Untold Stories (71 page)

Writing about writing is a second best. For a writer the process is only of interest when he or she finds that they cannot do it (as today, 13 November 2001). If I could write … a play, a short story, anything … I would, writing about writing (or not writing) is just vamping till ready.

A writer only feels he or she is a writer at the point of performance, the moment of writing. Do anything else, even related activities like research or background reading, and the claim seems fraudulent. A writer is only a writer when writing. The rest is marking time. And your published books and plays don't count; they only prove that you were a writer yesterday but not today, not now.

Some might think this is an over-literal view. An actor is still an actor when he is off the stage; a singer still a singer when he or she is not in full flow. But it is not the same. Put down the pen or abandon the keys and a writer is always on the brink of fraud.

I have always been a late starter, and was as slow off the mark with writing as I was in other departments. Even when I was writing on a regular basis it was a long time before I dared to think of myself as a proper writer as distinct, I suppose, from someone who just wrote sketches. I was not to know then that writing sketches was not a bad way to begin since that was how Chekhov had started, as indeed had Harold Pinter.

Since it was a revue, sketches were obviously the stuff of the first stage production I had to do with,
Beyond the Fringe
done first here in Edinburgh over forty years ago. I went on writing sketches, chiefly for television, and
when in 1968 I put together the stage play
Forty Years On
that too was still a bit of a hybrid, a play certainly but which included sketches, to the extent that some critics thought I ought to make up my mind.

But I never have and the stamp of my origins has stayed with me, and I still write in three-minute bursts so that beneath the most elevated stretch of dialogue or description lie buried the breeze blocks of revue.

By the time I'd written
Forty Years On
I was already thirty-four and had ceased to find reassuring Virginia Woolf 's remark that one should never publish anything before one is at least thirty. I had understandably been consoled by this all through my twenties, though as so often with the pronouncements of writers on their trade (Auden is a prime example) this was simply the writer saying, ‘All do as I do.' Virginia had kept quiet until she was thirty and so should we all.

When I hit thirty with still not much done I then took comfort from Proust, who had been an even later starter than Virginia Woolf: whatever else can be said about Proust, he did not hit the ground running.

In the end writing just seemed to sneak up on me. I was a writer after
Forty Years On
, not by virtue of having had a play produced but because by then I had started to do it (or to try and do it) every day. I still hesitated to lay claim to it as a profession, though, and it was only in the early seventies that I crossed out Teacher in my passport and substituted Actor/Author. The order is significant as I obviously thought at the time that the acting was a better bet than the writing; the actor would go on and the author might peter out, whereas it has tended to be the other way round.

Nowadays, of course, passports no longer require that one states (or confesses) a profession and rites of passage like mine are not so easily charted.

If I was slow off the mark it was also because it took me time to realise that I had a world to write about that was my own and not one that had been revealed to me through books or education. My Leeds contemporary the poet Tony Harrison had a similar experience. His class and social background were approximately the same as mine and like him I felt at
first that ‘the life … I lived didn't seem to be the stuff that literature could be made of … We didn't have books in the house,' he writes, ‘so that my love of language and books always seemed different from the life I actually lived at home. Once I'd found a way of writing about that life, it all came back to me in the richest detail.'
*

That wasn't quite my experience as I'm more light-minded than Tony Harrison and had (and maybe have) less of a grip on my vocation. It took me much longer to see that I had a childhood that could be written about and I couldn't truthfully say, as he does, that at sixteen or eighteen I loved language or had any notion that language or literature might be part of my future. But Tony went to a posher school than I did and a more snobbish one, and he suffered for his accent at school, was punished for his tongue as I never was, so it's hardly surprising if he sorted out his priorities quicker than I did.

For a long time, years even, it seemed to me I had nothing to put into what I wrote; and nor had I. I did not yet appreciate that you do not put yourself into what you write; you find yourself there.

When I realised that I ceased to worry. Or to worry about that anyway.

With a writer the life you don't have is as ample a country as the life that you do and is sometimes easier of access. My first play was set in an English public school, which was not an institution of which I'd ever been a pupil. I knew about it, though, and could write about it from the books I had read … memoirs, biography, school stories and indeed comics. State-educated, I had quite early on tried to write about the kind of school I had attended, a northern grammar school, but found it impossible and have never really managed to write about it since, perhaps because few others have managed it either.
†

There was certainly not much state-school literature to draw on and definitely no tradition. Art comes out of art and to break new ground unassisted is not easy. Certainly I found it hard to do, whereas to write
about the oddities and eccentrics to be found teaching in a run-down public school was to release the imagination, facilitate the jokes and draw on much that I had read. It was not a life I craved or an education I envied but I found public school far easier to depict (or caricature) than the lives of the sometimes desperate and deeply disillusioned men who had taught me in state school … and whom I would perhaps have been better employed trying to understand and re-create.

