Craft: Setting the tone before a scene of conflict
“The shadows are lengthening. Across the stripped crests of the elms, beyond the curtain of a row of poplars, white house fronts and blue roofs sparkle in the level light. Hardly anyone is about. Jean can hear the creak of wheels ploughing through the mud of a sunken road, but the cart itself is invisible. Etched upon the horizon, a grey horse and a bay are drawing a plough across a gently undulating expanse of stubble, the soft brown clods rising soundlessley beside the gleaming share. A belated puddle shines amongst the tree-trunks, where, overhead, abandoned nests crouch like big black spiders in their web of leafless boughs. The ploughman has reached the end of the field; slowly he swings his horses round and starts a new furrow. The grey horse, now coming toward Jean, conceals both the plough and the bay horse, and seems to be advancing by itself.
The wind drops. The creak of cart-wheels has died away. The dead leaves cease rustling. All is still…”
From Jean Barois, the 1913 novel by the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient, Roger Martin du Gard. First English edition translated by Stuart Gilbert and published by the Viking Press in 1949. (p. 77)
Thinking about editing and corrections and lots of paper
“The printing process involves more than just reformatting a manuscript with the goal of generating a large number of copies to circulate through time and space. It also encompasses a text’s transition into a sphere of error correction and heightened claims to truth. Printing involves press proofs, preliminary corrections, and thorough reviews. The inevitability of printing errors is not eliminated by the ability to print an improved, revised edition of a book, but it is kept in check.
… Modern authors are their own editors even before they approve their manuscripts for publication. When Erasmus of Rotterdam described the printed book as an object that permitted, and demanded, a theoretically endless sequence of corrections and revisions, he was not referring to printing alone. Correcting misprints is the job of the printer and typesetter, but factual errors or imperfect verses are corrected in the manuscript itself. In other words, this is the job of the author. In a letter from 1651, Guez de Balzac wrote that in the course of abridging, editing, and reworking a single satire he has used up ‘une demy rame de papier,’ or half a ream. Taken literally, this would have been 250 sheets of paper.”
Lothar Müller: White Magic – The Age of Paper, translated by Jessica Spengler, Polity Press, 2014
Autobiography as Original Sin
In the posthumously published book about memory and photography, the American author Janet Malcolm (1934-2021) gives this warning about the harmful impact of personal memories on writing:
My mind is filled with lovely plotless memories of [her father]. The memories with a plot are, of course, the ones that commit the original sin of autobiography, which gives it its vitality if not its raison d’être. They are the memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification –- and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them “Who asked you to tarnish my image with your miserable little hurts?” the dead person might reasonably ask. (p.32)
Memory is not a journalist’s tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly. Memory does not render characters. Memory has no regard for the reader. If an autobiography is to be minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue…its passion for the tedious. (p. 154)
Janet Malcolm, Still Pictures – On Photography and Memory, Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillan, 2023.
Writing with purpose: to upend established order and upset hierarchies
“…my commitment to writing … does not consist of writing ‘for’ a category of readers, but in writing ‘from’ my experience as a woman and an immigrant of the interior; and from my longer and longer memory of the years I have lived, and from the present, an endless provider of the images and words of others. This commitment through which I pledge myself in writing is supported by the belief, which has become a certainty, that a book can contribute to change in private life, help to shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed, and enable beings to reimagine themselves. When the unspeakable is brought to light, it is political.
…In the bringing to light of the social unspeakable, of those internalized power relations linked to class and/or race, and gender too, felt only by the people who directly experience their impact, the possibility of individual but also collective emancipation emerges. To decipher the real world by stripping it of the visions and values that language, all language, carries within it is to upend its established order, upset its hierarchies.”
Annie Ernaux, from her Nobel Prize Lecture in Stockholm, December, 2022. Each Nobel prize has a “motivation” and in Annie Ernaux’s case, it was awarded “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”
How This Leads to That: Joining the Dots After a Time of Plague,
In his monumental work The Earth Transformed – An Untold Story, Oxford University’s global historian, Peter Frankopan joins the dots between some remarkable post-pandemic events in history. This one links the Black Death with autoimmune diseases, a shortage of scribes, and the invention of the printing press.
“…many of those who survived the plague may have done so because they were carrying a genetic mutation that served to offer a layer of protection to the immune system. Ironically, this mutation, known as ERAP2, is now associated with several autoimmune disorders, such as Crohn ‘s disease, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis: in other words, alleles that protected against Black Death confer raised risk for diseases for people alive today.
