Between Eternities: And Other Writings Page 16

  My chosen method was extremely simple, although the path leading to it was not. I simply had to attribute to the Narrator a circumstance or event that bore no possible relation to me as the author. At one point, the Narrator states that after his two-year stay in Oxford, and back in his own city of Madrid, he is now married and has a child, who is only a few months old at the time of writing. I have never been married and have no children, and that is the only verifiable fact that prevents or could prevent a complete identification between the Narrator and the author that any reader – be he friend or relative or anonymous stranger – might try to establish. That verifiable fact, I should add, gave me even greater freedom when it came to emphasizing any similarities between the Narrator and me, without that fact, or so I thought, destroying the deliberate ambiguity I had opted for in not giving the Narrator a name or any physical description, because there is, in my view, a substantial difference between that second option (stating that the Narrator is married and has a child) and the option I rejected from the start (the Narrator is very tall and has red hair or the Narrator’s name is Juan), and the difference lies in the fact that I, the author, could never have red hair and be six foot three tall, or be called Juan (given that my name is Javier), while I, the author, could well have got married and had a child on my return from the city of Oxford. By using that very simple subterfuge (which was not merely a subterfuge, but essential to the plot), the Narrator could continue to accumulate as many characteristics or elements of the author’s disguise as I wished without that necessary ambiguity being in any way lost. In short, he could, in the novel as a whole, be ‘the person I could have been, but wasn’t’ as well as ‘the person who is No One, and yet resembles me’ and, finally – or so I would like to think – he could also be No One or Anyone, or, at the very least, Someone-else-plus-me.

  (1990)

  Time Machines

  More and more people are astonished when they see or find out that I still write using an electric typewriter, as if such machines were ancient relics. Not just because almost all my colleagues have long since moved on to computers, but also because, according to what many of my readers say, ‘they can tell’ that I write on one of those machines with the greenish or bluish screens, on which, it seems, you have only to press a key to find out instantaneously where and how often you have used the words ‘memory’ or ‘frying pan’. In my most recent novels, there is what I call a system of echoes and resonances, whereby phrases that seem, at first, to be merely trivial and of no particular significance reappear many pages later, sometimes identical but in a different context, sometimes with variations, like musical motifs, and thus they take on a deeper meaning or turn out not to be insignificant at all, but to form an essential part of the story. And the only possible explanation, it seems, is the computer’s memory, as if our own faculties were incapable of such feats and were slowly atrophying.

  I don’t think I could achieve the same thing (always assuming that I have) were I to liberate my memory from the tension needed to recover and reincorporate those repeated phrases or images. If I knew that I had only to press a key in order to summon up what I had written months before without myself making any effort to bring it back, I might well not even consider doing it, I might not make the same connections or maintain that same degree of alertness, I might become oblivious to the internal links in the novel. The fact that a machine can perform a particular function for us does not mean that it will. Indeed, the permanent possibility of being able to do something can have a dissuasive or even preventative effect. A similar thing is happening with home videos, where the filming and accumulating and filing away of certain scenes means that many people no longer recall them. Knowing that they are there, with every movement reproduced in real time, along with every gesture we made and the exact words we spoke, knowing that we can ‘relive’ them whenever we want to means that we are more likely to forget them. Their perpetual availability is an invitation to ignore them.

  There are a few other reasons too why I haven’t started using a computer and probably never will. One of those reasons is that what I enjoy about writing is the time it takes. I enjoy taking the sheet of paper out of the machine once I’ve typed it, reading it through, then crossing things out and shifting them around, making changes I can see and that don’t disappear for good once I’ve made them, because I often go back to what I’ve crossed out and reinstate it, deciding that what I thought was bad at one stage in the process is, in fact, good. You can always find those changes if you have the various drafts before you. And although I realize that you can also print things off from a computer, I don’t know anyone who does print off each and every one of the versions that he or she will later discard and that will never be seen by the reader. Another reason is that, according to computer converts, once you’ve tried writing on a computer, you can’t write on anything else, which, if it’s true, seems to me disastrous and highly dangerous, since you won’t, I imagine, always have your computer to hand. And there are those – for example, that very intelligent American critic Edward Mendelson – who maintain that the computer affects and impoverishes the rhythm of the prose, that the mechanical ease of writing leads authors to write in a more uniform fashion, with more monotonous sentences all of the same length. That seems rather unlikely to me, but I add it as a last resort, like a cat lying belly up on the carpet.

  I have to admit, though, that my main reason is an aesthetic one: right now, those little screens have an exaggeratedly modern air, whereas most of us writers look distinctly démodé. I’ve seen many photos of novelists sporting beards straight out of the nineteenth century or Trotsky-style spectacles or Isadora Duncan scarves or long Cossack overcoats or Becquerian hairdos, and there they are posing next to one of those aseptic, refined contraptions; the result is frankly painful and off-putting in the extreme: they look like anxious, unwitting time-travellers; it’s rather like seeing Valle-Inclán dressed up as the Terminator or, worse still, as Robocop.fn1 And so I prefer to remain entirely antiquated, my life being quite full enough of contradictions.

