- (Read the Danish version here.)
As a teenager, I loved reading about the grand and wild lives authors seemed to lead. Literary history overflows with these larger-than-life wordsmiths and life artists: F. Scott Fitzgerald with his Zelda, intoxicated by champagne, falling backward into a pool at a glamorous beach hotel on the Côte d’Azur. Stangerup among beautiful prostitutes in Bahia. Chatwin in Patagonia. Ib Michael in the Amazon. Blixen on her farm, stepping out of Africa. And, of course, the ultimate bon vivant: Hemingway, with grace under pressure in the trenches of World War I, fishing for marlin in Cuba, or drunkenly shouting Olé! from the front row at a bullfight in Pamplona.
Dreams in my childhood room
Back then, during the obligatory Sturm und Drang phase of my teenage years, I associated being a writer with living more intensely and dangerously than anyone else, whose most dramatic life event might be a delayed commuter train before a morning office meeting.
I sat in my attic room above my parents’ apartment in Frederiksberg, listening to melodramatic operas while writing what I was convinced was my first novel—a work as naïve and hopeless as a 15-year-old’s dreams of never riding a delayed commuter train. Life was supposed to be like those great authors’ lives—a moveable feast, full of drama, longing, and beautiful women who were always daughters of South American revolutionaries or Italian professors.
Solitude in the afternoon
Every day after school, I wrote a page of the book. I wrote on an old mechanical Remington typewriter—there was no question of using an electric one, of course; it wouldn’t align with the photographs of Hemingway I’d pinned to the wall with thumbtacks.
But something strange happened. Instead of making my life wilder and more exciting, writing turned out to be incredibly hard work. It was a battle to get the words onto the page, and I was constantly filled with doubt about whether what I was writing was any good.
And I felt utterly alone. Writing was an intensely lonely activity. I was entirely alone with the words and images in my head, and no one could help me. It was my first encounter with the solitude of writing—a loneliness every writer must live with, which over time becomes a friend you love to hate but can never escape.
Marguerite Duras and loneliness
This solitude has been beautifully described by Marguerite Duras in her little book To write (Écrire for the Francophone reader). I stumbled across it the other day—if one can stumble upon a book of only 54 pages—and was struck by the precision of the old master’s description:
“Writing does not come into being without the solitude of writing; without it, the written crumbles. It becomes bloodless in its search for what must be written next.”
Duras argues that there must be a distance between the writer and everyone else:
“There must always be a distance between other people and the one who writes the books. It is a loneliness. It is the poet’s loneliness, the loneliness of the written)
(…) This concrete solitude in the body also becomes the inviolable solitude in the writing. Solitude also means: either death or the book.”
In the attic
The cliché of the poor poet scribbling away in an attic room should, in fact, be taken literally. Because when you sit down to write, you are in precisely that situation. I felt it in my attic room during my teenage years. At first, I thought it was simply because I had no routine and still needed to learn the craft. But over the years, it gradually dawned on me that this is just how it is—and how it must be.
I slowly realized that if I wanted to be a writer, it wouldn’t be the grand, dramatic life that filled my days, but rather an inevitable solitude that would shape the days and years.
Alone among people
No one can help you as a writer; no one can support you in the process of forming sensory images and translating them into words and sentences. It can be terrifying, not least because it somehow pulls you away from other people when you sit within your own body, creating word after word, alone and sweating like a Swedish lumberjack.
Duras describes it this way:
“Writing makes you shy. You return to that state of nature that existed in the beginning of time. And you always recognize it—it’s the ancient nature of the forests. The one that lies in the fear of everything, vivid and inseparable from life itself. (…) To write, you must overcome yourself. You must be stronger than what you write.”
Reading “To write“
I don’t think it would have made any difference if I’d read Marguerite Duras’ description of the solitude of writing back then (besides, it hadn’t been published yet). But it might have taught me that the “wild life of an author” actually happens in complete silence, hunched over a keyboard.
To anyone who enjoys writing or reading fiction, I highly recommend Duras’ To Write. It’s a small book but should be read slowly. It offers a beautiful and deeply idiosyncratic glimpse into the soul of a great writer who, like all writers, sits each day at desks, kitchen tables, or even toilets, fighting their lonely battle with the written word.
