In the Margins. On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing Read online

  I’ve often used some passages from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary to get at the origin of this writing that eludes me. I would propose here, since time constrains us, only two excerpts, both very short but important to me. The first is a shred of apparently frivolous conversation with Lytton Strachey, who asks:

  “And your novel?”

  “Oh, I put in my hand and rummage in the bran pie.”

  “That’s what’s so wonderful. And it’s all different.”

  “Yes, I’m 20 people.”

  That’s it: the hand, the bran pie, twenty people. But, you see, in the space of a few self-mocking remarks there are two hints: first, the act of writing is a pure tempting of fate; second, what writing captures doesn’t pass through the sieve of a singular I, solidly planted in everyday life, but is twenty people, that is, a number thrown out there to say: when I write, not even I know who I am. Certainly, Woolf states—and here is the second passage—I’m not Virginia:

  It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life—yes, that’s why I disliked so much the irruption of Sydney—one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one’s character, living in the brain. Sydney comes and I’m Virginia; when I write I’m merely a sensibility. Sometimes I like being Virginia, but only when I’m scattered and various and gregarious. Now . . . I’d like to be only a sensibility.

  Woolf’s idea seems clear: writing is camping out in her own brain, without getting lost in the very numerous, varied, inferior modalities with which every day, as Virginia, she lives a raw life. It seemed to me, when I was young, that she was saying: oh yes, I like being Virginia, but the “I” who writes seriously isn’t Virginia; the “I” who writes seriously is twenty people, a hypersensitive plurality all concentrated in the hand provided with the pen. The task of that hand is to rummage in the bran pie and pull out letters, words, phrases. True writing is the gesture that digs into the warehouse of literature in search of the necessary words. Not Virginia, therefore, which is the name of the raw life and the compliant writing. The writer has no name. She is pure sensibility that feeds on the alphabet and produces an alphabet within an uncontainable flow.

  I am still fond of this image: an entity completely autonomous in relation to the biographically defined person (Virginia), which produces the written word in a separate space with extreme concentration. Except that it has become increasingly difficult for me to give it substance. Our impression is that writers talk about writing too often in an unsatisfying way. Think of when we say: the story tells itself, the character constructs him or her self, the language speaks to us, as if it were not us writing but someone else, who lives in us, tracing a course from the ancient world to our times: the god who dictates; the descent of the Holy Spirit; ecstasy; the encoded word in the unconscious; the network of relationships that we get caught in and each time modifies us, and so on. I’ve occasionally tried to clarify these ideas, but I haven’t done so, returning instead to myself, to my two kinds of writing. They’re not separate. The first, the usual, contains the second. If I deprived myself of it, I wouldn’t write at all. It’s writing that keeps me diligently within the margins, starting from those red lines in the elementary-school notebooks. Thanks to that writing I’m a prudent, perhaps timid (I’ve never had much courage—it’s my cross) producer of pages that keep me within the rules I’ve learned. It’s a permanent exercise, but if daily life becomes overinsistent, I can leave it without feeling too upset. Sometimes I say to myself that if Woolf’s Virginia wrote, she would write with that same compliance.

  The problem is the other writing, which Woolf prescribes for herself, defining it as a concentrated sensibility. Its center is, as for the first, in the brain—nothing but neurons. When I write I feel it, yet I don’t know how to control it. The head doesn’t know (maybe it doesn’t want to know) how to free it conclusively, or even control its appearances. So my scribbling (this, too, is an expression I got long ago from Woolf) is mostly playing the usual game, waiting for the moment of true writing.

  My work, in fact, is founded on patience. I start from writing that is planted firmly in tradition, and wait for something to erupt and throw the papers into disarray, for the lowly, abject woman I am to find a means of having her say. I adopt old techniques with pleasure; I’ve spent my life learning how and when to use them. I’ve always loved writing novels of love and betrayal, dangerous investigations, horrific discoveries, corrupted youth, miserable lives that have a stroke of luck. My adolescence as a reader became, without a break, a long and unhappy apprenticeship as an author. Literary genres are safe areas, solid platforms. There I can place a pale sketch of a story and practice with calm, wary pleasure. But really I am waiting for my brain to get distracted, to slip up, for other I’s—many—outside the margins to join together, take my hand, begin to pull me with the writing where I’m afraid to go, where it hurts me to go, where, if I go too far, I won’t necessarily know how to get back. It’s the moment when the rules—learned, applied—give way and the hand pulls out of the bran pie not what is useful but, precisely, whatever comes, faster and faster, throwing me off balance.

