Bookmarker tag: why/write (40 notes)

[...] He'd loved writing fiction, Infinite Jest in particular, and he'd been very explicit, in our many discussions of the purpose of novels, about his belief that fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. Fiction was his way off the island, and as long as it was working for him--as long as he'd been able to pour his love and passion into preparing his lonely dispatches, and as long as these dispatches were coming as urgent and fresh and honest news to the mainland--he'd achieved a measure of happiness and hope for himself. When his hope for fiction died, after years of struggling with the new novel, there was no other way out but death. [...]

And this is why writing good fiction is almost never easy. The point at which fiction seems to become easy for a writer--and I'll let everyone supply his or her own examples of this--is usually the point at which it's no longer necessary to read that writer. [...] It's a prejudice of mine that literature cannot be a mere performance: that unless the writer is personally at risk--unless the book has been, in some way, for the writer, an adventure into the unknown; unless the writer has set himself or herself a personal problem not easily solved; unless the finished book represents the surmounting of some great resistance--it's not worth reading. Or, for the writer, in my opinion, worth writing.

[...] There was an internal click as an actual idea of Cassirer's broke through. The sentence that had so addled me suddenly made sense [...]:

The same function which the image of God performs, the same tendency to permanent existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sounds of language.

He meant that words shaped our realities, our perceptions, giving them an authority God had for other generations. The indecipherable sentence had been circumnavigating my insides like a bluebottle fly for a week, and at last I got hold of it: words would define me, govern and determine me. Words warranted my devotion--not drugs, not boys. That's why I clung to the myth that poetry could somehow magically still my scrambled innards.

[...] I hold my liquor enough to hear--from the mouths of poets--work I'm itching to read, books I can vanish down into from my grind. The night is a burst of sea spray washed across my face, tangible evidence of a fresh existence only slightly out of reach.

Writing, whatever else it is doing, is always getting at something that it never quite obtains. There is always something unsaid, something that clings to writing like a shadow.

Thus, from the perspective of many educated political people, writing is something that one despises: an onerous task, a sacrifice one makes for the greater good. It results in left-wing writers becomingly aggressively boring, in an unconscious attempt to punish the reader: I've suffered for my writing, now it's your turn. Any writer who seems to be having a good time, revelling in the jouissance of writing, enjoying with rococo swagger the ornate sensuousness of language, is self-indulgent, a source of resentment. [...]

The literature of the left, is literary. Marx, Aimé Césaire, Suzane Césaire, Louis Althusser, Audre Lorde, Simone Yoyotte, Pierre Yoyotte, J H Prynne, Jules Monnerot, Simone de Beauvoir, Christopher Caudwell, Claudia Jones, Theodore Adorno, Walter Benjamin, CLR James, Leon Trotsky, John Berger, the prelapsarian Christopher Hitchens and Rusa Luxemburg are all notable for being, not just theorists, journalists, historians, philosophers, poets and intellectuals who opened up new worlds to their readers but, precisely on that account, great stylists. Historical materialism, at its inception, stressed the artifice - the art - in living, and goes on doing so. We make history, even if not in circumstances or with materials of our own choosing. Nothing has to be taken as it is given, not even our written language.

These literary jouissances are, far from being incidental trappings often essential to the persuasive power of the 'ruthless criticism' of all that exists, and to the new concepts to which it gives birth. They are part of the meaning of the work, which is something that is done to you, not just said to you. One way of putting this is that radical writing is an attempt at, among other things, conversion. We don't write just to pass on information, as honest brokers, but to change people: to shake them up, to make them laugh, pray, blush, worry, cry and yearn. We aim to help make revolutionary subjects, people who are capable of waging the kinds of difficult, and often unrewarding struggles that are the lot of any radical. [...]

In the conventional, thetic, paranoid form of reading imposed on children, every text is a kind of a puzzle. You can read it simply, enjoying the shape of the words in your mouth, their indistinct resonances, their minute associations which seem to hold a special meaning for you and you alone, or the ones which float in the clear vastness of possibility and never need to settle down and become fixed; you can take joy in the act of reading, and understand it as a perpetual collaboration between yourself and an author you've never met. [...]

