Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [47]
Life was unencumbered with the problems, values, and intricacies of modern civilization. There was some electricity, always unreliable, of the home generator variety. One school, one doctor. Otherwise there were no telephones, waterworks, or sewers.
Directly below Villa Murphy, St. Jean’s beach was split in half by an enormous boulder of lava that ran out to the sea. On this outcropping, built on several levels, was the single hotel, the Eden Rock, consisting of five rooms. I befriended the owner, a flier named Remy de Haenen who had pioneered the airstrip. His wife, like Denise Dumont and most of the women, was a superb chef, making little miracles of meals with the lean pickings from the fields.
Otherwise there was a lot of beach to meditate on, a lot of sunsets to watch, a lot of conversation at the Select Bar. I don’t know if anyone ever called me by my name. I was simply “the writer.”
How utterly strange the way things turned out. I came girded for battle, to scale or bash down walls of fear I had erected all my life. When I opened my eyes on St. Barths, the walls simply vanished. Instead, St. Barths opened its arms wide and caressed me and told me, “Take off your pack and stand at ease, Marine, and be afraid no more.”
I learned to shut out of my mind anything that distracted me from my work. I could go for days without remembering Penny and Roxy. This was my fear, remembering. It was a revelation that I had the capacity to forget.
This was what I came to find. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was, one day, going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world, the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity, stamina ... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That’s the bloody price. I don’t know, maybe it’s some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it’s part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love, you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three- or four-year period.
I learned this barefoot on a screened-in veranda on Villa Murphy. Nothing on this planet existed but the words I was putting on paper. I didn’t even exist. I had no needs but food and sleep. I had no reason to live, except to create by writing.
I ran the beach at sunup, thinking, talking to myself as I ran.
“Hey, writer, how’s it go?”
I’d wave and keep running.
I would talk out my next day’s work to myself watching the sunset. And when the sun went down I drank hard. Once in a while the words wouldn’t come. I’d take a day off and Pierre and I went fishing and he taught me to sail.
Sometimes loneliness would strike like the suddenness of the lightning storms. I would not permit the pain to overtake me.
Things were starting to happen now that I had longed might happen when I was a little boy. When the electricity failed, I wrote by candlelight. When a hurricane wrecked part of the villa, I wrote from a room at the Eden Rock. I had reached a level of obsession, consummation—not of this planet. I wrote when I had fever. I wrote with hangovers. I wrote when some damned fine-looking women came prowling around.
I had envisioned St. Barths as a hell island where I had to serve a sentence. Instead of imprisoning me, it liberated me in so many ways. I had learned that when you have accomplished, without fear, an ability to go far, far, far inside yourself, relive the emotional starvation and lovelessness from parents during childhood, you have come to know a certain awesome splendor. Without it, you cannot reach for eternity as a writer. Paying your dues to attain it becomes so frightening, so gut-wrenching, it guarantees you years of sleeplessness and nightmares. I had to find it or never hope again.
Every so often Tex dropped in in his stupid little Dutch STOL. For a time I expected divorce papers, but they never came. I filled