Friday, January 25, 2008

Lies about Lapwings...

I'm still trying to answer the question about why I decided to become a writer. I have written five attempts already. All of those efforts have been scrapped. They were unnecessary and with every word I typed, I typed a lie. I wonder why that is. Why this topic, this question, is so evasive and prone to throwing up distracting falsehoods. What am I hiding from myself?

Elsewhere in this web log, back in the mists of time when I still fostered some ambition, however uncertain it was, I made a statement about the fear of living without the dream of something better. Perhaps that is what I face now, perhaps that is why my fingers falter, the fear that what I have now is the best I can ever hope for, the epitome of my existence. Perhaps.

So in all the self-searching analysis that has gone on since my last entry here, did I ever come close to understanding why I suddenly decided, a few years ago, to try my hand at writing? Even now I really can’t say with any certainty. I find it difficult to extract the truth from the morass of ephemeral falsity in which it no doubt hides. But let me tell you about my father.

I am the only son of an only son. It is often said, by people who observe us together, that my father and I are very alike and I wonder sometimes, though never ask, whether he can see any of himself in me. Yet I think we are very different, similar metals, perhaps, but forged in different fires. My father was born in the 1930’s in one of those grey colliery towns that clings to the coast of the North East of England. His father was a miner and his mother had spent time as a milliner before becoming a fulltime housewife, as all miners’ wives were in those days. Neither of his parents was well educated. I got the feeling that his father was dismissive of education and the educated. His mother, though, now that was a different matter entirely. If ever there was a story of unfulfilled potential through lack of opportunity it could have been found in that small, gentle and good-humoured woman. And whereas many of her fellow miners’ wives must have been content with their early emancipation from the school house, she was cursed with knowing that she could have thrived if she had been allowed to stay on at school, done a whole lot better for herself, in life and in marriage.

So what hope is there for this boy of theirs, my father? A boy just discovering the world as Europe falls once more into war and the industrial towns and cities of the North become targets for bombing raids. No time for looking forward. Men must fight and die or labour deep underground extracting the fuel to keep the home-fires burning. The future is uncertain, victory is not assured.

Yet the war does come to an end and my father finds himself no longer living in the coastal mining town. His father has given up the grimy toil of the mines to become a publican, an inauspicious career move for a man who likes to drink more than he likes to work. The pub, an architecturally bland building devoid of any flourishes or finesse, sits like a squat box alongside a road that takes traffic north to Newcastle. Inside the floors are all wood and sawdust, spittoons still prevalent and in regular use, this is not a refined drinking spot. The clientele are, like my grandfather, coarse working men with brawny arms and calloused hands. Men from the collieries, and the harbour and the forge.

At night my father tries to sleep upstairs. The noise from the bar comes up through the thin floor, mixed with the stench of cheap cigarette smoke and stale beer. The noise is of men drinking, shouting, laughing, fighting and, for a young boy, it is terrifying. He knows well enough that there is more to fear than just the noise. What does he think of in those long nights? Does he think that this is where his destiny lies or does he dream of escape?

But although the nights are full of terrors, the days are different. Things are changing for this boy. Against the odds he finds himself attending the Grammar school in the city and even in such a conservative educational institution new possibilities are presenting themselves. He finds he even has some talent. Although he doesn’t know it, he will return to this school again some years later as a teacher and later still he will have a son attend there too, although by then it is no longer a Grammar School but has been transformed into a large Comprehensive School (similar metal, different fires).

At the weekends he escapes the dark and drab pub and runs with his dog across the fields. There, where field follows field to an endless horizon, lapwings take to the air and perform their low altitude acrobatics seeming to exhilarate just in their sheer mastery of the element. My father and his dog chase after them, knowing that they can never be caught. And in these fields what does this growing boy think about? As he looks at the clouds scudding across the sky, at the contours of the distant hills in the changing light, at the rainstorm coming in off the valley, and at the hedgerows, the scattered trees, the fields of barley, wheat and grass, is he thinking about what he is discovering in school? In school, it is becoming apparent that he is has a talent, a talent for art.

This talent seems to have come out of nowhere, certainly no inheritance from his father, and it fosters within him a creative urge that becomes all consuming. There is talk at the Grammar School that he should be thinking of Art College, that this talent should be encouraged. And what does that sharp-tempered miner, turned drunken landlord, think of his son when he hears of this? This question is at the very heart of the story, upon which all significant meaning rests. But I have never asked, so we must move on unenlightened. His mother, I know, though again I have never asked, is burning with pride when she hears though she contains her exuberance in front of her husband. She is also slightly afraid for her son, worried about all the impossible things he will need to face as he attempts to pursue his dreams. She worries for him still more when, a few years later, he leaves the local Art College and heads down to London, to the prestigious Royal College of Art. Finally he is free. He writes to his mother regularly, from London, humorous, warm-hearted letters about all that he is discovering there interspersed with scruffy cartoon illustrations which often depict him attended watchfully by vultures.

When he returns to the North East it is with his newly found fiancée, a student of medicine who will become a doctor, his wife, my mother. Where does the dream go then, when the children start to arrive? More mouths to feed, more bills to pay. He takes a position at his old school teaching art to give him a reliable, if not particularly large, income. And years pass. Eventually the children too leave school and home and he feels that he can at last give up his teaching post and return to his painting.

