A Room in Havana

Posted on by
3

Our flat is on the fourth floor in a busy street in central Havana. It has a living room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom – quite luxurious for most of Havana, well, luxurious for two people; often at least one family, probably more, would live in a place like this. It has a large balcony, where I spend much of my time, watching the constant action around. My neighbour’s balconies are just a few yards either side of me, and below. We have two

rocking chairs and a metal table with four chairs in the living room, a large bed; the kitchen is small but perfectly usable. We have a TV attached to the wall. Cuba has five stations now; it used to have two when I first visited. Yuri cooks every day.

Cuba13

 

The people below us were fitting a new bathroom. Intermittently, perhaps three days out of five, there was a constant banging, all day, until six or seven o’clock. It drove me mad. Yuri didn’t even notice it. The banging has changed. Tiles are being reshaped with an automatic grinder. The banging appears to have finished for the time being, cement has been mixed, I can just see it in the moribund bath on the balcony below, and tiles are being fixed. I assume the banging from before was making space for the tiles. There is occasional banging as the tiles are put in place. Everywhere you go in Havana, someone will be banging. Noise is compulsory.

When I first arrived I was completely sensitive to the noise. I insisted we change apartment (although, noise apart, I do like the place we have now). Later, I wouldn’t notice it during the day, but would get irritated if it continued after seven o’clock. Bear in mind that this noise is in conjunction with constant shouting, horns blaring, conversations of neighbours and assorted other noise. Now, after almost two weeks here, I hardly notice any noise. I think the banging would bother me, but it has stopped; the rest: the grinder, the soft banging as the tiles are put in place, the mixing – everything – is ceasing to bother me.

view1

It would be impossible to live in Cuba without acclimatising to the noise. There is something quite relaxing about that. I would not like to be Cuban; I would be at home with the organised chaos that seems to be a part of life here, but I would like to be less bothered by neighbours building a new bathroom, the everyday chaos of life. I would like to be more Cuban, while retaining whatever it is that makes me, me.

I have acclimatised before. I lived here. But I was thirteen years younger. I have certainly changed since then. I still smoke, but hardly ever drink. Before, I could barely go a day without rum. At my worst I would be drinking, perhaps, two bottles a day. I lost myself, had no idea what I was doing. I described the experience fairly accurately in my book, Caliente. I only just recognise the man who had those experiences – what was I doing? – I don’t really know. I came here with a plan. I was naive, some people tried to take advantage, others tried to help, I hardly knew which was which.

At the moment I can’t afford to stay here, although I would like to. My ambition when I get home is to promote my book (something I’ve been unable to do so far), continue with my writing and somehow find a way to live here. It would have to be partly on my terms – I would only intend to be part Cuban.  I would need a library of English books, a large library. I would need access to new books. I have discovered some Cuban and South and Central American writers I like; I’d like to discover more, but there are very few books in English here, and my Spanish is nowhere near good enough for reading. So, I would need a flat (something similar to what I have now would be fine, perhaps a little bigger) and the means to pay for it. And Yuri. That is really all I need.

The people below have started banging again, although it is fairly rare now. I have accepted it. To live in Cuba one must accept the noise, or to be more accurate: to live in Havana. We visited Tony at his Bahia house; it was perfectly quiet. In many ways it would be the perfect place for me. I didn’t like the house when I first moved there with Yamilia in 2001, or later when I lived there through necessity. I stayed there in 2009 with Yuri and I didn’t like it. The main reason for this was that the house is not within walking distance of anywhere: a few shops, a bar is ten minutes walk away, Havana a twenty minute taxi journey – back then it was not enough. But when we visited last week I suddenly realised that now, perhaps, it is ideal. It just what I need.

Before this trip I wondered if I would ever be able to visit Cuba without alcohol, specifically rum. But now I rarely drink. For three years I stopped smoking too, and I could not imagine being in Cuba without cigarettes. During the non-smoking, non-drinking years I didn’t do anything; I never went anywhere. Perhaps I was prolonging my life, but what for, for what reason?  When I began smoking again I came back to Cuba. Not drinking is now easy. I smoke far too much but I am working on that (I’ve been working on it for forty years). So now that I know that I can be here and enjoy myself without rum, Tony’s house becomes rather different. I’d often wondered what I would do with all my books, assuming that I could get them here. Well, Tony’s house is ideal; it has at least two rooms which could be used for books. And it has silence, something I didn’t want before, but now I do seek it like a pain relieving balm – I can become acclimatised to the noise in Havana, but never will I become comfortable with it. So, if I can get my books here, order the occasional new one, write, sell a few books – Tony’s house it is.

redsky2

We went to Yuri’s Padrino’s house. She is undergoing some form of santeria. Some men were banging next door; I was the only person to notice it. Later, much later, when it was time to leave, some men were banging the ceiling at Jose Marti Airport…

Cuba, a place of contradictions…

Posted on by
Reply

Cuba is most certainly a place of contradictions. If you are of a right wing persuasion you will disapprove of it; if you are left wing you will probably approve. Both sides see the country inaccurately: the right wing sees a dictatorship, as if there was freedom for the people before, under Batista, and before; the left see the last bastion of socialism, bravely holding out against a materialistic world. The truth has always been somewhere in between.

 

I have been coming to Cuba for over fifteen years; I’ve lived here for two of those years and have visited perhaps twenty five other times. My sympathies are with the Cuban people, although I do not wholeheartedly swallow the propaganda given out by the government in power, which has, in effect, been in place for over fifty years.

 

I try to see the good side. That is that Cuba has what the rest of the world has lost: a community, a people, a country. It is the one country in the world to resist Americanism. Its people still live together, they work together – they are together. How many would change given the choice? I don’t know, perhaps many, perhaps few. For years here there was little choice and there are still many restrictions.

 

At the airport we had to wait thirty minutes on the runway. The baggage area was poorly lit and understaffed. Many of the waiting Cubans were outside the building; they used to be inside. There have certainly been cuts in the labour force. But I haven’t seen drastic change; change is always very slow. Yuri (my girlfriend) says things are easier now. She knows. She is completely uninterested in politics, living only for the day. I suspect that she is not alone in that belief, that many, many more live the same way.

 

How many still support the Castros? A reign which must surely end soon, when Raul decides he is too old to continue. The Cuban news shows about two minutes of foreign stuff; the rest is advances in Cuban technology, new tractors, new medical advances, meetings where something or other was voted for or some certificate was handed out – everything is about Cuba – it is old-fashionedly Soviet in that respect. There is no internet apart from in the hotels. So the majority of the people have no idea what is going on. But they must know that their economy is a mess – the new entrepreneurship apart – and has been a mess for living memory.

 

But Cuba is a symbol. Central and South American countries have slowly tried to follow it. For all its faults Cuba has remained and sustained for over fifty years while the rest of the world has changed. Has it changed for the better? Despite the onslaught of propaganda, that is debatable.

