On Kate Atkinson's "Life After Life," and the value of the ordinary in writing.

Naples, Florida

Recently I was looking at photograph of three women of my family, and myself at about six. The ordinariness of the picture stays in my mind. It says much more than any photo lined up on the beach or at a wedding reception.  

It is a hot day. It is vacation time Naples, Florida. It is a long, long time ago and I don’t remember anything particular about that day.

But I know everything about the feeling of that day, and other days like it. And I know that there weren’t enough of them. This is at least due in part to my mother, Deborah Love’s, difficult marriage, (her third), that left her questioning everything about herself, including her origins in St. Louis.

Three generations of Love women are pictured. By the standards of today, these women did not have very long lives. My grandmother Mary Love, having a rest in the chaise, died at 76, and my mother did not attend her funeral. Her daughter Muffy, face down and sunning, died at 74, and her sister Deborah Anne, my mother, at 44.

I can’t seem to forget the female-ness of the scene. I always felt starved for the just-girls kind of hang out that so many took for granted. I never got enough of it, of really belonging, without having to say or do anything. Or at least, a reasonable appearance of not having to say or do anything. Just a sort of animal wallow.

Muffin’s hair drying in pin curls, sunbathing on her stomach. My mother in the middle, probably trying to get me to do my math homework. Having a go at it, at least.

None of us were aware of time passing. No one was thinking, oh, someday someone will look at this picture and be living a completely different kind of life. Or, we couldn’t have known that Debbie was going to become distant, and only had about six years, and Grandmother had only two. And we wouldn’t have discussed it even if we had known. For the moment, Debbie and Rue were visiting, and Muffy was here, and…

Everyone has a seat or a place to be. That little chair might be Muffin’s or it might be mine. In any case—I am supposed to be there. No one wished that I weren’t. I have a pixie cut, and I am wearing a Mexican dress I wish I still had. My mother is protecting her hairstyle with a fat hair band, her legs crossed, her long arched feet visible, her bathing suit straps tugged down to avoid tan lines. Behind her, legs also crossed, shod in white cloth shoes, my grandmother is watching my mother and me. Around her head, a corona of gray. She didn’t care about tan lines, I am sure.

It is possible to see the ties, and the contentment.  

The flip flops chucked here and there on the hot tiles. The straw bag on its side. The Florida sun beating down. We were probably on the driveway side of that small ranch house to catch the sun. It was an investment property that my grandparents lived in for a few years. A Mandarin couple lived in the basement as domestics, and drifted around unhappily. I later found out that my banker grandfather had written to Chiang Kai-Shek, and he had sent these two refugees. The house had a great, looming Banyan tree and a lawn of strange grass that was thick and springy between my toes. There were no pets. Around the base of the Banyan tree was packed dirt, which led to a big canal that fed into the ocean where the club was, with coquina shells in the fine sand. My mother had hired a nanny for me whom I liked. Her name was Flossie, and she was very religious and apparently, she taught me about God. I would say, the Lawd is my Shepud, I shell not wont,” which made my mother laugh.

That’s about it.

The picture speaks of life without reflection. The participants are not ruminating about each other, at least, not at the moment. No statements are being made. Not having to do or say anything—unreciprocated, not reflected upon or reflective existence. There is only the mood of a certain block of time, with certain people, who were taken entirely for granted—as if they were going to be around forever. Like furniture. Like houses. Like the ocean.

It is a novelists’ job to interpret ordinary days, to turn them around, to group them together and gather themes about them, put them in chapters and make some sense of them, and clap bookends fore and aft. And at the end, the reader will expect the hardest thing to deliver—closure. An explanation and a justification for it all.

It is Kate Atkinson’s particular wizardry that doesn’t deliver any of that and steals the show anyway.

Her weaving technique is mostly set in the uneventful day to day. Her conceit is that a placid and unremarkable present overlays crystal clear interior spaces where people are buffeted around, dragged down, buoyed up, and ultimately destroyed by time and circumstance.