The ongoing proletarianization of intellectuals prompts any number of further questions. Should we abandon the corporate publishers before they abandon us? So far we haven’t done so, but we’ve tried — as have many others — to fill the gaps left by the industry’s consolidation and caution. In our own work, should we tend toward more “accessible” language and popular forms — or take the increasing hopelessness of making a living from writing as license to experiment? In search of cheaper rents and fertile ground for new institutions, should we leave Brooklyn and make for the provinces? (Will we cross our displaced academic friends fleeing the other way?) Or do we stay and fight for rent control and the right to the city? And how to reply to the familiar reproach: If you want to change and not just interpret the world, why not give up writing and become an organizer or activist? Part of the answer, at least, is that learning to organize, like learning to write, takes years, and you can’t just substitute one job for the other — we will have to be amateur activists. Another part is that if activists are indispensable, so are intellectuals. The words of Adorno in “Sociology and Empirical Research” (1957), arguing for the Frankfurt School’s own version of critical sociology, come to mind: “Not only theory but also its absence becomes a material force when it seizes the masses.” Just this — for theorists and the masses alike — has been our problem.

These tentative answers to the whole perplex of culture and politics can also be taxed with vagueness and no doubt confusion. We’re trying to figure what to do from an unstable position amid crumbling institutions and generalized crisis. More than one variety of brave and honest, necessarily incomplete response to the dilemma can surely be offered, and still more varieties of evasive bullshit: a good ear will know the difference. We can’t bring ourselves to cheer the failure of institutions that have sustained us — but we can at least be grateful that the collapsing structures are carrying out a sort of structural rescue of meaningful individual choice, in politics and culture. Bobo or ProBo? Siege mentality (“We writers are in this together!”) or sorties beyond the walls: “We’re in this with almost everyone!”? Reform existing institutions, or replace them, or cultivate your own garden, or retire to your Unabomber cabin? Join the traditional intellectuals and seek patronage among think tanks, foundations, rich individuals, and multinational corporations, or do something for cultural revolution? Not that the old Marxist jargon matters too much, adopted or abandoned. What counts is history asking us a question — about our content or purpose in a society of accelerating insecurity, including our own — that one way or another we need to formulate as sharply as possible, since we answer it with our lives.

[...] There was something I wanted to feel, and I felt it only when I was writing. I think of this as one of the most important parts of my writer's education---that when left alone with nothing else to read, I began to tell myself the stories I wanted to read.

[...] The point of it is in the possibility of being read by someone who could read it. Who could be changed, out past your imagination's limits. Hannah Arendt has a definition of freedom as being the freedom to imagine that which you cannot yet imagine. The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can't imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn't matter. It isn't. Much the way you don't know what a writer will go on to write, you don't know what a reader, having read you, will do.

[...] Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. The thing you had to force yourself to do - the actual act of writing - turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

[...] they may even go from wanting to have written something to just wanting to be writing, wanting to be working on something, like they'd want to be playing the piano or tennis, because writing brings with it so much joy, so much challenge. It is work and play together. When they are working on their books or stories, their heads will spin with ideas and invention. They'll see the world through new eyes. Everything they see and hear will become grist for the mill. At cocktail parties or in line at the post office, they will be gleaning small moments and overheard expressions: they'll sneak away to scribble these things down. They will have days at the desk of frantic boredom, of angry hopelessness, of wanting to quit forever, and there will be days when it feels like they have caught and are riding a wave.

This leaves me with the thought that the problem and possibilities of the contemporary social novel are not exclusively tied to genre—i.e., they are not the classical problems of the novel, per se. They aren’t exactly the problems and possibilities offered by the familiar challenge of maintaining a balance between action and description (famously described by György Lukács in his rants on the political efficacy of realist prose). There’s something challenging in this unfamiliar territory but also something hopeful, not just because we seem still to like novels, but because it’s clear that literature can contribute, in a significant way, to contemporary events. And where literature can help is in its combinatory and experimental capacities. Novelists can do things and try things that academics and critics cannot. So I am advocating for that now. Let’s have more social novels that explore the disruption and near-impossibility of our cherished narrative forms. Let’s have more social novels that look for narrative—and even fail to find it. In their spectacular and detailed failure, such novels may more closely resemble us.

To me the important thing is not to offer any specific hope of betterment but, by offering an imagined but persuasive alternative reality, to dislodge my mind, and so the reader's mind, from the lazy, timorous habit of thinking that the way we live now is the only way people can live. It is that inertia that allows the institutions of injustice to continue unquestioned.

[...] I hope every writer has had at least a moment when they rode the wave, and all the words were right.

As readers, we have all ridden that wave, and known that joy.

Prose and poetry - all art, music, dance - rise from and move with the profound rhyhtms of our body, our being, and hte body and being of the world. [...] Once we get the beat, teh right beat, our ideas and our words dance to it, the round dance that everybody can join. And then I am thou, and the barriers are down. For a little while.