Cuba flag

Cuba remains Cuba. Change is incredibly slow. What will happen when the Castros are gone? It is difficult to say. There will be tremendous pressure from outside to change, to become the same as the rest of the world; there would be a real-estate bonanza, people would be moved out of their homes – so much adjustment would have to take place. All this must have been anticipated by the Castros. They must have strong people in place to continue with whatever they want to do. But they are tremendous symbols of a system. The whole of Cuba identifies with the Castros. When they are gone, and with the new spirit of entrepreneurship, how long can Cuba, as it is, last?

 

Holiday for God

Posted on by
1

I lived in Cuba from 2000 to 2002, and have visited maybe twenty times since then, sometimes spending three or four months of the year there. I lived most of the time with Yamilia; José was a constant friend, as was his girlfriend Celia. Tony was a business partner; he later became more than that, when I ran out of money, but that is another story. Manolo was a translator, Tony’s acquaintance.

Manolo spoke the best English.  He was word perfect, never slipped up, read books in English, could talk about anything.  I didn’t like him much.  He was bitchy and often depressed, unique in Cuba, and he looked down on people.  He was scornful of Yamilia, the ‘she devil’ and considered her stupid.  Lots of people felt the same way.  They thought she was wasting the opportunities she had by being with me. 

‘Why doesn’t she study something?’

‘Why doesn’t she learn to drive?’

‘Your woman is not clever, she wastes everything.’ 

I disagreed, particularly about the driving.  If Yamilia ever got a license no one was safe.  José had good English.  He was educated, could approach the tourists and communicate.  But, in my time in Cuba, I didn’t notice his English improve.  He often mumbled, repeated the same mistakes.  Tony spoke no English.  Celia spoke well, but never in company.  I had good conversations with her, one to one, but in company she always deferred, she observed rather that took part in life.  That was fine, he didn’t need it.  He was top of his tree.  Why should he learn English?  I couldn’t learn Spanish; I could make myself understood, but with so many English speakers around me, I just didn’t progress beyond a pidgin style, although I did understand more than they thought.

Then there was Yamilia.  Everybody, including Yamilia, considered her English poor, basic pidgin, that’s all.  She’d lived in France for a year, spoke some French and often mixed it up together with her Spanish and English.  She wasn’t sneaky.  Some people thought she understood much more than she let on.  She didn’t.  She did have an uncanny ability to pluck complete English sentences out of the air, though.  Often expressing sly humour, big ideas, home spun wisdom or insults.  Whenever she did speak English she pronounced the words clearly, spoke very well when she strung whole sentences together.  She naturally possessed an imperious, melodic, often mocking tone, and this added to the effect.

 

Once at Tony’s house, Tony, Manolo, Jose and I had been drinking, talking politics and generally putting the world to rights.  Yamilia had no interest.  She would listen to music, do her nails, hair or just fall asleep on the sofa.  On this occasion she swanned past us on her way to the kitchen singing, at the top of her voice:

‘We are the world, we are the people,’

She sang in such mocking tones that I stopped and watched her.  She gave me a sly smile.  She would have been around ten years old when a bunch of American multi-millionaire egomaniacs got together and made that record, so as not to be outdone by Bob Geldof’s Live Aid extravaganza.  All the sugary, sentimental, self-righteous hypocrisy of that record came across in her mocking tones.  It was the perfect put down of our self-important conversation, and she just plucked it out of the air.  How?  I thought she possessed a natural wisdom and the courage and sense of fun to puncture pomposity wherever she sensed it.  Cubans wouldn’t notice; it was too subtle.  I’m sure it was unconscious on her part.  I sometimes thought Manolo picked up on it, but he was far too against her to give her any credit.  I never even tried to talk about it to her.  She would have had no idea what I was talking about.  It was just there, sometimes, and it amazed me. 

 

During the longest day we were sitting in Cathedral Square, my favourite place at the time. Very touristy but beautiful and peaceful, no matter what the time of day, no matter if there was music playing, tables full of tourists or just quiet, mostly in the lull between the afternoon trade and the evening pick up when everyone began thinking differently. We would spend hours, sometimes all day there, watching the world go by.  I was in philosophical mood, thinking about the longest day in Cuba, the tropics; not as long as the longest English day, but the longest all the same.  The summer solstice, the day the sun is said to pause.  I liked the idea, something typically Cuban about it, as though the universe paused, took a day off work.  I said as much to Yamilia, explained the summer solstice to her.

            ‘How can the longest day be a holiday for God?’ she said.

She pointed to her head,

 ‘You have problem here.’

 

Exasperated, she turned away and went back to watching the tourists. I hadn’t mentioned God, or holidays.

 

YamiliaPicI thought of this story recently. Yamilia is gone. Permanently? I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for four years, although I am in fairly regular contact. She’s in Ecuador. I’m not sure why. And I’m with someone else, Yuri, as different from Yamilia as it’s possible to be. I will be in Cuba for the whole of August. I remember the days with Yamilia with affection but they are in the past; I am sure I will see her again but the three years we were together are a memory now: unforgettable, amazing but gone. During the month I spend in Havana I will write the second part of the memoir started in 1999. It will include Yamilia and bring the story up to, perhaps, 2010. Although I can never repeat the times of 1999 to 2002 (I not sure I’d want to), the next chapter awaits.

………..

Chris is the author of Caliente, a memoir of escape, love and trouble. Lots of trouble.

‘Yamilia waits in Havana. She is astonishingly beautiful and of volatile temperament. Her enemies, and even some of her friends, think she is unstable, even dangerous. José, Hilton’s closest friend in Havana, agrees, ‘She is a bad woman. Do not stay with her,’ he pleads. Hilton disagrees; he’s in love, he doesn’t see her that way – Yamilia is natural, honest, a force of nature. Like a hurricane. He will create a new life with her in Cuba. What could possibly go wrong?’

“There are 150 books which contain everything that literature has to offer”

Posted on by
10

In the film Before Night Falls, about the life of poet Reinaldo Arenas, his poor background and persecution at the hands of security police in Cuba, there is a scene where he visits the library of a wealthy Cuban writer, José Lezama Lima.

Arenas has just come second in a national competition; according to the film he should have won. Limas says to him:

‘People that make art are dangerous to any dictatorship. We create beauty, and beauty is the enemy. Artists are escapists. Artists are counter-revolutionary and so you are counter-revolutionary, Reinaldo Arenas, and do you know why? Because there is a man that cannot govern the terrain called beauty, so he wants to eliminate it. So, here we are: 400 years of Cuban culture about to become extinct, and everybody applauds.’

‘There are 150 books that contain everything that literature has to offer. Read them and you don’t have to read anything else.’

‘So what will be the first?’

‘The Bible. You have to read the Bible. Just read it like a novel. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to give you five books. Correction, I’m going to lend you five books. You return them and I’ll give you five more.’

The five books chosen by Lima are Sentimental Education, Flaubert; Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust; Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka; Moby Dick, Herman Melville; Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson.

Now, I have read the Bible, not much, but some and I liked it. But I am not able to judge it either way and am happy to take the word of those who have read it and decided that it is great literature.

