Deborah Levy on the writer’s inner life

I’m not a lover of writing craft books. In that sense, I align with the novelist Diana Wagman, who admitted late last year in the Los Angeles Review of Books that she had never “read an entire book about writing. ... I’ve opened all these books many times, and tried, many times, to force myself to sit down and read one or another. But I can’t do it.”

As to why this is, I suppose, it’s because craft books are, by their nature, inspirational, and writing, for all the inspiration it requires, is at bottom for me primarily a matter of hard work.

And yet, I find myself utterly captivated by Deborah Levy’s “Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing” (Bloomsbury: 114 pp., $20), a profound and vivid little volume that is less about the craft than the necessity of making literature.

Levy is a playwright and fiction writer; her novel “Swimming Home” was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Born in 1959 in South Africa, she was 5 when her father was jailed as a member of the African National Congress. The family moved to England, where she still lives, in 1968. All of this is backdrop to “Things I Don’t Want to Know,” which posits writing as a process of explication, of excavation, an essential tool box of the inner life.

“She said I shouldn’t be scared of something ‘transcendental’ like reading and writing,” Levy writes of one early teacher, a nun in the South African city of Durban. “She was on to something because there was a part of me that was scared of the power of writing. Transcendental meant ‘beyond,’ and if I could write ‘beyond,’ whatever that meant, I could escape to somewhere better than where I was now.”

That’s a child’s perspective, but it lingers, suggesting a through line between the girl Levy was and the woman she was to become, both of them bound together in pursuit of the written word.

“Things I Don’t Want to Know” approaches writing through precisely such a filter, not as craft but way of life. The British edition comes labeled as “a response to George Orwell’s 1946 essay ‘Why I Write’” -- a subtitle left off the U.S. version but telling nonetheless.

It is in “Why I Write,” after all, that Orwell connects his work to the world, both political and personal, around him; a writer’s material, he tells us, “will be determined by the age he lives in -- at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own -- but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.”

Orwell’s statement could be an epigraph for “Things I Don’t Want to Know,” which operates as a particularly interior sort of memoir, tracing the connection between imagination and circumstance.

There is nothing about the craft of writing here, but rather a portrait of the emotional life, the underpinnings, of the writer. For Levy, this has only partly to do with South Africa; equally significant is her experience as a woman. “A female writer,” she argues, echoing Virginia Woolf, “cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly.”

What Levy’s getting at is her own abiding sense of exile, which is, in the end, what “Things I Don’t Want to Know” is about. This is the story of her family, and of her identity; in a very real sense, it is the reason why she writes.

“Writing a book,” Orwell suggests, “is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

Levy, it would seem, concurs.

“What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with?” she asks herself. “What do we do with the things we do not want to know?”