Helen Dunmore is a writer I discovered fairly recently; her latest novel was nominated for the Booker literary award. I was attracted by the fact that it had been nominated and also by the setting: St Petersburg in the 1950s. I tend to think that any novel, film or work of literature opens a window onto another culture or time and potentially depending upon the work and the engagement it can be a very illuminating experience. Having done more research on the author, I came across this thought provoking article that she once penned on walking and the writing process.
Walking into the story
"Coleridge thought nothing of walking from Nether Stowey to Bristol; Virginia Woolf, for all her fragile elegance, would often walk the eight miles from Rodmell to Charleston to visit her sister; Keats tramped Scotland, and Emily and Anne Brontë made a holiday of walking from Haworth to Keighley and staying there overnight.
There they go, all of them heroic walkers by our timid twenty-first century standard: John Clare, James Boswell, Jane Austen, Dorothy Wordsworth, Henry Mayhew, T S Eliot haunting the brown London fogs, Katherine Mansfield discovering the New Zealand backblocks, D H Lawrence on the coast path from Zennor to St Ives. They are on foot, observant, seeing, smelling, touching, hearing, getting blown about and rained on, sinking onto milestones or sheltering in the lee of thorn-hedges, carrying stout sticks, losing their way and finding it again, meeting leech-gatherers, bores, beggars, prostitutes, drunks, thieves, flower-sellers, and writing about all of them.
What chance would they have had, from the inside of a Volkswagen Golf? Driving doesn’t just get you from place to place rapidly. It provides you with a mobile private space, which you can control even when you are stuck in a traffic jam. You listen to your own music, choose your own climate, and need speak to no-one. You are outside, but inside, moving from place to place yet never in public. In a car you’ll never smell the warm, metallic wind that gusts down a tube platform, be thrown forward as you negotiate the aisle of a badly driven bus, give up your seat or have one given up for you, be asked for money in a dozen languages, negotiate a street full of chuggers, steer clear of drunken football supporters, smile at somebody else’s baby, overhear the broken bits of conversations, watch the dexterous flicker of a blind man’s stick, hear the creak of the school crossing-lady’s slicker as she lifts her lollipop, or smell the pungency of the first drops of rain hitting summer pavements. In your car you won’t be greeted, smiled at, shouted at, cursed. Or if you are, you won’t have to deal with it, except by driving away fast. You won’t get caught by the weather, and your legs won’t ache. Above all, you will never share the neutrality and anonymity of the streets.
Maybe, for many, those are fine reasons for taking out a bank loan fast, and buying that car. Muggers and drug dealers come to outweigh the exhilaration of walking late, brilliant streets, and who wants to be bothered with picking their way over fast-food litter? We may still go for walks, in landscapes of our own choosing, but we prefer them to be beautiful. And so as we grow older we grow safer, until we shame ourselves by not knowing the fare to anywhere, and having no shoes in which we can walk more than a few hundred yards.
Besides, there’s the dimension of status to be considered. Success steps out of its black Mercedes and walks into its intimate venue. Mediocrity plods.
But writing hasn’t changed: it’s still the stuff that you do when you are not at your desk. Maybe it’s because the first things I wrote were poems - and very likely the last things will be poems too - that I’m convinced work has to grow into its own rhythm, inside the head. And there’s no place better for composition than a road. It has everything: space, time, an inner solitude which is constantly interrupted by everything from the scent of lavender rubbed against the fingers to a stretch of police tape where a murder’s been committed. Such qualified, interrupted solitude may be better for a writer than conditions which are more obviously ideal.
And nothing more quickly calms the stretched, exposed mind after a day’s writing than to walk. Walking dissolves tension, anger, disappointment, anxious self-regard. What seems important at the beginning of an hour’s walk is not the same as what seems important at its end. So much has happened. After walking past a house a dozen times, you notice that high up on the wall there’s a plaque that says that Amy Valence and Katherine Louise Medlicott lived there from 1822 to 1869, ‘devotedly serving the poor of this parish’. Or there’s a sudden, sharp quarrel between two men outside a sandwich shop which uses ‘only halal meat’. And then, after a couple of miles, the reward of a Cadbury’s Flake - and all at once the characters who were sullenly frozen begin to move inside your head, or a piece of dialogue picks up speed.
Recently some well-known writers, including A S Byatt and Minette Walters, allowed a documentary film-maker to follow their writing process from the beginning of a book to its end. Maybe the idea behind the programmes was that television might capture that invisible moment when dithering disguised as preparation becomes the thing itself: creation, the slippages of the brain as it accelerates into words that go down as fresh and wet as paint. And once that creative moment is recorded, maybe it can be pinned down, analysed, imitated.
Many of us, it seems, whether we’re writers or not, like to know how the process works. At readings, the most frequently asked questions are those about a writer’s procedure. Hours of work, discipline or lack of it, how many words per day, how many drafts per manuscript, how many years make a novel and how many novels make a professional. Absinthe or Ovaltine, Mac or PC, sitting or standing, Google or British Library, caf or decaf, fags or nicotine patches .....
But the moment of composition may have nothing to do with sitting in front of a screen, or putting words on paper. It’s a moment that does not want to be recorded, except by the one person who can find a form for it. And as the camera approaches, the moment, like the writer, retreats and walks away, becoming the shape of Coleridge with his coat on, striding across the Quantocks and into a poem."
(This article was first published in The Author)
