Writing Abroad / Features / Untitled Books

I was so successfully ignored due my lack of coherent French, my mind finally had enough space for my imagination to truly roam free.

Writing Abroad

STEVE TOLTZ, author of A Fraction Of The Whole, was recently named at The Hay Festival as 21 of the most exciting writers of the moment. He writes of living in Barcelona and Paris, about the peculiar freedom of writing away from home and those, including John Fowles and Henry Miller, who have found the same.

Following a blind urge I jumped on a plane to Spain where I discovered that not only is the grass greener on the other side of the fence, it’s also cheaper.

As you know, there are three fantasies common to every writer:

1. Your novel is taught at the school that expelled you;
2. Your entire output is translated into Klingon;
3. Like Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway, you write at least one book in either Barcelona or Paris.

Initially, I was seduced not so much by the 'there' of overseas, as by the 'not here' of it. Also, it's a universal truth that it's difficult to keep oneself fresh in the same environment - that is to say, I personally can't do it, so following a blind urge I jumped on a plane to Spain where I discovered that not only is the grass greener on the other side of the fence, it's also cheaper.

The surprises didn't end there. In Europe I found that when you announce yourself to be a writer (especially if you smoke), people generally take you at your word. This was very liberating for me, coming from Australia, a society designed in such a way that a person can't call themselves a writer without some pretty solid evidence to back up this wild assertion. But in Europe it seemed not as necessary, which gave writing a refreshing guilt-free aspect to it - though that wasn't the only reason I got more pages done in a day. The thing is, I've always found it quite difficult to write when someone is talking to me unless it turns out that someone is talking to me in a language that's not my native tongue, in which case I can write quite freely. Better yet: if no one is talking to me at all, not for days or sometimes weeks on end, then I can be extremely productive. That was the case for me when after a year in Barcelona I moved to Paris, where for eight months I was so successfully ignored due my lack of coherent French, my mind finally had enough space for my imagination to truly roam free. I learned that in the uninterrupted quiet of unremitting solitude, you find all those truths you didn't know you had.

Since then, I discovered that dipping my pen in the fertility of unfamiliar soil influences my writing in every way;

(a) Characters. You don't write what you know, but who you know. Stories and situations can be fabricated, but you can't 'invent' humanity. Traveling affords greater opportunity to mix with people who've gone through wildly divergent life experiences and it's also helpful if you'd like to dilute your disgust of the hideousness of your own people by witnessing first-hand the hideousness of others, as Louis-Fernidand Celine did in Journey to the End of the Night, his semi-autobiographical novel that sees him encounter vicious, egotistic, hypocritical and inhumane odd-balls in France, Africa and New York.

(b) Material. Living in the one place all your life, the least common daily experience is encountering new, unforeseen circumstances. It's much easier to get into hot water when you blunder into cultures you are not familiar with. Stories by Paul Bowles is a perfect example of how an old-fashioned culture clash is a well that never runs dry.

© Place. It's rare to get lost in your own neighborhood without requiring (or being a result of) medication. Overseas wanderings down strange streets, encountering God-knows-what, is a great source of inspiration. John Fowles wrote his trippy, labyrinthine opus The Magus based on his experiences living and teaching English in the Greek Islands. Also, if you a writer of historical fiction, writing overseas can be a lot like time traveling. If you want to know what it was like in your home country in the 1970s, or even further back, say, to the middle ages, there are certain countries that will give you a fairly accurate picture, though it would be impolite to name them.

(d) The writer. As they say, wherever you go, there you are. Or are you? An interesting English person can be boring in Spanish, hilarious in Italian, roundabout in Greek and straightforward in German. In other words, it's through language we discover Whitman's multitudes. Moving through landscapes and cultures not only widens your vision (and therefore imagination), but it's a fun way to find those hard to reach inner truths. If Blaise Cendras had not gone on his restless world journeys, for instance, he might never have produced his disturbing novel, Moravagine, which follows the self-titled character from Moscow to Texas to the Amazon.

(e) Home. Finally, as there are some prisons you can only see from the outside, being a long distance away often makes it easier to write about your native land; easier to see your national limitations and strengths, compare your fanatics with the fanatics of other countries, and to smell afresh your culturally defined prejudices by inhaling the prejudices of others. And since even a foreign land can feel, after a time, that you are being once more bludgeoned by the familiar, when you return back to where you started, you find that you see your home through fresh old-child's eyes, with a brand-new incomprehension, as Henry Miller did when he finally returned from Paris and traveled across his homeland to write the scathing portrait of the United States in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

Unfortunately, on a personal level, once home, you realize that nobody wants to hear about your experiences, and you have to live with the sadness of not being able to communicate them. For this reason, writing abroad and then returning home is ultimately like having cold water thrown over your life - refreshing, but may cause shrinkage.

Friday, 6 June, 2008