In 1946 George Orwell wrote an essay ‘
Why I Write’, in which he described some events that marked
his development towards becoming a writer and outlined what he saw were the four
main motives for writing: ‘Sheer egoism’, ‘Aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘Historical
impulse’ and ‘Political purpose’. He explained that he would not naturally have
become a political writer had circumstances not demanded it. Responding to this
essay but contrasting the bluntness of its assertions with a subtler and less
direct approach, Deborah Levy, who re-emerged from undeserved obscurity when she
was shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize for
Swimming Home (now shelved beside 1989’s
Beautiful Mutants at home), takes Orwell’s four
‘motives’ as titles for pieces of memoir: of her childhood in South Africa
(where her father was imprisoned for five years as a member of the ANC); of her
teenage years in England, wishing to ‘belong’; and of a time she spent in the
off-season at a small mountain hotel in Majorca, despondent, wondering how to
deal with things she didn’t want to think about and doubting her ability to get
her writing out into the world. As she talks with a Chinese shopkeeper, another
displaced character, over dinner, she comes to some resolve: “To become a writer
I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then
louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at
all”.
(August 2014)
