In just 30 days, you too can write a masterpiece

FROM THE INDEPENDENT

Or maybe not. As writers prepare for National Novel Writing Month, Andrew Johnson looks at classics that were knocked out in a few weeks

Hundreds of thousands of aspiring novelists around the world will put pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – tomorrow with the intention of turning out a 50,000-word book in only 30 days.


They will be taking part in National Novel Writing Month, the first of which was held 11 years ago when 21 friends in America decided they had to take drastic action if they were ever to achieve their literary ambitions. Now up to 200,000 books are expected to be uploaded on the writing month website (NaNoWriMo) by the end of November.

And although there are plenty of tales of great novelists spending years crafting their masterpieces – Joseph Heller took eight years to write Catch-22 – many of the literary world's most popular works were knocked out in a few weeks, such as Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

Lindsey Grant, who helps run NaNoWriMo, said that 55 novels written under the scheme have gone on to publication. These include Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, which spent 12 weeks in The New York Times best-sellers list in 2006. "The idea is to get the rough drafts of the novels down," Ms Grant said. "But so many people then go on to rewrite."

Two years ago, Birdsong author Sebastian Faulks wrote a James Bond thriller, Devil May Care, in only six weeks – following the work pattern of Bond's creator, Ian Fleming.

"I enjoyed the rush," he said. "There was a way in which my own race to the finish line mirrored the chase of the plot. Novels that have been written quickly can retain a slightly torn-off, uneven quality – like life. This is certainly one of the miraculous things about Jean Brodie, where the story zooms back and forth through time. There is a careering, out-of-control feeling, which is exhilarating. The main danger is that the writer hasn't worked out his/her theme. They don't really know what the novel's about."

Graham Greene wrote one of his most popular novels, The Confidential Agent, in only six weeks in 1938 while also labouring on the much more difficult The Power and the Glory. He later wrote in his autobiography: "The Spanish Civil War furnished the background. I was struggling then through The Power and the Glory, but there was no money in the book as far as I could foresee. Certainly my wife and two children would not be able to live on one unsaleable book, so I determined to write another 'entertainment' as quickly as possible in the mornings, while I ground on slowly with The Power and the Glory in the afternoons."

A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens, written in six weeks in 1843

Dickens more or less invented the Christmas spirit, goodwill to all men and general jollity in this classic ghost story, which also gave us Scrooge, Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit. "I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me."

As I Lay Dying By William Faulkner, written in six weeks in 1930

Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, turned out one of the 20th century's greatest novels while working at a power plant. It tells the story of the death of Addie Bundren in stream-of-consciousness style from 15 points of view. "I set out deliberately to write a tour de force."

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie By Muriel Spark, written in one month in 1960

The inspirational Scottish teacher Jean Brodie, who taught her girls more about life than anything else, catapulted Muriel Spark into the premier league of contemporary writers. "We were given to write about how we spent our summer holidays, but I wrote about how [my teacher] spent her summer holidays instead. It seemed more fascinating."

A Study in Scarlet By Arthur Conan Doyle, written in three weeks in 1886

Noted as the first outing of Sherlock Holmes rather than as a great detective story or literary masterpiece. "It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes ... Round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man," Conan Doyle wrote in a letter to his former teacher, Joseph Bell.

The Tortoise and the Hare By Elizabeth Jenkins, written in three weeks in 1954

Jenkins, who died in September aged 104, wrote her masterpiece in the "white heat of betrayal" following an entanglement with a married man who refused to leave his wife. "I have never looked at it since; it marked an era to which I had no desire to return," she said in 2005.

On the Road By Jack Kerouac, written in three weeks in 1951

Kerouac wrote one of the few books to cause a cultural shift on a single scroll of paper in one sitting. He had, however, kept copious notes during the seven years he spent crossing America. "I write narrative novels and if I want to change my narrative thought I want to keep going."

King Solomon's Mines H Rider Haggard, written in six weeks in 1885

The story of treasure guarded by a lost civilisation in Africa became an instant best-seller and founded the lost-world genre. It began life after a bet that Haggard could write a better tale than Stevenson's Treasure Island. "The thing must have a heart; mere adventures are not enough. I can turn them out by the peck."

