On the One Hand

2007

Which hand do you write with? I asked myself this seemingly simple question when a diary column quoted Martin Amis, who was pondering the balance that writers seek between journalism and fiction. “I think of writing journalism and criticism as writing left-handed,” Amis said, “where the connection isn’t to the part of me that novels come from.”

I’ve heard other writers use similar words and, being contrary and literal-minded, my reaction was to grab a pen in my left, my underused hand, and see what came out. This is what my left hand wrote in the watches of last night:

It’s so slow, so uncontrolled … the least flourish skids all over the paper … “W” I find is the very devil … tension transmits to your whole body, as if you were trying to write with your legs. No wonder it was so tiring to be at infant school. Noon, and you were done for.

If you persist—and “each page,” I wrote, “is like a wall to be painted”—what comes out is a kind of irritable, condensed poetry. Your hand moves so slowly that you can keep changing your mind about what you are going to say, and sentences can end up anywhere at all. My stabs at the paper reminded me of Julius Caesar. As I was compelled to think one letter at a time, I found myself speculating on whether Shakespeare, who gave the Romans cloaks, also gave them clocks, and whether Caesar died with “his mantle muffling up his face” or his mantel. I could have checked, but it was four in the morning, and the vexed small child I’d become couldn’t reach the shelf with the Complete Works.

You can safely try this at home. You might get a message from your psyche—something strange, like the automatic writing supposed to be dictated by the dead. Thinking back over my career as a columnist, I know that my pieces came from my right hand—trained, clear, biddable and capable of keeping count. I wrote on the computer screen, but my dominant hemisphere was in charge, my right hand steering the topic. I could trust myself not to do anything wild. For four years in the 1980s, I wrote a film column for the Spectator. Eight hundred words were requested, and though from time to time I turned in 799, I was seldom expansive to the tune of 801. After a while I didn’t even have to use a word count function. All my views—on anything—fitted into 800 words. “Should we be in Iraq?” Eight hundred words. “Is it cold out?” Eight hundred words.

Then, for a while, I wrote an opinion column, successfully concealing the fact that I had no opinions—or at least, not of the sort broadsheet editors want. If I were to be granted a coat of arms—an unlikely scenario, I admit—my motto would be “It’s not that simple.” Being a novelist has taught me, if I didn’t know before, that almost all human situations are complex, ambiguous and shifting. There is always more information, and more emerging information, than you can process, but the crudities of public debate require oppositional postures, the drawing of lines in the dust. I wouldn’t trust my left hand, even in what seemed a clear-cut controversy. My right hand, which is conventional, is, I hope, impeccably liberal, but what if my left hand turned out to be Ann Widdecombe, or to be a lyrical terrorist, seething with underdog’s discontent?

Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day, and sooner or later, when they have been pilloried for their views, most of them recognize this. It was senseless to ask them, as the media did, for their views on 9/11, or to ask them to take a line on any public catastrophe; why is their opinion, because it is dressed in fancy words, more valid than any other? I am not suggesting that artists should have no political engagement. Far from it: I can’t imagine writing at all unless I were driven by political concerns, in the widest sense. But, while the columnist is retained to turn over clichés as fast as the stock at Topshop, the novelist should produce a couture response—lovingly tailored, personal, an unmistakable one-off.

Martin Amis recognized this, going on to say that novels and commentary come from different places within the writer. He quoted Norman Mailer on the creeping pace of fiction: “you must let it weave and trickle through you.”

There’s one good reason for novelists to write for the papers, and that’s to subsidize, financially, the slow process of art. For sure, there are other benefits besides money—there’s the publicity, the contacts. For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it’s best not to like it too much. The desire to be a pundit must be suspect. If you have stamina and persistence, and your publisher sticks by you, you might, after forty years or so, frame a response to life that’s worth the paper it’s written on. You won’t do it with the same hand, the same tools, that you use to produce journalism, criticism or reportage.

Fiction isn’t made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. It multiplies ambiguity. It’s about the particular, which suggests the general: about inner meaning, seen with the inner eye, always glimpsed, always vanishing, always more or less baffling, and scuffled onto the page hesitantly, furtively, transgressively, by night and with the wrong hand.

