A Writer's Life

I am plodding on with Force of Circumstance and find that it is improving. Actually, to tell the truth, I am skipping the overtly political bits and concentrating on the author's reflection on her motivations, relationships, writing and travels. For a forceful and intellectual woman, she seems unduly troubled by the ageing process. Her relationship with the writer Nelson Algren having petered out (both too pig-headed to compromise), she mournfully resigned herself to a celibate decline. She had not even reached fifty, for crying out loud! An unexpected affair with the journo Claude Lanzmann restored her confidence and joie-de-vivre, particularly as he was 17 years her junior. She writes much more engagingly when living life to the full and it is not difficult to detect the grey cloud of depression that shrouds her when she feels lonely and disconnected. Misery chokes articulacy.

She describes the writing process extremely accurately, and it is heartening to know that even such a towering intellect as hers struggled to put pen to paper:

'When I feel ready [after much reading and reflection], I write three or four hundred pages straight off. This is arduous work: it requires intense concentration, and the rubbish that accumulates appalls me. At the end of a month or two, I am so sickened that I can't continue. I begin again from scratch. despite all the material I have at my disposal the paper is blank once more, and I hesitate before taking the plunge. Usually I begin badly, out of impatience; I want to say everything at once; my narrative is lumpy, chaotic and lifeless. Gradually I become resigned to taking my time. then comes the moment when I find the distance, the tone and the rhythm I feel are right; then I really get underway. With the help of my rough draft, I sketch the broad outlines of a chapter. I begin again at page one, read it through and rewrite it sentence by sentence; then I correct each sentence so that it will fit into the page as a whole, then each page so that it has aplace in the whole chapter; later on, each chapter, each page, each sentence is revised in relation to the work as a whole. Painters, Baudelaire says, progress from first sketch to finished work by painting the complete picture at each stage; that is what I try to do.'

Force of Circumstance: Part I, ch.5 'Interlude'

Inspiring stuff indeed.