Article Thirteen - The Life of an Author

Literature │The Life of an Author

(publihed in "Avrupa")

As I gaze across my room, allowing my eyes to fall upon the vast number of books that I have accumulated through many years; presents from people that know that I am obsessed with the written word, books that I buy from the market, the second hand shop, and the ones that I buy for myself at full price as a treat, I noticed that I have collected a decent number of biographies, autobiographies and diaries. It was while taking a second glance at these books that I had to ask myself, what was it that I wanted from these books? I have The Journal of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962, along with biographies of poets such as Ted Hughes, Blake, Wordsworth, and so on. I had also purchased Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Diary and have started collecting her diaries; so far I have Volumes 1-3 and have to buy the last two. The matter of the fact is, I wish to know and understand the minds and the lives of the writers and artists that have brought me endless hours of pleasure, transporting me away from my own thoughts and opinions. I want to know how Blake through writing and etching, was capable of seeing light in the darkest places, especially when he would be beaten for talking about his visions, such as angels in the trees on Peckham Rye. But what is it that makes me hunt down Woolf’s diaries which are not only out of print, but are also very expensive? Well my answer has something to do with the way I see writing and the ability to write, which to me is liken to a magic trick.

I want to know what it is about them that enables them to produce the greatest pieces of time, and wonder if I could possibly attain a slice of what they have. I’m not interested in what they had for breakfast or what side of the bed they sleep on, I am interested in how they decode the world around them, and how their mind ticks, but most of all, it is to our greatest pleasure when one finds out that they are in fact one of us, therefore, at this point, maybe I am slightly intrigued in what they had for dinner. From Volume 1 of Virginia Woolf’s diary, I have learnt a number of things, the first is about how humorous Woolf can be, and what a strong spirit she had, especially in the time of war where she discusses what a nuisance it was having to keep returning to the kitchen while the bombs went off throughout the night, but everything gets rounded off with a nice cup of hot chocolate. Such a moment would only sound like a half-truth upon some biographer’s tongue, and we deserve to receive the full-life of words and experiences.

There have been great moments of realisation when reading such diaries as these writers turn real life people into characters in their books and the smallest observations into pinnacle moments within the text, it is as though everything becomes recycled as Barthes wrote in his essay “The Death of the Author” (1977) “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. [. . .T]he writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.” But is life not like this? Are we not constantly interpreting everything we see and experience? Of course others have done this also, however, each experience is an individual one and does not deserve to be thrown away and dismissed as a mere copy and lacking any originality.

Claude Levi-Strauss once said, “I don’t have the feeling that I write my books, I have the feeling that my books get written through me...I never had...the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no “I”, no “me” This image of writing taking a hold of the author is a very supernatural one, it makes it almost seem easy, a little too easy in fact, and that is what I hunt for when reading the diaries and biographies of my favourite artists, I am looking for that trick that they have up their sleeve, but most importantly, I am looking for that link that can form a bridge from their world to mine.

©Zehra Mustafa

This week’s selection;

Current reads

Darkmans by Nicola Barker

&

The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1, 1915-1919

On this day...

Well, it's been a tough day, having only managed to type up only a few pages of corrections, at least the beautiful weather is holding up! I've been enjoying Virginia Woolf's diary, vol 1, not only does one get a real feel for the type of life she lead; her friends, her work, the war, but one gets a clearer sense of her being, something that you can not absorb through the vast amount of biographies that have been written about her.

Here is a piece written on Tuesday, April 24th 1928 (From A Writer's Diary)

"A lovely soaring summer day this; winter sent howling home to his arctic. I was reading Othello last night and was impressed by the volley and clime and tumble of his words; too many I should say, were I reviewing for The Times. he put them in when tension was slack. In the great scenes, everything fits like a glove. The mind tumbles and splashes among words when it is not being urged on; I mean, the mind of a very great master of words who is writing with one hand. He abounds. The lesser writer stints. As usual, impressed by Shakespeare. But my mind is very bare to words- English words- at the moment; they hit me, hard, I watch them bounce and spring. I've read only French for 4 weeks. An idea comes to me for an article on French; what we know of it."

