Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 14
(2000)– [tijdschrift] Literatuur zonder leeftijd–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
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Rescue at Härnösand
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End’. There was nothing to look forward to but the horrors of ‘retirement’. To an obsessive writer-by-compulsion, writing is life and retirement is for the dead. I had begun Niets is wat het lijkt in 1990. It was now the beginning of 1996. I had agreed to spend all of March that year as writer-in-residence at the University of Usmeä in the north of Sweden. Of course, what a writer-in-residence rarely does is write. What s/he does mostly is lecture to students, give talks to groups of teachers and librarians and to schools in the region, and lead workshops. So, it's a good job for a writer who can't or doesn't want to write. As March approached, I was glad to be going. At least I would escape from the unproductive sweatshop of my work room, meet some old friends (I'd visited Ume† before), and be distracted from lethal brooding on my dismal failure. A day or two before I left for Sweden, a pencil-written letter arrived from Härnösand. A small town on the coast in the middle of Sweden, where I was engaged to speak at a teacher's conference. It was from two fifteen year old girls, called Anki and Sofia. Here is what their letter said: To Aidan Chambers Engagingly brief. Attractively direct. Persuasively absent of flattery. But to be honest, I wasn, 't keen to meet these eager readers from Class 9a. What, after all, could I tell them, except that I wasn't any good at doing what they wanted to talk about. Far from being an honour to meet me it would be a disillusionment, and a waste of their time. For which fifteen year old wants to spend even five minutes with a sixty-two year old victim of The Glums? But the fact is I find it almost impossible to say no to young people who ask me to do something for them. I've always been like that. It must be genetic, a biological weakness built into my character from birth. There was no time to correspond about an arrangement so I wrote back, saying, okay, let's meet in a cafe on the Sunday evening after the conference, and ask your teacher to let me know the time and place.
I heard nothing more till I arrived in Härnösand, when the girls' teacher came to my hotel to discuss the conference. ‘And what about the meeting with Anki and Sofia?’ I asked. ‘Is it happening?’ | |
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‘Oh yes,’ said the teacher. ‘And we thought it would be nicer to meet in a private room than in a cafe. A colleague will help me provide tea and coffee and cakes. But don't worry, we'll stay in the kitchen. We won't get in the way.’ ‘Is that necessary?’ ‘Some of their friends and classmates will be with them. And some from another school.’ ‘How many?’ ‘About twenty-five.’ Why do teenagers have such a maddening way of escalating everything they do? Or, as my mother used to put it, ‘Give them an inch and they take a yard.’ ‘Their eyes are bigger than their bellies,’ was another one. The nineteenth century poet Robert Browning said it best and with a more positive spin, though inscribing the gender-prejudice of his culture: ‘A man's reach should exceed his grasp,/ Or what's a heaven for?’ [Andrea del Sarto]. Everybody should always bite off more than s/he can chew. You never know when there'll be a famine. I began to wish I didn't so readily say yes to teenage invitations. At that moment, on a Friday night in the dry asthmatic heat of a modest hotel in wintry middle Sweden, two days of the bonhomie gregarities of a conference to be faced by myself, a life-long passionate anti-gregarian, I could think of a more appealing way of spending a post-conference Sunday evening than being ambushed by a squad of teenagers dead set on interrogating me with questions like: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ (I don't know), and ‘What advice would you give to someone who wants to be a writer?’ (Don't). Or the one that permanently unsettled my soul just after my first young adult novel came out. I was (I thought then) still young and the world a place where Everyone Would Become A Literary Reader If Only We Worked Hard Enough To Achieve It. (This, of course, was Before Thatcher, and Before Blair, come to that. The world of words is a different place now.) I had given a bright and breezy talk about my precious new book to a group of teenagers in a school. The question, the last one of the day, came from a fifteen year old boy dressed entirely in black, who was sitting at the back of the classroom, his feet in big black boots firmly planted on his desk in the way of newspaper editors in Hollywood movies. In the vocal tones later associated with Darth Vadar, he asked, ‘How dare an old man like you think you can write books for a young person like me?’ His scorn was sublime. It is the sort of question that causes writers to end up giving that copout and untrue answer, ‘I don't, I only write for myself.’
