For a year or so I have been trying to write a children's novel; a mystery set in Eighteenth century and contemporary London. I have my plot just about put together on a collection of index cards which I accidentally shuffle from time to time. I have read, and made notes on many (too many) books of Eighteenth century history. I have four handwritten chapters: a few thousand words. But I am stuck. I can't seem to bring my characters into focus. I love the idea of my novel but I don't seem to love writing it. I have a shelf full of creative writing books and no inspiration whatsoever.
For the last three and a half years I have blogged about books at Book World and have thoroughly enjoyed both the writing and the comments and the interaction with other bloggers. But I felt, ultimately, that it was a form of displacement activity and so I put Book World into hibernation, hoping that this would free all my mental energies for creative writing.
And yes, the energy is here, but it doesn't feel as if I am channeling it in the right direction. Working on the children's novel feels like working against the grain. One of my absolute favourite books on writing is Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, especially this quote:
"Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. "The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity." Anne Truitt, the sculptor, said this. Thoreau said it another way: know your own bone. "Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life ... know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still."
The sad truth is that I simply don't want to gnaw at the children's book.
On a parallel track I had become more and more interested in the art of the personal essay. After reading Anne Fadiman's At Large and At Small, I started quietly stocking up on essay collections: Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, Virginia Woolf, as well as old and new anthologies, especially the wonderful The Art of the Personal Essay edited by Phillip Lopate. Reading the introduction to this last volume felt like being welcomed home by a good friend after a long time away. I felt kinship with his description of an essayist's traits. For a year or so I wrote Morning Pages after working my way through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, and I knew myself to be a fluent writer on the subject of me. Suddenly, attempting personal essays seemed like the right bone to gnaw at. Whether I can shape the subject into something readable remains to be seen, but there are several nerves that I feel drawn to work along already, circling round and round my life.
The final impetus to start experimenting with the personal essay form, here on a blog, is a fairly whimsical piece of business and will explain the blog's title.
I am a great lover of books about books. Earlier this year I read Michael Dirda's Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments. It's a book of anecdotes and enthusiasms rather than serious literary criticism, but Dirda is enormously well read and his passion is infectious. In one chapter (Frank Confessions) he talks about experimental works and mentions An Anecdoted Topography of Chance:
"One afternoon in 1962, artist Daniel Spoerri made a rough diagram of all the objects on his worktable - a paintbrush, a jar of paprika, a Magic Marker, a clock, a glass of wine, etc. Spoerri then wrote a sentence or a page about each of these objects: how it had come into his life, why it was on the table, who had been using it last; in short, whatever associations struck his fancy. These comments were then passed among his friends, who could, as they chose, footnote any element in them and add their own reflections. ...
Spoerri gradually discloses the story of his life and art; his German friend and translator Dieter Roth indulges in philosophical flights and extravagant wordplay; and everyone tries to be amusing, talking up such vexed matters as the naming of toilet papers,a mother's disappointment in her artist-son, the invention of a perpetual motion machine, and the dangers of maps. "From a button," says Spoerri, "you can explain the world." "
I was immediately intrigued (despite the somewhat forced sound of the humour) and my local library, amazingly, had the book in my hands two days later.
From its introduction:
"The procedure of the Topography, its modus operandi, is beautifully simple: a selection of objects and the associations they evoke are described, and these in turn give rise to further associations in the form of anecdotes. An apparently infinite process is unleashed, like a stroll taken in every direction at once. ...
Beginning with any object, enough elaboration can connect it to any other (specified) object: BLAKE'S "universe in a grain of sand." In fact, despite its apparently gratuitous and chaotic structure, the Topography performs an almost classical aesthetic, even philosophical, task: that of organising, or at least intimating a possible organisation of, a world whose complexity seems ungraspable..."
Disappointingly, I couldn't seem to find a way in to enjoyment of the Topography, but its premise, its promise, of a structured way to digress, to reminisce, to add layers and comments later still had deep appeal to me.
As Dirda goes on to comment:
"Many of the great experimental novels attempt to undercut the merciless domination of plot: Tristram Shandy, for instance, but also late James, Proust and Joyce. In general, these books are endlessly digressive or essayistic, replacing the propulsiveness of narrative with the leisurely play of consciousness."
Book World resounded with my increasingly desperate cries to escape from novels with plots into the delights of works like Tristram Shandy, Moo Pak, Housekeeping and anything else with that 'leisurely play of consciousness'. The beauty and elegance of thought on a page. The idea of doing something similar to the Anecdoted Topography charmed me instantly; I felt it had the potential to be an armchair version (albeit much inferior) of W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn, another deeply loved favourite of mine. Everything pointed to an experimentation with essays. And so here is Topography.
The photograph is of my desk as it was on 25 April 2008. The items piled on it have already been changed and moved but I have dozens of further close-up photos, an annotated inventory of the contents of each heap as they were then and a notebook filling up with ideas and digressions.
Topography will, I hope, be a home for those essays that emerge inspired by the objects on my desk, as well as as thoughts on the art of the personal essay.
