Great Writers

There are always difficulties with great writers. With great writers. You would like it if their writing stood alone, created not by human hand, but by some kind of magical automation. The problem, one of the problems, is that the truly great writer rarely has a typical family and personal background. Writing as an occupation brings with it a certain selfishness, or at least a self-centredness, which is required to get through the hours and days of abject tedium. The phrase “it’s a marathon not a sprint” is at its best when applied to longform writing, not taking a jog in London for a couple of hours in April with tens of thousands of others.

Sometimes, the life of the great writer is actually riveting. It is so interesting that you actually enjoy reading about it. The diaries and letters, the people they came across, all blend into a fabulous story that is better than any novel for being real.

Without fail, however, you reach a point of saturation that you realise would have been felt by the very many people they travelled with, or met, or befriended, on the road to greatness. If, as in my case, you are researching two overlapping lives at once, a moment comes when you are tempted to compare the two people.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, traveller and war hero, became known as a writer gradually. Primarily, he is thought of as a travel writer and sometime epistoler. Lawrence Durrell has no heroic war stories, although he did his bit, but his writing stands apart. Poetry, fiction, letters. He was regarded as one of the prominent novelists of his day and beyond. His novels are serious, imaginative and mould-breaking. Paddy has no novels, but he was knighted.

I chose these two blokes because of their network throughout the great and the good of literary Europe, and political Europe. Paddy wrote so many letters to Debo Devonshire, a Mitford sister, that an entire book of them exists. In contrast, Larry wrote reams to Henry Miller, a novelist often introduced as a pornographer, but latterly seen as a brilliantly inventive writer ahead of his time. Together with the equally provocative Anaïs Nin, Miller did wonders to promote Larry’s early works.

Sooner or later, I will turn to comparison. I have known Paddy for over a decade, and grown to respect his many achievements. Yes, he must have possessed a degree of self-obsession, but he seems to have been generous with it. Larry is such a serious man, at least about his writing, that he risks seeming a little silly. How can anything as abstract as writing be more serious than life and death? Well, it was to him. More important than taking proper care of his children, or his many wives. Paddy, for whatever reason, never had children. I think he knew himself better than Larry knew himself.