In Life After Life, she does something I don’t think had been done before in fiction. She kills off one of her main characters over and over again, in many different ways, and mostly, they don’t see it coming. The poignant detail of her writing shows that no matter what they wanted, or thought they wanted, it was all right there as they lived it—they were on the tip of time. I find myself wanting to embellish, “on the crest of a wave,” or “perched upon eternity,” or some sort of tripe. It is one of the hardest things to know, or even to understand, how one really has only the lead role in one’s own story until it’s over. Uh-oh, another metaphor. Sorry.

In all of the workshops and conferences I’ve attended, and there are many, a big no-no is variable points of view within a story or chapter. Atkinson breaks this rule. She’ll go over a seemingly simple experience, a walk, a conversation, and show what each one believes happened, or believes about the other’s motivations and perceptions and reasons. She’ll throw in a flashback that lasts three pages, and seamlessly deliver the reader back into the narrative present. She’s able to do it without being confusing because each character is distinct, as is their place in time.

This can work on a micro or macro level. She can fly back and forth between what happened earlier in the week, or over monstrous stretches of time, while keeping anchored in a narrative of say, a husband and wife getting ready for bed, having a conversation about their children, or not being “a good mother” in a commune, then losing a husband after his swim and wishing he were dead, then feeling crestfallen when he appears. No detail, no matter how large, is overly accented, which would tear the fabric of a narrative that is already taking wild chances with time and place. It’s fairly understated writing. The tone changes minimally, the transitions are so smooth they never seem like authorial choices; they seem as though we have just gently alighted here or there invisibly to witness happenings, thoughts, the way people, time and events intersect, or don’t intersect. It’s like watching traffic on a vast freeway, because of the time shifts we have the privilege of the pulled back perspective, and zoom in to see how it felt, how it was, what was pleasurable, what was satisfying, what was enraging, what was a total loss, what was tragic. We sometimes know about the tragedies before they happen, then read helplessly on, wondering when the accident, the pile up, the thing from which there is no recovery will happen and how it will happen. Where most writers would sneak up on tragedy, building to the climax, Atkinson delivers it as dispassionately as a bird leaves a turd.

The two novels of the Todd series, Life After Life, and A God in Ruins, run consecutively. I’m sure it was helpful to have the constraints of traditional marriage and rigid British society before say, 1960, and the drama and tragedy of two wars for one’s setting. Nonetheless, it’s hugely impressive.

It took me awhile to realize that though we mostly lost touch with my Love relatives, and they didn’t live extraordinarily long lives, my feelings of perplexity and loss were not unique. That no matter how long particular intimacies last—there’s always a sense of being robbed when it ends, even if everyone lives to be 100. When it’s over and not coming back, there’s a sense of being stolen from. Because one absolutely did not know at the time how much change was coming, and how foreign and familiar the original, from which everything evolved, would seem. Somehow in these scenarios, it was all taken for granted. There was no acknowledging moment, or if there was, it was maybe a bit choreographed and not as memorable. Mundaneness is almost always the most important factor in a narrative that sneaks up on you. As for ourselves, we might look back as I have and say Look! We were ordinary together. What more could one wish for?

Outtake from my novel, "Woman With Eyes Closed.”

In the fiction realm, we authors sometimes have to throw out a few expository paragraphs because, as the novel or story has developed, the character has grown in a different way. This is hard to do. Herewith, one of my favorite bits of Woman With Eyes Closed, that didn’t make the cut.

“As she always did on Sunday nights, Perrin watered the pots after dinner if they needed it, while Jack finished up in the studio. She walked down to the water, wading up to her knees to cool herself. The surf had kicked up now, big swells rolling in. She thought of Gia, busy and happy with her lights and cameras, and wondered if she herself given up on a career too easily. For instance when she didn’t get into the Neighborhood Playhouse, though she had been a top theatre student in high school. She never knew why she didn’t get in, they gave no explanation. After that there was a TV ad (shampoo), and some print modeling for a catalogue. There were parts in an off Broadway play. Small. Two. There were more auditions. Theatre stages with blasting klieg lights, basements of department stores with grey peeling paint, Upper West side producer’s apartments with overstuffed eighties furniture and stained pink deep pile carpet, and sometimes wandering hands. At the auditions she saw the same women over and over again— women like her, but older. It was hard not to notice how worn down they were, like caged birds, their feathers falling out. They had once been pretty like she was, and had had a few early successes. In NYC that joy that she once had had, of letting a role onstage overtake her, met with obstacles she could not overcome.