Came six o'clock, Sunday evening. A hired room-with-kitchen in some sort of community centre. As I entered the building, it seemed unsettlingly quiet, given | |
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that twenty-five teenage girls were supposed to be waiting for me. My experience is that such groups are delightfully talkative, if not engagingly giggly. Silence was unthinkable. At the least, recorded poppish music should be playing. Perhaps they hadn't turned up yet. Perhaps they had thought better of it and wouldn't turn up at all. Perhaps I could slope off to a quiet, older person's restaurant where the waiters were properly dressed in black trousers, white shirts, black waistcoats and long white aprons, where they used white linen tablecloths, the tables were placed too far apart for neighbouring diners to eavesdrop and they didn't play music of any kind. There I would eat a good meal and drink good wine in solitary silent state and thus restore my conference-depleted enzymes while musing on the fickleness of youth and the satisfyingly melancholy nature of existence. No such luck. As I entered the room, there they were, twenty-or-so of them, all girls, all standing, all in complete silence, as if waiting for evening prayers to begin. Except that they were all smiling the kind of smile one's face wears when anticipating the appearance of exactly the birthday present one has longed for all year, I also remember being astonished into speechlessness by their collective and individual beauty. They were, just to look at - if I may put it this way without causing politically incorrect or any other variety of offence - a better prospect than the fantasised meal. It was, I think, the most restorative welcome I have ever received from a crowd of strangers. Better by a long chalk than sustained applause. So enlivening was the sight that I was aware of my own face breaking into precisely their kind of smile. There followed one of those moments when no one quite knows what to say. In the absence of words, we just stood there and ogled each other. And then, because human kind cannot bear very much reality, we broke into face-saving laughter. And then the balm of practical action. Too many of us to sit cheek by jowl and chat, so tables were shifted, sit-up-and-beg chairs arranged around them, and we ended up like King Arthur's knights, except there was no king, we were a republic of readers, and all but the visitor were female. A happy metaphor of human progress. The two teachers bustled. Tea and coffee were produced and plates of cake and biscuits in magical profusion. Then with some reluctance the motherly chaperoning teachers disappeared into their keeping-out-of-the-way kitchen. During this time, names were exchanged, and jokes made about their ability to speak English (fluently) and my inability to speak Swedish. ‘Well,’ said I when we were settled, ‘you invited me here. I have nothing I want to say to you, except thanks for reading my books. What is it you want to say to me?’ At which there fell upon us the usual north European no-one-wants- | |
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to-speak-first silence of the tundra. And fell. Till I feared the evening might be suffocated. Not wanting that after such a high beginning, I said: ‘Okay, I'll tell you what. Why don't you start by each of you telling me which of my books you've read, and, to make it easy, telling me one thing you liked about them. Later on, when we've got to know each other better, you can tell me what you didn't like. And Anki, as you and Sofia wrote to me, and you are sitting next to me and Sofia next to you, why don't you start.’ And so it began. Anki and Sofia and mates had read Dance on my grave (Je moet dansen op mijn graf) and Now I know (Nu weet ik het). A few had read Breaktime (Verleden week). The girls from the ‘other’ school had been required to read The Toll Bridge (De tolbrug). Some had read the books in English as well as Swedish. I won't bore you with the minutiae. All I'll report is that after an hour or so I began to feel optimistic again, and that everything I had been trying to write for thirty-plus years might after all not have been without some worth. Something else was also obvious. The chaperons in the kitchen had done a great job as teachers. Requiring fifteen- and sixteen-year-old pupils to read and study a novel, without at the same time inducing boredom, if not also a disaffection for reading anything, demands the highest art of that difficult profession. Far from being bored these students were lusty. We want more was the general drift of their remarks. ‘When will we be able ro read your next book?’ Ah! Or rather: Arrrgh! ‘There won't be a next book.’ ‘You're joking!’ ‘Why not?’ ‘What?’ Et al. Close-up of sixty-two year old male writer looking as if he has just messed his pants. Panning shot of twenty-or-so fifteen- and sixteen-year-old female readers looking as if they have just detected an extremely unpleasant odour. Why does it feel so much like cruelty to disappoint teenagers? ‘Well, you see... the fact is... I was but... I never talk about the book I'm going to write.... How can I put this?...’ I don't think I have ever felt so inadequate. Why are teenagers (girls especially) always so emotionally disconcerting? At which point I heard myself say: ‘I'm going to do something I've never ever done before, and I'll probably regret doing now. I'm going to tell you about the book I was in the middle of writing, but have decided not to finish, and why I have decided that I won't ever write another book again.’ There was a shuffling of seats, a movement in and together. There suddenly | |
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seemed to be fewer of us in the room sitting closer together than it was possible for twenty-plus people to sit, and at the same time more pople in the room sitting closer than it was advisable for so many to sit. The word huddling comes to mind. Cabal also. I'm avoiding the word confessional. I think I took my jacket off.
