This is a guest post by Kwame Anthony Appiah (New York University) on reading and writing fiction, for a series of blogposts we are hosting on philosophers who write fiction or poetry (see here for an earlier installment).
My mother was an artist who became a writer because she found that it was easier, while raising children, to compose fiction than to paint. (A brief teenage conversation with my mother: “Mummy, why did you stop painting?” “You were born.” Guilty silence.) The first draft of my own first novel was written in about a week. For no recoverable reason I had imagined on paper the scene of a young man dying, probably poisoned. I showed it to my husband, Henry, who said: “Now, you have to explain how it happened.” He then set me up in the study of our sabbatical house in Ithaca and brought me sandwiches every few hours and regular cups of tea. Taking the first draft to a final version took longer, of course; and had the assistance of a splendid editor, the late Miles Huddlestone at Constable, in London. But I have never had another writing experience quite like that.
My mother’s writing didn’t proceed that way, either. Like most of my other books, her novels were made in pieces over a longish period of time, interrupted, in her case, by us children and, for both of us, by the rest of life. I think it’s true that fiction-writing can be done in the in-between times, when you can focus intensely for a few hours on making the next brick of the edifice. Novels—even the mystery novels I have written, which need both a structured unfolding of discoveries and an underlying set of events, a working plot—can be made in bits and out of order, then assembled later. I wrote mine by composing a murder to solve, one whose solution I didn’t know in advance, placing some characters into a context around it, and then moving their world forward and inventing slowly a way to make sense of the crime. Then, of course, I had to go back through what I had written and seed the clues and make sure people were in the right places at the right times. An odd process, but it worked well enough. But there are other ways to do it: one real novelist I know well plans his novels out in meticulous outline before he gets going.
Poetry, too, which requires great concentration, can more readily be done in unconnected blocks of time. (Wallace Stevens had a full-time job as an insurance executive, and still managed a Pulitzer Prize for poetry!) I published a poem once about doing philosophy, but otherwise the only poems I’ve published, since high school, were in a slim volume of family poems by my grandfather, my mother, my sister and me, that my mother produced many years ago. They are old-fashioned, metrical, verse, often rhymed. Some of them work for me like a diary, as a record of experience, as Wordsworth’s “Daffodils” must have been for him. I wonder about his famous assertion that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” I do not doubt that this was true for him, but for me poetry has often been a way of managing feeling rather than a spontaneous expression of it. But I agree with him that you can only do it in tranquility and after the event. And sometimes, at least for me, poetry is the expression of an attitude or idea rather than a feeling; as in two poems called “Books” and “Heritage,” about how tradition encumbers and enables, which you can see among the few verses on my website.
I have only ever published one short story, which came about as a result of an invitation from Melvin Dixon to contribute to an anthology written by gay men of African descent. For some reason, I never took to the form. I think it may be because I like closure, the sense of an ending, and in the modern short story that isn’t so much of a thing. Which doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy reading them. I do. But, for what it’s worth, my one short story was also possible to compose in bits and pieces, between teaching and writing philosophy.
Do my novels have anything to do with my philosophical work? Avenging Angel is set in Cambridge and has philosophers among the characters, but Nobody Likes Letitia is set on a remote Scottish Island, free of philosophers, and Another Death in Venice is also a philosopher-free zone … like Venice itself, mostly, though Giorgione’s Three Philosophers, one of my favorite paintings, was commissioned by a Venetian merchant. None of the novels has much real philosophy in it, though the philosophers in the first discuss a real philosopher’s puzzle, the surprise exam paradox. It’s more like the philosophy in Stoppard’s Jumpers, though: it’s meant to sound like philosophy, without actually doing any philosophy. If there’s anything in these novels relevant to my philosophical work, it is that they explore questions of identity. I’m not sure you could write a novel that wasn’t in some sense “about” identity, even Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities! (Strange fact: Musil wrote a PhD dissertation on Ernst Mach.) My protagonist is an upper-class English Catholic, an insider-outsider in the complex world of class and religious identity in Anglican England. I was raised as an Anglican, but not being white made the parts of my childhood spent in England, a sort-of insider-outsider thing, though I have to say that no amount of racial condescension ever made me feel out of place in the villages in the West of England where I grew up alongside my white cousins. A lot of the English poetry I love—a love I learned from my mother who loved it too—is, like “Daffodils,” about landscapes I love. I am writing a new kind of fiction, for me, now, started in the last month, about a childhood growing up across places. We shall see if it comes to anything: I get less done during the teaching term, but I’ll try to keep it moving ahead in those in-between times.
People want you to connect the parts of your life. The conventions of autobiography, though not, perhaps, of modern auto-fiction, don’t encourage you to say, “I did this, and then I did that different thing. No connection.” But I think I started writing novels precisely because it was so unlike writing philosophy. The disconnection was the point. It didn’t take away from my energy for philosophy; instead, it provided a respite from it. Serious philosophical writing is exhausting, and I have to be in the right mood for it. Writing fiction helped me recover the mood by taking me away from philosophy for a while, if you see what I mean. But the key to writing fiction, I think, is reading fiction. My mother placed a pile of her favorite novels on my bedside table in our home in Ghana at the beginning of the summer vacation, and we lived in a house full of novels; Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Galsworthy, Trollope, D. H. Lawrence, the Russians (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev), some Goethe and Flaubert and Hugo in translation, but also African novels by Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye and Ama Ata Aidoo and Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer.
I continue to read novels as much as I can, even though there is too much philosophy that I haven’t read and should be reading. It is a habit I can’t give up. And two years ago, as the chair of the judges for the Booker Prize, I read a hundred and seventy odd new novels in nine months, which was a wonderful but also a strange experience! Discussing them with my fellow judges was like being in a fabulous book club. But reading novels in order to rank them is an eccentric artifice. Only people who don’t understand literary criticism think it is a matter of grading stuff. (That’s what’s so odd about F. R. Leavis’s criticism: the only question seems to be, Is this part of the Great Tradition? … but I suspect I am being unfair.) This sort of grading gets in the way of really immersive reading.
The one writing task I do that involves finishing a complete “work” in a single session is my Ethicist column for The New York Times Sunday Magazine. I settle down, usually on a Saturday morning, and open the file of questions from readers that sits on my laptop and answer them usually in order, doing anything from three to ten at a time. Then I put them together in groups of about the right length—1200 to 1500 words. (I’m told the final length of the next column on a Thursday or Friday, which depends on arcane newspaper-layout mysteries I do not pretend to understand.)
One final thought, which is a point about reading fiction, not about writing it. There is a connection between my fiction reading and philosophy, which shows up through the presence of discussions of fiction in my philosophical writing. I find I learn a great deal about ethical life by thinking through the experiences of characters in the sort of densely realized worlds that novels imagine. Our philosophers’ examples are often very thin, schematic and sketchy; and that may be good for some purposes. But moral life is thick, dense, luxuriant. Philosophy that doesn’t recognize this can be of great theoretical interest: but it can’t do the thing that the heirs to Socrates, from Plato and Aristotle to the Roman Stoics, thought they were doing, which is helping you to live well. I’m not claiming that my mystery novels are much assistance there. But literary fiction—including mystery novels like the one I read last night, John Banville’s marvelous Snow—can be. I learned that at my mother’s knee.
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