Perched for the next year at the edge of a tiny Devon village, between a field of lazy cows and an estuary full of sailboats and gliding swans, I’m finding it hard to turn my mind from the pleasures of the moment back to the novelist’s stone-pile, where the shape I’d been slowly chipping away at for almost a year before I set it aside to pack up the house and fly off into the sunrise now seems vague: a strident hand, two bony feet, and half a face that might be anxious or simply bored. How do you throw yourself back into a stream once it’s had time to ice over? By chipping away the ice, I tell myself, and preparing yourself for the shock and shrivel.
The question every novelist asks at some point is, why not just stop? Why not just live? Writing a novel is the opposite of living: it’s like carving rock into the shape of a life, or what you imagine a life to be while you stand there chipping at the stone. Somewhere there are lights and laughter; you can hear it carried on the breeze coming in through the window. But you go on chipping at the stone because you’ve come this far and that’s the curve of an arm where there was once only marble and only by going on will you ever see it clearly.
For the last few years, I wrote in a long narrow attic room, and the writing I did there now seems to me long and narrow. This year, I’ll gaze out at that field of cows and the green hills rising beyond, hoping for wider perspectives. In the meantime, while I wait for the ice to clear, let me offer you, courtesy of The Observer’s recent list of The Fifty Greatest Arts Videos on YouTube, some reminders why we spend our lives in these fields of rock and ice, which can so often seem barren but occasionally bring forth a harvest that makes it all seem worthwhile.
First, here’s the famous clip of Jack Kerouac reading from On The Road in 1959, while Steve Allen noodles on the piano in the background. (Listen for the title of this post.) In the second clip, I was startled by Sylvia Plath’s surprisingly deep voice as she reads “Daddy” in 1962: she sounds like a matter-of-fact Eve Arden in some strange 1950’s film noir (“I have had to kill you.”) Next, a wonderful video of Vladimir Nabokov discussing Lolita (“I have invented an America, my America, and just as fantastic as any inventor’s America”) in the company of a bemused, cigar puffing Lionel Trilling. (“We can’t trust a creative writer to say what he has done. He can say what he meant to do, and even then we don’t have to believe him.”) (You can get the second part of the interview here.) Stranger, and more lovely, is this recording of Zora Neale Hurston singing “Uncle Bud” in 1939. These videos are a nice reminder that more is possible on a medium like YouTube than videos of teenage boys doing their Star Wars moves. But if you’re not convinced, and since Kerouac reminds us that we’re all going to die, here’s an image of God’s forefinger pointed straight at you: John Coltrane in 1961 doing “My Favorite Things”