The Writing Life Read online

  He then makes a very bold claim that has to do with the seeming limitations that might be involved in the demand that ‘we write from what we know’. Taking an extreme case, he tells us:

  The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is ever lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military. Greater miracles have been seen than that, imagination assisting, she should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen.

  What James is allowing for is the existence in us of a quality well beyond the ordinary (imagination, but also the capacity to make much of little) that might allow his observant young lady access to a world she would appear, given her sex and position, to have no useful knowledge of: and he offers as evidence a startling example:

  I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she had learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. The opportunities consisted in her once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at a table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but the moment was experience.

  This mirrors in a quite remarkable way the circumstances of young David Copperfield at the door to Captain Hopkins’ room. The same ‘threshold’ situation, the same apprehension, in a single moment, of all that is needed for a ‘glimpse’ to expand and become knowledge. But James takes us a step further. His woman of genius, he tells us, ‘was blessed with the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell … the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on the way to knowing any corner of it … If experience consists of impressions, it may well be said that impressions are experience.’

  Of course not all experience consists of what James calls impressions. Much of it comes to us in direct dealings with the world of events and accidents, the irruption into our lives of obstacles, some of them larger than we can manage, or fatally destructive, that we have to negotiate as best we can. What James is arguing for is the inner view, the sort of knowledge that comes, as it does to young David Copperfield at the door to Captain Hopkins’ room, as if from nowhere, and which most of us, if we are consciously aware of it, barely question. The writer is different only in that he is especially responsive to such impressions. That is his temperament, the very ‘atmosphere of the mind’, James would say, that he moves in.

  And we might go a step further here, and ask ourselves if what we call experience doesn’t also consist of impressions that come to us, not ‘from God knows where’ but from a place equally mysterious and off the map, the imagination.

  I’m thinking of occasions when our mind plays a peculiar trick on us and memory hits on an event so real, so alive in every way to our senses, that we take it at first for the recall of something that actually happened to us; we are so keenly aware of what it felt like to be there at the centre of it – the way the light fell, the very quality of the surrounding air. Then we think again. This isn’t something that happened to us. It’s something we read in a book! – But didn’t that also happen? How else explain the certainty we felt of having been there in our actual body; at an occasion, imaginary as it was, that had all the immediacy of sensory impact and presence with which real events come to us?

  The truth is that the thing did happen, but to our reading-self, while we were lost as we say in a book. And isn’t that precisely what we read for? Or go to the theatre or the opera or the movies for? This experience of being both there and not there. There in our real body, but more powerfully as well in some other, more mysterious entity; a disembodied mind or consciousness that is free to move beyond itself into new and finer, or more dangerous or painful situations, and emerge not only unscathed, but re-energised, enlivened.

  This surely is one of our most ancient pleasures. From the earliest days of storytelling, round the campfire or in the marketplace or in halls where the great epics and sagas were recited, this must have been the attraction, intensely personal, hugely liberating, that drew us to sit quietly in company, yet at the same time alone, and give ourselves up to entranced, excited listening. Especially in societies that were not yet literate and where storytelling was one of the few communal entertainments.

  Entering a story – a fairytale or folk-tale or fable: being taken out of ourselves into the skin of another; having adventures there that are both our own and not our own – is an experience of a particular kind. Release from the constrictions, whatever they may be, of our own life and body into a dimension where reality is not limited to dailiness and the laws of nature, and all sorts of occasions, richer and more fantastic, more exciting, more harrowing, can be imaged forth – imagined – and made real. There is a regenerative and healing quality here that makes such experiences something more than entertainment or simply a way of passing the time; though the passing of time is also essential to it.

  Time in a story passes more quickly than in real life – ‘the next day’ we say, all in a breath, or ‘some years later’. But it may also pass more slowly, or stop altogether, giving the narrator, and the listener, the luxury of looking around and absorbing things that in real life are gone too quickly to be taken in, or to consider and ask questions that real life leaves no space for. Such games offer a momentary respite from calendar and body time into the free time of ‘ever after’. As if by losing ourselves in the story, we had, at least for its duration, stopped the body’s clock from ticking on inevitably to death, and escaped its laws and limitations. Could, for example, be in several places at the same time, or slip out of one body into another, or put off the conditions of our heavy earth-bound nature and fly.

  This is the experience we get these days, the experience we seek, from reading, and the effect is all the stronger because of the solitary and inward nature of that activity, the complex alternation of active and passive attention it demands.

