The compost of the imagination

Perhaps a novelist has a greater ability to forget than other men -- he has to forget or become sterile. What he forgets is the compost of the imagination.

Graham Greene, A Sort of Life

Graham Greene

When novelist Robert Olen Butler spoke at the Festival of Reading in St. Petersburg in the fall of 2011, someone asked him how he managed to capture his Vietnamese characters so vividly in the short stories in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Butler replied that he spent a year in Vietnam during the war. He thought he had forgotten most of what he had experienced there when, decades later, he wrote those stories. To him they seemed to come out of his subconscious.

And then he added, "Writers write what they have forgotten."

This idea that writers, especially novelists, write what they have forgotten crops up again and again, suggesting that there must be some truth in it. In his book Patience & Fortitude, Nicholas A. Basbanes tells of visiting novelist Umberto Eco in Milan and viewing his personal library of some 30,000 books.

Among those books was an ancient and worn copy of Aristotle's Poetics. Eco said when he acquired the book he wrote down a detailed description of its condition and placed it in the book and promptly forgot about it. Decades later when writing The Name of the Rose he described an old manuscript important to the plot. He was shocked when he later opened that copy of Poetics and discovered that his descriptions of that book and the manuscript in the novel were virtually identical.

There is a conversation of Deborah Meyler at the end of the paperback edition of her novel The Bookstore. There she says "I think so many of us let events and funny moments slip through our memories into oblivion, like jewels into the dirt. I always mean to keep a journal and never do. My solace is that perhaps the memories really do merge over time to make something else, something new."

And this would seem to bring us back around to Graham Greene's idea of a "compost of the imagination." This is why those who write biographies of novelists study those novels so carefully. They often reveal details about the author's life that the authors themselves may have not been aware of. (The danger, of course, is that biographers can often be totally wrong.) Sometimes real people known by an author claim they were the model for some fictional character, which the author denies. But perhaps they actually were the model for that character, and the author has simply forgotten where the idea for the character came from.

Because experience turns into compost for imagination, it is vital that a novelist have experiences, lots of them, rather than just sit in a room somewhere and try to write. Many of our best writers, such as Greene, Hemingway and even Wodehouse, moved around at lot, often from one country to another, soaking up experience, which they converted into compost, so to speak, which then nourished their imaginations.

I doubt that novelists are alone in having compost heaps for brains. Most of us, I suspect, have as the source of most of our likes and dislikes, opinions, beliefs, biases and even basic knowledge (can you remember learning to count?) not memory itself but that melting pot of memories we call the subconscious.