The summer evenings of my boyhood when I used to ride by her cottage speak to me in that voice of hers now. On a road among fields, where it met the desolate highway, I would dismount and prop my bicycle against a telegraph pole. A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things—how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver—and this inability enhanced my oppression. A colossal shadow would begin to invade the fields, and the telegraph poles hummed in the stillness, and the night-feeders ascended the stems of their plants. Nibble, nibble, nibble—went a handsome striped caterpillar, not figured in Spuler, as he clung to a campanula stalk, working down with his mandibles along the edge of the nearest leaf out of which he was eating a leisurely hemicircle, then again extending his neck, and again bending it gradually, as he deepened the neat concave. Automatically, I might slip him, with a bit of his plantlet, into a matchbox to take home with me and have him produce next year a Splendid Surprise, but my thoughts were elsewhere: Zina and Colette, my seaside playmates; Louise, the prancer; all the flushed, low-sashed, silky-haired little girls at festive parties; languorous Countess G., my cousin’s lady; Polenka smiling in the agony of my new dreams—all would merge to form somebody I did not know but was bound to know soon.

[...] I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

[...] The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it nonmetaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; [...]

There’s a passage in The Ask where Milo likens himself to a figure in Hopper’s Nighthawks, and he mentions how, as a painter, he’d always described it in terms of “the stark play of shadow and light.” This is a perfectly appropriate way of looking at Hopper’s work, but then Milo says, “to be the fucker on the stool is another kind of stark entirely.” It’s a funny line, a throwaway almost, but it strikes me as an encapsulation of the burden of writers working today. Yeah, we’re concerned with form, with language, with allusiveness and scaffolding—the legacy of modernist and postmodernist writing—but a lot of us also want, to a degree maybe not countenanced by more playful antecedents, to get at the starkness of being “the fucker on the stool.” That seems like the project David Foster Wallace was working on for his entire career: getting at that, at how the methods of getting at it sometimes work at cross-purposes to the goal.

[...] You have to have that gift every now and again. And when the gift comes, you open yourself to it and the words just flow and you love it and that’s what the whole process is about. It’s really a way of going outside of myself. The sculpting and the chiseling and the work is more of a different discipline altogether. And I get tired of myself. I’m too aware of my limitations there and I’m always working against my limitations. So it’s claustrophobic for a while. And I wonder, is it ever going to get any better, because it’s me talking to me, what do I know? So you need that infusion from somewhere else, whether you call it the muse, or the unconscious, or whatever. It has to swing in, you have to be visited, I think. At least this writer does.

And we can name the trash this system encourages for what it is. It isn’t that we lack writers who can write well—just like many trash novels written to fit market demands in the fifties hold up well today. Writers have always had to work with and against a marketplace designed by the rich and powerful. But I personally can’t help feeling alarmed and enraged by the ways writers are now driven by incentives to fill the needs of creative executives working in Amazon’s film studio. It feels wildly dispiriting to see how much my friends and I casually accept the idea that we should craft our work to fit a commercial imperative—the entire system of our writing and reporting now being market-tested and data-driven and robbed by financial forces of much of its lasting value. There is a part of me that wants to grab all the rewards that come from this system, but it’s the part of me good writing is meant to kill.

[...] The emergence of the novel in the sixteenth century and its development since the eighteenth century are inconceivable without the incorporation of economic and media-related conditions. In particular, the realistic novel owes its existence to the upheavals in economics and media in connection with the formation of the bourgeois class. The same goes for literature today: its relevance owes entirely to its dependence on the social and economic contexts in which writing takes place. Since the eighteenth century, literature has classically stood for a lofty realm above economics, an idealized conception that literature itself requires. But this realm apart is tainted from the outset since it attempts to reject the economic conditions attached to its genesis. As the warrantor of a liberated subjectivity and society, literature is credible only if it exposes itself to the very thing that this emancipation simultaneously impedes and annihilates. This is particularly true of contemporary capitalism, which destroys precisely that which modern literature and art traditionally seek to preserve or even to call forth in the first place: the reconcilation of the past and the future, subject and nature, society and language, work and love.

