Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ I was seven, I had need to cling on to something. I had at the time a microscope, a telescope and a small kaleidoscope. These instruments were my toys. I drew what I saw down the microscope, I studied the stars and moon, I watched the shifting patterns of colour in the kaleidoscope. These toys directed my attention, at a critical phase of my development, outwards. My interest as a science fiction writer has been to make sense of the universe, to express the order I found there, and to relate that order – as Storr says – to the inner world of the psyche.

      The universe is a dynamic place these days, not at all the simple clockwork machine it was depicted as being during the nineteen-thirties. New discoveries crowd in on us all the while. The same holds good for our inner world. We may establish a pattern which, to our satisfaction, corresponds with events ‘out there’; but nothing stays put and, in a while, we may feel the urge to attempt the equation again. Of course, if our vision extends no further than the gatepost, we may never be troubled in this way.

      And what of readers? Reading is a creative occupation – much more so than watching television. A reader conspires with an author; they are two people rapt in a singular sort of communion; a writer’s work is not complete without his readers. He may not need many, or he may need multitudes; but he (or she) has to fight somehow to get in touch with the right audience. I believe that readers, people who are continually reading books, are very similar to writers; they may lack a degree of creativity, but they also seek to make sense, or a pattern, out of the universe with which they are presented.

      Anthony Storr puts this well in his work, The Dynamics of Creation, when he says, ‘By identifying ourselves, however fleetingly, with the creator, we can participate in the integrating process which he has carried out for himself.’ We all seek an identity; for writers as for actors this is often a primary concern. As Seurat’s paintings were formed from a multitude of coloured dots, so our identity gradually crystallises from our own view of the universe, or personal umwelt.

      Long-sustained creativity involves more than the intellect. The emotions are also brought into play.

      I have mentioned instruments I valued as a boy, telescopes, microscopes and kaleidoscopes. These are scientific instruments, but there are two sorts of science, the science which observes nature and the science which attempts to alter nature (Victor Frankenstein was the first scientist of the latter kind). I was, even at the age of seven, of the passive kind. I observed.

      For better or worse, this is one key to character. There is some evidence that writers are happier in the role of observer.

      Writing, like the other arts, entails many hours of labour, often in solitary state. If measured on a conventional scale of payment, the financial returns for these hours of labour are in general nugatory. Why then these hours of labour? One answer must be that they represent a defence against the outside world.

      Creativity is generally a mystery, even to the creative person himself. The popular view of creativity follows the ‘pearl in the oyster’ theory, which, in a slapdash way, embodies truth. The conception of Beethoven composing his symphonies despite his deafness, or Goya painting on despite a similar affliction, has a romantic appeal. The slavery of creative work may seem like a freedom if it protects the creator from worse things, from some loss in childhood, from a fear of the terrible vacuum.

      Anthony Storr, the authority on creativity, says:

      If creative work protects a man against mental illness, it is small wonder that he pursues it with avidity; and even if the state of mind he is seeking to avoid is no more than a mild state of depression or apathy, this still constitutes a cogent reason for engaging in creative work even when it brings no obvious external benefit in its train.

      It would appear that writing in the present day is a preserve best suited to the rather withdrawn personality, who is able to endure and even enjoy solitude. And not only in the present day. Vasari, writing his Lives of the Painters in the sixteenth century, claims that love of his art makes a man solitary and meditative, saying it is necessary that ‘he who takes up the study of art should flee the company of men’. Seclusion is an inseparable part of the pattern of intellectual and spiritual life in East and West alike.

      In sum, there are intellectual and emotional patterns which have proved over the years to be peculiar to creative people. If you are a star footballer and you feel the impulse to write a book, the chance is that you will write only one. To be a real writer over a number of years, you must have stamina and the right psychological make-up.

      Many think that the writer’s life is an enviable one. I am certainly of that number. But it has its shadowed side. A wish to unburden oneself is, after all, an indication that one is burdened. So it proves, according to recent researches on both sides of the Atlantic.

      Poets are well known to be prone to phases of depression. Their numbers include William Cowper – a poet in whom I once took personal interest, being born in the town where he died – Tennyson, Coleridge, John Donne, John Berryman, Louis MacNeice, Thomas Hardy, Christopher Smart, John Clare (who spent many years in a madhouse), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and others. Crane, Berryman, Jarrell, Sexton and Plath committed suicide, Cowper attempted it.

      Several of these writers suffered bereavements early in life. Cowper lost his mother when he was four, and cannot be said ever to have recovered from the loss. The melancholy A. E. Housman’s mother died on his twelfth birthday.

      Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Berryman, MacNeice and Plath all lost a parent before the age of twelve. The author of Frankenstein lost her mother when she was born, and her novel is heavy with that loss.

      A group of writers investigated at a writers’ workshop at the University of Iowa in 1974 showed that, of fifteen authors, nine had seen a psychiatrist, eight had been treated with drugs or by psychotherapy, and four had been admitted to hospital. Six had symptoms of alcoholism, and one committed suicide later.

      In February 1986, the Sunday Times published the results of research into forty-seven of Britain’s leading writers by Dr Kay Jamison of the University of California in Los Angeles. Ten of the eighteen poets who responded had received treatment for psychological disorders, while half of them had been treated for mania with strong anti-depressant drugs such as lithium, and had voluntarily undergone electro-convulsive therapy or spent time in hospital.

      Two of the eight novelists who responded to the survey had been mentally ill. As A. Alvarez says in his study of suicide, The Savage God, ‘The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.’

      Of course, it is not the writing which causes the depression, but rather the depressed who choose writing. And, it must be added, the term ‘depressed personality’ is used here in a clinical way. Those who are depressed in the common-or-garden sense of that term are probably incapable of looking constructively at a considerable body of work such as a novel or play.

      The clinically depressed are often remarkably cheerful. That may be the face they choose to present to the world.

      Or, or course, they may just have had a book accepted by Faber & Faber.

      6

       Recuperation: a Brief Chapter

      The Brightfount Diaries was published by Faber & Faber on 2 November 1955.

      Parker’s loyally ordered a half-dozen copies on sale or return. Their faith in their staff was rewarded. The copies sold out by lunchtime. I was safe round the other end of the shop, hiding behind СКАЧАТЬ