Julian Barnes on Writing

The Best American Essays series was not published until 1986. As is standard with any of the Best American books, The Best American Essays 1986 volume collects the putative best works of the previous year, 1985, the year of my birth.

As a writer of essays and autobiographical fiction, I owe it to myself to familiarize myself with the major works from my birthyear forward. Let's begin with the leadoff piece of this volume written by Julian Barnes titled "On Writer Worship."

Barnes claims to own a piece of fence that belonged to the house of writer W. Somerset Maugham (pictured left). Barnes also writes of a pilgrimage he took to the site of what was once the home (now destroyed) of Gustave Flaubert, where he came across a stuffed parrot that once sat on Flaubert's writing desk.

Like Flaubert, Barnes believes that prose writing does and ought to eclipse the biography of the prose writer. And yet he cannot and does not wish to shake the feeling that collecting the items of favorite authors, even taking pilgrimages to their birthplaces, can be restorative for those who hold these writers in high regard. In this respect, writer worship is much like any other hero worship.

Barnes's essay focuses on collecting and recollecting writer talismans, but Barnes well knows as a writer himself the actual, real-time activity of writing is so ordinary, boring, and solitary, and it must be. As has been said by every English prose writer from Virginia Woolf to Stephen King, a writer needs a private space to do the work. One cannot therefore gain proximity to a writer by owning a piece of his fence. At most, one can say that piece of fence was proximate to the flesh and blood person one thinks one admires but not to that person in his or her capacity as writer, because the work is as much about headspace as physical space.

Add to this the fact no writers know how the work actually gets done, apart from the fact they make use of spontaneous expression and hopefully render it into some comprehensible form that is satisfactory, in some vague sense. Having no knowledge how the work gets done, most of the writing for the writer might as well be magic. Which is why Barnes as a writer, I well imagine, has such a fondness for writer knickknacks.