Back in the 1990s, driven by the desire to carve out a space to write without any distractions, I took myself off to a Greek island for six months. If this conjures up images of hot sunshine, bottles of ice cold Retsina and Lotus-eating in Arcadia, think again. The island I chose for my writer’s exile is in the Northern Aegean and I went there in late autumn and again in early Spring, when gales and driving rain can cut off electricity and bring down telephone lines. Most of the time it was very cold, and my tiny, white-washed room, built to accommodate summer visitors, had no central heating.
There were days when the rain seeped through, round and under the doors and windows, forming puddles faster than I could mop them up, when I wondered why I had chosen to stay in a place with one hot water tap and a shower which dripped rather than showered, and why I had forsaken Marks and Spencer’s ready prepared food department for wrestling with a dead cuttlefish. The fisherman at the harbour who sold it to me assured me it would be delicious. All I had to do was to remove the large central bone which, as he demonstrated with a quick motion of his hand, was easy. However, my increasingly desperate efforts eventually caused the bone to shoot out of the cuttlefish and embed itself in the ceiling.
As a single, foreign woman, living in a small fishing village out of season, I attracted a lot of curiosity, if not to say notoriety, and all my movements were watched and solemnly reported back to me. Why, for instance, did I go for such long walks and refuse the lifts that were so kindly offered to me? Surely no-one would choose to walk when they could ride in a car? And didn’t I realise what danger I was in when I walked into the hills? When I asked why, looks would be cast from side to side, and the voice of the speaker would sink to a whisper: shepherds spent months alone with their sheep in the hills and the sight of a lone woman might be too much for them – after all, they were Greek men. My landlady chaperoned her elderly husband when he came to my room to fix anything, and if any man, and by that I mean any male over the age of fourteen, came to my room alone, the news was around the village within minutes. On the other hand, I left my door unlocked without fear, day or night, and there were days of brilliant sunshine, when the sea and the sky were of a blue so intense that it hurt my eyes and made me euphorically glad to be alive.
My latest novel Mothers, Sisters & Other Lovers grew out of that trip as well as many others I made to Greece, but the novel didn’t really take shape until I was back in England. Sometimes, it’s necessary to take a step back in order to see what is there. Freya Stark, the doyenne of travellers and travel writers, put it aptly when she wrote that writers, like painters, need to stand back from what they want to see in order to get the perspective right. She called it: ‘the eye of distance’.
Distance brings clarity of vision because it frees the mind from the petty tyrannies of everyday life, among them ‘the pram in the hall’ which the literary critic and writer Cyril Connolly so famously dubbed ‘the enemy of art’. Now the more cynical might say that this proves what they have always thought - that writers are feckless creatures - but it is this very attitude that has driven many writers to seek more amenable and less judgemental climes, where literature is viewed not just acceptable, but as a laudable vocation. That is not to deny that sex, that most basic of human drives has not played its part. In the past, the more lax sexual and social mores of ‘abroad’ were the reason that many a writer chose to live in self-imposed exile.
Lawrence Durrell, whose books, like those of his animal-loving brother, Gerald Durrell, first fired me with the desire to be a writer, as well as to go to Greece, voiced similar feelings to Freya Stark in his great work about expatriate life, The Alexandrian Quartet. At the beginning of the first book in the series, Justine, which is set on a Greek island, he wrote: ‘I have had to come so far away from it in order to understand it all.’
Perhaps that is why some of the writers most famed for their literary evocations of their native countries spent much of their writing lives abroad – distance distils memories and stories to their essence. James Joyce, that most quintessential of Irishmen, left Ireland with his partner Nora Barnacle when he was twenty. He wrote Dubliners in Trieste and Ulysses in three different European cities. Yet to readers, it is as though he wrote them while standing on a street corner in Dublin, drinking in the tastes and smells of that fair city.
This does not mean that to write a great book you have to travel, far from it. Many great writers never move any great distance from the house or the social milieu into which they were born, witness Jane Austen. However, it is their imagination, as well as their ability to see with the ‘eye of distance’, that allows them to make a universe of their world, a universe that can be recognised by anyone who reads them, whether they live in Manchester or Mumbai.
The New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, whose autobiography was so memorably translated into the film An Angel at My Table by Jane Campion, the director of The Piano, understood that. Frame spent a winter in Ibiza in the 1960s, and in the second part of her autobiography, An Envoy from Mirror City, she described the glittering image of Ibiza town mirrored in the sea. However, it was not the city she was seeking: ‘I knew that whatever the outward phenomenon of light, city, and sea, the real mirror city lay within as the city of the imagination.’
