life. On the other hand, Waugh was chided by his interviewer for living in reclusion in Gloucestershire. Waugh sensibly replied that some writers like Austen can write excellent works “out of just what they see within five miles of their own rectory. Others, like Conrad, have to go to the seven seas to find stories.”
Unless Kennedy is making a fictional narrator of her blog persona, just as Waugh would appear to have been doing on occasions (often to put himself intentionally in a bad light), it’s clear that she is not enjoying her writing career except in those few moments in which she sits down at her computer to write – usually at some time after midnight or on a train (she writes, “You want my life? You have it, matey”). Performance is the drug that keeps her away from her true calling and the calm she appears to need – with good reason, if half her stories are true. That is the lesson about writing that I take from her book, but it was not one that she intended.
In Ars Poetica, Horace advises the author to listen to established authors and then put the parchment away in a closet for nine years. “What you have not published you can destroy; the word once sent forth can never come back.” In those days, publishing meant commissioning scribes to make several copies – a tiny risk against that of the blog, which within seconds of it being posted could potentially be read by millions (I should clarify that some writers’ blogs are not at all personal, but simply artic
les published on the web, just like those in newspapers, and some of them are excellent). Although we can all agree that nine years is now too long (a historical era in our times), we can also agree that the essential element of literature is there – in the waiting. We are all a little impatient about publication dates, but those months in which the text rests and is rewritten count for a lot, as Kennedy also believes. Her other books are carefully reworked, and yet she openly admits that before publication in book form the blogs were not. Their immediacy is sacred, but in being published they cease to be immediate and therefore demand a higher level of coherence and a different relationship with the reader.
There are aspects of Kennedy’s On Writing that are attractive: her modesty, her humour, her political views, her fierce self-deprecation (a trait she shares with Waugh). You feel, however, that she is also weighed down by a duty to self-promote, another feature of modern society, not only present in publishing. Self-promotion leads to the blog, and the blog leads to a dictatorship of the self. Even the self-deprecation, which leaps from every page – the only forceful element – ends up, by dint of repetition, resembling self-obsession.
My contrast between Waugh and Kennedy is not so much between two writers as it is between two generations. Social media are particularly unkind to writers, because they are a written conversation and follow the rules of the spoken word. The question of how much writers should open up to the world around them remains unchanged and Waugh’s fear of the interview was based on similar reservations, but the pressures for us to get publicity are now extremely powerful. We are all affected, and writers are expected to be their own self-publicists. My advice – and on writing I have even more reservations about formulating an exact opinion than in most other spheres – is that writers should avoid Twitter, Facebook, personal blogs, and all outlets that entice immediate opinion or revelation, or at least use them very sparingly. The author is best served by a degree of mystery, and should remember that what appears to be only a minor lapse could turn into a flood. So I will end perversely with a self-revelation of my own.