I Write
Why I Write
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December five, 1976
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Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write Continued from Page 2. There you have iii short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the audio they share is this:
Joan Didion is the author of two novels, "Run River" and "Play Information technology as It Lays," and a book of essays, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Her new novel, "A Book of Common Prayer," will be published In March.
This is adjusted from a Regents' Lecture delivered by the writer at the University of California at Berkeley. tin disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole mode of intimating rather than challenge, of alluding rather than statingbut there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a cloak-and-dagger smashing, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most individual space.
I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a nononsense mode, all I take to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one "field of study," this one "surface area": the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am "interested," for example, in marine biology, but I don't flatter myself that yous would come out to hear me talk virtually it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is non to say that when I hear the word "intellectual" I reach for my gun, but merely to say that I practise not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless lateadolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could bargain with the abstruse.
In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was more often than not considered, by anybody I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would endeavor to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree exterior my window and the detail mode the petals fell on my floor. I would attempt to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron upwards the loma. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you bargain in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in autograph about the militaryindustrial complex and its role in the university community, but you lot would be wrong. I was simply wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.
I had problem graduating from Berkeley, not because of this inability to deal with ideas‐I was majoring in English, and I could locate the houseandgarden imagery in "The Portrait of a Lady" as well equally the next person, "imagery" being past definition the kind of specific that got my attention ‐but simply considering I had neglected to take a course in Milton. For reasons which now sound bizarre I needed a degree by the end of that summer, and the English department finally agreed, if I would come downward from Sacramento every Friday and talk about the cosmology of "Paradise Lost," to certify me proficient in Milton. I did this. Some Fridays I took the Greyhound motorbus, other Fridays I caught the Southern Pacific's City of San Francisco on the last leg of its transcontinental trip. I tin no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in "Paradise Lost," the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote 10,000 words that summertime. but I tin still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco's dining machine, and the fashion the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits into a grayed and obscurely sinister light. In short my attention was e'er on the periphery, on what I could see and gustation and impact, on the butter, and the Greyhound coach. During those years I was traveling on what I knew to be a very shaky passport, forged papers: I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. I knew I couldn't think. All I knew then was what I couldn't do. All I knew and so was what I wasn't, and information technology took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I hateful not a "good" writer or a,"bad" writer but merely a writer, a person whose most captivated and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never accept get a author. Had I been blessed with fifty-fifty express access to my own listen there would have been no reason to write. 1 write entirely to find out what I'yard thinking, what I'thousand looking at, whot I see and what it means. What t desire and what I fearfulness. Why did the oil refineries effectually Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my heed?
When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, well-nigh images that shimmer around the edges. There used to be an analogy in every simple psychology volume showing a cat drawn by a patient in varying stages of schizophrenia. This cat had a shimmer around information technology. Yous could see the molecular structure breaking down at the very edges of the cat: the cat became the background and the background the cat, everything interacting, exchanging ions. People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of objects. I'm not a schizophrenic, nor do I have hallucinogens, but sure images do shimmer for me. Wait hard plenty, and you tin't miss the shimmer. It'due south there. You tin can't think also much about these pictures that shimmer. Yous just prevarication depression and let them develop. You lot stay quiet. You lot don't talk to many people and you keep your nervous organization from shorting out and you try to locate the true cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.
Only every bit I meant "shimmer" literally I mean "grammar" literally. Grammar is a piano I play past ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its space power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the pregnant of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know well-nigh camera angles now, merely not and so many know about sentences. The organisation of the words matters, and the organization yous want tin be constitute in the picture in your mind. The motion-picture show dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will exist a judgement with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dyingfall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the organisation of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture. Nota bone:
It tells you.
You don't tell it.
Let me bear witness you what I mean by pictures in the heed. I began "Play Information technology as Information technology Lays" simply as I have begun each of my novels, with no notion of "grapheme" or "plot" or even "incident." I had just two pictures in my mind, more about which later, and a technical intention, which was to write a novel and then elliptical and fast that it would be over earlier y'all noticed information technology, a novel and so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all. About the pictures: the first was of white space. Empty space. This was conspicuously the motion picture that dictated the narrative intention of the book a volume in which anything that happened would happen off the folio, a "white" volume to which the reader would have to bring his or her ain bad dreamsand yet this movie told me no "story," suggested no situation. The 2nd picture did. This 2nd flick was of something actually witnessed. A young woman with long hair and a brusque white halter wearing apparel walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at i in the morning. She crosses the casino alone and picks upwards a business firm telephone. I watch her because I have heard her paged, and recognize her name: she is a pocket-size actress I run across around Los Angeles from time to fourth dimension, in places similar Sax and once in a gynecologist'south office in the Beverly Hills Clinic, but have never met. I know nothing almost her. Who is paging her? Why is she here to be paged? How exactly did she come up to this? It was precisely this moment in Las Vegas that fabricated "Play It equally It Lays" begin to tell itself to me, but the moment appears in the novel only obliquely, in a chap
"Maria made a list of things she would never do. She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar's alone subsequently midnight. She would never: brawl at a party, do S‐Chiliad unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: conduct a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills!'