I Once Stole a Book

2009

I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945. It was called Moral Questions. I was prepared at any time to give it back to a pupil who could show she needed it more than me.

Published in Dublin, it was a spin-off from a Catholic problem page in a weekly paper. Perplexed readers from all Ireland would write in, and the author, the Very Rev. Michael O’Donnell, would set them straight. It was revealing, from the pagan redoubt of England, to see what troubled the Irish conscience. Whole novels seemed to lie between the lines. Must a man obey his parents all his life? Is it a sin to be hypnotized? “Is it considered unlucky for two members of a family to get married inside the same year?” O’Donnell sees nothing against it; but when asked “Should a woman get married if she dislikes children?” he reminds the questioner that she’d better get over herself before she trips down the aisle, as “babies are essentially entailed in marriage.” He’s surprisingly lenient to brides with a reason to blush; even if you’ve got a bit of a past, it’s okay to wear “a wreath and veil,” provided your loss of virginity was managed discreetly and the whole congregation doesn’t know; if, however, you’re the parish bike, it would be a bit ridiculous. It’s a yearning, melancholy, rural and lonely world, the world of Moral Questions: “There is a certain Catholic boy I have longed to go with and marry. I have prayed night after night for this favor … Have I committed sin?”

I enjoyed the sex problems: “Is it possible to get medical aid to prevent involuntary nocturnal happenings?” But my favorite section concerned the rules on fasting and abstinence. “Is it permissible to eat beans or other food, flavored with meat, on Friday?” Absolutely not, snaps O’Donnell. “Is turtle soup permitted?” Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Gelatine is allowed on Fridays, despite its animal origin. Beef dripping? Yes. Gravy? No. It’s a minefield. Eight ounces of bread is advised during the Lenten fast; can you, begs one hungry man, toast the bread, make it weigh less, and so eat extra? This slacker’s hopes are soon blighted. Yet the rules are inconsistent: “throughout Ireland generally, butter is not allowed by custom at the evening meal; in Dublin, however, it is.” There’s a general feeling that the sybarites in Dublin do themselves proud, and are always looking for a way to bend the rules. In fact, there is a prevailing weasel tone: just what can you get away with? Is it in order, on a fast day, to skip over diocesan boundaries to a more lax jurisdiction? “A case might be made out in your favor,” O’Donnell smirks.

That the body of Mother Ireland, famished through the years thanks to potato blight and English wiles, was now persecuted with voluntary hunger … the idea brought tears to my eyes, though they were tears of laughter. I learned more about the land of my forefathers from Moral Questions than from any other source, if I except the novels of John McGahern. The sections on relations between the state and individuals were the most enlightening of all. “What are the obligations of a judge who has received a bribe?” The English answer to this is shock: The what?! The what who has received a what? The Irish answer is, let’s say, more circumstantial—though to be fair to the author, he doesn’t recommend routine corruption of the bench, and he’s not in favor of fiddling your income tax. What’s striking is the efforts of his correspondents to get him on their side and obtain absolution in advance of the sin. County councillors, it seems, are born to be bribed, and the general standard of civic conduct is that encapsulated by the popular electoral slogan, “vote early, vote often.” As for misdemeanors such as peddling illicit liquor, poteen is sinful “in certain localities,” but not others—a baffling answer which suggests O’Donnell runs a still himself. But he’s not a man who haunts the dog track; he seems surprised when asked if it’s a sin “to have two dogs known by the same name, and have one of them run when the other is expected.”

Who, I wondered, was Michael O’Donnell, DD? A genius, according to the book’s introduction. Not only did he discourse in “vivid, ironic and devastatingly accurate … Latin,” but he knew canon law so well that if all the texts were burned, he could reconstruct them out of his own head. Born in Donegal in 1881, he must have cut a fine figure. “He was, as his appearance bore evidence, of the princely line of the O’Donnells.” Poignant, that touch of snobbery. The rag-tag working-class Catholics among whom I grew up, crammed into black, English terraces and fodder for the textile mills, could go on pretending that we were all princes and princesses, in the never-never land where justice is done. The nuns who taught my generation made a sharp and early distinction, in the schoolroom, between nice, clean children from small families, and those ragamuffins who were number six or seven, and who turned up late and dirty-faced, wearing the hand-me-downs of their tribe. Father O’Donnell was firm on the matter, like any priest of his era: “the Church recommends continence or abstinence, not contraception.”

