Most writers who matter are monsters. Take Graham Greene. Journey without Maps describes a 1935 journey across Liberia, a place whose interior was shown on the few available maps as largely blank. Greene, whose travel experience has been limited to a few places in Europe and who has never trekked, not only decides to take a walk across the country but to take with him his 23-year old female cousin.
He has only just enough money to pay the bearers and guides, to provision them all and to meet the inevitable bribes. He relies on cashing cheques with missionaries and sweats his labourers. Unlike explorers or missionaries or the traders in Monrovia, Greene has no larger ambition than to sort out his obsessions – which is to say, to advance his writing. For this he drags a score of people through dense forest and swamp, risking disease and death.
If we are to believe his cousin, who survived the journey and wrote a book of her own about it, Journey without Maps is all wrong. But wrong, right, good or bad it worked for Greene. His next book was Brighton Rock.
The general awfulness of good writers was once better understood. Today’s crowd of writers in residence, at festivals and on chat shows could well mislead the unwary into thinking of writers as nice. Philip Larkin, a monster who matters, when asked why he wouldn’t do this stuff, replied “I don’t like going about pretending to be me.”
You are warned. Consort only with the mediocre, and if you must marry a writer, marry a dunce.