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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 September 1999 Issue No. 448 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 September 1999 Issue No. 448
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Comment Focus Special Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
I've acquired what wisdom I have through reading, not only books but newspapers and magazines. I need not dwell here over the value of reading serious books, yet most of my insights I have gleaned from newspapers and magazines. I find real pleasure in reading book reviews, interviews, even crime stories, so long as they deal with the human soul. I like to compare the styles of writers and I always try to figure out what the writers are like, invoking the famous edict, "the style is the man" -- or "woman" for that matter.
While leafing through my huge pile of accumulated Sunday papers from London, I recently came across an Independent interview with Rose Tremain, in which, talking about her recently published historical novel, Music and Silence, she underlines the importance of historical research. It is a joy, she says, "to have this great reserve of things that actually happened, together with things that may or may not have happened."
Tremain believes that a writer of historical novels should start with scholarly research, then endeavour to forget it, giving the information acquired the time necessary for it to undergo a fictional transformation. In the end, she says, "a lot of episodes are absolute invention" -- a fact which results in the historical and fictional aspects of the work being closely, inextricably interwoven.
Tremain deplores the repetitiveness of new novels. Out of 30 novels she read in her capacity as a judge in a recent competition, 20 dealt, in a nearly identical way, with flat sharing, first love, drugs and anorexia. The reader should get two kinds of pleasure from a novel, she insists, "the pleasure of recognition and, in opposition, the pleasure of surprise, of coming across something new."
Tremain believes that "one cannot teach people to write, one can teach them to be better at writing, to find their voice, their strength and their weakness" -- an echo of what my creative writing teacher told us back in 1947. Having heard this comment, half of us failed to turn up. I remember him telling those who remained -- and I was one of them -- that writing fiction comprised a synthesis of two parts of the mind, the dreaming part, which knows nothing, and the rational, logical part.
But so much for creative writing. There is more to say about writers and critics. In a delightful short article in The Sunday Times Nigel Williams writes about the anxiety of anticipating a review of his recently published novel. "Don't open the paper," he hissed to his wife. "There might be a review of my novel in it." Williams tells the story of Anthony Burgess, who reviewed one of his own novels, which he had published under a pseudonym. He was pretty generous about it and ended up being fired for his pains. Should a critic be objective or should he allow his hatred of a writer to influence his opinion? Reviewing is simply a matter of opinion, Williams says.
He goes on to recount how, some years ago, he received an unfavourable review from the novelist Paul Bailey. He was having dinner with a friend who had, for reasons of research, introduced him to an East End gangster. During the meal Williams remarked that he would like to have Paul Bailey hung by his thumb and strangled with a wire, and the man leant across the table, put his hand on Williams's arm, and confided that it could be easily arranged.
Williams finally sums up the philosophy of criticism. Criticism, he says, matters not because it is right or true but because it is, like literature itself, among humanity's most fundamental rights. It has, too, become a creative genre in its own right, and much of the best writing today is produced by critics who have at last achieved their secret aim, to be artists themselves.