…The aftermath of plague also saw new fashions, diets and attitudes toward luxury goods, partly as a result of the emergence of competitive consumption, partly because smaller populations meant goods cost less, and partly because of the euphoria of having dodged death’s call. Protein availability not only soared in Europe because there were fewer people to feed, but as farmers and herders were forced to find new markets for their livestock – opening up what one historian has called an international meat trade. It has been argues too that the deaths of so many copyists during the pandemic led to the fall of the price of paper −something that spurred literacy levels and perhaps even helped prompt the print revolution of Johannes Gutenberg and others.”
Peter Frankopan: The Earth Transformed – An Untold History, Alfred Knopf, 2003, p. 313-4
People and their Books: Sarah Bakewell #1 – Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
In her book Humanly Possible – Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, former library curator and now acclaimed author, Sarah Bakewell, presents a series of vignettes about the relationship people have with books.
Here she presents the example of French essayist Michel de Montaigne:
“Michel did know his classics intimately, and his love for his favourite authors was profound. He built up his own book collection and housed them on shelves built to fit the round interior of his tower. He also had that tower’s ceiling beams painted with quotations, so that he could look up and see them at any time…In pride of place was Terrence’s Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto: “I am human, and consider nothing human alien to me.” …
Yet Montaigne trashes all the humanistic pieties on the subject of reading. As soon as he gets bored with a book, he says he flings it aside…
Instead, he likes books when they enhance life and when they expand his understanding of the many people who have lived in the past. Biographies and histories are good, because they show the human being “more alive and entire than in any other place – the diversity and truth of his inner qualities in the mass and in the detail, the variety of ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him.”
Of his own work, Sarah Bakewell adds:
“the Essays return constantly to the classic humanistic themes of moral judgment, courtesy, education, virtue, politics, elegant writing, rhetoric, the beauties of books and texts, and the question of whether we are excellent or despicable. But, pondering each of these themes with a skeptical and questioning eye, he dismantles them. Once they are lying around him in pieces, he reassembles them in a more interesting, more disconcerting, and more thought-provoking spirit than before.”
Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible – Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, Alfred Knopf Canada /Penguin Random House, 2023, pp. 157-8.
People and their Books: Sarah Bakewell # 2 – Anton Chekhov (1860 -1904) and Vasily Grossman (1905- 1964)
In her book, Humanly Possible – Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, former library curator and now acclaimed author, Sarah Bakewell, presents a series of vignettes about the relationship people have with books.
In this excerpt, Bakewell links the Russian short-story writer and playwright, Anton Chekhov, with the Ukrainian chemical engineer and creative writer, Vasily Grossman.
“[Chekhov’s] short stories, especially, are humanistic in the close attention they pay to events (or quiet non-events) from people’s everyday lives: moments of love or heartbreak, journeys, deaths, boring days. His views on religion and morality were also those of a humanistic: he disliked dogma and was skeptical about supernatural beliefs. As one twentieth-century admirer of Chekhov wrote: He said – and no on had said this before, not even Tolstoy – that first and foremost we are all of us human beings. Do you
understand? Human beings! He said something no one in Russiahad ever said. He said that first of all we are human beings – and only secondly are be bishops, Russians, shopkeepers, Tartars, workers …Chekhov said: let’s put God – and all these grand
progressive ideas – to one side. Let’s begin with man; let’s be
kind and attentive too the individual man.”
These words area actually spoken by a fictional character, in a scene from the novel Life and Fat by the Jewish Ukrainian writer, Vasily Grossman…Like Chekhov, Grossman was a scientist as well as a creative writer: he began in a career as a chemical engineer. Then he took up fiction, much of it light and comic at first. And journalism during the Second World War, especially by filing reports from the battle front in Stalingrad. In the 1950s he worked on Life and Fate…. [The novel] plunges us into the very worst that the twentieth century had to offer: war, mass murder, cold, hunger, betrayal, racist persecution in both Nazi-occupied territory and the Soviet Union – in short, human grief and suffering on a staggering scale. … But through all of this, Grossman imbues the narrative with his humanistic sensibility, putting individuals at the centre, never ideas or ideals.”