It is this ‘city of the imagination’ that all writers seek, wherever they are.
(This post is an edited version of an article that appeared in the British Airways ‘Highlife’ magazine in January 1999)
There were days when the rain seeped through, round and under the doors and windows, forming puddles faster than I could mop them up, when I wondered why I had chosen to stay in a place with one hot water tap and a shower which dripped rather than showered, and why I had forsaken Marks and Spencer’s ready prepared food department for wrestling with a dead cuttlefish. The fisherman at the harbour who sold it to me assured me it would be delicious. All I had to do was to remove the large central bone which, as he demonstrated with a quick motion of his hand, was easy. However, my increasingly desperate efforts eventually caused the bone to shoot out of the cuttlefish and embed itself in the ceiling.
As a single, foreign woman, living in a small fishing village out of season, I attracted a lot of curiosity, if not to say notoriety, and all my movements were watched and solemnly reported back to me. Why, for instance, did I go for such long walks and refuse the lifts that were so kindly offered to me? Surely no-one would choose to walk when they could ride in a car? And didn’t I realise what danger I was in when I walked into the hills? When I asked why, looks would be cast from side to side, and the voice of the speaker would sink to a whisper: shepherds spent months alone with their sheep in the hills and the sight of a lone woman might be too much for them – after all, they were Greek men. My landlady chaperoned her elderly husband when he came to my room to fix anything, and if any man, and by that I mean any male over the age of fourteen, came to my room alone, the news was around the village within minutes. On the other hand, I left my door unlocked without fear, day or night, and there were days of brilliant sunshine, when the sea and the sky were of a blue so intense that it hurt my eyes and made me euphorically glad to be alive.
My latest novel Mothers, Sisters & Other Lovers grew out of that trip as well as many others I made to Greece, but the novel didn’t really take shape until I was back in England. Sometimes, it’s necessary to take a step back in order to see what is there. Freya Stark, the doyenne of travellers and travel writers, put it aptly when she wrote that writers, like painters, need to stand back from what they want to see in order to get the perspective right. She called it: ‘the eye of distance’.
Distance brings clarity of vision because it frees the mind from the petty tyrannies of everyday life, among them ‘the pram in the hall’ which the literary critic and writer Cyril Connolly so famously dubbed ‘the enemy of art’. Now the more cynical might say that this proves what they have always thought - that writers are feckless creatures - but it is this very attitude that has driven many writers to seek more amenable and less judgemental climes, where literature is viewed not just acceptable, but as a laudable vocation. That is not to deny that sex, that most basic of human drives has not played its part. In the past, the more lax sexual and social mores of ‘abroad’ were the reason that many a writer chose to live in self-imposed exile.
Lawrence Durrell, whose books, like those of his animal-loving brother, Gerald Durrell, first fired me with the desire to be a writer, as well as to go to Greece, voiced similar feelings to Freya Stark in his great work about expatriate life, The Alexandrian Quartet. At the beginning of the first book in the series, Justine, which is set on a Greek island, he wrote: ‘I have had to come so far away from it in order to understand it all.’
Perhaps that is why some of the writers most famed for their literary evocations of their native countries spent much of their writing lives abroad – distance distils memories and stories to their essence. James Joyce, that most quintessential of Irishmen, left Ireland with his partner Nora Barnacle when he was twenty. He wrote Dubliners in Trieste and Ulysses in three different European cities. Yet to readers, it is as though he wrote them while standing on a street corner in Dublin, drinking in the tastes and smells of that fair city.
This does not mean that to write a great book you have to travel, far from it. Many great writers never move any great distance from the house or the social milieu into which they were born, witness Jane Austen. However, it is their imagination, as well as their ability to see with the ‘eye of distance’, that allows them to make a universe of their world, a universe that can be recognised by anyone who reads them, whether they live in Manchester or Mumbai.
The New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, whose autobiography was so memorably translated into the film An Angel at My Table by Jane Campion, the director of The Piano, understood that. Frame spent a winter in Ibiza in the 1960s, and in the second part of her autobiography, An Envoy from Mirror City, she described the glittering image of Ibiza town mirrored in the sea. However, it was not the city she was seeking: ‘I knew that whatever the outward phenomenon of light, city, and sea, the real mirror city lay within as the city of the imagination.’
It is this ‘city of the imagination’ that all writers seek, wherever they are.
(This post is an edited version of an article that appeared in the British Airways ‘Highlife’ magazine in January 1999)
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