William Nicholson's Blog, page 9

Article written for The Daily Telegraph by William Nicholson at the time of publication

It began with a picture in my head, and a puzzle to which I didn't know the answer. I saw a shadowy reading room with a long table down the centre, and shelves of books covering the walls on either side. A young man, who was perhaps myself when young, was sitting at one end of the table. Before me on the table lay a hand-gun. At the far end sat a second man, slumped forward, dead. I had no idea where I was, or who he was, but it seemed to me that I had shot and killed him. Why?

The scene seemed to belong in a film, but I knew at once that I wouldn't write it as a film. It would be a book. More, it would be the kind of book I myself am so strongly drawn towards as a reader: the life journey. I don't know how else to describe this category, but it has fascinated me ever since my late teenage discovery of John Fowles's The Magus, Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf, and Colin Wilson's The Outsider. As I've grown older I've sought out life-journey experiments, Thoreau's Walden, Kerouac's On the Road; and so found my way to the great life-journey novels, like The Brothers Karamazov, and War and Peace. These are books that plunge unashamed into the muddy waters of meaning, and flounder their way, sometimes ridiculously, towards Big Answers. I love books that make me cry out, 'But I've asked that too! I've felt that too!' In my play about C.S.Lewis, Shadowlands, I gave Lewis the line, 'We read to know we're not alone.' That has been my own experience. It's through books that people I've never met have reached out to me, saying, 'This is what matters most to me. Does it matter to you too?' This feeds something very different to the appetite for entertainment. It feeds, I suppose, the hunger for meaning.

Why not take the medicine neat? Why not read the great religious texts? The great philosophers? Why not write my new book as amateur philosophy? The answer is that we life-journey addicts don't want to be dumped so unceremoniously at our destination. We want to follow a twisting road. We want to know not just where our guide has got to, but how, and with what difficulties along the way. We want to take that journey step by step, comparing our own fears and longings with our guide's as we go. We don't want a sermon. We want a story.

My dark room, my dead man, my bewildered killer, were the beginning of a story. And for me story-telling has become far more than a pastime, or even a profession. It's my way of making sense of life.

I don't think I'm alone in this. I think the hunger for stories is deep in all of us, not as escapism, but as the construction of meaning. After all, our actual experience shows us every day that accidents happen, justice fails, good people suffer, nothing ever gets fully explained. So we take the same elements and rearrange them into stories that have shape and meaning, and this gives a profound satisfaction; or at least, it does if we believe it. Because we know how difficult life is, any resolution, any meaning, has to be earned and paid for. Stories that cheat by delivering unearned happy endings fail us intellectually and emotionally. Well-constructed stories carry profound truths.

I used to be a poor story-teller. I've improved. For this I have Hollywood to thank. My years of screen-writing, or rather of 'development', as they call it, have taught me lessons that did not come my way studying English Literature at Cambridge. I too have developed. So now, contemplating this picture in my head – the dark library, the gun, the dead man – I knew that what I wanted to do was tell a story with the compelling drive of a good movie, but with the complexity and lasting resonance of a good book.

I was embarked on writing a thriller about the meaning of life.

Many years ago I attended a three-day seminar given by Robert McKee on the craft of structuring stories for the screen. What I remember most vividly was one of his opening lines: 'If you call yourself an author, you'd better have authority.' It's a sobering reminder. Why should anyone give you their all-too-brief leisure time if you don't give them in return something rare, precious, worth the effort? So if my impulse now was to write a book that asked the question 'What really matters?', I had better have an answer.

For the purposes of my book, I asked myself three questions: what did I value most in life? What did I mean by the well-lived life? What made me happy?

These questions are not new to me. When I was nineteen years old and living in college, I constructed a Happiness Machine. This was a simple wooden frame in the shape of a cube, six foot to a side, with white sheets pinned to the frame to form walls and ceiling and floor. Inside hung four coloured electric bulbs. The seeker of happiness sat in the box draped in yet another white sheet, while music played and the coloured lights came on and off: red to blue, to green, to yellow. The theory was that the subject's perceptions would become bemused by the ever-changing all-embracing colours, and his sense of his own body would begin after a while to blur into the undifferentiated space. Then the ego would dissolve to nothing, leaving only pure being. Needless to say, the Happiness Machine drove everyone who tried it mad, and they had to be let out, jibbering. But the underlying principle was not entirely foolish: that one condition of happiness is escape from the vain, fearful, anxious, ever-dissatisfied scrutiny of the self.