The Confidential Agent By Graham Greene, written in six weeks in 1938

Greene was "struggling" through The Power and the Glory when he realised he'd quite like to make some money, so he began writing The Confidential Agent in the mornings. "I fell back for the first and last time in my life on Benzedrine. For six weeks I started each day with a tablet, and renewed the dose at midday."

Devil May Care By Sebastian Faulks, written in six weeks in 2008

James Bond creator Ian Fleming wrote his 007 thrillers in six weeks, and Faulks decided he should follow suit when asked by Fleming's estate to write a new story. "After almost five years researching Victorian psychiatry for Human Traces, there was something attractive about a jeu d'esprit which I could write in six weeks."

The Gambler By Fyodor Dostoyevsky, written in 26 days in 1866

The Russian author was heavily in debt and was addicted to gambling while he was working on the tour de force that was Crime and Punishment. So he had to knock out this novella at the same time, dictating to a young stenographer called Anna Snitkina. Shortly afterwards he married her. "I realised that it was his own life he was telling me about," Snitkina said.

Andrew Johnson

Keepers of the flame: The literary widow's lot

FROM THE INDEPENDENT
Natasha Spender, who died last week, was married to a great poet. After Sir Stephen's death, she became gatekeeper to his memory and his work – a burden many literary widows have shared

By Peter Stanford

Natasha Spender liked to recall that when she first met her husband, the poet Sir Stephen Spender, in 1940 she had little interest in writers.


She was busy making a name for herself as a concert pianist when an invitation turned up to a party given by Horizon, the literary magazine. "I was so not into literature," she remembered with a throaty chuckle, "that when they asked me to Horizon, I thought it was a pub."

The remark is typical of her self-effacement, especially during the last 15 years of her life – from Spender's death in 1995 until her own peaceful end, at the age of 91, last Thursday. During those years, she became, like many literary widows, the keeper of the flickering flame of his enduring reputation, first forged as one of the celebrated "poets of the Thirties". But it is also ironic – as she knew when she told the story – because during that decade-and-a-half she became, in her own words, "a walking memory-bank" for all those interested in the literary figures of the second half of the 20th century.

The procession of academics and biographers and historians who sat and listened in the draughty basement kitchen of her marital home in London's St John's Wood was never-ending. Each was treated – if their subject had known Natasha and her husband at some stage during their 50-plus very social years of marriage – to her humour, her crystal-clear power of recall, and her candour. Plus tea and cake. If there were papers in the archive that she was carefully assembling in her study, she would share them.

Her good grace and open-door policy to enquirers was all the more remarkable because, as she herself often acknowledged, there are few more thankless roles than that of literary widow. Their private grief, and that of their children (the Spenders had two), at the loss of their writer husbands was usually rudely intruded upon by those who wished to rake over the coals of episodes in their marriage (infidelities, political posturings, straightforward misjudgements) that most widows would prefer to forget. In Natasha Spender's case, there were always questions about her husband's sexual orientation, and about his being a CIA dupe when the US intelligence agency covertly funded the literary magazine Encounter, with which he was closely associated in the Sixties.

The first challenge for a literary widow was to develop a way of coping with such questioning. Natasha had it off to a T. She once replied good-humouredly, to an interviewer who pressed her on the exact nature of her husband's late-flowering passion for American zoologist Bryan Obst: "It's less clear, isn't it?" But the main thing that a literary widow has to master is management of her husband's literary estate. Since she has right of veto over any use of his writing, her powers range from saying yea or nay to all requests to quote from them to the appointment (or not) of an official biographer.

This is all notoriously tricky territory. TS Eliot's widow, Valerie, for instance, has had to put up with carping from biographers and critics over the years for her decisions since her Nobel Prize-winning husband's death in 1965. For instance, she is reported to have tried to block Peter Ackroyd's 1984 life of Eliot by refusing him permission to quote from the poems, but then allowed Andrew Lloyd Webber to use them in his West End musical Cats. Illogical, cried her detractors, who usually then go on to question her qualifications for making such choices because she had been Eliot's secretary for eight years before their marriage in 1957.

Some even queried whether their marriage had genuinely been a love match – in spite of much evidence to support that view – and theorised that Eliot had simply been in search of a young woman who would live on and fight his corner in the battle of literary reputations for decades afterwards.