I wish I could say that all of this passed like a bad trip, the way high school does for so many people. But to this day, it’s rare that I end a social interaction without retracing the steps of those long walks home from school: convinced that everything I said was false, that authentic communication is impossible within the confines of social norms. I suppose I might be an angry person had I not, in the end, found my way back to Nature, or its closest analogue. It was during high school that I began writing. I transcribed conversations I’d overheard at school, observations about people, insights about the books I was reading. It became a habit that I came to depend upon, like nourishment, in the same way I craved solitude. The world was pulsing forward at a relentless pace, but the page was infinitely slow, infinitely patient. My first-person voice became my primary sense of identity — an avatar of words and air that I constructed each day and carried in my backpack like a talisman. Its private sustenance was less like a pastime than like the wilderness I explored as a child with total freedom, never exhausting its limits.

[...] a writer can have many homelands, and sometimes the identity of that homeland depends greatly on what he’s writing at the moment. It’s possible to have many homelands, it occurs to me now, but only one passport, and that passport is obviously the quality of one’s writing. Which doesn’t mean writing well, because anyone can do that, but writing incredibly well, and not even that, because anyone can write incredibly well. So what is top-notch writing? The same thing it’s always been: the ability to peer into the darkness, to leap into the void, to know that literature is basically a dangerous undertaking. The ability to sprint along the edge of the precipice: to one side the bottomless abyss and to the other the faces you love, the smiling faces you love, and books and friends and food. And the ability to accept what you find, even though it may be heavier than the stones over the graves of all dead writers. Literature, as an Andalusian folk singer would put it, is danger [...]

Borges, who wrote absolute masterpieces, explained it once already. Here’s the story: Borges goes to the theater to see a production of Macbeth. The translation is terrible, the production is terrible, the actors are terrible, the staging is terrible. Even the seats are uncomfortable. And yet when the lights go down and the play begins, the spectators, Borges among them, are immersed once again in the fate of characters who traverse time, shivering once again at what for lack of a better word we can call magic.

Something similar happens with the popular Passion plays, in which the eager amateur actors who once a year stage the crucifixion of Christ manage to transcend the most dreadful absurdity or unconscious heresy on the wings of divine mystery, which isn’t actually divine mystery but art.

How to recognize a work of art? How to separate it, even if just for a moment, from its critical apparatus, its exegetes, its tireless plagiarizers, its belittlers, its final lonely fate? Easy. Let it be translated. Let its translator be far from brilliant. Rip pages from it at random. Leave it lying in an attic. If after all of this a kid comes along and reads it, and after reading makes it his own, and is faithful to it (or unfaithful, whichever) and reinterprets it and accompanies it on its voyage to the edge, and both are enriched and the kid adds an ounce of value to its original value, then we have something before us, a machine or a book, capable of speaking to all human beings: not a plowed field but a mountain, not the image of a dark forest but the dark forest, not a flock of birds but the Nightingale.

One of the things that was interesting to me working with Czesław for twenty-five years was that he never thought it wasn’t the most important thing in the world. He had despair about the world. He had despair about whether his art could ever achieve what he hoped it would achieve. He had a feeling that serious art can lose its way among junk. But he always felt that, as he says in one poem, “Great was that chase with the hounds for the unattainable meaning of the world.” He always thought that the poets and the philosophers and the artists and the theologians and so forth were engaged in the grand human adventure.

It is an immense relief to be, today, just one of many people asking the same questions, and no longer among the youngest ones. So it is no more than my own thought to reflect that, in addition to the value of relentless critique and prospective imagination, one way would be to remember, in detail and without apology, how the world has looked to people, now mostly dead, who believed in its political transformation. That would be writing that recaptured, for example, the socialist promise of freedom and solidarity in language that helped make it a living thing, available to the sensations of imagination. To write that way, without bowing to the prohibitions of the age, would deepen the record of our disappointments. In my mind, it would make up for some of the things left unsaid in the last fifteen years. And it might, in some unforeseeable way, help to make those disappointments and silences into a source of still-prospective joys.

VILA-MATAS

I fully recognize myself in it! Today I know that the best thing about that whole experience was getting to know Duras. I arrived in Paris tired of “normal people,” and tired, too, of all the prim, proper writers that proliferated at the time—not to mention these days, today there are even more. In Paris I confirmed that the writers who appealed to me were those like Duras, the kind who don’t appear on school honors plaques and who are divisive, distinctly unedifying, full of defects, but show immense talent. I think that really terrible side of Duras—she was spectacularly brutal—had a great influence on me.

INTERVIEWER

Brutal?

