Do you ever tell yourself to be more vigilant about something, then keep making, from time to time, the same damn error?
Here’s my ongoing flaw. As someone who travels a great deal I am frequently leaving items in those trays in which you have to dump the contents of your pockets when going through airport
security. A few days back I was traversing Logan Airport for a flight to Amsterdam – and an hour after clearing security (and making certain I’d picked up everything out of the security bin) I went to pay for a newspaper and realized that I had left my money clip (with about $40 in cash) somewhere. To say that I
was angry with myself is to engage in understatement. I am ruthlessly self-critical and hate when I do something stupid because I was rushed… and because I wanted to get through security as fast as possible (another of my phobias – long queues).
But then I returned to the security area and enquired if anyone had found a money clip with $40 in cash. To say that I was less than hopeful for this to be recovered was to engage in understatement. One of the TSA officers asked around. Suddenly I was tapped on the shoulder. I spun around. A woman TSA officer was behind me, holding up a plastic bag with my money clip and $40.
“Might this be yours?” she asked.
“Indeed it is” I said.
“Lucky man” she said.
And one who needs to be a little more thorough when going through security. I am writing this on a flight from Boston to Amsterdam. We are an hour late, but the fight is only 6.15 minutes – so we should arrive in time. But if there is a delay getting to the gate… if there is any air traffic issues… I might miss my connection to Berlin. And that would throw a spanner into my day as I want to be there early for a concert and for getting my life set up there and getting to the gym and having a siesta and perhaps going to the cinema and all those other things I want do on my Sunday day off.
This is not exactly a life/death dilemma. This is simply about wanting things to run smoothly… and being someone who is not particularly Zen about such matters. I hate missing a plane, a train, a bus. Maybe it’s my inherent impatience, maybe it’s that side of me that hates disorder (a hangover from the disorder of my childhood and adolescence). Maybe it’s also the fact that I am punctual and wish everything and everyone was as on time as I am. Maybe I get anxious when I know I might not make a connection – and have to negotiate the obstacles of airport immigration and security. Maybe I’m just someone who rails about things being out of my control, while philosophically understanding that so much is out of my control.
And by the way I made my connection to Berlin. At the start of this year I ended a friendship with someone who had been part of my life for over fifteen years… something I hated doing, but concluded was necessary. And a subsection of the reason why I decided to stop calling this fellow a friend is because he was constantly, relentlessly, excessively late. The day after I had a severe bicycle accident – which saw me hospitalized and severely banged up – I managed to make it out to a local restaurant via an Uber. When I called this guy the night before from the emergency room he didn’t once offer to pick me up some food or to help get me home after I was discharged (and this is someone who’d borrowed my apartment gratis in the past).
The next night, wanting company to cheer me up, I suggested that we meet in a local restaurant. He said he would just show up for a beer… and then arrived almost an hour late.
This happened a further time – and when I wrote him about his lack of punctuality and that friendship is something that needs to be attended to, his response was flippant and arrogant. I dropped him thereafter.
I personally think that people show themselves most not just when a crisis befalls you… but when they arrogantly forget that we all have to respect each other… and six times showing up over thirty minutes late shows arrogance and a complete lack of respect. This fellow did other things to make me cut ties with him. But punctuality – which is something I practice and have instilled in my children as a crucial cornerstone of politeness. And respect for others. I was talking with a friend in Los Angeles about matters mystical. She has always been something of a spiritual surfer, whereas I have always been an ultra-rationalist who nonetheless has a cognitive soft spot for ambiguity and mystery. I told my friend a story that has haunted me for years:
While traveling in South Africa right before the onset of the Covid lockdown in 2020 I woke up at seven in the morning in a hotel in Stellenbosch and thought to myself that I owed a good friend in LA who had been battling with cancer for over a year a call. There had been radio silence from him in recent months – which I took as a sign that he wanted to be left alone… and I respected that.
Anyway on this morning in late February 2020 I woke up and thought: ‘I must write Jon [not his real name] now and see where he is in the vast terrible fight.
I sent the email. A week later I got an email from Jon’s wife, telling me that Jon had died on the same day, at the exact same moment that I had sent my email to him. Right down to the minute.
Was there some sort of cosmic symmetry at work here? Was this merely extraordinary happenstance? How should this synchronistic event be interpreted? My friend with the mystical bent just smiled and said: “Embrace the mystery…” which was a very Angelino thing to say… but one which I fundamentally
agreed with.
