Why do men wander rather than sit still?
Bruce Chatwin, Anatomy of Restlessness
How to Settle is an occasional survey of writers settled, and writers settling.
Writers, in their own telling and in our imagination, are bound to a footloose calling. For the last couple of hundred years or so in Europe and America, and sporadically before that and elsewhere, to be a writer was to be a nomad of the spirit, a wanderer, a prophet, a troubadour, an exile, animated by a vestigial need to move—to work up, in Baudelaire’s phrase, a little horreur du domicile; to grab a pen, a notebook, a typewriter, a laptop, and go. To wander, we learn from Baudelaire and Byron and D.H. Lawrence and Bruce Chatwin and many others, is to be drenched in yearning, to respect the natural rhythms of the land, to seek enlightenment, to reinvent yourself, to live free, beholden to no orthodoxy, hardly respectable, often solitary, but always true.
But this is largely a Romantic myth, one not borne out in the process of actual writing. The awkward truth for these peripatetic outsiders is that from time to time they must stop and sit, often for months and years at a stretch, if they are to get anything done. Yeats, in The Tower, grumblingly called the writer’s profession “this sedentary trade”. And Chatwin wryly notes the irony that the writing of his odd penultimate book, The Songlines, “which is a passionate defence of movement, involves its author in years of limpet-like existence.” To read the letters and journals of writers is almost invariably to read an ongoing lament on the difficulty of finding anywhere to write (something they also frequently romanticise, as hermit’s caves, monk’s cells, towers, retreats).
In short, for all that writers like to paint themselves as the great wanderers and edge-dwellers, the reconnaissance unit of the tribe, the most wide-ranging, wandering books are written, by and large, in solitary stasis, a cup of tea going cold at the author’s elbow, rain dripping on a winter garden as they recall or reinvent warmth elsewhere, the hardships and vibrancy of movement, travel, the desert.
Appropriately, because to write, and especially to write a book, is an attempt to fix something in place. To settle an idea, or a great whirling mess of ideas, in a final lucid form – a form not just of words on a page, but of edited words on a printed, published page. A book, from a certain perspective, is a settlement of the mind. If you are lucky, a bustling, ideal city of the mind. But a settlement, nonetheless: a place in which ideas and the expression of ideas dwell, and to which we may return to find them only slightly altered by time.
The writing of a book, then, is not a grail romance, not a great upwelling of sentiment and intellect, but a series of jostling settlements and accommodations. Or perhaps a writer’s best, most fruitful, most satisfyingly errant wandering happens when they are sitting at theirs desks, staring into blank space, over a blank page, a little wilderness. Either way, books are written, not by nomads of the spirit, but by farmers, day-dreaming nomads of the spirit. Books are written, one settled individual to another, about restlessness, and then are placed on shelves, where the dust settles on them.
...
How to Settle takes therefore as its subject writers in this half-state of settlement. It peers into their workspaces, their desks, their habits (productive or otherwise); it thinks about the rest or restlessness of their prose; it wonders about the various settlements and accommodations and compromises they have made; and it tries to light on, here and there, their point of resistance: the point at which they settle no more.
Posts are occasional, and only for paid subscribers.