Gift

I’m old enough now to reread books, if not the books I myself have read, then books that other people have read before me and that I’ve acquired but never really paid much attention to. The book I’ve just started re-reading happens to be Hemingway’s A Movable Feast. I assumed on starting it that the book would come back to me in a flash, having, I thought, read it shortly after leaving school, in the hot flush of needing to improve on my middle-rate education.

The improvement plan didn’t go to any specific agenda. I read what came to hand, as I do now. Hemingway’s A Movable Feast must have been one of the first, although someone has been there since that long ago first reading, notably my mother. There is an old recipe of hers tucked between two of the pages, along with a collection of leaflets promoting a rejuvenating skin cream. She had not got very far with the book. On re-reading it I overtook her at about page 20 and instantly drew conclusions as to why she didn’t last all that long with it. She was probably looking for the kind of story that Hemingway was good at telling.

My mother may not have finished reading the book but I did inherit from her one or two of Hemingway’s invaluable bits of advice to writers. They come right at the beginning of A Movable Feast; the idea that you should always stop with the next step clearly in mind and that you should spend the intervening hours when you’re not writing being available to the ‘source’ of your particular creativity. I’m not sure if I learned these things from my mother, who would have read them as written by Hemingway, but I have certainly sensed them, imbibed them, over the years.

While I can’t speak with confidence about other creative processes; music, for example, I can vouch for writing, in some measure at least, and for painting. I’m not yet far enough along in the Hemingway book to know what writers are supposed to do with their sense of misgiving about their own creative ability, and about the point of it all. As one memorable English teacher once said to me, “you can’t eat books”.

So why do we do it? Or is that an indecent question? To ask it is a bit like shedding clothes in public, a bit too exposing, not just of oneself but of everyone else who happens to be engaged, fruitlessly most of the time, in the creative process. Perhaps it’s not a question that brooks any kind of answer. We do it because we have to. We do it to assuage loneliness, to feed some kind of need, the need to make sense of existence, to restore some kind of order to our memories and to the legacy of emotions which they have bequeathed to us.

We read books for the same reason. We are seeking ourselves, especially in fiction. This is why I lament the fact that I am incapable of writing a novel. Things have to be true if I’m to write about them. I can’t just use them as raw material for fashioning something fictitious. They have to have really happened, or else I am lying. Despite my many faults, I’ve never been a good liar.

I think the questions about why we read, and hence why we write, are especially pertinent today because so much creativity is subjected to market forces, or strangled at birth by other forces, most notably the burgeoning forces of artificial intelligence. The latter are particularly concerning because one can’t help sensing that they brook no questioning. Their validity is above reproach. They can, and do, turn out anything that is, on the face of it, ten times more readable or interesting than anything you or I, the real human being tapping away on a computer in a coffee shop while waiting for the dog to finish having his hair cut, could possibly engender, especially through the medium of a blog. It all seems fruitless a lot of the time.

I realise that using the word ‘fruitless’ will evoke various kinds of responses, mostly denials, because on the whole, people are kind. They do not respond to our moaning about the fruitlessness of what we do with loud affirmations of “yes, you’re rubbish, a word peddler with nothing meaningful to offer, nothing new or ground-breaking in terms of widening and making straighter the rubbled road of life and of human experience in general”. So perhaps a better way to come at the question of why we write is to ask why we read, which returns me to the Hemingway book and to the detritus of my mother’s long ago beauty routine.

We read in order to find ourselves, to make contact with what is real about who we are and what we do, the two being complementary facets of the same coin. My mother’s beauty routine was a desperate attempt to recapture a long vanished youth, and hence to recapture herself. She believed that a woman’s face was her fortune.

I am now much further along with A Movable Feast than I was when I started writing this post. I like the book’s raw honesty. Hemingway lived a world away from mine, although I have known what it’s like to be broke and living in Paris. A Movable Feast was published around the time when I,as a young adult, was going through similar experiences to the ones he describes. I remember what it felt like to walk past brasseries and patisseries catching the smells but never able to savour the delicacies on offer. I know what it means to break apart a still warm baguette when you are really hungry, to appreciate the textural contrast of paté, cornichon and soft white bread against the hard resistance of its crust in the single delectable moment of that first bite. Unlike Hemingway, I never drank alcohol when I was alone. I was alone most of the time so had to make do with coffee. Well brought up young women did not consume alcohol alone in a public place. I wonder if this is still the case. In retrospect, I rather envy Hemingway. At the same time, I don’t. His life was a tragedy. Though gifted, he made more enemies than friends. He ended by taking his own life.

Gift always comes with a price tag. Other people can feel threatened by it. Part of the reason for this is that a truly gifted person is not just someone who is exceptionally good at something. Their gift embodies something of their enduring youth, a young spirit that they carry within them, regardless of their actual age, and which seems to the less gifted unassailable. Really gifted people are blessed with a kind of unconscious generosity of spirit which seems to be sourced in a kind of enduring youthfulness somewhere deep down in that person’s inner being. I can think of two teachers I have known who were gifted in this way, one an eminent university professor, the other a former headmistress of a girls’ school in south Wales. They both had this particular generosity of spirit and essential youthfulness, although to the best of my knowledge, no one ever felt threatened by them. They were universally liked.

This was clearly not the case with Hemingway. From what you can glean from reading A Movable Feast it seems that he didn’t really like himself very much, although that may have been covered over with a brash coating of general hubris and an antagonistic manner, designed, subconsciously, to keep people away from the wounded animal raging inside him. How many gifted people hide underneath the same carapace? How vital it is that they be understood for the fragile beings that they really are, and loved into a more exposed and happier place.