  (1995)

  The Isolated Writer

  I think most writers tend to feel isolated or, indeed, want to be isolated, especially after a certain age. Perhaps this isn’t the case initially, particularly among those who start writing and publishing young. In one’s early years, it’s exciting to belong to a new and supposedly innovative group or generation. We often despise our immediate predecessors, notably those who come from the same country as ourselves and write in the same language. We judge them to be wrong, out of step, old-fashioned, we have no sympathy for them and are in a hurry to dismiss them. We often, quite unfairly, deny that they have any worth at all and consider them a mere mistake in the history of literature, destined soon to be forgotten. Young writers jump over their literary parents and ‘reclaim’ their grandparents, who, to them, seem weak, unthreatening and on the retreat. However, this feeling of camaraderie and combat, of being part of ‘a new wave’, is short-lived. As soon as a writer stops looking at the other writers around him, he ceases to be concerned about the ‘state’ or ‘future’ of literature in his own country and language, realizing that this is what matters least to him and that, besides, it is not his responsibility. Instead, he devotes himself to the one thing he should devote himself to, namely, writing his own books as if there were no other books in the world, and it is then that he begins to feel isolated. This is partly of his own choosing and partly because he has no alternative if he is to continue as a writer.

  This is not, of course, merely the well-known – and very real – solitude in which all writers work and about which much has been said. It is simply the way in which the novelist chooses to spend his days – the novelist more than the poet, the dramatist or even the essayist – just as others choose or are obliged to spend their days in an office or a factory, permanently surrounded by people. It is, more than anything, the need to feel almost unique, rather than the mere interchangea
ble member of a generation or group, rather than even ‘a child of one’s time’. Nothing irritates a real writer more than those critics, professors and cultural commentators who insist on labelling him or setting him in context or establishing links between his work and that of his contemporaries, in attributing to him membership of certain trends or movements or fashions, in describing him as ‘realistic’ or ‘historical’ or as ‘a literary writer’ – that absurd tautology that has become so popular in our own stupid age – or as a cultivator of ‘autofiction’ – another ridiculous concept currently in vogue – or as a ‘postmodernist writer’ – I’ve never known what that adjective means, but it is, fortunately, falling into disuse. The real writer is also infuriated by attempts to establish ‘his place’ in the literary tradition of his country and language or to find connections between him, that tradition and its classic works. The writer knows that the country in which he was born and the language in which he writes, while important, are only secondary, even, up to a point, accidental, fortuitous and reversible. He knows that Proust could have existed in Italian or English, Lampedusa in Spanish or German, Thomas Mann in Czech or Swedish, or Cervantes, even, in French or Portuguese: he knows that language is just a vehicle, a tool, never an end in itself or something sacred, and not in any way superior to those who use it. It is not a determining factor, or perhaps only in certain ‘ornamental’ writers, who, in Spanish, for example, seem to expect their readers to cry ‘Olé!’ after each exquisite, elegant, quintessentially Castilian phrase. It makes little difference if a writer shares the same language as Shakespeare or Dante, Montaigne or Hölderlin, Conrad or Nabokov or Wittgenstein, still less when one remembers that the last three writers all switched languages at some point in their lives and chose the language in which they wanted to express themselves.

  All these things annoy the writer, and quite rightly so, because he will only manage to write and finish what he is writing if he works in the false belief that his book is the only book in the world. If he looks up from his typewriter or his computer – I still use a typewriter – if he glances back at the past or into the future and sees his work reduced to just another name on an endless list; or if he looks at the present and wastes time wondering how his colleagues are getting on, what they’re up to and what they have achieved and how original or profound they are; or if he considers his predecessors or, indeed, allows himself to be overwhelmed by all the marvellous things that have been written before and that will doubtless be written after his uncertain passage through the world, he will be lost. That is why a writer needs to isolate himself while he is writing, and, needless to say, only while he is writing. He knows full well that his false belief is, as I said, both false and transient. He knows that once the book he has written has left his room and has been exposed to other eyes and, finally, published, it will disappear among hundreds of thousands of other books, and he will see it then as just another drop in the ocean, which, like all the other drops, will be doing its best to be noticed. He will have the sense that his book is, if anything, superfluous.

