Early expeditions over the fields to the Burtons at Engine Town took me across the River Leen, and then a railway which ran along its shallow, wide valley. These two obstacles both hemmed me in and tempted me out, and made the advance beyond into an adventure of the spirit, as well as an exploration of new territory.
Crossing the railway I would sit on the fence by its side, watching coal-trains pulling trucks from Nottinghamshire collieries. In those days before the mines were nationalized I read the names painted broadly and plainly on each truck as it went by, one strange word after another, some so quick and difficult that I had to see them several times before my memory held them. Nevertheless, the words came fast, forming an eternal telegram that was never sent, but which still occasionally spins into my head:
BOLSOVER
NUNCARGATE
NEWSTEAD
BLIDWORTH
ALDERCAR
CLIPSTON
PINXTON
RIDDINGS
TIBSHELF
PLEASLEY
TEVERSAL
HUTHWAITE
romantic place-labels, almost as if they had come from Italy or Abyssinia, and while they showed me the headstocks of their collieries, like the one I could see just up the line, I did not also visualize — as I no doubt should have done but am pleased that I did not — row upon row of miners’ houses that would be clustered round about. Or if I did, they were set in the sunshine of hilltop situations, and were altogether more picturesque and salubrious than those among which I lived.
I recited their names like a litany for the rest of my way to the Burtons, as I broke through hedges and leapt streams. They kept me company when the sky darkened and it began to thunder. I remember the smell of bacon frying on damp Sunday mornings in summer. And when I slept at the Burtons’ on Saturday night, those big white words on the coal trucks rode by in my dreams.
The stuff and fibre of peoples’ language is made up of names. Total history is nothing less than an accounting of every name in it — not just a few, but all of them. Without a name nothing exists — neither place, person, nor piece. Names cement the regions and generations in such a way that time becomes timeless, and only words are important, the labels that pinpoint a person’s soul, the backdrop and bedrock of languge.
Names mean life and matter that is always on the go. They decay and change, fret and vanish, then come up somewhere else and grow again. Those who hold their names too tight get buried with them — just as raindrops, glorying too much in their own moisture, melt on meeting soil.
Names remain. The passing years pile up and give them tales and weight, or bleed them white and take out all significance. When you can’t tell one name from another all men look the same. The more people there are, the more you know them by their names or not at all. An increase in breeding broadens the tongue. We must know one from another — man and name — if civilization is to take hold and properly accumulate true richness.
When the wild and conquering hordes settled down to their fields they contemplated each other and gave out names that would last. A cycle is complete and now expands. Poets take over. Tillage and metre rule. The seasons and the moon dominate utterly when every place and person has a name — some of which eventually ride by on coal trucks through disordered childhood dreams.
58
When I told my father I was going to have a novel published he said: ‘That’s bloody good. You’ll never have to work again’—as if I’d been given a million pounds in exchange for colic on the heart. A dozen books later I still see what he means. ‘You’ve got an aim in life now,’ he added, though with more truth than before.
But to write books is not to have an aim in life. It is a camouflage under which a real aim can wither before it is even understood. By blind chance I became a writer, and unknowingly sidestepped a career which might have turned out more useful and satisfying. It is a futile thought that occasionally flashes in, but as long as my proper fate stays with me — as it presumably does — I shan’t complain.
Any true aim perished in the blinding light of emptiness when I tried to understand it, and so my spirit withdrew from the struggle as if it were burned, and took refuge in the greater comfort of the periphery, where the process of writing begins. And if in spite of this I still mull on it and wonder why I became a writer, I’m careful not to make the mistake of driving straight to the empty middle and search for the truth there.
Having sorted among the aborted tributaries of my family it is no use coming back into the core of myself to get at the truth. It would be a sentimental head-on clash, to be avoided at all costs. It is better to chase the indirect and apparently unimportant as being more worth while, to keep my thoughts clear and insignificant, rather than boringly definitive.
In someone of low intelligence sentimentality is pathetic. In those of high intelligence it is obnoxious, even dangerous. I will not decide which of these categories I fit into, but state them so as not to get entangled — and send each one into that great central fire of emptiness where they can burn into gas and ashes, while I stay on the rich outside.
A writer is born without God, and his centre has been taken over so that he is a god. It could be that he then spends his life writing in order to hold off the fear of dying and death, and keeps writing so as not to expose himself to the danger of having his questions answered and therefore of having to accept God.
The ultimate aim is to phrase questions, not to solve them, for if you show people what to ask, they will soon find their own solutions. A question is not a question unless it contains the seeds of its answer, and when this phenomenon occurs to a primitive or uneducated person he overcomes his fear of the world and makes a fundamental break with his past. For a writer, another sort of fear comes with the questions, because he is afraid that the questions may desert him. It also stays because fear is a birthmark of life. Those who do not have it are not yet born. Whoever says ‘I am not afraid’ has grown old before his time. Who cannot suffer morally, perishes physically. Lack of fear bursts the heart, which is the worst of diseases. If the bravest of the brave replies that fear makes the face ugly, and takes all honest beauty from it, and that the earth will despise the fearful and pull him more quickly to his death, he is wrong. To be fearful is to be able to love. To lie three days in no-man’s-land as Edgar did, with every minute full of terror from the rats, men, and unseen dismemberment, was a feat of adoration for the scarred earth he clung to. It was a love that drove him almost out of his mind, a state of question without answer he chose to live with for the rest of his life.
The soil also pulls you under out of love, and since death is the end it is better for it to be welcoming than ward you off. It will cool and cushion those who are hot from dying, or merely warm you if the chill of crossing that terrible barrier is still present.
59
A simple man is a person who cannot express his complexities. A writer expresses them for him and still lets him keep the illusion of his simplicity. The Burtons are the simple men in me, but they had illusions of complexity that could never break out. The Sillitoes are the complex men, but they had illusions of simplicity that could not prevent the complexities from tormenting them.
The qualities of one family shift onto the other. They merge and cross-fertilize, become a running sore, ruining memory in a sea of psychic pain — which I distrust. Truth is like the tip of an iceberg: one-tenth of it based on nine-tenths lie. When I am out walking I sometimes feel the sallow Sillitoe blackness gaining the upper hand over the optimistic, energetic, easy-going Burton lot. At such times the two forces separate, and leave me in the middle of an expanding emptiness.