Therapy

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SEPTEMBER 21st. I’ve come to the conclusion that the essential difference between book-writing and script-writing isn’t that the latter is mostly dialogue — it’s a question of tense. A script is all in the present tense. Not literally, but ontologically. (How about that, then? Comes of reading all those books about Kierkegaard.) What I mean is, in drama or film, everything is happening now. That’s why stage directions are always in the present tense. Even when one character is telling another character about something that happened in the past, the telling is happening in the present, as far as the audience is concerned. Whereas, when you write something in a book, it all belongs to the past; even if you write, “I am writing, I am writing ,” over and over again, the act of writing is finished with, out of sight, by the time somebody reads the result.
    A journal is halfway between the two forms. It’s like talking silently to yourself. It’s a mixture of monologue and autobiography. You can write a lot of stuff in the present tense, like: “ The plane trees outside my window are in leaf... ”But really that’s just a fancier way of saying, “I am writing, I am writing... ” It’s not getting you anywhere, it’s not telling a story. As soon as you start to tell a story in writing, whether it’s a fictional story or the story of your life, it’s natural to use the past tense, because you’re describing things that have already happened. The special thing about a journal is that the writer doesn’t know where his story is going, he doesn’t know how it ends; so it seems to exist in a kind of continuous present, even though the individual incidents may be described in the past tense. Novels are written after the fact, or they pretend to be. The novelist may not have known how his story would end when he began it, but it always looks as if he did to the reader. The past tense of the opening sentence implies that the story about to be told has already happened. I know that there are novels written entirely in the present tense, but there’s something queer about them, they’re experimental, the present tense doesn’t seem natural to the medium. They read like scripts. A present-tense autobiography would be even queerer. Autobiography is always written after the fact. It’s a past-tense form. Like my memoir of Maureen. Like this piece I’ve just finished writing.
    I kept a journal of sorts on my travels, but my laptop packed up in the mountains of León, and I didn’t have the time or opportunity to get it repaired, so I started keeping a handwritten diary. I’ve printed out my disks, and laboriously typed up the diary, but put together they made a very rough and rambling account of what happened to me. Conditions often weren’t ideal for writing, and sometimes at the end of the day I was too tired or had imbibed too much vino to do more than make a few allusive notes. So I’ve written it out in a more coherent, cohesive narrative, knowing, so to speak, how the story ended. For I do feel I’ve reached the end of something. And, hopefully, a new beginning.
     
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    I drove from London to St-Jean-Pied-de-Port in two days. No sweat. The only problem was holding the Richmobile under the speed limit on the autoroute. The cruise control came in handy. So did the air-conditioning — the road was shimmering in the heat on the flat marshlands south of Bordeaux. When I climbed into the foothills of the Pyrenees the weather turned cooler, and it was raining when I reached St Jean Pied-de-Port (St John at the Foot of the Pass). It’s a pleasant little market-cum-resort town of red gabled roofs and rushing brooks, nesding in a lumpy patchwork quilt of fields in various shades of green. There’s a hotel with a restaurant that has two Michelin rosettes where I was lucky enough to get a room. I was told that a little later in the season I wouldn’t have stood a chance without a reservation. There were already lots of hairy-kneed walkers in the town, wandering about disconsolately in wet cagoules, or mellowing out in the cafés while they waited for the weather to improve. You could tell which ones were pilgrims on their way to Santiago because they had scallop shells attached to their rucksacks.
    The scallop shell, or coquille (hence, coquilles St Jacques, which they did extremely well at my hotel) is the traditional symbol of the pilgrimage to Santiago, for