Your thoughts? I have a friend for many decades who is married to someone I just don’t like (for reasons I will not go into here), and who has this infuriating habit of always making a slightly snide comment at a moment when all I want to hear is a bit of empathy. And yet this fellow has been a good friend to me – and is someone who I know to be an excellent father and not malevolent. Sometimes I think the gent lacks poetry in his world-view and has this undercurrent of sarcasm which he directs toward me on occasion. But I still like the guy. And I have also come to accept the fact that this is just who he is – and I can shrug off the occasional barbed comment… because sarcasm directly at someone else usually masks personal doubt. And because a long friendship is something to treasure… and we all have our attendant complexities. And rather than rail against the fact that someone has this corner of his persona which sometimes grates on me I have now come to accept it as simply part of my friend’s complex persona. And we all, in our disparate ways, have a complex persona.
Joan Didion got it absolutely right when she once noted that writers are always selling somebody out. Or as Flaubert noted: “Emma Bovary, c’est moi”. But though Flaubert grew up and lived for much of his life in the northern city of Rouen (near to which the drama of ‘Madame Bovary’ unfolds), he himself had never been an insecure, ill-educated, somewhat charming housewife married to a provincial doctor. Nor, like Emma, did he seek refuge from domestic tedium in the arms of a visiting military officer... with disastrous results. So how, as many have asked. could Flaubert could claim that he was Emma Bovary? I understood his declaration immediately: because you don’t have to be the person you are writing about to invest that person with so much of yourself. In fact I would argue that, after twenty-four books, I have come to realize that a kind subconscious transference (to borrow a psychoanalytic phrase) comes to play when writing fiction. You might not be writing from direct experience, but you are bringing to bear on the story all you have lived, experienced, considered. More tellingly your own past and world-view must inevitably shape the narrative. Consider, say, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. It is, for me, one of his key novels. It concerns a solitary novelist living in South London during the Blitz, involved in an increasingly possessive affair with the wife of one of his closest friends. Yes Greene himself had lived for a spell in Clapham (which indeed is in South London). Yes he had a longstanding affair with a married woman named Catherine Walston. And yes the novel’s thematic strands of Catholic guilt and spiritual mysticism undoubtedly came out of Greene’s own experiences as someone who was received into the Catholic Church while at Oxford, and who remained a practicing Catholic for the rest of his life. But given all that... could The End of the Affair be considered an autobiographical novel? To which the only answer to such a question can be: yes and no.
Let me repeat what I said earlier: to a writer everything is material. As such even the worst that befalls you can be used in fiction. But I would advise all writers to consider using the merde that has blown into their respective lives - or which they themselves have had a hand perpetuating - in a discerning way. Revenge fiction always carries with it a subtext of bitterness. It’s the literary equivalent of halitosis: spitting out bile without imposing a critical distance between you and the events that happened to find something interesting to say about that ongoing dilemma called the human condition. As such I have found ways of writing indirectly about my deeply unhappy parents, my two ex-wives, and certain romantic disasters...yet doing so without every writing directly about that which actually transpired. Because, of course, the truth is: when it comes to recounting things that have happened to you there is no truth. There are just conflicting versions of that which transpired. And you the writer are not supposed to tell the truth. Just a good story that will hopefully illuminate the way we try to connect with each other... and often fail to do so.
If I may therefore indulge in a broad-stroke... whether it be a novel set in Sophoclean Athens or among hipsters trying to find their way in Bushwick, there is always one abiding theme underscoring all fiction: the way we have always - and will always - make a mess of this narrative called life. Which is why - even in the middle of a crisis - a proper writer is always making notes. And why perhaps a larger rule of romantic thumb should be:
Never sleep with a novelist. We read to discover that we are not alone. Over the course of twenty-four books, I have rarely written out of direct experience (outside a book of philosophy, All the Big Questions... With No Attempts At Any Answers - which was also something of a memoir). Why did I make an exception with this short story? Because I changed enough details (my narrator was a Franco-American lawyer, all the details of the woman and her background had been carefully altered to mask her true identity) to allow me to treat the events in a fictional manner. Most tellingly the very fact that the lawyer narrator of the story clearly admits that he is guilty of not seeing what was directly in front of him at the beginning of this romance - indeed what the woman herself told him she was ultimately about - made ‘the mistake’ very much his own. Was I admitting my own mistake? As it wasn’t “Douglas Kennedy Novelist” narrating the story it wasn’t a direct admission. But in another way, I was doing just that - and I wrote the story to explore how I had talked myself into such a muddle. And yet it was still a work of fiction.
