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Notebooks, cameras and the process of creating

My daughter and I are sitting on the steps of the Duomo in Bologna. Francesca is drawing in her sketch book when a couple with a small movie camera hover behind her. The man lowers the camera over her shoulder and aims the lens at her page. ‘Keep drawing’, the wife orders her. ‘Go on!’ They have an ambition to record her moving hand in their film. Francesca laughs. I start to laugh. She closes her sketch book. The movie-makers are disappointed by her attitude. She tells me that when she’s drawing in the British Museum or the National Gallery, tourists crowd round her, taking photographs. They’re excited by an artist practising their art.

On the same holiday, I’m sitting on a cobbled street in Fermo. I’ve left the tour of the Roman cistern, a hilltop man-made cavern of rooms, built to store water; the damp underground air has affected my breathing. But never mind, I have my blue notebook and my fountain pen. I want to make notes because the cistern is full of the contradictions that a poet loves. Five minutes in, and I’m startled by the click-click of a camera behind me. A man is aiming his lens at my notebook. ‘It’s a wonderful photograph’, he says. ‘It has come out so well.’  He expects me to join in his rejoicing. Then, without showing me, he runs away. 

I’m waiting to meet Francesca in the Royal Festival Hall café, a place where other coffee drinkers tap away on laptops. My daughter is late, so I open my green notebook and join the writers around me. After a few minutes, I sense I’m being watched. Am I imagining it? No. Over by the gift shop, a man is focussing an elephant trunk of a lens on my notebook. We clock each other. I close my notebook. He lowers his heavy camera and drifts off. 

I’m on a train to Bristol, writing in my red notebook…well, you can guess the rest. 

These incidents make me ask why we’re so fascinated by the processes of creation. Why do people want to photograph artists while they draw? The desire to photograph a drawing as it almost magically appears on the page is more understandable than wanting to photograph the act of writing. Is there something quaint about analogue methods? Is handwriting a dying artform, the image of which should be archived for posterity? Everywhere, writers work on laptops but are probably not the subject of photography. But isn’t the camera itself a kind of notebook? While my notebook contains my rough impressions, it has become a note in someone else’s visual collection.

I have some sympathy with these photographers. As a creative-writing lecturer wanting to help students, I discovered more about the different practices of writing from reading writers’ notebooks than from reading ‘how to’ books on craft. And as a writer of my own notebooks, I’m encouraged by reading those of others. So why do I prize notebooks, journals, diaries and letters where writers record both their lives and their source material? What is it about those raw notes that attracts me? Is it somehow the desire to experience with the writer the first spark that fires the finished work? I can’t claim to read journals and notebooks in a scholarly way. I dip into them randomly and achronologically. While it’s rewarding to recognise the seeds of, say, The Swimmer, John Cheever’s famous story, I’m not seeking the roots of a finished piece for critical purposes. Rather, I think what I enjoy is the exploration of a writer’s sensibility.

Firstly, there’s the matter of the writer’s zeitgeist. John Cheever, David Gascoyne, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath all communicate a sense of their times, whether it’s the amount of alcohol consumed in Ossining in the sixties, being hungry in Paris in the thirties, the pleasure of visiting Mrs Plum in Devon in 1962, an episode that shows Plath’s warm understanding of other women and makes me like both her and Mrs Plum, these writers communicate live moments from their times, mixed up with personal crises and developments. A diary differs from a historical novel where a writer has researched and selected details to include. In journals, a writer has no sense of temporal distance, but dashes down immediate moments. On 13^th October 1936, David Gascoyne suffers a raging toothache, wakes in the sordidness of an ‘after-the-party’ room and takes part in an anti-Fascist procession to Alexandra Park, hears Fascists shouting anti-Jewish slogans in Green Street and sings the Internationale at dusk in Green Park, where ‘a great crowd stretched away towards the surrounding trees, dotted with red flags and banners.’ The entry for 21^st October 1936 includes an expired railway ticket, staggering round to deliver surrealist bulletins, encountering annoying friends, descriptions of walkers on Hampstead Heath and a tantalising reference to ‘my wild and much-loved godmother whose grave is in the cemetery which the bus passed by.’ Who was she? How did she die? What form did her wildness take? A journal writer has no need to explain, and a life leaps off the page, a present grief in the writer’s memory. Like Stendhal’s mirror, the journal is the view from the bus passing by.  

