I Write Therefore I Am

(1964)

I have never really wanted to be a novelist. For me the word carries a load of bad connotations - like author and literature and reviewer, only worse. It suggests something factitious as well as fictitious, insipidly entertaining; train-journeyish. One can't imagine a 'novelist's ever saying what he actually means or feels - one can hardly even imagine his meaning or feeling.

These words have bad connotations because they suggest that in some way writing and being a writer aren't central human activities.

I've always wanted to write (in this order) poems, philosophy, and only then novels. I wouldn't even put the whole category of activity - writing - first on my list of ambitions. My first, ambition has always been to alter the society I live in; that is, to affect other lives. I think I begin to agree with Marx-Lenin: writing is a very second-rate way of bringing about a revolution. But I recognize that all I am capable of is writing. I am a writer. Not a doer.

Society, existing among other human beings, challenges me so I have to choose my weapon. I choose writing; but the thing that comes first is that I am challenged.

A publisher accepted The Collector in July 1962. I had been deliberately living in the wilderness; that is, doing work I could never really love, precisely because I was afraid that I might fall in love with my work and then forever afterwards be one of those sad, faded myriads among the intelligentsia who have always had vague literary ambitions but have never quite made it. I chose ten years ago to be a writer - chose in the existentialist sense of the act of choosing; that is, I have constantly had to renew the choice and to live in anguish, because I so often doubted whether it was the right one. So I have turned down better jobs; I have staked everything on this one choice. Partly it had been a conscious existentialist choice, partly something in my blood, in the Cornish quarter of me, perhaps. I think, now, that even if the book had not been accepted, even if I should never have had any book accepted, I was right to live by such a choice. Because I am surrounded by people who have not chosen themselves, in this sense, but who have let themselves be chosen - by money, by status symbols, by jobs - and I don't know which are sadder, those who know this or those who don't. This is why I feel isolated from most people - just isolated, most of the time. Occasionally content to be so.

Money makes me happy to the extent that it brings me more time to write. But it also brings me proportionately sharper doubts about my ability to write; existentialist doubts about whether I have really earned the freedom to write. The present perfect is the appropriate tense here because these doubts are about both past and present performance. I always have to write something every day. A day when I write nothing is a desert.

In January of 1963 I decided to leave work. I can't imagine myself as a professional writer. Writing has always been with me a semi-religious occupation, by which I certainly don^’t mean that I regard it with pious awe, but rather that I can't regard it simply as a craft, a job. I know when I am writing well that I am writing with more than the sum of my acquired knowledge, skill, and experience; with something from outside myself.

Inspiration, the muse experience, is like telepathy. Nowadays one hardly dares to say that inexplicable phenomena exist for fear of being kicked in the balls by the positivists and the behaviourists and the other hyperscientists. But there is a metatechnics that needs investigating.

I don't think of myself as 'giving up work to be a writer'. I'm giving up work to, at last, be.

To a career man, I suppose, the decision would seem lunatic; perhaps even courageous. But a bank vault is secure; an atomic shelter is secure; death is secure. Security is one of the prison walls of the affluent society; ever since the pax Romana, being safe has been an unhealthy mega-European obsession.

Why have I got it in for the novel? Because it has been shifted away from life, whatever, as Wittgenstein put it, is the case, these last fifty years. Circumstances have imposed this shift. It is not the novelists' fault. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novel was at one remove from life. But since the advent of film and television and sound recording it is at two removes. The novel is now generally about things and events which the other forms of art describe rather better.

All the purely visual and aural sequences in the modern the cinema. Of course, very few of us ever get the chance to express ourselves on film. (Having one's book filmed equivalent to having a luxury illustrated edition; it is not expressing oneself on film.) So over the novel today hangs a faute de mieux. All of us under forty write cinematically; our imaginations, constantly fed on films, 'shoot' scenes, and we write descriptions of what has been shot. So for us a lot novel writing is, or seems like, the tedious translating of an unmade and never-to-be-made film into words.

I don't know which is worse, having the words and the ideas, or the reverse. I think the former, not just because the latter happens to be my case but because I believe that if it comes to the crunch - in great novels it never does - good ideas are more important than good words. That is what I dislike about some postwar American novels. Almost all the younger American novelists write technically so much better than we (the British) do. They have much more skill at describing, at cutting, at dialogue, at all the machinery; and then at the end one takes the sunglasses off, and something's gone wrong, One hasn't a tan. The whole process with them seems (even when it isn't) artificial, frozen-food; cleverly mixed, a-la-modish (even when it's not meant to be); sound, in creative-writing terms. But humanly, or in some other vague European way, unsound.