  Does that reliably produce good books? No, I don’t think so. As far as I’m concerned, in the end not even this writing, despite the sense of frenetic power it conveys, fills the gap between pain and pen: it, too, leaves on the page less than what in the moment it seems to have captured. Maybe, as with everything, you have to know how to capture, restrain, contain it; that is, know its merits and defects, learn to use it. I haven’t managed that and I don’t think I will. I’ve long felt it only as an instrument of destruction, a hammer that could knock down the enclosure penning me in. But destruction today seems to me a rather ingenuous, avant-garde-like project. Like all timid and dutiful people, I had the unconfessed and unconfessable ambition of going outside the given forms, letting the writing spill outside them. Gradually that phase passed: even Samuel Beckett, the extraordinary Samuel Beckett, said that the only thing we can’t do without, in literature and any other place, is form. So I got in the habit of using traditionally rigid structures and working on them carefully, while I waited patiently to start writing with all the truth I’m capable of, destabilizing, deforming, to make space for myself with my whole body. For me true writing is that: not an elegant, studied gesture but a convulsive act.

  I cited Beckett for a reason. It’s rare that someone who devotes his existence to writing hasn’t left at least a few lines on the “I” stuck forcibly in a corner of the brain making written words. And I’m sure that in those lines there is not simply a sort of homage to the passion for writing but a door or gateway open onto the meaning of the writer’s own work, its flaws and virtues. Now, in my view, Beckett, in The Unnamable, has done this best. The passage I propose is long, forgive me, but it could be even longer, maybe the whole book. Let’s read:

  I’m in words, made of words, others’ words, what others, the place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me, I’m the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs, flows, like flakes, I’m all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray, I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I’m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in
a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast, and that I seek, like such a beast, with my little strength, such a beast, with nothing of its species left but fear and fury, no, the fury is past, nothing but fear . . .

  In this orderly-disorderly din created by an I made exclusively of words—in this din that step by step leads back to the image of a long chain of caged beasts, motivated only by fear—I somewhat recognized myself. Before coming across it I had another image in mind, which originated with my mother: a whirlpool of fragment-words that made me feel sick, that scared me, and that, in my imagination, were the debris from a land submerged by the fury of the waters. A frantumaglia, my mother said, frightening herself, when she talked to me about her head, and frightening me so much that for a long time I preferred the image of the cage. At least it had secure boundaries, and it calmed me to feel that I was within a perimeter. I’m someone who generally closes the door behind me, and for a long time I preferred to resemble someone else rather than feel that I was without features. In a cage, the whirlpool of frantumaglie—which in recent years has reasserted itself—seemed to me more controllable.

  The notebooks of elementary school were certainly a cage, with their horizontal black lines and vertical red ones. There, in fact, I began to put down little stories in writing, and since then I’ve tended to transform things into neat narratives, orderly, harmonious, successful. But the discordant clamor in my head remains; I know that the pages that finally persuade me to publish books come from there. Maybe what saves me—though it doesn’t take much for salvation to be revealed as perdition—is that beneath the need for order is an enduring energy that will stumble, disarrange, delude, mistake, fail, soil. That energy pulls me every which way. Over time, writing has come to mean giving shape to a permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up. Thus the novel of love begins to satisfy me when it becomes the novel of being out of love. The mystery begins to absorb me when I know that no one will find out who the murderer is. The bildungsroman seems to me on the right track when it’s clear that no one will be built. Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly. And characters? I feel they are false when they exhibit clear coherence and I become passionate about them when they say one thing and do the opposite. “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” say those extraordinary narrators who are the witches in Macbeth as they prepare to hover through the fog and filthy air. But we’ll talk about this and other things next time.

  AQUAMARINE

  Ladies and gentlemen,

  today I’d like to begin with a rule I made for myself at the age of sixteen or seventeen. The writer—I wrote in a notebook that I still have—has a duty to put into words the shoves he gives and those he receives from others. I reinforced this statement with a quotation: Tell the thing as it is, from Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, by Denis Diderot. I knew nothing at the time of Diderot’s book; a teacher I liked had quoted the phrase to me once, as a piece of advice.

  As a girl I had a passion for real things: I wanted to circumscribe, inscribe, describe, prescribe, even proscribe, if necessary. I couldn’t contain myself, I was going to spill out into the world, into the other, into others, and write about them. I thought: everything that randomly kindles the start of a story is there outside and hits us, we collide, it confuses us, gets confused. Inside—inside us—is only the fragile machinery of our body. What we call “inner life” is a permanent flashing in the brain that wants to take shape as voice, as writing. So I looked around, waiting, for me at the time writing had, essentially, eyes: the trembling of a yellow leaf, the shiny parts of the coffee maker, my mother’s ring with the aquamarine that gave off a sky-blue light, my sisters fighting in the courtyard, the enormous ears of the bald man in the blue smock. I wanted to be a mirror. I assembled fragments according to a before and an after, I set one inside the other, a story came out. It happened naturally, and I did it constantly.