Similar motives, it is claimed, lay behind George Orwell's marriage, in October 1949, three months before his death, to Sonia Brownell, better known as another formidable literary widow, Sonia Orwell. Yet to her many defenders, Mrs Eliot is a much-maligned figure. Her knowledge of "the work" is profound, they say. She had admired his writing as a schoolgirl, and remains his greatest fan. And as she herself has pointed out, her husband had insisted that there should be no biography of him – or at least no authorised biography. "Ackroyd knew that when he set out," she once explained, "So to start bleating at the end about not being able to quote from the poetry, when everyone else has to obey the same rules, is pretty feeble."

So maligned have literary widows been, though, that they tend to stick together. Valerie Eliot and Natasha Spender, for instance, were last seen in public together earlier this year at the memorial service for another of their number, the actress Jill Balcon, widow of Poet LaureateCecil Day-Lewis. The three had other things that united them; all were second, younger wives.

Balcon used to reflect that she was unusual in that her husband had left her clear instructions on how to play the literary widow, in a poem entitled "The Widow Interviewed", published in 1965. Or, to be more precise, how not to. It had been inspired by two literary widows of an earlier generation, Willa Muir, wife of the Scottish poet Edwin Muir, and Helen Thomas, whose poet-husband Edward died at the age of 39 in the trenches of the First World War.

"The Poet" (well, that's the way her

generation

Talked) "the Poet wrote these for me when

first –"

(she said, touching the yellowed manuscripts

Like a blind girl gentling a young man's hair)

– "When first we were betrothed. I have kept them:

The rest I had to sell."

It was not, Balcon agreed, an attractive portrait, but it gave few clues as to what in fact she should do. In her case, that dilemma was further complicated because some of Day-Lewis's best-known verse had been written for, and about, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann – the woman Balcon displaced in his life and who ever after maintained a none-too-private campaign against her. Should Balcon put his literary reputation above her own feelings and champion those poems about her rival as key to Day-Lewis lasting literary legacy, or should she seek to deflect attention onto the work he produced later, when she was his muse, even though it had prompted less enthusiasm among the critics? It was a circle she never quite squared.

And like other literary widows, she had also to contend with bio-graphers (myself included) who sought to identify other love affairs referred to in her husband's poetry. The struggle to reconcile her completely understandable wish to draw a veil over their private disputes with the need for any biography of Day-Lewis to be candidabout his failings was often written on her face as I questioned her.

Did his memory belong first and foremost to her and their children, the writer Tamasin Day-Lewis and the actor Daniel Day-Lewis, or was it something which, in pursuit of literary immortality, she was going to have to share openly with a public audience? Bravely, she chose the latter course, but at great personal cost.

There were 21 years between Balcon and Day-Lewis, 37 years between Tom and Valerie Eliot, but Janis Bellow tops them both. She was 44 years younger than the American novelist Saul Bellow when she became his fifth wife.

Still only 50, she is perhaps a role model for a new generation of literary widows. She said in a recent interview about the publication next month of Bellow's collected letters that she had left the editor to it and avoided being proprietorial. (Other widows, Valerie Eliot included, have chosen to edit the letters themselves.) Janis Bellow claimed, moreover, to feel "overwhelmingly joyful" about the new book – even though she did not make her appearance until page 411 of its 550 pages.

Talk of literary widows suggests that this is an exclusively female club. And though the latter part of the 20th century boasted many more women in the role than men – to the list should be added Kathleen Tynan, widow of Kenneth, Caitlin Thomas (Dylan Thomas), and Beatrice Behan (Brendan Behan) – there is one notable (and for some notorious) interloper: Ted Hughes. He was repeatedly attacked by admirers of his wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, for the way he handled his role as literary executor. They felt he was too anxious to control the material left in his charge, both to protect the couple's secrets and to present as positive a picture as possible about his own role in Plath's life, and death. The couple had separated five months before her final depression and suicide in 1963.

Though Jill Balcon and Natasha Spender both had considerable careers of their own, Hughes is exceptional in this context, having been a literary figure to rival Plath, and Poet Laureate until his death in 1998. To be open with biographers and academics about Plath's life would therefore have been to lift the lid on his own, and, like many living writers, he did not want to do that. He would not let his own biography become an offshoot of his wife's. That was a sacrifice that Natasha Spender, by contrast, always seemed more than happy to make.