Bakewell then outline’s Grossman’s difficult and often perilous journey in getting his book into print: “It was immediately hailed as a twentieth-century masterwork, comparable to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or to an interlinked series of Chekhov stories. Part of its fascination was its own story; one of survival against the odds. Like so many works by our humanists in earlier times, it had been saved by ingenuity, concealment, rescue, and reduplication. And as Petrarch and Bocaccio and the early humanist printers knew, nothing is so good for rescuing a book as making lots of copies of it.”
Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible – Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, Alfred Knopf Canada / Penguin Random House, 2023, pp. 360-2
On the Road to Write
When I was the commissioning editor at Novalis, every month I would receive a different proposal for what was essentially the same book: the story of a writer’s experience of “doing the Camino” as they attempted or completed their pilgrimage from (usually) somewhere in France to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain.
Retracing the steps of millions of pilgrims through the centuries, this journey has always served as a way of seeking answers to vital questions. What makes Mary Colwell’s book about her pilgrimage so compelling is that she completed her journey under markedly different circumstances: it was winter 2022, and all of Europe, like North America, was under severe lockdown. It was cold, and instead of being one of the usual 300,000 pilgrims who make this journey each year, she was, for the most part, quite alone.
In this excerpt, she explains the link this journey has with writing and story telling:
“So many souls gather on this line through the land and each one has a unique story to tell. The physical Camino is the skeleton, the bare bones on which to hang the flesh of a tale. The villages, towns and cities, the mountains forests, wine regions, agricultural plains and upland farms form the universal chapter headings, the same story arc of a walk of 500 miles across northern Spain, but innumerable different adventures emerge. Each journey comprises a unique set of characters with an intricate, infinite web of back stories. It is this particularity that makes the Camino live in a million different hearts in a million different ways, and all of them begin by walking.
When people say it is the journeying involved in pilgrimage that matters as much as the destination, it is because the time spent en route is the creative space that allows the invisible to get to work. The combination of walking, someone’s personal history and the stories both old and new that are ever-present, all form a potent solution where feelings, hunches and notions begin to crystalise. They fill a void normally crowded out with daily life, getting stronger and more substantial as each day passes. It cannot be instantaneous, it is an unfolding, developing process, like a mother of pearl accreting around a stone. Insight is born in the gap between experiencing and recognition, between an inkling and an understanding.”
Mary Colwell, The Gathering Place – A Winter Pilgrimage Through Changing Times, Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2023, p. 132
On Writing: Wisdom from Hilary Mantel
In 2017, the acclaimed British novelist Hilary Mantel (1952 – 2022) gave that year’s Reith Lectures for the BBC. In a series of five linked and remarkable presentations, she talked about the art of writing historical fiction. Her insights into the writing process are the result of years of honing her craft in a series of formidable novels: Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies, Beyond Black, The Mirror and the Light, A Place of Greater Safety.
Here are just three important insights into the process of writing that she included in her lectures:
The raw materials of fiction
“Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more ‘the past’ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.”
“An event you choose to tell may not be dramatic in itself. Your scene may be as simple as a woman writing a letter, when a man comes in and interrupts her. But when two people are talking in a room, they have a hinterland, and you must suggest it. To that one moment, you bring a sense of every moment that led us there, everything that has brought your woman to this hour, this room, this desk. The multitude of life choices. The motives, conscious or unconscious. The wishes, dreams and desires, all held invisibly within the body whose actions you describe. They hover over the text like guardian angels.”
Writing history/writing fiction
“The task of historical fiction is to take the past out of the archive and relocate it in a body.”
“Landscapes, streetscapes, objects, are dead in themselves. They only come alive through the senses of your character, though his perceptions, his opinions, his point of view. There are no special tricks to make exposition work. There are only different levels of skill, in the author…. You cannot give a complete account. A complete thing is an exhausted thing. You are looking for the one detail that lights up the page: one line, to perturb or challenge the reader, make him feel acknowledged, and yet estranged.”
The hard work of writing
“…you educate yourself towards you characters and that’s why it takes such a long time. That’s what all the hours, days, years in libraries are about. It’s about growing knowledge, knowledge and another sensibility that will stand beside the one you started out with, the one that’s native to you.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing, till you try to do it. As capacity increases, so does ambition. But when it comes getting the words on the page, you can only work breath by breath, line by line.”
“In time I understood one thing: that you don’t become a novelist to become a spinner of entertaining lies: you become a novelist so you can tell the truth.”