But that's no more than the clearing away of an obstacle. What does it take to feel positive happiness? I've often pondered what I call to myself the Prison Window Paradox. I imagine I'm in prison, serving a life sentence. Out of my prison window I can see the branch of a tree. The buds that grow in spring, the bright leaves of summer, the falling leaves of autumn. I look at the leaves and I say to myself, If only I could leave this prison cell and walk in the park and see the trees again, I'd want nothing more. That would be enough. That would be more than enough, it would be heaven on earth. Then I stop imagining. I walk out of the door. There's the whole wide beautiful world, waiting for me. Why don't I feel it's enough? Must I go to prison first, to learn to appreciate what's already there? I'm a grown person: can't I pull off this trick, this realignment of perception, all by my myself?

It seems not. It seems I become aware of what I love and value only when it's threatened, or gone by. I can look back at it and recognise it. But to be in it – to accept it within its own moment – to say, This is it! This is enough! – that I can't do. I need the prison cell first.

This is where the making of stories plays its part. It's not necessary to go to prison to get some small glimmer of what it must feel like. Using empathy and imagination, through the power of a good story, we can touch the fringes of some of these necessary experiences. Horror stories let us discover how we deal with danger and fear. Love stories let us practice facing up to choosing and being chosen, to longing and rejection. The stories don't have to offer total solutions. They're just samples. You can try before you buy.

So I decided to make my story be itself the pursuit of my questions. It took me very little thought to discover who the man with the gun had killed, and why. But I wanted the journey to that inevitable ending to be a celebration of everything I valued, however mundane. Our deepest truths aren't novelties waiting to be found in faraway places, but form slowly within us as we grow, and wait patiently to be noticed and granted respect for the first time.

So I began to construct my thriller. A man on the run, a mysterious pursuer; moments of danger, moments of revelation; and in due course the requirement, even the duty, that I lay my cards on the table, and deliver some answers to my own questions. In the end there were several answers. Here's one, a paragraph composed by one of my principal characters:

'If you ask me, What then is the nature of the well-lived life?, I must paint you a picture. In a warm room a group of old friends sit round a table. They have eaten an excellent meal, and now, as they finish their wine, they push back their chairs and stretch out their legs and the conversation flows. Their subject is, perhaps, What is the nature of the well-lived life?'

Talking round a table with friends. Not much of a goal for a life. Unless, that is, you've been on the terrifying journey I inflict on my hero, by the end of which everything looks different. I, of course, haven't been on that journey. My life has never been threatened, I've never suffered the loss of all my familiar landmarks. But in imagination, in a story, I've tried to feel what it's like, and to learn what values endure, and to grant them new respect. My book reaches out to unknown readers, asking, 'Have you felt this too? This is what matters most to me. Does it matter to you too?'

I write to know I'm not alone.

Article for You Magazine by William Nicholson

Find a moment when you and your husband are alone together and ask him a hypothetical question: 'If you had the chance, and if you were sure no one would ever know, and if you were sure there would be no consequences, would you have sex with another woman?'

'Well,' he'll say. 'That's not a real question. It could never be like that.'

'Yes, but if it was?'

'Why are you asking me this? What am I supposed to say?'

So he dodges and wriggles, and if you persist in the end he'll tell you what he knows you want to hear. 'Of course I wouldn't. I've got you. Why would I want another woman?'

No husband is ever going to tell you the truth. Except me, now. Of course he'd do it. Any man, given a chance of sex with a woman he finds attractive, would take it if he truly believed there would be no consequences. Men desire and enjoy sex in and for itself, without any other emotional connection. How else do you explain the massive male appetite for pornography and prostitutes? How explain star footballers paying for sex when every club they enter is packed with young women who'll gratify them for nothing? Men want sex without strings. Just a bit of fun, and then back to work.