Sentimental Education is said to be best novel of the nineteenth century. I’ve read it twice, find it acceptable, but without its reputation I don’t think I would bother with it. There is too much that lacks interest; everybody is too concerned with financial dealings; I couldn’t (even after two readings) keep track of everybody; a revolution was going on while the second half of the main story played out, but I remained as unaffected by it as the author. I know Flaubert was obsessed with finding the mot juste – the perfect word; that he was one of the first authors to ‘show don’t tell’. He once said

‘Around man all is shadow, all is emptiness. The moment I don’t have a book on hand or dream of writing one I could howl with frustration. Life is tolerable to me only if one can conjure it away.’

I didn’t care about Frédéric, about Madame Arnoux or Sénécal; his novel had no effect on me.

Remembrance of Things Past, I’m trying to like, people keep saying you must read this but I don’t like it. I don’t want to go too deeply into why I don’t like these books; perhaps it’s because I see them as anti-life – especially Kafka – just to say here that I do not like them. I have tried three times to get into Proust (I will probably re-try the other authors, but Kafka has probably defeated me). I was just thoroughly bored.

Metamorphosis is difficult. I find all of Kafka unreadable (apart from his letters to his girlfriend). I can barely read one sentence of him. I’ve attempted to read other stuff. I’ve tried The Trial; I appreciate the sentiment, one man caught up in a swirl of bureaucracy, but I can’t read it. I’ve even tried the graphic novel. Believe me, I’ve tried. I don’t like Kafka.

I read Moby Dick when I was still at school, then recently tried again. I enjoyed parts of it but they were few and far between. As Clive James said,

‘Melville’s ocean clung like tar. It’s one of those books you can’t get started with even after you have finished reading.’

But the filmmakers chose those five. After seeing the film (which is great), I tried to read Lima’s Paradiso. It was the only novel he wrote (he was a poet) and I can see why. Arenas too, was a poet, but he wrote some fiction too, all of which I find unreadable. This is not to say that I am right and the writers or their critics are wrong. It is a matter of opinion.

Treasure Island I’ve only read once (and fairly recently). I liked it, maybe because it was meant to be a children’s story or a tale to be taken at face value, perhaps because it’s a

‘tale [that] sprang, effortlessly, from his pen at the rate of a chapter every morning.’

Perhaps I liked Jim’s sneaky heroics, Long John Silver’s survival instincts or Dr Livesey’s steady, cheerful demeanour. It doesn’t matter why I liked it or why I disliked the others.

They could have chosen five different books for the film, for example, The Wings of the Dove, Little Dorrit, Anna Karenina, Middlemarch and The Great Gatsby, to name just five; there are many more I could have chosen. I won’t name them here because I’m sure you have your own choices. I’d like to hear what they are. And Lima chose 150 books; he chose five at random. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that three of the five are my least favourite books, a fourth very close and only the fifth rescued the scene (in my eyes).

There is something life-denying about four of the books, excepting Treasure Island (and the Bible of course). Perhaps it’s an attitude to life; an attitude that life isn’t worth living. I would like to add other authors to the list. My list is very conservative; I wanted to make sure that my writers were literary greats: I think James, Eliot, Dickens, Tolstoy and Fitzgerald are greats in anyone’s language.

Perhaps story should be king, as it is (I think) with the five writers I have mentioned. Perhaps I am too stupid to ‘get’ Kafka, Melville, Proust and Flaubert. I don’t know. But the scene in the film stayed with me; it’s now seven years since I saw it and I return to it every two years or so.

What do you think?

Who’s Your Muse?

Posted on by
1

the_MusesIn my last blog, Write or Type, I quoted John Steinbeck, who always wrote longhand, discussing his pencils, where, almost incidentally, he said that

“sometimes when I am writing I am very near to a kind of unconsciousness.”

That ‘kind of unconsciousness’ has mystified artists for thousands of years; even the Greeks, where muses originated, could not agree on what muses are. Many writers acknowledge a debt to muses, the mysterious source of inspiration; muses are an attractive idea (to men anyway), beautiful goddesses bestowing wisdom on mere mortals at their whim, possessing all the world’s secrets but giving only small snippets to those who wish to tell truthful stories of human existence.

Do you need inspiration to work, or at least produce work that satisfies you? Or do you believe that everything is about technique, planning and hard work, that the muses are just a pleasant fantasy, adding mystery to what is a job like any other, that can be learned and mastered?

Not all writers have faith in the muse. Flaubert distrusted them. William Golding thought the idea of inspiration ridiculous. On being asked about DH Lawrence’s statement

“Never trust the artist, trust the tale”

he replied

“Oh, that’s absolute nonsense. The man who tells the tale, if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about, and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed, inspired creature, dancing along with his feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he’s leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.”

While I agree with much of what Golding says – the successful ‘starry eyed’ artist is rare – he does ignore the fact that the man who knows ‘exactly what he is about’ can still receive help from a source he does not know ‘exactly’, help from the unconscious, from the muse. Was Golding a writer who used his intelligence and ability only, always aware of exactly what he was doing, planning meticulously and never changing direction due to flashes of inspiration? Are writers divided between those who believe that they are sole creators and those who admit to outside help?

Gerard Manley Hopkins thought inspiration

“a great, abnormal mental acuteness, either energetic or receptive.”

I haven’t found much on what women think about muses, if they think in those terms at all, although Anais Nin believed that

“this dangerous alchemy called creation, or fiction, has become as dangerous for me as the machine.”

I’ll try to discover what women think about this subject (I’m sure the information is available), but would also like to hear from women writers about their belief, or lack of it, in muses and inspiration.

I do believe that good writing is the result of hard work, but also that during that hard work, inspiration can take over, providing mysterious insight, its origins not fully understood. It can change the direction of stories, give characters a life of their own, produce tales that were not consciously planned. I do like to think of the muse as female (mostly) but my sources of inspiration can vary according to mood, a bit like belief in an unidentifiable God – something is always there, you have faith in it, but you don’t know what it is.

The nine Greek muses were female: Calliope (Epic Poetry), Clio (History), Erato (Love Poetry), Euterpe (Music), Melpomene (Tragedy), Polyhymnia (Hymns), Terpsichore (Dance) Thalia (Comedy), and Urania (Astronomy). calliopeThere was no muse for novelists at that time due to them not existing, so I suppose Calliope represented the muse that would most likely provide inspiration for writers today. Calliope was a superior muse. She kept the company of kings and princes in order to impose justice and serenity, was the protector of heroic poems and rhetoric art. According to myth, Homer asked Calliope to inspire him while writing The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Stephen King has both experience and success. He possesses a fantastic imagination, and the ability to translate it into wonderful stories that appeal to millions of readers.  Although he is not a starry-eyed dreamer, far from it, he nevertheless gives credit to outside assistance. While his muse may not have the allure of scantily clad Greek beauties or Calliope’s obvious brilliance, there is no doubting King’s belief in its existence

“If you don’t want to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well. There is a muse. Traditionally, muses were women, but mine’s a guy. He’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your computer. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labour, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think this is fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he’s on duty), but he’s got the inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the midnight oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.”

