I find this reflection by Garth Greenwell on writing his first novel and what he calls “the privacy to fail” moving — called Like Flying a Kite in a Storm, it speaks to some of my anxieties so much, and the emotional candour here is clear-eyed and self-aware without unhappiness, heartfelt but unhistrionic, reminding me of Macneice’s The Strings are False. The novel itself will be out next January, from FSG.
[excerpts]
“I wrote the book by hand, in a series of slim spiral-bound notebooks I bought for a lev—about 70 cents—at a little stationery store on the way to school. They were wide ruled, meant for schoolchildren, and the ones I liked best had scenes of idealized village life on their covers, with the words Our Bulgaria scrawled across the top in Cyrillic. Something about composing by hand in a foreign country in the early morning dark, without a computer and its irresistible distractions, with just a small lamp lighting the page, turned writing into the most intense privacy I had ever known. I was working in a kind of figurative dark, too, since I had never written fiction before and was feeling my way forward sentence by sentence, without a clear model or shape in mind.”
*
“It’s hard now not to think of that privacy with nostalgia, but when I reached the end of what I had slowly realized was a novel, it had come to feel like a trap. After so much solitary work, I wanted the book to exist in the world, and the business of publishing fiction was more than a little terrifying—especially when I thought of approaching it from abroad. More than that, I had been teaching high school for seven years, and when I turned 35—which for whatever reason inspired a bout of stock-taking—I realized I had barely begun to do what I hoped to do as a writer, and also that I would never know what I was capable of unless I could put writing at the center of my life.”
*
“I felt sheepish at the idea, for various reasons. I already had one M.F.A., in poetry, earned more than a decade earlier, and it seemed frivolous to get another. I had fled graduate school after three years as a Ph.D. student, convinced I didn’t want the life of an academic. I loved being abroad, in a country where everything seemed as strange as a poem and where I spoke a language other than English every day. Most important, I had been living in a kind of provisional, preparatory way for so long—school and more school and then a career I felt sure wasn’t permanent—and when did I think real life would begin? I knew this was a matter not of external circumstance but of my own orientation toward the world. Another degree felt like further postponement.”
*
“And so even as I work with a publicist to construct an outward face of accomplishment, I have to try to reclaim the privacy that gives one permission to fail. So much of making art is the courting or indulgence of failure, of trying to make something you’re not sure can be made, of knowing that whatever you make will fall short of your vision for it. I hope so much that my novel will be a success, whatever that means. I also know that, where art is concerned, success can only ever be a distraction from failure.”
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird