How do you keep on fighting on when the going gets tougher?
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. 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 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 is 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).
Is the impatient temperament something that comes out of the convulsions of a complicated childhood? I’ve spoken to others plagued by the impatience gene as they all report familial conflicts, an instilled lack of self-worth (which underscores so many professionally ambitious people), and at least one hyper-active or manic parent underscoring his/her detestation of a queue. But can it merely be an ingrained part of one’s personality? ‘Patience’ – so an old platitude goes – ‘is a virtue’. Impatience has its virtues as well – as it indicates a need to push forward and not be dragged down by the quotidian. Or, at least, that’s my take on the dread I feel every time I see a line I have to join.
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. 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 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 is 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).
Is the impatient temperament something that comes out of the convulsions of a complicated childhood? I’ve spoken to others plagued by the impatience gene as they all report familial conflicts, an instilled lack of self-worth (which underscores so many professionally ambitious people), and at least one hyper-active or manic parent underscoring his/her detestation of a queue. But can it merely be an ingrained part of one’s personality? ‘Patience’ – so an old platitude goes – ‘is a virtue’. Impatience has its virtues as well – as it indicates a need to push forward and not be dragged down by the quotidian. Or, at least, that’s my take on the dread I feel every time I see a line I have to join.
