When an author's muse packs up and leaves

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This was published 17 years ago

When an author's muse packs up and leaves

By By Catherine Keenan

Some of literature's biggest names have been struck down, but writer's block is not always an angst-ridden affliction.

When Gabriel Garcia Marquez recently ann-ounced that he was giving up writing, the news was reported around the world. The 78-year-old told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia that last year was the first in his life in which he hadn't written even a line, and that his heart was not in it any more.

Fans mourned news that there would be no more magical stories, while sager voices reminded us that writers, like engineers and accountants, often say they're quitting and carry on just the same. Paul Valery, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Maeve Binchy and Morris West have done it. News of Garcia Marquez's literary death may yet be an exaggeration.

Yet it is an oddly troubling fact that many writers do stop writing. After In Cold Blood, Truman Capote became the most lionised writer in America - and never published another book. The film Capote suggests this was down to guilt over his duplicitous behaviour towards Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the murderers he supported then let swing when it suited him.

Gerald Clarke's biography, on which the film is based, is more nuanced, adding that Capote's tragic view of life would have tripped him up sooner or later anyway, as would the booze and pills, and that he was paralysed by ambitions that ballooned to monstrous levels. For all the adulation, In Cold Blood did not win the Pulitzer or the National Book Award, and Capote determined that the only way to avenge this terrible slight was to write something so brilliant nobody could ever say a word against it.

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For years, he told everyone this book was Answered Prayers, a dark comedy about the very rich, whose title derived from a quote from St Theresa of Avila about how more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. He never finished it, but its sentiment became the coda to his life. Capote wrote, Clarke argues, as a means to an end, a way of finding fame and adulation and the love denied him as a child. When he got it, he realised, inevitably, that it was hollow. The reason for writing evaporated.

Capote's childhood friend Harper Lee is often assumed to have suffered from prayers too fully answered. She made possibly the greatest literary debut of all time with To Kill a Mockingbird, winning the Pulitzer (galling to Capote) and selling more than 10 million copies. But in the 46 years since, she has produced only three magazine articles, all in the '60s. In a rare interview in 1964, she said: "I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected." In the same interview, she said she was working on another novel; we do not know what happened to it.

The paradigmatic case of the dangers of early success remains F.Scott Fitzgerald, who after The Great Gatsby became an alcoholic wash-up, a perfect example of his famous dictum that "there are no second acts in American lives". (Ironically, there was for him. He died believing himself forgotten, but a posthumous re-evaluation made him over into the literary giant he remains.)

J.D. Salinger is perhaps the most famous case of literary renunciation, though it is possible he has only stopped publishing, not writing. His daughter, Margaret Salinger, claims he keeps piles of unpublished novels and short stories in a vault, to be released after his death.

Yet if success can paralyse, the lack of it can do the same. After the spectacular critical and commercial failure of Moby Dick, Herman Melville's despondency cut his productivity down to a trickle over the next 40 years. The indifference of the British reading public and the critical establishment saw Barbara Pym give up writing entirely, as she moved to the country with her cat. Playwrights, who need their work performed, are especially prone to fits of giving in: Somerset Maugham, Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams all went through periods of turning their backs on their art.

Of the many interesting facts Zachary Leader unearths in his book Writer's Block, one of the most surprising is that the term "writer's block" dates back only to 1950, when it was used by Edmund Bergler in The Writer and Psychoanalysis. Leader claims it still has no direct translation in French or German, and is often regarded as an American affliction, indulged only by those who don't have to earn a living from their pen.

Yet the concept has been around for some time. Writers, like other artists, have probably always struggled with their work, but the notion that an inability to write might be a specific affliction dates back to the romantic period when the whole notion of writing changed. Before then, it was understood to be the product of effort and discipline, much like tanning hides or embroidery. The romantics, however, recast it as a gift bestowed in moments of inspiration, which had the corollary effect of making the writer less an agent and more a receptacle of a kind of divine grace. The failure to write thus became strangely externalised and largely beyond a writer's control. Before then, he or she simply wasn't working hard enough.

It fits, then, that the first great poet of writer's block was Wordsworth, whose Prelude is part of a paradoxically rich tradition of writing about the difficulty of writing. Wordsworth, like Keats, often battled with block, though neither was floored by it as spectacularly as Coleridge. The poems for which he is remembered, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan (another classic of writing about the impossibility of writing), were all written when he was a young man. He remained a prolific letter writer and journalist for the rest of his life but he became increasingly unable to write what most mattered to him: poetry. He penned twice as many lines between the ages of 18 and 26 as in the following 36 years.

