We often finish a book with an impression
of the person who wrote it. After spending hours with their words, we begin to
imagine how they might speak across a table, whether they would be good
company, perhaps what they would find funny. Do authors talk in the same way
they write? I wonder how much of that person we have supplied ourselves.
Or do some authors find writing easier than
conversation and socialising? A quiet person may write with considerable
boldness, having time to consider words they would struggle to find in company.
The page gives them a chance to revise a sentence before anyone else sees it.
That need not amount to putting on an act. If we met them briefly, we might
never hear the thoughts they can express quite readily in writing.
Perhaps there are three types of authors:
the hermit, the showperson and normal people. I would be reluctant to decide
who qualifies for the last group, particularly if I had to include myself.
Their books may never reveal any of these traits, leaving readers with a quite
different impression of the person behind them.
Are authors normal people, though, and is
there such a thing as a normal person? If normal means being like most people,
we first have to decide which people count and which parts of their lives we
are comparing. Somebody who seems entirely ordinary at work may spend their
evenings pursuing an interest their colleagues would find baffling. Much
depends on what they have allowed us to see. I cannot see why writing should
put someone in a separate category of person. Spending hours over a paragraph
may look peculiar to somebody who would prefer to spend those hours repairing a
motorbike, though either might struggle to understand the other’s idea of an
enjoyable afternoon. We seem quite willing to call a person normal once their
peculiarities resemble our own.
Does a writing style reveal the author’s
personality, or does it give them somewhere to hide? There is something of the
actor in a writer who can produce a voice that readers find convincing, then
leave it behind when the work is finished. The difficulty comes when we assume
that the voice continues through the rest of their life. We accept quite
readily that an actor can play someone whose temperament bears little
resemblance to their own, and would hardly expect an actor who plays a villain
to behave like one when the filming ends. Writing allows a similar freedom,
although the performance is less visible. We see the words and may forget how
much work went into making them sound natural.
A clown can write a serious book. The
familiar image of the tragic clown complicates this, because it encourages us
to imagine unhappiness behind the painted smile. That is another assumption.
The person wearing the costume could be perfectly content, with an interest in
something that calls for serious writing. Neither the costume nor the book
would give us the whole person.
I have watched interviews with comedians
who seemed to have very little of the wit or humour I associated with their
performances. Away from a script, some were surprisingly serious.
Perhaps I had expected them to keep
entertaining me simply because they were comedians. Yet being able to construct
something funny does not oblige someone to provide amusement whenever they
speak. A joke that works on the page may have taken considerable thought and
revision.
P. G. Wodehouse offers an interesting
example. Gerald Clarke’s introduction to their Paris Review interview describes his quiet,
largely secluded later life on Long Island and the attention from interviewers
that he found tiring. I would hesitate to expect the creator of Bertie Wooster
to provide Bertie’s performance over lunch. Neil Gaiman described anger at unfairness
beneath Terry Pratchett’s genial authorial voice, complicating any assumption
that a humorist must be permanently jolly.
Franz Kafka gives us a glimpse in the other
direction. His name can bring to mind the anxiety and confinement of his
fiction, but the Bodleian Libraries’ exhibition Kafka: Making of an Icon
drew attention to a postcard in which he joked to his brother-in-law about his
exceptional skiing skills, despite being severely ill at the time. That small
exchange interests me because it belongs to ordinary family life, somewhere we
may forget to look when imagining the author of such unsettling stories.
These examples hardly establish that the
writers were entirely unlike their books. They do suggest that the person we
construct from a particular kind of writing can be incomplete. Someone who
writes humour has other moods, while an author whose work unsettles us may also
enjoy being ridiculous. We make people surprisingly narrow when we expect them
to resemble the shelf on which their books belong.
Once mental health enters the discussion,
it opens a can of worms. Does writing offer someone a temporary escape from
thoughts they find difficult to live with? Could inventing another life give
them some distance from their own, or might writing bring them closer to what
troubles them? Those are questions I would want to leave open. We cannot settle
them by deciding that every cheerful writer must be concealing sadness, or that
dark writing tells us the author is unwell.
The About the Author section seems to offer
a direct route, although that too has been written for an audience. Its facts
may be accurate, but someone has chosen which ones to include and how to
arrange them. A career, a place of residence and a few interests make a useful
introduction. There is a great deal of living that will never fit into those
paragraphs.
Nonfiction may seem to allow less
concealment, especially when written in the first person. Someone writing about
regret or unfairness may omit the humour they enjoy elsewhere.
I am full of humour, although I do not
relay much of it in my books. Readers meet me while I am considering questions
that occupy a serious part of my attention, and they have little opportunity to
discover what I am like outside that writing. There is something of me in the
subjects I choose and how I approach them, but anyone expecting to know my
personality from those pages would have quite a bit missing.
Hiding parts of your personality behind the
contents of a book suits many authors. Writing with a masked pen seems a
fitting term for it.
I can see
the attraction of sharing work without having to make the rest of your life
available for inspection. Other arts allow that freedom too. A painting can
express a mood its creator does not carry around all day, and a piece of music
need not describe the temperament of the person who composed it. For me, that
is one of the beauties of art. A writer can care deeply about a book and still
keep much of themselves private. Readers may understand what I am trying to say
while having very little idea of what I would be like across the table.
A book can reveal something of its author without
showing us the whole person.