King typically stresses the relationship between hard work and the support of his muse. The fact that hard work is essential is stressed repeatedly in King’s excellent On Writing. Another straight talker, Steven Pressman, also puts it succinctly

“Sometimes we baulk at embarking on an enterprise because we are afraid of being alone. We’re never alone. As soon as we step outside the campfire glow, our muse lights on our shoulder like a butterfly.”

Pressman quoted Somerset Maugham

“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

Maugham, said Pressman, recognised a deeper truth

“that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting his work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronised her watch with his.”

Pressman adds

“The muse favours working stiffs. She hates prima donnas.”

John Lennon, while not identifying his help, or recommending hard work, said

“So I’m lying around and this thing comes as a whole piece, you know, words and music, and I think well, you know, can I say I wrote it? I don’t know who the hell wrote it.”

The comedian John Cleese, on being asked where he got his ideas, said

“A little man in Swindon gives them to me, but I don’t know where he gets them from.”

Despite writers’ strange and diverse beliefs: Cleese’s little man in Swindon, King’s cigar smoking slob or Anais Nin’s ‘dangerous’ alchemy – one thing is certain – whomever or whatever your muse is, they will not come and they won’t help until you have put in the work. They will sit idly by, holding back your secrets, your tales yet to be told, secure in their ability to pluck wisdom, genius or just a good story out of the air and, when you have worked and suffered and you’re close to giving up, they might, just might, if they like what you’re doing, give you a little help.

Who’s your muse?

 

 

Note:

If you choose only two books to help you to write, not only to write, but perhaps more importantly to develop a system of work that, providing you have sufficient talent, will give you a fair chance of success, then I recommend Steven King’s On Writing and Steven Pressman’s The War Of Art. Both books give brutally honest advice and I strongly recommend them to any aspiring writer.

Write or type?

Posted on by
11

penI am fascinated by how writers write and how the process of writing has changed with the advent of technology, from the pen and typewriter which dominated until comparatively recently, to now, where in theory, one could write a novel on a tiny handheld phone. Some writers still write in longhand, believing that they work better that way, sometimes for practical reasons: to avoid distraction or because pen and paper do not need batteries, but also because they feel there is an intangible relationship between mind, hand, implement and creation.

Stephen Fry’s recommendations for writing poetry include:

“Buy a notebook, exercise book or jotter pad and lots of pencils (any writing instrument will do but I find pencils more physically pleasing).”

JK Rowling says she

“still likes writing by hand. Normally I do a first draft using pen and paper, and then do my first edit when I type it onto my computer. For some reason I prefer a black pen to a blue one, and in a perfect world I’d always use narrow feint writing paper.”

Jackie Collins’s Goddess of Vengeance comprised of 2000 handwritten pages. An assistant then types the work and Collins edits that version. She says

“I write in longhand. It takes me a long, long time to write my books. I do a lot of things on the computer but when it comes to writing I want that black felt tip pen and I want that yellow legal pad and I’m good to go anywhere in the world.”

Cecilia Ahern, author of PS I Love You, uses

“pen and paper because I love the physical act of writing – and that you can sit down anywhere and do it longhand without worrying about low batteries or Internet connections. I can write pretty much anywhere.”

These writers stress the practicality of longhand but are also specific about what they prefer: Rowling’s ‘black pen and narrow feint writing paper’, Collins’s ‘black felt tip and yellow legal pad’, while Ahern emphasises ‘the physical act of writing’. There seems to be, for some writers, a relationship between brain, hand, implement, paper and, crucially, what is actually written, something corporeal but mysterious that affects what eventually appears on a mechanically printed page.

Many writers admit when asked that most common of questions

“Where do your ideas come from?”

that they don’t know. Stephen King says

“and we know we don’t know…your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognise them when they show up.”

Ideas have ‘shown up’ to writers ever since people have told stories; before writing was reproduced and printed, stories were told from memory. Until very recently, mechanical aids were not used for writing; Shakespeare, we know, used a quill pen. It was said that he never blotted a line,

“Would that he had blotted a thousand”

said Ben Jonson, a statement of both envy and respect.

Even in the office “paper still matters” according to Phyllis Korkki in the New York Times. She cites David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, describing paper as

“in your face. Paper reminds us that we’re physical beings, despite having to contend with an increasingly virtual world,”

he said

“People complain that writing by hand is slow, but that can be good for thinking and creating. It slows us down to think and to contemplate and to revise and recast. Its physical presence can be a goad to completing tasks, whereas computer files can easily be hidden and thus forgotten.”

Some of his clients are returning to paper planners for this very reason. Although Allen does much of his writing on a computer, there are still times when writing with a fountain pen on a notepad

“allows me to get my head in the right place.”

Getting one’s head in ‘the right place’ is a difficulty most of us experience daily, but for a writer, having one’s head in the wrong place is probably the greatest obstacle to creation. So does the method of writing affect the process of getting the head in smooth writing mode? And what is the right place? To simplify matters for my purpose here, let’s just describe it as that blessed state where writing flows effortlessly. And to simplify further let us abandon the office, journalism too, and concentrate on the novelist.

John Steinbeck, in his Journal of a Novel, described writing as

“a strange and mystic business. Almost no progress has taken place since it was invented. The Book of the Dead is as good and as highly developed as anything in the 20th century and much better than most.”

Steinbeck always wrote longhand with pencil and felt that

“sometimes when I am writing I am very near to a kind of unconsciousness.”

That unconsciousness may well describe those periods when something else takes over (the Muses?) and we write as if driven by something other than ourselves, when a story becomes autonomous and seems to unfold in a way that it decides, rather than being controlled by the writer. In 1951, when Steinbeck wrote East of Eden, he could have used a typewriter. Did he, like many other writers, even today, find that writing flowed more through this relationship between hand, implement and paper than via a machine?

Steinbeck certainly had a minor obsession with pencils. In his Journal of a Novel, the diary he kept of the process of writing East of Eden, he wrote

“For years I have looked for the perfect pencil. I have found very good ones but never the perfect one. And all the time it was never the pencils but me. A pencil that is all right some days is no good another day. For example yesterday, I used a special pencil soft and fine and floated over the paper just wonderfully. So this morning I used the same kind. And they crack on me. This is the day I am stabbing the paper. So today I need a harder pencil. I have my plastic tray you know and in it three kinds of pencil for hard writing days and soft writing days. Only sometimes it changes in the middle of a day, but at least I am equipped for it. I have also some super soft pencils which I don’t use very often because I must feel as delicate as a rose petal to use them. And I am not often that way.”

Steinbeck complained that pencils were a great expense to him and that he used at least sixty a day. His best friend was the electric pencil sharpener,

“I have never had anything that I used more and was more help to me. I like to sharpen them all at once and then I never have to do it again that day.”

But he had another motive:

“I have lost the sense of rush with which I started and that is exactly what I intended to do.”

