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It seems to me that I have wanted to write for the whole of my life. The intensity of this insistence, despite its implausibility, suggests an emotional, rather than literal, accuracy. I think my life didn’t seem my life until I started to write.
I came from a family of talkers. But talk, in my house, was not conversation. Talk was holding forth. Prevailing. Having the last word. Only one person could do it at a time, which meant that there was constant barging in and interruption, as impatience to speak grew more feverish and more relentless. Everybody wanted to talk. Nobody wanted to listen. In this, I was exactly like my mother and my father and my sister, though we had, each of us, a distinctive style.
More and more, the sentences I had in my head were like the sentences I loved in books: they began in one place and ended somewhere you hadn’t imagined them going, though, at each turn, idea seemed to follow idea perfectly naturally. The surprise at the end, as the thought completed itself, seemed wildly exciting: the whole sentence needed to be reëxperienced in this light; waves of unexpected revelations and insights resulted. Paradox. But an interrupted paradox is not simply edited—it is fundamentally changed, sometimes into the orderly, reasonable opposite it seemed destined to be. Because I never got to finish what I intended to say, a response (on the rare occasions when one was given) never seemed a response to my thought but, rather, to the simplified idea it had become.
I came to have a sense that the self I was in the world, among other selves, was alternately precarious and invisible. I did not think speech was a good conduit to the self, or expression of it, because in my childhood it was not. The page was different. Here my voice had a stability and an immutability, qualities that I passionately craved and never remotely approached in my social interactions. How could I? Stability and immutability are not characteristics of the spoken word.
I learned to read at a very early age. And I began writing at the same time. My father also wrote. He wrote witty rhymed verses, doggerel; I had the sound of doggerel in my head as far back as memory goes. I knew how rhyme worked. I heard the way rhythmic patterns conferred a strange sense of wholeness and inevitability. I began to write my own versions of this sort of poem, little bleak existential ditties, using the vocabulary available to me at, say, five years old:
If kitty cats liked roastbeef bones,
And doggies sipped up milk;
If elephants walked round the town
All dressed in purest silk;
If robins went out coasting,
They slid down crying whee,
If all this happened to be true,
Then where would people be?
My sister and I were also writing books. Our father was our scribe. We made up stories, and he wrote them down on pieces of paper folded to make books; afterward, when the writing had been completed, my sister and I drew illustrations in the large spaces left for them. None of these books still exist, to my knowledge, but I remember how they looked. I remember the joy of making things up; I remember the absorption, the world falling away.
Making up stories, making up anything, seemed to me the most involving and wonderful activity I could possibly imagine. And the story seemed, in some way, more important than anything in the world, I suppose because it was not subject to change. I imagine that people believe in God for the same reason.
In the poems I was writing then, the pleasures of doggerel united with the wild happiness of inventing something that would have a separate existence, more convincing and more durable than my unreliable human existence. Those poems were me; they represented or embodied me. But, at the same time, they were not me; they were a thing apart that could be studied and adjusted and made perfect, as my actual self could not be. I was the writer; I was also the reader. The immersive creative act gave rise to analytic distance as the finished poem detached itself from its author. I had no control over the writing self, which seemed vulnerable to chance and whim, about which I had constant anxiety. But I had infinite control as a reader, a critic. Control and stamina and intense investment. Imperfect details and conventional perceptions tormented me; these problems I attempted to resolve, even in childhood. The process was called revision, I later learned, though this word seemed a little calm for an effort so protracted and often so hopeless.
Writing became almost immediately the form of communication that seemed to me most true and least fraught. Important conversations are routinely remembered differently. Of speech, an impression remains, which memory amplifies and distorts. No two people hearing the same remarks are likely to have identical memories of what was said. Certainly, the exact words will not be remembered. Whereas the written word can be remembered only exactly; if a written line is not repeated exactly, word for word, it is not being remembered, it is being paraphrased. The existing text will confirm this. In that text, words do not mutate or switch places. Meaning can be disputed, but the actual words survive argument and mutilation.
But with whom was I communicating? Unclear. In part with myself—I was learning what, or at least how, I thought. In part with strangers, my imagined ideal readers, most of whom were not yet born. In part with the future, a time when I would not exist to explain myself.
The things I wrote down so urgently were not fixed thoughts projected from my brain onto the page. What I considered thought was a kind of seeking, a mission. But it was very difficult. This was not writing as rhetoric or catharsis. This was writing as transformation (or this is what I wanted it to be). I wanted to turn experience, often disappointment or hurt, into an externalized form that, in its accuracy and beauty, would both separate me from the experience and redeem it. The need to write in this way was constant, but the ability to write at all came and went; often in my life it was gone for years. This was not something I could do anything about.
I had, in regard to making poems, no feeling of agency at all. Words and phrases came from nowhere; I rarely had any sense of what they meant or to what context they belonged. Nor could I access the source of these fragments. Whatever their source, I was either its victim (if I was hearing nothing) or its beneficiary. I felt, in childhood, like Joan of Arc in the story my father told my sister and me at bedtime, with the burning omitted. Joan, who heard voices and saved France. I heard voices, too. I heard pieces of phrases. But I did not have any idea what they were telling me.
I was exalted but also tormented. What I heard was suggestive, haunting, but unintelligible. In any case, I often heard nothing. But when I did hear I was possessed.
My task was to discover what the words meant. Who said them. Why. The method by which these investigations were conducted will be well known to psychoanalysts and analytic patients. The object, in fact, is not so different. In its most essential terms, the object is always to discover the self.
The method is free association. What I did in analysis imitated for me what I did as a writer. Analysis seemed a parallel search, with its constant reëxamination of connections and transitions, the archetypal stories varied or not in each retelling; this tracking of thought was like writing but with a crucial difference. Free association in writing, when writing is actually going on and not merely longed for, is euphoric; thought seems to move upward and skyward, the panorama widening, the material available to the gaze increasing as one rises farther away. Whereas in analysis, association spirals downward. Toward origins. Toward bedrock. Capitulation or recognition and later, sometimes, clarity. But not exaltation.
There is a second difference. In analytic association, the tool or the instrument is memory. Memory is examined, and also the juxtaposition of memories that are not sequential. Other journeys occur, but this, in my experience, is the central one. This is not what happens in the making of a poem. Memories may flicker here and there, but the associative leaps are almost exclusively related to language, and the shape of the poem is the shape made of the implications and atmospheres inherent in particular words or syntactical structures. So the process is in some essential way abstract, a kind of trailblazing that has no basis in lived event.
There remains a strange relation to the poems I have already written. Though they were written to create or affirm my existence, they did not, once they were finished, continue to do so. What they suggested, when I read them afterward, was that I had once existed and had thoughts; something that had been alive and specific was now silent or vanished. So the poems became a kind of chastisement, taunting reminders of what was not.
How different all this is, in its essence and outcome, from physical life. In the great physical events, extreme bodily pleasure and extreme bodily suffering, the self disappears completely or is lost. Either way, an involuntary act, unlike the struggle to be, to exist, that underlies the need to write.
I wrote a short book last summer, in prose, about a pair of twins living through their first year. One of them, despite being pre-verbal, is obsessed with the idea of the book she will one day write—is already writing in her head, though she has no words. Her name in my book is Marigold. Her sister, who is less driven, more gregarious, and easy to love, is Rose. And Marigold knows that she needs to write her book because she needs there to be something in the world “that stood for herself as Rose stood for Rose.” ♦
—2022
This is drawn from “Driven to Write: 45 Writers on the Motives and Mysteries of Their Craft.”
Sourse: newyorker.com