In a recent fourteen-part masterclass that I gave for The Artists Academy I devote a chapter to using that which has happened to you as the basis of all fiction. Even if it is not what the French call un roman à clef (a novel lifted entirely from your life) the fact remains: all fiction is, by its very nature, autobiographical. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t lived the events in your story. You are, in some manner, always bringing the experience of your life to bear on the narrative. An example: my 2004 novel, ‘A Special Relationship’ is, among other things, about a post-natal depression and a montrous custody battle that ensues thereafter. It is narrated by the woman in the throes of this nightmare; an American living in London. Now (surprise-surprise) I have never suffered a post-natal depression. But I did spend many hours interviewing a woman who had been through such a horror show, just as I discussed the matter with several doctors. After that... well, I basically winged it... trying to think myself into the mindset of a my narrator, and also bringing to bear on the story my own experience as an American living in the UK (as I did for twenty-four years). I also used the moments when I too had struggled with despair (of a more reactive variety than that which had befallen my narrator). Many readers who’d been through a post-natal depression informed me that I’d gotten the inner landscape of this terrifying condition absolutely spot-on. Which was both pleasing and a little baffling to me at the same time - because I was just imagining what it must be like for my narrator to be trapped in this labyrinth of desperation. Yes it was crucial that I had talked extensively with someone who had weathered this horrendous experience (even using many of the details she told me - like slamming her head against the tiles in her Chelsea kitchen in an attempt to get the monstrous voices telling her to kill her infant son out of her head). But the story I told in my novel was far divorced from her own and was also infused with all my ambivalence at the time about being a Yank in London. Some years ago - eleven to be exact - I was just coming out of a twelve month period of personal and legal hell... better known as a bad divorce. Now the expression ‘a good divorce’ may be something of an oxymoron... but as the two brilliant women lawyers handling my case in London informed me once it was all done-and-dusted (to use a rather appropriate anglicism) that mine had been something of a doozy. As any professional writer will tell you (this one included) resilience and perseverance are essential components when it comes to the long slog of writing a novel. The same could be said for getting through a period when the entire foundation of your life has been upended and you find yourself in something approaching freefall. So I continued to force myself to write a minimum of five hundred words per day through this vertiginous moment - actually completing a draft of my then ninth novel, ‘Leaving the World’ just after the divorce was finally settled.
And being in a rather vulnerable state I also managed to talk myself into falling in love, She was a forty year old woman living in Paris (where I have a pied-a-terre): tall, beautiful, passionate, vastly intelligent. From the outset she seemed as smitten as I was. But she did tell me very early on in our romance (which was conducted in French):
“Avec des hommes dans le passé j’etais très difficile, très dûr. Je les ai piquè tout-le-temps. Mais avec toi tout sera different. Parce que je suis si amoroeuse de toi”.
(With all past men I was very difficult, very hard. I had to sting them all the time. But with you it will be different. Because I am so in love with you).
When it comes to matters of the heart - especially those that arrive at a difficult moment in our lives - we see what we want to see. I was guilty of such romantic stupidity. After an initial two months of true happiness the reproaches began. I was out too much in the evening, haunting cinemas, concert halls (I am a classical music junkie), jazz clubs. So too the blow-ups over nothing, followed by her tears of sorrow about having been so difficult. And then there was her need to tell me excruciating details about her past lovers. After four months I fled - and cursed my folly for getting involved with someone whom I knew from a few weeks into the relationship has some very serious pathological issues.
One of the central rules of life as articulated by the great mid-century Chicago novelist Nelson Algren (who for many years was Simone de Beauvoir’s lover) was: ‘Never sleep with someone whose problems are bigger than yours’. I had done just that. But I am also a believer in another writerly truism: everything is material. Around a year later, when a French magazine asked me to write a short story for them, I knew I wanted to confront that very human need to fall in love at a juncture when love is so desperately craved, yet with the knowledge that one was walking into the metaphoric equivalent of an empty elevator shaft. The story which came out of this experience, The Mistake, was also published digitally by amazon as an instant Kindle read - and I received much feedback from readers. In articulating my own romance-induced myopia at a particularly vulnerable moment in my life, it turned out that I was speaking for many a reader who’d also make the same mistake.
