39 Books: 1998

I said I'd come back to "not writing". 

A few months ago I watched Unstuck in Time, a long but captivating documentary on the life of Kurt Vonnegut and his friendship with the film's maker, Robert Weide. In his final years, Vonnegut moved to the country and stopped writing. His neighbour was the novelist John Irving who said first thing in the morning he'd often find Vonnegut sat on his porch. He claimed to have been there for only a few minutes, but numerous dog-ends on the slats at his feet suggested otherwise. Weide asks: "What happens when a writer stops writing?"

The question had been on my mind long before I heard it asked, prompted by wondering what Maurice Blanchot did when he stopped writing, at least stopped writing for publication. He died in 2003 after living quietly in this location, as discovered by the poet David Wheatley.

For a writer who was heavily involved in Parisian journalism before the war, then writing for many years in solitude and isolation in a stone cottage in the medieval village of Èze, and in the late fifties back in Paris to oppose the rule of Charles de Gaulle, becoming an anonymous force in the May '68 revolt, it seems unlikely that he would stop. But if he wrote anything new and unpublished, it wasn't found after he died among the manuscripts of previous works "salvaged from a rubbish bin" after his death. 

When Philip Roth announced that he would write no more, I felt that partly explained why I never valued his work, as it suggests a literary professional at work rather than those I valued who wrote as an existential necessity: "as long as I live I live writing" as Thomas Bernhard said. No doubt this is an overly romantic demand. The book for this year reveals that the opposite – the need not to write – can also be an imperative.

After Jorge Semprun was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp he stopped working on the book he was trying to write because "the two things I had thought would bind me to life – writing, pleasure – were instead what estranged me from it, day after day, constantly returning me to the memory of death". To remain alive, he had to stop: "while writing depends on memory, staying alive can depend on forgetting."

Written much later, Ecriture ou la vie is the narrative describing his liberation, which would be more faithfully translated as Writing or Life. It crashes forward like waves crawling up a beach only to be drawn back by the undertow of terrible memories. 

One of the happier ones comes soon after liberation when he bonds with an American soldier over their shared love of German literature who then uses his authority to insist on a private tour of the Goethehaus in nearby Weimar. The elderly guardian is very unhappy with their presence and talks proudly of showing the Führer around the building. The soldier shoves him up against a wall and locks him out so they can continue in peace. Going back to my entry for 1989, I wonder if the old man was the father of Grete Kirchner, Kafka's brief infatuation 33 years before. It's a remarkable possibility.

Of course, Kafka is another example of someone who felt an existential need to write but who also questioned its value. Unlike Vonnegut and Roth, however, he never stopped writing. So, to ask again: "What happens when a writer stops writing?". The question hangs before us like fog over the edge of a cliff. The writer is the one who runs.