If, as Steinbeck suggests, no progress has taken place in writing since The Book of the Dead, does how we write make any difference? Will technology, the ease with which the physical book can be produced, along with automatic spelling and grammar checks produce better or worse writers? And does writing with pen or pencil improve one’s writing? Is it an aid to thinking and inspiration?

Half of the chapters in my first book were written with pen and paper. I use a Grey Pilot V5 Hi-Tecpoint 0, 5. I find the effect very similar to a pencil and of course it never needs sharpening and is good for a hundred pages or so. I keep a constant supply, always having at least ten in reserve. I can’t write with anything else; I find writing with a ballpoint resistant to flow. I do love pencils but can only write a few lines (I press too hard) before a sharpener is needed to restore a pleasing feel and appearance to my words.

Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel Prize winner for Literature, uses a graph paper notebook. He writes one full page, and then leaves the next page blank for revisions. I too like this method. Despite using a computer most of the time now, I still prefer to edit on paper, printing off a few pages and making changes with a red pen before adding them back into the screen version. I find reading and editing much easier on paper; everything is much clearer to me and the edits feel more satisfying that way – they feel right. There is certainly something very natural to writing on paper, something lacking on the screen, and I feel it’s much easier to miss errors on screen, errors which leap off the page on paper. Despite their convenience, particularly for holiday reading, I am unable to read more than a few pages of books using a Kindle or other software aids. I get no pleasure from it – something important is missing.

Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese-British novelist, organises and writes his novels with pen and paper. Only when the novel is complete does he type his own pages; before that he uses flow charts, folders of narratives, plot and narrators in a two year process – all hand-written with edits in pencil. John le Carré prefers to write his novels in longhand; he says that he’s allergic to computers. He writes from 4 a.m. until midday, when his wife types up the day’s work. All Le Carré’s papers were kept in a barn until he donated 85 boxes of manuscripts to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Much can be learned from paper manuscripts about a writer’s methods and thought processes that cannot be easily discovered from a computer. Of course, once deciphered an archive can be simplified and made available on line, but that archive would not be available in the first place without the meticulous, handwritten record.

Many of my ideas and parts of stories are in notebooks which are easily found and referred to. I find these much more accessible than those in my computer, where I have more than a thousand files containing one-line ideas, chapters, potential blogs, articles and short stories. I sometimes find stuff on my computer that I think is good and wonder who the author was, then I realise that I wrote it, often many years previously. Opening a computer folder full of files, I can’t remember what work goes with the titles given to each piece and it is very time consuming to open and check each file, whereas flicking through the pages of labelled notebooks is easier, quicker, more efficient and satisfying. For me it is, anyway. I’m sure the technically proficient could show me more efficient ways of storing work on a computer, but I think I would still come across five year old work that I’d forgotten about that would have been worth pursuing. Perhaps I’m just hopelessly disorganised and anti-technology, but I find books and notebooks a better method of storing and retrieving information.

Bestselling author Tess Gerritsen blogs on the computer, but for novels, only pen and paper will do. She uses a Bic pen and sheets of unlined paper. Comfortable composing articles at the keyboard, she struggles with novels, finding that she wastes too much time

“perfecting them.”

Gerritsen appreciates pen and paper for its physical properties:

“I like knowing that once the ink’s on the page, it can’t magically disappear when the power goes out. I like being able to write notes in the margins.”

This is not to suggest that everybody should suddenly revert to using pens and pencils. Nor am I implying that those writers using longhand are better writers, or that keyboard writers are worse. I am merely theorising about the mysterious source of inspiration (my blog on Muses) and its possible relationship to the physical process of actual writing, rather than typing.  Computers are fantastic aids to general writing, for most business uses, for journalists, for articles and those with deadlines.

Whether one writes longhand or not, pens and notebooks remain indispensable; I always carry both. Watching TV, I have an open notebook beside me for those ideas which come from the news or drama or just arrive from nowhere. You think

‘that’s a great idea. I’ll work on that later’

but you won’t – you’ll forget. The best ideas come only once; they vanish as quickly and easily as they arrive. They must be recorded somewhere, quickly. Perhaps some writers make notes in their phones or other gadgets, but what if the idea needs expanding? You can’t draw arrows, margin notes and fast alterations with a gadget. Not yet anyway.  Writers who use longhand speak vaguely of a physical relationship, physical properties, hard and soft writing days, the physical act of writing, a physically pleasing aspect. There is something there, but we are not sure what it is, how to describe it or why it helps. What I am getting at here is that the pencil (or pen) is an aid to the imagination. It is certain that even some modern novelists still prefer to write this way; when it comes to creating something more than the quotidian it appears that for some, only pen and paper will do.

Lists, rules and things to do

Posted on by
1

lists-001Do you make lists of things to do and then make rules for carrying them out?

Do you find writing lists easy and fun?

Does writing a list make you feel as though you’ve achieved something?

Do you come across old lists and rules that you’ve written down, and then realise that you haven’t done a single thing about them?

Are you beginning to despair, feeling that you’ll forever be a writer of lists and nothing more?

…

Take heart.

Below is a writer’s list of things to do. The writer’s response to what was achieved is in italics.

Take a guess as to the identity of the writer before it’s revealed.

 •••

 1)     Study the whole course of law necessary for my final exam at university.

2)      Study practical and theoretical medicine.

3)      Study languages: French, Russian and German.

4)      Study practical and theoretical agriculture.

5)      Study history, geography and statistics.

6)      Study mathematics and the grammar school course.

7)      Write a dissertation.

8)      Attain an average degree of perfection in music.

9)      Acquire some knowledge of natural sciences.

I have not managed to do these things.

•••

New List

Write down new rules.

I wrote down a lot of rules all of a sudden and wanted to follow them all, but I was not strong enough. So now I want to set myself one rule only and to add another rule to it only when I’ve followed that one.

The first rule which I prescribe is as follows:

1)      Carry out everything you have resolved must be carried out.

I haven’t carried out this rule.

 

 •••

The lists above were taken from Tolstoy’s early diaries when he was a student at the prestigious Kazan University. Tolstoy was a bad student, the beginning of a lifelong contempt for authority. He behaved very badly and then castigated himself in his diaries.

 “He had a raging uncontrollable spirit leaping off in all directions.”

97i/43/huty/9230/09

Tolstoy

 

But he did not lack ambition. He had rigorous plans, parts of which are related above. Tolstoy was forever making lists and plans and promises to himself to be the strongest, the cleverest, the most saintly model of manhood. However, in diary entries that remind you more of Adrian Mole than a future literary giant, he discovers that writing lists is the easy part.

I find it enormously encouraging that the writer of War and Peace and Anna Karenina had similar problems getting started that I suspect most of us do. It certainly prompted me not only to write fewer lists, but to make much more effort to actually carry them out and, crucially, not make promises to myself that I don’t keep.

I hope it inspires you too.

More on Tolstoy later.

Too much information

Posted on by
2

“Distraction is the barrier through which a writer must force his way.”

