Great Panjandrum with the little button at top

Entering autumn - life in the old dog yet.

This morning, filled with sadness at the course my life has taken, I was walking along Everlasting Lane to buy some milk.

Suddenly I remembered making the same walk, at the same time of year in autumn 1996, filled with the same melancholy of unfulfilled promise. On my walk I noticed a
bush of sloes growing in the hedgerow. The sloe was new to me; I was intrigued and delighted by them, and went back to my desk and put a reference to the fruit into the novel I was writing.

Suddenly he recalls himself, and looking about, sees that Blanche is standing in the doorway, watching him. She is carrying a creation of  bright berries and late autumn gold for his approval. She says nothing. Her watching him says everything that is necessary. He feels moved to make some gesture to express the sadness and beauty that are in his heart.

He puts down the axe, leans it on the chopping block, and goes towards her.  He runs  his hand down her cheek, slowly, slowly, so that his fingers brush the skin as carefully as if he were dusting the gold leaf on a book of hours.

“You are so beautiful,” he said.

She shakes her head, very slightly, a breeze, a murmur of disbelief.

“O, but you are, and not knowing it makes you more beautiful still.”

He leans towards her through the thicket of berberis and sloe and kisses her.

That novel was Palliser Wentwood, the writing of which turned a corner of my life, and changed it for the better, for ever. The melancholy sense of underachievment was banished for years.

Eventually, of course, it returned. These days, I am conscious of having squandered the gifts I was born with, much in the way I have squandered my money. There is a certain amount to show for the talent, as the pages of this journal bear witness, and also for the money, but nothing like as much as there should be for either. Far too much talent wasted on politicking and changing direction and far too much money poured out on a good time, on wine, paté and steak, on clothes that no longer fit (because of the wine, paté and steak) and books unread (see under wine, good times, changes of direction.)

However, it is not too late.  I am not dead yet, as I constantly tell my agent, and anyone else who laments the absence of solid literary work (my play apparently not counting). By chance, the next paragraph in Palliser, after that quote above, featuring the sloe, reads thus:

 

The morning after the kiss, a Sunday, Palliser stands at his window, testing the floor boards with his bare feet and thinking about the slippers lined with possum fur that Jemima made him for his fortieth birthday. Lovely soft fluffy fur, from such a nasty little animal. Fur that reminds him of nothing so much as -

Sunday is officially his day off, and there being no breakfast provided in this strictly fasting household, he has nothing to detain him. More than once he has given up his Sunday morning to take Blanche to the parish church for the advantage that is to be gained from sitting close by her side through the longeurs of the sermon. Sermons always provoke thoughts of the flesh in his mind, and he prays that they might in hers.

But today he feels moved to go out into the autumn and find a bit of skirt. In his pocket is a month’s salary, in crunchy pound notes. In his limbs is energy and in his loins fire. The sun is shining, and there is life in the old dog yet.

Portrait of the artist (medium, inactive) in a new office

In one direction a characterless street with cars whipping by in a constant stream;in the other a vast sea of identical desks. I feel like a character in one of those Sixties futuristic movies, in which all eccentricity and character has been expunged from ordinary life, to create a Brave New World of equality, security and safety. Every desk is identical. We are not supposed to keep personal items on our desks. We are not supposed to eat at our desks. We are to swipe in and out of every door. We are restricted and bossed-about at every turn, removing all sense of autonomy. There is no-one against whom to rail - only a faceless They who have decreed these things.

And what has all this to do with the writer's life that I am chronicling, sporadically, in these pages?

Everything.

The loss of status, the loss of identity, the loss of difference - these sap the vital spiritual juices, the little supposedly irrepressible spring of self-esteem that allows the writer to believe their voice worth hearing. Here, in the heartland of barren business efficency, it is only barely possible to cling on to the sense of self, the essential egotism that is the engine of art.

Engine stalled, hence no activity.