Читать книгу Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s - Brian Aldiss - Страница 6

The train was crossing India from west to east. It ran steadily over the wide Ganges plain, from Agra towards Jamalpur, the weight of the brilliant day bearing down upon its carriages. I stared out of the window, stared and stared, absorbed in the landscape.

Nothing was to be seen but the wastes of the plain and the sky above it. A tree, a thatched hut, stood here or there, as pallid as the earth itself. In that dry season, there was no sign of the river; it had dwindled like a shrivelled limb.

Peasants worked on the plain, sometimes near the tracks, sometimes distantly. Unlike the peasants of China, these were isolated one from another. The sun had burned them hollow. They toiled almost naked. Some stood upright, working with hoes, while others were bent double. They appeared motionless, like figures on a frieze.

And they laboured on the plain every day of their lives.

Monotony was their lot. How did a man’s thoughts run, out there on the baked mud? What would he have to tell at sunset?

‘I was up before dawn and took a handful of rice. Then I worked, as you know. It was hot. Nothing grows. Now I shall rest. It’s dark. I will sleep …’

That terrible monotony, as stern a ruler as the sun. Ever since infancy I had feared reincarnation when, at the age of three, I was convinced I had been a wizard burned at the stake in a previous incarnation; the agony of the fire often woke me, crying. What was there to prevent me from awakening next time as a peasant, bound to the Ganges?

To survive as an Indian peasant requires endurance born of centuries of fatalistic courage, passive acceptance, qualities scarce in the unsleeping West.

Those days on the train were ones in which my determination to be a writer developed. I wished to tell everyone about that alien way of life. I had my subject matter. What I did not realise was that I also had the stubborn temperament a writer requires.

A glance at the list of titles I have written since those Indian days shows a preoccupation with time. From Space, Time and Nathaniel, to Non-Stop, through Moment of Eclipse and Eighty-Minute Hour, to Seasons in Flight and Forgotten Life, the idea of passing time glides like a serpent through the words.

Of course it was never planned that way. It just happened, as much in life happens. Perhaps I have a problem with my time sense.

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

LENINGRAD. I was one of six writers on an Arts Council tour of the Soviet Union. We had been to Moscow and flown over the Caucasus to Tbilisi. Now we were being taken to the Kirov ballet.

The home of the Kirov is a grandly restored eighteenth-century building. The company itself is magnificent.

That night, they were dancing Hamlet to a modern score.

The ballet stayed very close to Shakespeare’s original story. But even a faithful Hamlet becomes, without words, the story of two rather pleasant middle-aged people who marry and, on their honeymoon in Elsinore, are pestered by a young fellow in black. This adolescent, contrary to the usual rule of adolescence, loves his father, who has died, and spends all evening dancing in and out, mucking up the honeymoon.

Hamlet is not Hamlet without Shakespeare’s words. The best part of a writer exists on the printed page. Without his or her words, a writer spends his time dancing in and out, imprisoned in Elsinore.

BORNEO. If there are still white patches on the globe, then unsurveyed parts of the interior of Borneo must qualify as terra incognita. There, hiding from the depredations of the timber industry, lives a wandering tribe which regards itself as part of the jungle which encloses it.

This tribe has a religion which would interest Carl Jung. It believes that all men possess two souls, an ordinary everyday soul which deals with ordinary everyday life, and a second soul the tribe calls the Dream Wanderer. This Dream Wanderer is a free being, not under the command of the person it inhabits. Although it cannot manage everyday things, it is native in the lands beyond the prosaic.

Directly I heard of this tribe, I knew I was an honorary member. I also am inhabited by a Dream Wanderer. The Wanderer roams where it will; sometimes it leans over my shoulder when I am typing and communicates in its own fashion. If I am lucky.

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name …

She was very attractive and we were getting on famously. By mutual consent we crept away from the party and found ourselves in a little warm courtyard. There we fell into intense talk, touching, and looking deep into each other’s eyes. The point came when I had to tell her I was a writer of novels.

‘Do you write under your own name?’ she asked.