I have problems with people who give up. I have several friends who have done just that – called it quits on a future career, on writing another book, recording the next song, attacking the next blank canvas. I know people who have given up on the idea of romance… or even healthy regular sex with someone of a mutual point of view. I know people who tell me that the global future is so bleak, in such ecologic and political decline, that we are all doomed.
I acknowledge that all such pessimistic point of view have a certain validity (maybe not the one about giving up romance… but I can understand… though not agree with… someone who has thrown in the towel on that front). I think about what it must have been like to have lived in early 1940s Europe, at that juncture when the Nazis were winning and totalitarianism was nigh. And how Hitler’s boasts of the 1000 Year Reich seemed possible.
Let’s now jump back to Ancient Rome and imagine what life was like under the madness of the Emperor Nero. Or let’s jump forward and consider the genocidal horrors of Cambodia, of Rwanda, of Bosnia… and how, for those being brutalized, it seemed like a nightmare without it.
If history teaches us anything, nothing is permanent. ‘Things fall apart… the center will not hold’. And concomitantly tyranny usually scuppers itself.
I can certainly comprehend – and concur with – the rightful fear we all have about the planet’s climate becoming undone. Will the world wake up to this crisis… or be in thrall to the profit motive of the fossil fuel merchants and their deep tentacles in the workings of so many governments. As a man starting to crowd seventy I sense that, when I am dust, there will be a desperately changed environmental landscape, and one which will punish the next generation for the sins of those of us from the Baby Boom Years who thought little about our gas guzzling ways.
But I also feel quite strongly that fighting on – for the preservation of liberal democracy, for economic and social equality, for the importance of education and culture – is the only way to battle back the plutocrats and their attendant philistines.
And I will never give up on the idea of romance. I was once asked by an interviewer: what is the one thing that you would like to change about yourself. I said: my immense impatience. I am terrible in a queue. For someone who travels as much as I do I hate waiting in line while checking in at the airport. I hate waiting in line for a bus. I practice quasi-zen exercises when in a long queue. Music via my headphones. Taking mental notes. Imagining myself elsewhere. But the truth is: a queue fills me with dread.
I am patient in other ways. I consider myself deeply patient with those I love. I am patient when it comes to the writing and extensive rewriting of my novels. But I am also acutely self-critical and fear wasting time (perhaps one of the reasons why I am so prolific as a novelist).
security. A few days back I was traversing Logan Airport for a flight to Amsterdam – and an hour after clearing security (and making certain I’d picked up everything out of the security bin) I went to pay for a newspaper and realized that I had left my money clip (with about $40 in cash) somewhere. To say that I
was angry with myself is to engage in understatement. I am ruthlessly self-critical and hate when I do something stupid because I was rushed… and because I wanted to get through security as fast as possible (another of my phobias – long queues).
But then I returned to the security area and enquired if anyone had found a money clip with $40 in cash. To say that I was less than hopeful for this to be recovered was to engage in understatement. One of the TSA officers asked around. Suddenly I was tapped on the shoulder. I spun around. A woman TSA officer was behind me, holding up a plastic bag with my money clip and $40.
“Might this be yours?” she asked.
“Indeed it is” I said.
“Lucky man” she said.
And one who needs to be a little more thorough when going through security. I am writing this on a flight from Boston to Amsterdam. We are an hour late, but the fight is only 6.15 minutes – so we should arrive in time. But if there is a delay getting to the gate… if there is any air traffic issues… I might miss my connection to Berlin. And that would throw a spanner into my day as I want to be there early for a concert and for getting my life set up there and getting to the gym and having a siesta and perhaps going to the cinema and all those other things I want do on my Sunday day off.
This is not exactly a life/death dilemma. This is simply about wanting things to run smoothly… and being someone who is not particularly Zen about such matters. I hate missing a plane, a train, a bus. Maybe it’s my inherent impatience, maybe it’s that side of me that hates disorder (a hangover from the disorder of my childhood and adolescence). Maybe it’s also the fact that I am punctual and wish everything and everyone was as on time as I am. Maybe I get anxious when I know I might not make a connection – and have to negotiate the obstacles of airport immigration and security. Maybe I’m just someone who rails about things being out of my control, while philosophically understanding that so much is out of my control.
