Bewilderment

Christmas is over for another year. I spent it with my wife, my daughter, her husband and our grandson. He had a great time, but every now and again I caught him looking around with a puzzled expression. He clearly had no idea what it was all about or what was going to happen next.

Today the news is full of a story about a man who shot his wife, her sister and her niece at a New Year drinks party. People in the small town in which the shooting took place are stunned. Police are trying to make sense of the incident.

I remember a Christmas about fifteen years ago, when my mother was alive. We were talking about a friend of hers who used to pop into our house on a Saturday afternoon when I was growing up. She was a bright, lively person, full of laughter and jokes and I always enjoyed it when she made an appearance. But she never stayed for long.

The reason she invariably hurried away, my mother informed me, was her husband, a tall, menacing man who seldom spoke, but whose smouldering eyes were filled with a barely suppressed violence that even as a child I recognised though I could not explain.

'He was terribly jealous,' my mother went on. 'She always told him she was just going to the shops. If she was gone too long and he found out she'd called into our house there would have been terrible trouble.'

'But why?' I asked, naively. 'I mean Dad was out of work. Who was he jealous of?'

'He just wanted to be in control,' my mother said.

My daughter, whose grandchild I now look after two days a week, was fifteen at the time. She had been sitting in a corner half-listening to this conversation. Now she spoke. 'But why did she stay with him?'

'Well,' I said, searching for an explanation that might make sense to her, 'marriage was a different institution in those days.'

'It certainly was,' my mother said. She spoke with feeling.

My daughter shrugged. 'I would have just left him,' she said. It seemed so obvious to her.

I was pleased by her clarity but also a little daunted. The past is such a difficult thing to explain to the present.

On the mantelpiece of my sitting room there is a photo of me standing amid a group of children in somebody's back garden. I am about two years old so it must be 1956. I'm holding a ball and gazing seriously at the camera with an air of faint bewilderment. Since that time the world has changed so much I sometimes think there is nothing the child in that photograph has in common with my grand children growing up today. Nothing except bewilderment.

The Process

The last event of my professional year was my agent’s party last night. Unfortunately, half way through she cut herself on a broken glass that someone had disposed of rather carelessly. Apparently, the sight of blood always makes her faint, so she was slumped over her desk while colleagues held her arm up in the air to try to stop the bleeding. This sounds comical but in truth it was very alarming.

Today I went Christmas shopping in the mall.That was pretty alarming too. The food section of Marks and Spencers was like something from Dante’s Inferno.

I have loved Dante ever since I encountered the Divine Comedy in the Penguin translation at the age of 13. Indeed, those of my readers with a taste for intertextuality will be aware that my trilogy, The Promises Of Doctor Sigmundus, is a kind of reinvention of Dante’s themes. However, I prefer to encounter his creations in my imagination rather than in the Food Hall of my favourite retailer.

Now I am trying to content myself with getting the house ready for Christmas, wrapping presents, and arranging social meetings with friends and family. But I keep feeling like I’ve forgotten something important. What can it be, I wonder? Oh yes, writing.

I don’t like to be separated from The Process for even a day. I feel myself growing fainter by the hour. Not fainter like my poor agent confronted with her own blood. No, fainter as in an image, or a ghost perhaps - gradually disappearing.

One of my favourite poets, Catullus, practically invented the love-hate relationship. At least, he was the first to immortalize it in literature in a delightful couplet which begins odi et amo (I love and I hate). What is particularly clever about this opening is that because of the rules of Latin poetry, when you say these three words you have to run them together - so it’s like one word.

Catullus, of course, was talking about a woman but I think a lot of writers feel the same way about The Process. My wife said to me the other day, ‘You hate it when you’re at the beginning of a book, you hate it when you’re in the middle of a book and you hate it when you’re nearly at the end of a book. So when, exactly do you like it?’

I must have been complaining too much.

The thing is, I like it all the time as well. Especially when I can’t do it because something like Christmas intervenes. (I originally said ‘gets in the way’ there but that made me sound so curmudgeonly that I had to edit it out in favour of ‘intervenes’. There you are, you see: The Process. I can’t stop doing it.)

So Happy Holiday to all of you who take the time to read my blog. Or should that be Season’s Greetings. Or maybe something with ‘yuletide’ in it. But what the hell does yuletide mean, anyway?

The Zombie Army

A bitter wind blows over London as the zombie army of Christmas marches relentlessly forwards, laying waste to everything in its path. My poor, timid creativity has gazed upon its serried ranks, turned pale and fled.

A couple of days ago there were three new books clamouring at the gates of my imagination, demanding to be let out. Now I can hardly hear their cries against the rising tide of seasonal music spewing forth from hidden loudspeakers in department stores, car radios and tv sets.

My mother used to tell me about Christmas when she was a girl, walking back from midnight mass through the narrow lanes and across the patchwork fields of West Cork. At every house she passed a candle would be burning in the window.

That’s what my writing self feels like. A tiny candle burning in a great, dark, empty countryside.

Christmas

I once ran an evening class in Creative Writing. I didn’t particularly enjoy it because some of the students were very strange indeed. There was one man, for example, who reminded me of an autistic Sherlock Holmes. He was in his thirties, tall and thin with very straight brown hair, a high forehead, prominent cheekbones and an aquiline nose. He hardly said a word but every week he came to the class with a slightly different version of the same story, each time apparently convinced that he had written something quite new.

The story generally started something like this: ‘I hear a key turn in the lock. The door creaks open and they enter the house.’ He would then go on to describe a group of people of varying number, but always at least two, walking slowly and carefully up the stairs of a suburban terraced house which he often protrayed in immense detail, right down to the pattern of the wallpaper. They never spoke; all were too intent on their purpose. In their hands they clutched knives and forks.

The narrator who was clearly in a state of great agitation, grew more and more terrified as he chronicled the progress of these mysterious individuals, through each of the bedrooms in turn. Only when they finally stood outside the door of the uppermost bedroom, did it become clear that he was telling the story while strapped to a bed inside and that the silent individuals who stood ready to enter the room were members of his own family whose purpose was to eat him alive. See what I mean when I say, strange?

I asked him once what inspired this story. Christmas, he told me.

Well I hope your Christmas wasn’t too much like his. Mine was very, very relaxed. Nice food, music, dvds and pleasant company. I didn’t turn the computer on for two days. But I could hear it calling to me all the time, whispering my name in the dead of night.

There would have been no point, of course. Writing is all about concentration and I find it impossible to concentrate for at least a week before or after Christmas. It’s a writer’s wasteland: a great swathe of the imagination blanketed in snow.

But a thaw is coming. I can hear the sound of trickling water. And so I have turned my computer back on and I am looking forward to returning to work. No one has eaten me alive, I’m pleased to say. And I very much hope the same is true for you.