Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s. Brian Aldiss
ordinary person this seeking holds no great urgency, except perhaps in adolescence; it may be satisfied by a religion or an ideology of some kind, which lends a framework to daily life. Even the weekly football pool may make a kind of pattern to life; behind it lies a wish, not only to win money, but to control – on however small a scale – future events.
The search for a pattern may be painfully intensified in those whose upbringing, for whatever reason, was disturbed. In its extreme form, this disturbance may lead to a paranoid personality, who sees his or her world in terms of a conspiracy against him (it is usually a him). Painful this may be, but at least the intellect has its pattern. Something is satisfied.
Writers, so it seems, live somewhere between these two extremes. They feel the need to search, to seek for a pattern. Their books may represent separate, almost unrelated attempts to find this pattern; each book is a transient pattern in itself. Other writers, perhaps the more important ones, seek more comprehensive orders; their writings will be all related. Critics then speak confidently of such a writer’s development. Our leading writers, Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing, are accorded such attention.
This is not to say that such authors verge on paranoia, although Graham Greene has declared that he would have become a criminal if he had not turned writer. It is to say that, in this respect, they are not ordinary people; and their profession slowly separates them from the ordinariness they once possessed. (Of course, in every other respect they may be perfectly ordinary, shop in Marks & Spencer, weed the garden, travel on the Northern Line.)
‘The human mind seems to be so constructed that the discovery, or perception, of order or unity in the external world is mirrored, transferred, and experienced as if it were a discovery of a new order and balance in the inner world of the psyche.’ So says Anthony Storr, who has written more clearly about creativity than anyone. The quotation comes from his book, The School of Genius.
When I was seven, I had need to cling on to something. I had at the time a microscope, a telescope and a small kaleidoscope. These instruments were my toys. I drew what I saw down the microscope, I studied the stars and moon, I watched the shifting patterns of colour in the kaleidoscope. These toys directed my attention, at a critical phase of my development, outwards. My interest as a science fiction writer has been to make sense of the universe, to express the order I found there, and to relate that order – as Storr says – to the inner world of the psyche.
The universe is a dynamic place these days, not at all the simple clockwork machine it was depicted as being during the nineteen-thirties. New discoveries crowd in on us all the while. The same holds good for our inner world. We may establish a pattern which, to our satisfaction, corresponds with events ‘out there’; but nothing stays put and, in a while, we may feel the urge to attempt the equation again. Of course, if our vision extends no further than the gatepost, we may never be troubled in this way.
And what of readers? Reading is a creative occupation – much more so than watching television. A reader conspires with an author; they are two people rapt in a singular sort of communion; a writer’s work is not complete without his readers. He may not need many, or he may need multitudes; but he (or she) has to fight somehow to get in touch with the right audience. I believe that readers, people who are continually reading books, are very similar to writers; they may lack a degree of creativity, but they also seek to make sense, or a pattern, out of the universe with which they are presented.
Anthony Storr puts this well in his work, The Dynamics of Creation, when he says, ‘By identifying ourselves, however fleetingly, with the creator, we can participate in the integrating process which he has carried out for himself.’ We all seek an identity; for writers as for actors this is often a primary concern. As Seurat’s paintings were formed from a multitude of coloured dots, so our identity gradually crystallises from our own view of the universe, or personal umwelt.
Long-sustained creativity involves more than the intellect. The emotions are also brought into play.
I have mentioned instruments I valued as a boy, telescopes, microscopes and kaleidoscopes. These are scientific instruments, but there are two sorts of science, the science which observes nature and the science which attempts to alter nature (Victor Frankenstein was the first scientist of the latter kind). I was, even at the age of seven, of the passive kind. I observed.
For better or worse, this is one key to character. There is some evidence that writers are happier in the role of observer.
Writing, like the other arts, entails many hours of labour, often in solitary state. If measured on a conventional scale of payment, the financial returns for these hours of labour are in general nugatory. Why then these hours of labour? One answer must be that they represent a defence against the outside world.
Creativity is generally a mystery, even to the creative person himself. The popular view of creativity follows the ‘pearl in the oyster’ theory, which, in a slapdash way, embodies truth. The conception of Beethoven composing his symphonies despite his deafness, or Goya painting on despite a similar affliction, has a romantic appeal. The slavery of creative work may seem like a freedom if it protects the creator from worse things, from some loss in childhood, from a fear of the terrible vacuum.
Anthony Storr, the authority on creativity, says:
If creative work protects a man against mental illness, it is small wonder that he pursues it with avidity; and even if the state of mind he is seeking to avoid is no more than a mild state of depression or apathy, this still constitutes a cogent reason for engaging in creative work even when it brings no obvious external benefit in its train.
It would appear that writing in the present day is a preserve best suited to the rather withdrawn personality, who is able to endure and even enjoy solitude. And not only in the present day. Vasari, writing his Lives of the Painters in the sixteenth century, claims that love of his art makes a man solitary and meditative, saying it is necessary that ‘he who takes up the study of art should flee the company of men’. Seclusion is an inseparable part of the pattern of intellectual and spiritual life in East and West alike.
In sum, there are intellectual and emotional patterns which have proved over the years to be peculiar to creative people. If you are a star footballer and you feel the impulse to write a book, the chance is that you will write only one. To be a real writer over a number of years, you must have stamina and the right psychological make-up.
Many think that the writer’s life is an enviable one. I am certainly of that number. But it has its shadowed side. A wish to unburden oneself is, after all, an indication that one is burdened. So it proves, according to recent researches on both sides of the Atlantic.
Poets are well known to be prone to phases of depression. Their numbers include William Cowper – a poet in whom I once took personal interest, being born in the town where he died – Tennyson, Coleridge, John Donne, John Berryman, Louis MacNeice, Thomas Hardy, Christopher Smart, John Clare (who spent many years in a madhouse), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and others. Crane, Berryman, Jarrell, Sexton and Plath committed suicide, Cowper attempted it.
Several of these writers suffered bereavements early in life. Cowper lost his mother when he was four, and cannot be said ever to have recovered from the loss. The melancholy A. E. Housman’s mother died on his twelfth birthday.
Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Berryman, MacNeice and Plath all lost a parent before the age of twelve. The author of Frankenstein lost her mother when she was born, and her novel is heavy with that loss.
A group of writers investigated at a writers’ workshop at the University of Iowa in 1974 showed that, of fifteen authors, nine had seen a psychiatrist, eight had been treated with drugs or by psychotherapy, and four had been admitted to hospital. Six had symptoms of alcoholism, and one committed suicide later.
In February 1986, the Sunday Times published the results of research into forty-seven of Britain’s leading writers by Dr Kay Jamison of the University of California in Los Angeles. Ten of the eighteen poets who responded had received treatment for psychological disorders, while half of them had been treated for mania with strong anti-depressant