Late Last Night Books

Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon is a fascinating literary novel and also a treasure of quotable wisdom. On the walk to work a Bern schoolteacher experiences a life-changing moment when he saves a woman from jumping off a bridge into the river. If he doesn’t become haunted by the woman herself, he becomes haunted by her language and, after a ride on the night train to Lisbon, her country. In a secondhand bookstore he buys a little-read memoir and begins an excursion into the life of a physician who grew up devoted to his father yet in conflict about the fact that his father was a judge under the dictator Salazar. The passage on anger that so struck me, being someone who has spent a lifetime feeling that his temper is his worst enemy, comes from the fictional memoir within the novel.

Last year Roz Morris interviewed me on the subject of creative writing courses, specifically, and more generally, how to learn to write. It was a long conversation, so we’ve divided the interview into four parts. This is Part One.

Roz Morris is a professional writer, editor and blogger. She is the author of the Nail Your Novel series, as well as the novels My Memories of a Future Life and Life Form Three. She is also the author of Not Quite Lost: Travels Without a Sense of Direction, (for which I interviewed Roz in this blogzine exactly one year ago, January 26^th, 2018). She teaches masterclasses for The Guardian newspaper’s writing classes, and has ghost-written bestselling books.

I opened the I Ching at random this morning and came up with #38, K’uei / Opposition.   The commentary says it is common for two opposites to exist together, needing to find relationship.  I realize an opposition is being set up just in the act of writing my memoir Drop Out:  my inner writer will be observing everything I do closely and recording what she finds valuable.  I’m reminded of a review of Journey into the Dark:  The Tunnelby William Gass that appeared in The New York Times Book Review:

Writers double themselves all the time in their fictions, of course.  That’s one of the reasons for writing them:  to clone yourself and set yourself out on a different path, or to reconfigure yourself as a marginal observer of your own childhood, as Lawrence does with Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, and as Woolf does with Lily Briscoe in To The Lighthouse; or to split yourself in two and reimagine one side of yourself through the eyes of the other, as Joyce does in Ulysses, and as Nabokov does in Pale Fire.