I need to find a "moment" for a
newspaper-column pitch, where my life changed. That’s the way the gig works you
see. It’s called the moment that changed my life. My publisher, the brilliant 'Fly on the Wall Press' are keen for me to pitch a script and we'll figure out a way to tie it into the launch in February of 'The Wager and the Bear.' It's a great idea, but this is a tough
call for a writer. Writers aren’t meant to have interesting lives. We are supposed
to be slaves to our desks, hunched forever over our typewriters (OK … keyboards),
gazing wistfully at a world beyond our windows. We don’t have adventures of our
own. We are expected to invent them. That way, everyone can enjoy them.
Of course this hasn’t always been
true. Literary history is strewn with hard-drinking, swash-buckling,
law-breaking, jail-bird adventurers who somehow managed to find time to put pen
to paper. Hemmingway had a remarkably eventful
life if you remember. I’ve seen the spot on the Nile River where he and Mary
Welsh crashed their little Cessna plane and had to camp on the crocodile-infested
riverbank. These days, guides on the Murchison-Falls tour-boats helpfully point
the location out for you. There are still plenty of crocodiles, but the
jeopardy is not quite the same. The day after the accident the Hemmingways
crashed a second plane, and the great writer escaped only by smashing through
the window with his head. Now that was a significant moment. I bet Hemmingway would have used that one. Kurt Vonnegut
was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, and he survived the
fire-bombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker. He'd have had no trouble with this column. Günter Grass served in the
Waffen-SS and got taken prisoner by the Americans. George Orwell fought in the
Spanish civil war where he got shot in the throat by a sniper. Significant, life-changing moments all. And it is difficult
to imagine these writers producing their masterpieces without these experiences.
I’m just not sure I can match any
of these. I once spent a night in a French prison (don’t ask) but it hardly compares with John Bunyan who was
imprisoned for twelve years for preaching without a license, or Dostoevsky’s four
gruelling years in a Siberian prison camp for meeting in a bar with other
intellectuals to discuss utopian socialism. You have to hope the beer was good.
Primo Levi survived a year in Auschwitz. Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in the Gulag
for criticizing Stalin. Henri Charrière got sent to a brutal penal colony in
French Guiana in 1931. He escaped and wrote ‘Papillion.’
I’m not sure whether to pity or
envy the experience of these writers. They certainly knew how to turn their
life changing moments into good stories. And when writers couldn’t find time for adventure,
they could often claim a tough childhood. Dickens had to leave school at the
age of twelve to work in a boot-polish factory because his father was in a
debtor’s prison. Mark Twain also had to finish school at twelve. He went off to
be a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi. That must have been eventful. Maya
Angelou was abused by her mother's boyfriend at the age of seven and she didn’t
speak for almost five years. James Joyce grew up in poverty. So did Edgar Allen
Poe. So did Frank McCourt. And Tennessee Williams. And Rousseau. And Robert Burns.
And Orwell. And Jack London. And D.H.Lawrence. JK Rowling faced hardship as a
single mother living on the breadline. Sylvia Plath battled depression. Virginia
Woolf struggled with her mental health. It makes you wonder if fortitude and a
talent with words go hand in hand.
I can’t really claim a life-changing
moment like any of these writers. I can’t boast a difficult upbringing and I’ve
never had to buckle a load of swash. I once saw a Javan rhino. That’s a rare
thing. I had a holiday job counting elephants in Tsavo. I met Idi Amin in a bar
and he bought me a drink. I drove across the Sahara in a Renault 5. I played
Laertes in a school production of Hamlet. I was part of a team that broke the
world record for speed-reading Shakespeare. But somehow, I don’t think any of
these things will feature in my obituary. None of them changed my life. Not
really.
So I’m going to have to keep on
thinking. If I ever get the gig I shall post it here.
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