My Vocation

translated by Dick Davis

My vocation is to write and I have known this for a long time. I hope I won't be misunderstood; I know nothing about the value of the things I am able to write. I know that writing is my vocation. When I sit down to write I feel extraordinarily at ease, and I move in an element which, it seems to me, I know extraordinarily well; I use tools that are familiar to me and they fit snugly in my hands. If I do something else, if I study a foreign language or try to learn history or geography or shorthand or if I try and speak in public or take up knitting or go on a journey, I suffer and constantly ask myself how others do these things: it always seems to me that there must be some correct way of doing these things which others know about and I don't. And it seems to me that I am deaf and blind and I feel a sort of sickness in the pit of my stomach. But when I write I never imagine that there is perhaps a better way of writing which other writers follow. I am not interested in what other writers do. But here I had better make it plain that I can only write stories. If I try to write a critical essay or an article that has been commissioned for a newspaper I don't do it very well. I ...