After an audition she’d see someone five or ten years older than her, leaving the supermarket with a bag that sagged with a cans of soup. She began to wonder about faith, and why hers had begun to feel so flimsy, like nothing so much as the milkweed floss she used to find in the marsh as a kid. Faith was absolutely necessary to continuing. Having faith was part of the folklore of the city. You were supposed to endure, and the hardship would sharpen your talent. That is, if you had the fortitude. At the auditions, the women began to recognize her, and she them. The smile, the nod. The shabby coat, the frazzled dye job with graying roots. The paperback copy of Portrait of a Lady, or The Bell Jar held against the faded linen shift. Hello they said—with a tossed scrap of sympathy. Hello, we’ll be seeing you…we’ll see you... They assembled indistinctly, like water through cracks in a subway tunnel—the prettiest ones, the gifted ones—from obscure corners of California and Oregon and depressed little upstate towns… Hello…Hello, we’ll see you, they said, smiling at her.”

On Writing a Multi-Genre Memoir

When I undertook to return to Ireland with my family to try to find a castle called Annaghkeen, that I had lived near to as a child, I certainly did not have a book in mind. My mother had died forty years before, leaving a beautiful, personal chronicle of our summer there. It was called Annaghkeen, after the castle. My father was still living, and sometimes we talked about that summer, how we had to row from our small island to the landing and our car, to just get groceries or make a phone call, and how far away from New York it had felt. This led to the idea that, with my husband and our son, I might travel there to find the castle again, still looking out over the island and house, as it did in my memories.

My son was just six, about the age I was when I lived had lived there. My husband Steve was a teacher so he was able to travel. Not long after we touched down in Shannon, I could feel atmosphere of the earlier time all around me, and that just became stronger. Annascaul, Dingle, Bantry, Dublin—memories of my parents and my odd, fragmented childhood unspooled every day. Of course, I started writing about it. I soon had reams and reams of pages. The trip to find the castle had turned over so much of the past that it would have been impossible for me not to write it, and then I thought that I might have a book in it.

I approached it just as a stand along journal, which didn’t work. Much that needed to be claimed, revealed, and to some extent, understood, was bracketed by two trips, the earlier one when I was seven, and the later one with my own family. It was very difficult to enable these story lines, time frames, and places run concurrently. Over a long period of time, working on it every day, two essential pieces fell into place. First, the narrative would have to be the real time of our journey, and be continually pegged there. Second, I decided to use passages of my mother’s book, Annaghkeen, to open every chapter. Usually, the passages had relevance to either the emotional context or the setting of the chapter (Cong, Bantry, etc) or both. This was a thrilling way to write, because it ended up being like having a conversation with my mother who had been gone so long. An added benefit was that her writing style was so very different than mine, that it further deepened the story of us, and allowed the reader to understand who she was independently of us.

I should add that this was a painful book to write, and very emotional for me as the narrative unfurled. It really was as if I was being guided by the story and the characters, (oddly, even my own “character”). The only thing required of me was the patience, the time, and the strength. As I was putting it all together, I often had the thought, “This is why books are important, and if they’re worth their salt, gain value over time.” Unfortunately, my father did not live to see the finished Castles & Ruins. He did love the title. He often said of my mother’s book Annaghkeen, that it should be back in print.

It is satisfying to me that to some degree, Annaghkeen is back in print, her passages juxtaposed with mine.   

From Chapter 11, Old Timers

"Hey, let's go see Cong," said Steve, with a humorous twinkle in his eye.

Across the road we found Emmett throwing stones. Above his head they flew in an arc one by one, landing in the water with a soft glug. There was still plenty of daylight, a wide sluice of sun on the river's Eastern flank. Like a town in the foothills of a mountain range, we could hear water bubbling and coursing almost everywhere. But there were no mountains here. The source is the neighboring lake, Lough Mask, almost as big as Lough Corrib, and thirty-three feet higher. The massive Lough Mask actually vanishes underground at different points along its southern bank, and flows for three miles before rising to the surface in pools and streams around Cong. It does this "now you see me now you don't" act in perpetuity, never failing so far as history stretches to drop into the earth and wend its way through subterranean waterway and cave, carving ever larger tunnels and caverns from the limestone. It then surfaces at Cong in the form of this and other rivers, before emptying into Lough Corrib.

