My Faith in Writers is Still Devout

Or is it?

Sometimes I read about some writer who’s motivated, it seems, only by cupidity and fame and the salacious trilogy, and I wonder what’s the matter with me.

Sure, the money would be welcome with a book deal, but all I’m hoping for is enough to live off, and if that’s not enough, then I’ll slim down my expectations or my living. Just get more frugal and Occupy a life that is both generous and imaginative and hopefully inspiring on some level to another person. But to have money hound you and drive the ambition? Just doesn’t slip between my spine enough to make the writing interesting. And that’s where it matters for me: to be daring and dangerous in the writing.

Truthfully I find writing easy and living terribly difficult. So trying to figure out how to make tons of cash from the thing I love, well, it just complicates the passion.

And the fame aspect. Well, I suppose we all deserve our 15 minutes of fame, however it comes — even if it’s writing about the Warhol legacy. But to write and nurse celebrity under your crooked arm? Seems a bit like robbing the cradle.

And the trilogy equation is now like some default setting. What ever happened to cycles (like Dune or Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood) or quartets (like Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria one)?

I’m not sure why I’m obsessing about this. Each writer makes his or her own bed and then lies in it — because we are all so good at fabrication.

It just seems to me that more and more I seem to read or hear about writers who bang these big gongs, announcing to all the young writers that, hey, here’s the path for you to follow as a writer: write a blockbuster, zero-in on the money, do the derivative dance, write it quick, sell it off, upgrade from writer to author in no time.

I guess I’m sick of this spectacle. Partly because I don’t know if I have it in me to write some bestselling book and land loads of dough. And why should this be lauded as the only goal, which it  does so often. Why must the avatar of wealth and greed be the commodity of choice, especially when it comes to writing. I mean, is this the goal for all writers now, is this what is expected of us? Is a book just another “For Sale” item, a commodity? Is a writer simply a worker in a book factory?

I suppose it comes down to the question of what is more valuable: a world of excessive greed and financial success with the bizarre tautology of “value for money,” or the intrinsic value of books, written not to promote this way of life, but to challenge it, change it.

I know where I would like to stand on this.

There Is No Five O’Clock Hero In My House

Maybe I just missed the work ethic rally as a kid, but when did the misconstrued idea come about that a person should enjoy his or her job?

Now let me be clear. So out comes the Mr. Clean & Shine. I’m talking about those jobs that supplement a writer’s life the way an appetizer gets the taste buds excited. Those jobs that play the role of butler to the lord of the manor.

I think back to the coal-black, ancestral roots of my nation. I’m talking about Welsh miners who descended into the bowels of the earth to make a living wage. I can’t imagine any of them loved the work, but they did it because, okay, yes, they had no other choice, but they also did it to stand up to life, face it square on and not let life break them into just more fuel for the fire.

It can be argued now, by any high-school debater, that contemporary culture gives us more choices, it is a meritocracy for the highly mobile and deliciously ambitious. It’s a fast-attainment paradise for anyone who can sprint or text or surf the Web. In fact, none of us really need rouse from our endless-possibility stupor because there is a vista of opportunity and personal flexibility just seeping out like jam from the daily bread of life.

That’s fine if you can work it. Some of us just can’t be complicit in this restless activity of work that hides a paralysis of imagination. Maybe because we either have a radical vision which is at odds with society’s great expectations of the citizen or else we are damaged in some way and just don’t fit into a bland consensual culture.

I know what I love. But right now I must exist as an amphibian until I can learn to entirely breath the thing I love: writing.

Basically, what this says about me is that I can only be faithful to my true love. I have a monogamous nature. I’m not interested in extra-marital affairs of the working kind.

So the work I have to do, is, well, simply the work I have to do. It’s manual labour of the finest kind, of course, but it’s still the heavy lifting before the sitting for the rest of eternity in a chair and writing.

So, I ain’t about to be noncommittal, honey!

And I certainly don’t have to enjoy all this screwing around while I court my beloved. It’s just part of the job after all.

The Great God Pan

An “ incoherent nightmare of sex,” is how Arthur Machen’s novella The Great God Pan (Watchmaker Publishing, Seaside, Oregon; 59 pages; $4.95) was described when it was first let loose on an unsuspecting, civilized, Edwardian society. But the up-tight, stuffy Edwardians gobbled up the Welshman’s mystical tale of horror.