That is the beginiung of the chapter and that is too the end of the chapter, which may advise what I meant by "white space."
I recall having a number of pictures in my mind when I began the novel I but finished, "A Book of Common Prayer." As a affair of fact one of these pictures was of that bevatron I mentioned, although I would exist hard put to tell you a story in which nuclear energy figured. Some other was a newspaper photo of a hijacked 707 burning on the desert in the Middle East. Another was the night view from a room in which I one time spent a calendar week with paratyiphoid, a hotel room on the Colombian declension. My husband and I seemed to exist on the Colombian coast representing the United States of America at a moving-picture show festival (I think invoking the name "Jack Valenti" a lot, as if its reiteration could make me well), and it was a bad place to have fever, not only because my indisposition offended our hosts simply because every nighttime in this hotel the generator failed. The lights went out. The lift stopped. My husband would become to the event of the evening and make excuses for me and I would stay alone in this hotel room, in the dark. I remember standing at the window trying to call Bogota (the telephone seemed to piece of work on the same principle as the generator) and watching the nighttime wind come up and wondering what I was doing 11 degrees off the equator with a fever of 103. The view from that window definitely figures in "A Volume of Common Prayer," as does the burning 707, and nevertheless none of these pictures told me the story
The movie that did, the picture that shimmered and made these other images coalesce, was the Panama airport at 6 A.M. I was in this airport only once, on a plane to Bogota that stociped for an hour to refuel, but the way information technology looked that morning remained superimposed on everything I saw until the day I finished "A Book of Common Prayer." I lived in that airport for several years. I can notwithstanding experience the hot air when I stride off the plane, can come across the heat already rising off the tarmac at 6 A.Yard. I can feel my skirt damp and wrinkled on my legs. I tin experience the asphalt stick to my sandals. I remember the big alpine of a Pan American plane floating motionless down at the end of the tarmac. I remember the sound of a slot machine in the waiting room. I could tell y'all that I call up a particular woman in the airport, an American woman, a norteamericana, a thin norteamericana nearly 40 who wore a large foursquare emerald in lieu of a hymeneals ring, simply there was no such woman in that location.
I put this woman in the airdrome afterward. I made this woman up, but as I later made upward a land to put the ahtport in, and a family unit to run the country. This adult female in the drome is neither communicable a airplane nor coming together one. She is ordering tea in the airport coffee store. In fact she is not simply "ordering" tea but insisting that the water be boiled, in front of her, for twenty minutes. Why is this woman in this airport? Why is she going nowhere, where has she been? Where did she get that large emerald? What derangement, or disassociation, makes her believe that her will to see the water boiled can possibly prevail?
"She had been going to one airport or another for four months, ane could see it, looking at the visas on her passport. All those airports where Charlotte Douglas's passport had been stamped would have looked akin. Sometimes the 'sign on the belfry would say 'Bienvenidos' and sometimes the sign on the tower would say 'Bienvenue,' some (places were moisture and hot and others dry and hot, but at each of these airports the pastel concrete walls would rust and stain and the swamp off the track would be littered with the fuselages of cannibalized Fairchild F‐227's and the water would demand boiling.
"I knew why Charlotte went to the aerodrome even if Victor did not.
"I knew about airports."
These lines appear about halfway through "A Volume of Common Prayer," only I wrote them during the 2nd week I worked on the volume, long earlier I had any idea where Charlotte Douglas had been or why she went to airports. Until I wrote these lines I had no grapheme chosen "Victor" in mind: the necessity for mentioning a proper noun, and the name "Victor," occurred to me as I wrote the sentence. I knew why Charlotte went to the airdrome sounded incomplete. I knew why Charlotte went to the airport even if Victor did not carried a piddling more narrative drive. Nigh important of all, until I wrote these lines I did not know who "I" was, who was telling the story. I had intended until that moment that the "I" be no more than the vox of the author, a 19thcentury omniscient narrator. But there it was:
"I knew why Charlotte went to the airdrome fifty-fifty if Victor did not.
"I knew about airports."
This "I" was the voice of no author in my house. This "I" was someone who not simply knew why Charlotte went to the airport but as well knew someone chosen "Victor." Who was Victor? Who was this narrator? Why was this narrator telling me this story? Permit me tell you ane affair virtually why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel. ■
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/05/archives/why-i-write-why-i-write.html
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