Peter Stanford's biography of C Day-Lewis is published by Continuum

Harold Bloom discute sua seleção de cem poemas

POR ESTADAO
Em entrevista, Bloom fala sobre sua seleção de cem derradeiros poemas de autores de língua inglesa

Lúcia Guimarães - O Estado de S. Paulo

Ele nunca decepciona seus interlocutores. Passional e provocador. Professoral, sempre. Num momento pede socorro à mulher porque derrubou o aparelho de audição ("Está tudo desmoronando por aqui!") e em seguida elogia, sedutor, o que chama de voz maviosa da repórter ao telefone.

Harold Bloom acaba de completar 80 anos. No final de 2009, sua saúde o afastou por meses do convívio com os estudantes da Universidade de Yale, onde ocupa a mais famosa cadeira de crítica literária do país. Se você faz 80 anos e passou a vida lendo o melhor da poesia, então, "começa a saber que, diante do morrer e da morte, a imaginação é, ao mesmo tempo, nada e tudo".

Assim Bloom explica seu desejo de reunir cem poemas em Till I End My Song - A Gathering of Last Poems (Até Eu Terminar Minha Canção - Uma Reunião de Últimos Poemas). O título cita o verso repetido em Prothalamion, de Edmund Spenser, o poeta elisabetano, que abre a coletânea. O fim que une os poemas não é necessariamente o fim temporal.

O livro cobre 450 anos de poesia, de William Shakespeare a James Merrill, de Robert Frost a Robert Lowell e termina com o poema The Veiled Suite, de Agha Shahid Ali, indiano de Kashmir morto em Massachusetts, os 52 anos, em 2001 e incluído numa coleção póstuma publicada em 2009. Bloom considera os versos de The Veiled Suite entre os mais obsessivos que trataram da morte.

Apesar do tema e de sua avançada idade, Bloom está longe de se deixar abater pelo assunto. Comemora suas cinco décadas na academia - "Dei aula para cerca de 25 mil estudantes, o bastante para lotar uma cidade" - e conclui: "O propósito de ensinar é estender a bênção da vida prolongada."

Quando telefono para sua casa em New Haven, Connecticut, o professor contorna a primeira pergunta e já sai palestrando sobre a nova obra. "Sim, há um tom um pouco sombrio na obra que inclui poemas de amigos queridos, como Robert Penn Warren, morto em 1989, e Anthony Hecht, morto em 2004. Ainda sofro o luto por eles." E segue, entusiasmado com Till I End My Song. Acompanhe.

Qual é a distinção que o senhor faz entre a finitude da morte e a finitude que encontrou em certos poemas?

Veja que não é uma coleção de poemas sobre a morte e sim uma coleção de poemas que lidam com a incerteza. Todos nós queremos e não queremos saber quanto tempo temos de vida, e esta é a incerteza. Reuni três tipos de "últimos" poemas. Os poemas cronologicamente finais são minoria. Há poemas que marcam o fim de uma carreira. E queria me concentrar também no que considero o auge - o final - de um processo de imaginação.

Por que o senhor diz no livro que estava interessado em conhecimento e não na piedade, no pathos ligado à morte?

Sim, por que dizemos isso? Queria deixar claro que o fim é uma parte importante do conhecimento. Montaigne, o ensaísta maior, nos dá o melhor conselho: "Não percam tempo aprendendo a morrer. Quando chegar a hora, vamos saber morrer direito."

O senhor destaca que os poemas se colocam contra a morte e não contra o morrer.

Sim, a morte é uma ideia. O ato de morrer é diferente. É algo que todos vamos experimentar. Mas a ideia é complicada. Como a ideia da morte não é um modo de existência, a poesia pode nos esclarecer sobre ela.


Por que o senhor considera importante desfazer a mitologia da morte?