Reading and going to the pictures as a child I had readily absorbed the inverse moral standards that prevailed in these alternative worlds. I needed no telling that the real villain in the gangster movie was not one of the small-time hoodlums and bully boys but the genial, white-haired and seemingly respectable mayor. In the story-book world, poor was better than rich and plain than pretty. Nothing was as it seemed.

So thoroughly did I absorb these topsy-turvy values, I expected them to prevail in the real world also. How could the French nobles on the eve of Agincourt not see that their overweening confidence and superior strength must inevitably doom them to defeat? Had they never read a fairy story? Or David and Goliath?

I was old enough to register the rout of the BEF in France in 1940 but the defeat and evacuation at Dunkirk to me made the victory at El Alamein and the D-Day invasion seem a foregone conclusion. Though it helped, of course, that that was also how the story was told.

If part of writing consists in smuggling the efforts of the imagination past an internal policeman or customs officer, one function of that official is as a monitor of taste. The precepts of taste are determined by the past and its precedents: the laws of taste are case law; they are a guide to what has been done and so can be done again with safety. And for some writers the constraints are no handicap at all; fences only become barriers if you choose to leap them.

But taste is no help to a writer. Taste is timorous, conservative and fearful. It is a handicap. It stunts. Olivier was unhampered by taste and was often vulgar; Dickens similarly. Both could fail, and failure is a sort of vulgarity; but it's better than a timorous toeing of the line.

Taste abuts on self-preservation. I have too much taste, find it hard to let go. And it is the audience that polices taste. Only if you can forget your audience can you escape. It was in an effort to evade this internal policeman that when I began to write sketches at Oxford I would often get drunk first, though since it's never taken much to make me tipsy a quarter bottle of whatever was enough to see me through the evening. To begin with it was gin, then I sickened of that, tried whisky, finally graduating to vodka, really because it has almost no taste at all. I never had any hesitation in telling my friends (who drank much more than I did) what I was occasionally up to and was surprised by how shocked they were, solitary drinking thought by them to be the first step to perdition. It seemed perfectly natural to me, a way of loosening up the mind and eluding the censor that narrowed one's scope, a thin vinegary voice which said, ‘You can't write that. Other people can but not you. Not unless you want to make a fool of yourself.'

Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York, I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a kind of divestment, a striptease even, so that if I start off undressed I have nowhere to go.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought unique and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
*

To achieve this in writing must be satisfying, too, though short of being told so by readers (not easy if you're Montaigne, say) the writer may never know he has hit the spot.

Emerson writes:

The same note is struck by Seamus Heaney, who, when he is analysing the need the poet has to write, describes first how he appeases that need by learning to find his own unique and distinctive voice but

Never exactly a pushover, these notes of common humanity are harder to strike nowadays on account of competition from an unexpected quarter. Locating in one's own life or imagination those thoughts, impulses or experiences that may be part of the common stock is not without risk and can be shaming. Though a sympathetic reader may nod and say, ‘I've thought that,' the less sympathetic may be outraged and think the writer a brute for even daring to set it down.

Most aware of this nowadays because of their more immediate access to an audience and its responses are not novelists or writers of autobiography. Today the keenest searchers after a currency that they hope is common are the stand-up comedians. Their coin is laughter bred out of recognition, their stock in trade riffs that begin ‘Have you noticed that…' – there following some observation (less hard won, the poor novelist may feel, than his or hers) and the more shocking and intimate the better, the nearer the bone they come the more likely they feel that they will tap into thoughts so shaming or unspeakable we had thought them peculiar to ourselves (and wanted to keep them that way).

No longer. There is nothing nowadays that comedians cannot say. Jaded though one may feel their observations may be, their aperçus contrived and seldom so spontaneous or joyously incidental or indeed thrown off as they would have us think, nevertheless the comedians are at the same game as the rest of us. Playwrights, novelists, autobiographers, poets or comedians, it makes no difference; Proust is on a continuum that stretches past Billy Connolly to Eddie Izzard, Bernard Manning and beyond. And should you doubt that look up Proust's description of Charlus's behaviour when he first sees the young violinist Morel on the railway station; transposed, it is a routine by Jerry Seinfeld.

If there is a beneficiary of all this intrepid soul-searching and delving into our most intimate secrets by the nation's comedians seeking after common ground then I hope it will be a boy such as I was at fourteen, awkward, self-conscious and ridden by fears that seemed shameful and incommunicable. At the same time prudish and prurient, he feels himself set apart from his fellows and convinced of his own wickedness and hypocrisy. I hope there aren't as many such boys or girls as once there were and that the efforts of the writers and the routines of the stand-ups will set them free. But there will always be some, there being no enlightenment that can prevail against the ineluctable capacity of the human spirit to imprison itself.

If writing is a form of striptease it's easier when the author invents a satisfactory long-running eidolon such as Philip Roth's Zuckerman, for instance, or John Updike's Rabbit. I could have wished many (not that there are many) of my life's stories onto such a figure while at the same time maintaining my reserve. But I have not written enough fiction for that and plays seldom allow of sufficient continuity to feature a recurrent character.