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I met Mac in a bar in Beirut. He was the journalistâs journalist. He wore a faded khaki waistcoat that smelled of cordite and was stuffed with notebooks, plus combat trousers and paratrooper boots. âYouâre never off duty in this job,â he assured me.
Assurance was his thing. He listened with one ear to the bar (âThatâs my Arabic ear: had the best stories that wayâ), one ear to the TV news, and no ear at all to me. His legs were full of shrapnel, and he downed a tumbler of whisky for my every sip of beer.
âSee that guy?â he said, nodding to an Arab hunched over a pink gin. âI canât tell you about him, but youâll hear of him soon. Oh, yes, you will. Another one, please, Khalid.â
Mac knew what had happened and what would happen, exactly when and exactly why. The shifting alliances of Lebanese politics were as predictable as arithmetic. It was a great privilege for me to sit at the feet of an oracle. My role was just to buy the whisky. Mac knew that he was a great writer. That, along with the date of the next car bomb, was unarguable.
When I got back to the hotel I looked him up. His pieces were swashbuckling, emphatic, and usually wrong.
They could be no other. They purported to be about the real world, and the real world is always incalculable. Mac saw himself as a realist, his vision unclouded by sentiment or prejudice. In fact he wasnât describing the real Lebanon at all, but his own theories about the place: theories more precious to him than the data; theories so sacred that they could not be confounded by hindsight.
He was always, and only, writing about himself. Mac was a splendid, clever, and well-informed man, but his theories about Lebanon werenât as interesting as Lebanon, and did not relate in any meaningful way to it. His certainty was an absolute disqualification for the job he was employed to do.
What makes a great writer? Keats was famously clear. Especially in literature, he wrote, a âMan of AchievementâŚis capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.â My paraphrase: a great writer is one who appreciates the incalculability of the cosmos and everything in it, and writes accordingly. Shakespeare, wrote Keats, possessed this capacity (which Keats called âNegative Capabilityâ) âso enormously.â
What does Negative Capability look like on the page? The English philosopher Iain McGilchrist nails it down in his 2009 book The Master and His Emissary. In Shakespeareâs plays, he wrote, âthere is a complete disregard for theory and for category, a celebration of multiplicity and the richness of human variety, rather than the rehearsal of common laws of personality and behaviour according to type. Shakespeareâs characters are so stubbornly themselves, and not the thing that fate, or the dramatic plot insists they should be, that their individuality subverts the often stereotypical pattern of their literary and historical sources.â It’s why King Lear is truer, in a way, than much of journalism.
This is (Iâm certain) because uncertainty is part of the web and weave of the universe. Niels Bohrâs great achievement (now proven experimentally) was to show that no theory, however sophisticated, could ever explain everything about the world, because the action of everything is affected by the observer.
This is usually quoted in discussions about quantum phenomena, but it is true at every level. The visible world is just a scaled-up set of quantum phenomena. Just think how many observer-observed relationships there were in Lebanon; how many incalculables. This is a world of vertiginous contingency. Itâs far too exciting a place to be comfortable, and itâs certainly too exciting a place to be described by any rules, or written about as if it could be.
For my money, the best advice to writers comes in Alan Garnerâs book of essays The Voice That Thunders (1996). He wrote that the function of the storyteller is âto relate the truth in a manner that is simple; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery.â
It’s good physics to say that the universe is mysterious, and good writing to acknowledge it. One of Garnerâs characters, Colin, a physicist himself, declares, in the novel Boneland (2012): âIâm for uncertainty. As soon as you think you know, youâre done for. You donât listen and you canât hear. If youâre certain of anything, you shut the door on the possibility of revelation, of discovery. You can think. You can believe. But you canât, you mustnât, âknow.ââ
It shouldnât cause paralysis. But it should be an antidote to hubris, a call to humility, an implicit statement of the writerâs job descriptionâand it should imply something not just about what the job is but how, practically, it should be done.
If certainty is in principle impossible, writers shouldnât look for it inside themselves (by reference to their life experience, their pet theories, whatever). Where can they look? Only to the story itself. There is an absolute duty to the story: to let it tell itself. The right language to describe this duty is the language of mediumship. An authentic medium doesnât rig up devices, generate fake protoplasm, or tap the table herself. She gets out of the way.
Thereâs great craft in writing like this, of course. The legitimate pride of a writer is in getting out of the way of the story, in letting something that isnât linguistic at all reveal itself in words. The sorts of words best for that are surely simple, short, direct, Germanic words: mostly nouns and verbs; only occasional adjectives, and adverbs (self-referential horrors for the most part) only on special occasions.
We need to abandon the notion that the creative (as opposed to the crafty) part of writing happens at our laptop. It happens in the reading. This is true whether the writing is fiction or nonfiction. (All writing, after all, is only ever relative nonfiction or relative fiction.)
All this is a big ask. It demands real cleverness as well as real simplicity (not a common coalition), a strenuous sense of responsibility, and a really fanatical humility. âThe proper person to be entrusted with power,â wrote John Stuart Mill, âis the person most unwilling to accept it.â His maxim is easily adapted for writers. âHe must increase, but I must decrease,â declared John the Baptist of Christ. Writers, similarly, should practice decreasing so that the story may be told more truthfully. Itâs of a piece with everything we know of life outside the writerâs study. All the Eastern religions, for instance, advocate the dissolution of Self so that reality can be seen more clearly.
There is nothing flagellant about this radical literary humility. There is, for a start, the sheer joy in the craft: in fashioning joints between sentences; in choosing the one terse word that will say more than a page of artful fabrication, that will let the reader create when she reads it. And then there is something even more exciting, and more metaphysical. We see the same principle at work in our offices, at our dinner tables, and in our bedrooms. There seems to be a general law: the last will be first: that only if you humble yourself will you be exalted.
In the story related in the Lurianic Kabbalah, Ein-Sof (who very roughly equates to God) created the world. What next? An imperious command? A stream of iterations? No: he withdrew: withdrew to create a place for something other than himself to come into being. âThough we may be the lantern bearers,â observed Garner, âwe are not the lanterns.â
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