In our modern-day hive of sexual arousal, Machen’s “sex” is more boudoir than Internet porn. But his “incoherent nightmare” epithet could easily give contemporary English writer J. G. Ballard a roll in the dystopian mud.

The Great God Pan is incoherent: if by that we mean it doesn’t follow a direct and appropriate narrative arc or a formal, linear plot. It plays with time and space. (The perfect form for a pre-Christian, pagan mystic like Machen.) Machen switches back and forth in time, creating fragments of a story, unlimiting himself, drifting from the opening scene of the wealthy benefactor Dr. Raymond and the innocent Mr. Clarke to several other characters who pop up like the chorus from a Greek play to indoctrinate a reader’s fear and loathing in fin-de-siècle London.

And the sex is no Sex in the City! This is wild, metaphysical Eros. A shapeless, shifting act, the way Eve in the biblical tale is never sexual, but all sin. Machen’s sex is prurient without being lecherous because he restrains himself; he doesn’t give into the physical. His “sex” is a voracious avatar of seduction, the offspring of a diabolical experiment in brain surgery, and an amorphous deity of nature. So it’s a bit of surprise to find out that she is a woman, and a beautiful one at that. But Machen isn’t crude enough to be so materialistic, or even gender specific. Yes she is a woman named Helen Vaughan, but at the heart of the novel, she is a force of nature, a pagan spirit born to a new life.

The story begins naturally enough with an interaction between a Dr. Raymond and his witness, a Mr. Clarke, in a lovely bucolic setting. But it doesn’t take long for the Gothic, phantasmagoric elements to rip apart this tenuous reality. Mr. Clarke says to Dr. Raymond: “We are standing on the brink of a strange world, Raymond, if what you say is true. I suppose the knife is absolutely necessary?”

The knife turns out to be a scalpel that the doctor wields to cut a lesion in a working-class waif’s grey matter. The woman is named Mary and was saved by the good doctor from a life of misfortune and is now his guinea pig in a fantastic experiment: “Yes, the knife is necessary; but think what that knife will effect. It will level utterly the solid wall of sense, and probably, for the first time since man was made, a spirit will gaze on a spirit-world. Clarke, Mary will see the god Pan!”

She does — and becomes a drooling imbecile. “Yes it is a great pity; she is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan.”

As a reader, it’s not impossible to believe that seeing the pagan god Pan will have its price. But Machen wants you to see more; he wants you to cleanse the doors of perception, William Blake-style. So if you expect the rest of the book to be easy, think again. There’s cleansing going on, and you can’t get redemption in a Gothic tale without getting a lot of metaphysical evil and mayhem out of the way first.

Enter Helen Vaughan, the daughter of Mary, who is never physically described. She simply flits like some macabre succubus leaving a trail of bodies through fashionable London. And when she is described, it is vague, alluring, confusing, haunting: “She would be called very handsome, I suppose, and yet there is something about her face…. The features are exquisite, but the expression is strange.”

Strange, indeed, for a Victorian woman to have such power over men, infuriating, frustrating, alluring, seducing, and then killing them. She is a woman of the haute bourgeoisie, married to a Mr. Herbert, who now wanders the streets of London in rags and who says his wife corrupted him body and soul. And then there are the dead bodies. Mysterious deaths around which a certain Mrs. Beaumont, the toast of society, is associated. Men who are either struck down by sheer terror or else hang themselves.

Murder, madness, and a malevolent spirit. Who can it be, seducing and, like the god Pan, striking terror into mortal man?

It’s Helen Vaughan, daughter of Mary and the offspring of the nature spirit and cloven-hoofed god Pan. Helen is on one hand a rampant symbol of pagan nature let loose on civilized London with its enlightened ideas of science and its obsessive reliance on the material. Her terror-gaze nothing more than the mirror that the real Medusa, London society, holds up to itself. But this is perhaps relying too heavily on symbolic suggestion and reading too much into Arthur Machen’s own predilections with the world around him that had forgotten its pagan past, its spiritual inheritance, and was so easily squandering it to the gods of science and industry.