The mucky bottom was just a few feet down, the water clear as glass. According to the Wilde book, this was once a mill depot, to which the Abbey owed its early patronage. The working Abbey had a stone “Fish House," perched about a third of the way out. In the time of the monks there was a canal beneath it with a fish trap, to which a bell was attached. My mother found this fascinating.”

On ROCCO and HIS BROTHERS

Alain Delon

On “Rocco and His Brothers”  (Minor Spoilers)

This film, from 1960, directed by Luchino Visconti, was eclipsed somewhat in film history. Fellini’s 8 ½ was released a few years later, and for Americans at least, Rocco and His Brothers disappeared into the general wash of Italian neorealism from the decade.

This is a shame. The two films could not be more different. And though I loved 8 ½, it is a comparatively lighthearted romp. Memorable, long, charming, and saturated with Fellini’s style; one is imbued with a sense of what Italy was, and I guess in some ways still is. (I travel there a lot and see Felliniesque scenes often). One feels for protagonist Guido Anselmi, with his movie making and women problems, appreciates it greatly, but from afar. If 8 ½ is a beautiful sword, Rocco is like getting impaled on it.

Same composer for both the films, one of my favorites: Nino Rota. Notable how different the tone of each film is musically. 8 ½ views its own struggle with a sort of pre-post-modern irreverence, the soundtrack is mostly lighthearted. Rota’s score in Rocco does not allow the audience to stand back from the action at all. The film opens with long shots of Milan in winter, specifically the train station into which the Padroni family will soon arrive. The accompanying song to this, backed by only a few guitar chords, is so spare and stripped down it’s as if one came undetected upon a lonely shepherd in a field who was singing to no audience, lamenting over something that was lost. This sets the tone for the entire film. 

The very poor Parondi family comes from a little town in the south, in the Lucania region. They tumble out of the train, four handsome brothers and their recently widowed mother. (I have seen reviewers say these boys are improbably handsome. To which I say: have you been to Italy?) Dressed in rags, loading their bundles onto a horse cart, they’ve never been in a big city before and it shows. They go to meet the fifth brother, Vincenzo, at his engagement party at the home of his fiancé, Ginetta. Troubles begin right there. The two matriarchs clash, causing Vincenzo and his fiancée to break up. Vincenzo then finds them an apartment, a freezing basement with ice on the windows. Together they pick through cheap lentils for rocks, patch their clothing, and rejoice upon the first snows where they’ll be able to work clearing streets and sidewalks. This is the one interlude where all the brothers are together, and their mother, Rosaria, desperately desires that they will remain so. Everywhere they go, they’re pegged as southern hicks, but they persevere. They are strong in their unity, Rosaria striving mightily to keep them together under her roof.

Gradually things improve, monetarily. Guileless Rocco works at a laundry, his older brother Simone is recruited as a boxer and has some success. But here the character of Simone becomes more clear. He charms the owner of the laundry and steals a shirt, and Rocco feels he has to cover for him. This is just the beginning of the slow reveal of Simone’s character, and Rocco’s saint-like devotion. Nadia, (played by the incomparable French actress Annie Girardot), is a sex worker who lives in their building. She has been rescued from the cold by Vincenzo after being thrown out of her apartment. Insouciant and beautiful, the brothers are smitten with her, Rocco in a low key, shy way, the others more obviously. Though not from Milan, Nadia is a big city girl, tossing her hair and flashing her legs and lingerie, the likes of which they have never seen. She and Simone later get together, while his boxing career founders, because of his bad habits and lack of discipline. She leaves him. While trying to rectify Simone’s continuing crimes, Rocco temporarily gives up and joins the army. After his first year, he runs into Nadia in another town, where she has just finished a stint in jail. She tells him this, as a challenge. But he doesn’t care, finding this information superficial. Rocco’s belief in her, his attunement to her situation, is the lynch pin around which the major tragedy of the film turns. Nadia, hiding behind dark glasses, believes herself to be ruined, she is utterly without hope. (In retrospect, we see her as well as a victim of poverty, and of the inhuman mores of her day). Over coffee, he takes her hand and tells her,

“You shouldn’t be afraid and you seem to be. Have faith. Have great faith and have no fear,” he says.

“In what?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he replies. “In everything.”

“In you?”

“Yes, in me too.”

She believes him; her toughness melts away right before our eyes. It’s a leap into a future she had thought impossible. Against the gloomy backdrop of Milan’s public housing, Simone’s decline, and the hardship of their lives, Rocco will save her, and she will save him by allowing herself to be saved.

It’s like watching a slow-motion train wreck.

Because Simone is rotten. As much as Rocco is a sort of saint, Simone is a hapless drunk, a bumbling but extremely dangerous villain. He gets into more trouble and bombs out of boxing. His promoters press Rocco, in whom they see talent, to box, to help recoup their investment in the defunct Simone. Rocco despises boxing, but he’s good at it. He agrees, while Simone continues to screw up. I won’t spoil it, but will say that Rocco will do anything to protect his brother.

Despite all of the tension, toward the end we are treated to one of the most joyous scenes in the film, of which there are aplenty. Rocco has just won a major boxing tournament; the family is flush with cash. They are at their apartment, at a dining table that opens out to the balcony, and interior of their public housing. Vincenzo has married Ginetta and they have a baby; the sparkling wine is flowing. It’s a celebratory dinner, mother Rosaria is ecstatic. Everyone is there except for Simone. Rocco yells up to the entire building and everyone comes out, joining in the merriment. Bottles are thrown balcony to balcony without losing a drop, toasts are made, the entire scene is suffused with a warm sweetness—where even Rosaria forgets for a moment that all of her sons are not there. Shy Rocco is reluctant, but the crowd persuades him to make a toast.

He begins, “To the day, which is still far away, when I can go home. Ours is the land of olives, and moon sickness, and of rainbows…” This brings tears all around, especially from his mother, Rosaria.

He then asks Vicenzo, who is a builder, “Do you remember Vincenzo, when starting to build, the head mason throws a brick at the shadow of the first person that has happened by? As a token of sacrifice. So the house can be built solidly…”

This is received somberly, as Rocco is still catching up with himself. He is attempting to justify his recent act of unimaginable cold-heartedness, and make it into a sort of poetry. This works overall for the film, somewhat, but not for him. He has thrown the brick into the shadow, but at that moment he is still unaware of how dark the shadow will be.

Quite often Delon is referred to in reviews as a “matinee idol.” This is a diminishing put down, given how many great performances he has turned in. Journalist Scott Eyman wrote that Delon “has the face of one of Caravaggio’s dark angels,” and it’s true. But Delon’s watchability does not detract from his talent. I don’t think he ever had an acting lesson and did not benefit from much of an education. It doesn’t matter. His performance as Rocco, at the age of twenty-five, is a tour de force.

The other stand-out is Annie Girardot as Nadia. An actress I had never heard of, I want to see more of now, in fact, I want to see everything she’s done. As a screen presence, she is Europe’s answer to Barbara Stanwyck. She is unforgettable here, and will haunt your dreams.  

Reviewers have called Rocco and His Brothers, operatic, and I agree.

To begin with, there is no irony anywhere in it; tragedy and transcendence are gone over repeatedly, teasing out every nuance. The family is dirt poor, they came to Milan because they had no choice. As things develop, the impoverished southern village that they came from takes on a charm it might never really have had. (In the first scene, they bring oranges from Luciana to the engagement party, the smell and taste of them bring great joy to the guests).

Like an opera, the film is grueling, but it is not depressing. Rather it has the opposite effect, because in every detail and in its length, it embraces anyone’s lost dream, and lost innocence. The prevailing subtext, beautifully and poignantly rendered, is the times before it all happened, and what each of the characters were, or imagined themselves to be, in “the land of olives, and moon sickness, and of rainbows.”

 p.s. I recently saw the film at our wonderful cinema in Sag Harbor.

Annie Girardot and Renato Salvatori

Muriel Spark’s Loitering With Intent or “Dueling Memoirs.”

Attention! The following has spoilers!

A book that stuck with me is Muriel Spark’s Loitering With Intent. It’s about a career woman, Fleur, who is working on a novel called Warrender Chase. Her boss, a pretentious man of letters I’ll call Sir David, has a small vanity press for peerage types who want to publish biographies. Only people with the right social credentials will be considered. He presses his customers/students for honesty and meticulous truth telling in their manuscripts, while he milks them for information he can hold over them and worse.

At the beginning Fleur needs a job and is interviewing around. She hears about the position at Sir David’s firm through a friend. She realizes during the interview that Sir David is a terrific snob, but the job that he offers is the best fit, in part because the work of editing these amateur manuscripts comes easily to her.

Sir David runs the firm out of his London home. His mother, Clara, lives with him. Clara is ancient, cared for by housekeeper/nurse that she hates. Clara wears bright red lipstick, big jewelry and says outrageous things. She must live with her son because she’s old and dotty, but she’s acutely aware of how awful he is.  She’s mischievous, as well as incontinent, urinating where she stands at times to express her discontent, or irritate the nurse, or something. The reader never knows exactly what. She’s sly and funny and has everyone’s number, while being like a child in the way of a very old person. Fleur and Clara become friends, along with another friend of Fleur’s, a lawyer I’ll call Scott, who helps guide Fleur in the legal tangle at the end. They become a trio, a merry band of whistle blowers, with Scott and Fleur taking Clara for jaunts here and there in the town. There’s a conspiracy of sorts between them about the dreadful Sir David, though it’s more understated than active. The understanding exists in a sort of undercurrent between them. The writing is wonderfully subtle.

All the while, Fleur is writing her Warrender Chase book. About two thirds of the way through Loitering With Intent, the scenes that she has written start coming true among the patrons of the vanity press. Eventually she realizes that a copy of her book has been stolen by Sir David, (who is writing his own memoirs), with the aid of his creepy friend I’ll call Barbara, who is also a sort of “frenemy” of Fleur’s.

No one gets away unscathed, not even the narrator, because she never admits that she has drawn from life for her novel. (Has she? We don’t know, and then think, well, she must have.) When Fleur’s book is prophetic, this reader understood that its accuracy came from Fleur’s knack for observation, as well as out of a sort of fateful mystery. In Loitering With Intent, Fleur maintains that she doesn’t know how her novel came about, intimating but not saying that it was an osmotic process. It’s a high concept plot twist which works only because Spark’s powers of observation are so keen, and she is so playful. Indeed, “Loitering With Intent,” gives much away about writing itself, especially the title does!

We Must All Be Artists Now

I saw an advertisement the other night that stuck with me. It opens to a rough looking sky light, a loft-y space, as one might have seen in Soho in the seventies, only no grime on the sky light. Music with a classical bent plays, as the camera lovingly traces scrubby walls down to the paint splattered floor, where a Pilates toned woman in her fifties wields a sculpting tool. In the center of the room, unaccompanied by any detritus of sculpting, a large manatee shape yearns towards the skylight. The music builds, the woman dances gracefully, poking here, smoothing there, in a state of art-making bliss, a diaphanous smile on her face. The music flows along, the voice over intones "FLUMMERY FINANCIAL…thirty-five thousand strong, in seven nations, looking after your interests worldwide…" The woman has never been happier, the music swells, all of her days have led to this moment, the manatee masterpiece flowing from her fingertips. The voice again, "FLUMMERY FINANCIAL—YOUR VISION IS OUR VISION…"

WAIT A MINUTE.

WHAT?

The implication was that money management and the making of art somehow have something to do with each other. A woman, consumed with her creative endeavors, has a good portfolio thanks to Flummery Financial. The only accuracy is that she will likely need it.

In ’87 the Beatles “Revolution” was the soundtrack to a Nike ad, and in 1990 the Stones “Brown Sugar,” did the same for Pepsi, so this advertisement wasn’t the first time a collective memory, from which a strand still felt intensely personal, had been stuck onto the side of a product like a wad of gum. But the offense of Flummery Financial, moreover the astounding inaccuracy of this message made me feel as if my house had been robbed. To equate the long, thorny, often thankless struggle of making art with the concerns of a financial brokerage firm was going too far.

I grew up around mid-century writers and artists who were, to venture a broad generalization, mostly running against the grain of what was expected. In these post war years the future was supposed to roll out along straight lines for everyone—job, or for women, motherhood, a car, spouse, kids, a higher education if you could get it. In Kim Evan’s wonderful documentary about Jackson Pollock, my father’s first wife Patsy Southgate, a writer and translator, talked about the artists around her in Springs, New York. “…right after WWII men had come home, and they were supposed to all settle down with nice families in suburbs, and I think that the writers and artists were women and men who didn’t fit into that role, but didn’t know how to get out of it.”

This group came to New York city and the East End of Long Island to remake themselves, to seriously undertake an elucidation of their own restlessness, of that which might have been, up till then, unnameable. We know the names of the more successful ones: Pollock, De Kooning, Krasner, Plimpton, Southern, my father Peter Matthiessen, a truncated list which is defined mainly by my own associations. Yet there were many more that did great work, who weren’t famous, or lucky, who never will be famous. Unlike a well managed stock portfolio (given the economy doesn’t collapse), the long term lookout of an artist can be grim. There are many who spend their lives trying to express something, who stayed true to it, sacrificed for it, who followed it as it evolved for them, which had little or nothing to do with the success they may or may not have had. Who starved, died, or went mad doing their work. Who had success late in life or not at all. The work they produced valued by family and friends, but, essentially, a silent song never heard by the wider world. And certainly, there were great talents whose work was under appreciated even by those close to them, that ended up moldering in storage spaces, or burnt up in fires, or were unloaded on babysitters and cousins, or by second wives trying to cadge some more space by clearing the attic corner of all those dull xeroxed poems no publisher wanted. To a pragmatist, i.e., a banker, to undertake a profession like this, to devote a life to it, would be sheer madness. Better to be a gold bug or a survivalist. Better to ply your fortunes in Vegas getting shit faced at the bar listening to “Luck be a Lady,” on your ear buds. Better to try a Thelma and Louise experiment and see if you live. Not for sane folks, but for romantic, moony, impractical, self deluded types, the sort who put their energy into hail Mary passes (like those who sent letters to hundreds of electors begging them not to elect our current not-my-president.) And were disappointed.

Some would say, it wasn’t always so hard. Some would say that in the forties and fifties the fields of art and literature were wide open. There was so much room, it was easy to be a success. A gullible public with unrefined tastes to cultivate. A post war baby boom who grew up with books and almost no TV, and time to burn. No distractions. No cellphones. Hungry for content. No sophistication. Innocent. A giant sponge that you could saturate with anything. An audience.

Now, (on the coasts), if one says I’m a lawyer, or an accountant or yes, a finance person, it might be perceived as dull. We must all be artists now. We must all be exotic, traipsing around on the interior of our psyches trying to extract something that someone else can use. Forget religion, being an artist, expressing ourselves, being creative is the favored path to salvation. And because of that, some say, there’s hardly an audience left.

To which I say, not having an audience is something artists contend with more often than not. It isn’t an actual impediment to creativity. Unless you are Shirley Temple.

Just to give a sense of what it was like for those intrepid Americans who crept out to the Hamptons in the forties and fifties, I must remember the way the winters were here. Hard, very cold, and long. Sagaponack, where I grew up, had no other writers to speak of, just my father, working in his studio next to the potato fields, and my mother, writing and researching in her upstairs study. All the kids in my grade school were farmer’s kids, every last one. Though they were great neighbors, it’s hard to remember the clouds of insecticide boiling across the fields and into our house with nostalgia. It could be very bleak. The summers were a colorful break, on the most beautiful beaches in the world, among a chic crowd that was growing larger every year. Then I was back in school, freezing at the bus stop once again.

