HOW I FOUND MY PURPOSE
By Nicholas Lezard
I have to admit that when I was asked to write this I was baffled even to learn that I had a purpose, or that someone else thought I did.
“My what?” I asked.
“You know, writing.”
“Ah, that purpose.”
The thing is, I had been doing it so long I had ceased to see it as an end in itself. But I suppose that is what it is. A purpose comes trailing all other sorts of little purposes with it, though, and, of course, one purpose shared by every human being: to cope with, or fathom, the unfathomable business of being alive. Putting it like that seems a bit portentous but then you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t thinking along the same lines.
But my purpose found me as much as I found it, and at an almost freakishly early age, when I learned to read at, I am told, the age of two. I find this hard to believe but I do remember being given a book to read at my nursery school and being baffled as to why others next to me were having a problem. I can still remember what the book looked like; and I can also remember thinking that maybe I was doing it wrong, because I was finding it so easy. Was I missing something? Where, I asked myself, was the struggle? But I kept on getting good marks and thought little more of it. I had other purposes in mind. I was six when the first moon landing happened; I was allowed to stay up late to watch it; and for quite a while, my purpose was strictly confined to becoming an astronaut. I was small for my age and I had learned – because I had started reading voraciously around the subject – that as cockpits were cramped, it helped to be on the small side; and I had a head start on that.
Eventually, reality took over. Apparently you had to be in the Air Force first. Then I discovered pop music, and thought I had finally found Plan B. This persisted for an embarrassingly long time – I won’t say how long, but let’s just say there was a considerable overlap between the start of my writing career and the realisation that I wasn’t ever going to be on Top of the Pops.
I suppose I realised around the age of 10. I had been given a membership of the Puffin Club: an operation by the junior wing of Penguin books explicitly designed to ensnare young girls and boys into the murky world of books and writing. Cleverly, they made it sound fun and cool; members were encouraged to send in their own writing, and once I realised that they had a tolerant position on vers libre I sent in a poem and it was considered so good they gave me a year’s free membership, and a special badge. This was validation of a high order. (I can still remember what the poem was about: I had just seen an episode of the TV series The World at War and, inspired by the footage of World War 2, wrote a dozen or so lines courting controversy by saying that War Was Bad. I might have skated over the reasons why that war had started in the first place; I was taking the broader view.) I started writing a sci-fi novel when I was 11; it wasn’t very good, at all, and I knew it as I wrote it, and I also remember thinking at the time: am I a real writer? Have I left it too late? Am I a fraud? It was only many years later that I learned all writers are harried by exactly the same self-doubt.
I was encouraged by well-meaning teachers, and, of course, the kind of middle-class upbringing that allows such impulses to flourish. I survived A-levels, which at the time were a kind of assault course designed to put you off literature, but I was introduced to Beckett, and from that I learned that a mixture of idleness, insolence, and imagination could help one directly address the question raised above: how to manage being alive; or how to acknowledge that while life was unspeakably awful, it was the only show in town. And I also learned, with Beckett, that High Art could also be funny: funnier than anything else. At the heart of all decent writing is the urge to entertain. In this way the aborted pop star in me was appeased. Then there was university, and the way I was taught it at the time, the general message was: how dare you even think of comparing yourself to TS Eliot or Henry James. It was pretty tough. Not only did we have to read George Eliot, we then had to understand why she wasn’t as good as some people said she was. It wasn’t so much an assault course but rather an elite boot camp: three years of being told you weren’t good enough. It drove a few people mad. But the general idea was that there was no higher calling: words were the best way of explaining life – the only way – and you had to treat them with respect. And also: words weren’t just marks on paper, but sounds, with music and rhythms of their own. And they could make you think, or cry, or laugh; most importantly, laugh. The laughter is incredibly important. Just as the weakling in the school playground learns to avoid a pasting by making the bully laugh, so the writer learns how to cope with the biggest bully of them all: death.
A brief post-university career as a copywriter also told me that one of my chief purposes in life was also not to have to go to work every weekday; and also that doing it just for the money was no way to live your life. To this day I reserve a special contempt for people whose sole purpose is to make money. When I was offered a serious promotion at my job I resigned on principle, and since then I have got up when I wanted and, most of the time, written what I wanted. It is a privilege I am grateful for every single day.
The beauty of it is that it is an unending process. You try to be better than you were the last time you sat down to write; it’s a matter of constant self-improvement, even if there are regular episodes of failure. (Beckett’s line, “fail better”, has over the years become a catchphrase among people who haven’t read a single other word of his; but it works, and it’s honest.)
Along the way, there are tributaries that feed into the purpose: the desire, in my capacity as a book critic, to help others who have not achieved recognition, to encourage others who want to see life whole, however slippery the tools – words – at their disposal; to acknowledge and celebrate the work of others, while at the same time furnishing the cave inside your own head with wisdom. There will always be gaps in the shelves: and these are gaps that can be readily, although not effortlessly, plugged; and each time a space is filled, another one opens up somewhere else. The task is Sisyphean; but how would we even know what that meant, if someone hadn’t taken the trouble to write down the story in the first place?