Her lecture series is available on the BBC Radio 4 website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08tcbrp
A Perilous Trade
In The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing, Michael Castleman paints a broad-stroke panorama of the perilous trade of writing and publishing. Piracy, agents, take-overs, remainders, technology, copyright, contracts, digitization, ancient past practices that still inform current conditions. Overall, this is not the happiest of sagas, but he loads the book with little nuggets of possibility and surprising success stories.
He offers these two important predictions as he concludes his journey:
“Long-form reading is resilient. Nothing can kill books. As technology evolves, new innovations are bound to seize the public imagination and prompt renewed predictions of books’ demise. But repeatedly, new technologies have not killed book reading. Nothing ever has, and all evidence suggests nothing ever will….
A huge swath of the population loves to read and won’t stop, no matter what new widgets software engineers dream up.
Authors will continue to write. …. Human beings are creative. Countless millions love to write. We writers yearn to express ourselves in words, and to do that, we’re willing to make sacrifices…Yes, the book business is bittersweet. It always has been and looks like it always will be…” (p. 253-4)
Michael Castleman, The Untold Story of Book: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing, The Unnamed Press, 2024.
Stefan Zweig part 1: In 1937, when people said the era of the book was over:
Austrian-born Stefan Zweig (1881 -1942) was one of the foremost authors of the early twentieth century. His fiction and biographies were deeply influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud. This is the first of 2 excerpts from his 1937 collection, The Old-Book Peddler and Other Tales for Bibliophiles, Translated by Theodore Koch of the Charles Deering Library at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.
In this extract he is reacting to critics who, 87 years ago, suggested that the time of the book had come to an end and that “technical developments are now to the fore.”
They say that the phonograph, the cinema and the radio are more precise and more convenient means of conveying language and thought, and have already begun to replace books; that the rôle of books in the history of civilization will soon be a thing of the past. This is a narrow view, a stunted way of thinking!
What miracle has technical skill ever accomplished that surpasses or even equals the marvelous effect of books through thousands of years! Chemistry has not produced an explosive with such far-reaching power, sufficient to shake the world; it has not made steel plates or reinforced concrete that can outlast this small bundle of printed sheets. No electric lamp gives out such light as proceeds from many a thin pamphlet, and no power current created by technical skill equals that which fills the soul when it comes in contact with a book.
Ageless and indestructible, changeless through the centuries, storage batteries of the highest potency in the smallest and most usable form, books have nothing to fear from technical developments, for is not technical skill learned and improved by means of books, and by nothing else? Everywhere, not merely in our own times, books are the alpha and omega of all knowledge, the beginning of every science.
The more intimately we associate with books the more profoundly we experience the unity of life, for our personality is multiplied; we see not only with our own eyes but with the countless eyes of the soul, and by their sublime help we travel with loving sympathy through the whole world.
Stefan Zweig Part 2: Thanks to Books – “our truest and most silent companions”
Austrian-born Stefan Zweig (1881 -1942) was one of the foremost authors of the early twentieth century. His fiction and biographies were deeply influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud. In 1937 he write this about the value of a book:
There they are, waiting and silent. They neither urge, nor call, nor press their claims. Mutely they are ranged along the wall. They seem to be asleep, yet from each one a name looks at you like an open eye. If you look their way or reach a hand toward them they do not call out, nor are they insistent. They make no demands. They wait until advances are made to them; then for the first time they open up. First, when there is quiet about us, peace within us; then we are ready for them.
Some evening on returning from a tiresome round of duties, some day when we are weary of humanity, or in the morning when clouded and heavy with dream-laden sleep,—only then are we ready for books. You would like to hold a parley and yet be alone. You would like to dream, but in music.
With the pleasurable presentiment of a pleasant experiment you go to the bookcase: a hundred eyes, a hundred names silently and patiently meet your searching glance as a slave in a seraglio looks to their master, humbly awaiting the call and yet blissful to be chosen. And then, as the finger gropes about on the piano to find the key for a hidden melody, gently it yields to the hand, this dumb white thing, this closed violin—in it all the voices of God are locked up.
You open up a book, you read a line, a verse; but it does not ring clear at the moment. Disappointed, you put it back almost roughly, until you find the right book for the moment. Then suddenly you are seized, you breathe rapidly and as you carry it away to the lamp, The Book, the happily chosen volume glows, dazzles with an inner light. Magic has been done; from delicate clouds of dreams there stalks forth phantasmagoria. Broad vistas open up and your vanishing senses are lost in space.
