The Writer's Life: Who said: “To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so”? And said what about novelists?

Answer: Sir Walter Scott, who wrote Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Bride of Lammermuir and stacks more. On novelists: “Every successful novelist must be more or less a poet, evenalthough he may never have written a line of verse. The quality of imagination is absolutely indispensible to him; his accurate power of examining and embodying human character and human passion, as well as the external face of nature, is not less essential; and the talent describing well what he feels with acuteness, added to the above requisites, goes far to complete the poetic character."

The Writer's Life: As you know: Read from the Masters, old and new. For a stunning example of character description read here;

From a 1956 profile of Tennessee Williams by the late Kenneth Tynan, one of the legendary theater critics. “In Spain, where I saw him last, he lookedprofoundly Spanish. He might have passed for one of those confidential streetdealers who earn their living selling spurious Parker pens in the cafes of Malagaor Valencia. Like them, he wore a faded chalk-striped shirt, a coat slung over hisshoulders, a trim dark mustache and a sleazy, fat-cat smile. His walk, like theirs,was a raffish saunter, and everything about him seemed slept in, especially hishair, a nest of small, wet serpents.”

This, and many other such real-life characterizations, can be found in theTynan anthology, Profiles, one of the finest master-classes in how to write non-fiction. As it’s one of my favorite books, expect to see excerpts from it here fromtime to time.

The Writer's Life: If, under threat of death, I had to choose only one poet of all time, who would it be?

Answer – The sublime and immortal Gerard Manley Hopkins. Born 1844 in England, died 1889 in Ireland, a Jesuit who despaired at what he saw as his own lack of excellence, he wrote some of the most profound poems of all time. His rooms in Dublin are preserved as he left them, and in them you feel the austerity that focused him and made him great. Here (in a timely way) is one of my favorite Hopkins pieces, the sonnet, “See How Spring Opens.”

See how Spring opens with disabling cold,
And hunting winds and the long-lying snow.
Is it a wonder if the buds are slow?
Or where is strength to make the leaf unfold?
Chilling remembrance of my days of old
Afflicts no less, what yet I hope may blow,
That seed which the good sower once did sow,
So loading with obstruction that threshold

Which should ere now have led my feet to the field.
It is the waste done in unreticent youth
Which makes so small the promise of that yield
That I may win with late-learnt skill uncouth
From furrows of the poor and stinting *weald.
Therefore how bitter, and learnt how late, the truth.*
“Weald” – open countryside, sometimes wooded.

 

The Writer’s Life: “Re-reading Sylvia Plath: inside all the distress, there’s wonderful writing, as on February 25, 1952:”

Now read what she wrote that day, and in it you can feel the cold heat that grew and grew inside her;  “Can you see, through the strange dark tunnel of cupped hands to the great Cyclops eye, blurred, staring, flecked, with one lightspot that grows and becomes a cloud, shifting, endowed with meaning, imposed upon it. Can you feel, listening with trained ear to heartbeat of the other, the wind shrieking and gasping and singing, as one listens to the vast humming, inside the paradoxical cylinder of the telephone pole?  Such uncharted, wild barrens there are behind the calm or mischievous shell that has learned its name but not its destiny. There is still time to veer, to sally forth, knapsack on back, for unknown hills over which… only the wind knows what lies. Shall she, shall she veer? There will be time, she says, knowing that in her beginning is her end and the seeds of destruction perhaps now dormant may even today begin sprouting malignantly within her. She turns away from action in one direction, to that in another, knowing all the while that some day she must face behind the door of her choosing, perhaps the lady, perhaps the tiger.”

I’ve sometimes wondered whether that moment might mark the opening of her last long pathway through the world she found so fraught. After many attempts, she finally took her life almost eleven years later by putting her head in a gas oven. And left behind some exquisite if often troubling poems. 

 

The Writer’s Life: “Best book of all time for the aspiring writer/beginner? Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande.”

Thoughtful, kind, encouraging and wise – those are the words by which I characterize Dorothea Brande. Her husband may have been a fascist, but she had a gift of releasing talent in people. Read this, from “Becoming a Writer,” and you’ll see what I mean. 

