BARBORA ON TV
Wrote brief bits of The Prague Metro, arguments to be expanded later. I have to attempt some ethical conclusion. It’s very difficult — I have read no philosophy, and am coming up against holes in my argument so big that I sometimes wonder if there isn’t more hole than cloth. It seems, of its own will, to be expanding. It’s now a travel book-cum-novel-cum-political essay-cum-psychological report-cum-just about everything else. I’ll probably be including poems and drawings and pieces of music next. What a mess. And totally unpublishably egoistic. But I can’t see what else I can write. A nice narratorial novel, with an odd bunch of people. A satire. I’m composing more at the typewriter. Using funny kinds of paper — do anything to step sideways, to trip over the thought or the line.
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Letters to Paddy and Mum and Dad. Tried rewriting ‘Auerbach’ again. I suppose the subject means I should rewrite hundreds of times, over years.
What is it about Bruce Chatwin, his style isn’t impeccable, whatever the critics say, there are lapses into journalese in every paragraph. Yet he managed to write what I can only term ‘atmospheric’ books, and I can only define this by instancing Wuthering Heights. The Songlines is not just a book, it is a creed. But is he a great writer? Does it matter?
Finished — Chatwin’s What Am I Doing Here, also The Chess Scene.
Auerbach
Vocation, unlike dirt, cannot be washed off
at the end of the day. Instead, rooted down
in the flinty night of earth, the violence
explored by worms, vocation is bloody, like
a mythic tree which, when its twigs are snapped,
bleeds blood.
Lost in the upper worlds /for we cannot
deny those basic, sub-iconic myths, of light
and dark, of up and down: more basic
even than male sun and female moon/ above
the tangle of non-angelic thought, this
is where you are not. Instead you are held,
beneath, within.
Instead the basics; the form before, and its
appearance beneath a different kind of weather,
within the lightbulb’s cool, facetious gaze;
the shift of perception like the shift of clouds
without the clouds themselves: completion like
the cup in which the ignorant water rests.
To instantly make
the decision, breaking over the wave
of occurrence, to see immediately that the decision
was wrong, but not to regret the decision,
to make the next decision and to accept
the next mistake, knowing, at least,
that your past mistakes were wholly meant.
(24th October to 5th November 1990)1
It isn’t for anyone else, but this is an important poem for me. I took Frank Auerbach’s working method, as I understood it, and applied it to a poem about him. This was the first time I had consciously rewritten something through multiple drafts, to the point I saw it becoming worse and worse. But I wasn’t going to stop at that; I was going to take it through exhaustion, in the hope of reaching — somehow — exhilaration.
I advise all my writing students to attempt this, at least one. Take a story, perhaps not your best, but one with potential, and rewrite it multiple times in multiple ways. Try to make it as short as possible. Then expand each sentence as far as you can see it go. Then reduce it again. Try writing it in the style of your major influence of the moment. Then go to their opposite, perhaps some writer you dislike.
In some ways, this kind of approach is a test. If you don’t want to go through this, you’re going to struggle to improve — because how?