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Andrew Timothy A Novelist's Journal

I've passed through the ten thousand word pain barrier, the first time since 2002. My health is good though my sleep pattern has been slightly erratic lately. Not getting much of it. My sister is having difficulties with Nathaniel, her son. He's not yet two and creates havoc. It's difficult to control him, especially if he's being so destructive. Hopefully, when he grows a little older and is able to articulate himself he'll calm down. Yasmin is the model niece, thoughtful, clever. I can't help thinking she's going to make something of her life. Perhaps she'll become an actress or, instead of me, be the writer of the family.

Not much on the love front. I have basked for too long in solitude, you know. Part of my condition, granted, but the warmth of human intimacy is growing more alien by the day. Which is worrying. Half of me thinks how much I would lose by falling in love. It's not something one does consciously anyway. Attachments form despite themselves, don't they? Or because of themselves. Because love provides more meaning than loneliness?

Andrew Timothy A Novelist's Journal

18th December 2005

I was reading through an old attempt at a first novel yesterday and the temptation was there to clean it up and continue with it. It would mean losing precious time on the psychiatrist novel, but the story I had rediscovered was so appealing.

The story concerns a young teenager, Trevor, rather at odds with the world, his parents unhappy with each other, and then an Indian, Babayati, moves into the empty house across the road and changes the young teenager's life with tales and parables of the Orient, Eastern spirituality. The young man becomes dependent on his guru as school ends and the unemployment of the eighties becomes more than just a news item.

His mother meets the Indian too and in her flighty way falls in love with him. But the Indian slowly opens Trevor's heart and he begins to fall in love, or become close to, a girl, the daughter of a man his mother had an affair with. Yet he also realizes he has a deep love for Babayati, not a romantic love, but a love which he cannot articulate, nevertheless. The girl tells Trevor she wants to be a missionary but he does not know how far this ambition is yet to be realized. He cannot think of telling her he loves her, not in quite the detail or remote longing he feels. She thinks he merely wants a platonic relationship and, upset, she meets up with his friend, the socialist skirt chaser, Sykes. Sykes tells her he loves her but wants only sex and leaves her once he's got what he wants. Panicking, the young girl tells Trevor what has happened and is met with the cold response that he cannot forgive her.

Trevor is upset himself and goes to Babayati for comfort, only to find the Indian in his mother's arms. His illusions shattered, Trevor retreats home, promsing never to see Babayati again. Babayati leaves the town downcast, knowing how he has let his young protege down. Trevor, however, changes his mind, and wants to see Babayati once more, but when he goes there he finds the house empty. Babayati has gone, leaving only a letter. With only the young girl left in his life, Trevor hopes to find her home, only to discover that she has gone to Africa as a missionary. The next time he sees her she is married. We finally learn that Trevor, some years later, is now looking for Babayati once more in the foothills of the Himalayas, reflecting if things had turned out differently.

Andrew Timothy A Novelist's Journal

13th December 2005

Although science has not unlocked the mystery of everything, it likes to think it can dispel the mysteries in mystery. Deconstruction attempted to untether art and literature not only from a sense of an artist and author but from a presence, be it human or divine. Fundamental Christians barely grasp these arguments, not knowing the subtle but threatening locutions of modern science and aesthetics. They hardly help themselves, using the Old and New Testaments like DIY kits for assembling furniture, with translations from the Hebrew and Greek that rarely invest in the beauty of language. Above all, the Bible is a work of literature in which, however faintly, if it is His, God's voice calls to man, and man's to Him.

I think it is in the Exodus (Ch19) of the King James translation where God repents of what He has said. In subsequent translations the meaning is altered or the passage is missing altogether. Mystery has been sanitized. The poetry of the last supper in the Gospel of John is hacked to pieces in the NIV and the Good News translations. One wonders, with the difficulties of translation alone present in any work, whether it is religious or not, if such books have endured beyond their usefulness. Christians may argue that the importance lies in what is said but how the language conveys whatever is said can subtly or radically change its meaning for the reader.

Andrew Timothy A Novelist's Journal

12th December 2005

There are only a few readers of literary novelists outside the metropolis in England. Much of what is published in this vein rarely attracts the public attention as a whole; vanity publishing in this sense is vital but has little shelf life. Given this, and the astonishing power of the mass media, it ought to be said that posterity - the memory of talent and genius - is not so much a gift of public reverence but of public relations. The academia may fight this notion with its preferred canon (it has little to do with a canon of the future), but the mediocre and the formulaic have vested interests more powerful than the preservation of Literature: money.