'But they shouldn't!' (Forgive me if I put words into your mouth, it's the writer in me imagining your response.) 'It's wrong, it's selfish, it's hurtful. You may want it, but tough. Zip it up. You've made a commitment. Live up to it. Be faithful to your wife.' And maybe you add under your breath, 'I'm glad I'm not your wife. I'm glad I've got a decent husband.'

This is where things get complicated. I've got history, like most people. I had many relationships through my twenties and thirties. Then I married at last when I was forty. Since then, twenty-two years ago now, I have been faithful. Marriage has proved to be a liberation. I have no desire to return to the freedom I so jealously guarded for so long. I've found a happiness in marriage, in commitment, in fidelity, that is greater than anything I knew before.

And yet I'm the same as any other man. I too, like any husband, would enjoy making love with another woman, if there were no consequences. I don't because there are consequences. Because when I balance up the gains and losses I find I stand to lose too much. Because I no longer get the offers. And because I'm getting older.

There are two more aids to fidelity which have made a big difference to me, but which may not apply to all men. Both are the fruits of marrying late. I've learned from my own experience that sex with someone you don't know, which looks so thrilling from the outside, is simply not as good as sex with someone you know well. And because I was older when I married, I had learned quite a lot about myself; about my desires, my fears, my self-doubts. I told them all to my wife, as if to say, 'Be warned. Are you still sure you want to make a life with me now?' She heard me without surprise, and responded by telling me about herself. For the first time it dawned on me that someone who loves you actually wants to please you, and needs only to be told how. It sounds easy. But I hadn't managed this in twenty years of moving from lover to lover.

Over those same years my central subject as a writer has been love. Even in Gladiator, unlikely as it may seem, my major contribution to the screenplay was Maximus's love for his wife and his longing to be reunited with her after death. Love and its complications continue to obsess me. My latest novel is about a married man who has an affair; which I have never done. And yet he is me. He's me as I would have been had I married younger, and had I not begun my marriage with so much honesty. He loves his wife, his children, his home, but he has never felt able to live out his sexual dreams in his real life. It's the story of what's called a fling – and why it may not be such a big deal after all.

'Aha! Now you're going to start making excuses for unfaithful men! So he has some adolescent fantasies he'd like to act out? Tell him to grow up. Life doesn't give us all our dreams. And if he thinks I'm going to wear stockings and suspenders and let him whip me, he can dream on.'

No, you don't have to dress up and feel stupid. You don't have to be someone you're not. All you have to do is listen to him and find out who he is. If he can talk to you about his sexual fantasies, it's almost as good as living them. What he wants most strongly is not the actual stockings or the actual whip, but to be able to include the sexual excitement he gets from such thoughts in his love-making with you. We men long to know that we can still be loved and desired even when revealing our true sexual preferences.

'But why do they have to be so adolescent? What's wrong with romantic love? What's wrong with grown-up sex?'

All I can say is, it may look infantile to you, but this is strong stuff. See it from his point of view. His waistline has expanded, his hair has receded, and these days he can't always get it up. He meets a woman who wants his body and likes him to talk dirty to her – My God! He's born again! Just once, oh Lord, just once, let me live the dream!

And suppose he does. What has happened? Has he stopped loving you? Is your marriage now over? Of course not. He's not turned into a monster. He's just catching up with himself. He's having a fling.

'But it's not a fling! It's sex! This is the most intimate part of our relationship, and he's doing it with someone else. The very thought of it makes me feel physically sick. And ugly. And old. How can I ever be the same with him again? How can I ever trust him again? And you tell me I'm supposed to forgive him!'

Not exactly. What I'm asking for is understanding. Feel it as he feels it and you won't be quite so hurt.

The plain fact is, it's different for men. Just look at the basic physical differences. For you, for the woman, sex requires you to open yourself up, to make yourself vulnerable. It's something that happens within you, something you receive. And it exposes you to the chance of the longest-term consequence imaginable – a child. For the man it's all the other way round. The act of sex happens outside himself. It's something he throws away. It has no long-term consequences. So he can have his fling and still love you, unlikely though that may seem. He can have sex with another woman and not love her at all. If you can deal with it, this could be your chance to make a far more powerful marriage, based on the truths you hadn't dared tell each other before.

