The Sunday Tribune - Spectrum

Then he got writer’s block. The lectures stopped, and so did his writing. His niece and companion, Joan Severn has described how, when William Gladstone who had been a close friend, died, Ruskin wanted to write a condolence letter to Gladstone’s daughter, Mary. He sat for an hour and more and could not get beyond "Dear Mary, I am grieved......"

Oh, well. John Ruskin was nearly 80 and thus long post retirement age, even as a writer. It is sad that he was now incapable of even writing a few lines to express his grief at a friend’s demise. But that writer’s block for you. Even a single line becomes an impossible task.

Earnest Hemingway got his writer’s block when he was much younger.For 20 years and more, Hemingway had been America’s literay icon and he certainly earned more money than other authors. But he was a big spender, too, and frequently found himself in arrears of his income tax payments. A letter he wrote in 1954 to his friend and financial manger, Alfred Rice who had obviously questioned his claim for tax deductions, is illuminating: "I have a diamond mine if people will let me alone and let me dig the stones out ... I will make more money for the government than any Texas oilman."

Hemingway wrote that letter early in 1954. He was in his mid-fifties, in sound health and hard at work on a novel which he had been writing for several years and in which the story takes place in Africa. He wanted to touch the truth of its setting, renew his ‘feel’ for the veld, its sights and smells and moods. So he took off on his second safari to Kenya in the company of fourth wife, Mary.

That safari nearly killed him. He became involved in two plane crashes, one after the other, which left him bruised and battered: burns on his skin, a ruptured liver, a damaged kidney, a fractured backbone. He suffered constant pain and from attacks of depression which the doctors treated with what was called shock therapy. It didn’t work. He must have been already in the grip of writer’s block, but definitely kept pegging away at his African novel. In 1958, he told his publisher, Scribner that he had 850 pages ready but that the book was still without a title. "Working hard on the title," he emphasised.

In 1961, America was a glow with a spirit of self-congratulation. These were the years of the New Camelot, with a knight in shining armour, John F. Kennedy, as the country’s President and with a glamourous first lady, Jackie, by his side. Kennedy’s admirers wanted to pay a fitting tribute to their hero by bringing out a book in his honour and sought to rope in the country’s most eminent writers to contribute articles to it. Earnest Hemingway, the General Patton of the world of letters, had agreed to write one line for it.

That’s right. Just one line.

He found he couldn’t do it. He struggled desperately with it and gave up. Not long after, onJuly 2, 1961, Hemingway killed himself — or so they say. That he held a double — barrelled shotgun against his forehead and "emptied both barrells."

Both barrells: — but how could he? I, who have handled firearms since boyhood and know what well-made shotguns can and cannot do, find that detail perplexing. For both barrells to be discharged, both triggers have to be pressed. Would someone with his head already blown off by the blast of the first shot have enough volition left to pull the second trigger?

But than suicide, accident, murder. All are quibbles. O.K., the man Hemingway died as the result of those two shots. But the writer Hemingway, the owner of that diamond mine of words of which he had been so proud, had died several months earlier, when he had discovered that to write one coherent sentence had become for him an insurmountable task.

Those 850 pages of his book which he had told Scribner were ready. They were shot through with horrifying testimony of the havoc caused by the disease. As Joan Didion reveals: "typed over and over again on each of the hundreds of pages was the single line: ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

With the consent of Mary Walsh Hemingway, Scribner editors went to work on those 850 pages. They hacked and hewed and spliced till they had reduced the manuscript to half its size. Then they published it, under the title, True at First Light.

That title, culled out of a sentence that Hemingway himself had written, "In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon," is pure Hemingway, clear and sparkling, but does it not also suggest what Hemingway himself might have thought of the book? For it Farewell to Arms was Hemingway at first light, true; surely, True at First Light is Hemingway well past noon — indeed after sunset. A lie?

That apart, the sad fact remains: here was one writer who was felled by writer’s block in the prime of his life; someone who had given so much to the language he wrote in and had not really filled out to his full promise.

As I said, this is a disease only writers can get, but not all writers, get it no matter how old they are, which is a real pity because, as everyone knows, this is a profession which is a preserve of the elderly and is positively glutted with super-annuated practitioners. Hemingway himself was sixty when he died, which is past of the retiring age for civil servants. But for a writer as for a politician, there just is no retiring age: they go on and on, till they drop dead.

The past is another country. A writer who inhabits the cultural landscape of his times becomes increasingly separated from the reality of the world around him with the passing of the year. After all, if I myself find today’s novels hard to read, have to seek help from friends for the meaning of new-fangled words such as ‘drag queen’ or ‘shooting up’, and dismiss much of modern music as a form of sonic slang, then, surely, what I write must seen outlandish barroque to the under-forty generation?

O.K. Editors don’t send back my stuff with rejection slips. But that doesn’t mean I should go on till they do. Much more sensible to phase myself out — on half output for a year and then out. After all, if we old timers who write get so worked up about politicians hanging on long after they should have let go, surely we ourselves must abide by the rules...

But excuse me, I must stop. Today is Saturday, and the time 2.30 p.m. In five minutes, Allastair Cooke will go on the air and I don’t want to miss him. I know, I know; he’s ninety years old. But what does that matter? It would be madness for someone like Allastair Cooke to think of retiring.

Oh, absolutely?