Those were the days, before feminism, before AIDS, before the sex abuse scandals, when I could laugh at what enrages me now: the hypocrisy, the waste, the damage. During my A-level year I had such pleasure from Moral Questions that, being the school librarian, I issued it to myself on lifelong loan. But later I lent it to a friend; and somehow it found its way back to a bookshelf congenial to it, by the pious Catholic hearthside of her in-laws. Many years later I needed it, to help me write my novel Fludd. I wanted to quote it verbatim; it was beyond me to make this stuff up. Drawing on the network of influence that spreads outward from a master criminal such as myself, I activated a daughter of the house to travel from her home in Liverpool, divert the attention of her parents, and slip the book into her traveling bag. In this way it came home to the woman who appreciates it most, and who keeps it to hand in case of sudden difficulty. After all, suppose I had to carry out an emergency baptism, and no water was to hand? “In a crisis we are allowed to use any liquid that, even probably, reaches the standard. Milk must be excluded; beer and tea are doubtful…” Use your discretion, the priest urges; no doubt there’s many a sickly infant, born around 1945, whose papist life began with a sign of the cross and a splash of stout.

Exam Fever

2009

Nostalgia takes some perverse forms. I saw a book for sale the other week called The Eleven-Plus Book: Genuine Exam Questions from Yesteryear. Are there really people who would buy this and chortle over it as they recalled the torments of their childhood? Did they enjoy it so much that they want to relive it? Those clammy nightmares, where an illegible test paper and a broken pencil are set before you, and the clock is set ticking—do these people wake up next day and say, “I had such a happy dream!”

I remember a good deal about the day I took my 11-plus. Subject to a special playtime, let out briefly between papers while the rest of the school was shut away, we careered around the asphalt, boys and girls together in one febrile whirlwind, crazed with adrenaline and caught up in a riot of chase and capture where everyone was chasing and no one was caught; and the dour nun who was in charge of us, I remember, stood goggle-eyed on the steps, wondering if we were going to trample her, or set fire to the school. It was everything to me, whether I passed or failed, and I remember being ill with nerves when the day for the results came—actually feverish, so that I had to be kept at home, and the result brought by a friend. Some orange squash, my mother said, should be given to the messenger who brought the good news; I remember how, when I tried to pour it, my hands shook and the fat neck of the bottle went chink, chink on the rim of the glass.

I don’t, in fact, recall any of the questions. And nothing would induce me to relive those days by buying a book of them. As it turned out, I was good at passing exams, but I always wondered how much this meant. Once they became a matter of writing essays, my blinding verbal facility— no credit to me at all, I had done nothing to acquire it—meant that I sounded as if I knew what I was talking about, even when I didn’t. You would have thought examiners would have seen right through me. At O-level we got a strange religious knowledge paper with questions that actually required thinking for oneself, an activity in which we had never been encouraged. Prepared only to regurgitate the trite little facts we had been taught, we were startled, and an impulse of bewilderment—I could feel it in my fingertips—ran right around the exam room; but I came out confident, because I reckoned that any fifteen-year-old who could, like me, wield the word “parthenogenesis” was bound to get to the top of the heap. Regrettably, I was right. It didn’t seem fair that words could do so much. At maths, of course, I was an abject failure. The simplest equation had me stumped.