Falo da minha própria metafísica. Três poetas que sempre celebrei, Percy Shelley, Walt Whitman e Wallace Stevens, são românticos lucrecianos. Eles seguem a metafísica epicurista, em que a morte é exposta como um filamento da imaginação, um bicho-papão que as pessoas impõem sobre si mesmas. O W.H. Auden e eu discutíamos sobre isso. Ele nem considerava aqueles três poetas, tinha um temperamento forte.


O senhor concorda que o medo da morte é o oposto do gosto por viver?

Com certeza. Não existe essa coisa chamada morte. Shakespeare é o mestre em tratar disso. Como nas palavras finais de Hamlet, "o resto é silêncio".

Na introdução, o senhor manifesta uma esperança de renascimento na Era de Obama, "depois de anos no mato" ("In the bush", trocadilho com o nome do último presidente.)

Eu nunca quero falar em política. Mas confesso que fui um pouco otimista e me arrependo. Eu não imaginava o que ia acontecer. Por favor, pode me citar: os EUA ficaram completamente malucos. Talvez possamos nos recuperar depois que Obama for reeleito. No dia 2, vamos ter eleições e ninguém com acesso à mídia tem a honestidade ou a decência de dizer a verdade. O Tea Party é o nosso movimento fascista. Nem adianta falar em "neo", como neonazistas. É fascismo mesmo. Vários candidatos deles vão se eleger e os democratas vão perder a maioria entre os deputados. Haverá uma total paralisia legislativa. Eles vão instalar comitês de investigação. Se puderem, vão tentar o impeachment de Obama. Os próximos dois anos serão assim. Depois, tenho confiança que aquela mulher magnífica vai ser candidata a presidente e perder. Sarah Palin (Bloom parece estar na sala de aula), uma peça bem acabada de fascismo populista.

Till I End My Song - A Gathering Of Last Poems

Organizador: Harold Bloom

Editora: Harper Collins

(Importado; 379 págs., R$ 56,73)

CHI PUO' VADA

Le héros récurrent, une longue histoire

D'APRES LE MONDE DES LIVRES


Une rature : c'est par ce geste que prend forme l'idée géniale du retour des personnages sous la plume d'Honoré de Balzac, lorsqu'il remplace, dans le manuscrit du Père Goriot, en septembre 1834, le nom d'Eugène de Massiac par celui d'Eugène de Rastignac, grande figure de la future Comédie humaine, que le lecteur avait déjà "rencontré" trois ans auparavant dans La Peau de chagrin. Le romancier était sans doute conscient de la portée de son invention : après avoir conçu l'idée de relier tous ses personnages pour en former une société complète, il aurait traversé Paris, si l'on en croit le témoignage de sa soeur, pour annoncer à celle-ci : "Saluez-moi, car je suis tout bonnement en train de devenir un génie !"

A vrai dire, l'idée du retour des personnages d'un livre à l'autre du même auteur n'était pas tout à fait nouvelle. Plusieurs écrivains, et non des moindres, l'avaient déjà pratiquée, et cela dès le Moyen Age : Chrétien de Troyes, Rabelais, Madame de Lafayette... ou, à l'époque d'Honoré de Balzac, Fenimore Cooper dans le cycle des Histoires de Bas-de-Cuir (1823-1841), pour ne parler que des textes narratifs.

Balzac donne cependant au procédé une ampleur jusqu'alors inconnue, d'ailleurs presque inconcevable quand on se rapporte aux chiffres : près de 600 personnages reparaissent, sur les 2 500 êtres de papier qui peuplent l'univers de La Comédie humaine. Surtout, Balzac élève l'idée du retour des personnages au rang de système, ressort essentiel pour créer une oeuvre-monde visant à concurrencer l'état civil, selon la devise du romancier, et à peindre la fresque de l'état social contemporain.

Effet de familiarité

Félicien Marceau se demande même comment Balzac aurait pu faire pour éviter le retour des personnages : "Quand, dans Illusions perdues, allant à l'Opéra, Rubempré y rencontre Marsay et Rastignac que nous, lecteurs, nous avons déjà rencontrés dans d'autres romans, qu'y a-t-il d'étonnant à cela ? Tous les trois, ils vivent à Paris, dans le même temps." C'est dire à quel point on risque de prendre la fiction pour la réalité, ou vice versa... Expérience capitale : pour le lecteur, retrouver les personnages déjà connus crée un effet de familiarité, voire l'illusion d'entrer dans un univers pensé comme un réseau relationnel.