Several years later and I’m working in London for a big corporation. I’d never planned it, just sort of fallen into a job because I needed the money. It is December, cold and dark, I leave the office at lunchtime and scurry across Hungerford Bridge into the West End. My father is in town. There is an exhibition of paintings and he has several in the show. We meet for lunch and talk about a few things of little consequence, the weather, work, football before heading over to the gallery. It is the private view, the day before the public get in, so the gallery is mainly full of people with some connection to the gallery or the artists. I can’t stay long, I need to be back at the office even before we walk through the doors of the gallery but I want to see my father’s paintings, I want to be in the gallery even if just for a little while. We’re in there looking around the exhibition and, every now and then, people come up to my father and say hello. He introduces me to them and they always say something like how we look the same, how they can see the family connection. And then they ask me whether I paint too. They all ask this as though it is the most natural thing to ask and I’m embarrassed standing there next to my father and his paintings and telling them that no, no I don’t paint, that I’ve never even tried. They look surprised. I tell them what I do for a job and they seem confused. I realise that none of these people has ever worked for a large corporation, they don’t know what it means when I say what I do. And there, in that gallery, the words I speak seem strange to me too. But my time is up. I say goodbye to my father and head back through the gloomy half-light of day, across the river, and to work..

And somewhere in that story is the reason I decided to try to become a writer or at least some of the reason. Except, of course, it’s all lies. I don’t know whether there is any real truth to it at all. The bit with the lapwings, that’s true. But the rest? The rest I can’t make any guess at how much of that is true. Maybe some, maybe none but the core of the story, its real heart, is missing because I really have never asked my father about it, about his life growing up and discovering an unlikely talent.

Perhaps this has moved my exploration of the question on a bit, in a cursory and oblique way. I still can’t grasp at it, reduce it to a single imperative succinctly expressed in simple terms. Perhaps it also helps me understand that giving up that ambition was also inevitable. There are still many miles of uncharted corridors to explore here in Tartarus Central, though few promises of answers or suggestion that there is ever any way out.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

A beautiful post Martin. Would it be too tricksy to suggest that you became a writer in order to find out why you became a writer? After all as TS Eliot said in East Coker, 'In my beginning is my end'...

Dave

Martin R. said...

Dave, thanks for dropping by. I suspect that I was drawn to writing because there is something unresolved that I perhaps wanted to explore. Some of this is tied in with my father, or at least my imagining of his life, but this is in a fairly straightforward way. I suspect that all men look to their fathers to see if they can identify some connection, some heritage, some reason why their own lives have taken a particular course. In our fathers we have the most obvious starting point of the long causal chain that is our lives.

But that is just one element. The reasons to write are many and various. Some are more pressing or compelling than others (some are more worthy than others too) and I have almost reached the conclusion that it is a combination of these factors, rather than a single imperative, that turns one to try ones hand at writing. But this could turn out to be misleading. The more I think about it, the more unclear it all becomes.

Ginger said...

I thought I replied to this ages ago. I am guessing a kiddo came by and interrupted my post causing me to close things down before completing my thoughts.

Martin, I need to know the rest of your father's story! That would be such a great novel!!! I sat here reading it the first time around wondering how you could ever feel blocked with such a fantastic tale to tell.

I am of the opinion (though humble and naive it may be) that you are putting far too much thought behind the whys of your craft. Forget the whys for now and simply write! Write because you can. Free yourself of these chains of why. The answer to your whys will come along later. Often the over studied image becomes hidden to the viewer's eyes.

Martin R. said...

Thanks for dropping by, DC, and for your kind words also. You are right, of course, I do indulge in too much theorising and this will ultimately lead to little. I suppose I do it because it is easier than going back to writing. When I think about creating fiction, my first thought is not about a story or a theme but, instead, it is about how impossible it is to create fiction and this stops me, fingers dead at the keyboard. I am overly concerned with the process and the mechanics of it but at the same time know that even if I can grasp a deep understanding of the mechanics it will perhaps hinder me more than help. Very annoying.

I really admire those people who get up one day and say, “I’m going to write a novel” and don’t flinch at the prospect, don’t recoil from it in a way that they might if presented with a sheer cliff face to climb.

Laura said...

Martin, I think your writing is beautiful and vivid. Write for yourself, to capture the emotion. You can always rewrite and rework it later.

My father, too, was an artist. I didn't know him. I think I write to find out my truth, that thing I can't get to any other way. Whatever the reason, we have to do it.

Martin R. said...

Laura, thank you. It's good to hear that you have to write. I think it is this necessity and self-compulsion that differentiates the true writer from the ones who merely dabble. I spotted that tendency to dabble in myself and have avoided writing since. I do miss it at times but the sheer impossibility of it all became so overwhelmingly obstructive.

Even though I had always made it a rule that I wouldn’t create stories that had any autobiographical details, I agree with you that the core of writing, serious writing, is to be found within ourselves. Some hidden truth, some forgotten knowledge. That is why I find it so hard. I contemplated, for a while, moving away from trying to write serious fiction in favour of genres more superficial and formulaic. Yet, somehow this has no appeal for me. I don’t know whether this is because I’m unenthusiastic about the superficiality of popular fiction genres or whether, again, I fear to fail at these too.

Anyhow, I wish you luck with your writing. Shun all distraction and self-doubt.