Perhaps I'm simply justifying my own technical deficiencies. I sweat from ideas (ideas proper, symbolism, plots) to words (the page); and maybe there are writers in America who feel that they are sweating their way from their easily composed pages to their hard-come-by ideas.

It is the dramatic psychosexual implications of isolating extreme situations that excite and interest me. The only sort of relationship, with men or women, that has ever had any interest for me is the I-thou one. I am an ochlophobe; for me three is always a potential mob.

In The Collector I tried to write in terms of the strictest realism; to go straight back to that supreme master of the fake biography' Defoe, for the surface 'feel' of the book. To Jane Austen for the girl. To Sartre and Camus for the 'climate'. It is only very na'if critics who think that all one's influences must be contemporary. In the noosphere there are no dates; only sympathies, admirations, allergies, loathings.

The kind of British novel I have no time for is what I call the novel of fun - variations on the old picaresque novel done in the debased contemporary rococo. I don't blame the writers of such novels - not much, anyway - but I do blame the reviewers and literary publicity men who seem to have erected Fun (from funny farce to funny satire) as the great dipstick of literary worth. For this reason I class all writers as either entertainers or preachers; I'm not against entertainers, but I am against their present hegemony.

I think this trend in the British novel springs not only from our endemic refusal to take writing in general seriously, but in particular from a contemporary refusal to take European writing seriously. I see no future in the sort of isolationist attitude that Kingsley Amis has popularized. I loathe John Bull at the best of times; but John Bull in blue jeans is the bloody end. I'm sick to death of the inarticulate hero. To hell the inarticulate. Pity the slobs, but don't glorify them.

I don't want to be an English writer; I want to be a European one, what I call a mega-European (Europe plus America plus Russia plus wherever else the culture is essentially European). This isn't vaulting ambition o'er-leaping itself, but plain common sense. What is the point of writing just to be read in England? I don't even want to be English. English is my language, but I am a mega-European.

The Atlas situation: carrying the world on one's shoulders. Every writer must feel this; the world he or she has created crushing down, piling him or her into the ground. Sometimes you feel it as you read the book. The novel has steamrollered the novelist. Or the reverse happens: the world is a bubble of air and the Atlas-novelist stands flexed like a Mack Sennett weightlifter, magnificently upholding nothing. What I look for is the poise, the concord, the exact agreement between the strength of the Atlas and the weight of his or her world. Flaubert, for example. Or Jane Austen.

I very much dislike having to document, as if climbing a pitch where the rock is treacherous. I dislike all the places where the imagination is helpless and mere documentation takes over. I want to be 'true to life' - but by 'life' I mean my limited knowledge of objective reality, not necessarily the scientific, linguistic, or statistical reality I might get if I spent months interviewing people and swotting up textbooks. It seems to me that this is a new problem (or an old one much aggravated) for writers: just how much use they should make of all the modern means of recording what objects actually look like, how people sound, and so on. Some American creative-writing courses apparently encourage the docu­mentary approach. For me this will always represent a fundamental heresy. A novel is one person's view of life, not a collage of documentations.

The one thing a modern writer should not be committed to a style. The next great mega-European writer will write in all the styles, as Picasso has painted and Stravinsky composed, This does not mean a loss of identity. The loss of identity occurs in the sacrifice of everything to the fear of loss of identity. The first English writer to accept this was Defoe.

This is the wretched loneliness of writing: constantly having to judge between judgements - other people's and one's own - and never really knowing what standards others judge by. But fearing the worst.

I don't want some passive thing: to be sold, to be read. Writing is active, and the kind of writing I have always admired, and shall always want to achieve, makes reading active too - the book reads the reader, as radar reads unknown. And the unknown ones, the readers, feel this.

When Miranda talks about the Few, in The Collector, this is the kind of people I meant her to mean: pre­eminently creators, not simply highly intelligent or well-informed people, nor people who are simply skilled with words. Such writers can't help being what they are, nor do they cease to belong to the Few if they reject the concept. They are of the Few as this man is born left-handed and this, Chinese. They have no choice about freedom; they have to be free. And this is what isolates them, still, even when all the other barriers between them and the Many, the Profane Mob, are down.

1. Write a precis of the essay.

2. Comment on the following statements of J.Fowles:

a) Writing is active, and the kind of writing I have always admired, and shall always want to achieve, makes reading active too - the book reads the reader, as radar reads unknown.

b) The Atlas situation: carrying the world on one's shoulders. Every writer must feel this; the world he or she has created crushing down, piling him or her into the ground. Sometimes you feel it as you read the book. The novel has steamrollered the novelist.

3. Do you share the writer’s skepticism of the “novel of fun”? Why? Motivate your answer.

4. Do you think books might be ousted by visual arts? Why do you think so?

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