12. Words of Wisdom for Creative Writers

 



 



One of the problems of single sex boarding schools, and presumably unisex boarding schools too, though I have no knowledge of them, is to fill after class hours and weekends with activities that are developmental or productive or, at the very least, absorb the energies of the pupils. A continual programme of activities, generally of a communal kind, ranging from compulsory sports and games to voluntary clubs and societies for photographers, wood-carvers, musicians, bird-watchers, cavers, chess-players, metal workers, model-makers, stamp, coin and butterfly collectors, debaters, would-be politicians, is laid out to keep idle hands and minds from mischief.

One such activity at Wells Cathedral School when I was a boarder there in the nineteen fifties was a regular evening set aside for the headmaster, or some other member of staff with a literary bent, to read excerpts from ‘great literature’ to the assembled boys. These readings, which inevitably produced generations of school leavers with a well-honed antipathy to ‘great literature’, were scheduled under the title of Other Men’s Flowers. (The notion that women might have been responsible for ‘great literature’ was not, in those days, even a matter of casual speculation, which was very fortunate for would-be women authors and perhaps explains why bookstores run special promotions to entice men into bookshops.) 

The passages chosen for these floral tributes to ancient genius were either texts thought to be of an ennobling and uplifting nature – Mark Anthony’s ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech in Julius Caesar, Keats’ ‘Ode to a nightingale’, Wordsmith’s ‘On Westminster Bridge’, Robert Browning’s ‘Home thoughts from abroad’, and other favourites of literary anthologies – or texts of a stoical and pathetic kind, dwelling sentimentally and mawkishly on the mysteries of life and death – Gray’s ‘Elegy in a country churchyard’, Goldsmith’s ‘The deserted village’, Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’, Henley’s ‘Out of the night that covers me’, Little Nell’s death scene from The Old Curiosity Shop. Occasionally there would be a reading from Tom Brown’s Schooldays or from Nicholas Nickleby so that we could appreciate how fortunate we were in comparison to our Victorian counterparts. Each pupil was encouraged to enter his own favourite literary excerpts in a personal Commonplace Book, set out in his best handwriting with subject and author index.(1) 

During my occasional flirtations with creative writing I have been pilfering, filching, raiding the gardens and orchards of other writers for the flowers and fruits of their experience, seeking words of encouragement and exhortation. Clearly writers, like other cultural heroes, are expected to offer pithy comments about the secrets of their success and to be articulate about the mechanics of their profession. Indeed whole books have been devoted to quotes from writers on writing.(2) Here are a few that I particularly like:

·         ‘… the usual writerly method [resembles] the ways of the jackdaw: we steal the shiny bits, and build them into the structures of our own disorderly nests.’ – Margaret Atwood.(3)

·          ‘Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.’ – Iris Murdoch.

·         ‘The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.’ – Arthur Miller.

·         ‘Write what you write… Write to make your soul grow.’ – Kurt Vonnegut.

·         ‘The only writers I respect are those who have put themselves completely into their work. Not those who use their skilful hands to do something. This isn’t writing in my opinion. A man who can dash off a book, let’s say, and say it’s a good novel, a best seller, even of some value, but it isn’t representative completely of him, of his personality, then there’s something wrong there. This man is a fraud in a way, to me. All he put into his book was his skill. And that’s nothing. I prefer a man who is unskilful, who is an awkward writer, but who has something to say, who is dealing himself one time on every page.’ – Henry Miller.

·          ‘Annie Dillard said you should write as if you’re dying. Nadine Gordimer… that you should write as if you were already dead and it no longer mattered what anyone said about you.’(4)

Finally a favourite passage from Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead:

‘Rilke, in his Sonnets of Orpheus, makes the underworld journey a precondition of being a poet. The journey must be undertaken, it is necessary. The poet – for whom Orpheus is the exemplary model – is the one who can bring the knowledge held by the Underworld back to the land of the living…’

‘You have to sit down and eat

with the dead, sharing their poppies,

if you want enough memory to keep

the one most delicate note…’ [Sonnet 9, Pt I]

‘This poet doesn’t just visit the Other World. He partakes of it. He is double-natured, and can thus both eat the food of the dead and return to tell the tale.’

    
 Go to the underground. But come back alive.

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1. I have my own Commonplace Book still, dated ‘Autumn 1958’, full of schoolboy dreams, hopes, depressions and vanities. It seems unremarkable stuff now, but has one surprise. Carefully copied out on page 29, which I have titled ‘WOMEN’, is a verse from a Rupert Brooke poem, ‘The Chilterns’:

                        And I shall find some girl perhaps

                        And a better one than you

                        With eyes as wise, but kindlier,

                        And lips as soft, but true.

                        And I daresay she will do.

For years I thought that this was a Spike Milligan piece. I don’t think the tutor of my dating class at Cambridge (see blog 7) would have been impressed by such a misattribution.

2. For example, The quotable writer: words of wisdom from Mark Twain, Aristotle, Oscar Wilde, Robert Frost, Erica Jong and more, edited by William A. Gordon (2000).

3. In Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002).

4. Keyes, Ralph, The Courage to Write (1995); also the source of the Murdoch and Miller quotes.