VILA-MATAS

Brutal because her obsession with writing sprang from a genuine belief that she could transcend the words and reach another—inexpressible—reality. And in order to reach it she was prepared to do anything. She was, frankly, scary. To put it another way, she was a writer on a mission. If I remember correctly, she described this process of reaching “the inexpressible” as “piercing the black shadow,” an “interior” shadow. I also remember that, given her belief that absolutely everybody possesses an inner shadow, she found it strange that not everybody wrote.

I think if we are being honest, we probably would admit that at times we fear there is an unbridgeable gap between us and others—readers, friends, family, partners—that language cannot cross. Or maybe we fear the gap is in fact bridgeable by someone less damaged or more talented or attractive or authentic than ourselves. To cross this gap is the dream of all writers, and that dream is a kind of metonymy of the human dream to cross over into intimacy or connection. It is this melancholy awareness of inevitable distance between humans, and the hope that it can somehow be crossed over, that gently permeates this poem.

Nanni Balestrini’s novels have meant a great deal to me over the years. Formally, stylistically, they are in a category alone. Until I discovered them, I had often wondered if a novelist needed to have contempt for humanity, à la Céline, to have a great style. Style and cynicism—the ability to satirize, and to leave nothing sacred—had always seemed linked. In youth, I’d even regarded a lack of nihilism as an artistic weakness. Balestrini gives the lie to this idea. His novels, which are as funny and bleak as Journey to the End of the Night, are fueled not by contempt but instead by a kind of indestructible belief in revolutionary possibility. This may have something to do with the way the books were made. Balestrini was a subversive, an activist, and an organizer lifelong, in meetings, on barricades, outside factory gates, in the streets, in clandestine spaces. Never a voyeur, and always a participant, which must have been why people trusted him when he turned on his tape recorder. He was introducing art—the novel—to the work of rejecting, possibly overthrowing, bourgeois structures of power.

There’s the door, she tells me, and points. Why don’t you just walk out?

I don’t move. I can walk out the door, but then I’d have to stand in the hall and wait.

What about that gate? She’s pointing out the window now. The gate is lit up at night: razor wire coiled along the top, the tower with a sharpshooter in it. Or what about your cell doors? she asks. Or block gates? Or shower doors? Or the mess hall doors, or the doors to the visitor entrance? How often do you gentlemen touch a doorknob? That’s what I’m asking.

I knew the minute I saw Holly that she’d never taught in a prison before. It wasn’t her looks—she’s not a kid, and you can see she hasn’t had it easy. But people who teach in prisons have a hard layer around them that’s missing on Holly. I can hear how nervous she is, like she planned every word of that speech about the doors. But the crazy thing is, she’s right. The last time I got out, I’d stand in front of doors and wait for them to open up. You forget what it’s like to do it yourself.

She says, My job is to show you a door you can open. And she taps the top of her head. It leads wherever you want it to go, she says. That’s what I’m here to do, and if that doesn’t interest you then please spare us all, because this grant only funds ten students, and we only meet once a week, and I’m not going to waste everyone’s time on bullshit power struggles.

She comes right to my desk and looks down. I look back up. I want to say, I’ve heard some cheesy motivational speeches in my time, but that one’s a doozy. A door in our heads, come on. But while she was talking I felt something pop in my chest.

I got to my class the first night and there they were: the trash. Looking huge at their desks. Most of them seemed edgy, curious, but not Ray Dobbs. He was lean, with thick dark hair. Handsome. But his blue eyes were dead.

I gave him an assignment: Write a story three pages long. And he came back the next week and read out the vilest shit about fucking his teacher. All of them were howling and I was really scared, knowing if I lost control of the class there’d be no getting it back. And that gave me an adrenaline surge that was the tiniest bit like getting high.

So I started to talk. And as Ray Dobbs listened to me I saw something open up behind his eyes like a camera shutter when the picture shoots. It made goose bumps rise up all over me because I’d done that; I’d made that happen just by talking. It felt intimate, like something physical between us.

After that I could feel Ray watching me. It made me alert, like someone had scrubbed mint all over my skin. I’d walk into that stinking, miserable prison and for the next three hours, a wise and beautiful woman would float out of the wreckage of my life, and her words and thoughts and tiniest movements were precious.

Over ten years have passed, eleven summers that raise to fifty-five the number of years that have elapsed since the summer of '58, with wars, revolutions and explosions at nuclear power stations, all in the process of being forgotten.

The time that lies ahead of me grows shorter. There will inevitably be a last book, as there is always a last lover, a last spring, but no sign by which to know them. I am haunted by the idea that I could die without ever having written about 'the girl of '58', as I very soon began to call her. Someday there will be no one left to remember. What that girl and no other experienced will remain unexplained, will have been lived for no reason.

