Do I have to note down the time and my circumstances as I begin to write? 7.30 AM, still early, another hour before I have to be in. ‘Complacencies of the pegnoir’ Stevens might say – laziness in a ragged dark green dressing gown instead; no ‘coffee and oranges on a morning chair’, but remnants of last night’s stir fry, complete with slices from a block of processed fish I bought from the Chinese supermarket, and small bright pieces of red chili to warm my throat at this cool hour.
Yesterday, I was awake – too awake – I thought: there’ll be a price for this. A good mood always has its cost; I suspect them; I want them to pass as quickly as possible, along with the delusions of ability and possibility they grant. Never walk out in a good mood: you will have to tolerate stupid fantasies unfurling in your head – half-dreams of achievement that are only the faintest double of the real thing. Fantasies like the images borne behind the fire in Plato’s Cave, and throwing shadows on the wall we take for our reality.
Never let a good mood soar you into heaven; clamp down on it, beat it, take yourself to the gym and punish your excess. Nothing worse than a mood untethered, that carries you into the sky of vague aspiration. Perhaps it was okay when you were young, walking along the road in a haze … the dreaminess of youth, of a life hardly begun, when you barely have to stand up for yourself: it is your youth that dreams, beautiful soul that it is, unconnected with having to earn a living and make your way in your foolishness into the foolishness of the world.
Of what did I dream back then? I won’t relate it here, but I think many of my friendships came from that dizzy kite-flying that came of good moods, being based on the credit of a life not yet lived, but still so far away as to be formless. A young man’s disease, and not, I think, young womens’; for the former, the latter only get in the way (and perhaps it is the same for men who love men, and women who love women): what is romance but a chance to poetise oneself from a relation whose term is blurred because hardly noticed?
She is barely anything but an empty space for projection: a sky in which vague, kite flying aspirations can dance in the breeze of fancy. Infatuation cannot deepen into love: what chance does it have when the former seeks only itself, and searching and losing what it is as it restlessly passes through infatuant? This is the Don Juanism of the beautiful soul, who lives only in what might be, in vague dreams of greatness that billows out the sails of his youth.
Leave those land-yachts to those who remain on the shores of life, and have not cast forth. I think the young are always rich in that – not time, but possibility: the sense of a life far forward and still indefinable, and still as great and wide as the sky. What will I be? And this questioning is luxuriance: a way of bathing in the light of distant planets, not yet the sighing of a life narrowed by those small choices that now make you run through a maze like a rat?
I suppose heirs and heiresses can sail their great-sailed yachts out to sea – possibility is, for a time, their milieu; to be young and rich is to have the infinite as your kingdom: isn’t anything for possible for one who do as they please, when their whole life is spread as wide as the horizon?
I used to be drawn to them, the rich, and passed through their lives when they pulled me up onto their deck. For a time, I could dream, like them, that anything was possible. But I was young, then. As soon as I made my way, we had cast each other aside, and forgotten our brief but happy alliance. Who was I, for them? I think I embodied arts and culture; I lent them books – I played them music. Of course, I was young, and barely knew anything, but it was my thirst that impressed them: here was someone really compelled to seek out that world they already knew, born, as they were, at a time when a certain cultural capital still seemed necessary to back up the real capital they possessed.
Still, the arts were dull to them, though they’d been to the best schools, and here was I, a curious fish, full of youthful ardency and fire, and I think they could project on me a different future for themselves, for it was true that though they lived like millionaires, they would have to impress their fathers and mothers of their seriousness.
To study the history of art and then waft through life was not really enough: sooner or later they would find themselves in a firm run by their family or a friend of their family. Seriousness, one day, awaited them; and for the women, a serious match: but they were not yet bent on finding their man, or at least they had time to pause and knock on my door in the student hall.
Didn’t I long for some unpleasantness to befall them – an accident, perhaps, or some great crisis? Didn’t X. know then to tell me Sloane Disaster Stories to calm me down (Y. paralysed after she drunkenly climbed on the roof of her house to throw herself off; Z.’s sliced up arms beneath her always long sleeved blouses? Not because I particularly wished them ill, but I wanted to know, for a while, that their kingdom was not the whole wide world.
