Chance encounters

As those who know me will attest, I quite like going to pubs on my own. I don’t want to sound anti-social, and I much prefer going with friends, but if I want to read, or write, or leaf through the weekend papers, I’m very happy doing so in a moderately busy pub. In an ideal world, “moderately busy” is key. I want to get a seat, and not be hemmed in, but at the same time I want to experience, vicariously, the buzz of human interaction, people talking to people, the warmth of friendship at a distance.

One of the perils of being alone at a pub, which I fully accept, is that sometimes other people – maybe also on their own – will sit at your table. I don’t mind this too much, if they ask first; it really boils my piss when they plonk themselves down uninvited, and they will often get a growled “No, please, help yourself”, usually at a volume which they just might hear, but generally not. It’s not too much of an imposition, and I accept that as a lone gunman I cannot expect to occupy three or four seats which paying customers might otherwise make use of. I’m not that selfish.

So it was last night. I got to my local, the Falcon on St John’s Hill, at about 7.00 pm, and, to my delight, found one of the comfy wingback armchairs free, into which I sank gratefully, intending to write for maybe an hour before I headed for home. It’s dark in the corner snug, but it’s cosy as well, and I find it quite a conducive atmosphere. The chairs are leather-covered and studded, like a gentlemen’s club, and the wine is passable (though, last night, in a comedy of errors, they ran out of wine glasses, so I found myself drinking out of a goblet designed for Belgian beer).

After about ten minutes, a woman, in mid-telephone conversation, pointed to the empty chair opposite me and asked if I would mind if she sat there. Well, she asked, so I smiled politely, and said that would be fine. I noticed, without eavesdropping too much, that she had that enviable to switch from fluent English (clearly her native tongue) to fluent French. She was American, I think, or possibly, given the French, Canadian. She also pronounced the word “about” oddly, which leads me perhaps to the latter conclusion.

Anyway, I continued to peck away at my keyboard (I am a very poor typist, never having been taught and being just old enough to have written school essays by hand). I’m wrestling with a short story which is either an insight into young love or just therapy for my younger self – I still can’t tell, and I may need an outside opinion to tell me.

During a pause in tapping away, and after she’d finished her telephone calls and bought another drink, she looked at me and said “You’ve got to make me leave after this one.” I gave my best smile but my heart sank. She was a talker. I assured her I would, and, to be sociable (which does not always come naturally to me), I made vague noises about this being my last drink as well.

“So what you up to?” she asked. I explained, though I could easily have lied, that I was trying to write a short story, and initially my implication was “And I’d like to get back to it”. But suddenly we fell into conversation about writing.

I know what most of you are thinking. This is unremarkable. But for me, it is not. I don’t talk to strangers in pubs, beyond “Excuse me”, “Thank you”, and “Yes, that’s fine”. Yet here I was talking about Hemingway with someone I’d met – if you can even call it that – five minutes before. She was obviously well read, more so than me, I’m sure, and very engaging company. I offered my opinion that one of the greatest short stories ever written is Hemingway’s six-word epic: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”. Just typing those words makes me well up.

(Sidebar: I don’t care for children, as my friends know. But I know people who have lost sons and daughters both before and after full-term, and I cannot imagine, simply cannot imagine, the heart-rending grief it must entail. It subverts the natural order of children burying their parents, and robs mothers and fathers of the vessels into which they must pour all their hopes and ambitions. I don’t know how – if – they ever recover.)

She – her name was Andrea, and she was a psychologist, as it turned out – was on her third glass of wine, having spent the day seeing 25 suicidal or self-harming patients. I certainly didn’t begrudge her the release. I’m not built for the so-called caring professions. My father was a psychologist, my mother used to work with damaged and disruptive children, but nope, sorry, just not happening here. Perhaps I’m unusually unempathetic.

The conversation turned, as we both drank our wine, to the relationship between creative sorts, in this case writers, and addiction. Papa Hemingway, already mentioned, liked a drink. I mentioned William Faulkner, who drank himself to death but supposedly never wrote while under the influence (which I seem to recall Hemingway, who hated him, disputed: there’s a quotation which I can’t find about Don Ernesto saying that he never touched a drop while writing, and that “I leave that to Faulkner.) Andrea brought up Scott Fitzgerald, who was capable of the most beautiful prose but was clearly a raging alcoholic. And we also mentioned Truman Capote, whose tastes were broad but was clearly the addictive type.

Why should this be? Is it so, in fact, or were we self-selecting? One theory, which popped into my head and I advanced tentatively, was that for creative people, the world was just too much, too fast, too frenetic, and they needed booze or drugs or just cigarettes to slow things down to a manageable pace. I wish – well, a little part of me does, but without the self-destructive urges – that I could classify myself in that group, that my head was so full of ideas and fizzing with genius that I needed to anaesthetise it. Not so. Plots come to me very slowly, sometimes never at all, and sometimes turn out to be junk. But I wonder if there’s a grain of truth in the hypothesis. I know some writers keep a notebook by their beds so they can scribble down notions that come to them, or fragments of dialogue, or characters, that come to them in the long watches of the night. Sadly, it is not so for me.

Another idea we tossed around was that writing – and maybe other artistic disciplines too, though I have no experience of them; I could draw passably well as a child, but I could never paint – is in itself an addiction, a need to put words on paper. So maybe it is the case that being a writer is a product of an addictive personality, and merely one facet of it. Writers will turn to alcohol and drugs just in the same way as they turn to the keyboard or typewriter, and with no less dedication. I’m not sure.

A final notion that Andrea posited, based on the experience of her 15-year-old son, who had just been expelled from his second school, was that creativity grew out of a rejection of authority, and that perhaps addiction, in whatever form it took, was a continuation of that. After all, drug-taking, for example, is thumbing your nose at The System, which tells you what you should do, what is good for you, what is acceptable. There might be something in this. Writers – artists in general – are often anti-authoritarian. Think of Orwell, or Kerouac, to take two relatively recent examples. Or de Sade, to go back further. To shock is to entertain.

We reached no firm conclusions, and then the glasses were empty. I kept my promise to chase her out, and out she went. She said – ha! – she looked forward to reading my first book. Well, I don’t think that’s all that likely. But what had begun as something I’d regarded as a grinding observation of social niceties had become a rollercoaster of ideas and notions. I regret I didn’t catch her surname. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see her again, unless she turns up to my first book launch. Which is a shame. Next week she has five days straight of suicidal patients. Maybe that’s why we started with Hemingway.