Where I'm Reading From

by Tim Parks

  As it progressed, Chekhov’s illness sharpened his dilemma: to seek treatment or ask for help would mean submitting to routine and restriction, which he restlessly avoided. To live intensely, as he wanted, would speed up the illness and shorten the life available. In 1901 at forty-one, now ill beyond any denial and forced to live in the warm climate of the Black Sea, Chekhov married a lively and successful actress who worked in Moscow. The frequent trips from the hot dull (as he saw it) south to the freezing and frenetic capital were, his doctor observed, the worst thing he could do for his sickness. And indeed so many of Chekhov’s characters seem to make the worst possible, if not suicidal, choices. Having spoken, in April 1904, of going to the front line of the Russian-Japanese war to get a view of the action, Chekhov died in a hotel room in the German spa town of Badenweiler where he had finally agreed to seek treatment.

  It is not that I believe that one pattern fits all, simply that so many of the writers I have looked at seem permanently torn between irreconcilable positions, something that seems to feed that famous ambiguity literary critics so much admire; eventually, the dilemma driving the work either leads to death, or is neutralized in a way that prolongs life but dulls the writing. Dickens, father figure par excellence and great promoter of the happy family, writes novels that draw people of every class into a sense of national belonging, yet he simultaneously feels drastically let down by wife, children, publishers, friends, sometimes even readers. Firing his wife, mother of his ten children, he takes up with a young mistress who must be kept hidden, since what kind of identity can Dickens have if he is not Britain’s favorite and very respectable family author?

  The grim later novels—Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend—express in all kinds of ways the impossibility of balancing these conflicting impulses. They are books of greater scope and seriousness than the earlier work, yet at the same time dissatisfying or disturbing in their failure to resolve these conflicts even aesthetically. In his fifties, shortly after pushing his wife out of the home and against the advice of his doctors, Dickens launched into one reading tour after another, often performing for hours night after night, becoming the center of attention for rapturous audiences. This was meat and drink to him, but raised even higher the cost of any revelation of his private circumstances. After the readings came the grueling journeys to arrive at wherever he had hidden his mistress, between Paris and London. Drinking heavily the while, Dickens did not surprise doctors, friends, or family when he collapsed and died at fifty-eight.

  Before one last example, let me be more precise. What I am suggesting is that a novelist’s work is often a strategy (I don’t mean the author need be aware of this) for dealing with some personal dilemma. Not just that the dilemma is “worked out” in the narrative, as critics often tell us, but that the acts of writing and publishing and positioning oneself in the world of literature are all part of an attempt to find a solution, however provisional, to some deep personal unease. In many cases, however hard the writing is pushed, the solution is indeed only temporary or partial, and both author and work eventually succumb. Obviously the easiest group of authors to look at in this regard would be the suicides, Virginia Woolf, Cesare Pavese, David Foster Wallace. But to finish, let’s consider William Faulkner.

  Throughout his life, when asked for biographical details Faulkner would begin by saying he was the great grandson of the Old Colonel, a man renowned for his courage, temper, energy, and vision—and a writer to boot. In contrast Faulkner saw his own father as a nobody and a loser, an opinion he seemed to share with his mother, to whom he remained close throughout his life, having coffee with her most afternoons and never missing a family Christmas if he could help it. From his earliest days he was eager to present himself as bold and courageous, inventing in 1918 a bizarre story of having crashed a warplane while celebrating the end of the war. For years he affected a limp supposedly resulting from the crash, though at the time he had never piloted a plane at all. His brother was actually wounded in the war. Faulkner’s first novel focuses on a soldier returning home a hero, but so badly wounded that he dies.

  Like Thomas Hardy, Faulkner eventually invented a fictional territory of his own where his novels could all take place in relation to each other. Acts of courage in Yoknapatawpha County—usually a very physical, manly courage, but also the courage to claim the woman you really desire—end up, as in Hardy’s novels, in wounds, disaster, and death. Like Hardy, Faulkner married a woman he was eager to betray (and did) but never able to walk out on. Community in the South is presented as a tremendous, insuperable burden that one can neither escape nor overcome. The only freedom available is the freedom, the courage, to live slightly apart, not to engage with the world or women, like Ike McCaslin, hero of The Bear.

  Over the years Faulkner’s writing became both a solution to and a representation of the conflicting impulses that tormented him. His stylistic experimentalism became an act of courage in itself, allowing him to criticize the genuinely war-wounded and mythically courageous Hemingway for not being brave enough to experiment with his writing and risk failure. Yet Faulkner’s experimentation is never liberating: his prose gives us the impression of a wild, would-be heroic energy pushing through an impossibly dense medium, shoving aside negative after negative to reach the brief respite of a positive verb, losing itself in a heavy slime of ancestors and ancient wrongs. It is not a world in which one could hope to become the courageous man Faulkner wished to be. From the black community, Faulkner told a friend, we can learn “resignation.”

