Writing with a Masked Pen

We often finish a book with an impression of the person who wrote it. After spending hours with their words, we begin to imagine how they might speak across a table, whether they would be good company, perhaps what they would find funny. Do authors talk in the same way they write? I wonder how much of that person we have supplied ourselves.

Or do some authors find writing easier than conversation and socialising? A quiet person may write with considerable boldness, having time to consider words they would struggle to find in company. The page gives them a chance to revise a sentence before anyone else sees it. That need not amount to putting on an act. If we met them briefly, we might never hear the thoughts they can express quite readily in writing.

Perhaps there are three types of authors: the hermit, the showperson and normal people. I would be reluctant to decide who qualifies for the last group, particularly if I had to include myself. Their books may never reveal any of these traits, leaving readers with a quite different impression of the person behind them.

Are authors normal people, though, and is there such a thing as a normal person? If normal means being like most people, we first have to decide which people count and which parts of their lives we are comparing. Somebody who seems entirely ordinary at work may spend their evenings pursuing an interest their colleagues would find baffling. Much depends on what they have allowed us to see. I cannot see why writing should put someone in a separate category of person. Spending hours over a paragraph may look peculiar to somebody who would prefer to spend those hours repairing a motorbike, though either might struggle to understand the other’s idea of an enjoyable afternoon. We seem quite willing to call a person normal once their peculiarities resemble our own.

Does a writing style reveal the author’s personality, or does it give them somewhere to hide? There is something of the actor in a writer who can produce a voice that readers find convincing, then leave it behind when the work is finished. The difficulty comes when we assume that the voice continues through the rest of their life. We accept quite readily that an actor can play someone whose temperament bears little resemblance to their own, and would hardly expect an actor who plays a villain to behave like one when the filming ends. Writing allows a similar freedom, although the performance is less visible. We see the words and may forget how much work went into making them sound natural.

A clown can write a serious book. The familiar image of the tragic clown complicates this, because it encourages us to imagine unhappiness behind the painted smile. That is another assumption. The person wearing the costume could be perfectly content, with an interest in something that calls for serious writing. Neither the costume nor the book would give us the whole person.

I have watched interviews with comedians who seemed to have very little of the wit or humour I associated with their performances. Away from a script, some were surprisingly serious.

Perhaps I had expected them to keep entertaining me simply because they were comedians. Yet being able to construct something funny does not oblige someone to provide amusement whenever they speak. A joke that works on the page may have taken considerable thought and revision.

P. G. Wodehouse offers an interesting example. Gerald Clarke’s introduction to their Paris Review interview describes his quiet, largely secluded later life on Long Island and the attention from interviewers that he found tiring. I would hesitate to expect the creator of Bertie Wooster to provide Bertie’s performance over lunch. Neil Gaiman described anger at unfairness beneath Terry Pratchett’s genial authorial voice, complicating any assumption that a humorist must be permanently jolly.

Franz Kafka gives us a glimpse in the other direction. His name can bring to mind the anxiety and confinement of his fiction, but the Bodleian Libraries’ exhibition Kafka: Making of an Icon drew attention to a postcard in which he joked to his brother-in-law about his exceptional skiing skills, despite being severely ill at the time. That small exchange interests me because it belongs to ordinary family life, somewhere we may forget to look when imagining the author of such unsettling stories.

These examples hardly establish that the writers were entirely unlike their books. They do suggest that the person we construct from a particular kind of writing can be incomplete. Someone who writes humour has other moods, while an author whose work unsettles us may also enjoy being ridiculous. We make people surprisingly narrow when we expect them to resemble the shelf on which their books belong.

Once mental health enters the discussion, it opens a can of worms. Does writing offer someone a temporary escape from thoughts they find difficult to live with? Could inventing another life give them some distance from their own, or might writing bring them closer to what troubles them? Those are questions I would want to leave open. We cannot settle them by deciding that every cheerful writer must be concealing sadness, or that dark writing tells us the author is unwell.

The About the Author section seems to offer a direct route, although that too has been written for an audience. Its facts may be accurate, but someone has chosen which ones to include and how to arrange them. A career, a place of residence and a few interests make a useful introduction. There is a great deal of living that will never fit into those paragraphs.

Nonfiction may seem to allow less concealment, especially when written in the first person. Someone writing about regret or unfairness may omit the humour they enjoy elsewhere.

I am full of humour, although I do not relay much of it in my books. Readers meet me while I am considering questions that occupy a serious part of my attention, and they have little opportunity to discover what I am like outside that writing. There is something of me in the subjects I choose and how I approach them, but anyone expecting to know my personality from those pages would have quite a bit missing.

Hiding parts of your personality behind the contents of a book suits many authors. Writing with a masked pen seems a fitting term for it.

I can see the attraction of sharing work without having to make the rest of your life available for inspection. Other arts allow that freedom too. A painting can express a mood its creator does not carry around all day, and a piece of music need not describe the temperament of the person who composed it. For me, that is one of the beauties of art. A writer can care deeply about a book and still keep much of themselves private. Readers may understand what I am trying to say while having very little idea of what I would be like across the table.

A book can reveal something of its author without showing us the whole person.