'But how can I know? I feel cheapened by what he's done. I feel I'm worth less. I don't love him as I did. I'm angry with him. I want to punish him. Shouldn't we just cut our losses and part?'

Maybe. Maybe you married young, without really knowing yourselves or each other, and now you've grown up you've found you're not compatible. Maybe this affair is his cowardly way of getting out of a marriage that has made him unhappy for years. Maybe this isn't a fling at all, it's his bid for escape. How are you to know?

I don't think it's hard, if you can bear to face the truth. If you can convince him that you really need to know what he's going through, and that you aren't simply seeking more ammunition with which to punish him and make him feel guilty, he'll tell you.

'But I do want to punish him and make him feel guilty. He's behaved like a selfish bastard. Why shouldn't he be made to pay?'

Because if that's how you deal with him he'll go on lying to appease you. And you need the truth. Is he in or out? If he wants to stay, and you want him to stay, it can be done. Your life together can go on, bent out of its former shape, full of sharp new edges, but intact.

Not very romantic? Actually, I think it is. I think two people learning to love and accept each other, failures and all, is deeply romantic. We're all so needy and insecure, so full of guilt and shame. What we long for is to be known as we really are and still loved. That's a project that takes time and honesty and courage and compassion. That's what I call a marriage.

All the Hopeful Lovers

The sequel to 'The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life', set eight years later, in December 2008.

Gorgeous Chloe is now 19, and takes it upon herself to set Alice up with Jack, which would be great except Jack's dreaming of Chloe… Chloe's mother Belinda, aged 50, wistfully reflects how much better at sex she is now than when she was young, but she'd never be unfaithful to her husband Tom. So when she discovers he's having an affair she's more than angry….

The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

'You are happily married. Suddenly your long-lost lover calls. Would you be tempted?'

Read the most recent Secret Intensity of Everyday Life review in The Observer

 

Crash

My new play fuelled by rage at bankers' bonuses:

'It's a reunion of sorts, but you'd never guess they ever had anything in common to see them now. Nick: Securities Trader for Goldman Sachs and collector of art. Humphrey: an artist with ethics and a cheque he's not sure he should cash. Christine: the beautiful girl they both loved. All together again, in Nick's Elizabethan mansion, getting ready to celebrate the unveiling of a new sculpture.

But under the surface Humphrey is angry. Angry in the ...

Rich and Mad

My first experience of pornography came at the age of nine. As a day boy at a mostly-boarding prep school I was secretly commissioned by a boarder to buy him a copy of the News of the World, so he could look at the semi-naked women. I couldn't see the point myself. A few years later, now myself at boarding school, I was allowed to look at a friend's pack of five black-and-white photographs sent in a plain envelope from Amsterdam. I was overwhelmed.

Today any teenager can see full-colour...

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Rich and Mad

I'm not afraid of loving. I'm just afraid of not being loved back.

Maddy Fisher has decided to fall in love. And not just any sort of love: can't-eat can't sleep crazy in love.

Rich Ross is after the same thing. He's set his sights high, and he's going to make it happen.

The problem is, in life's messy whirlwind of friends and lies and sex and porn, the real thing can be hard to find.

But there's always a first time for everything..

The Wind Singer

“I hate school! I hate ratings! I won’t reach higher! I won’t strive harder! I won’t make tomorrow better than today!” In the walled city of Aramanth, exams are everything — not only for children, but for whole families. When Kestrel Hath dares to rebel, the Chief Examiner humiliates her father and sentences the family to the harshest punishment. Desperate to save them, Kestrel discovers that life in Aramanth was once different — and if she can find the secret of the Wind Singer, maybe life can

Slaves of the Mastery

The city of Aramanth has become a kinder place, but in becoming kinder it has also become weaker, making it the perfect target for the ruthless soldiers of the Mastery. After a swift and brutal battle that leaves the city burned and the Manth people destined for slavery, Kestrel finds herself alone, angry and bitterly sworn to wreak her own revenge. But first she must find her beloved brother Bowman, and he in turn must find a way of understanding the secrets of the mysterious Singer people. Onl