  One major difference between the patterns that guide Hardy’s and Faulkner’s work is the latter’s relationship with alcohol, which, more than a mere disinhibitor making courage possible, becomes a sort of courage in itself. However adventurous and ferociously provocative, Faulkner’s writing was not enough to satisfy his need to feel courageous. Throughout his life he drank epically, heroically. In the hunting camp that is the setting of The Bear we hear that

  the bottle was always present, so that after a while it seemed to him that those fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they had spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the pagan’s base hope of acquiring the virtues of cunning and strength and speed, but in salute to them.

  Whiskey and writing intertwine throughout Faulkner’s life, feeding each other, blocking each other, never allowing him to achieve any stability, always acting out a salute to other men he feared he could not resemble. By the time he was fifty the end seemed inevitable. There are only so many times one can dry out in a clinic and fall drunk off a horse. It was actually something of a miracle that Faulkner outlived his dear mother for a year before one more courageous binge, one more salute to the truly brave, as he saw it, did him in, aged sixty-four.

  IV

  Writing Across Worlds

  “ARE YOU THE TIM PARKS WHO . . . ?”

  WHAT THE POETS of the ancient world feared most was exile, alienation from their community. This was the punishment of Seneca, Ovid, Catullus, and many others. It wasn’t that they were incapable of learning another language and addressing a different audience; just that it made little sense to do so. Their work had meaning in relation to the community to which they belonged.

  To what community does a writer belong today? The whole world, might seem to be the obvious answer in an era of globalization. Alas, it’s not that simple. Take my own case. I am known in England mainly for light, though hopefully thoughtful nonfiction; in Italy for polemical newspaper articles and a controversial book about soccer; in Germany, Holland, and France for what I consider my “serious” novels Europa, Destiny, Cleaver; in the United States for literary criticism; and in a smattering of other countries, but also in various academic communities, for my translations and writing on translation. Occasionally I receive e
mails that ask, “But are you also the Tim Parks who . . . ?” Frequently readers get my nationality wrong. They don’t seem to know where I’m coming from or headed to.

  How can something like this happen in a world where information is supposed to flow so freely? The key, I suppose, is never to enjoy huge success in any of the fields you work in. Chance, modern communications, and an urgent need to earn money can do the rest. In 1979 I married an Italian; in 1981, aged twenty-six and already writing novels that were regularly rejected, I moved to Italy. Unable to publish, I translated, first commercially, then, with a lucky break, novels. At last in 1985 a novel of my own was published in London and I began to build up a small reputation as a novelist. However, my living in Italy prompted publishers to ask me to write about the place, luring me with offers of “a great deal more money than you will ever earn with the kind of novels you write.” After ten years I gave in, writing first about the street I lived in and some years later about Italian children, schools, and families. It was great fun and all at once I was Mr. Italy.

  But if this reputation made sense to the English—one of their ilk decoding another country—it didn’t attract the Germans, Dutch, and French who seemed to feel that serious novel writing was not compatible with this kind of ironic anthropology. In Germany, where my novels were outselling English editions by many times, the critics invited me to intensely earnest debates on Europe and fiction, and in general everybody felt it would be unwise to insist too much on this other material. I was now quite different people in England, Germany, and Italy, where I had begun to write newspaper articles in Italian on Italian issues for Italians, without the framing and contextualizing needed when talking about such matters to those who don’t know the country. Then, while all this was going on and for reasons I have never fathomed, The New York Review of Books invited me to write about Italian authors and books on Italy; a long collaboration began, I convinced the Review that I could also write about matters non-Italian, and my image in the USA, if one can speak so grandly, became radically different than it was elsewhere. I was an essayist.

  Why do I feel this state of affairs is interesting? We think of globalization as drawing more and more people into a single community where readers all over the world read the same authors. The process is hardly new, more like an acceleration with greatly empowered means of an old propensity toward connection, communication, acquisition, appropriation, aggregation. Since earliest times communities expanded, swallowed each other up, or were swallowed, became more aware of and curious about those neighboring communities too big to beat. The writer whose community was destroyed was finished. Who would listen, even if he could speak their tongue? He was irrelevant. Others more fortunate found themselves with a larger and larger community to address: the court, the burghers, a growing group of cultured men, eventually the middle classes, and finally the people. Now there was also the possibility that somebody in another country, seeing your local fame, might grow interested, might translate your work.

