Essaying forth: The subjects explored in Hedley Twidle’s latest collection of nine pieces of shorter nonfiction, titled Show Me the Place, are varied and esoteric, gentle yet devastating.
‘Writing is the slow, recursive process in which words are laid down, then reordered and revised, tested and retested against memory in the attempt to produce something halfway dignified, somewhere between a sentimental fiction and a truth that can seem too harsh, or too self-satisfied in its harshness.”
This quote, taken from the fourth of the nine essays which comprise Hedley Twidle’s incredible new collection Show Me the Place, reflects the author’s stance on writing. And like so many of Twidle’s thoughts and phrases, it lands simultaneously as gently as the first butterfly of spring and as solidly as a tonne of bricks dropped from four storeys up.
Writers, as with so many who undertake creative endeavours, approach their craft for a variety of reasons and with a variety of techniques.
There are those who write purely as a commercial endeavour.
You may scoff at these folks if you like, but they count greats among their number.
Take Edgar Rice Burroughs, who gave us Tarzan and John Carter of Mars purely as ways to put food on the table.
And Lee Child, whose wonderfully ludicrous Jack Reacher novels only exist because the author needed an income after losing his job.
Hell, even 18th-century literary top guy Samuel Johnson, famous for A Dictionary of the English Language, once said: “Only a blockhead writes for anything but money.”
There are, of course, those who write because they have something to prove.
Professional sports people often talk about “playing with a chip on your shoulder”, that is, playing like you’re proving something to the world and yourself.
Well, it’s not only the jocks who think like that. Many authors do, too, and some would argue that almost all of them do.
Then there are those who write because they feel there is something that the world needs to know — that there is an inescapable truth people need to realise about themselves or others or the world, or something, that is overlooked because no one has found the means or desire to articulate it.
And then there are those who write because it feels as if, if they don’t, their skulls will explode with the force of all the words contained within going unexpressed. They simply can’t help it; their brain is constantly linking thought and experience to the written word without any explicit command to do so.
It’s as if a lunatic demon sits at the core of their consciousness, thumping away at an infernal typewriter, grinding out reams and reams of flaming prose seemingly without end.
And if that prose is not committed to paper, well, it’s just going to build up until they experience critical failure and spend the rest of their days in a home, drooling on themselves and muttering to caregivers about allegory as a rhetorical device and the merits of structure versus style.
That last point was belaboured so tortuously because I believe Twidle firmly belongs in the “if I don’t write, I will go crazy” camp.
Clearly a “blockhead” by Johnson’s definition, Twidle finds artful prose in the delightfully mundane. And when presented with something outside of mundanity, his ability to cobble together meaning and style makes for irresistible reading.
The nine essays that comprise Twidle’s latest collection are varied and esoteric, to say the least.
The first concerns surfing and the devout ramblings thereon by an amateur who is long on enthusiasm but short on talent.
The last details a bicycle trip around the Scottish islands, where the author is, ironically, playing third wheel to a couple of anarchists whose laughable self-seriousness is exceeded only by their capacity for needless bickering.
In between, we are treated to a smorgasbord of writing which relates, either directly or indirectly, to the collection’s theme — Utopia.
Or, in the words of the blurb, “…Twidle, in quixotic mood, sets out to snatch utopia from the jaws of dystopia.”
We are given a story about the defacement — literally, in this case — of monuments devoted to South Africa’s colonial past.
We are given a story about an ersatz kibbutz in the Western Cape, and the colourful characters contained therein.
And we are given my two favourite pieces in this collection:
A treatise on Ursula K le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed, which is her examination of the concept of Utopia and its inherent flaws. (The telescoping “wheels within wheels” nature of mentioning a book review within a book review is fundamentally delightful and not lost on me.)
The author’s chronicle of his mother’s slow descent into dementia, which was brought on by Alzheimer’s, and what he learned about himself along the way.
Since this piece is already unusually rich in quotes, let’s introduce one more, gifted to the world by Stephen King in his magnum opus on his craft, On Writing: “You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair — the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names.
“You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.”
Twidle does anything but “come lightly to the blank page”. His writing is powerful, evocative and thought-provoking. It is as likely to elicit laughter as it is to send you into minutes-long reverie about a concept he has introduced.
He presents to us adventures most of us would never undertake in a thousand lifetimes but makes them feel as personable and relatable as taking a walk to the corner shop to buy milk.
Show Me the Place is a series of wonderfully constructed, well-thought-out and thought-provoking essays on a series of topics one would be unlikely to find writing on in general, let alone bundled together in one collection.
Show Me the Place is published by Jonathan Ball.