This could be a moral tale, but it’s far more enjoyable as a supernatural thriller that produces, even now in our contemporary world, bursts of horripilation for Helen Vaughan, the pagan temptress of chaos, a nameless apparition from a wild wood on the borders of Wales, the vengeful spirit who is cast out as an orphan to make her way in a cold, heartless world of men. Pan’s child,  “changing and melting from woman to man, from man to beast, and from beast to worse than beast.”

And it is as if Helen Vaughan knows she’s cursed because at the end of the book, through the machinations of Villiers and Austin, both bent on discovering the identity of this mysterious woman who is followed by death, Villiers sends her the “best hempen cord.”

The perennial power of Arthur Machen’s story of unleashed, pagan terror is the fragmentary way in which he presents information to a reader. He is sly, much like the woodland god, slowly giving snippets of the fantastic until everything is revealed at the end. The full circle of horror is complete as we return to the doctor, the progenitor of the unleashed terror, the man who held he knife, that made the incision, that lifted the veil. “I have played with energies which I do not understand,” Dr. Raymond admits at the end of the novel. And he reveals the truth about Helen Vaughan. “I knew what I had done the moment the child was born, and when it was scarcely five years old, I surprised it with a playmate. You may guess of what kind.”

But who, you may wonder, has the more seductive powers? The great god Pan or the great Welsh writer of the macabre, Arthur Machen?

Possessed

Henry Miller wrote: “A writer shouldn’t think much.”

And I don’t when I sit down to write. The only thing I like to keep in mind is that I’m getting as close as I can come to Lewis Carroll writing sheer nonsense. But I’m never mindful of this — it just wanders like a mendicant throughout my body. And I never, anyway, reach that absurd beauty. But how I strive for it!

You could say I write as if I’m taking dictation. I never seem to know just exactly what is going to happen. Which is not to say that I don’t know what I want to write about, because I do. I’m just not all that hypnotized by how to say it. And a lot of the time it happens like this. Words spilling out and I am just a medium. Which is not to say I’m a mannequin sitting in his chair, empty but for the grace of words. No. I’m alive, present, actively engaged in the words that are coming and turning them at the last second, you could say, into the words I want. I am the hook that catches the fish, and the fish is scales and fins and blood and gills and yet at the time of its landing, I have given it a name.

When I am done, I am amazed at what I’ve written. Not in the sense of, wow, look at what I can do, but more along the lines of: I never knew I had that in me. It’s more a humbling feeling than an arrogant one, which would feel wrong, any way. There is no arrogance when writing, it’s always a surprise one word at a time. Arrogance as a writer completely spoils the work, much like too much spice destroys taste.

I suppose I approach writing the same way I approach reading: I’m always looking for that writer to lift me out of myself, free me from taboos, pluck me free of the mundane and drop me, sometimes kicking and flailing, into the unknown, which is always the most unprofitable side of creation, but always the richest.

“Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn’t the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.” Henry Miller

“The artist is lagging behind, his imagination is not keeping pace with the men of science.” Henry Miller

What Is the Fairest of Them All?

You know those thoughts that leave craters in the skull? I’ve got one.

What’s more important as a writer?

1. To write books as a lifestyle choice

2. To purely make money

3. To write for vanity reasons

4. To write to make even a small difference in the world

5. To write a book as a cultural intervention

6. To write a bourgeois fashion accessory

7. Communicate something new

8. Sharing egalitarian imagination

9. Challenge a reader and myself to risk something, anything

10. Reanimate the ghost town that is called contemporary fiction

11. Breed like a fucking rabbit new life into old ideas

12. Silence the damn foghorn that publishing is in decline, books are dead

13. Prove that social change is not passé or an academic pursuit

14. Spark discussion

15. A passionate appeal to mind and body

16. Avoid facile populism

17. Bet on readers’ intelligence

18. Be at once lucid as well as conceptually dense

19. To make the writing one’s own, not some slogan to the lord of derivative

20. Have a sexy selling point

21. Write a book that makes something happen emotionally or intellectually

22. Create honesty through fiction

23. Love it

24. Confuse the senses

25. Deliver a vision no matter how warped

26. A longing for that elusive intimacy with the other

27. To share a gift

28. Satisfy the mad ego

29. To usurp the competition

30. To prove to all the naysayers; agitate all the naysayers

31. To be the other

32. To do it no matter what

33. To sell out

34. To never, ever give in

35. To never compromise, even when your back’s against the wall and even the wall has gone

36. To prove that a person can live their own life in their way

37. Make combat, not love

38. Make love, not combat

39. Create the dissenting voice, any voice other than the endless drone

40. Fling apart the world atom by atom and build it anew

41. Refuse to write the low mimetic

42. Kick realism in the imaginary balls

43. Fight for your right to be heard in the din, but not as more noise

44. Because nobody else will write that book for you

I wonder if I ever have to choose?