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow, in a lecture at Oxford University, said that a typical ‘quality’ newspaper, the London or New York Times, for example, contained considerably more information in one day than even an educated Elizabethan absorbed in an entire lifetime:

“I suspect that an Elizabethan was less confused by what he saw. He would certainly have been less agitated than we are. His knowledge cannot have laid him so close to the threshold of chaos as ours.”

That was in 1990, the Dark Ages in technological terms. How much more information do we absorb today, with the 24 hour bombardment from television, the Internet, Smartphones, iPads, radios and the printed media? More than we are designed to absorb? Can writers rise, clear-headed, above the fray and actually observe their world dispassionately before relating it back coherently to readers and, if they can, will their views be obsolete as quickly as a new phone?

Saul Bellow considered himself above the fray. Although he admitted to a certain daily addiction to ‘the news’, he was more concerned with how to get through to an increasingly distracted audience,

“The concern of tale-tellers and novelists is with human essences neglected and forgotten by a distracted world.”

Surely even Bellow, who died in 2005, would struggle against distraction today.

In 2008 Nicholas Carr wrote an article entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid? Much has been written since on this and related topics, indeed Carr expanded his article into a book, and then another, but I believe this early, brilliant and perceptive article provides most of what we need to know. Carr claimed that the Internet

 “…is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print.”

Carr cites a study of visitors to the British Library research sites, which provided access to journals, e-books and other sources of written information. It was found that people exhibited:

 “…a form of skimming activity, hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would bounce out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.”

Users would,

“power browse horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

Rolling news requires that the viewer watch and listen to material that has been repeated hundreds of times already, and is being constantly repeated elsewhere, while also reading about ‘breaking news’ being transmitted in text across the screen, probably with a view of a busy newsroom in the background where newshounds scurry back and forth, dedicated to providing the viewer with news of everything that is happening in the world, as it happens.

Mastering the delights of technology gives the illusion of control. But, for many, is it just an avoidance of life ‘out there’ rather than participation within it? We have the illusion that we are on top of everything, but what, apart from the ability to use gadgets, do we have control of? Since succumbing to a Smartphone I’ve found distraction has increased ten-fold, where once I was available only to calls and texts, now I’m available for everything – always.

Henry James advised writers

“to try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.”

Wise and true, I believe, but an Einstein-like big brain is now needed to hold and make some sense of all the information available.

Michael Foley wrote in his excellent The Age of Absurdity (2010) that

“My television and laptop both behave as though they are on first name terms with their owner and have intimate knowledge of his personality and tastes. Nowhere is safe now. I visit my dentist where for, for decades, there has only been dog-eared magazines with missing covers and find a music centre behind the reception desk, a television in the waiting room and a radio playing in the surgery.”

 ***

When Harper (Nellie) Lee and Truman Capote were researching Capote’s In Cold Blood, his ‘factual’ novel about the murder of a wealthy Kansas farmer, his wife and two of their children, they took thousands of pages of notes, interviewing and often befriending residents in their homes. They encountered an unanticipated problem: trying to keep people’s attention away from the TV,

“The nuisance of manic commercials in the background tested Nelle’s and Truman’s patience, especially when the whole point of an interview was to try to talk intimately with someone.”

NBC had recently begun broadcasting from Garden City. It was 1959. Neither Lee nor Capote owned a TV because

“It interferes with work.”

The average American is now subjected to over 3000 advertisements per day. The rest of the world cannot be far behind.

Distraction is nothing new: Virginia Woolf’s dress could be so careless that, according to Quentin Bell, her

“drawers would literally fall down”

and on one occasion,

“everything dropped”

as she was saying goodbye to guests at the door. GK Chesterton once sent a telegram to his wife, saying

“Am in Kettering. Where am I supposed to be?”

Of course their distraction was of a different kind: internal; they had both probably been mentally composing an essay or a novel at the time – this is the internal distraction of the quintessential artist, not the external distraction of modern life.

So how can writers overcome not only today’s distraction of 24 hour information but the noise that accompanies it?

In the 1880s the French poet Jules Laforgue believed that

“the modern world has embarked on a conspiracy to establish that silence does not exist”

and, like Proust, soundproofed his room with cork. Kafka thought that:

“One can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence when one writes, why even night is not night enough.”

 

NM

“I used to have a little studio in Brooklyn, a couple of blocks from my house – no telephone, not much else. The only thing I ever did there was work. It was perfect. I came in ready to sit at my desk. No television, no way to call out. Didn’t want to be tempted. There’s an old Talmudic belief that you build a fence around an impulse. If that’s not good enough, you build a fence around the fence.”

Wordsworth said that poetry comes from emotion recollected in tranquillity. The tranquillity available to him may have gone forever, but it does not mean that it cannot be found. I find I have to go to expensive extremes to get any serious writing done.  I must have some form of peace to write. I don’t need to be distracted to be diverted from writing. I can do that by myself. If there were an Olympic discipline in prevarication, I’d have a great chance of a medal – although that might be an event with a poor turnout. I planned and wrote by book from home, completed a synopsis and a few chapters and sent them away. When a literary agency told me that they would find me an agent if I could turn my draft into 300 pages of flowing text, I knew there was only one way to do it: get on a plane and go somewhere where I might be able to work without distraction.

bali-001

My Bali writing hole

The first half of Caliente was written in the garden of a cottage in Bali, the second half at a villa in Havana. An expensive and indulgent way to get one’s writing done, I agree, but it wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I can’t blame technological distraction entirely for that, but escaping it was nevertheless a part of the process; in neither place did I log on to the Net apart from morning emails from an Internet café in Bali, and in Havana from hotels with Internet access. I left my phone at home. I don’t regret my decision. I wanted to get the book written and I would have done anything to achieve it.

chriscuba-001My second book will take shape during August, in Havana. It will be extremely hot so I will spend the days in air conditioned isolation while I write for 6 to 8 hours per day, before enjoying a cooler, well-earned night out with friends. To complete the book I will probably need to find peace and isolation again. That peace might need to be found closer to home – a cottage in Wales perhaps – and more frugal writing sites may soon become a necessity. Like Michael Foley, I find much of modern life absurd. I have to escape from it before I can write about it.

“I have lived magnificent days.”

Posted on by
3

Image

I took the photograph above in 2007 in a restaurant on Obispo, in Old Havana. The restaurant hadn’t been there when I lived in Havana from 2000 to 2002, nor was it on subsequent visits in later years; it had, like many buildings in Havana, been derelict and on the verge of collapse. Practical as ever, the Cubans merely helped the building to fall down, cleared a nice bright space, installed cooking facilities and a bar, put up a canopy for shade and in case of rain, provided music both live and recorded, and it became one of my favourite places.

The mural of Che Guevara was painted by Osvaldo. It was about half complete when I first met him and took a few weeks to finish; he had also painted Ernest Hemingway. His payment for the work seemed to be that he was allowed to take a break every five minutes or so to hustle customers, including me. I was drinking alone one night and happy to buy him mojitos – instant friend.

