Forty-Four Handed Writing

Spainish writer Javier Montes, author of ‘The Hotel Life’ which features in our new issue, Granta 113: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists, writes for the Granta blog this week recounting our events promoting the new issue in London.

Santa Teresa de Ávila – arguably the best female writer in the Spanish language – was happy when things went berserk: ‘God writes straight on crooked lines. We must be doing something good if the Devil bothers to bother us.’

I read that in New York the Granta launch was plagued by flu. In London we had some tonsillitis; across Europe blizzards blocking trains and wildcat air-traffic controller strikes and even a State of Emergency that shut down all Spanish airports. A gran finale preceded by what Teresa herself would have called a promising opening.

I’d travelled to London with Andrés Barba, a close friend – despite being a colleague – just as the first snowflakes were beginning to fall. After wondering if it would be better to jump onto the Gatwick Express instead of a taxi, Andrés reassured me: This isn’t Spain. These guys are used to their weather. They know how to deal with it.

Then, for the next four hours, our minicab journeyed through a mini-Odyssey. Overturned lorries, bus drivers gone very berserk, blocked highways, claws springing from sinister mounds of snow at the sides of what only after a lot of wishful thinking could be called a road … Our skilful driver miraculously got us to the hotel. He was Gujarati: an Indian region which from here on will represent for me the earthly home of selfless heroism.

After that taxi ride, I couldn’t bear to tell Andrés about my second fear: it was related to the very idea of putting together, under the same roof for more than two hours – not to speak of more than two days – a number of writers. The guys from Granta are used to this, I told myself. They know how to deal with it.

And I turned out to be right. Granta has spent many years showing expertise in the storage of explosive ammo. Putting writers together – in their pages, on their lists, even in person – is a highly risky business into which they throw themselves with an almost Gujarati heroism (and equally deft results).

Not an easy task. Paul Valéry hated museums and said it was always preferrable to have our bit of mass tourism done in parks where the plants always match. Pictures hate each other: each one carries encrypted in its genes, he said, a programme for the destruction of any other work of art on Earth.

The same goes for writing – maybe for writers. It’s not just a matter of ego (but then, it is also that). It has to do with the very nature of the craft. Every piece of writing is born from a tangle of ambitions and rejections, influences and rivalries, bitter inimities and elective affinities. But once it begins to display itself – maybe from the very first word – every tale ever told aspires, more or less consciously, to leave all that behind and to achieve the condition of black hole and antimatter regarding every other piece of writing. While being read, it introduces itself as the only bunch of words ever worded, as the only possible model for the task.

We shouldn’t delude ourselves here with democratic good feelings. Any small fraction of literature does its best to establish a dictatorial regime: postulating itself as the only totalitarian way of doing the thing.

That’s why four-handed writing – two writers working on the same text – is scarcely interesting. It tends to the episodic and has given no masterpieces yet that I know of (Barba and I wrote a book together, by the way). The imaginary Bustos Domecq was a peculiar Argentinian writer, but he can’t stand comparison with his two halves, Bioy and Borges. In these cases, the total sum is less that its parts.

Let’s say it again: writers are difficult to match up. Curiously enough, that might be precisely the very reason why anthologies such as this are so interesting. Read them as highbrow, apparently civilized fights in the mud. Because writers are not gregarious animals. At their best, they can have a go at mating with each other. But they never hunt in packs.

Given certain ritual conditions, they can get together for a while. For dinner, on panels, in anthologies (and even behave while doing so: I like to think we did so in London last week). And my bet is that while dining, each writer is musing about the pleasures and miseries and duties left behind, in the real world of un-heroic routines and tasks and conversations which explain and justify their writing. Just as in anthologies every fragment is thinking of the whole of the work to which it belongs and which it misses, which justifies it and is perhaps represented by it.

No matter how jaded and worldly the specimen thinks himself to be: the writer, in writers’ meetings, tends to stiffness (or worse, to overacting). He feels compelled to represent himself in person and is a bit mystified by that, afraid of falling short or going too far. He is used to lurking behind his writing and to allowing it to speak for him.

Anthologies – and their launch events – are, in that sense, always a bit of a carnival. They might not be particularly edifying, but end up being extremely illustrative.

I really hope none of us did anything remotely edifying while in London. But perhaps the mere fact of being seen together for a while was more educational to our potential readers than we were aware of. I have a vague memory of trying to explain to some table partner, late at night, long after the dinner had ceased being a writers’ dinner (it might have been after the wine tasting), the Spanish phrase: ‘de su padre y de su madre’. Literally, ‘from one’s father and one’s mother’. It is used to convey the idea that the respective origins of a group of people couldn’t be more disparate.

We are all a bit de su padre y de su madre in this issue. And it feels right that way. Precisely this, maybe, makes the sum of us all, if not bigger, at least more telling than its parts. An eloquent example of forty-four handed writing if ever there was one.

Previously on the Granta blog... Patrick Ryan on moderating our translation event in New York, and Ollie Brock on found poetry, Nicaraguan street addresses, and Zoetrope: All-Story's Latin American issue