"Anyone can write a novel given six weeks, pen, paper and no telephone or wife," said Evelyn Waugh.
Anyone? Really? To think good writing is a generic skill is to be like those theoretical physicists who believe the janitor could replicate their work if only so minded.
Or the politician who professes to believe that unemployed miners may simply retrain as Java developers.
But the 'wife'/phone point is well-taken (adjusted to modern conventions). The necessary selfishness, indeed callousness of the hard-working writer can hardly be overestimated.
---
Fay Weldon (‘Letters to Alice’, 1984) wants us to believe that the author's characters are made up, not thinly disguised versions of themselves and their families and friends.
"Authors writhe and chafe at the notion that they are parasitical upon spouses, family, friends, colleagues. The charge is so nearly true, yet never quite. People in fiction are conglomerates or abstractions: in personality and in appearance. Fictional characters are simple and understandable - real people are infinitely complex, incomprehensible and even in appearance look one way one day and another the next.” (p. 78)
And a few pages later (p.96)
“And how, if you write novels, are you going to live with your friends and neighbours, who are bound to see themselves therein? They will devour your books simply to do so. They will still confide in you, but they will draw back, saying, I suppose you're going to put all this into your next, and that's hurtful. The writer is not parasitical in the way that they suppose. Everything is fed in, it is true, to that unstoppable inner computer: there is no helping that, but it is the stuff, not the substance, of what is regurgitated; there is something besides, so oddly impersonal about it all.”
For Fay Weldon perhaps. But in so many cases the thinly disguised person is there, obvious to anyone who knows them, used by the author to make points ‘difficult’ in a purely factual memoir.
---
"According to a well-known metaphor, the novelist demolishes the house of his life and uses its bricks to construct another house: that of his novel," says Milan Kundera in "The Art of the Novel", p.146.
Mr Kundera believes that the art stands by itself, that all biographic information about the author should be stripped away, eliminated from the reader’s view.
A thousand author biographies scream otherwise.
Kafka said of his books, ‘They’re all about me!”
Martin Amis regularly writes thinly-fictionalised episodes of his life (‘The Rachel Papers’).
John Fowles’s own lightly-clothed life experiences and his relationship with his wife Elizabeth (stormy) drove most of his novels ('The Magus', 'The French Lieutenant's Woman').
---
To write well it helps to be smart. Authors like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan please step forward. But to be truly great you also have to have some demon torturing your soul, demanding to be released in words.
Absent such psychological shards the danger is the literary novel of style not substance, admitting admiration but not love. Who remembers the substance of a typical Amis or McEwan novel? Those gilded lives lack rocket fuel.
---
I leave you with more from Milan Kundera.
"The artist must make posterity believe he never lived," Flaubert said.
“Maupassant kept his portrait from appearing in a series on famous writers: "A man's private life and his face do not belong to the public."
“Hermann Broch said about himself, Musil, Kafka: "The three of us have no real biographies." Which does not mean that their lives were meager in event, but that they were not destined to be noteworthy, to be public, to become biography.
“Someone asks Karel Capek why he doesn't write poetry. His answer: "Because I loathe talking about myself." The distinctive feature of the true novelist: he does not like to talk about himself.
"I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers, and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life," said Nabokov.
“Italo Calvino warned: no one should expect a single true word from him about his own life.
“And Faulkner wished "to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books." (Underline: books and printed, meaning no unfinished manuscripts, no letters, no diaries).”
‘The Art of the Novel,’ Milan Kundera, pp.145-6.
---