Somewhere a clock ticks. But it does not penetrate in this self-circumscribed time. Here the hours are measured by another unit. There are books which traveled through many centuries before their word came to our lips; there are new books, just born yesterday, just yesterday begotten out of the confusion and necessity of a youth, but they speak magic languages and one like the other soothes and quickens our breathing.
While they excite they also comfort; while they seduce they also soothe the open mind. Gradually you sink down into them; there come repose, vision and a calm suspense in their melody in a world beyond this world.
Leisure hours, carrying us away from the tumult of the day; books, truest and most silent companions, how can we thank you for your ever present readiness, for this eternal lifting, elevating influence of your presence!
What have you not been in the darkest days of the soul’s solitude, in military hospitals and army camps, in prisons and on beds of pain! You who have always been on the watch, have given us dreams and fragments of tranquillity in moments of unrest and torture. God’s gentle magnet, you have always been able to draw out the soul into its own sphere if it were lost in everyday routine. You have always, in all periods of gloom, widened the inner heaven within us to something greater.
Little fragments of eternity, quietly ranged along the plain wall, you stand there unpretentiously in our home. Yet when the hand frees you, when the heart touches you, you break though the everyday ordinariness of prose; your words lead us as in a fiery chariot up from pettiness into the eternal.
STEFAN ZWEIG The Old-Book Peddler and Other Tales for Bibliophiles, Translated by THEODORE W. KOCH 1937, Northwestern University, The Charles Deering Library Evanston, Illinois
When writers get tense – advice from the novelist David Lodge:
This excerpt is from a NOVEL in which the author has written a page from a JOURNAL that is being kept by his main character, who is a writer of television DRAMAS. It’s reflection that about the craft of writing that is a lesson about writing according to the conventions of a specific form.
“…in drama or film, everything is happening now. That’s why stage directions are always in the present tense. Even when one character is telling another character about something that happened in the past, the telling is happening in the present, as far as the audience is concerned. Whereas, when you are writing something in a book, it all belongs to the past; even if you write, ‘I am writing, I am writing,’ over and over again, the act of writing is finished with, out of sight, by the time somebody reads the result.
A journal is halfway between the two forms. It’s like talking silently to yourself. It’s a mixture of monologue and autobiography. You can write a lot of stuff in the present tense, like: ‘The plane trees outside my window are in leaf.…’ But really that’s just a fancy way of saying, “I am writing, I am writing…’ It’s not getting you anywhere. As soon as you start to tell a story in writing, whether it’s a fictional story or the story of your life, it’s natural to use the past tense, because you are describing things that have already happened. The special thing about a journal is that the writer doesn’t know where the story is going, doesn’t know where it ends; so it seems to exist in a kind of continuous present even though the individual incidents may be described in the past tense. Novels are written after the fact, or they pretend to be. The novelist may not have know how the story would end when [they] began, but it always looks as if [they] did to the reader. I know there are novels written entirely in the present tense …[which] doesn’t seem natural to the medium … they read like scripts. Autobiography is always written after the fact. It’s a past-tense form.”
From the novel Therapy, by David Lodge (1935 – 2025), published by Penguin, 1996, (p. 285-6)
Ira Wells on Book Banning
The freedom to read is under attack…
Book bans are as old as the book itself…
…Where book banning once largely involved the legal and disciplinary apparatus of the state, the new censorship consensus works through both state actors and a constellation of special interest groups operating inside and outside of institutions. Their target is libraries…
…One reason why book banners so frequently attack historical fictions … is that the banners are fighting for control of our collective past. At the same time, in seeking control over the narratives that children will carry into adulthood, the banners are fighting for their vision of the future.
Essential reading.
Ira Wells, On Book Banning, Biblioasis, 2025
How Writers Find Themselves in the Stories They Tell – Fictional or Factual
“I have long wanted to write at least one book for no one’s purpose but my own – to satisfy
my curiosity, to convey to others a sense of the chase of history and the exhilaration it involves.
…I wanted to be free to invoke what now has almost been lost but what was once as common as it was essential in the writing of history: a vivid sense of place. Good history, as Barbara Tuchman has reminded us, is written by the ounce, through fidelity to the ‘telling detail.’