And by the way I made my connection to Berlin. At the start of this year I ended a friendship with someone who had been part of my life for over fifteen years… something I hated doing, but concluded was necessary. And a subsection of the reason why I decided to stop calling this fellow a friend is because he was constantly, relentlessly, excessively late. The day after I had a severe bicycle accident – which saw me hospitalized and severely banged up – I managed to make it out to a local restaurant via an Uber. When I called this guy the night before from the emergency room he didn’t once offer to pick me up some food or to help get me home after I was discharged (and this is someone who’d borrowed my apartment gratis in the past).
The next night, wanting company to cheer me up, I suggested that we meet in a local restaurant. He said he would just show up for a beer… and then arrived almost an hour late.
This happened a further time – and when I wrote him about his lack of punctuality and that friendship is something that needs to be attended to, his response was flippant and arrogant. I dropped him thereafter.
I personally think that people show themselves most not just when a crisis befalls you… but when they arrogantly forget that we all have to respect each other… and six times showing up over thirty minutes late shows arrogance and a complete lack of respect. This fellow did other things to make me cut ties with him. But punctuality – which is something I practice and have instilled in my children as a crucial cornerstone of politeness. And respect for others. I was talking with a friend in Los Angeles about matters mystical. She has always been something of a spiritual surfer, whereas I have always been an ultra-rationalist who nonetheless has a cognitive soft spot for ambiguity and mystery. I told my friend a story that has haunted me for years:
While traveling in South Africa right before the onset of the Covid lockdown in 2020 I woke up at seven in the morning in a hotel in Stellenbosch and thought to myself that I owed a good friend in LA who had been battling with cancer for over a year a call. There had been radio silence from him in recent months – which I took as a sign that he wanted to be left alone… and I respected that.
Anyway on this morning in late February 2020 I woke up and thought: ‘I must write Jon [not his real name] now and see where he is in the vast terrible fight.
I sent the email. A week later I got an email from Jon’s wife, telling me that Jon had died on the same day, at the exact same moment that I had sent my email to him. Right down to the minute.
Was there some sort of cosmic symmetry at work here? Was this merely extraordinary happenstance? How should this synchronistic event be interpreted? My friend with the mystical bent just smiled and said: “Embrace the mystery…” which was a very Angelino thing to say… but one which I fundamentally
agreed with.
Your thoughts? I have a friend for many decades who is married to someone I just don’t like (for reasons I will not go into here), and who has this infuriating habit of always making a slightly snide comment at a moment when all I want to hear is a bit of empathy. And yet this fellow has been a good friend to me – and is someone who I know to be an excellent father and not malevolent. Sometimes I think the gent lacks poetry in his world-view and has this undercurrent of sarcasm which he directs toward me on occasion. But I still like the guy. And I have also come to accept the fact that this is just who he is – and I can shrug off the occasional barbed comment… because sarcasm directly at someone else usually masks personal doubt. And because a long friendship is something to treasure… and we all have our attendant complexities. And rather than rail against the fact that someone has this corner of his persona which sometimes grates on me I have now come to accept it as simply part of my friend’s complex persona. And we all, in our disparate ways, have a complex persona.
Joan Didion got it absolutely right when she once noted that writers are always selling somebody out. Or as Flaubert noted: “Emma Bovary, c’est moi”. But though Flaubert grew up and lived for much of his life in the northern city of Rouen (near to which the drama of ‘Madame Bovary’ unfolds), he himself had never been an insecure, ill-educated, somewhat charming housewife married to a provincial doctor. Nor, like Emma, did he seek refuge from domestic tedium in the arms of a visiting military officer... with disastrous results. So how, as many have asked. could Flaubert could claim that he was Emma Bovary? I understood his declaration immediately: because you don’t have to be the person you are writing about to invest that person with so much of yourself. In fact I would argue that, after twenty-four books, I have come to realize that a kind subconscious transference (to borrow a psychoanalytic phrase) comes to play when writing fiction. You might not be writing from direct experience, but you are bringing to bear on the story all you have lived, experienced, considered. More tellingly your own past and world-view must inevitably shape the narrative. Consider, say, Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. It is, for me, one of his key novels. It concerns a solitary novelist living in South London during the Blitz, involved in an increasingly possessive affair with the wife of one of his closest friends. Yes Greene himself had lived for a spell in Clapham (which indeed is in South London). Yes he had a longstanding affair with a married woman named Catherine Walston. And yes the novel’s thematic strands of Catholic guilt and spiritual mysticism undoubtedly came out of Greene’s own experiences as someone who was received into the Catholic Church while at Oxford, and who remained a practicing Catholic for the rest of his life. But given all that... could The End of the Affair be considered an autobiographical novel? To which the only answer to such a question can be: yes and no.