“If people are writing books as a lifestyle choice or purely to make money or out of personal vanity then obviously people will stop caring eventually, because literature has become indistinguishable from wine or wrapping paper or jewelry or lingerie or any other consumer product.” Alex Niven, Zer0 Books

Deep Faith, Ardent Doubts

If you opened me up like a fridge, you’d find a lot of bottles full of the cream of human confidence at the door. But if you moved these bottles aside, you’d find an empty jar shoved in the corner. It would be chipped and its contents long gone and unrecognisable.

This pretty wells sums up how I feel about myself as a writer.

There are days when the faith in what I do goes so deep, I’m giddy over the possibilities. And then there are days when the doubts fly like bullets and I’m on a stretcher and even the nurse is damn ugly and wants me to suffer.

Why this anchor that at times can ground me to the writing life and at other times bury me under the ground?

I suppose all writers go through this no rhyme, no reason of the ancient kind.

Schisms of the writing life. Perhaps it forces me to be a better writer. If you swing between such polarities, then maybe the chances for improvement are much better.

Whatever the case, I prefer the deep faith. But I realize it could be the ardent doubts that keep me writing.

In A Dark Wood

“I found myself in a dark wood,” wrote Dante. Ancient, mysterious woods are an eldritch power that have enchanted, frightened, and inspired humanity since the dawn of time. In Robert Holdstock’s award-winning book Mythago Wood, it is the titular wild woodland of Celtic and English folklore that is at the centre of this dark and disturbing novel.

But there is more than forest spirits and shadows that haunt Holdstock’s primal forest. The woods are alive with ancient and limitless archetypes of myth that are transformed into flesh and blood. Heroic kings and brave outlaws; beautiful noblewomen and savage huntsmen; and the Urscumug, who “decks himself with woods and leaves, on top of animal hides. Face seems smeared with white clay, forming a mask upon exaggerated features below.”

The wood is Rhyope, and it has been the obsession of George Huxley for many years. With a febrile mind, he has kept notebooks that are filled with both the beautiful and deadly mythago creatures he has encountered in the woods.

Weary and wounded from the global conflict of World War II, George’s son, Steven, returns home to Oak Lodge, his family home in Herefordshire. His father is dead from an illness that has inflicted him for years and Steven’s brother, Christian, is master of the old estate.

But Christian has been delving into his father’s notebooks. And he has fallen in love with one of the mythagos, Guiwenneth, who “had lived a thousand times, and never lived at all.” Steven finds his brother becoming as obsessed about Rhyope as their father, returning back to it time after time and returning home with the “air of the primitive about him… reeking of sweat and vegetation, as if he had spent the days away buried in compost.” It is only when Steven finds the buried body of Guiwenneth in the back garden that he begins to understand that there is a brutal, disturbing, unknowable, pre-Christian consciousness at work at the heart of this primal wood.

The narrative is told through the tight first-person of Steven. It’s the perfect choice as the plot unfolds and the primal personas emerge from the wild wood to entice Steven into their mystery. Like his brother Christian, Steven, too, soon discovers his father’s notebooks and begins to be at once attracted and repulsed by the brutal and primitive spirit of the wood. He also falls in love with a reincarnation of the mythagos Guiwenneth. But this is a tale of star-crossed lovers because Christian returns from the wild wood, having gone “native” like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The bewitching power of the wood has transformed Christian into a savage leader of a band of even more bloodthirsty warriors called Hawks and he has come to snatch Guiwenneth away.