In the sixth form, freed from numbers, my flannelling capacity only increased. If there had been an A-level in bullshit, I’d have got some sort of national award. My teachers’ only anxiety, in the run-up to exams, seemed to be that I might never stop writing—that I might simply refuse, and use up all the spare paper in the exam hall, and sit scribbling till darkness fell and they had to call the fire brigade to remove me, like someone who needed to be cut out of the wreckage of a car. Did I know, they asked me, that I would have only forty minutes for each answer? Yes, I knew, and I knew precisely how much persiflage I could pack onto each side of paper. In an attempt to slow me down, perhaps, they found an extra exam that no one else was sitting, in spoken English, and sent me off on the train with my bag of words to deploy them on some examiners whom I would, given the nature of the thing, meet face to face. I was not afraid, but by the time I left, it’s possible that they were.

When I look back, it seems as if between the ages of twelve and twenty-one I was a trembling voyager on a sea of black ink, living in a permanent state of dread, because the consequences of failure, as they were represented to me, were unbearable. I was familiar, then as now, with every trick for procrastination, constantly guilty, constantly fretting that what I had crammed into my head would not be enough, and waking myself up at 3 a.m. to get in some extra hours of study. Once I had graduated from university I could have changed—other people managed it—but after a year freed from the desk and the library lamp I felt so useless, so futile and distressed, that I bought some more ink and paper and started writing a very big book. I know that, despite my bluffing abilities, I did work hard at school, much harder than I needed to, and I know that when the results came, I always felt as if I might be an imposter.

Do other people feel this? Is it a girl thing? These days I’m always glad when autumn comes, when the exam season is over, and the poor teenagers have had their results ridiculed, and everyone is bedded down, or not, in their university or college. In the lead-up, while the discussion of declining standards is going on, I’m subject to flares of retrospective panic. In recent years, I’ve found a new reason for it. I’ve asked myself whether going into school to collect A-level results in June was better or worse than waiting till this month to know if I’ve found favor with the Man Booker judges. In schooldays, there was a friend to share the crawling apprehension, and go to the pub with afterward. Until recently, the Booker business was simple enough to handle. The committee’s workings were private—leaks apart—until they issued a shortlist. Your publisher called you, sounding like an undertaker, to say that you weren’t on it. You swallowed hard, and got on with your next book. Only once has my routine varied; when Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton was omitted in 1992, I cried, because if Ulverton wasn’t good enough, I couldn’t think what you’d have to do.

But now, with the issue of an official longlist in July, the waiting consumes the summer, and by the time the shortlist is released you simply don’t know what to do with yourself. You realize that, in effect, by becoming a writer you have agreed to sit exams all your life. There was a party on the evening of the shortlist announcement this week, one of those occasions where authors show their public faces; at previous prize ceremonies, where they didn’t win, they have perfected fixed expressions of sickly sanctity or amused indifference. Inside (unless they are very unlike me) they feel like mad axemen. They would be glad to have the chance to trample a nun or set fire to a school. The more public the process is, the more cruel. Perhaps it’s better, though, than sitting alone, tapping your fingers and shuffling your feet, waiting to know whether words have failed you.

Where Do Stories Come From?

2009

I once mentioned Charles Lamb’s dictum that no one ever put down a newspaper without a feeling of disappointment. I didn’t admit, at that point, that I am the exception; that the paper has never been printed that didn’t make me happy. I understand the despondency and lassitude that overtake the reader at the repetitious parade of human folly, and the evidence, reinforced on a daily basis, of nature’s malignity and the indifference of the gods; but me, I just like the small ads. I pick up the freesheets in towns I’m passing through, to find out about their local version of a good time, and what they buy and sell to each other, what rows have broken out in the council chamber, which luxury sauna has got some all-new blondes, and who wants planning permission for a conservatory roughly the size of their house. I like reading the “In Memoriam” verses for people I’ve never known, and feeling sorry they’re dead, if only because their relicts have such a woolly idea of scansion.

It was in the small ads of a local paper in Norfolk that I saw for sale three bridesmaid’s dresses, identical, to fit sizes 24, 26 and 10; ever since, I have been imagining the photographs from the original wedding, and wondering if such bridesmaids ever occurred for a second time, or if the dresses are still hanging in a closet. When we lived in Sunningdale, a respectable parish, we had a dodgy car dealer in the area; he would add, to his description of every clocked and clapped-out vehicle he was trying to flog, the claim “drives superb.” This term long ago entered our family lexicon. “How’s my new chapter?” I might ask my husband nervously. “Drives superb,” he’ll say. If next day I realize that it’s broken down on the hard shoulder, emitting sparks and stenches, I blame myself for expecting a bargain in the first place; smooth engines and smooth writing don’t come easy or cheap.