The image of Che’s face is so ubiquitous that Osvaldo painted from memory; images of Che are everywhere in Cuba – they are also to be found throughout the world, but I’ll get to that later. I asked him if he was a painter. He dismissed the idea; the painting was nothing: he was a musician. Osvaldo was 40 but looked younger; he spoke good English and was impossibly lively, laughing and joking constantly as if he dared not stop. For the price of a few mojitos and the entrance fee to a club or two, I found places and people I otherwise wouldn’t have found. Osvaldo was contemptuous of his subject, Che Guevara, along with Castro, the revolution and the entire Cuban system,

“I am a musician, and what do I get for my talent? Nothing”

he told me, many, many times.

ImageHe was desperate to leave and chased a succession of female tourists in the hope of marrying one. He was just as tireless in this as in everything else: dancing (he was a fantastic dancer), joking, laughing, playing his music (he could play several instruments), singing and generally showing probably hundreds of women a good time. Sadly, when their holidays ended, his reward for this devotion to fun was,

“Thanks for the great time Osvaldo, I’ll never forget you.”

and they left, without him. Osvaldo introduced me to the woman I’m still with today. When I returned later, I asked after Osvaldo

“He’s in Spain”, she said, “He married a tourist.”

I’m pleased for him and hope it’s what he hoped it would be, although I miss him. The restaurant had gone now too; the site remained but it was closed. I don’t know why.*

Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara would have returned Osvaldo’s contempt, and disapproved of me also. While not humourless, and certainly possessing an unquenchable love of life, he was a very serious man:

“I do not cultivate the same interests as tourists”

he once said, putting me firmly in my place, although I do not think of myself as a ‘tourist’.

In April 1960, the freighter La Coubre exploded in Havana harbour while unloading munitions, killing at least 75 people and wounding hundreds. Guevara, a doctor, rushed to the scene to treat the wounded. At the memorial for the dead, a deeply affronted crowd were unusually quiet and reflective. Although it has never been proved who exactly was responsible for the explosion, the act was felt personally and viscerally as an attack on the Cuban people, on their efforts to free themselves from years of colonisation. Fidel Castro made a stirring four hour speech (quite brief for him) in which he used the phrase Patria o Muerte for the first time. While attention was focused on Castro, Che appeared briefly and gazed at the crowd for just for a few seconds. Alberto Korda, Castro’s official photographer, took two quick pictures of him before he disappeared again.  It’s probable that Guevara knew of the photograph before he met his death in Bolivia, but, while it hung on Korda’s wall for seven years, few outside of Cuba knew of its existence. Soon after that the whole world knew of it.

cheKorda cropped his original image to show just the face. It hung in his apartment for 7 years.

chepotraitMuch has been written elsewhere about Guevara, the copyright of the most reproduced photograph of all time, and the fortunes made from the reproduction and adaptation of Korda’s work. While Jim Fitzpatrick, who used the image to create his own stylised posters, signed over the copyright of his image to a Cuban hospital,

“because Cuba trains doctors and then sends them around the world.”

Andy Warhol insisted that profits from his own version of the image went only to Andy Warhol; he wasn’t alone. Korda, and his family since, have shown no interest in profiting from the picture. Che’s wife Aleida and his daughter are involved only in trying to limit the image’s misuse.

cheredKorda’s black and white image has been cropped, adapted, stylised, coloured, digitally altered, used, abused and misused for nearly fifty years, but remains essentially the same: an expression of clear eyed determination to fight injustice that has inspired millions. It helps that the subject was charismatic, handsome and enormously attractive to women. Richard Gott, a journalist and writer who travelled to Cuba in 1963 to report on the revolution, met Guevara. In his book Cuba: A New History he wrote:

Guevara strode in at midnight, accompanied by a small number of friends, bodyguards and hangers on. He was impossibly beautiful. Before the era of the obsessive adulation accorded to musicians, he had the unmistakeable aura of a rock star. People stopped what they were doing and just stared. Like Helen of Troy, he had an allure that people would die for.

Unlike many who have been deified after dying young, Guevara was the real thing. He was painfully honest, courageous and completely dedicated. Sickly as a child in Argentina and asthmatic, he nevertheless enjoyed rolling around in the mud, and at the age of fourteen he progressed from mud to an affair with the housemaid. Friends who spied on him described his enthusiastic lovemaking interspersed with blasts from his inhaler, the same inhaler used during the heated battles of his later career as a revolutionary.

His first experiences of poverty came during a 5000 mile road trip through South America, with his friend Alberto Granado, in 1951. Witnessing the crushing poverty of the rural poor set him on a course from which he never wavered. He abandoned his career as a doctor and, via Guatemala and Mexico, joined the Castro brothers Fidel and Raul in the revolution that toppled Batista in Cuba. It may seem naive now, but he wanted to eradicate poverty and create a more just world; people believed in that possibility then. Che was an incurable idealist while Castro was more interested in politics and power, a Fidelista according to Enrique O’Varez, once a student friend of Castro but one of the first who later tried to kill him.

Fidel Castro said of Che that

“he embodies, in its purest and most selfless form, the internationalist spirit that marks the word of today. “

But Che’s unwavering dedication to truth was painful and irritating to many of his colleagues, including Fidel. His rigid honesty spilled over into his personal life when he refused his wife Aleida’s request to go shopping in their official car,

“No Aleida. You know the car belongs to the government, not to me. Take the bus like everyone else.”

Raul Castro said:

“If the day comes when Guevara realises that he did something dishonest in relation to the revolution, he would blow out his brains.”

According to Alex von Tunzelmann, in her book Red Heat, Guevara had,

“always put his principles, however impossible, before the fundamental urge to win, and keep winning. [His] integrity was the problem.”

Integrity and politics do not go hand in hand. Perhaps only half-jokingly, Fidel said to guests at a dinner party,

”I’m going to send him to Santa Domingo and see if Trujillo kills him.”

After a spell in charge of the National Bank of Cuba, where he nearly wrecked the already fragile economy, and disillusioned with realpolitik, he decided to take revolution elsewhere, disastrously to the African Congo and then to Bolivia.  He wrote a farewell letter to the Cuban people and Fidel which included the line:

“If my final hour comes under distant skies, my last thoughts will be for this people and especially for you.”

Castro, while publicly expressing sadness at his departure, must have been glad to see him go.

Later, in Bolivia, he believed that the people would rise up as they had in Cuba, to bring down an oppressive government. Richard Gott wrote that

“He believed with passion that small groups of armed men could defeat established armies, as they had done in Cuba.”

He was wrong. The people were frightened and cowed, too afraid to act; many were willing to betray Guevara and his small band of followers. The end was inevitable. He was isolated with just 24 companions. His death came in a school room at the hands of a Bolivian soldier. Accounts vary, but it is certain that the Bolivians wanted him dead and to make it appear that he had died in battle. They also wanted his face untouched so that they could display him, in death, to the world. It seems certain that he did spit at his executioners and say;

“I know you’ve come to kill me. Shoot. Do it. Shoot me, you coward! You are only going to kill a man!”

