Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Of attics and apples




Do  the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn't be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they've been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn't always abandoned because it fails some quality control test. The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

With Flaubert, the apocrypha cast a second shadow. If the sweetest moment in life is a visit to a brothel that doesn't come off, perhaps the sweetest moment of writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never  needs be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its author.

Julian Barnes: 'Flaubert's Parrot' (1984)

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