I spent nearly thirty minutes outlining the plot of Niets is wat het lijkt and explaining why I felt it was a disaster, why it would not appeal even to lusty and enthusiastic readers of my books, like themselves, why I felt that, if anything, it was an ‘adult’ novel (with a digression on the difference between an ‘adult’ and a ‘youth’ novel), and why I felt even as an ‘adult’ novel it was, or would be if I ever wrote it (which I wouldn't), nothing better than dross. I was, I concluded, old now, out of touch, lacking the marathon energy it takes to write a novel, and in general how I was past it. Washed-up. They listened with gobbling attention and without interruption. Now,’ said I, ‘you've heard the plot. I've told you the story - I ticked the list off on my fingers - is about a seventeen year old English boy (Jacob Todd) who hates pop music and is a bit of a loner, includes an assisted death of an old lady (euthanasia), is about her experiences with the English boy's grandfather during a second world war battle in Holland (the Battle of Arnhem and A bridge to far) about which you know nothing, a novel within the novel. It discusses risky stuff about sex and marriage and friendship which I'm sure you'll only think is boring, plays games with language (English and Dutch), goes on (and on) about Rembrandt and Anne Frank, and is set in Amsterdam, about which there is a fair bit of detail because the English boy falls in love with the city. Surely that isn't a youth novel? Surely, if it's anything, it's a book for adults?’ ‘No, it isn't,’ said one of the girls, Maria, at once. ‘It isn't?’ ‘No,’ said others, ‘it isn't.’ ‘Why not?’ Maria said: ‘Because adults wouldn't understand it.’ Why are teenagers so unsettlingly concise? Why can't they do what old men do and explain everything in extensive detail? Twice. I was so taken aback by this remark, and everyone else regarded it as so blindingly obvious, that I did not recover quickly enough to ask Maria what she meant before the conversations raced on. ‘Of course you have to finish this book.’ Why are teenagers so irritantingly assertive? And unashamedly demanding? ‘Why?’ | |
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A chorus of voices: 'Because we want you to!' Laughter. The author in disarray (i.e. on the run). ‘But it would be very long.’ ‘We love long books. It can't be too long.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because then they don't end so quickly. It's horrible when a book you really like ends.’ ‘How d'you know you'll really like this one?’ ‘Because we've read your other books.’ ‘But what if this time you don't?’ ‘We will. And anyway, how can we know till we've read it?’ The author in nonplussed silence. The girls waiting expectantly as only teenage girls can. Sometime during the above the teachers had slipped unnoticed into the room. ‘I'm sorry’, one said now, ‘it's ten o'clock. You'll have to stop. We're getting phone calls from parents asking what this Englishman is doing with their daughters.’ Rather, ask what their daughters are doing with this Englishman. The cabal was broken. There was a collective sigh. Bodies moved backwards. But remained seated. A decision was required. It hovered in the air above the author's head, carried in the beak of the proverbial dove, or in this case more appropriately a raven. Why did I think of Waiting for Godot? An intense trembling pause. Then: ‘Okay,’ the author said, not without trepidation, for he knew clearly enough the implications for his life in the next few years. ‘All right.’ Like a prisoner who has been made an offer he can't refuse. ‘I'll try again.’ The smiles that had greeted my arrival returned. A second benediction. We stood. Hugs all round. Farewells. Why are teenagers so unsettlingly affectionate? (When they want to be.) Anki and Sofia stayed till last to say goodbye. ‘Will you finish it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Just for you.’ ‘And will you come back and see us when it's published?’ ‘Try and stop me.’
Since the rescue at Härnösand Anki has written now and then to ask ‘How's our book coming along?’ The English editon of Niets is wat het lijkt was published on 7 January 1999. I sent a copy to Anki. It's now April 1999. I've just had a let- | |
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ter from her: ‘I loved it!... you certainly lived up to my expectations.’ Close-up of author sighing with relief. He doesn't care now if everyone else hates it. Books are not about the mass, or about the many. They are only about the One. The Other. One Anki is Other enough for me.
The Swedish edition will be published at the Göteburg Book Fair in September, translated by Katarina Kuick, herself in her own teenage days, like Anki and Sofia, a reader who helped keep me going, as now in her thirties, she still does. Afterward I'll be touring the country. No surprise that one of the places I'll be visiting will be Härnösand. But by then, all the girls I met that Sunday evening in 1996 will have left school. I'm still an old man. They will be girls no more but young women. How many will be there for a reunion? Readers move on, find new pages to browse, new authors to sustain. But I know I'll meet Anki. She'll be at university by then, studying philosophy. All I can say is any university will be lucky to have her as a student. Just as I was lucky to have her and her friends as readers. They belong to that group of people of whom Gustave Flaubert said:
‘We do not read, as children do, to amuse ourselves,
or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction.
No, we read in order to live.’Ga naar voetnoot2.
The epigraph at the beginning of Niets is wat het lijkt says: ‘All writing is memory’. To Anki and the girls of Härnösand: Thanks for the memory.’ |
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