LAST WEEK I WAS AT THE inaugural Rome Fiction Festival. At last, I presume some of you are thinking, a proper first sentence for a Books column – those who aren’t thinking: is it Jeanette Winterson’s turn again this week? Unfortunately, the Rome Fiction Festival is not a book festival. It’s not even, as I at first presumed, a festival celebrating all types of fiction, books included. It’s a television festival – fiction, in Italian, means specifically fiction on television, dramas, mini-series and comedies (the word for fiction as in novels is romanzo).
I had been asked not as a novelist, or even as an eminent Books columnist, but because one section was devoted to British TV comedy, and they were screening, with Blackadder, Little Britain, Extras etc, the sitcom I made for Sky in 2000, called Baddiel’s Syndrome. To be honest, I don’t know which surprised me more: the arrival of the invitation or the introduction to the British Comedy Strand in the Roma FictionFest programme, which explains that the strand was created to unite “the nation that has produced the greatest TV comedy with the nation that undoubtedly has the finest film comedy tradition”. That second nation, in case you’re wondering, is Italy.
Some naifs might have said, y’know, America, what with Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Bob Hope, Woody Allen, Pixar and so on, but they’d be quite forgetting about Roberto Benigni.
But anyway: books, books, books. Yes.
At the screening of my sitcom, in the audience were the writers Zadie Smith and Nick Laird. They hadn’t, I should emphasise, flown straight out from London on hearing that, at last, there was a chance to see Baddiel’s Syndrome on the big screen. No: they are friends of mine, and live in Rome. They moved there about eight months ago to write – and it’s worked so well that they intend to stay for another year.
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Such a move seems to me impossibly romantic and glamorous, but, at another level, it’s immensely practical, two well-known writers getting away from the stupid pressures of press and parties, and the immediate distractions of friends and families to devote themselves to the job.
But I also think that their decision raises a deeper issue about the relationship between the writer and his/her environment. I recently contributed a small piece to a book called How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors, in which Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Carol Oates, Alan Hollinghurst and others talk about the space they need to get into to squeeze the words out. In my piece, I talked about two pictures on opposing walls of my study, one on my right of Simon Wiesenthal and one to my left of The Simpsons. This means that should I get blocked at any point, and look up from the page, I am being stared at either by the world’s greatest Nazi-hunter, or Bart with a remote control, and I cannot imagine a narrative or psychological issue that might come up while writing that would not be on the spectrum thus created between them.
This was a gag – most of the other authors in How I Write try to describe the deeper processes of creativity, not just what they see when they look up from the computer – but actually, I think that what you see when you look up from the computer – and certainly what you see when you go for a walk in between chapters – does make a big difference. In Rome last week, it astonished me – not for the first time when abroad – how walking in the city late at night, around people not unacquainted with wine, and bars presumably containing a smattering of mafiosi, felt completely safe. Where were the abusive men, the flashing, scrapping, bingeing women, the ever-present sense of threat? My point is not, however, that the absence of these things is attributable to some straightforward contrast between our national character and Italy’s; rather, I think, it is to do with beauty. The streets of Rome are so beautiful that it feels venal to despoil them. Although no doubt many British stag parties have a go.
So if the most bestial instincts can be mollified by beauty, surely a “higher” pursuit, such as writing, can actually be enhanced by it. Of course the problem is that Laird and Smith are modern, urban writers, and too much enhancement – too much beauty – might lead to some sort of terrible literary softening. Luckily, they both come back to London fairly often, which presumably allows them to pick up the requisite healthy dose of brutalisation.