  We take this, and our easy adaption to it, so much for granted that it is difficult to imagine a state in which these reading-selves of ours had not yet emerged; as it is difficult for us to imagine any other self than the one we now live with, or to believe, perhaps, that a pre-literate self, inhabiting a pre-literate world, though it experienced things in a very different way, might have been no less complex, and possessed of a sensibility no less rich and crowded with sensations, than the one that now lives daily with motor vehicles, supermarkets, mobile phones, and an information system that has access to satellites, out there in space, that beam into our homes and offices – but instantaneously – what is still in process of occurring on the far side of the globe.

  It takes a strong exercise of the imagination, of un-remembering, of emptying our minds (our bodies too with their accustomed reflexes) of all they know and take for granted, to see how differently men and women of another age might have come at the world. We need to run the mind backwards like a film, letting it discard as it goes all acquaintance with those means by which, over more than two centuries now, information has come pouring into our overloaded sensory systems – email, the internet, the mobile phone, the computer, the fax machine; then television, radio, the telephone, the telegraph; finally newspapers, periodicals, the printed book – till we find ourselves back once more at a point where news comes to us by word of mouth and slowly, at pony or walking pace; a time before rail or motor transport when even a journey to the next village was a venture seriously undertaken, and news was what was happening a dozen miles, not half a planet away.

  What we call consciousness must have had a different feel then, and bodies too; when everything that came to hand came first hand, out of a world that
was always within reach, and for the most part only in reach; when to make any discovery at all of what surged and spawned and swarmed around you, of how things worked, you had to be all eyes and ears for the immediate detail and effect, since your only source of knowledge was looking and listening. Looking closely and giving yourself time to take in the smallest deviations and differences. Listening. Listening in.

  Of course there must have been observers and observers, and that quality of imagination that allows some men and women to build on what they have observed; and intuitions that could take some of them ‘beyond’. There must also have been degrees of listening, of catching more than the next man of what was being said. And there must have been those as well in whom the link between eye and mind, eye and hand, was unusually quick.

  We know from the sermons that have come down to us from the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, when much of normal Sunday churchgoing had to do with hour-long addresses from the pulpit, what practised listeners these churchgoers must have been; from speeches too in the theatre, where what had originally been a crowd in search of crude sensation and knock-about farce had, in little more than two decades, become an ‘audience’ that could follow the complex moral arguments and riddling wordplay of a Hamlet, a Macbeth, a Lear. This, if nothing else, should convince us that the pre-literate, or mixed literate and pre-literate world that makes up so much of human history was neither undeveloped nor primitive. There are places all over the planet, even now, in an age of instant information and global consciousness, where a highly advanced technology and low literacy exist side by side; so that men and women living in the same space, and in daily contact, draw their experience simultaneously from different sources. Directly, in the age-old way of observing and listening, and in addition to this, if they are literate, through whatever advanced technology is available to them. And if we take the long view, this ‘mixed’ set of conditions, where the two forms of experience exist side by side, is the norm.

  This is how it was in the classical world of Plato and Aristotle and the Greek dramatists, of Vergil and Plutarch and Horace; in the world of Dante and Petrarch and Shakespeare; and as it is in many places today. It is worth recalling, when we are tempted to be complacent about our own high level of development, that the greatest works of philosophy and literature, before the eighteenth century, were produced in societies that were largely illiterate, though not necessarily uneducated in the wider sense, and that the scientific discoveries that have made the largest contribution to life on our planet – the making of fire, the domestication of seeds and animals, and of fruit and vegetables by cross-breeding or grafting, the irrigation and fertilisation of soils – were the work not of trained scientists, but through long centuries of observing and experimenting in a purely practical way, or through a sudden leap of the imagination, or by making an inspired guess and getting it right, of humble herders and farmers, and in some places, such as Africa and South America, of women.

  It is the richness of such ‘mixed’ worlds as a source of individual experience that answers what has for so long been a problem to some of our best scholars and commentators: how it is that a youth growing up in a town of some fifteen hundred souls, and with little more in the way of education than seven or eight years at the local grammar school, could have acquired the wealth of knowledge, and the experience, across so many trades and professions and orders of society, that is on show in the plays that come to us under the name of William Shakespeare.

  Quite apart from the question of how much formal education a writer might actually need (think of Dickens), what this problem ignores is that other quality Henry James points to, ‘the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell’.

  That ‘inch’, in the young Shakespeare’s case, was a prosperous town with a wide range of home-based industries – brewing, weaving, tanning, dyeing (Shakespeare’s father was a glover) – as well as all the trades associated with building, and in close proximity to a countryside of orchards, ‘small pelting farms’ and larger ones involved in the many branches of the wool trade.

