Fresh Air Fiend (5 page)

It is true that I could share some of the feelings of spiritual crisis in the literature of the fifties and sixties, but I had no strong belief that God was dead. In any case, God was like Banquo's ghost, popping up at every riotous occasion, to my great shame. I had been raised a cultural Catholic, and so religion had a strong ethnic coloration, depending on who was saying Mass or giving the sermon, an Irish priest (Saint Patrick, Mary mother of God, boozy funerals) or an Italian (Saint Anthony, the muscular Christ, boozy weddings).

Now and then I recognized my own world in fiction—in the stories of J. F. Powers
(The Prince of Darkness,
for example); in José María Gironella's Spanish trilogy—I have no idea how
The Cypresses Believe in God
(sex and syphilis figuring in a large way) came to be in the house; in Joyce's
Dubliners.
But mostly I didn't recognize anything in fiction as resembling the world I knew. I envied the prosperous families with prep school kids, the Jewish families trying to look respectable, even the struggling blacks: their worlds appeared, to a greater or a lesser degree, in popular fiction. Stereotypes of them existed. They were written about. My own mongrel world had gone unreported. It was like being denied my own experience, and without a model—with nothing to imitate, with the mistaken notion that my world might not even be worth writing about (after all, there seemed nothing specifically literary about the life I knew). I devised my own remedy. I fled, went away as far as I could, with the Peace Corps to central Africa.

Africa was a lucky choice for me, because distance, in terms of both space and culture, produced in me feelings of alienation that only memories could ease. I could not live in a culture that was completely foreign, and my solution was to live in my head. I needed to remember the past in order to be calm, and retrieval was not easy. I was in Nyasaland, which at that time was a British protectorate. The African towns were superficially English, like English culture made out of mud. In the absence of stimuli—I went to Africa with one small suitcase; I had virtually no possessions—I had to devise ways to gain access to my memory.

Does this seem a deliberate process? It was nothing of the kind. It was not a calculated act. Like almost everything in my life, it was haphazard, accidental, and I was seldom conscious of what I was doing. Writing is to me only superficially deliberate. It is more like digging a deep hole and not quite knowing what you are going to find, like groping in a dark well-furnished room—surprises everywhere, and not just remarkable chairs but people murmuring in the weirdest postures. I am inclined to agree with the novelist narrator Bendrix in Graham Greene's novel
The End of the Affair
when he says (and Greene himself believed this): "So much of a novelist's writing ... takes place in the unconscious; in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them."

This is why writing takes such patience. I had that, and determination—a great stomach for the job. And why? Because my life depended on it. I had nothing else—no one to support me, encourage me, or pay my way. If I faltered, or failed, or if I took a year off, I was shafted.

For years I had been practicing the craft of writing, but what is the craft? It involves rumination, mimicry, joke-telling. It requires long periods of solitude; I have always managed to be happy alone. Many writers I have known talk to themselves. I have a mumbling habit, which has served me well not merely as a mnemonic device but as an imaginative rehearsal for writing—it is image-making of a serious kind—and I nearly always mutter as I write.

Nothing is truly forgotten—there is no forgetting—Freud said; there is only repression. In
Civilization and Its Discontents
he wrote how "in mental life nothing which has been formed can perish ... everything is somehow preserved, and in suitable circumstances (when for instance regression goes back far enough) it can once more be brought to light."

All his life Freud was concerned with retrieving early memories. This preoccupation led him to develop theories of repression and eventually to write his wonderful paper "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming." A Freudian might explain my creativity in Africa as follows: when I had ceased to be affected by repression at home, and in the United States generally, and was living entirely on my own, unaffected by the scrutiny and the ambitions of my somewhat censorious parents, I was able to recapture in these suitable circumstances the early memories that gave me an impetus to be creative. Perhaps.

Writing in Africa gave me access to the past, helped me cope with long periods of isolation in a foreign place, made me reach specific conclusions about the people I was among—in a word, it enabled me to see Africa clearly. This plunge into my own memory inspired in me feelings of oneness with Africans and their landscape. Our lives in many respects were totally different, but on closer examination I saw how much we had in common and how these people shared many of my fears and hopes.

I am speaking of an early period in my writing life, but the most crucial one. I was in my early twenties. I had begun to deal with reality. It was no longer the literature of the Waste Land, the theater of the absurd, minimalist poetry, the barren and featureless narrative. I do not belittle them; I am simply saying they were no help to me. I may seem to criticize certain types of writing. No; only that they are not my type. "The house of fiction has many windows," Henry James said.

From the vantage point of Africa, I was able to see that where I came from seemed to have merit and was a worthy subject. Africa too was an immediate subject—after all, hadn't Conrad and Hemingway written about it? Nevertheless, I arrogantly felt that these great writers had not done Africa justice. It irritated me that although
Tarzan of the Apes, Henderson the Rain King, The Unbearable Bassington,
and
Devil of a State
were partly or wholly set in Africa, Burroughs, Bellow, Saki, and Burgess had never set foot on the continent.

Conrad and Hemingway had no such excuse, yet in their fiction they ignored Africans or else made them insubstantial figures in a landscape. Conrad could be terribly ponderous and vague; Hemingway, remote and rather privileged, hadn't the slightest clue to the human activity, the politics and culture, in the country. He was a big-game hunter, the sort of rich and complacent
bwana mkuba
we saw in Land Rovers heading for the herds of kudu or the migrating wildebeest.

