Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux Page B

young person who wonders what his or her chances are of becoming a writer ought to assess their ability to deal with solitude and, figuratively speaking, an entire working life thrashing around in inspissated darkness. It has been said that writing is a rat race in which you never get to meet the other rats.
    The writer is odd from day one, and in the course of pursuing this maddening profession becomes distinctly odder. There are not many exceptions. Only unfunny non-writers were surprised when Art Buchwald announced a few years ago that he had been treated many times for depression, or that William Styron wrote in
Darkness Visible
of being suicidal. It is a commonplace to say that creative people tend to be irrational, manic-depressive, or hard to get along with. It is not unusual for a successful writer—your favorite, the one you think of as full of sunshine, wisdom, and laughter—to spend great portions of his or her life in a state of fury, or hideously disappointed, or even raving mad.
    The loneliness of the long-distance writer concerns me, because writing a large book is a daunting task requiring time, silence, and space. It is a condition summed up in the image of a two-pound chicken trying to lay a three-pound egg. It can be very irritating when writers are told how they might manage their lives better ("You should get yourself a computer!"). The more imaginative and ambitious the writer, the greater his or her solitude—and, you might say, the greater the likelihood of the person's being eccentric.
    You might deduce from the foregoing that writing is my hopeless passion. Perhaps it is, but it is not occasional, nor is it work in any conventional sense. It has no limits; it is simply my life.
    I feel a need to emphasize the seriousness of the writer's dilemma because of the radical nature of my solution. I am not dealing with the fanaticism of the literary passion, but with the problems it poses—the way it may consume a person or wreak havoc on his health. I take writing for granted as a fact of life, so I am more interested in the opposite of writing, which is a counterlife and a consolation and also a passion.
    I have always lived near water, and for forty-five years, since I learned to row at the age of ten, I have found refuge in the bosom of small boats. Scarcely realizing why, I took my frustration outdoors and gave it an airing. When I was eleven, at scout camp, I learned to paddle a canoe. At my school, team sports were the thing, and strong talented players were chosen over weak inexperienced ones like me. I did not mind being rejected. I knew that the school, like most American schools, hated losing teams. It would have been a humiliation to be regarded as having helped the school lose, nor was any school inclined to teach me the fine points of the game—any game. As a result, I lost interest in all ball playing. Never played, never went to games, still don't.
    The sense of liberation that I felt on the water, alone in a boat, was comparable to the freedom I had felt expressing myself in writing. Navigating on a trip in a small boat is like a reenactment in the open air of being a writer. "The Open Boat," Stephen Crane's short story, is only superficially about seamanship, and there is hardly a boat trip or ship journey in literature that is not also a metaphor for the active life. On lakes and rivers in Africa, in sampans and sailboats for three years in Singapore, throughout eighteen years of boating in Britain—on the Thames, along the coast, on the elongated lochs of Scotland—I felt I had found a way of freeing myself from the intensity of writing and the sense of suffocation of being confined indoors. I never owned an engine or outboard motor: my interest is in non-polluting self-propulsion, not speed—sailing, rowing, paddling.
    The passion became stronger as I grew older, more aware of my health and, especially, more conscious of a growing inwardness. Being outside,