C'est dans ce sens que l'expression de "personnage reparaissant", employée pour le roman balzacien, n'est pas entièrement synonyme du "héros récurrent" que l'on connaît dans les oeuvres sérielles : cette dernière renvoie en effet au retour d'un personnage central, le plus souvent identifié par son rôle, par exemple, le détective dans le roman policier. Dans ce cas aussi, il faut remonter au XIXe siècle pour assister à la naissance du concept, incarné par la figure d'Auguste Dupin qu'Edgar Allan Poe met en scène dans trois nouvelles (la première étant Double assassinat dans la rue Morgue, de 1841) qui fondent le genre policier. Or les paradigmes de Balzac et de Poe - auxquels il faudrait ajouter celui d'Emile Zola, fondé sur les lois de l'hérédité, et systématisé par l'arbre généalogique des Rougon-Macquart - relèvent d'une vision qui assigne à la littérature le rôle d'interroger la relation de l'individu au monde, au sein d'un système de valeurs que l'oeuvre instaure par la dialectique entre le particulier et le général (Balzac), ou par la démarche analytique déductive (Poe).

Au coeur de cette littérature qui s'érige au rang de forme de connaissance du réel se trouve le personnage récurrent. Non seulement il est doté du pouvoir de ne pas mourir symboliquement à la dernière page du livre, mais il acquiert surtout une profondeur psychologique nouvelle, qui donne chair à son être de papier.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrea Del Lungo est maître de conférences de littérature française à l'université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail (Haute-Garonne), et membre de l'Institut universitaire de France.

Kertész : «Quand je n'écris pas, je suis un homme inutile»

D'APRES LE FIGARO


Par Bruno Corty


L'écrivain hongrois, Prix Nobel 2002, publie son Journal des années 1960-1990.

Journal de galère est un passionnant document pour qui voudrait appréhender l'œuvre de Kertész et tout savoir sur son métier d'écrivain, ses lectures et sa vision de survivant de la Shoah pris dans l'engrenage du communisme.

LE FIGARO LITTÉRAIRE. - Moins de 300 pages en trente ans, ça semble peu pour un Journal?

Imre KERTÉSZ. - J'ai pratiqué beaucoup de coupes, car le manuscrit original était trois fois plus épais, mais il comportait des longueurs. J'ai réduit, mais tout en veillant à ne pas altérer le sens. Je n'ai jamais cessé d'écrire ce Journal. Pour réfléchir, j'ai besoin d'écrire, tout le temps, partout. Je suis un graphomane. Je peux dire avec Cicéron: «Pas un jour sans une ligne.» Quand je n'écris pas, je suis un homme inutile.

Dès la première page, évoquant votre premier livre en gestation, vous écrivez: «Tout est bon à jeter» Ça commençait mal…

Au début des années soixante, le seul fait de penser que je puisse un jour devenir écrivain avait quelque chose d'invraisemblable. Je n'avais pas les moyens matériels; je vivais dans une toute petite chambre en sous-location et je n'avais personne à qui dire que je voulais écrire un roman. La littérature de l'époque était victime de la censure stalinienne. Un jour, j'ai eu entre les mains La Mort à Venise, de Thomas Mann, et un petit livre jaune, L'Étranger, de Camus, dont je ne connaissais pas même le nom. Ce livre, j'en suis devenu esclave ! Et puis, j'ai découvert à la fin des années soixante Kafka, dont je relis ces jours-ci Le Procès. C'est l'écrivain du moindre détail; un tel géant ! Tout comme Flaubert: L'Éducation sentimentale est en tête de mes romans préférés. J'enrageais d'avoir attendu si longtemps pour découvrir ces merveilles. Je me disais: c'est ça, la littérature. Quelque chose que je pensais ne jamais pouvoir atteindre. Je vivais dans un sentiment d'infériorité perpétuelle.

D'où l'idée du suicide qui revient sans cesse. Faites-vous toujours vôtre la phrase de Cioran: «Un livre est un suicide différé»?