  Should we really assume that to have access to all he ‘knew’ – that inside knowledge the plays reveal of the law, of drugs, cures, seamanship, and a very convincing expertise in such military matters as the laying of mines and the conducting of sieges – the young Shakespeare must at some time have been articled, or practised medicine, or been to sea, or done service on one of Elizabeth’s many military adventures on the continent? All this a young man with an ear for shop-talk and an eye for observing workmen at their trade, especially a young person of imagination and genius as James puts it, on whom nothing was ever lost, could have picked up – with no awareness as yet that he was in training for his own barely existent trade – in the streets of Stratford itself, or in the houses of neighbours, or in idle hours at a tavern in the company of some sailor home from the sea or soldier back from the wars.

  The range of what Shakespeare acquired in the way of experience was prodigious; he was, after all, a prodigy. But the means by which he came to it was common, and is so still.

  Young people today grow up in a world where information comes to them through sophisticated high-tech systems – the internet, email, iPads – and where communication across a wide range of places and persons is both frequent and immediate. Space and time have been telescoped, intimacy replaced by a new kind of distance; and this is just one example of a distancing that has become general in the culture as a whole. Our global economy means that commodities and products that were once local or seasonal are now available everywhere in the developed world and at all times of the year; but this also sets us at a remove, personally, from all but the most abstract acquaintance with their source and production. Everything now, from fruit and vegetables of the most exotic kind to eggs, chicken thighs, cereals, comes packaged or frozen, in a way that makes invisible, and to many young people unimaginable and of no interest or concern, the natural world to which these things once belonged and the skills of those who produce and gather them. In the case of a plastic tray of chops, for example, the long process from breeding to slaughter that was once the life of a real animal and has brought it first to the supermarket, now to the table.

  A continuity has been broken. Between the part of our experience that sets us in nature, as one of its creatures and subject to its laws and changes, and that other part where we exist as social and economic units, consumers. What has got lost in the break is much that once belonged to our direct sensory experience – the glow of a ripe peach behind leaves, the first blades of green in a furrow, the feel under our hand of the bristles on the back of a hog, the dance of threads in a hand-loom; something too (think of what fed so much poetry) of our sense of the world we were in as a place of teeming variety and growth, in which each thing had its moment of perfected ripeness or growth, but also, inevitably, of decline, and was a source of feeling in us as well as of use.

  The change in most places, and in the lives of many of us who are still living, has been rapid. Even fifty years ago, a child growing up in a good-sized town, as I did in Brisbane in the forties and fifties, would have had a backyard to play in, with two or three pawpaw trees and a mango or lemon, rows of peas, beans, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, a corner for rhubarb where fat snails congregated, and a chook-house where you could reach your hand in and feel for the warmth of a new-laid egg. Also, close beside it, a block where some familiar rooster or hen had its head chopped off for Sunday dinner, and afterwards hung from a hook trailing threads of sticky gore, headless but still convulsively flapping its wings.

  All this is gone in most city places, and with it the baker’s boy with his basket of warm loaves, the milkman’s horse clopping down the street just before dawn, the milk in a striped jug on the front step, covered with a doily weighted with beads.

  But that said, there is something still of that older way of experiencing things that is not gone. Families, for all the changes, remain pretty much what they have alwa
ys been: little word-of-mouth societies, repositories of facts, skills, stories, teasing secrets (and sometimes insoluble mysteries), where children pick up what they first know of the world in the way they always have, by question and answer. By puzzling things out from what they are told – but more often from what they are not told but gather by eavesdropping, or like the young David Copperfield, by lingering on a threshold to catch what comes to them, in a flash, from God knows where, or as a glimpse while they are ‘looking away’.

  Children continue, even in an age of technology, to acquire a good deal of what they will one day think of as their first experience in the most old-fashioned ways. Through codes, habits, rituals – which provide us with our first apprehension of how things fit together to make a style of living or local culture; how power works and who has it and how it can be negotiated – how it can be manipulated too and misused; who among those who come and go in a household belong, and to what degree, and who does not and why; all the ins and outs of family lore and gossip that no-one sets out precisely to inform us of but which we take in and carry with us for the rest of our days.

  This, in the making of young lives, is much, and not to be underestimated. What is being shaped here, as the questions arise and are provisionally answered, is a take on the world that will be conditional, as all experience is, on the disposition of the little watcher and listener, and in that way tempered to the purely personal view. ‘We cannot say too little,’ Emerson warns, ‘of our constitutional necessity of seeing things under private aspects, or saturated with our humours.’ Much more will come, as a life gathers the elements that will define it: love, loss, a vocation discovered and professional skills acquired, partnership, parenthood, perhaps a time at war – the thousand oddities of experience undergone and accidents survived. But what these amplify and build on is what has already been laid down in those first months and years, and was acquired in the most traditional way.