31/100: Fact or fiction

I guess an even split

(credit/apologies to Bright Eyes for the title)

All month and the month before, I’ve been working on non-fiction. I like non-fiction, I like it a lot, I like that I get to do it and I love piecing things together and I’m happiest in archives, or at least happiest there unless the alternative is standing in a field with a warm pint watching a band I love, and then I’ll take the band and the bad beer, but other than that, I’m happiest being a small geek indulging in my oddest interests, trying to work out how to make them interesting to more than three other people. I hope I succeed.

Last week, I was mostly in the MoMA digital archives and writing begging emails to Harvard’s archives. I fear archivists hate me. I often think of the effort it has taken to store all that information, to catalogue so much work, to preserve it and pass it on. It’s incredible really. And it’s all just there for vultures like me. Later in the year, I hope to spend more time in archives and am currently compiling lists of what I need and when I need it and anxiously eyeing the calendar trying to work out how, when, where etc. Back to the who what where when and how elements of writing, but applied to life.

I have, over the last few weeks, been equally amazed and happy that this is my job. The years I spent getting here, writing The Last Days, were mostly spent crying, throwing up, excavating and exorcising trauma and I was so sick of it and so bored of myself by the end that I needed a break. Or a different job. One where I didn’t cry every day.

I haven’t cried at work recently. This is progress.

This week, I returned to a draft fiction manuscript I rewrote earlier in the year. The greater the distance between early drafts and later, the greater the chances of later drafts succeeding, I think/hope. I hope this because I’ve been working on this in one form or another for 17 years. I think this because I don’t think the first idea is ever the final idea, but more a screen you need to get behind, or a surface you need to crack to see what’s happening underneath. It’s the underneath that’s interesting. There are enough surface books in the world, no more are needed.

I think now of telling a well-respected critic that my first novel wasn’t jam, everyone likes jam, I said, who wants to write it.

Me! shouted my pissed friend sitting next to me, I want to write jam. Sometimes, around royalty cheque time, I wish I wrote jam. But I am no good at the overly sweet or cloying or sentimental although I really love jam. Raspberry, with the pips in.

Although I no longer cry at work and love what I do and love writing about people WHO ARE NOT ME, this type of writing doesn’t feel like art. I know this might rile a few people so I’ll say it again, I’m not sure non-fiction is art. I’ll caveat that, for me I’m not sure non-fiction is art. Sure, there’s an art to it, but is it art, I’m not sure (I’m doing this on purpose now because how can you decide where you sit on a thing without an antagonist?). Especially if it presents the world as is or near as is.

It feels like a remaking, not making something new, and certainly not breaking something. I’m rereading Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was The Rage, which isn’t helping with the way I’m missing New York, but more, it’s making me think of the context he began writing in and the context we’re working in today. This passage really struck me:

The war had been a bad dream we wanted to analyse now. It was as if we had been unconscious for three or four years. Once the war was over, we began making private treaties with ourselves. We demanded nothing less than unconditional surrender from life, or to it. There was a feeling that we had forgotten how to live, that the requirements would be different now.

As political administrations change and it becomes safer to wake up and really look at the 14 years behind us, I wonder what private treaties we will begin to make with ourselves. I wonder how this will be reflected in art. The war was such an artistic cataclysm, I wonder if the Tories years will present similar. I wonder how much more breaking is possible?

But a novel is also a private treaty with the self, demanding both unconditional surrender from and to life. At some stage of writing it, all there is is it. There are not children or school runs or dinner or friendships or any ideas or interests other than it. It is a tyrant, a vampire, a leach. It hides from you, refusing to reveal itself until you accept the terms of the deal, which is that it is bigger than you, more demanding than you, that it is something you bring into being but can never hope to fully understand or explain, no matter how often you sit on a stage trying to. It is neither the circumstances of or the story of your life although it is bound by the limits of both; in short it is something that will should outlive you, that strives too to reflect and yet deflect the time it’s created in; it should break with form as it yet conforms to plot. It grows from everything that’s ever driven you mad and in doing so, will drive you mad; there is no other way than to succumb entirely to its lure, its rhythm, its demands, its characters. It is cannibal in the way non-fiction is not. When I’m writing non-fiction, I am making nothing up, I am bound entirely to the circumstances of my life or the lives I’m writing about, I am detective but not maker, whereas fiction leaves me, at the end of a draft, feeling as if I’ve returned from war or another place entirely, unsure where I’ve been or how I’ve spent my time, there is just a manuscript sized hole. This is why I’m terrified of it and by it. This is why I love it too, like Arthur Russell wrote real love is heart and soul. Real work is too, the rest, I love, but fiction’s what absorbs me, allows me to lose myself for long enough that I don’t (entirely) mind coming back to myself for a while.