Andrew Timothy A Novelist's Journal

11th December 2005

To anyone who has suffered it, what does pain mean? There is the pain of consequence, of something we have done and there is the pain of apparent arbitrary affliction, the ravaging torment of an inner demon, perhaps. Of the pain of consequence there is an education, of a sorts, that can be drawn, that one can be resigned to or ignore. But of the apparent arbitrary affliction, what associate value does it have? Pain is not a harbinger of philosophic or artistic or scientific genius or talent. It does not draw one closer to another, except in the telling. If anything, the experience of pain isolates the individual from normal discourse. Therefore, I ask again, what purpose does pain have?

A Novelist's Journal 9th December 2005

9th December 2005

I haven't written anything today. I didn't sleep last night, which was bad, but I didn't go down to the kiosk for cigarettes, either, which is good. Second day without the weed.

Not writing anything leads, though not inevitably, to the question: why write at all? In George Steiner's words, "Why, then, art, why the created realm of fiction?" He goes on to answer, "Compelled to take the guise of a verbal proposition, of an abstract claim, no reply can be adequate to match the force of the obvious. I can only put it this way (and every true poem, piece of music or painting says it better): there is aesthetic creation because there is creation. There is formal construction because we have been made form. Today, mathematical models proclaim access to the origins of the present universe. Molecular biology may have in reach an unravelling of the thread whose beginning is that of life. Nothing in these prodigious conjectures disarms, let alone elucidates, the fact that the world is when it might not have been, the fact we are in it when we might, when we could not have been. The core of our human identity is nothing more or less than the fitful apprehension of the radically inexplicable presence, facticity and perceptible substantiality of the created. It is; we are. This is the rudimentary grammar of the unfathomable." (Steiner, Real Presences, pp201, University of Chicago Press edn., America 1991, Faber and Faber, London, 1989.)

Does Steiner fail to discriminate between insinuating that there is creation because we have, our world, our consciousness, have been created, or because we are capable of creation and so creation exists? Both approaches are theological in tone, which is no coincidence since his book interestingly argues a theological exploration of art, against the deconstructionist fanatics of 1970s America.

I personally believe that art, literature should not be wholly religous or theological in tone, but that it should be combined with the humanistic, the human circumstance. Today, most of what we read is purely human and thus suffers an emotional loss, which an appeal to that which is beyond ourselves, however vain, could enrich the reader beyond measure.

Andrew Timothy

A Novelist's Journal

8th December 2005

A problem: do you continue to revise throughout the writing of a first draft, ie. combine a first and second draft; or do you write the first draft without pausing for breath? The latter method allows one's ideas to flow more freely but the first allows a sense of perspective to seep into your work.

I confronted this problem today when I went to see a friend who told me my language was too thick, my metaphors too elaborate, resulting in non sequiters and a general lack of clarity. Charles suggested I be more serious. His opinion was invaluable. Thank you, Charles. I realized I had to radically pare down my language,and cut the comic flourishes, which inhabit my writing. I promised myself that after every seven pages of material I'd give myself this treatment. The on-going revision method makes the eventual final draft seem less daunting, even if the accumulation of work is slower.

My novel is serious, but I have a tendency to write jokes. The novel is essentially comedic but it is the comedy of pain, of recognition, rather than the comedy of laughter, that ought to prevail. I should remember this and hope to do so.

Andrew Timothy

A Novelist's Journal

7th December 2005

Right now I should be writing my novel, but the temptation to begin writing this blog was too much. I'm writing my first novel and it's about a psychiatrist, how the symptoms he deals with every day in his patients trap him in an unsuspecting way. It's not a novel about madness. Too often, depressives write novels about depression and the result rarely exceeds the depressing. It's a book about religious culture as well, insofar as I have imagined it. And the pain of living life solely within the imagination.

Brief synopses: An out-patient is in love with Dr James Porter's wife; and their daughter, it is revealed in a diary, cares for the out-patient. The psychiatrist's close friend, Professor Kolinsky, an emigre from Russia confesses to him that he is having an affair with a student he met in the middle east, who he has invited to study over here in England. Over the course of the novel, with the encouragment of Professor Kolinsky's letters, Dr Porter's imagination gets sexually feverish concerning this young muslim woman and admits to himself that with his marriage dead, he is in love, probably for the first time. But the young muslim woman exists entirely within Dr Porter's imagination. Does she exist? Is the doctor deluded? This leads to the denoument between the psychiatrist and Professor Kolinsky, and finally, perhaps tragically, his out-patient and daughter.