In the introduction to Cheever’s journals, his son tells us that Cheever ‘feverishly typed’ his journal pages, ‘with floating caps, misspellings, and cross outs’ and yet the writing within these pages is elegant, disturbing, poetic, full of painfully honest self-analysis. As someone who typed his journals, Cheever probably wasn’t writing them in streets, cafés or outside, as I often do.  Yet Cheever’s present tense draws me into his personal experiences as if they are synchronous with the act of writing up. He is always the artist and, whether reflecting on his own nature, sexual longings, religious faith, alcoholism or engagement with the quotidian world, he finely observes and dramatises each situation. In 1959, he writes: ‘The lower school here burns down. A rambling frame building with turrets and amendments, saturated in creosote, it seems to explode in flame. Ten minutes after the old teacher smells smoke, it is a pillar of fire. The firemen can’t approach it, the heat is so intense. All the surrounding trees can be seen to wither. Here is the savage power of fire, the smiting force, which, like so much else in life, evades precautions and is ruthless. Within half an hour everything is gone, the clothing, the children’s toys, the souvenirs of travel and athletic prowess, the rich precipitate of their lives. At three o’clock they possessed an environment. At three-twenty they are naked and dependent upon charity. The bitter smoke.’ There are layers here. Cheever embeds the damage to three generations: the old teacher, the firemen and the children. He credits the power of objects and spaces that give meaning to daily life. But the master stroke is ‘the bitter smoke’ of mortality that follows us all. I’d never have read this if I hadn’t dipped into the journals where every observation forms a bridge between Cheever’s inner apprehension and his exterior world. For me, the passage justifies, not that it needs to, time spent on notebook writing, observing and creating fragments. These unexpected jewels are heartening when reading other writers’ notebooks where a sense of place and time is so powerfully rendered. 

In Woolf’s diaries, we see the writer’s creative mind, interrupted by relatives, by the fascinations of walking through London, by tea at Charleston, but ever returning to fictional composition. In 1923, Virginia Woolf is at work on both Mrs Dalloway (or The Hours as she was calling it then) and The Common Reader. Her diary entries switch between notes and queries about both books. On August 17^th, she writes a list of headings and authors to consider in The Common Reader. On August 29^th, she reflects on her progress with The Hours. On October 15^th, she says, ‘I am now in the thick of the mad scene in Regents Park. I find I write it by clinging as tight to fact as I can, & write perhaps 50 words a morning. This I must re-write some day.’ Woolf’s methods, daily amounts of writing, creative problems, interruptions and the switching between a journalistic book on reading and a novel are fascinating. Despite her thinking the design remarkable, she questions her creation of Mrs Dalloway’s character. Here, Woolf mentions her famous tunnelling process, the way in which she ‘tells the past by instalments, as I have need of it,’ and takes a stab at Percy Lubbock’s idea that a writer can plan a book consciously. Woolf detests the idea of systematised writing. I too love the messy processes of writing and resist the notion of rules, which is why I gain more from Woolf than handbooks on novel structure. The agility of her switchback associative mind is bracing and inspiring. Woolf’s constant interrogation of her own writing process and her description of it, interspersed with accounts of conversations, discussions about reading, visits, descriptions of weather, city and countryside, urge her on to complete the work. The diary becomes almost a writing coach, a mentor, a dialogue of the everyday self with the writer self. Woolf frequently reflects on her word count, her goals in terms of dates, weeks and days. No wonder she wrote novels called (originally) The Hours and The Years. Everything in her diaries attests to her fascination with time. Open any page, and there will be a reference to time whether it’s lunch, an appointment, the season, the counting of days left to finish a book, a date of publication, a comment on age or history, the time taken to write 100,000 words. Somehow reading Woolf’s diary, all kinds of writing seem possible within the varied confines of measured time.

