Bonus Post: Constraints

(with a side note on Ian McEwan and the two Viviens)

There’s a passage in Ian McEwan’s new novel What We Can Know where André Gide is quoted (albeit at two removes), saying ‘Art lives by constraint and dies from freedom. From which was meant the constraint the artist chooses on himself.’ The constraints that writers set on themselves can be what defines their style. Sometimes this involves turning one’s limitations into opportunities. For instance, a writer who doesn’t enjoy descriptions turns the absence of descriptive writing into a virtue (though in genre fiction this kind of restraint can also be an example of Elmore Leonard’s oft repeated dictum leave out the parts that people skip.)

For Greeneland, I set myself certain constraints - only cover the times when Greene is in Nottingham, only invent where the detail isn’t known and only write from Greene’s point of view. After completing the first draft, I realised that these limitations weren’t entirely working and I dropped the third constraint, bringing in Vivien’s point of view, which also allowed me to get around the first constraint when I needed to, and give a rounder portrait, both of Greene’s life and how others perceived him.

For the serialised novel I’m now writing, I added a much tighter constraint, one that forced me to rewrite everything I’d done before. Each entry would appear a hundred years to the day after the one on which it is set. Each entry would be tied to a specific day, though it could refer to things that happened earlier. One wants to avoid backfilling where one can, however, because the pluperfect (a tense that I used to tell my students was like a flashback within a flashback) is usually clunky, and has to be used with care.

This latest constraint forced me to raise my game. In making Greeneland a serial novel, and one where each chapter represents a day in the author’s life, I was sacrificing key elements of the author’s playbook. The principal loss was the ability to structure a life like a story. Every life is a story, or a collection of stories, but few lives are structured like one. In the case of Greene, there are numerous strands to the story of his life in Nottingham. In the first version of the novel, read by only a handful of people, these were carefully arranged: career, conversion, romance, writing and looking after a pet. The marriage plot would be the main driver for some readers. Its link to the conversion story would, I hope, keep on board readers for whom the religious element is a turn off.

Ditto the dog subplot. In the original version, Greene’s first two weeks were all about settling into his job and finding a better place to live. I moved Graham’s note seeking Catholic instruction forward a little and the arrival of Paddy the terrier back a little, barely conscious that I was doing this, because – even in a documentary novel – art is the lie that reveals the truth (an aphorism usually credited to Picasso). Using a novelist’s tricks allowed me to give a truer picture of Greene than a more episodic, day to day account. So why am I now doing just that, when I know that the approach is bound - to some extent - to fail?

All books fail but – might as well throw in Beckett here – the idea is to fail better. I was determined to turn this new constraint into an opportunity. And to make the book better. The original novel was written during a bad period of my life. When asked why he wrote a couple of sentimental novels, one told from the point of view of a dog, during a bad period in his life, the late Paul Auster said something like: ‘it’s all I was capable of’. Greeneland, written during Covid and my late partner’s long, last illness, was all I was capable of.

The tone of the original version of the novel is quite flat, the focalisation of the main character, Graham, isn’t close. This was partly out of respect, but mainly because the adolescent Greene is a mass of contradictions, hugely sentimental, at times jarringly bipolar, hugely ambitious and madly in love. Maybe I’d toned him down too much and, in doing so, was sacrificing a trick or two. I was also worried that I’d spent too much time writing about chess and a flirtation that I’d intuited from the briefest of mentions in his autobiography. It was a relief when, reading through the Austin archive of Greene’s letters to Vivienne I found his first reference to Mrs Loney’s daughter, who he describes as ‘very pretty’. She isn’t mentioned again, although the one incident that clearly involves her (no spoilers) is included in A Sort of Life. And that, in itself, is suspicious, for here is Greene, sex obsessed as perhaps only a 21 year old male virgin can be, living in a room below an attractive, available teenager.

I named her Sally, but was worried about including these scenes, which can be read as prurient, but I felt the novel needed them. Where something isn’t known, I allow myself the freedom to invent. The scenes with Sally let me show Greene treating his dog with rather more kindness than was necessarily the case. If he wasn’t getting some help walking Paddy and feeding the pet when he was at work, how could the dog be properly cared for?

I’ve started applying another constraint, in that I rewrite the work just before it’s published. I couldn’t do this originally, because I had a long trip to South America scheduled and this clashed with the first two weeks of the novel. Unfortunately, these two weeks are the most packed part of the story, but that couldn’t be helped. I rewrote and edited furiously before leaving, scheduling the posts from October 31^st to November 14^th, two days after I got back. I needed to rewrite the entry for November 15 but there wasn’t much to do on that one.

I’d allowed for jetlag but not for the fact that my house would be comprehensively burgled while I was away (thieves managed to get in through the historic allotments at the back of my house, and went through every single drawer in the house, leaving loads of mess). So I didn’t look at the next entry, which I had down to be on November 22, until a couple of days before. And immediately saw that I’d left myself with loads to do, thinking I’d be properly on it by the time I came to rewrite. I might have added another chapter earlier in the week. That ship had sailed. But what I could do was maybe… nah, better sleep on it.

Last Friday, then, having slept on it, I got to work early and began to rewrite the entry that needed to be published the next day (which would be set on a Sunday). I couldn’t work out why I hadn’t had Graham go to mass and put that in. But the chapter was still wrong. I went back to Greene’s letters from Nottingham (which I photographed at the Ransom Centre in ’24) and began to figure out how I could split the chapter into two. But that would require my publishing an entry this very day. If I was going to do that, I was already late. But the time of day at which entries are posted is not one of my constraints, just as long as it’s a hundred years to the day, and I’m well aware that many readers like to stack up a few entries to read: lateness was not a big deal. When I read the second part of the epic length letter Greene sent that weekend, I realised why I hadn’t shown him go to mass. Because his landlady, who he’d seen out on the town the night before, neglected to bring his breakfast on time, and he overslept.

I ended up with two chapters and you, dear reader, can be the judge of how well I did. Each was published less than two hours late (I usually publish at midday GMT). I don’t intend to leave it so late in future. At the moment, the next entry is due on Thursday, and I shall start work on rewriting it tomorrow (Tuesday). It’s possible I’ll change the day it’s set on, or that I’ll find something in my rereading of the letters, which will affect what I write. I had to speedread the letters in Austion (there are over two thousand pages from those four months in Nottingham) and they’re rather easier to read when expanded on my computer screen than they were when holding a magnifying glass to Greene’s spidery script. I keep finding little things I missed.

Back to Ian McEwan. I enjoyed his new novel - one of his best, I think, although the first half promises more than the second half can deliver. While my novel is set a century in the past, his is set a century in the future. Surprisingly, they share a protagonist, nominally at least. His novel’s plot engine is the search for a missing masterpiece, ‘A Corona For Vivien’, written for his wife by fictional poet Francis Blundy (a poet with Hughes/Heaney sort of stature). It’s only halfway through the novel that Vivien’s first husband, Percy, is given a surname, and we discover that her name before she married Blundy was - wait for it - Vivien Greene. Like the real Vivien (who changed the spelling of her name after my novel is set), she has a rather disappointing marriage. Is invoking Vivien Greene’s name deliberate on McEwan’s part? Of course it is. What readers take from it, however, is up to them. Sometimes novelists put in details like that purely to amuse themselves. The same is true of some constraints. They aren’t necessary, they’re just there to give the author a challenge.

On which note, I’d better go back to those letters.