i admit - i’ve been struggling with content for this blog. ordinarily, i have no difficulty reducing my views and reviews, opinions and observations to writing, and that writing has been generally persuasive and even entertaining, somethimes. and yet, somehow, this medium is having a chilling effect on the creative process and bringing on a veritable crisis of confidence. so, i got to thinking: what in calliope’s name makes me think i can write, anyway? well, you see, i wrote a novel when i was 9 years old. it was never published, of course. partly because, well, i was 9 years old, but mostly because agatha christie beat me to it.
writing is the natural by-product of reading, and i gather i was reading at an uncommonly early age - alice in wonderland, the wizard of oz and treasure island, by 4, and most of the books in my parents’ library by 13. i’m not sure that siddhartha and lady chatterley’s lover are appropriate pre-teen reading material, but my parents, martinets, otherwise, didn’t seem to impose any restrictions on what i could and could not read; with the notable exception of ’the happy hooker’.
And here’s the story of that sorry escapade: i went to an all-girls school in georgetown, guyana (bishops‘ high school). it was very proper, run by the anglicans. uniforms had to be 4 inches below the knee (yes, below), no jewelry, no makeup, and so on. anyway. at one point, i’m 12 or so, xaviera hollander’s ‘the happy hooker’ is making its way around the school. it started at the top (the 6th formers), and made its painstaking way down, until finally, it got to me, in the second form. FINALLY, it was in my waiting hands. and a rattier, more dog-eared, nastier tome you've never seen. i was VERY excited. i put it in my games bag, played games (netball, i think it was) after school, and then went home. and, as i usually did, dropped the bag at the door and promptly forgot about it. well, the nanny found the book, realised it wasn't on the required reading list, and took it to parents, who blew a stack.
my parents had a standard way of handling these things. my mother would rage and rage, and demand answers, and my father would sit there sighing and looking like i'd kicked him in the stomach. this was prototypical, except that even he was expressing his abject disappointment in me, the model child. where HAD they gone so terribly wrong? they demanded to know who i'd gotten it from. i refused to say. (believe me, the wrath of my parents was gonna be a snap compared to the treatment i'd suffer at the hands of 200 angry girls). they manhandled me to the headmistress's office the next day. both of them. and all three, plus the severely pickle-up-the-ass spinster assistant head-mistress, used all forms of torture on me for several hours. but i didn't spill. nothing. not even name, rank and serial number. they eventually had to release me to amnesty international without the names of anyone else to torture. book was confiscated, though, and i still got shit from the girls, especially the other form 2 and form 1 girls who were in line after me, for the book. and you know what? i’ve still never read the damn book! it and its author (who must be close to 80-years old now, which is not an appealing thought at all), continue to hold some mystique for me.
believe it or not the foregoing was not the point of this story, at all. it was quite possibly, the longest digression in the blogosphere. (it probably isn’t; i just like saying that made-up word).
anyway, reasonably soon after i started to read, i started to write (first, disobediently and shamefully, on those two or three blank pages that can be found in hardcover editions of the classics, and then later, after some whupass from the martinets, on paper designed for the purpose, complete with illustrations). then, having decided that d’d satisfactorily mastered the art form of the short (very short) story, the poem and the diary, a la pepys and anne frank (well, without the concentration camps and plague), i decided to embark on a novel. it was daunting and herculean, but i devoted a great deal of time, thinking and effort (not to mention, paper) to the task, and i was happy with the finished product. it was a snappy little murder mystery, set on a boat on a river, and entitled (cleverly, i thought), ’murder on the nile’. i took it to my father, confident in his approval and admiration. he reached up to the third shelf on the right, and pulled down the hercule poirot anthology.
write what you know, he said. what?? i’m nine freaking years old! what do i know? i got nothin'! no-one’s gonna want to read about piano lessons (even though they were interesting insofar as every day we experimented with ever larger and sharper objects on mrs. haynes’ chair, to determine the precise point at which she would actually start to feel something through her outsize ass), or climbing guava trees, or that time I was thrown off my bike headfirst and everyone else just rode straight past me, or when the jordans had an exorcism, next door, and I tape-recorded it, or about the maid that used to drink my parents‘ gin and replace it with water, and then roll around on the floor, and all of my parents‘ friends couldn‘t understand why their G & Ts were so weak. write what i know, sheesh!
which may be why i'm having so much trouble with this blog...
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