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.Maybe it was too late to change my voice.I wrote two more novels in my own style and sent them round, but they still came back with the same kind of comments.Then, when I was on the verge of retiring from my job at the African Institute, the idea for my last novel, Quartet in Autumn, came to me.And again, I started writing it with no real hope of getting it published.It’s about four people in their early sixties – two men and two women – working in a London office.During the course of the story, the women retire and one of them dies.I wanted to write about the problems and difficulties of this stage in one’s life and also to show its comedy and irony – in fact I’d rather put it the other way round: my main concern was with the comedy and irony, the problems and difficulties having been dealt with almost excessively, one might say, elsewhere.I think some readers have been disappointed in this novel because it seems less light-hearted than some of my earlier ones, yet I enjoyed the writing of it almost more than any of the others, perhaps because I felt that I was writing for my own pleasure with no certain hope of publication at that time.But then, at the beginning of 1977, both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil wrote of me as ‘an under-rated writer’ in The Times Literary Supplement.As a result of this, Quartet in Autumn was accepted for publication, and two of my earlier books were re-issued.It was marvellously encouraging to be brought back from the wilderness.But it was disquieting too.I wonder how many other novelists have suddenly been told their work is not fashionable or saleable any more, and never been lucky enough to have the generous praise I had from the right people in the right place.And this leads me on to the question of why we write at all.Is it enough just to write for ourselves if nobody else is going to read it? As Ivy Compton-Burnett said in a conversation with her friend Margaret Jourdain, ‘Most of the pleasure of making a book would go if it held nothing to be shared by other people.I would write for a dozen people … but I would not write for no one.’ This is what I feel myself – it is those dozen people that spur me on, even when it seems that I’m writing for myself alone.So I try to write what pleases and amuses me in the hope that a few others will like it too.So I did go on writing, even in the face of discouragement.For the last thirty years or so I have kept a series of notebooks, like a kind of diary, in which I also write down all sorts of other things – possible scenes or turns of plot for novels, quotations that appeal to me, occasional overheard scraps of conversation, anything, in fact.Doing this is often more of a pleasure than the actual writing.To jot down an idea for a scene and then to imagine it filled out is immensely satisfying, but, as everyone knows, the final result invariably falls short of the original conception.I’m fascinated by the notebooks of great writers – Hardy, for example.Let me quote this entry for Sunday, February 1st 1874: ‘To Trinity Church, Dorchester.The rector in his sermon delivered himself of mean images in a sublime voice, and the effect is that of a glowing landscape in which clothes are hung up to dry.’ Or another entry, for October 25th 1867, more likely to have inspired a poem: ‘Martha R –, an old maid whose lover died, has his love letters to her bound, and keeps them on the parlour table.’To descend from these heights, here’s an example from my own notebooks.In September 1948 I described a visit to Buckfast Abbey:… much commercialised, teas, car park etc.shop full of Catholic junk as well as books.Abbey very clean and new looking, inside bright and light, tiled effect; incense smells almost hygienic.Not thus would one be sentimentally converted to Rome, though perhaps rationally.Very young priests in the parties of sightseers, mostly in pairs like little beetles, from the seminary in Paignton.The herds of people – the monk showing us round says: ‘I don’t suppose any of you are Catholics’ and explains about Our Lady – makes one feel inferior.This passage seems to have found its way, very little changed, into my novel Excellent Women.At about the same time I noted down something seen from the top of a bus – ‘A woman and a clergyman sitting on chairs (hard) in the Green Park and talking with animation’ – and this gave me the idea for an important twist in the plot of that same novel.Sometimes, on the other hand, the novelist will seek his material more deliberately.Robert Liddell, in his book A Treatise on the Novel, describes the experience of Flaubert who went to a funeral.‘Perhaps I shall get something for my Bovary,’ he wrote to a friend before he went.But when he got there, all he met with was a bore, who asked him foolish questions about the public libraries of Egypt, a country which he had lately visited.Whatever Flaubert had hoped to gain from experiencing the funeral was quite put in the background.So in this way we may not always get what we expect or hope for from an experience, but we shall probably get something, though I don’t know whether Flaubert ever made use of that bore.Ivy Compton-Burnett, on the other hand, claimed not to have the notebook habit, but admitted that some sort of starting-point is useful and that she got it ‘almost anywhere’.This starting off, the point where to plunge in, as it were, is often more difficult than might be imagined from the finished work.I usually think of several beginnings and try them out before the right one emerges.I find it’s sometimes necessary to go further back in the story or to look at things from a different standpoint.Perhaps I’ve been influenced by something I was once told about Proust – that he was said to go over all his characters and make them worse.Regrettably – I think, and I daresay others would agree with me – it’s more interesting to write about people’s less admirable qualities than to chronicle their virtues.After having published seven novels and written a great many more, I suppose I can be said to have found a voice of sorts.I hope so, anyway.But whether it’s a distinctive voice must be left to others to judge.One of my favourite quiz games on television some years ago was that one in which panellists were asked to guess the authorship of certain passages which were read out to them, and then to discuss various features of the author in question.There were no prizes for guessing, no moving belt or desirable objects passing before their eyes, just the pleasure and satisfaction of recognizing the unmistakable voice of Henry James or Henry Greene, or whoever it might be [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]