Walking on air

There was a programme on BBC Radio 4 about the writing life. At this moment, it’s only available to “listen again” for another five days, so I’d better get on and publish this. In any event, I’ve made a transcript of the important bit. It starts at 22:26 and you can hear the full audio programme here: “Thou Shalt not Bore”.

Martin Amis: We ought to say that though it’s a wonderful life, I think, being a novelist, it has its fair share of suffering and that in fact the two ingredients that make up a novel are a) exaltation and b) anxiety. But that suffering, the anxiety, is as big an ingredient as all the inspiration you’re ever going to get. With my last novel, Lionel Asbo, I came to the end in nearly a year and thought it was almost done, just polish it, and then revising it took another year. And a writer friend said “What did you have to put into it that wasn’t there before?” And I said, “Anxiety.” I had written the first draft with a certain euphoria, because I was very astonished to see that the novel was sort of there—and it was based on a quite tenuous idea—and then I realized I just hadn’t done the suffering. And by Christ, I did suffer. And the only way you can suffer is to suffer as writers suffer, i.e. you sit down to write a scene and it’s completely dead. Norman Mailer said, “When you come to a scene, you expect your subconscious to have prepared the ground.” And it even led me to offer a definition of writer’s block, which is when the subconscious goes dead.

Robert McCrum: And this happened to you with . . .

Amis: It did, yeah. Do the suffering and . . . Often the suffering entails a nadir, which is, you think, “this novel is no good. And, come to think of it, all my other novels are no good . . . (pause)”

McCrum*: . . . “I’m no good!”

Amis: “I’m no good.” (They laugh) When you get to that point, you can begin.

I listened to the programme in the car, mostly stationary after I’d reached my destination. I’m no novelist but I always find an affinity with Amis, as a writer and as a person, though the personal knowledge comes only from such interviews and his memoir, Experience. Exaltation and suffering are the ingredients in my own writing, too. I’ve been to zenith and nadir—all the way to “I’m no good”—several times in the last few weeks, trying to put a polish on my magnum opus. The process may take several years, so the important thing is to retain the impetus, then attain the steady rhythm of a long-distance runner. There will be a book; it may be like no other.

After listening to the programme, I still had an hour free. I could have gone to the waiting-room as on previous occasions, but this time I went for a walk instead. I took along two electronic companions. One was my Sat-Nav (GPS device). This was to help find my way back. It gives you a glorious freedom where you can just go, no matter where, just follow your nose without a care (walking being already a hundred times freer than driving, at least where I live.) The other companion was my voice recorder, so much more faithful than a camera in helping capture the moment. This is what I said, with a little editing for coherence:

I realized it was the only way I knew how to write—short yet rambling essays.

And when this [book] is done, I could start to write another. And I could also write it [first] on the blog, just as before. Interactive, a conversation with the reader.

There’s a special euphoria that comes from just walking. Here I am. Walking the face of the earth. It is a kind of Zen meditation, I’m sure. You just do it. Everything else is a sort of plus. There’s no particular thing [e.g. purpose] attached to it. . . .

Some times I want to take a different route. And some times I want to follow an old route. It varies between the two. Because in a way, it sometimes doesn’t make a difference where you’re going. You’re there, you’re walking the earth, and there is meaning, just in doing that. Or whatever there is, whatever happens, it has enough meaning.

But the idea of meaning is far too intellectual. It requires far too much education—of some sort or another. [What I want to say is] Beyond meaning. There is just a sense of one part of creation—me—within the rest of creation. I’m devoured, swallowed up by creation. In fact [I was] never separated from it in the first place.

[Meaning is a kind of explanation but] In fact nothing can explain it. But I think it’s when you are carefree. You have left those cares behind. And if it’s a [relationship with] God that can do it, then, yes, you should believe, believe. Because that is what you do. [First] You learn it, and then you strengthen it. And then it holds for you. It’s strong. I don’t have that. I don’t know what I had, ever. [My beliefs were quite vague, rudimentary.] But I think the strongest thing is walking on air. So that is my title [for this post]. Nothing but my own body, my own two feet, my life, my mortality, and being buoyed up by this creation. It doesn’t need some special belief—as you might say, in the force of gravity or even of antigravity—which you might call levity. Levity is another thing. . . .

I don’t know if the above conveys the exaltation of that hour’s walk. In any case, the suffering—sinking down to the inevitable nadir of “I’m no good”—followed later in the day. And so it will go on, I guess, until the work is done. In the meantime, I’ve stopped agonizing about anything I publish here. Some readers may bear with me, I guess. Perhaps fewer than usual.
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* I later looked up Robert McCrum, learned about his stroke in 1996, found an article he wrote in The Guardian, Sunday 25 May 2008, which starts as follows:

I’ve read somewhere that, across the world, there are about 175,000 new blogs launched every day. That’s two new blogs a second, a truly awesome statistic from the global IT revolution of our times. Since I joined The Observer as literary editor in 1996, the world of print seems to have been in continuous transition. From an historical perspective, I have had the professional good fortune to live through the biggest IT development since Caxton and Gutenberg about 600 years ago.