And now begins a gripping, outlandish quest as Steven and his friend Keeton decide to venture into the woods, forging their way to the heart of the wood and being aided by a host of myths: Saxons, Roman, pre-Christian Celts, and Neolithic clans, tribes out of fable, and even older legends that time has forgotten. Steven is on the trail of his brother, now known as the “outsider” in the fabled wood, his name passing into lore and legend the further he goes into the wood, the more he kills and menaces the mythagos within the wild wood.

Throughout it all, Rhyope Wood is a fantastical character in this novel. Holdstock weaves its own dark psychology on all who enter.  The wood is febrile, unreal, visceral, deadly, and beautifully brutal. It contains its horror, its secrets, and yet so freely unleashes it on all those who wander in.

In fact, Holdstock’s novel is remarkably original and avant-garde for its time. It is so strangely and wonderfully at odds with the ever-pervading idea that the world-building of fantasy must be feudal, sometimes even sentimental. In Mythago Wood it is pagan, brutal with a shamanistic subconscious; a bewildering mixture of a lost pre-historic world where the lost instinctual energies of animal and human spirits are alive and hungry.

Robert Holdstock more than most writers can rightfully assert: “I found myself in a dark wood.”

Let’s Celebrate!

Before I begin the celebrations, though, I would like to take off my writer’s hat and offer a big bow to the wonderful writer Cat Valente, who recently wrote a blog about the importance of ritual in our lives. It was her generous, open heart that made mine flutter.

Why is it that a part of our humanity wishes to deny others the chance to love?

We do it by refusing to let gay couples marry. We do it when we become sanctimonious and moralizing and snigger at holidays like  St. Valentine’s Day or Christmas or even St. Patrick’s Day — although you will generally never hear these same people criticizing Flag Day or the Fourth of July. I guess patriotism is above ridicule and well below any honest ritual.

That’s why this whole mass of inertia against gay marriage will not win in the end. (And isn’t that what damn Christianity is based on, Love and Forgiveness?)

Do we really think in our arrogance that we can deny people the chance to love?

Thing is, why do any of us have to agree to do what others do? Is it just so we can get along? But here lies the irony: we actually don’t get along with each other (look at wars, look at violent crimes, look at the blatant bigotry and racism that surrounds us in this bleak and awful and also wonderful world).

Okay, let’s consider Valentine’s Day. My wife and I celebrate this holiday with slices of neapolitan cake (ah, that marzipan and cake is like love’s “ever-fixed mark”). If someone else wants to get a Hallmark card, okay, do it, that’s their way of honouring the day. I don’t want to do that (it’s not me), but why should I stomp on their way?

Plus, that kind of ego-driven desire to squash another person, to make them feel like their choices in life are worthless and petty and risible, simply misses the whole point of ritual and celebration. The most important thing is that we celebrate the sacred that allows us to transcend the monotony of the every day. It’s our way to stay human and not become machines. And we also connect with the past and the future this way, and can for a brief time sense everything that has come before, making it special, making the past not dead, but alive, making it a living presence that was once full of people so much like us who lived and suffered, too.

If we deny rituals and holidays, we just cut off the past, which is a bad thing. We won’t even recognize the others who came before us also had great ideas, imagination, and invented and loved and married and celebrated and died.

Contrary to common belief: We are not the only century with the greatest inventions, the greatest stories to tell, the greatest achievements, the greatest visions, the greatest lifestyles, the greatest ad infinitum.

If the past tells us anything, it is to continually remind us to stay humble. Death is coming for me, I always hear the past whisper. I am not a monument. I am a life. And lives pass — which is our burden and our lightness of being. We inherit death from others. Why, then, do we think we can deny anyone anything? We cannot deny. Death teaches us this. Life, too, if we look at it with our doors of perception cleansed, as the great Poet Blake wisely tells us to do.

That is why it is so important for us to celebrate, to revel in the fleeting, mutable world that rushes on even though we try to keep it with us. Even at our most intimate moments (sex, sharing a meal together, and reading a book, being three), we are reminded that tempus fugit; and the world comes in like a giant with a bone to pick.

Do away with our celebratory nature and we might as well do away with our hearts. Pickle them in jars and hide them away all winter long and bring them out only in summer, when times are good, when there is harvest and bounty, and show them off to the world. But how will we know that summer is upon is if we refuse to celebrate?

Refusing to mark off time is like refusing to signpost a road. If we did that, then all roads would lead nowhere and all would be the same. It would be like saying we should all just exist as DNA, since this is what carries all our genetic make-up and makes us who we are. Great. But where would we be without a heart and a mind? And what room does that leave for the soul?

So go and buy the person you love a box of chocolates if it makes you feel alive, if it makes you feel like love is a living not dead emotion within you. Like the great poet Rilke has written: “To love is also good, for love is hard. Love between one person and another: that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is just preparation.” I would add to celebrate is also hard, but it is needed if we hope to have any chance at leading tragic and comedic lives.

And if we want to romance the naysayers back into love with St. Valentine’s Day, let’s reinvigorate it. Let’s make it into a contemporary Lupercalia festival of fertility and purification with milk and blood and wool.

What full-blooded modern man or woman wouldn’t like to strip naked and spank each other with strips of goat flesh?

Wild Visions

On to my second book review. This one is of a book that has now become a living part of my DNA. I carry it around like an extra heart. And I have to once more thank Liz Hand for this. In her benevolence and wisdom she told me about this book — I don’t think I would have found it on my own. And Sarban was the nom de plume of the Brit diplomat John William Wall.

The beauty of perversion would be one way to describe Sarban’s seminal work The Sound of His Horn. The novella was originally published in 1951, but, like a wild beast, it has trotted into the future without losing any of its literary seduction. The reason for this lies not so much in the originality of Sabarn’s vision but in the controlled and even fastidious handling of the narrative. There’s a familiar sarcasm and cynicism and a controlled absurdity to make a reader immediately wonder if this novella isn’t a contemporary work of fiction.

The story begins as all great Gothic novels (since Sarban’s novella is deeply rooted in Gothic tropes) begin with a supernatural ethos: “It’s the terror that’s unspeakable.” This is spoken by the main protagonist, an Englishman named Alan Querdilion, and so the stage is set — it’s as if Sarban has cast out his narrative demon, leaving no doubt in a reader’s mind where the arc of this story is going to lead.

Ironically, though (or more aptly, intentionally), Sarban reins the narrative in after this outburst. He actually presents a reader with a benign first chapter, Querdilion silent and awkward after his initial confession, reluctant, even, to say anything more about his ordeals after being captured by the Germans during WWII. But the tension has already begun and as Spinoza has written: “Desire is the essence of man.”

And what a delicious desire Sarban creates in the second chapter. As expected, Querdilion is unable to stay silent. He is not so much coaxed as relieved to tell the tale to a friend who served in the army with him. And now the story within a story begins, and the POV of the narrative shifts firmly to Querdilion.

In fact, Sarban creates a bewildering and thrilling range of tension and plotting as he mixes realism and horror, sci-fi and fantasy. As Querdilion retells his tale, we learn that after he escapes from a Nazis prison camp he discovers a strange light in a wood and is drawn to it and literally experiences his first shock. “It jarred along every bone in my body and shattered its way upwards, tearing out at the top of my skull… my body, bereft of all its weight and cohesion, went whirling and spiraling upwards like a gas into the dark.”

Here begins an alternate history as Querdilion finds himself a hundred years after WWII, one in which the Germans have become the supreme master race with under-race slaves and genetically altered feral cat women in tight skin jerkins and “leopard claws of steel” sheathing each hand. And these hunters are fierce, sensual, and bloodthirsty. Their quarry are other humans and Querdilion becomes a hunted man, the quarry of Count Johann von Hackelnberg, Reich Master Forester, who rules his domain with the iron fist of a feudal lord.

Sarban is superb at creating the dark, menacing spirit of old hyperborean woods and the diabolical aspects of a human hunt. And his portrayal of the cat women is erotic as much as it is sadistic: “Sweat glistened on their thighs and their breasts heaved…. Blood dabbled all their faces, their breasts and arms and their sleek coats and the clear bright brown of their bellies and smooth thighs.”

