Claire Tomalin's Desk
Claire Tomalin's desk was featured in today's Guardian review. It was gloriously messy and so a great relief to see. My own desk has been nigh on invisible through these past months, as I worked on my biography of J. S. Haldane. As just about the best biographer going, it's good to have Tomalin's example fresh before me. Her desk even lacked what I most yearned for, that small square of clear surface on which one could place a notebook and take some notes by hand. Other people's lives are overwhelming in all the documentation they bring to light as you conjure them into your biography. I never actually got round to counting, but the range of sources I consulted each day went from something like fifty to the hundreds.
In interviewing Jim Salter the other day, the writer Will Fiennes tried to lure him into admitting to a shared feeling that the original writing is agony, and the joy of writing lies in the redrafting. Salter agreed, maybe just to be kind. I don't get it myself - it seems somewhat like suggesting that Michelangelo had to pass his own gallstone before getting to carve it. Writing is a joy. That's what I hope to get back to for a while. I came back from a walk to Hampstead today with two fresh manuscript books under my arm. Two novels are bubbling away inside of me, both of them fun, relying much more on imagination than research. This may be the novelist in me having fun with fantasies, but I look forward to getting back to the old days when I wrote novels out by fountain pen then typed them up on a typewriter. That typewriter stage I can let go of, but I like the notion of sitting down each day and storytelling for a few hours of a morning till a new novel has accumulated.
As my partner, who is addicted to tidiness as some God-given restraint to my own free-for-all way of living, notes, it will make my clearing up at the end of the day much simpler. All I'll have to do is close up my manuscript book and slot it on a shelf. All those biography notes won't need to be shuffled into some utterly false semblance of order for me to disassemble into my known piles the next day. The chaos can simply shift around unseen inside my head, waiting to dribble out sentence by sentence till we have a flow going.
In interviewing Jim Salter the other day, the writer Will Fiennes tried to lure him into admitting to a shared feeling that the original writing is agony, and the joy of writing lies in the redrafting. Salter agreed, maybe just to be kind. I don't get it myself - it seems somewhat like suggesting that Michelangelo had to pass his own gallstone before getting to carve it. Writing is a joy. That's what I hope to get back to for a while. I came back from a walk to Hampstead today with two fresh manuscript books under my arm. Two novels are bubbling away inside of me, both of them fun, relying much more on imagination than research. This may be the novelist in me having fun with fantasies, but I look forward to getting back to the old days when I wrote novels out by fountain pen then typed them up on a typewriter. That typewriter stage I can let go of, but I like the notion of sitting down each day and storytelling for a few hours of a morning till a new novel has accumulated.
As my partner, who is addicted to tidiness as some God-given restraint to my own free-for-all way of living, notes, it will make my clearing up at the end of the day much simpler. All I'll have to do is close up my manuscript book and slot it on a shelf. All those biography notes won't need to be shuffled into some utterly false semblance of order for me to disassemble into my known piles the next day. The chaos can simply shift around unseen inside my head, waiting to dribble out sentence by sentence till we have a flow going.
posted by Martin at 8:01 PM
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