  Time passed and things got complicated. I began to be at war with myself: why this, why not this other, it’s good, it’s not good. Within a few years it seemed to me that I no longer knew how to write. Nothing I did could equal the books I liked, maybe because I was ignorant, maybe because I was inexperienced, maybe because I was a woman and therefore sentimental, maybe because I was stupid, maybe because I had no talent. Everything came to me as if fixed: the room, the window, society, good people, bad people, their clothes, their expressions, thoughts, objects that remained impassive even when they were handled. And then there were voices, the dialect of my city that in writing made me uneasy. As soon as I wrote it down, it sounded both remote from true dialect and jarring within the polished writing I was striving for.

  I’d like to take a small example that I found in my notes of long ago: the aquamarine on my mother’s finger. It was a real, very real, object, and yet there was nothing more variable in my mind. It shifted between dialect and Italian, in space and time, along with her figure, which was sometimes clear, sometimes murky, and always accompanied by my loving or hostile feelings. The aquamarine was changeable, part of a changing reality, a changing me. Even if I could isolate it in a description—how much I practiced descriptions!—and gave it a “sky-blue light,” in that formulation alone the stone lost its substance, became an emotion of mine, a thought, a feeling of pleasure or distress, and turned opaque, as if it had fallen in water or I myself had breathed on it. That opacity wasn’t without consequences; it tended almost imperceptibly to raise my tone, as if in that way I could restore luster to the stone. Better, I said to myself, to write a “pale celestial light.” Or forget light, just the color, “pale celestial aquamarine.” But I didn’t like the sound of it. I rummaged in the dictionary and pulled out cyan, the color of cyan—then, why not, cyanotic. That seemed effective: cyanotic aquamarine, aquamarine with a cyanotic light. But the light of the cyanotic aquamarine—or the cyanotic light of the aquamarine—was expanding, along with the images it evoked, into the story of my mother, into the prototype of the Neapolitan mother I was constructing, violently clashing with her dialectal voice. Was it good, was it bad? I didn’t know. I knew only that that little adjective would now make me leave the dull story of a real family and enter into a dark, almost gothic tale. So I retreated in a hurry, but reluctantly. Goodbye “cyanotic.” But I had already lost faith: the now true ring, which as a true object of my true experience should have given truth to the writing, seemed inevitably false.

  I’ve lingered on the aquamarine to emphasize that my passion for realism, stubbornly pursued since adolescence, at a certain point became a statement of incapacity. I didn’t know how to get an exact reproduction of reality, I wasn’t able to tell the thing as it was. I tried a fantasy story, thinking it would be easier, but gave up; I tried neo-avant-garde strategies. But the need to anchor myself in things that had really happened to me or others was indisputably strong. I modeled characters on people I’d known or knew. I noted gestures, ways of speaking, as I saw and heard them. I described landscapes, and the way the light passed over them. I reproduced social dynamics, settings that were economically and culturally far apart. Despite my uneasiness, I let dialect have its space. So I accumulated pages and pages of notes derived from my direct experience. But I collected only frustrations.

  At that point, by chance—which is the case with almost everything, and so also with the books that are truly helpful—I happened to read Jacques the Fatalist and His Master. I’m not going to talk about what’s important in Jacques; I would have to begin with Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which precedes and influences it, and I would never end, but, if you haven’t read them, believe me, these are books that discuss how difficult it is to tell a story and yet intensify the desire to do it. I will confine myself here to observing that reading Jacques enabled me, after many years, to restore to its context the phrase cited by my teacher: “Tell the thing
as it is,” the master orders Jacques the fatalist. And he answers: “That’s not easy. Hasn’t a man his own character, his own interests, his own tastes and passions according to which he either exaggerates or understates? Tell the thing as it is, you say! . . . That might not even happen twice in one day in a whole city. And is the person who listens any better qualified to listen than the person who speaks? No. Which is why in a big city it can hardly happen twice in one day that someone’s words are understood in the same way as they are spoken.” The master replies: “What the devil, Jacques, those principles are enough to outlaw speaking and listening altogether. Say nothing, hear nothing, believe nothing! Just tell the thing as you will, I will listen as I can and believe as I am able.”