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Tuesday 13 May 2008

Scribble, scribble, scribble

Allan Massie on why writers write

Why do we write? Dr Johnson had no doubts, or pretended to have none: ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’. This is manifestly false, unless you make writing for some other reason one of your definitions of the word ‘blockhead’. In any case it’s not true of Johnson himself. Despite the indolence for which he reproached himself, he was an assiduous correspondent, writing long thoughtful letters to his friends. Likewise, there are those who — obsessively — keep journals or diaries without, until recently anyway, expecting ever to profit from them.

The American novelist Jay McInerney has suggested that writing comes ‘out of a deep well of loneliness and a desire to fill some gap. No one in his right mind would sit down to write a book if he were a well-adjusted, happy man.’ This too is not quite nonsense, but comes close to being so. What about P. G. Wodehouse, by all accounts as happy as a lark, who was able to say ‘I love writing’, even though he also said that his way of working was to ‘put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and curse a bit’.

There are writers of course who seem always to have worn a hair shirt, Conrad for instance who claimed that the sight of a pen and inkwell made him angry. His letters are full of moans about the difficulty of writing; it’s a dismal trade that is making him ill. Nevertheless it was the trade he chose and he stuck at it. Surely there was some satisfaction to be found.

It may be that many of us do indeed take to writing because we are not, as Beryl Bainbridge has said, very good at living. So we try to make sense of things on paper instead. This may be why success is so often bad for a writer; it allows him to suppose he has mastered life. Complacency sets in; he is less curious about himself and other people, and his work suffers.

There are simpler explanations. Ambition is one — the desire to be well thought of. Being a writer may not get you a better table at a restaurant, but it does make you more interesting, to some people at least. Their initial interest may well be disappointed on further acquaintance, but while it exists, it is gratifying. Orwell, despite asserting that everything he wrote was in the cause of advancing democratic socialism, was honest enough to admit that the desire to be praised and make a show in the world was one motive for writing. For anyone who lacked confidence in youth or had a thin time of it at school, writing is a form of revenge. Even the most self-effacing of writers is crying out ‘look at me’ in every book or even newspaper article.

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