Writers can be profoundly dull, or at least they appear to be.
I have dreamt of a large library, whose dimensions I could not determine; and full of the smell of ancient thought. It was large enough to fit an entire continent. I recall sitting on a high pew, nearly russet hued, and of a glorious mould, stern like a mule's vertebrate, reading something like Tolstoy. Yes, Tolstoy it was; the girth of the book and the scent of those perennial sentences confirmed my suspicion. How strange; sometimes people you come across in dreams are total strangers to you in real life. These are unimportant musings; but however unimportant and irrational they may seem to an average eye, they are the very desideratum of a writer's life. All writers are quaint in that way; what makes them tick is anybody's guess.
I once met a venerable novelist from Delhi, whose name I can't put in here; because he's so insular, so private, almost to a confounding degree. “Public appearances torment me,” he told me esoterically, “of course you'd know how it works,” he added.
He told me that once he was having his chai in a cafe, under an awning, and saw at some distance a young, weather beaten, emaciated drudge; who looked like one who's never had any real work to do in life. He saw him squatting by the pavement, rolling up the hem of his kameez, clenching it by his muzzle, and pulling his member out by those fingers that looked like branches of a cedar, so as to relieve himself. The novelist enjoyed the whole process so much that he included the scene in one of his books. Chekhov believed that anything irrelevant to a story must be chucked out; but some writers don't think like that; they may make most things that mould their experience, relevant.
Writers do possess a bit of divine energy to create characters out of nothing, create men and women, and give them identities, genealogies, nomenclatures, faith, sexual orientations, social situations, grief, loss, opulence, ennui. No one knows where the scenes in a novel are coming from; whether they're spontaneous or culled from actual experience, no one knows. No one can ever know how the characters ripen; nothing in a writer's life is wasteful.
Somerset Maugham, it is said, owed most of his characters to his devoted sittings in the bars and cafes of Paris and London; for hours upon hours he'd sit there watching crowds streaming in and out, both young and old, observing every colour of their moods, every bend of their physical movements, every curve of their nostrils, every turn of their native colloquialisms. Dostoevsky, one wonders, worked on his fiction whilst sitting among an unending throng of graves; not a bad idea if one likes to write about grief, about loss. After all, those who've lost something prove to be the kindest of souls and the fiercest of lovers. Even a stray hound knows the importance of scarcity; on finding cold meat he masticates with rare relish; whereas our much cuddled and overfed home-pets treat their meals as routine gobbling exercises.
Dickens was well known to parade through the squalor of Victorian London, through her horse bespattered sludge; that is where his characters lived, in little ugly ghettos full of leaked casks and staggering poultry, in factories, in filthy hovels. Hardy found his in the undulating dales of Wessex. Khushwant Singh, the great Indian novelist and a personal favourite, one senses, had a fetish for anything rustic. I cannot be wrong in saying that he admired gazing at the softer sex, perched on their rooftops, drying their wet sheets by pegging them hard to the rope. I will apologise to men like Sir Francis Burton and DH Lawrence for my disrespectful insinuations; but the manner by which the former elucidates the act of copulation in his translations of The Perfumed Garden not only suggests an infinite interest in – and an intimate familiarity with – the contours of a female body; but also suggests firsthand experience of that momentary bliss that bears the force of rekindling dormant fires even in an ageing septuagenarian or a timid crone. As for Lawrence, one may imagine striplings, virgin maidens, and even bored housewives hiding in their duvets on winter nights, and reading about the promiscuity of "Lady Chatterley" as though she were the author's very own mistress. That is one reason, and a satisfying one too, why readers come to literature, are drawn to it as moths are drawn to a flame.
Real life is so poorly unromantic, so absent of thrill. The married think of their bond as eternal torture, the monotony simply saps their enthusiasm for life; the unmarried desire a partner to lodge a seed or a secret; the youth look forward to advanced age; the old look upon the young with longing; the poor mourn their insufficiency; the rich have no one they could truly confide in; nobody's complete, nobody's ever satisfied. It is only through imaginative literature; through its lavishness; that people get a chance at living the lives they've always wanted.
Literature, in that sense, is an opium for the people, much like religion. And so, writers have to be the irrational engines that drive human thought; their intellectual authority; their mysterious prestige outlasts their corporal existence, and in fact in time, grows to be regarded as ancient wisdom. A nation blessed with a rich pool of writers and thinkers will always have a future. To think that oil wealth, supplemented by modern technologies, can alone shore up the minds of men, will only, in the words of Milton, result in "chaos." It is utter imbecility to think that our civilisation can get very far without minds who could interpret life for us.
But writers are never malleable; on the contrary, they're so obstinate and impulsive that they're either ennobled or killed. They must either excite or vex; and if they can't do all of that; their charm is wasted. Writers who make a habit of making enemies truly excel at their art; for they tell you what you do not wish to know: your flaws. They may reform you, almost like an act of parliament. And they're born, not made; no school, no university, no sanctuary of learning can produce a quality writer. They can only owe their distinction to the university of life.