Given Time

Or imagine it this way, the poet says. Imagine reading the biography of a writer – one of those huge biographies they publish nowadays, one of those tombs. The early chapters tell of the early years, telling of struggle and despair, the inability to find a voice, the inability to be published, you want to reassure the one of whom you read. It's going to be olay. Everything will come right.

Later chapters see the first works are published, one after another, with a kind of necessity. And you want to say, be patient; hold something back; your great works lie ahead of you. Your early books are juvenilia, they are perfectly worthless, measure by what is to come, poor indices.

And then the years of triumph. Then the great bridge of the central chapters of the biography, arching up. Having read the first few hundred pages of the book, the account of our author's parents, and his parents' parents, you feel you've earned the right to revel in the reception that greet the masterpieces that stream forth from his pen.

You suffered with him, struggle with him, read of the critical reception of the early works as they came out, and now the masterpieces come that have given him immortality. There would have been no biography without them. He would have been but a minor author, forgotten with all the others.

Read on. Even the years of decline mean nothing to you. Even the marriages and divorces, even the fallings out with old friends are insignificant, for the masterpieces surround him, for it is upon them that his fame will rest. Does he know his own greatness? Somewhere, it knows itself in him. His genius knows itself in everything he's done.

And then, still later, when he had nothing more to say – when he can no longer ascend the plateau of his mornings, the open space beneath the sky where possibilities spread out all around him? Ah, but he has lived his life in one sense. The biography is nearly finished. The story of his final years will take a handful of pages to tell.

So he no longer leaves his house except in slippers: so what? So the glass of water beside his breakfast in his mornings is really a glass of vodka: what does it matter? One part of him is satisfied; in a sense, his life has already been rounded off. What is he but the ghost of his own authorship?

In the mirror, he sees a crumpled verson of that middle aged man posed seriously on the dusk jackets of his five-hundred-page masterworks. Crumpled: but he is the same man; his books will tell you, the assurance of his genius.

He wanders from room to room in the house he earnt from his royalities. He sits in an armchair overlooking his garden. Leaves on the grass. It's autumn, he thinks. Tomorrow, a journalist is coming to photograph his workroom, what irony! For he no longer works, not really. He is a potterer, a ghost.

Seventeen books – isn't that enough? Hasn't he written enough? And now imagine the biography of this life after life, of a writer who's written enough, and who writing refuses. Imagine a biography of the aftermath, of the life in decline – of a writer in involuntary retirement, whom writing has shut out from its garden, and whose workroom is only a place where dust drifts in the afternoon air, and the house that his royalties bought is as much of a tomb as the biography of him whose pages you turn.

Outside, autumn leaves on the grass. Outside, the grass that needs cutting – its last cut before winter. The old writer should rake up his leaves and build a bonfire, or he should ring someone else to do it: he's in retirement, after all. He should pour himself a glass of something and watch someone else at work. But why should he bother?

Then his gaze wanders out over his beech hedge to the fence that separates his neighbour's garden from road. Then it wanders out over where the road must be – he sees the roofs of cars, sees the upper windows of large houses like his. Sees bare branches of great trees, chimney pots, and imagines his gaze leaping street after street, and pressing towards the centre of his city, towards the bars where he used to wander with his writing friends, when he had friends, towards the restaurants in which he would host whole evenings and then to the river where he had strolled with this lover and with that. Where he had spoken inspiredly into the open air, where he had wooed by his genius, where his great reputation ran along ahead of them, he and his companion. And where they had kissed, a whole galaxy of light lighting up the water, the bridges beyond. Life, life!

Outside. He fears it now, he says. Where would he go if he were to step outside? How would he get there? Stay in, instead. Keep inside. After all, they can reach him here, the journalists who phone him for his year end book recommendations, his agent who still secures deals for his back catalogue, his editor who issues volumes of his occasional writings.

Sometimes an academic will write: they organise conferences on his work; students write PhDs. Sometimes enthusiasts, letters passed on by the publisher, who lament the great days when literature was at the centre of culture, when everyone knew our author's name.

But it's still famous enough, his name. It's become an adjective that joins it to a sensibility like Kafkaesque or Ballardian. His name crowns him, but it rides above him. How glorious his reputation, and small and crumpled he has become! Oh, how gloriously it rides, but when a young author who's weasled out his address knocks at his door to meet him, our author knows he's disappointing.

So what should he do, our imaginary writer whose biography we are reading? Imagine him in his workroom, the poet says, where the light falls aslant on his notebook. Imagine the whiteness of the page, and his hand as it runs across its grainy surface. Imagine the tub of sharpened pencils he keeps by him as the light falls evenly across the page.

What will he write, he who has already written enough? What to write, for the one whom writing has deserted? Not a story, but the undoing of stories. Not a narrative, but its unravelling, its absenting, like rivers that run away into the sand. A thousand and one beginnings, but no real beginning – his is a writing that unravels itself.

Imagine him, our writer, the poet says, there in his first floor work room at the front of the house, looking out over the street at mothers with three-wheeled pushchairs, dried up leaves on the pavement, car after car parked along the street, front wheels turned in to stop them rolling down the hill.

Now, he can begin it, the writing that occurs after writing. Now it can begin, the story of one who has the gift of writing, but nothing in particular to write. The light on a windshield: write of that. The crack on a paving stone: write of that. The trees half stripped of leaves, branches and twigs upraised to the sky: write of that.

The double decker bus that stops a hundred yards away: write of that, write of its passengers, write of the people who waited at the bus stop. Write of the weather, the autumnal sharpness in the air. Write of the pale blue sky. Write of the sharp edged disc of the sun, of the cirrus clouds. Write of the light that falls evenly upon all.

He's been given time, our author realises. Given it, and now he must let the writing on his page develop like a photograph from the gentle pressure of light. He will make an impression of time. Of the neglect of time. Of time's malaise, as it seems to sag from itself over the course of a long afternoon. Of time as it lengthens the afternoon into all of time, as dust motes drift and moments drift, prolonging themselves obscurely.

He's not writing anything right now, he tells his agent on the phone. Oh, just his journal, nothing important, he tells his editor. He scribbles away at a kind of diary, he tells the journalist. There's nothing personal in it, no secrets. It's of no interest to anyone, he says. Even he's uninterested in it. Rivers run into the sand. Clouds melt away in the desert air. What does it matter, what he writes now? What does it count for, when it will lead to no particular publication?

Writing adrift; errant writing. Writing that wanders along the edge of everything. That bespeaks its own nothingness, its unimportance. Why does our author feel he's attained writing in some way?, the poet asks. Why is it only now that he thinks he has come across writing, like he might some wild animal in a woodland glade?

He remembers a deer he saw crossing a field. It didn't see him. It hadn't sniffed him out; the wind was blowing in another direction. But there it was, alive, unscared, and living according to its own law. There it was, in the open, there where it thought no one was looking.

And so, now, with writing. Writing, at last, has been allowed to ignore him. To write itself by way of him, with his hand, but by ignoring him. And isn't this what he wanted? Wasn't this what he wanted all along – to be a way of freedom, a kind of corridor for something else?