I WANT to speculate as to why the question ‘Why do you write?’ should be posed at all. After all, you don’t ask a shoemaker why he makes shoes or an aeronautical engineer why he dreams of a faster Concorde. Clearly there is sometime mysterious about the desire to wield words, especially in a world increasingly in the grip of visual images. There is also implied in the question, I think, a kind of wonder that anyone should want to write at all – anything, that is, above the level of an office memo, a piece of newspaper reportage, or a computer programme. To produce a book is a desperate undertaking. To try to make one’s living out of the production of books is a kind of lunacy.
You will notice that the authors who make fat livings out of books are not asked why they write them. The question is unnecessary: the reply would be nonverbal – the author being served with a cocktail beside his private swimming pool, at the wheel of his Mercedes-Benz, signing a five-million-dollar contract in bed. The end of the writing of a best-selling novel is the writing of a best-selling novel. The responses of the reader of a best-selling novel have, strictly speaking, nothing to do with literature in its Ezra Pound sense of ‘words charged with meaning’. The words of Lace or The Carpetbaggers or Princess Daisy are minimal triggers for the explosion of sex and violence. The reader does most of the work, building his voluptuous dreams of rape or mayhem with the least possible artistic assistance from the author. He would resent ambiguity, complexity, poetry, any verbal construct above the level of the near-cliché. Needless to say, not everyone can produce that kind of book. It requires a special sort of talent, though it is strictly a talent of deprivation – an inability or unwillingness to look beyond the glands, muscles, and the vocabulary of technical processes.
Real writers take seriously what writing is about – wrestling with words. Words are not inert counters like cloak-room tickets. They are living creatures which resent being treated as if they were knives, forks and spoons. You cannot take them out of a drawer, use them, then stow them away again. They are stubborn and they sometimes refuse to mean what the writer wants them to mean. It’s not merely a matter of the word itself – there’s also the delightful agony of arranging them in patterns, making music out of them. Dr Johnson, a very great wordsman, wrote in the Preface to his Dictionary that words were the daughters of men while things were the sons of heaven. True, but we have to try to bring the sons of heaven down to earth, and only words can do this. Moreover, there’s an order of reality above things – the sphere of ideas. Ideas cannot exist until they are cast into the form of words. We human beings are intensely verbal creatures. Not many people realise this, but writers live with that awesome knowledge. They are the custodians of a primal human truth.
Being, for the most part, modest and intensely uncertain about both the practice of their craft and their achievements in it, writers don’t care to speak out much about the loftiness of their vocation. I personally tend to disparage what I do. You will often find me talking of the need to earn a living and, having failed in everything else, assuming the writer’s trade because there seemed to be nothing else available. This is what writers frequently say, though they may not always mean it. It is, so to speak, a defensive attitude. If they worship the Muse, the Muse, with feminine capriciousness, may fly away: best to pretend not to take her too seriously. Authors are also extremely sensitive to criticism, and the attitude of merely getting on with the trade (like your cobbler or aeronautical engineer) is sometimes a means of warding off the attentions of the enemy. The don’t-care pose is a kind of armour. But underneath the carapace there is a quivering hypersensitivity which is not much salved by timid visits to the bank.
There is a book still to be compiled with some such titles as Why Critics Criticise. Critics are writers of a sort – indeed, I’m a critic myself as well as a sort of novelist (note the fingers-crossed modesty) – but they couldn’t exist unless there was a creative meat for them to tear at – or, to be fair, sometimes consume with a qualified relish. When a writer finishes a book, he thinks less of the pleasure or enlightenment he has tried to contrive for his readers than of the reviews he is going to read in the quality newspapers. He knows there are reviewers out to get him and he knows, far better than the reviewer, the faults that are going to be castigated. He submits to being butchered to make a Sunday holiday. He is to be butchered for faults so deeply ingrained in his nature that he can do little about them. And there is one answer to the question ‘Why do you write?’ which he is rather unwilling to give.
For the answer is ‘I write to exhibit myself, to show the world what, underneath the writing skill, is a representative chunk of human nature.’ The writer strips himself naked, well aware that he is not, like the professional strip-tease artist, necessarily all that well worth looking at. There is a paunch, and the toenails are growing yellow, there are boil-scars on the left buttock. We find in authorship degrees of compulsive exhibitionism. The poet is most naked. The novelist tries to hide behind characters, but his prose style gives him away. The dramatist is luckiest: there is no point in looking for him even in the wings: he is agonisingly patrolling the street outside the theatre, biting his nails. Shakespeare is not Hamlet. But most other writers are, in mourning for literature, wondering whether to be or not to be. Writers, that is.
The variety of responses to the great question, as manifested in this collection, all conceal the true answer – compulsion. A writer writes because he has to. Writing comes before eating. And that is not just a matter of the priority of vocation over subsistence. If we don’t write we don’t eat either. We write, among other things, for grub. That is why the London thoroughfare of needy scribblers – no longer on the topographical map but still very much part of the spiritual townscape – is called Grub Street.
Previously unpublished; dated 1985