In recent years I have often asked myself what is a man well into the autumn of his life doing writing historical fiction. It certainly isn’t for notoriety or fortune. I have spent the greater part of my life analysing probabilities, first as a cardiologist and more recently as an investor in fledgling companies, and from that experience I understand the probability of any writer gaining either is a mathematical outlier.

The answer to my question is multifaceted, but in many ways writing semi-imaginary stories was a reaction to my all too intense and conventional former lifestyle. Much of my life heretofore had been spent in practicing medicine and trying to meet the demands of that most demanding mistress while trying to allocate what time remained to my remarkable wife and our three sons.

At last freed from the many demands of that lifestyle it was perhaps natural that I would turn to the more reflective pursuit of writing. What seemed to matter however was not the mere generation of words-the world already has far too many words and producers, but some reason to justify such a pursuit to a conscience that had always demanded productive engagement.

There is an old medical adage that says “when all else fails ask the patient.” In searching for some justification for the luxury of writing fiction instead of scientific commentary or some other pragmatic use of words, I turned not to patients but to others who were masters of the craft that I had encountered in my life as a reader.

Of these I will mention but two.

The first is the Frenchman Michael Montaigne who escaped from the demands of civic duties in turbulent Sixteenth Century France to contemplate in the quiet of his library the peculiarities of life from the singular perspective of his own experiences. It is clear even today that this great essayist gained more self insight from his writing than any other of the numerous activities that filled his life. I too have learned from trying to express my thoughts in words, and share the sentiments of his pithy introduction in paying tribute to the exercise as a formidable means to understand oneself.

Yet much of my training makes it difficult for me to accept the value of any activity that has such a concentrated center of worth. What a sorry world it would be if our actions were solely governed by personal aggrandisement. The great William Faulkner provided a far grander vision of the writer’s craft which seems even more relevant in today’s world of seemingly infinite noise and angst than it did in 1950.

I am amazed at how few people have read Faulkner’s address at the acceptance of his Nobel Prize for Literature. Perhaps it should not come as a surprise given the sorry state of pedagogy in many universities. Great books and writers have been subjected to notions that have decimated English departments by a focus on the absurd rather than the magnificence of the art.

For those of you who have not read this short speech a link is included. For those that have, it is worth your time to revisit it.

In that speech Faulkner is in his most lyrical mode when he describes the agony and sweat of creating out of the human spirit that which did not exist before. For those familiar with the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, it is the notion of going from zero to one.

What makes this speech relevant and noble, however is not simply the creative act, but how it is consummated.

Faulkner cites his present time, but in reality he speaks for the entirety of the human experience when he speaks of a universal fear that grips mankind and debases the creative process.

Such a mindset creates an art that is cursed, but he offers an eloquent prescription to cure such a malaise.

“He (the writer) must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.” He must put fear aside and “leave nothing in his workshop but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so he labors under a curse. He writes not of love, but of lust, of defeats in which no one loses anything of value,of victories without hope and,worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”

Extraordinary words that seem to touch on most of what passes for art today. It would be the height of arrogance if I asserted my fiction meets Faulkner’s ideal. Yet my writing is by design old fashioned. and though it may never be viewed as art or even worthwhile, it has been crafted using Billy Faulkner’s eloquent words as an ideal.

In the end such great art matters, for as Faulkner reminds us “the poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be a prop to help him endure and prevail.”

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html