I have been reading the journals/notebooks of Camus and Simenon and it is striking, as so often with major literary figures, that they felt they ‘had to write’; they had no option but to translate an urge to commit pen to paper (in those faraway days) into publications. In one respect I am at one with them. In my fifth year of retirement I cannnot stop carrying my laptop around with a view to publishing or blogging. I am of course operating in a league way below theirs.
I suspect in fact that most academics, us babyboomers at least, have difficulty even in seeing ourselves as ‘writers’. I personally have a style that (I think) is clear and concise, but that is also esoteric or arcane: in other words, it does not lend itself to a non-academic readership. Possibly my blogs plot an intermediate course. For now I am content to move my arguments on a bit, item by item, while I search for new areas or topics. I must ponder on the rationale for doing so, beyond mere habit!
In hs journal When I was Old, Simenon – a massively under-rated talent – sees old friends Henry Miller and Charlie Chaplin as ‘bohemians’: they ‘take’ rather than ‘give’. They go their own way in defiance of social norms and conventions. Is he of their number?
‘What am I doing, I, in this brotherhood? It is simply that I have, basically, the same anticonformism, the same rebellions. I am a true anarchist, I too, but because I live in a society, because in spite of myself I profit by it, I consider it my duty to follow its rules. Without believing in them. Without teaching them to my children. I follow them the more scrupulously because I do not believe in them, because that is my way of ‘paying my share’.’
And a few pages on:
‘I am against every established order, against every imposed discipline. But I cannot live without order and discipline and there is no object on my desk that is not in its place. I get up from my armchair to pick up a tiny piece of paper on the carpet. Contradiction? I’m not sure. Protective instinct? It’s possible, for I may have just missed becoming a Bohemian.’
A comment or two: pace Wittgenstein, the possibility of being a bohemian only exists because it is possible not to be one; and pace Durkheim, one positive social function of being identifiably bohemian, a deviant or outsider, is that it affords an opportunity for the majority to act – as it were, against them – to re-assert their claims to be ‘normals’ or insiders. And what surely underlies Simenon’s ‘honesty’ and sense of a lurking ‘contradiction’ is that one can only be properly bohemian in the event of the back-up of orderly others (extending in Simenon’s case to several servants).
NB One can only be a focused autonomous reflexive (a ‘greedy bastard’) with near-total – and typically gendered – lifeworld support.