Not a Writing Neurosis but a Writing Indulgence

For years I resisted the Moleskine notebook, believing it to be the preserve of the poseur writer (and I’m not wrong about that, but it’s not the SOLE preserve of the poseur writer, that’s the point) but a clever friend gave me a Moleskine and immediately I was hooked. Thank you, clever friend.

Hemingway used them, which cuts no ice with me. Papa and I would not get on. But Bruce Chatwin used them, which slices a fair number of icebergs, as I do believe Utz is one of the finest short novels I’ve ever read. Above all though, once I’d started writing in my Moleskine, I knew I would never, from choice, use another notebook.

And today I closed Moleskine #3 for the last but one time. Its pages are full of novel – written from front to back, and short stories – written from back to front and they’ve met in the middle, with just a half page of blank space and lots of notes and telephone numbers and thoughts jotted down with weird little chapter break markers that I love drawing because they make me feel like a publisher, or at least a type-setter, although such lovely creatures don’t really exist any more.

Moleskine #3 has a star drawn on its top edge to remind me not to open it upside down, #1 had a moon and #2 had a heart. Moleskine #4 has a leaf. I’m not a visual person, or not very much so, but I spend quite a bit of time thinking about that little doodle and what it says about the novel that’s being written inside the book. #4 will bridge finishing the current contemporary novel and starting one about World War I: the latter features an orchard, so the leaf is symbolic of my desire to get to that work. The star on #3 reminded me that one of the characters in the novel I was writing then would probably have been a musical success, if he hadn’t died tragically young.

And I will open #3 once more, to copy over to #4 all the story ideas and fragments that didn’t get used up in that notebook’s life. It’s bittersweet, but satisfying, and having the old notebooks stacked up under my desk reminds me that I am a real writer, after all.

Honesty in Writing

There are things we’d all rather not remember, and certainly don’t want to find ourselves writing about: our sad childhoods or pathetic teenage years, our failed marriages or disastrous career experiences. And there’s no reason, unless we particularly desire to produce a misery memoir, or are writing for self-development purposes, that we should go into those murky, painful areas.

On the other hand, there’s something profoundly dishonest about turning our backs on public, rather than private, history. And something that a contemporary recently mentioned to me in an email made me think about this in a very specific way. Having a couple of weeks of doctor prescribed ‘not doing much’ gave me a chance to test my understanding of this particular area of the past and what I found (which is, of course, random, a limited sample, and possibly not representative of contemporary literature as a whole) rather depressed me.

Here’s the thing. I was born in the sixties – too late to be a flower child, but young enough to be infected with many of the hippy generation’s beliefs. I grew up with the developments of that era: the contraceptive pill, equal rights for women, rampant consumerism to name but three that emerged through my teenage years and twenties. And like many of my contemporaries, both male and female, I was sexually hedonistic, amoral and what would now be called promiscuous. Back then we called it having a good time. And we did.

The thing about sexual hedonism is that, by and large, it takes more than one person to experience it. And, like all those university students who sat in pot-smoke filled rooms, listening to folk music, in the generation above mine, I could name names. If I was there, so were you, and you and you …

So why aren’t you writing about it? Current morality requires safer sex, that’s sure, and those of us who didn’t end up with an STD or HIV (and, surprisingly, most of my generation were lucky enough to get away with it) may now regret what we did for other reasons, but that doesn’t wipe it off our histories. Like the US Senators who deny smoking pot (or snorting/ingesting/injecting worse things) our denial deprives our children of the chance to learn from us. It gives them no resource to call on. It leaves them believing that they must make discoveries for themselves because we never went there, or did that, or felt bad (or good) about it.

To be blunt, I’ve never regretted a moment of my past. Sexual hedonism, in a guilt-free atmosphere, when you are both desiring and desired, is one of the most powerful periods of life you can experience, because it is an integrated experience involving body, mind and emotions and provides, if you’re lucky, absolute gratification in pretty short order. Even when I can’t remember the names of the people I had sex with, I remember the actual sex with great fondness. I know that this is not true for everybody, and from time to time I find myself listening to a litany of woes from somebody (usually male) who regrets his Lothario past and wishes he’d learnt to be a considerate man rather than a profligate lover. Sometimes it’s the other side of the equation entirely – those people who didn’t, or couldn’t or weren’t welcome to join in, who tell me how their young selves were scarred by rejection or denial or outright prejudice. While I can’t enter into either experience, I can at least empathise with the different facets of what it meant to be one of that generation and to have a different path through our sexual jungle.

But what I can’t forgive is the way that this period seems to be wiped from our literature. Perhaps I’m just not reading the right books, so if there’s literature out there that admits that young people in the sixties and seventies were at it like rabbits, regardless of their later regrets, please tell me. Because I’ve been looking for it, and I can’t find it, and that makes me sad. And I’m wondering – if I’m right about its literary absence - if we don’t write it, or publishers don’t publish it, or readers don’t want to read it? And I really can’t believe it’s the latter.