Let me repeat what I said earlier: to a writer everything is material. As such even the worst that befalls you can be used in fiction. But I would advise all writers to consider using the merde that has blown into their respective lives - or which they themselves have had a hand perpetuating - in a discerning way. Revenge fiction always carries with it a subtext of bitterness. It’s the literary equivalent of halitosis: spitting out bile without imposing a critical distance between you and the events that happened to find something interesting to say about that ongoing dilemma called the human condition. As such I have found ways of writing indirectly about my deeply unhappy parents, my two ex-wives, and certain romantic disasters...yet doing so without every writing directly about that which actually transpired. Because, of course, the truth is: when it comes to recounting things that have happened to you there is no truth. There are just conflicting versions of that which transpired. And you the writer are not supposed to tell the truth. Just a good story that will hopefully illuminate the way we try to connect with each other... and often fail to do so.
If I may therefore indulge in a broad-stroke... whether it be a novel set in Sophoclean Athens or among hipsters trying to find their way in Bushwick, there is always one abiding theme underscoring all fiction: the way we have always - and will always - make a mess of this narrative called life. Which is why - even in the middle of a crisis - a proper writer is always making notes. And why perhaps a larger rule of romantic thumb should be:
Never sleep with a novelist. We read to discover that we are not alone. Over the course of twenty-four books, I have rarely written out of direct experience (outside a book of philosophy, All the Big Questions... With No Attempts At Any Answers - which was also something of a memoir). Why did I make an exception with this short story? Because I changed enough details (my narrator was a Franco-American lawyer, all the details of the woman and her background had been carefully altered to mask her true identity) to allow me to treat the events in a fictional manner. Most tellingly the very fact that the lawyer narrator of the story clearly admits that he is guilty of not seeing what was directly in front of him at the beginning of this romance - indeed what the woman herself told him she was ultimately about - made ‘the mistake’ very much his own. Was I admitting my own mistake? As it wasn’t “Douglas Kennedy Novelist” narrating the story it wasn’t a direct admission. But in another way, I was doing just that - and I wrote the story to explore how I had talked myself into such a muddle. And yet it was still a work of fiction.
In a recent fourteen-part masterclass that I gave for The Artists Academy I devote a chapter to using that which has happened to you as the basis of all fiction. Even if it is not what the French call un roman à clef (a novel lifted entirely from your life) the fact remains: all fiction is, by its very nature, autobiographical. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t lived the events in your story. You are, in some manner, always bringing the experience of your life to bear on the narrative. An example: my 2004 novel, ‘A Special Relationship’ is, among other things, about a post-natal depression and a montrous custody battle that ensues thereafter. It is narrated by the woman in the throes of this nightmare; an American living in London. Now (surprise-surprise) I have never suffered a post-natal depression. But I did spend many hours interviewing a woman who had been through such a horror show, just as I discussed the matter with several doctors. After that... well, I basically winged it... trying to think myself into the mindset of a my narrator, and also bringing to bear on the story my own experience as an American living in the UK (as I did for twenty-four years). I also used the moments when I too had struggled with despair (of a more reactive variety than that which had befallen my narrator). Many readers who’d been through a post-natal depression informed me that I’d gotten the inner landscape of this terrifying condition absolutely spot-on. Which was both pleasing and a little baffling to me at the same time - because I was just imagining what it must be like for my narrator to be trapped in this labyrinth of desperation. Yes it was crucial that I had talked extensively with someone who had weathered this horrendous experience (even using many of the details she told me - like slamming her head against the tiles in her Chelsea kitchen in an attempt to get the monstrous voices telling her to kill her infant son out of her head). But the story I told in my novel was far divorced from her own and was also infused with all my ambivalence at the time about being a Yank in London. Some years ago - eleven to be exact - I was just coming out of a twelve month period of personal and legal hell... better known as a bad divorce. Now the expression ‘a good divorce’ may be something of an oxymoron... but as the two brilliant women lawyers handling my case in London informed me once it was all done-and-dusted (to use a rather appropriate anglicism) that mine had been something of a doozy. As any professional writer will tell you (this one included) resilience and perseverance are essential components when it comes to the long slog of writing a novel. The same could be said for getting through a period when the entire foundation of your life has been upended and you find yourself in something approaching freefall. So I continued to force myself to write a minimum of five hundred words per day through this vertiginous moment - actually completing a draft of my then ninth novel, ‘Leaving the World’ just after the divorce was finally settled.