As a resident there, not a tourist, I understood that any slob could kill big game in Africa. The animals were big and they were everywhere. Nothing was easier than bagging a zebra—there were herds of them—and an animal like the coveted (and now seriously endangered) bongo was the easiest of all: you just set dogs on this broad-horned antelope, and when it was preoccupied with this pack of savage mutts, you shot the poor creature in the heart (to preserve its head as a trophy). Hemingway's Swahili was notoriously bad and laughable. As for Africans themselves, they were like a well-kept secret: no one had really written about them except sentimental settlers like Karen Blixen, who wrote from the point of view of a colonial memsahib. Doris Lessing came a bit closer in
The Grass Is Singing,
but even she seemed to be writing about an earlier period.

I was not writing particularly incisively, but I had started along the right road—a narrow and empty side road. I had a sense of being freer, of growing stronger, and my belief in myself had nothing to do with success or failure but only with writing well. Of course, I wanted to be recognized—I wanted to be a hero—but that desire was not incompatible with the various fanciful roles I had chosen for myself, growing up: the traveler, the hunter, the explorer, the lion tamer, the forest ranger, the scientist, the surgeon, which were all brilliantly solitary and somewhat heroic. I can honestly say—and it was a great help to me—that I had no driving ambition to be wealthy. If so, I am sure I would have given up writing and done something more immediately profitable. I knew many people who did just that.

"The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real," Freud writes in "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming." He goes on to describe people's fantasies and the relationship of these daydreams to the reality of their lives. "We may lay it down that a happy person never fantasizes, only an unsatisfied one." Time is a crucial factor, because of the relationship between memory and fantasy. The fantasy is linked to three "moments of time" (not very different from the "spots of time" to which Wordsworth alludes in
The Prelude):
"Mental work is linked to some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present which has been able to arouse one of the subject's major wishes. From there it harks back to the memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this wish was fulfilled; and now it creates a situation relating to the future which represents a fulfillment of the wish. What it thus creates is a day-dream or fantasy, which carries about it traces of its origin from the occasion which provoked it and from the memory. Thus past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them."

Normally, a daydreamer conceals his fantasies, but if these fantasies should be revealed to us, Freud says, we would be repelled or unmoved by them. On the other hand, when the creative writer discloses his fantasies, we experience pleasure. "How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential
ars poetica
lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others"—that is, in artistic alteration, the writer softens and disguises his daydreams, and with style or wit he gives us aesthetic pleasure. It is all in the telling, Freud says, which is true enough, and this "enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds." He goes on in an aside to say that "not a little of this effect is due to the writer's enabling us [as satisfied and enlightened readers] thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame."

In a word, reading is liberation. We are vindicated in our dreams. The same is true of writing, since a dream is being fulfilled in its artistic recreation. And the dream has a complex time frame of past, present, and future. Something in the present provokes an impression that rouses a wish that is linked to an earlier memory.

Being in Africa certainly liberated me, and I did remember a great deal that I had thought I'd forgotten. This access gave me a sense of conviction; it calmed me, and in that reflective mood I was given greater access. I discovered, for example, that if I was very calm, at a point of resolution, I could write well. It might be truer to say that I needed to be calm, needed my mind clear, in order to remember. My sense of freedom grew: the joy of writing made me more joyful, because at its best it has always demanded a mental journey and led me deeper into my unconscious mind. There is a paradox in this: the deeper I have gone into my own memory, the more I have realized how much in common I have with other people. The greater the access I have had to my memory, to my mind and experience, searching among the paraphernalia in my crepuscular past, the more I have felt myself to be a part of the world.

The political dimension of this creative process was something I had not expected. There was a dissatisfaction among Africans, a hankering for something better in their lives. That yearning and that bewilderment was familiar to me. They felt as I had growing up, and in many ways their condition, the way they had been patronized by colonial powers, recapitulated the condition of children in a large, oppressive household. Imperialism is like a big unhappy family under the control of domineering parents. It was the way I had felt at home. Contemplating the conditions of Africans stimulated my own childhood memories—the frustrations, the longings, the fantasies. Consequently, in this atmosphere, writing about Africans and recalling my past, I could truly express myself.

The provocative occasion that Freud mentions as stimulating the memory and producing a creatively useful fantasy might also be the simple contemplation of an object, or the chance association of music or an odor. A musical phrase stimulates memory in Proust's
Jean Santeuil,
the famous memory-unlocking taste of the cookie in
Remembrance of Things Past.

I developed internal ways of stimulating my memory. It is possible for a writer to think creatively only if he or she manages to inhabit a mood in which imagination can operate. My need for external stimuli inspired in me a desire to travel—and travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is for me the opposite: nothing induces concentration or stimulates memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. More likely you will experience intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life. This does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present, however; in fact, what makes the whole experience thrilling is the juxtaposition of present and past—Medford dreamed in Mandalay.

It was a deliberate dream for me. In the dark, in distant places when I needed the consolation of memory, I used to calm myself and reflect on the past by mentally getting into my father's old Dodge and driving from home through Medford Square, up Forest Street, down to the Lawrence Estates, past the hospital where I was born, and then drive the long way home, around Spot Pond, taking in all the scenes of my early youth.

Who are the great travelers? They are curious, contented, self-sufficient people who are not afraid of the past. They are not hiding in travel; they are seeking. Recently I was on the northern Queensland coast of Australia, in an aboriginal reserve. In the most unlikely spot I encountered a beachcomber who had been living there for several years. He was looking for plastic floats and bottles, building a raft that would take him around the top of Cape York in one of the most dangerous channels in the world, the Torres Strait. I asked him if he knew the risks.