Or why writers tend to lend themselves to melancholy
AT A GLANCE
Happiness leaves such slender records; it is the dark days that are so voluminously documented. —Truman Capote
In his acceptance speech at the Nobel Prize banquet in 1954, which the American ambassador to Sweden at the time read in his behalf, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “Writing at best is a lonely life.”
It’s ironic that in order to connect with the world, a writer has to be alone through torturous hours, the more removed from the world, the better his chances to write something true and beautiful.
Vladimir Nabokov said, “Loneliness as a situation can be corrected, but as a state of mind, it is an incurable disease.” Even of happiness, he could not speak, unless in the context of its opposite. Thus he said, “The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal’s black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.”
Solitude, more than a tool, is a writer’s workshop. The blank page is his weapon but he must draw from silence and stillness, often from sorrow and sadness, to fire it up. “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind,” said Marcel Proust.
“But that was the impetus to understand the world, get closer to the world by writing about it, writing about the world that I was in,” said Bret Easton Ellis. “I was never lonely, but I was a solitary figure, and I have pretty much always been that way since I was a teenager.”
I thought that maybe Truman Capote was happy when he was best friends with Babe Paley, hanging around the New York swans, but all that ended and he was never happy again. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, before he was shunned by New York society after the publication of “La Cote Basque,” he might have been prophetic when he wrote, “A disquieting loneliness came into my life, but it induced no hunger for friends of longer acquaintance: they seemed now like a salt-free, sugarless diet.”
Maria Popova wrote that for John Keats, the sacred road to love and beauty passed through the gates of solitude. And true enough, in Bright Star, he wrote:
“Closer of lovely eyes
to lovely dreams,
Lover of loneliness, and wandering,
Of upcast eye, and tender pondering!
Thee must I praise above
all other glories
That smile us on to tell
delightful stories.”
Ah solitude, are you a muse, who vanishes when I am surrounded by people or when I am filled with joy? Solitude, such jealous creature, who possesses me in those lonely hours of writing, must I embrace you so you will let me write, let me write, let me write something terribly true?