…I wanted to write a book with characters from whose lives the book’s dominant themes issued, strands of human experience played out inside their homes: strands of commitment and betrayal, accomplishment and frustration, community and isolation, love and indifference. And to do so in a way that engaged the reader at an emotional as well as an intellectual level, writing for the heartbeat.
…Someone once asked André Maurois why he had chosen to write a life of Shelley. He answered that the poet mirrored his early emotions; ‘and it seemed to me indeed,’ he added, ‘that to tell the story of this life would be a way of liberating me from myself.’
…All true art, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Olen Butler once said, is rooted in yearning. I believe this.
…We need more often to reach within ourselves and liberate this force in the act of authorial creation.
…Books written from such depths carry with them a clear sense of the authenticity of the author’s moral vision.
…Great works of history, narrative or not, invariably convey the authenticity of publicly expressed yearning. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says, in his book After Virtue: ‘I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
From A. B. McKilop’s essay “Engaging History: Historians, Storytelling, and Self” in Thinkers and Dreamers: Historical Essays in Honour of Carl Berger, edited by Gerald Friesen and Doug Owram, University of Toronto Press, 2011.
A.B. McKillop, is former Chancellor at Carleton University, biographer of Pierre Berton (2008), and author of The Spinster and the Prophet: Florence Deeks, H. G. Wells, and the Mystery of the Purloined Past (2000) which tells the story of Miss Florence Deeks and her charge of “literary piracy” against H.G. Wells in 1925.
Janet Frame (1924 – 2014) on the complications of “horizontal” and “vertical” and “whirlpool” memory – “propelled by a force beneath”
In her biographical essay about the acclaimed New Zealand author Janet Frame, “Wouldn’t you like to be normal?” Lucie Elven identifies how Frame consistently wove autobiographical threads in her fiction. Her difficult complex mental health issues made her a very reluctant subject for would-be biographers. Writing her three-volume autobiography (To the Is-Land in 1982, An Angel at My Table in 1984, and The Envoy from Mirror City in 1985) was Janet Frame’s attempt “to have what she called ‘my say’.”
Toward the end of her finely detailed essay, Elven includes this explanation from Janet Frame, explaining why she found writing from and about personal memory especially difficult.
“Where in my earlier years time had been horizontal, progressive, day after day, year after year, with memories being a true personal history known by dates and specific years, or vertical, with events stacked one upon the other, ‘sacks on the mill and more on still, the adolescent time now becomes a whirlpool and so the memories do not arrange themselves to be observed and written about, they whirl, propelled by a force beneath, with different memories rising to the surface at different times and thus denying the existence of a ‘pure’ autobiography and confirming for each moment, a separate story accumulating to a million stories, all different and with some memories forever staying beneath the surface.”
]
“Wouldn’t you like to be normal?”
Lucie Elven
London Review of Books, May 8. 2025, p. 23-28.
In the Age of Enlightenment: Advice Given/Advice Taken. Or not.
While doing research for a current project I am immersed in “Conversations with Goethe”, an almost 700-page compendium of interview-like vignettes assembled in 1836 by Johann Peter Eckerman (1792 – 1854). He worked closely with the legendary poet, playwright, novelist, thinker, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) in the final years of his life.
Here are two wonderfully contradictory pieces of Goethe’s “advice” for writers:
“…do people take any notice of what we old-timers say? Everyone thinks he knows best, with the result that many young writers lose their way, and many stay lost for a long time. But people should not be getting lost now; that’s what our generation was about – seeking and going astray; and what was the point of it all, if young people are just going down the same paths that we did? We’d never get anywhere like that! Our generation’s errors were not held against us, because we found no beaten paths to tread, but we must expect more of those who come after us. Instead of seeking and going astray all over again, they should be heeding the advice of us old folk and following the right path from the beginning. It’s not enough to take steps that will one day lead you to your destination; each step should be both a destination in itself, and a step along the way.” (1823)
“Giving advice is a curious thing, and when one has been round long enough to see how the most sensible enterprises fail, and the craziest ones often succeed, one I inclined to think twice before giving advice to anyone. Basically, it’s an admission of inadequacy on the part of the one asking for advice, and a mark of presumption on the part of the one giving it. One should only give advice about matters in which one will be personally involved. If somebody asks me for advice, I generally say that I am happy to give it, but only on condition that you promise not to take it.” (1831)