I
have just read Michael King’s biography of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame,
and am struck by how much the story of her life was a gradual retreat from extraneous
noise. In her solitary bedsit in London in the
1950s, she tried to build a soundproof booth in the centre of the room, draped
with towels and blankets, to keep out the noise of her landlady’s baby and a
booming TV set. Back in New Zealand, she moved house any number of times simply
to get away from the noise of motorcycles or barking dogs. On the suburban
sounds of lawnmowers and do-it-yourself carpenters she wrote:
‘They are all an invasion of privacy.
You wouldn’t let a stranger enter your house without knocking, so why let his
noise come in unwanted? Chekhov made the same complaint, and in some meagre way
I can compare myself to him. Silence and solitude are the only ways to get on
with my work. If you want to write you must get on with it. There’s no point in
socialising. When I was younger and leading a sort of hippie existence in London
I used to go to the cafés and see all the young people who said they wanted to
write. But if they had really wanted to write they wouldn’t have been there,
would they? They’d have been in a quiet room getting on with it.’
According
to Michael Foley in his book Embracing
the Ordinary, Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust spent most of their only
meeting with each other moaning about how much they were distracted by other
people’s noise. Proust recommended that Bergson try Quiès ear plugs. ‘I have
found that people are curiously insensitive to the nuisances they inflict on
other people,’ the Orcardian poet George Mackay Brown wrote in his
autobiography. ‘The air is full of noises; sound is thought to be a natural and
acceptable background in the twentieth century. Silence is the thing to be
dreaded.’ Brown was so sensitive to noise that, during a stay at a TB
sanatorium, he grabbed his roommate’s transistor radio in a fit of rage and
smashed it against the wall.
I don’t want to become like these
people, aural versions of the fairy-tale princess distracted by the tiny pea
under dozens of mattresses. I don’t have the talent to justify their
neuroticism. But sometimes I can’t help agreeing with Jules Laforgue who wrote
that ‘the
modern world has embarked on a conspiracy to establish that silence does not
exist’.
Mundane
quote for the day: ‘Have you noticed that the BBC keeps its silliest
programmes, and its jokiest announcers, for those times in the morning and
evening when people are on their way to and from work. It’s very significant.
Why should the BBC choose those times to cover the land in a pall of fatuity?
What is it about work that we have to be hurried to and from it by drivelling
idiots?’ Alan Bennett, Getting On