If Woolf and Cheever mix accounts of life and writing in their journals, Henry James, at least in my edition of his notebooks, focuses on working out his characters. He takes a dilemma and puzzles at it. On November 3^rd 1894, James writes of:

…the situation of some young creature (it seems to me preferably a woman, but of this I’m not sure), who, at 20, on the threshold of a life that has seemed boundless, is suddenly condemned to death (by consumption, heart-disease, or whatever) by the voice of the physician.

This is James working out the scenario and characters of the three protagonists in The Wings of the Dove. Out of character comes action, and James works intensely on character contradictions before naming and placing his cast. James began as a playwright and his methods of working out choices, inner problems, social pressures and the cross-play of action before he embarks on the actual novel writing is reminiscent of a playwright’s method. James argues with his own ideas saying, ‘But’ or ‘or’ as he tries out different scenarios and back stories — ‘He has no income and she no fortune, or there is some insurmountable opposition on the part of her father. […] Or say they simply have no means […]’. There are many dashes and interjections, snatches of dialogue, weighing of one option of action against another, and worries about the crudeness of the plot. Early on he’ll say, ‘I cannot see it yet’ but the very writing of the notebook entry helps him to envisage his story. As the notes continue, James comments, ‘I seem to see a penniless peer, who my elder girl refuses.’ The tone becomes less tentative, more decided. ‘She is eager, ready to marry now […] He’s in distress […]’. And towards the end of his entry, James says, ‘I seem to see her perhaps as an American […]’. It’s an exciting read because the shape of the novel and the characters form before the reader’s eyes. James works initially without names for characters or places and then weighs up names from lists. In 1891, James has some fun with this list:

Pickerel — Chafer — Bullet — Whitethorne — Dash — Elsinore (place) — Douce — Doveridge (person or place — Adney — Twentyman (butler) — Firminger — Wayward (place) — Wayworth — Greyswood (place) — Nona (girl’s name) — Runting.

The continuing list, too long to recite here, is as rhythmic as a poem. 

To write this article, I’ve spent some time in the company of Plath, Gascoyne, Woolf and Cheever, and finally I’m glad to return to novels and completed published poems. The writer’s voice in their notebook is confiding, tentative and often insistent. The finished work intended for public readership is less directing and self-questioning, more shaped and paradoxically more open to the reader. Yet, I know I’ll still be dipping into Rebecca Elson’s notebook entries or Elizabeth Bishop’s prose or Virginia Woolf’s self-questioning or marvelling at the moment where Du Maurier’s nameless heroine in The Rebecca Notebook suddenly slips from third to first person and in that instant takes on a life strong enough to voice the narrative. I’ll still be writing my own notebooks, listing plants from a walk or writing seasonal notes or wracking myself over past mistakes or trying to unpick difficult situations or noting down political events. I always thought that if I’d kept a notebook at an earlier age, I would have made wiser decisions, behaved better in personal relationships and worked out my writing, as well as my life, more successfully. I’d like to be able to say that keeping a notebook is cathartic, moral, a mode of survival but that can’t be proved. Woolf and Plath committed suicide, and Cheever and Gascoyne often thought of doing so. But who knows whether the notebooks kept them going at key times? Gascoyne lived till he was eighty-five but was desperate at the age of twenty-one.

As Woolf says, ‘the question is how to get the work done […]’ and when I read these notebooks I’m confronted by the writerly hooks that catch the fish, the energetic interrogations and observations of writers’ minds. There are no rules. Lists are fine. Messy over-long periodic sentences are fine. Shouting at yourself is fine. Woolf tells us that she enjoys everything. Yes, because of the writer’s eye, curiosity, and the chance to get it down in a notebook. Flip the book open. Start anywhere. On January 28^th 1778 the naturalist Gilbert White, whose journals were the first I read because of my Selborne childhood, wrote: ‘Frost comes in a doors. Little shining particles of ice, appear on the ceiling, cornice, & walls of my great parlor; the vapour condensed on the plaster is frozen in spite of frequent fires in the chimney. I now set a chafing dish of clear-burnt charcoal in the room on the floor.’ My notebook is the chafing dish that melts the ice and holds the charcoal when I begin to write.

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