  Huge numbers of languages, great riches and diversity were lost in this process, which allowed larger societies to form so that eventually a single writer was in a position to speak to thousands, millions, even tens of millions. At this point writers were competing to be one of the chosen few who would enjoy the privilege of selling their work to much larger, though necessarily looser and more fragmented communities. Some began to see this as a form of freedom; not to be fatally attached to one homogeneous group, not to risk extinction as a writer if your community, your peers, rejected you. The day came when writers actually sought out exile, left voluntarily, and were proud of it. Byron, Shelley, Lawrence, Joyce—they stood outside the societies that had made them and became in their own lifetimes international figures. Yet they continued to write toward and mostly against the nations that bred them, and their international success depended on their notoriety in their home countries.

  We still feel this is the normal model for literature. At the Nobel level it is very unusual to give the prize to a writer who has not already won laurels in his own country. For popular fiction, Stephen King, Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling, and Stieg Larsson all follow a similar pattern: a book is phenomenally successful at home, other countries buy into it (which can happen very rapidly now), as the sales mount up, a promotions machine gears up to support them, projecting the same image of the author worldwide as was projected at home. The effect is to sever the umbilical chord, if not the relationship, with the home community. Writers like Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling cannot be exiled. They have readers everywhere.

  But globalization is not uniform and not always so kind. It can happen that a writer remains absolutely trapped in his local community, perhaps well known for a restricted group, but unable to project him or herself outside it. I think of the fine South Tyrolese novelist Joseph Zoderer, who yearns to be an international novelist and has had his work translated in some countries, but never in English, and who finds himself constantly labeled as a Tyrolese writer. To publish successfully he has to write toward this community; when he seeks to write about matters outside it, neither his own community nor the outer world are interested. Likewise there are many writers from ex-colonies or simply the developing world who find they have to address the Western world about their now distant home; publishers are immediately less interested if they seek to address other issues (I have heard this from a successful young Chinese novelist in London, and from a Surinamese in Holland). I say “have to” with the implied condition, if they want to be well and traditionally published. It is our desire for money and celebrity that binds us.

  But my own case is, I think, more curious, and I would be eager to hear of other writers in the same position, or rather many positions. Inevitably, as one addresses different communities of readers in different countries one tends to write differently for them, not necessarily to please, but just to be in meaningful relation to them. In fact if I want to displease them, I have to be very aware of their likes and dislikes. I don’t do this with cynical calculation. It simply happens, like an adjustment to the weather, or the language you are speaking, or your new girlfriend’s parents; and you discover you are a different writer, a different person almost, when engaging in different projects. This can be quite liberating and certainly more fun than the writer who feels trapped in a small world. You realize you are many writers, potentially very many, and the way your talents develop will depend on the way different communities in different countries respond to you.

  This reality is in sharp contrast with the rhetoric that surrounds creative writing today. If asked, most writers will say they write only for themselves and are not aware of, let alone swayed by an audience. An ideal notion of globalization, then, posits this sovereign individual, who enjoys a consistent and absolute identity, above any contamination from those who buy his work, selling the product of his or her genius to a world that is able to receive it and enjoy it in the same way everywhere. So individualism and globalization go hand in glove. The idea that we are absolutely free of any community permits us to engage with all people everywhere. This is why so much international literature is about freedom and favors rebellions against institutions.

  But the experience of the writer addressing multiple separate audiences—or perhaps using pseudonyms for certain kinds of writing in contrast with the work published under his or her own name—belies this myth. Indeed, as the years go by, I begin to suspect that it is precisely in positing themselves as independent from and uninfluenced by the collective, that writers are in fact agreeing to fill a part that the modern community of would-be individuals has dreamt up for them: the one who allows us all to believe that freedom and absolute identity outside the community are possible.

  UGLY AMERICANS ABROAD

  I’M ENGLISH AND live in Italy. During March 2011, within two or three days of each other, I received: from The New York Review of Books, four novels by the Swiss author Peter Stamm; from the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore, Jonathan Franzen’s F
reedom, in English and Italian; and from a New York publisher, a first novel, Funeral for a Dog, by the young German writer Thomas Pletzinger. The last was accompanied by some promotional puff that began: “Pletzinger is German, but you wouldn’t know it from his debut, which is both wise and worldly.”

  What a wonderful insight this careless moment of blurb-talk gives us into the contemporary American mindset! We want something worldly, but if it seems too German, or perhaps just too foreign, we become wary. As my mailbag indicates, the literary community is very much an international phenomenon, but not, it would seem, a level playing field. To make it in America, Pletzinger must shed his German-ness as if he were an immigrant with an embarrassing accent.

  Peter Stamm, whose novels I eventually reviewed, rises to this challenge with great ingenuity. He writes in the leanest prose imaginable, telling stories about phobic characters in love with routine, in need of protection, but simultaneously anxious that life might be passing them by; they yearn for life and are afraid of it, and the more they yearn, the more they are afraid. Stamm’s genius is to align his spare prose with the psychology of people who fear richness and density; that way he creates a style that’s both “literary” and absolutely translatable: