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Cover illustration from the Picador edition by Frances Broomfield, after Vermeer, 'Head of a Young Girl'

Great writing articulates a universal truth – or at least one so familiar it provides succour to readers: I’m not the only one who’s felt this, not the only one to behave so oddly! Perhaps I’m not so odd after all. Odd comes with the territory for writers, not least for Herman Orff, comic book writer protagonist of Russell Hoban’s 1987 novel The Medusa Frequency (yes, it predates Tracy Chevalier’s better-known book about Vermeer’s painting by 12 years and also features a certain young girl’s head, along with other heads less savoury). Orff is searching for his third novel in an excitation of phosphors and seeks esoteric help out of Blighter’s Rock. Bigger problems are about to overtake this creative dilemma, involving the head of Orpheus and the Kraken. One chapter, though, articulates a problem familiar to many writers: a meaningless search for an unneeded thing that requires you to turn the place upside down in “hot waves of aggravation” in place of working. I too have learned the search for whatever is lost must simply be accepted as part of the work.

The chapter of The Medusa Frequency is titled ‘I Mention This’. It is tangential to the plot of the novel and yet the experiences it describes are so central to the experience of being a writer (and it’s relatively short even for a Hoban chapter), I feel it’s worth reproducing in full without further comment:

Often in my researches I’ve come across old books of a specialist nature in which the author, usually a retired wing commander, expresses in a modest foreword the hope that the little volume may be a vade mecum for the model steam engineer, coarse angler, sado-masochist or whatever. I feel that way about these pages: I hope that this little volume may be a vade mecum not so much for the specialist as for others like me – the general struggler and straggler, the person for whom the whole sweep of consciousness is often too much. Here I am reminded of the words of H. P. Lovecraft:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

Persons for whom the whole sweep of consciousness is often too much are prone, when in a weakened condition, to wear themselves out by looking feverishly for things they cannot find. I’ve described my desk and I might as well say right here that my whole workroom is in pretty much the same state of terminal clutter. Oh yes, I have filing cabinets and folders to put things in but life isn’t that simple and there are always papers that hide themselves in odd places or in wrong folders.

I mention this because no sooner had I typed the title The Seeker from Nexo Vollma on to the screen than I found myself trying to remember where I’d put a loose folder containing a several years’ old article from Newsweek on mud-brick architecture. I had no need of that information at the time but my mind in its irregular and desultory patrolling of its boundaries had happened to note that it didn’t know at that moment where the mud-brick architecture article was. So I went looking for it, at first casually and then seriously and with hot waves of aggravation flooding over me like colour changes on a cuttlefish.

I found the folder after about five hours, it was stuck between two books on Çatal Hüyük. By then it was time for lunch. After lunch I had a kip then read over what I’d typed out during my conversation with the Kraken the day before. Good God, what rubbish it seemed. By then it was drink time which made the burden of my critical faculty easier to bear.

The main thing to keep in mind in the situation I have just described is that nothing is gained by pretending not to care about the mud-brick article; on the contrary, any lapse in concentration may well result in falling off a ladder or stepping into a month-old mug of coffee. The search for the mud-brick article must simply be accepted as that part of the work that precedes reading what one has written yesterday and recognising it as rubbish.

The Medusa Frequency, © Russell Hoban, 1987, published in hardback by Jonathan Cape

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