ON 'ALONE' AND 'LONELY'

THOUGHTS FROM A PARIS APARTMENT

“But don’t you get lonely?” a friend asked the other day.

I suppose I should. With Marie Dominique in our summer place and Louise living in Bordeaux, there isn’t a constant presence in the Paris apartment, unless you count Mowgli, the cat.

So I’m often alone. But “lonely” implies a deficiency, a want of company, when what I most covet, like any writer, is peace to work.

As a teenager in a small Australian country town, I was exiled to a “sleep out”, a portion of verandah enclosed in fine wire mesh over which a canvas was draped. The canvas could be raised to improve ventilation, but seldom was.

I can remember how transformative I found that detachment. Some complained about the isolation but, to me, this dark, anechoic space increased the intensity of every experience (hence my early and continuing pleasure in the cinema.)

I shouldn’t have been surprised, talking to other writers, to find that most have had, and often still have, such spaces to which they retreat.

Those I’ve visited range from a sort of garconniere under a bungalow in suburban Brisbane where writer David Malouf enjoyed his early creative experiences to the room at the top of a medieval tower in Tuscany used by film director Mario Bava to dream up the horrors of Il Maschera del Demonio.

Silence, half-light, tranquility: a simple formula – and applicable to our Paris home. This is a place for looking out - and looking inward. You can see why Sartre defined as his ideal “a sixth floor apartment with a view over the roofs of Paris.”

Needing quiet to write explains my habit of getting up early. All my life I’ve woken around 4am, and these days it’s more often at 2am. Before electric light, there were two “sleeps”: one when the sun went down and you stopped work to eat; the second when you woke after midnight to bank down the fire, visit the toilet, maybe enjoy sex, “the poor man’s opera” – or write.

Another eminent loner, Dylan Thomas, put it well in a favourite poem. You know the one. “In my craft or sullen art/Exercised in the still night…” But it sounds better with him reading it.