Write to experience the withdrawal of writing. Write – and it is the withdrawal of writing, that great writing in which anything is possible, writing as the fulfilment of life – that you would mark.
Read a biography, read of the travails of Kafka. In his darkest hours, when he’d written nothing for months and you know, as he does not, that he would write again, but not for months, still the knowledge that he has written something. Still The Judgement; still at least one blessed night that allowed him to follow that story across the hours.
And to have written nothing – or nothing of worth? Not to have had a sign, an intimation of that great writing that falls so bountifully on those writers whose biographies you like to read, and that lifts these lives out of oblivion?
I would like these hours at the desk, before the yard to be the husk of a great writing. Would like my life to be the dross of an anonymous book that would rise out of my life like a new island from the sea. There it is, sufficient to itself; absolute. There it is, the book that is the book, and I only part of its great unfolding, its relation to itself. I would be a limb of the book, that is all, and my life that space consecrated to its unfolding. A willing sacrifice – anything for the book; anything so that life could be lifted from the mediocrity of the day.
And how I would welcome my obscurity! How wonderful the clouding over of a life entirely redeemed by the composition of a book! How marvellous each obscure detail of the day, that is already aglow in the beneficient light of the book! Plato was wrong: it is not the immortality that is sought in the creation of the book, but the sweetness of obscurity. Not immortality – not the fame of a name that spreads from generation to generation, but the oblivion of a name, the St. Andrew’s Cross that is placed across it. Abolish me, book. Scrub out my name. Let every trace of me be obliterated as my whole life catches fire from the book.
Last night, unable to sleep, I broke open my emergency book, the book reserved for the plateau of insomnia. Last night, the last of my Bernhards broken open – last of the secret stash, over which there might as well have been a glass case and a warning saying: use only in case of emergency. I used it – I finished the book. In one sweep, all finished. In a few hours, and then the mediocre dawn, pale light, light rain: done. The last word: yes, and I could say yes to sleep; I fell asleep at last, and woke up too late.
What time was it? Too much of the day had gone. I thought: you’ll accomplish nothing today then. You’ll begin nothing, finish nothing off. Stranded, instead, mid-work. Stranded in the middle of that piece you would like to finish. Stranded in a mediocre writing, stranded before a writing in which you can sense, ceaselessly, the withdrawal of that great writing that would grant these voided hours some retrospective sense.
But there is no sense. A life wasted; mediocre life – life in lieu of what would lift it to life, and to writing. A life sacrificed to writing? That would be too grand. A life lived in the hope of writing? That would be a lie. Life lived in the hope of hope – perhaps that. Not even hope, that would be too much, but the hope for hope – for the chance, the possibility of writing. Hope for the hope that the great writing might be possible.
This morning, having taken the day off to write, I pass from one room to the other. One room – and then another, and there are not many rooms. A bedroom, a living room, a bathroom. From one to the other. The bedroom, where I have a laptop, to the living room, where I have a desktop, to the bathroom, rotten with damp. And there is the kitchen too, which is also rotten. The rotten kitchen, in which the electricity has failed.
A pipe leaking in the bathroom, and a leak in the kitchen, too. A rotten pipe in the bathroom, and a whole rotten wall in the kitchen, from which water seems to seep. Woodlice on the walls in the kitchen, dried there. Woodlice on the walls, slug trails on the worktop, and the mildewed ceiling sagging and cracking from damp. Everything, in short, is disgusting. The kitchen, which is barely a room, is especially disgusting. But then the bathroom vies for its abhorrence with the kitchen.
Last night, I broke open the last Bernhard. This is an emergency, I thought; reach for the Bernhard. Reach for the book you’ve been saving for emergencies. I open the Bernhard. The first sentence is the funniest, greatest first sentence I have ever read. The whole first sentence is a masterpiece, and the rest of the book is a masterpiece. How deft it is! How marvellously controlled! How marvellously it builds up to the climax: to the final word, ‘yes’!
It’s the equal of Concrete; it’s better than Old Masters. A different kind of book than Extinction or Correction, that’s true – and different still from Gathering Evidence, a book whose separate parts should be read in order of publication not the order they have been given in the edition in English. Different – smaller in compass, but great in its own way, perfectly rounded, a book that exists unto itself, absolute.
Happily there is Yes. Happily there was Yes, last night. A spectacularly funny book. A book it is impossible to read without a smile. A book that is marvellous funny from its first lines, which I have to stop myself from copying out here. A book that is not only great, but also funny – now that is a marvel. Funny and great – what a combination. And compelling – I didn’t mention that. It bears you along. It bore me happily along, from page to page. It exhibits narrative tension. One great sentence sweeps you into another, because of the great, sustaining narrative tension.
If I began to quote from it, I wouldn’t know where to stop. If I paused to copy out this or that line, I could not resist quoting another, and eventually the whole book. Perhaps that’s what I should have begun, last night when I couldn’t sleep. Perhaps I should have simply begun transcribing the whole book, line by line and page by page, until the final ‘yes’. Until the final, wonderfully placed, ‘yes’.
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