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| Tessa Hadley |
Author, author: Tessa Hadley
What we admire in the writers we love is their confident authority – authority in the sense of originating a scene and a vision and a form of words. How does Nadine Gordimer know to begin her novel with a bird welcoming an exile home to Africa? How does John McGahern know that he can make a whole world circle around one quiet country lake in his late stories? Where does Alice Munro get the bravura to jump 25 years between paragraphs?
As we read, we're attending not to the author but to the authored thing – a newly independent African state, an Irish community around a lake, a woman's life and ageing; but supporting our passage over the threshold of the book into its world, we need to feel we're in safe hands. The writer must know what she or he is doing, not only in words but in life. And we imagine that in order to write with these bold strokes, this distinctive truthfulness, this writing personality strong as the flourish of a signature, the writer in her or his self must be full of personality, distinctive, bold.
Yet I don't think writing begins necessarily in strength of self. No doubt some writers are born, so to speak, fully formed – when they find their right voice in the written word, it's as an overflow for the self that's already there, forceful in talk, in sociability, in influence. But the preparation needed for good writing could just as well begin in an opposite place – in a weak and underdeveloped sense of self, a chaotic and incoherent personality.
It might be valuable in the would-be writer's youth to be suggestible and susceptible, much too easily impressed with the power of other people. Your teens and 20s might pass in a fog of exaggerated admiration, you might fall in love indiscriminately; in a romantic inversion of your own uncertainty, you might read power and poetry particularly into anyone who's very definite and determined. You might be uncertain what you think about anything much (except for books of course); moved by a radical iconoclasm one day, a sceptical aristocratic disdain the next. How to choose?
Other people might seem to know so much better than you do how to live. You can imagine the beauty of fulfilment as a teacher, or a nurse, or a world-wanderer: are those what you ought to be? Which one? You might spend your time imitating other people, trying on their lives, wearing their clothes and borrowing their style – whether the people are real or from inside books. I remember deciding at one point to drink as glamorously heavily as the crowd of young radicals in Doris Lessing's 1950s Salisbury: disappointingly it made me sick and I had to abandon that plan.
There are unfortunately no guarantees that being suggestible and susceptible and vacillating will lead to good writing. Elizabeth Bishop worked for a while, when she was young and fresh out of Vassar, on a correspondence course for a "School of Writing". "You, too, could earn money by your pen," the course promised. Bishop explains: "Henry James once said that he who would aspire to be a writer must inscribe on his banner the one word 'Loneliness'. In the case of my students, their . . . problem was that on their banners 'Loneliness' had been inscribed despite them, and so they aspired to be writers."
You might have "susceptibility" on your banner, and yet never get down a decent sentence. The bitter lesson is that you might undergo all the suffering prescribed for the writing apprenticeship, and still never take creative flight – at whatever point you choose to define "flight" (finishing a book? Publication? Sales? The homage of posterity?). Writers know it's best not to dwell on that, if you can help it. (No one owes a failed writer any sympathy – it's not even like failing in a round-the-world yacht race, or to reach the South Pole.)
But there's something to be said for the writer as a permeable personality. That outwards wash of imagination in youth, filling up the world, isn't all delusion; it's partly the necessary rush of fantasy, which to transcend solipsism has to be impressed by what's outside itself. "Impressed" is exactly the right word – the sensibility offers its malleable surface up to take the stamp of all kinds of otherness, enter into their shape and their appeal and their danger and contradictions (feel them, perhaps, as they can't be felt from inside). Other people – and other places, systems, ways of seeing – really are impressive, for good or for ill, melting or terrifying. If you want to write, you ought to have felt that. It ought to be writing's effort, to pay tribute to the power of the forms the world takes. When you want to begin, you may be glad that you've been too moved by everything. Susceptibility isn't the whole story, but it's a good place to start.
And it's probably healthier for a writer to be impressed by teachers and sailors and dancers and field-workers than by writers, after all. Isn't there something unsettling in the circularity in which some writers write because they want to be writers? Of course, Munro's work is close to your heart, you love it, it has changed you absolutely. But you don't long to write in order to have her life; you long to have her power, or even the least 20th or 100th of it, to do justice to real things, in beautiful words on the page.
How can the hero-worship of other writers feed literature so well as the yearning to capture what's outside writing's magic circle? In so many ways it would be better to be a nurse. (You go on thinking that – no doubt you romanticise.) But you know you'd be no good at it. There's only one place you can even dream of being confidently authoritative. In the end, it's all you can do. And even then, there are no guarantees.
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