It is impossible to give across-the-board explanations for why writers get blocked. There are so many reasons for writing and, presumably, just as many for giving it up. Modern theories, such as that espoused by Bergler in his book, are often psychoanalytic and tend to emphasise factors in the personal past. But Coleridge, like many writers, saw himself as crippled by the weight of the artistic past, by what critic Harold Bloom would later call the anxiety of influence.

"I have too clearly before me the idea of a poet's genius to deem myself any other than a very humble poet," Coleridge lamented. As Joan Acocella argued in a marvellous essay in The New Yorker, many cases are inextricably tied to alcohol and drugs and depression, and it can be hard to tell where one ends and the other starts.

Whatever its cause, the notion of block is always one of wrestling with an external condition, and to this extent it has a much mythologised heroic dimension. De Quincey recalls seeing Coleridge deliver a lecture during the height of his block, in 1808, and talks of his appearance being "generally that of a person struggling with pain and overmastering illness. His lips were baked with feverish heat, and often black in colour; and, in spite of the water which he continued drinking through the whole course of his lecture, he often seemed to labour under an almost paralytic inability to raise the upper jaw from the lower."

Yet Coleridge never stopped trying to write poetry, and it is another of the great paradoxes of the condition that his inability to do so became a kind of proof of his genius - a sign that he was aiming for heights so lofty that others did not even attempt them. Perversely, those who write quickly and easily are not always considered to have the greatest natural facility. In her essay, Acocella notes that the publication of Anthony Trollope's autobiography in 1883 effectively ruined his reputation because it revealed he wrote every day from 5.30am to 8.30am, with a strict quota of 250 words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before 8.30, he simply took out another piece of paper and started the next. This allowed him to produce a staggering 49 novels in 35 years, but it also relegated him to the second rank for years.

There is, of course, something grandiose about this romantic idea of writing. The brutal truth is that it is an ill-regarded job, paying virtually nothing and requiring long solitary hours and isolation. Perhaps in order to keep going one must think of it as something more magnificent that one has no choice but to do. And perhaps this is why writers who choose to give up writing remain the most troubling.

Undoubtedly, the greatest example - perversely, because his is such a romantic story - is the French poet Rimbaud. Still in his teens, he not only rewrote the rule book on poetry but lived a life that was the very embodiment of the romantic ideal. He was wildly rebellious, handsome and an early advocate of the "rational derangement of all the senses". He had a hugely tempestuous affair with the older, married poet Paul Verlaine, during which the latter shot him in the wrist, but after stunning the literary world with Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) he didn't publish another thing.

He didn't make a grand gesture of farewell to his art: his poems simply petered out, and his last one is a ditty in a letter to a friend about soldiers farting. He never appeared to regret leaving it behind. As Graham Robb writes in his elegant biography, Rimbaud: "There is no evidence that Rimbaud simply woke up one day and found that his muse had packed her bags."

In contrast, Robb argues that such careless abandonment is part of a pattern that defined Rimbaud's life. He quit his family, his friends, his lovers, his country and his ideals. A former communard, he became a mercenary. After he deserted from the army, he became a recruiter. He begged, worked in a circus, lost a fortune in a casino, became an arms dealer and was worshipped as a kind of prophet in parts of Abyssinia. Experience was what Rimbaud hungered for. Eventually poetry, like everything andeveryone else, had to give way to that.

This is not, in fact, that unusual. The English novelist E.M. Forster, for instance, wrote five great novels by the age of 35, then A Passage to India, possibly his greatest book, 10 years later. But for the next 40 years, he wrote no fiction at all, though he did become a noted biographer and journalist. People have long speculated why this was so: some say that he had simply written out his vision, exhausted the store of ideas and insights granted to him. But Nicola Beauman argues in Morgan: A biography of E.M. Forster that Forster's gradual acceptance of his homosexuality meant he was no longer interested in writing about the only subject he could treat properly - heterosexuality. As Forster gained independence from his mother and entered a long and loving relationship, the simple truth is that he became happier and didn't need to write any more.

Other writers give up writing, sometimes temporarily, without regretting it. Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize with her first novel, The God of Small Things, but since then she simply seems to have found better things to do than write fiction, and has become a vociferous activist in India. In her final interview before her death at 85, Judith Wright told Ramona Koval that she stopped writing poetry at 70 because she simply lost the urge. "Sometimes you just find that something isn't there any longer that was there. It isn't sad. It's just right." Gerald Murnane has announced his exit, apparently without regret, and who knows, perhaps Harper Lee is happily sipping cocktails by a pool in Alabama, with nary a thought of another book.

So perhaps we won't hear from Garcia Marquez again, and he might not regret this, either. It is hard to know which to hope for.

Catherine Keenan is the Herald's new literary editor.

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