No other writing project seems to me as - I wouldn't say luminous, or new, and certainly not joyful, but vital: it allows me to rise above time. The thought of 'just enjoying life' is unbearable. Every moment lived without a writing project resembles the last.

5/25/41

It’s so important that people—especially young people write some poetry during their lives. Even if it is bad poetry. Even if they think they do not like poetry or have no talent for writing it, they should write, and even badly, if it is sincere. And really sincere poetry is seldom bad even if the form is not perfect. But the poetry opens a new vista of the world. It is not so much that we see new things, but that we see old things differently. And this experience is invaluable. It is as soul-shaking as the experience of love. It is more ennobling. It makes philosophers and kings.

5/18/42

Creation of the best order comes from the greatest need. Who never has sat on the edge of his bed weeping through the night, conscious of the tongueless voice within him, thirsting after the beautiful tone, the exquisite line of verse, the perfect stroke, the flavor in his mouth that would tell him perfection, does not know what I suffer now, and will never create. Let me be, says my own voice. Let this first painful child deliver itself. Then come, if you will, probe and test and kill me, but I shall never die then. In the air-pockets, in the mountain tops, in the clothes of all mankind, in the rock of the earth and the cement of the pavements, in the waters of the seas I shall be then! But I that am heavy laden now, leave me be. I shall fashion my own tongue out of the dross of the fire, I shall find it buried in the twisted ashes. It will be there for me, it will be like no one else’s. Then I shall speak not greatness, not life, not growth perhaps, not family nor brotherly love, but speak the need of others like me who have not found their tongues, or for whom perhaps there will never be a tongue but mine. The duty is great and the burden is heavy on me, but the work will be the deepest joy on earth. Not life shall I create, not life, but truth above all, as no one has seen it before.

SEPTEMBER 21, 1949

To the Grotta Azzurra with K. Very cluttered with rowboats, so certainly 50% of the light was obscured. What a shame. Caught the 4:10 bus back to Napoli. Then the parting. And the rushing. Grapes. And a last dinner with K. I in my white suit, which I’d wanted to wear the first evening with her. We dined—indifferently—at the vine balcony restaurant of our first lunch. K. often holds me, looks earnestly into my face, and kisses me on the lips. What does she wish me to say further? (I have said nothing.) She doesn’t wish anything. But mightn’t I? Plans—does K. want them? I know it is I who do not want them. That K. could more easily bear than I could say, I shall come to London next year and we shall live together. No, I don’t not know what I want. With perfect equanimity, I can contemplate nothing but brief affairs—promiscuous ones—in N.Y. And yet I hope for a jolt (of time, in time) to crystallize my desires. I long to write, and dream of its coming out easily as a spider’s web. Now I know why I keep a diary. I am not at peace until I continue the thread into the present. I am interested in analyzing myself, in trying to discover the reasons why I do such & such. I cannot do this without dropping dried peas behind me to help me retrace my course, to point a straight line in the darkness.

It was like a walking frame or a wheelchair, a crutch, which when you think about it is what most writing is, something to support the figure of the writer, so that he doesn’t fall back into the primordial soup of everyone else, which is no one.

[...] once of the reasons I wrote the novel was that I felt there are blank spaces where novels ought to be, particularly in nineteenth-century literature. For instance, I would like to read novels that give the taste and flavour of the Chartists, and their personal lives, their discussions, their conflicts, and perhaps, the small revolutionary groups that flourished in London in the nineteenth century, most of them dedicated to fomenting revolution in Europe. I think The Golden Notebook is a useful testament to its time, particularly now that communism is dead or dying everywhere, or changing its nature. Nothing seems more improbable than what people believed when this belief has gone with the wind. Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

Interviewer: Do you enjoy writing, or is such a term irrelevant to your experience?

Mailer: Oh, no. No, no. You set me thinking of something Jean Malaquais once said. He always had a terrible time writing. He once complained with great anguish about the unspeakable difficulties he was having with a novel. And I asked him, "Why do it? You can do many other things well. Why do you bother with it?" I really meant this. Because he suffered when writing like no one I know. He looked up in surprise and said, "Oh, but this is the only way one can ever find the truth. The only time know that something is true is at the moment I discover it in the act of writing." I think it's that. I think it's this moment when one knows it's true. One may not have written it well enough for others to know, but you're in love with the truth when discover it at the point of a pencil. That, in and by itself, is one of the few rare pleasures in life.