A Cuban sniper, Felix Rodriguez, working for the CIA was also present. He claims that he gave the order to shoot Guevara and asked him if wanted to say anything to his family. Guevara replied:

“Tell my wife to remarry and try to be happy.”

In the last letter to his children he wrote:

”Your father has been a man who acted according to his beliefs and certainly has been faithful to his convictions. Until always, little children. I still hope to see you again.

A really big kiss and a hug from Papa.”

chealeidaThere is no doubting his bravery and ability when he had loyal followers, demonstrated when he won a great victory at Santa Clara against all odds. The battle was accurately portrayed in Steven Soderbergh’s epic film, Che. Over 50000 Americans stood, heads bowed, in front of the Lincoln memorial on the news of his death, while ironically it went almost unnoticed in Moscow where disdain was expressed for his adventurism. In the White House, the news was received with satisfaction. Walt Rostow, advisor to President Kennedy, said, “They finally got the son of a bitch. The last of the romantic guerrillas.”

So much has been written about Guevara that would not have been written without the existence of Korda’s photograph. He has become a symbol of revolt, of hope in an increasingly homogenised world, where half the people live dangerous, poverty stricken and fearful lives while most of the other half don’t care or avert their eyes. For a multitude of reasons Cuba’s revolution failed, although it tried, and remains a symbol of hope to many. Cuba can with justification be criticised; Che, through dying young, remains pure; his image portrays the man: his beliefs, his honesty, his courage and his humanity. Whatever happens to Cuba, however history judges Castro (and that argument will never end), that image and its power to inspire will endure. He became worth more dead than alive; not only to Fidel but to radical politics.

That it didn’t inspire Osvaldo is understandable. He wanted a better life. I hope he found it. I’ve seen that image of Che a thousand times and appreciate its power, but I prefer the man behind the legend: the man who set off with his friend to explore South America, who was inspired to action by the poverty he witnessed; the young man determined to have a good time, who fell in and out of love; the man who in battle cared nothing for cleanliness and wagered his compañeros that his shorts would stand up independently if he removed them – they did – and he won his bet; the young man who said after his South American trip,

“I began to realize then that there were things as important as being a famous researcher or as important as making a substantial contribution to medicine: to aid those people”

and never wavered from that promise; the man, who facing death, spat at his executioners and called them cowards. Irritating and unrealistic he may have been, but the image speaks of someone willing to strive for ‘impossible’ principles. Where many revolutionaries have proved to be frauds, fame seekers and sociopaths, Guevara was absolutely genuine.

I told Osvaldo the story of Che’s shorts. He didn’t stop laughing for ten minutes. I think Osvaldo would have liked that young man too, but times have changed. Richard Gott met Guevara just once. Strangely, he was present four years later in the aftermath of his death and, with a Cuban-American CIA agent, Eduardo Gonzalez, was one of only two people present who had seen Che Guevara alive and could identify the body. When Gott asked him where he came from, he replied

“From nowhere.”

Exactly.

“I have lived magnificent days.”

chesig

*   The restaurant has since reopened. It’s still great, but in a different way. Osvaldo’s murals have gone.

Victor Hugo did it Naked

Posted on by
19

Victor Hugo did it naked, standing at a lectern facing a third floor window of his Guernsey home, overlooking St Peter Port harbour. Tennessee Williams couldn’t stop doing it and worried constantly about it. George Orwell thought it “a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness”, while Evelyn Waugh required “merely silence” to do it; he preferred his children to be “away”. John Lennon thought it ‘torture’ and GK Chesterton believed there was only one way to do it.

penFor many authors, writing is not a pleasurable experience, although Victor Hugo may have discovered a fun element.

Why am I writing about writing? Well, I’ve written one book and I’m desperately trying to write a second. I didn’t begin writing my first until into middle-age and it took me a few years to complete.  I’d always wanted to write, so why did it take me so long?

Because I will do anything rather than sit down and write; tasks I normally hate: cleaning, paying bills, laundry, suddenly take precedence over writing, even though it’s the writing and the ideas for writing that are constantly swirling around in my mind. When I finally force myself to write, the early stages are the hardest, the period when nothing will come, when I believe I’m an utter moron and question my ability: “who are you kidding, thinking you can write?” This is often the stage where I just have to do that extra piece of research, read the latest book on how to write or the latest author biography, switch on that must-see TV programme – or just give up and open a bottle of wine.

But why is writing so hard?

John Yorke, in his recent book Into the Woods, shows that stories follow a pattern, a common structure. This is not a new idea, far from it, but Yorke believes that the archetypal structure matches deep psychological needs within us all: order from chaos, characters changing, confronting their demons to become the people they were always capable of being. This supplies a need for the reader, who is comforted by the process, identifying with the character that brings order from turmoil, confronts and slays the enemy. The detective story is a perfect example: a problem is solved; there is resolution. Most of us do not confront what we fear; we hide and play it safe. This explains the hunger for stories, be they in books, films, soap operas or reality TV shows: secret fears are confronted and overcome.

I have oversimplified outrageously, but I believe that for many writers the process of sitting down and writing is also, like story structure, a confrontation with the enemy: self-knowledge, not only in the sense of revealing oneself but in conquering doubts over one’s ability. In practical terms writing should be easy, you just sit down (or stand naked at a lectern) and do it. But it isn’t easy. Steven Pressfield in The War of Art puts it bluntly:

“How many of us have become drunks and drug addicts, developed tumours and neuroses, succumbed to painkillers, gossip, and compulsive smart-phone use, simply because we don’t do that thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is telling us to? Resistance defeats us.”

I love the idea of writing, I want to write but hide from its practice, unless … unless I force myself to sit and write, probably awful stuff, for at least an hour. Then, miraculously, something happens – not always, it’s not that easy – and the awful stuff begins to make sense: it flows, ideas appear from everywhere, ideas that had been locked away, ideas locked away by me while I resisted and wasted my time, pour onto the page, ideas I didn’t know I’d had; plots change, characters change, and for a blessed few hours I am creating something, something worthwhile and I am enjoying writing. But that initial process of beginning – it’s hard, and I resist it much more often than I embrace it.

The truth is that writing is very hard work; you have to be dedicated and professional to keep going. Norman Mailer put it well:

“One must be able to do a good day’s work on a bad day, and indeed, that is a badge of honor decent professionals are entitled to wear.”

Apparently more than 80% of people say they want to write a book, but less than 1% do. Not all those would-be writers have the ability to write – The X Factor shows us that believing you have talent and actually possessing it are two very different things – but I’m sure there are many talented people among that group telling themselves every day that they will start that novel tomorrow or next week or after they’ve finished researching the history of Florentine art for that Renaissance murder mystery they’ve been planning for five years. Steven Pressfield, straight as ever, gets right to it:

“We don’t just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.”

And GK Chesterton’s

“one way to do it”

his method of getting it done?

“Apply the seat of the pants to chair and remain there until it’s finished.”

I’m about to do just that, right after I’ve cleaned those windows, they’re filthy.