I became a confidante; A. told me about B. and B. about A.; and a whole wheel of gossip began to turn around my room. I knew everything; I knew too much. One after another would surprise me reading, and I’d be pressed to hear a confession or a complaint. Once, one of their menfolk came down to be seduced, since to play Ute Lemper was enough then to signify homosexuality; he wasn’t sure of himself, not yet, though he whispered to me of the younger men he liked, and how his girlfriend was nothing to him, not really.
But I was no so daft to think I really belonged; my dreaminess let me range ahead into a future of arts and culture. I read Ted Morgan’s biography of William Burroughs and conceived for myself an itinerant’s life, setting travel before my mind’s eye and not answering my door when it was knocked. I pushed another future open for myself, and I think this is what drew them to me, the sons and daughters of the rich: wasn’t I in some sense a fellow aristocrat?
Of course my learning was not deep, although I talked a good game. I could barely write, though I thought I could. The heirs and heiresses wrote a Latinate prose: very sure and true, and I was left, as I still am, with a billowy lyricism that makes for a writing I can hardly bear to read, perhaps because it is the prose of one forever young – who cannot help but dream as he writes, and throw those dreams ahead of him.
What gives the desire to write?, asks Sinthome. The answer I want to give this early morning is that I would like youth and chance and possibility be reborn in me, not because I regret my life or mourn it – everything’s turned out very well, I can’t deny that – but because it is still a kind of maze in which only writing lets me look up.
Lyricism, luxuriance: I deeply regret it in myself: a blowy, undisciplined prose, and I always agree with those trolls who write to castigate me for pretension. And yet how can I help it when the early morning stretches arms in me of hope? When the rising sun – it is rising now – carries hope above me like a kite whose tail trails out in the breeze.
I distrust good moods; I do not like them. Better the end of day blankness that makes my tongue thick. Better the melancholy of the threshold, 5.00-6.00 PM, when the caffeine of my day departs my body and leaves it limp. Better quietness in the pub, and letting the eloquence of others displace my silence.
But I will say this: the lone kite of writing in the morning is not my vague and giddy transference. I project nothing of myself, I should say that: writing before content, and not the other way around, as Sinthome puts it. Writing first, before there’s anything to say (and didn’t I sit down this morning with Frank Bascombe’s voice as my topic?) and not to throw ahead a possibility from which I might live – a widening of life, a chance to become a beautiful soul once again -but to leave a furrow that said I was there and that writing broke the crust of my life and spilled over.
For a time I am only part-rat; or it is a chance to lie down in the maze and look up: the sky, imperturbably remote, does not spread wide a horizon into which I can rise. That’s why I never dream of making a book out of this occasional writing – why I will not let aspiration ride out ahead of me, and keep a firm grip on the halter of the donkey I fitfully ride.
And that’s why I never – bitter lesson – confuse the feeling of lightness in writing – the happiness of breaking through – with the merit of what is written: what is worse than reading my own prose after being carried along, say, by Frank Bascombe’s voice in The Sportswriter or Independence Day (which I’ve just begun)?
Let those rich in dreams do that. The young, and the young at heart – whose youth, I would also say, is not yet the youth of a writing that has broken from being merely their possibility. And that is why I think failure is necessary for writing – that it must begin in collapse, and that I do not believe the merits and accolades Saul Bellow lists on the flap of Humboldt’s Gift: mustn’t he have failed once? Mustn’t he have been crushed by failure?
This is what Kafka knew – and Bernhard – and Beckett. It’s what Duras knew, with her drinking, and perhaps even Henry Green, although he is always opaque for me. And it is what makes the other writers dull, or at least unnecessary – I won’t list their names here.
My own prose – what laughter! My own writing – laughter again! Nothing is justified in what I put down here. Nothing, made in the hobby shed at the end of the garden of my life. A question mark hovers above Brod in the margins of Kafka’s life, writes Benjamin, very beautifully. And a question mark hovers above this excuse for prose, this endless blowy lyricism. But I laugh at that, too, and this, I think, is why I am a man of joy: nothing is sought here except to make a mark. Nothing: except the laughter of writing that opens a small stream for itself, like lava breaking open a new flow.
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