Article Twelve - A Waste Land

Literature │A Waste Land
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

(published in 'Avrupa' newspaper)

As I searched among the library shelves for a Vita-Sackville West novel, and unable to find one, I set out to find another book, as I can not abide leaving the library empty handed, and that was when I came across Evelyn Waugh. I knew that he had written Brideshead Revisited (1945) which had been turned into a film for a second time in 2008, but that too was not available; however, I was not disheartened, as I came across A Handful of Dust and returned home, anxious to delve into my new find.

Evelyn Waugh, was born in London in 1903, into a comfortable English middle-class family, but he wasn’t really a happy chap as he contemplated suicide, he even got as far as swimming out to drown himself, but had decided that it wasn’t really for him. Waugh has been considered to be one of the greatest English writer’s of his time, but he has also been considered to be unimaginative and untrue about certain aspects of society, his writing bulges with satire, almost in the same league as William Hogarth, but not anywhere as good as Alexander Pope.

A Handful of Dust (1934) was Waugh’s fourth novel, it delves into the marital state of Mr Tony Last and Lady Brenda Last, which turns out to not be such a contented one, and of course Tony is completely oblivious to his wife’s dissatisfaction with her life in her husband’s beloved Hetton Abbey, which is out in the country, in the middle of nowhere. It is not long before you become aware of a satirical voice, in fact the first instance made me laugh out loud when John Beaver refers to his mother as “mumsy.” Waugh sets the classes apart immediately on the page mainly through language, there is the upper class (Tony Last & co), the middle class, aspiring to be the upper class (Mr Beaver and his mother) and there is the working class (Ben) who manages the horses and has a certain effect on the young John Last. These separations are terribly obvious, and therefore, the book doesn’t make one’s cogs in the brain work too hard. At first, I found the writing to be awfully flat, the language dried to the point of it shrivelling, and therefore did not really engage with my mind, it almost seemed somewhat feeble and laughable, but this may have been Waugh’s ruse all along. Waugh places the concept of the gothic in the background, with the gothic Abbey as the Last’s home which has been passed down from one generation to the other, and with the even more terrifying ending of the book, in which we finally find ourselves in the desolate and dangerous land of Brazil.

Until chapter five, titled “In Search of a City”, the novel doesn’t really roll out in front of us very gracefully, instead, it is as if it has been plonked onto our laps, as though Waugh is saying “there, make what you will out of it, I am done with it.” My first impression to Waugh’s writing came with a sense of hostility, as it seemed as though he hadn’t placed a scrap of emotion within the flat text, maybe it was to do with the fact that he didn’t favour marriage too well due to the break up of his first one, but I shall not go into that. I laid it down to what seemed like what could be considered as emotionless-ponce English. His ability to describe a setting is least to say lacking, that is until the end when the setting is reverted to foreign lands such as Brazil, maybe where his heart really lies, but in the meantime, descriptions of what are presumed to be beautiful settings in England where dismissed and replaced with bland imagery without the slightest hint of poetry, which is the way that I tend to enjoy settings as they broaden the imagination. However, I may have been hasty, as the novel is about the decay of marriage and the absurdities of society, the title even induces a strong sense of this decay, as well as the thoughts of “nothingness”, which is a concept that Waugh took away from Eliot’s epic poem, “The Waste Land”. Waugh cleverly uses language to mirror this sense of nihilism, making the reader aware that he is not in fact dosing away in his chair, but sitting upright, ready to write a story, which may not be a completely accurate image of society, as declared by Virginia Woolf, but an image of a society which is quite real to Waugh himself.

Character development is not Waugh’s strong point; his penchant is with actions and situations that arise within the text, making the novel heavily based on circumstances. Waugh’s fixation with the gothic becomes more apparent towards the end as Tony Last tries to escape a divorce settlement and leaves his beloved abbey to pursue a lost city in Brazil in which we become wrapped up in concepts of the ‘other’ and the “sublime & the beautiful”. The last part of the novel could not be further away from the posh confines of life at Hetton. In fact it is exhilarating, and exciting, but I warn you, this novel has a cruel twist, one that leaves the reader shocked, and petrified, it’s almost a cruel joke on the author’s behalf, and it is this twist at the end that makes the read truly worth plunging into.