Chaque livre publié est un nouveau sursis. On ne peut mourir tant qu'on a des livres à publier. Il ne faut pas vivre trop longtemps non plus, car toute l'histoire finit par le déclin, la dépression. Quand ça arrive, il vaut mieux se jeter par la fenêtre… ou écrire. Vous ne pouvez pas imaginer le quotidien d'une dictature, sa grisaille atroce, son ennui terrible. Quand j'ai eu fini mon premier roman, Être sans destin, en 1975, je l'ai porté en main propre à l'un des deux éditeurs de Budapest, sans dire que j'en étais l'auteur. J'ai essuyé un refus aussi impoli qu'impitoyable qui se résumait à quelques formules: «langage incompréhensible, fautes de style, roman nauséabond et antisémite». C'en était trop pour moi. Pas l'offense, car j'étais sûr de moi et du livre. Mais l'amertume, l'absence d'avenir, d'issue. Que faire de ce texte?

En 1975, après quinze années d'acharnement, vous sortez des ténèbres…

Quand Être sans destin a paru, l'accueil a été grandiose, mais j'entendais les gens dire: «Quel dommage d'avoir écrit cette histoire si tard, ces événements appartiennent au passé désormais.» Et moi, je pensais et je pense encore aujourd'hui qu'Auschwitz est le plus grand traumatisme de l'histoire européenne et de la chrétienté. Si des gens l'ont oublié et si l'on n'y pense plus, ça reviendra, car rien n'est effacé. En pleine crise économique et financière mondiale, il y a encore des gens qui lisent Mein Kampf. Ne sachant pas comment sortir de la crise, ils cherchent des issues, et beaucoup retombent sur les slogans nazis. Le totalitarisme, c'est la solution de facilité pour certains ; cela dispense de réfléchir. L'individu n'est plus responsable de rien ; tout est entre les mains de partis politiques ou de meneurs. L'individu isolé n'oserait pas assassiner, mais, en nombre, on le fait par obéissance. Comme l'Europe n'a pas encore fait sa catharsis d'Auschwitz, tout peut recommencer demain.

Dans la suite de ce journal, Un autre (1991-1995) vous finissiez par ces mots: «Je me tiens à la limite de la vie et de la mort.» Et aujourd'hui?

J'ai terminé la moitié d'un roman qui me tient très à cœur. J'ai toujours l'envie. Vous savez, le plus troublant à mes yeux, c'est que la vie avait signé un contrat avec un garçon de quatorze ans. Elle lui avait dit: «Tu seras déporté à Ausch­witz, tu survivras et tu écriras.» C'était quelque chose d'absurde et de mauvais, mais ce quelque chose avait malgré tout un bon côté.

Journal de galère de Imre Kertész, traduit du hongrois par Natalia Zaremba-Huzsvai et Charles Zaremba, Actes Sud, 276 p, 21 €.

Hunting for the Dawn of Writing, When Prehistory Became History

FROM NYTIMES

By GERALDINE FABRIKANT

CHICAGO — One of the stars of the Oriental Institute’s new show, “Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond,” is a clay tablet that dates from around 3200 B.C. On it, written in cuneiform, the script language of ancient Sumer in Mesopotamia, is a list of professions, described in small, repetitive impressed characters that look more like wedge-shape footprints than what we recognize as writing.

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Olaf Tessmer, Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin
A Sumerian clay tablet from around 3200 B.C. is inscribed in wedgelike cuneiform with a list of professions.
In fact “it is among the earliest examples of writings that we know of so far,” according to the institute’s director, Gil J. Stein, and it provides insights into the life of one of the world’s oldest cultures.

The new exhibition by the institute, part of the University of Chicago, is the first in the United States in 26 years to focus on comparative writing. It relies on advances in archaeologists’ knowledge to shed new light on the invention of scripted language and its subsequent evolution.

The show demonstrates that, contrary to the long-held belief that writing spread from east to west, Sumerian cuneiform and its derivatives and Egyptian hieroglyphics evolved separately from each another. And those writing systems were but two of the ancient forms of writing that evolved independently. Over a span of two millenniums, two other powerful civilizations — the Chinese and Mayans — also identified and met a need for written communication. Writing came to China as early as around 1200 B.C. and to the Maya in Mesoamerica long before A.D. 500.