“Set yourself to discover if you can see any connection between a good morning’s work and the conditions of the evening before. Can you tell whether or not the good writing came after you had spent an active day, or a quiet one? Did you write more easily after going to bed early,  or after a short sleep? Is there any observable connection between seeing certain friends and the vividness or dullness of the next morning’s work? How did you write in the morning after you had been to the theater, to an exhiition of pictures, or to a dance? Notice such things and try to arrange for the type of activity which results in good work. “

 

The Writer’s Life: “Current reading: “The Right Stuff “by Tom Wolfe. Here’s a stunning sentence: “A career in flying was like…”

“A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzying progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stuff and could move higher and higher and even – ultimately, God willing, one day – that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.”

I ask myself how long Mr. Wolfe worked at that sentence, at its structure, its language, its context in the book ,and I say to everyone who wants to write, “Go thou and do likewise.”

 

The Writer's Life: From Arthur Schlesinger’s Journals February 1981 - a pithy comment on President Reagan from Dr. Kissinger

“I get along well with Reagan,” he [Dr. K.] said. “I spent an hour and a half with him only a few days ago. He is a nice man, a decent man.  One odd thing, though. When he talks, all his illustrations are drawn from the movie business. He never says, ‘We had a problem like that in Sacramento,’ never brings up his eight years as governor [of California]. It is always, ‘We had a problem like that in the Screen Actor’s Guild’.” 

 

The Writer's Life: “If there’s a verse that keeps echoing in your head write it down; it’s telling you something.” Now read one that haunts me:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed;
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest
A handful of gray ashes, long, long ago at rest;
Still are thy gentle voices, thy nightingales awake
For Death, he taketh everything but these he cannot take.”

For many years I had known only the first four lines; then I discovered the second four, all translated from the Greek by a teacher at Eton College, England’s poshest school. The original poem was written by Callimachus, the 3rd century poet and librarian from Alexandria, and the word “Carian” refers to the birthplace of Heraclitus, the famous philosopher whose death is lamented in the two verses; it might as easily have been “Anatolian” but it wouldn’t scan. Speaking of which, the penultimate line doesn’t scan, and that’s why I’ll now never get the damned thing out of my head because I’ll always be trying to write that line in a way that scans.

Bonus extra: William Cory, the Eton schoolmaster who did the translation,wrote to a friend, “Life is short; let us love one another; there is nothing else worth living for.”

The Writer's Life: Have you heard of a “commonplace book”? These daily tweets, “The Writer’s Life,” are my Commonplace Book."

First, a mea culpa: how often have I said that no matter how well you know something,e.g., a quotation, check it when you’ve typed it? A reader, Ken Fletcher, has pointed out to me that I mixed up the Bronte sisters and their authorships. It’s now corrected and thank you, Ken.

Commonplace Books: They were first a tool of self-education, used by people who had newly learned to write. They kept – often elaborately decorated -notebooks for noting down interesting, arresting and useful phrases, comments, jokes, quotations, proverbs that caught their attention in a commonplace day. Then it developed into something unnecessary but quite stylish, a means for ladies and gentlemen of education to capture words and illuminations that flew in the air abovetheir heads. Writers have always used them, if not necessarily calling them commonplace books; an idea comes to you – write it down. And it’s handy (I’d say essential) to have a notebook where all such write-it-downs appear.

I’ve known more than one person who kept a commonplace book. One or two have even been published; and it stands to reason that from a commonplace book you learn a great deal about the person who keeps it. And, though The Writer’s Lifeis not the first commonplace book on the Internet, it’s cool to think that a private, if not intimate, literary practice that has been in play for a number of centuries is now active in the most modern mass communication tool that we possess.

The Writer's Life: “When a deep injury is done us, we never recover until we forgive.”

Read more: I had the privilege of interviewing Alan Paton at the BBC in London. His wonderful book, “Cry the Beloved Country,” had long mesmerized me with its lyrical beauty and its deep understanding of a people’s collective pain. If it were possible, he proved almost more inspirational in person. Not tall, he radiated modesty and immense kindness – not merely person-to-person, but for humanity in general. When I asked him (as we walked along a corridor) whether he thought his book had launched civil rights movements everywhere, he stopped and said, “Please don’t put that question to me in the interview. It will make me sound important and I only do what I can.” Several times during the broadcast, his eyes shone with tears as he talked about the beauty of his beloved South Africa – as did my eyes when news of his death came in 1988. He was born in January 1903, making (for me, anyway) every January worthwhile.