  Besides, no writer nowadays can take much comfort in the idea of posterity, seeking refuge in some far-off future, trusting that time and its mysterious selection process will single him out as special on some distant day that he will not even be around to see. There always was something slightly ridiculous and somewhat pathetic about the idea of posterity. Now it seems positively grotesque, given that the ‘lifetime’ of things is becoming ever shorter, a process that is happening at an ever more dizzying speed; the release of a film, a piece of music or a book instantly transforms them into ‘something that has been and gone’; we have the impression that the only things that truly exist are those that do not yet exist, but are about to, and the mere existence of something – the film you can already see, the music you can already hear, the book you can already read – signals its imminent expiry and immediately relegates it to the past. We have already seen or heard or read that work, we want something new, which means, of course, that we are always waiting. It’s as if the idea of durability belonged to another age entirely, and is, therefore, only within the grasp of those – Shakespeare, Montaigne, Cervantes, even Conrad and Nabokov – who achieved it when such an idea was still conceivable, still possible. As if it were no longer achievable by any writers living now. For a writer nowadays to think that he will be remembered is entirely at odds with the workings of the modern world, in which everything is ‘old’ the moment it has been born; it is quite simply incompatible with everything around us; it is, in short, grotesque, and this only adds to a writer’s sense of isolation and transience. One thinks: ‘I only really exist while I’m writing, that is, as long as no one can see me and as long as no one knows what I’m doing. Paradoxically, I exist only as long as my work and I remain hidden, as long as we do not as yet exist for the world. As soon as we appear, we will cease to exist and become lost among the swift, impatient rabble that devours, digests and excretes everything.’ Emily Dickinson wrote: ‘Publication is the auction of the mind of man’, and that is an idea I often return to. It is the vile contact with the external world, with the crowd, with the millions of pages similar to our own, all born of the same impulse. It is finding ourselves placed in the framework of a tradition, be it of our own country, our own language or of the whole history of literature (doubtless as a footnote). It is the realization that, far from being unique, we have a great deal in common with our predecessors and with our contemporaries; the realization that the former, whom we have possibly never even read, did the same as we did, only years before, and that the latter, who do not even know us and are unaware of our existence, write books that are, irritatingly enough, connected to our own. It is at this painful moment that we are obliged to accept that such a thing as a zeitgeist does exist, and that we are, involuntarily and unconsciously, at its service.

  Occasionally, there is an even stronger reminder that we are just one more name to be added to the many others, that we are part of a list. This occasion is one such reminder – one, however, that comes in the most pleasant of guises. I have received various prizes (most of them foreign, few of them Spanish), but I don’t believe I have ever before been honoured with one as long-standing as this Austrian State Prize for European Literature, which, I see from the list, was first awarded in 1965. On that list are writers whom I admired when I was very young – when I was only a reader and not even a secret writer – and who seem to have had time enough to achieve posterity, for they lived in an age in which the concept was allowed: names like that of the great poet Auden and the dramatist Ionesco, the magnificent Italo Calvino and Simone de Beauvoir, Dürrenmatt and Manganelli. These were figures whom I viewed almost as extraterrestrial beings, some ever since I was a child, and who, I was sure, bore no resemblance to myself, being unsurpassable, given their greater age and artistic achievement. There are other admirable names on the list as well, those of writers who are still alive or only recently dead and who belong, therefore, to the confused, forgetful, swift-flowing times in which we live: Kundera and Rushdie, Esterházy and Lobo Antunes, Eco and Semprún, Barnes and Enquist and Magris. I have even met some of them briefly, but – how can I put it – for me, they have always been ‘them’, ‘the others’, the writers I read and from whom I feel quite separate. And so, in receiving this Austrian State Prize for European Literature, I cannot but feel puzzled (as well as grateful) to see my name added to a list that makes me somehow less myself, that makes me exist less. Or perhaps, who knows, it makes me exist more, when, as now, I am not shut up in my room, or hidden away, tapping at my old, anachronistic typewriter (or playing ‘at home with paper like a child’, as Stevenson put it). How can I possibly believe that my books are isolated, when I am shown with such kindness and clarity that, on the contrary, whether I like it or not, they form part of a long and noble chain called European literature. Thank you very much.

  (2011)

  Too Much Snow

  Those who have read m
y novels All Souls and Dark Back of Time will be familiar with the name John Gawsworth, the second King of Redonda, John I, although others will certainly not. Suffice it to say that what initially drew me to Gawsworth, who was born in 1912 and died in 1970, was the enormous contrast between his beginning and his end. He started out as a precocious, promising young author, first published when he was only nineteen, became the youngest member of the Royal Society of Literature, was twice or perhaps thrice married, and was created monarch of the real and fictitious and eminently literary Realm of Redonda (an island next to those two tourist hotspots, the islands of Montserrat and Antigua), and yet he ended his days as a beggar, at the age of fifty-eight.

  One of those strange, altruistic English literary societies, The Friends of Arthur Machen, unearthed and issued, on DVD, part of a BBC film shown just two and a half months before Gawsworth’s death in hospital. Two years before that, for lack of funds, the poet had been obliged to leave his last fixed address: a rented room in Bayswater. After that, he became what we would now call ‘a homeless person’, and when his patient friends or his last girlfriend were unable or unwilling to give him shelter, he had no option but to sleep rough on some bench in Hyde Park. An appeal was set up to help him, and this aroused the interest of the BBC, who, in early 1970, made a brief, somewhat charmless documentary featuring Gawsworth himself and some of his old friends, Lawrence Durrell being the best known.