When it comes to the national press, I can make any paper last two hours, and when I’ve finished it’s not fit for another hand; it looks as if a drunk has been making paper hats with it. I read all those parts of a newspaper that aren’t news and aren’t features and aren’t really anything else but listings of one type or another: church services and engagements and wills, encapsulated yearnings for love and offspring, and traces of lives well spent. If the Guardian has a fault, it’s that it doesn’t offer enough of this peculiar entertainment and I have to supplement it with other papers if I want to know, for instance, the Princess Royal’s daily engagements, or keep up with the Duchess of Kent through the efficient track-and-trace system provided by the Court Circular; not a Lord Lieutenant in any county shakes hands with her, but I know about it. Through close study of the “Birthdays,” I am aware, as others may not be, that Charles Moore and Jimmy Savile share a natal day, though not a year. I know of all the latest Crispins, Chloes and Clementines born into the chattering classes. I am particularly fond of the column called “Appointments in the Clergy”; one week recently, I actually knew one of the clergymen mentioned, a coincidence which caused me to feel airy and full of grace, as if I’d just been baptized and got a second chance.

So I need not explain why I was reading a list of school reunions, when my eye fell on what follows: the address of a girls’ school in Llandudno, and the notification that it was the “Final Old Girls’ Reunion.” Next April it will occur; the information tolled in my ears: why is it the last, how can anyone know? It may be that the organizer has just got tired of doing all the work: that fewer and fewer old girls are turning up, that some of them are shrill and grubby and have vodka bottles in their bags, and piercings, and toyboys in tow: or that Llandudno is just too hard to get to. But sadder explanations suggest themselves. Are there only two old girls left, and has one of them been given a bad prognosis? I can’t help thinking what it would be like, two sassy old dames crumbling a final scone together, replacing in its saucer the teacup drained of Darjeeling, polishing their noses with a crumpled tissue: “Well, Blinky, old thing…” “Well, Nodders, old girl…”; brushing crumbs from their laps, laying down the final butter knife, stepping into separate taxis to go their final ways. Surely there’s a short story in it. But it’s not mine, is it? It’s one for Jane Gardam.

Who owns stories and where do they come from? The last part of the question is one that readers ask all the time; writers are very poor at giving the answer. We don’t like to say “from the personal columns,” or “from the small ads,” even if it’s true. It sounds too obvious, too much like the way people assume authors operate. For years my family has supposed that in restaurants and pubs I eavesdrop on other tables, and so pick up ideas.

Only recently I’ve found the courage to say that in fact I don’t hear well, and that my expression of rapt attention is my effort to prepare for a hard question, such as “Still or sparkling?” Stories must be happening all the time and I simply don’t hear them. I am not a ready writer of short fiction and I have almost to trip over a story before I recognize it. I tend to assume that whatever strikes me belongs somewhere inside a novel, and will have to hang about in my notebook for that novel to come along: which makes, I can tell you, for a prodigiously slow rate of progress at turning life into ink.

I can sometimes see a poem, but I don’t have the craft and skill to make it work. Requests to “write a fairy story” strike me dumb; aren’t fairy stories just there? Yet I did once manage it, because I did it without thinking. I didn’t recognize the result as belonging to me; it seemed like a stone kicked, or flicked off from my heel, into an underground stream. I have imagined whole novels (and sometimes written them) while wondering if they belonged to someone else: Beryl Bainbridge, mostly. BB gave me courage when I was a beginning writer; I used to think well, if she can get away with this outrageous stuff, maybe I can sneak in more of the same kind? The question about “your influences,” so often posed to writers, is hard to answer, however great the desire to give an honest reply. You’d like to know, yourself, why you do things the way you do. It hardly seems graceful to admit that, if you take your ambition from Shakespeare, you take your inspiration from “Flats to Let.”

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