“It was the first true information revolution,” Mr. Stein said. “By putting spoken language into material form, people could for the first time store and transmit it across time and space.”

The Oriental Institute spent two years assembling the show, much of which comes from its own collections. However, it did borrow important Sumerian pieces from other institutions, including the clay tablet from the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, which has never before been seen in the United States.

The Oriental Institute, which opened in 1919, was heavily financed by John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had been greatly influenced by James Henry Breasted, a passionate archaeologist. Abby Rockefeller had read his best seller “Ancient Times” to her children.

Today the institute, which still has seven digs going on, boasts objects from excavations in Egypt, Israel, Syria, Turkey and Iraq. Many artifacts were acquired from joint digs with host countries with which the findings were shared. Among the institute’s prized holdings is a 40-ton winged bull from Khorsabad, the capital of Assyria, from around 715 B.C.

The exhibition, which runs through March 6, focuses heavily on the Sumerian civilization that flourished between 3500 B.C. and 1800 B.C. in what is now southern Iraq. Until the 1950s experts had believed that the Sumerians influenced the Egyptians, spreading the use of writing westward. But in the 1950s Günther Dryer, a German archaeologist, found writing on bone and ivory tags in an elaborate, probably royal burial site at Abydos in southern Egypt. The depth at which they were buried and subsequent carbon tests proved the pieces to be as old as Sumerian works. Because the marks were different in style, scholars believe that the Egyptians developed their own writing system independently.

Experts are still struggling to understand just how writing evolved, but one theory, laid out at the Oriental Institute’s exhibition, places the final prewriting stage at 3400 B.C., when the Sumerians first began using small clay envelopes like the ones in the show. Some of the envelopes had tiny clay balls sealed within. Archaeologists theorize that they were sent along with goods being delivered; recipients would open them and ensure that the number of receivables matched the number of clay tokens. The tokens, examples of which are also are in the show , transmitted information, a key function of writing.

Writing as a carrier of narrative did not evolve for another 700 years, as shown in the inscribed versions of the Sumerian epic tale of Gilgamesh, also on display in the institute’s general collection.

Although Egyptian hieroglyphics are more broadly familiar than cuneiform, Sumerian writing was done on clay, which is more durable than papyrus. As a result, Sumer is among the best documented of ancient societies.

An important part of the Oriental Institute exhibition’s allure is that it describes some of the unknowns that still intrigue archaeologists, including the birth of the alphabet. The show includes a plaque dated from 1800 B.C. that contains signs that seem to be inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphics but that are actually the earliest letters of an alphabetic script representing Semitic languages. It was found near an ancient turquoise mining site in the Sinai Peninsula, in what was part of ancient Egypt, but the men who worked there spoke the Semitic language of the Canaanites.

Because this is one of the first examples of the use of the alphabetic letters, it suggests that the alphabet was inspired by hieroglyphics. Still, no one really knows who the miners were, if they were literate or how they adapted hieroglyphics to write a western Semitic language. But in later discoveries those same forms make up parts of words.

An alphabetic language has a limited number of signs and is easier to both use and to teach than a representational system like hieroglyphics. An alphabet allows a more rapid spread of literacy and communications. Today almost all languages except Chinese and Japanese are alphabetic. The lack of an alphabet makes Chinese particularly difficult for foreigners. But if Chinese bears little similarity to languages elsewhere in the world, its origins — like the origins of hieroglyphics — have to do with the gods. Bones from ancient Chinese tombs, also on display at the Oriental, were used to help divine the future. The inscriptions on them are the earliest form of Chinese writing, and they make statements about events, such as a battle or the birth of a royal child, and also, in effect, ask how they will come out. Hot brands were put into hollows carved into turtle shells, and the configurations of the resulting cracks were interpreted as answers to important questions.

Less is known about the earliest phases and origin of Mayan writing. Much of the work under way concentrates on artifacts from the Mayans’ later period, around A.D. 600. The exhibition includes a Mayan stone monument showing the face of a dead Mayan lord. It carries his name and the date of the dedication of the stone.

To Christopher E. Woods, associate professor of Sumerology at the University of Chicago and the curator of the show, it was important to include examples from all four cultures because the goal of the exhibition was “to present and describe the four times in history when writing was invented from scratch.”