Shadowplay

Beyond the steamed, greasy window, the beginning of the midlands: the distant lights of towns, the smokestacks and steeples, the brickfields and quarries served by new metalled roads. Between the towns, the mellow, dreeping meadows with their byres and barns and crucified scarecrows, the towpaths by the green and calm canals, the manors and their orchards and red-bricked boundary walls, the mazes and lodges and rectories. It is so like the Irish countryside yet like it at all. Something different, undefinable, a certain quality of light, a sadness perhaps, an absence that is a presence. Welcome to an absence called England.

‘Playing is my trade, the butter on my bread. But artistry is also a spirit, a secret room in the soul. Where it is or the key that unlocks it is difficult to find, so that sometimes the door must be broken down by a sort of force. That is what is meant by having a style. One’s force. Once inside one’s own style, proportion changes. The room becomes an anywhere: a forest, an ocean, a prison cell, a fairyland, a number of spheres revolving inside each other, all at once, each on an axis the others nothing about. At least, that is how one pictures it oneself. To be an artist is to know there are ghosts.’

Would it work? Might it upset people, cause unrest, unhelpful questionings? Never enough time to think a story through. Never enough money to stop thinking. Money is everything. He didn’t know it before. What a writer thirsts for is time, the permission to fail if needs be, the removal of the thumbscrews brought by having to pay the rent. Money is a work of fiction but it is needed all the same. The only kind of fiction that is.