Bag Lady in the City of Fiction

I have a cutting I've kept for more years than I care to remember. It's from an article in which Libby Purves talks about how she became a novelist.

She says that she had always wanted to write a novel but as an English Lit student always felt herself under the shadow of Dickens, the Brontes, Kipling and Greene and didn't dare consider it too seriously. "... even the lighter classics impressed me so much by their sheer craftsmanship that it seemed downright impertinent to try to join them".

"Curiously, I was not even encouraged buy the avalanche of terrible throwaway fiction which has descended on us since printing became so cheap; nor by the realization brought on by a year as a Booker judge that a lot of 'serious' literary fiction is a load of pretentious twaddle."

But she says, the moment of liberation came when she read the great opening essay in Fay Weldon's Letters to Alice. Purves says:

"In it she imagines the City of Fiction. There are towering old palaces there, double-fronted business premises by Thackeray and Balzac, cathedrals by Trollope. But between and beyond them the city stretches out into every kind of alley, shanty town and suburb; there are red-light areas, dark alleys and smug suburban villas; there are disgraceful tin-roofed shacks, slick villas with no foundations, jerry-built lean-to sequels tacked on to great works by impertinent imitators. Some houses fall down and are forgotten within their own generation; others last unexpectedly well, or are rediscovered and cleaned up decades later.

But the great thing is that there are no planning regulations. Anyone can build here. Reading this, I saw that all I had to do was build myself a shack in some deserted plot and see what happenened ..."

She took nine months off from her journalism to build that shack. She now has eleven novels to her name, so I would imagine that she's relocated to a more substantial dwelling!

Now when I first read the article I laughed. At that time I had only just started writing and had my favourite writer Annie Proulx sitting on my shoulder all the time whispering into my ear "You'll never be as good as me." Purves article made me realise that what I wanted more than anything was to be in that City of Fiction. I didn't care where. I didn't even aspire to her shack!

I would, I decided, be perfectly content to be a bag lady in the city, sleeping on a park bench and drinking from the water fountain. I'd spend my days begging for coins and raiding dustbins just to survive.

But now this bag lady has her nose pressed up against the estate agent's window looking for a humble little property to move into. Some honest graft should make it possible.