But the eroticism is not purely gratuitous. It is more a wild, metaphysical Eros. Sarban’s eroticism is prurient without being lecherous, it’s more a voracious avatar of seduction; the cat women more a force of nature, a pagan spirit set free. And the bloodthirsty violence of the Baron is like a primeval force, a force of twisted nature, but still red in tooth and claw. And the book is more than just a visceral force of literature, especially when Sarban introduces the character of Kit, a female prisoner who is also being hunted. With her introduction into the narrative, Sarban transcends the purely animalistic and perverted pleasure of the Count. The author creates a wonderful pathos since Kit sacrifices herself to the Baron’s wild hunt so that Querdilion can go free, return to his present time. It’s as if the seductive perversions of the master race have been finally neutralized by one virtuous act.

Although you have to wonder, who has the more seductive powers? The great storyteller Sarban or his wild women and bloodthirsty Count?

Last of the Gang to Realize

In my twenties, I got this crazy notion. I suppose all of us get those at some time. Mine was that I wanted to be a writer. But I had no idea where to begin — besides reading.

So I read. Anything, anywhere, everywhere, and then some more. I think a lot of people I knew thought I was either crazy or delusional or else depressed.

I was ecstatic — an electric light with no off switch and alone with myself.

At some point I tried writing my own stuff, imitations of the masters and, as is expected, it was lousy crap that now I wince at but at the time I thought was something — the way you think death is something that always happens to others.

Then something odd happened. I stopped writing. But I didn’t stop reading. This wasn’t the odd thing. It was that I started to believe that emulating the crazy lives of the writers I loved (like Henry Miller, Dylan Thomas, DH Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, Ted Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Knut Hamsun, James Joyce, Tolstoy, Dickens, Steinbeck, Joseph Conrad, Blake, Shelley, Byron, Rimbaud, Thomas Hardy, Herman Hesse, Baudelaire, etc, etc) would make me a writer. That adventure was more important than writing. All I needed to do was jot things down in a fancy notebook and recite poetry or shock people with irreverent and diabolical ideas and thoughts all stolen from the writers I loved. It was my homage to them, proof that I was their blood brother in waiting and in writing.

The problem was, I was too timid to be like my heroes. Their lives were such a huge undertaking and too big of a call to life for me. I just didn’t have that kind of spirit in me, at least not physically, although I now realize it was beginning to emerge creatively, even spiritually.

But the biggest problem of all was that I didn’t write!

I just created a fictional me who had aimlessly stepped out from a novel. And still nobody recognized me. Did nobody read Miller or Thomas or Wilde or Hamsun, I kept shouting to the stars? How could they not recognize the writer in me? Blind fools!

It was a sort of mystical time period when I look back at it. I wasn’t writing a damn thing, just jotting ideas and quotes down and living an itinerant sort of life, not keeping a job for long, and reading lots, and trying to create this real, tangible persona of a writer without doing a bit of writing.

I blame the writers I admired. They always seemed to be off having adventures in Paris or London or Laugharne, leading wild lives, and then having a brief moment of frenzied writing that was immediately published to great acclaim and fanfare. They all made it look so damn easy! And I wanted that.

Which is a shame really, since twenty years later, I’m still struggling to free myself from that myth. Although now I look at it with a good dose of humour. Now I know the writing life isn’t anything like that. I only wish someone had told me instead of ridiculing or ignoring or worse telling me to give it up and that only a certain breed of gifted individuals become writers. Or I wish I could have woken up and smelled the book spines. Or do I?

My apprentice years have been longer, I think, because I had to work myself out of two writers: the real and the imagined. Although now I look back fondly on that imagined one. I think without that callow youth who thought he knew what it took to be a writer was simply having joie de vivre and elan and moxie and passion and irreverence and balls and attitude and despair and misery and poverty and magnetism and personality and a reckless heart and a joyful soul, I don’t think I would have found the real writer in me.

And in truth, I was already training my mind to be more imaginative. By seeing myself like a character out of a book,  I was helping the writer along by always reaching for something witty to say or practising some idea out on a stranger to see how they reacted. It was all training, the way I look at it.

In a way, I’m thankful for that young man. Grateful that he made a fool of himself then so I don’t have to make a bigger fool of myself now.

And as the writer Jeanette Winterson has said, what is the “I” but a fiction, or Rimbaud with his “I is someone else.” We tell stories every day to others and ourselves.

The only difference now is that I’m much more serious about jotting those stories down. I’m becoming that writer I always wanted to be. Which is what I set out to do in my twenties, it’s just taken me a bit longer to arrive.

But arrive I will, one way or another.