I recently read an article by Geoff Dyer in the New Statesman where he describes how some years ago he went to Paris for a couple of months to write a novel based on Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender is the Night”. (Incidentally one of my favourite novels)
Anyway, he had a thoroughly miserable time and got no where with his novel. Shortly before he was to leave Paris, he made a trip to the scene of the Battle of the Somme, ostensibly to do some research for his failing novel. When he arrived at Thiepval, site of a memorial to the British dead he was so moved that as he said:
“To cut a long story short: I abandoned my Paris novel and ended up writing a book about what the Great War meant to me, to us.”
He concludes by pondering;
“… What would have happened if I hadn’t gone that afternoon? I could, theoretically, have gone another day, and maybe the weather wouldn’t have been perfect, but the question actually misses the point: this wasn’t just a visit, it was a meeting (“only this moment and only me”), a rendezvous. The other possibility – what if I hadn’t gone at all? (not so unlikely; my time in Paris was running out ) – scarcely bears thinking about. I went to the Somme in the midst of a period of complete stagnation and frustration. From that moment on I was revitalised. I had a new interest, a purpose, something to do, something to live for. There was a place for me again.”
After I had finished reading it, I felt this is quite purposive drift, may be I should write something about this here. Imagine my surprise and delight when during some background research I discovered that, to a much greater extent than I had suspected, here was a man who lived purposive drift.
In an article in the Guardian he talks about his life as writer giving as an example a book he wrote about Jazz:
“… I didn’t know much about jazz. Certainly not enough to write a book about it – that, precisely, was the motivation for doing so. I loved jazz but it was infinitely mysterious to me. I wanted to know more – and the best way to find out about anything is to write about it. If I’d known what I needed to know before writing the book I would have had no interest in doing so. Instead of being a journey of discovery, writing the book would have been a tedious clerical task, a transcription of the known.”
and going on to say:
“The jazz book was the beginning of my life as a literary and scholarly gatecrasher, turning up uninvited at an area of expertise, making myself at home, having a high old time for a year or two, and then moving on. This, it goes without saying, is no way to make a career (a word which, for anyone seriously committed to a life of writing, should never be spoken, only spat).”
and concluding with the glorious statement:
“… although we live in a time that sets great store by measuring progress (“research” in academic parlance) in precisely demarcated areas of knowledge, real advances are often made by people happy to muddle along within the splendidly vague job description advanced by Susan Sontag, whose “idea of a writer [was] someone interested in ‘everything'”. Why, realistically, would one settle for anything less?”