And being in a rather vulnerable state I also managed to talk myself into falling in love, She was a forty year old woman living in Paris (where I have a pied-a-terre): tall, beautiful, passionate, vastly intelligent. From the outset she seemed as smitten as I was. But she did tell me very early on in our romance (which was conducted in French):
“Avec des hommes dans le passé j’etais très difficile, très dûr. Je les ai piquè tout-le-temps. Mais avec toi tout sera different. Parce que je suis si amoroeuse de toi”.
(With all past men I was very difficult, very hard. I had to sting them all the time. But with you it will be different. Because I am so in love with you).
When it comes to matters of the heart - especially those that arrive at a difficult moment in our lives - we see what we want to see. I was guilty of such romantic stupidity. After an initial two months of true happiness the reproaches began. I was out too much in the evening, haunting cinemas, concert halls (I am a classical music junkie), jazz clubs. So too the blow-ups over nothing, followed by her tears of sorrow about having been so difficult. And then there was her need to tell me excruciating details about her past lovers. After four months I fled - and cursed my folly for getting involved with someone whom I knew from a few weeks into the relationship has some very serious pathological issues.
One of the central rules of life as articulated by the great mid-century Chicago novelist Nelson Algren (who for many years was Simone de Beauvoir’s lover) was: ‘Never sleep with someone whose problems are bigger than yours’. I had done just that. But I am also a believer in another writerly truism: everything is material. Around a year later, when a French magazine asked me to write a short story for them, I knew I wanted to confront that very human need to fall in love at a juncture when love is so desperately craved, yet with the knowledge that one was walking into the metaphoric equivalent of an empty elevator shaft. The story which came out of this experience, The Mistake, was also published digitally by amazon as an instant Kindle read - and I received much feedback from readers. In articulating my own romance-induced myopia at a particularly vulnerable moment in my life, it turned out that I was speaking for many a reader who’d also make the same mistake.
I have problems with people who give up. I have several friends who have done just that – called it quits on a future career, on writing another book, recording the next song, attacking the next blank canvas. I know people who have given up on the idea of romance… or even healthy regular sex with someone of a mutual point of view. I know people who tell me that the global future is so bleak, in such ecologic and political decline, that we are all doomed.
I acknowledge that all such pessimistic point of view have a certain validity (maybe not the one about giving up romance… but I can understand… though not agree with… someone who has thrown in the towel on that front). I think about what it must have been like to have lived in early 1940s Europe, at that juncture when the Nazis were winning and totalitarianism was nigh. And how Hitler’s boasts of the 1000 Year Reich seemed possible.
Let’s now jump back to Ancient Rome and imagine what life was like under the madness of the Emperor Nero. Or let’s jump forward and consider the genocidal horrors of Cambodia, of Rwanda, of Bosnia… and how, for those being brutalized, it seemed like a nightmare without it.
If history teaches us anything, nothing is permanent. ‘Things fall apart… the center will not hold’. And concomitantly tyranny usually scuppers itself.
I can certainly comprehend – and concur with – the rightful fear we all have about the planet’s climate becoming undone. Will the world wake up to this crisis… or be in thrall to the profit motive of the fossil fuel merchants and their deep tentacles in the workings of so many governments. As a man starting to crowd seventy I sense that, when I am dust, there will be a desperately changed environmental landscape, and one which will punish the next generation for the sins of those of us from the Baby Boom Years who thought little about our gas guzzling ways.
But I also feel quite strongly that fighting on – for the preservation of liberal democracy, for economic and social equality, for the importance of education and culture – is the only way to battle back the plutocrats and their attendant philistines.
And I will never give up on the idea of romance. I was once asked by an interviewer: what is the one thing that you would like to change about yourself. I said: my immense impatience. I am terrible in a queue. For someone who travels as much as I do I hate waiting in line while checking in at the airport. I hate waiting in line for a bus. I practice quasi-zen exercises when in a long queue. Music via my headphones. Taking mental notes. Imagining myself elsewhere. But the truth is: a queue fills me with dread.
I am patient in other ways. I consider myself deeply patient with those I love. I am patient when it comes to the writing and extensive rewriting of my novels. But I am also acutely self-critical and fear wasting time (perhaps one of the reasons why I am so prolific as a novelist).