©Zehra Mustafa

Article Eleven - The Other

Literature │The Other
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz

(published in "Avrupa" newspaper)

I believe that honesty is of upmost importance, in fact, it is vital, and that is why I am going to immediately declare that within the first few chapters of this novel, I nearly put it down and cast it away for good; but I kept on reading having been told that it was a good book, and as you may know, when someone tells you that a book is good, you almost feel that it is your obligation to be a fan of it also. The reason for my hesitation was due to my prudishness, so I have been called, I do not think of myself as a prude, but believe myself to have a particular taste, one that does not involve too much violence, too much sexual imagery and too much slang, after all, this book is certainly no Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The novel is riddled with sexual imagery and direct language which deals with life as a Dominican and the history of life in the Dominican Republic, a world that I literally knew nothing about. Once I became accustomed to the narrative, I found myself quite enticed and intrigued by the novel’s plot. The wondrous element of this novel was the way in which I became completely submerged in a completely alien environment whilst sitting in my familiar chair in my familiar setting, and what a fascinating plunge it was to carry on reading this novel with its numerous intriguing stories that unravel slowly before your eyes.

What I really want to discuss briefly is the subject of women and their portrayal in this novel. The Story is ‘yes’, named after Oscar who is a geek who can not help but fall in love over and over again, but the novel centres on strength, belief, passion and survival, especially when it comes to women; such as Oscar’s mother Beli, his sister Lola and grandmother La Inca. Now I must make it very clear, I am in no way a feminist, but one can not help but look into feminist theory when reading this novel; one must take into account the way in which language is used and the way that it is terribly apparent that there is a strong male voice throughout. The novel has a male narrator and the focalisation is quite evidently male also, and yet it is the women within the narrative that literally govern the entire story, therefore Diaz does not completely suppress the female experience altogether but describes one in which women are merely pieces of eye candy, a bit of entertainment, and in some cases, particularly to Oscar, the universe.

Women throughout history and throughout this novel have always been treated as the ‘other’. Women in this novel tend to be feared by men, either by their beauty or their ferocity. In one instance, in chapter five “Poor Abelard” which is about a doctor (Beli’s father) who fears that his beautiful daughter will be noticed and raped by the evil dictator Trujillo who had his way with any beauty he wanted, we witness how a woman’s beauty becomes her enemy in such a horrific circumstance, she becomes a piece of meat that a father can only hope to appear rotten and not given a second glance. Simone de Beauvoir discusses the way in which women have been viewed throughout history by men and why it was important for men to be able to differentiate themselves from women. One can see that the reason is partially to do with the fact that in many cases such as in this novel, that they fear what they may not be able to control. In Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex, she discusses the woman as the Other and the way that everything gets broken down into biology, she writes; “Woman? Very simple, say the fanciers of simple formulas: she is a womb, an ovary; she is a female…The word female brings up in his mind a saraband of imagery…the monstrous and swollen termite queen rules over the enslaved males; the female praying mantis and the spider, satiated with love, crush and devour their partners…” This is certainly the image that is conjured up throughout the novel; when men have felt like they have no control over a woman, she tends to get beaten up and put into her “place”. Dominican women are portrayed as tough women who are what would be considered as “male- like”, the language is used to mirror this, when a woman has done something courageous, Diaz refers to her as having the ‘ovaries’ to do it rather then the typical use of the male anatomy that tends to be used.

The fact that the women are strong within this particular culture, as portrayed by Diaz, is not because they are irrational and fiery the way that they may appear, but they are the way that they are through force and their experiences with men throughout the centuries. This known experience therefore gets passed down from mother to daughter and from father to son, which continues even when the setting changes, such as in this case which is New Jersey. This novel is certainly worth picking up, as it is quite fulfilling, not only as a small guide to the history of the Dominican Republic, but also into the lives that have come out of such a turbulent past and the way in which strength can be found within those that find themselves at their weakest point and when least expected.

©Zehra Mustafa

Good Friday & a Good Reading Day

Finally, on a grey Good Friday, I have officially finished editing my book! and now I shall have to re-write my synopsis, and off it goes to the agents again, and I must prepare myself for the scrutiny yet again and the thoughts that I may not be good enough. But for today, I'm going to give the writing a rest, and try and to get some reading done, what else is there to do on a wet day in London?

I have just finished reading Elif Shafak's The Bastard of Istanbul which turned out to be quite a good book, the problem with the novel is the way in which everything seems to unravel at quite a fast pace at the very end of the book! but it is definitly worth a read, I will probably end up doing a review of it in a few weeks time, but in the meanwhile, I've taken Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust out of the library, I've already read a few pages and burst out laughing when John refers to his mother as "mumsy". So, my advice, make it a reading day.