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The Bookmarked Series
John Knowles’ A Separate Peace by Kirby Gann
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I’ve voiced my belief that writers are more often made rather than born, but believe natural predilections must exist as well; aspects of character that contingency happens to nurture as we begin to take possession of ourselves. A factor common in a writer’s biography is a significant amount of time early in life spent alone, often in convalescence. Which probably accounts for why most people who don’t read picture the typical writer as some friendless pasty-necked geek. My own history contains both, although the stretch of convalescence did not occur until my early twenties when a severe back injury returned me to a floor in my parents home for several weeks, where gifted books piled up beside me. Writing had already captured my interest by then and so the physical suffering was offset by the opportunity to read for hours without interruption. But going farther back—diving deeper into my own navel is how this feels—I find many of my most lasting memories from childhood are steeped in imaginary lives. Every kid plays like this, inventing imaginary friends or reciting storylines for dolls or action figures to enact, and there’s probably some name for this stage of development that my childlessness excuses me for never having had to learn. Anyway, as we age and mature and reality begins to impose its incessant demands we indulge less often in such harmless myth-making, learn to put away childish things, etc.
A fiction writer, though, never gets around to moving on. Rather than being a stage of development, this habit of play settles in as an important facet of who one is. How else to describe the invention of stories populated by imaginary people but as a kind of semi-directed daydreaming? The lure of this kind of the play remains provocative, even compulsive and habitual; it clings to the same rites of fantasy but the focus changes, turns less whimsical and by necessity more coherent, oriented toward adult possibilities and concerns. In some way—and this is neither for good or ill, it simply is, as the nature of the process—one’s character remains deformed from that supposed maturity, reluctant (or unable) to move beyond the detailed imagining of other, vastly foreign selves. We can’t experience firsthand everything available, every interesting possibility, in this world. So through sympathetic imagination we invent other selves.
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