Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt

Author:A.S. Byatt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307426635
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Raw Material

HE ALWAYS TOLD THEM the same thing, to begin with “Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don’t invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don’t try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease.” Every year, he glared amiably at them. Every year they wrote melodrama. They clearly needed to write melodrama. He had given up telling them that Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy. In ways both sublime and ridiculous it clearly was, precisely, that.

The class had been going for fifteen years. It had moved from a schoolroom to a disused Victorian church, made over as an Arts and Leisure Centre. The village was called Sufferacre, which was thought to be a corruption of sulfuris aquae. It was a failed Derbyshire spa. It was his home town. In the 1960s he had written a successfully angry, iconoclastic and shocking novel called Bad Boy. He had left for London and fame, and returned quietly, ten years later. He lived in a caravan in somebody’s paddock. He travelled widely, on a motor bike, teaching Creative Writing in pubs, schoolrooms and arts centres. His name was Jack Smollett. He was a big, shuffling, smiling, red-faced man, with longish blond hair, who wore cable-knit sweaters in oily colours, and bright scarlet neckerchiefs. Women liked him, as they liked enthusiastic Labrador dogs. They felt, almost all—and his classes were predominantly female—more desire to cook apple pies and Cornish pasties for him, than to make violent love to him. They believed he didn’t eat sensibly. (They were right.) Now and then, someone in one of his classes would point out, as he exhorted them to stick to what they knew, that they themselves were what he “really knew.” Will you write about us, Jack? No, he always said, that would be a betrayal of confidence. You should always respect other people’s privacy. Creative writing teachers had something in common with doctors, even if—yet again—creative writing wasn’t therapy.

In fact, he had tried unsuccessfully to sell two different stories based on the confessions (or inventions) of his class. They offered themselves to him like raw oysters on pristine plates. They told him horror and bathos, day-dreams, vituperation and vengeance. They couldn’t write, their inventions were crude, and he couldn’t find a way to perform the necessary operations to spin the muddy straw into silk, or turn the raw bleeding chunks into a savoury dish. So he kept faith with them, not entirely voluntarily. He did care about writing. He cared about writing more than anything, sex, food, beer, fresh air, even warmth. He wrote and rewrote perpetually, in his caravan. He was rewriting his fifth novel. Bad Boy, his first, had been written in a rush just out of the sixth form, and snapped up by the first publisher he’d sent it to. It was what he had expected. (Well, it was one of two scenarios that played in his young brain, immediate recognition, painful, dedicated struggle.

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