The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer #13

Is the end also a beginning?

This week, ‘Grosse Fugue’ finally appeared, ready for its soft launch.  If you’ll permit, I’m going to be even more self-indulgent than usual.

I can now hold in my hand a printed book of something that was once merely a figment of my imagination and a plan sketched out in a notebook.

For large tranches of the intervening period, I barely dared to hope that, one day, it might be able to take its place on bookshelves in homes, shops and libraries.  That it might jostle for space with heroes like Primo Levi and George Orwell, well who could even dream of such a thing!

And yet, here it is, and here I am.

What’s strange is that I feel somewhat empty.  I’m not looking for sympathy, I hasten to add.  I know how fortunate I am to have got here.  But in the confessional nature of some of these blogs, it seems to me that I ought to be honest.

First things first, I am a perfectionist.  I also subscribe to Kant’s dictum that ‘from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made’.  So I am alive to the novel’s flaws and imperfections, blinded by the might-have-beens.  I’m a glass-half-empty kind of guy; in fact, I’m pretty sure someone peed in it when I wasn’t looking.

I revisit the entire editing process and think of all the times I might have been more assertive or built in more buffers to allow for reading the latest changes with some distance and detachment.  My only consolation is that when it’s a runaway success (ahem), I can seek a revised reprint that allows for more improvement (and even revisits my original ending).  Well, is there any harm in dreaming?

I’m also painfully aware that the high ambitions I set for ‘Grosse Fugue’ may well remain unfulfilled.  While unpublished, there was no risk of failure or of a full frontal attack on the ideas it contains.  Now, I’m a bit like a stand-up comedian – hopelessly exposed and nowhere to hide.  It’s a strange sense of nakedness.

So this is a new phase.  At the age of 58, I think I can say with some confidence that it’s never too late to live your dreams, and I’m so grateful to my publisher that they have enabled me to proclaim that.  Leonard Cohen sang ‘there ain’t no cure for love’.  We all know that there ain’t no cure for writing, either.  Once bitten, we are forever infected.  I feel the fever rising once again as I begin to think about the next book.

As I look at ‘Grosse Fugue’, I find myself drawn to some great words by Zamyatin: “True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and sceptics.”

And I wonder which, if any, am I.

Ian Phillips is a freelance writer for businesses whose first novel, Grosse Fugue, is being published by Alliance Publishing Press. Further information is now available at www.alliancepublishingpress.com.  He’s tweeting developments @Ian_at_theWord.