Though the East End of Long Island is just one area, it did boast a large concentration of people who broke through in the arts. In the late fifties my father naturally gravitated toward the few other writers who were here or came from the city regularly, and toward Springs where the visual artists were. The places they lived were very rough. Though I was small, I remember them. I can’t pass an old fisherman’s cottage with a bumpy lawn and overgrown brambles without a sort of yearning. These little places were full of rich impressions for a child, they were open to the whims of the wind and weather, not in a story book way, but in an adventurous way. They seem terribly romantic now, immortalized in old pictures and films, and, as one by one, they are torn down for someone else’s fantasy—usually a big, insulated house. The modern-day truth of the matter—a fisherman’s cottage has small rooms, moldy plaster, a leaky roof, cold walls, eccentric additions, and drafty windows. Add to that winters that were mercilessly cold, and a local power plant that often went down for days at a time when there was a serious storm. The public were treated to glamorous, transcendent results—but those of us who were around saw the process, the excess, the self destruction, the misery, the fight, the fortitude. It was a far cry from a wealthy woman in a re-furbished SoHo loft, dancing around a manatee.

In the Pollock documentary, there is a lot of footage of those early parties, and the sweet little drafty places of Springs, and big beach picnics that went on until morning. The beautiful Patsy spoke of what it was like to choose a career in art or literature, in the America of her youth. She talked about the Hemmingway mystique, which was still very much in force. “There were nightly, drunken, large parties,” she said, and added, “since artists did have such a limp wristed image in the American view—that their manhood was threatened by doing something as delicate as creating art or writing a poem—they over compensated by being super macho.” She talks about train trips with Pollock into the city, each to see their therapists. At that time, Pollock had a great tangle of worries, his affair with Ruth Kligman in progress, his marriage to painter Lee Krasner in trouble. Patsy said his state of mind was “…extremely desperate. He felt that the art within him that he wanted to express was so difficult because he had to bring it up from his subconscious, which was in turmoil.” She added that she believed he couldn’t possibly maintain that state of intensity. He died not long after this, in a car crash where he was, as usual, very drunk and driving very fast.

These were not pretty lives. They were agonized and messy. It was very, very hard work. There were no guarantees. Their families usually didn’t understand. Their immediate families were usually damaged due to neglect and obsession. The general culture was against them, or just indifferent. They were neither fashionable or familiar, not in the way that the concept of a “creative life,” is now. The ones that made it, that you’ve heard of, were very few. There were so many more that didn't make it. On the subject of writing my father often said, “Most writers have to write. There isn’t a choice.” This was certainly true for him. The other thing he liked to say was, “No one is asking you to do it.” In other words, there is no demand. There is no niche, you must create one. It takes some courage to set your cap for something that has no guarantee, especially considering the amount of effort that is usually required. It can be incredibly foolhardy. To equate this kind of life with the calculations a banker must make to produce X return, is pure drivel, but there is something to be learned in the comparison.

It’s almost impossible to be a decent artist and follow a tested, known route, the way you’d hope your banker would do. Which leads me to the idea of the conventional in connection with the creative effort. Books that are calculated to tick all the boxes in the current lexicon of cares (politically correct) are fundamentally boring. To conform to current norms may work in journalism, but it’s death to creative writing. A good book should reach considerably beyond what one is supposed to feel according to one’s peers. It should take its finger off of the zeitgeist. Otherwise it’s conformist, and when you read it you know you’ve heard it before. Books that don't have any real point of view, i.e. a distinct self, are disappointing. The path to creative heat cannot be conventional in the same way the layers of a person’s thoughts and views and feelings are never in any way conventional. Even a middle-of-the-road writer like myself cannot make something live on the page without completely departing from any idea of what someone else thinks it should be, or even what I think it should be.

Early on, when I’d labor over a paragraph for, sometimes, two days and still not have it right my father would say, “It takes as long as it takes.” Looking at that line all these years later makes me laugh. It seems as sure a formula for screwing up your life as any. Think of the things I would miss. A sensible job, a steady income, a community, a long term plan, perhaps any sort of relevance at all. Following that advice, my time would be at the mercy of whether or not a paragraph or indeed, a whole book came out right. In fact, my first book, Castles & Ruins, took seven years and was subject to later revisions. I worked part time in real estate to support it, and my husband worked and supported it. We did other things out of necessity, which was also why it took so long. I attempted something no one had done, which was to write a travelogue of Ireland and a memoir of my childhood, together. I haven’t made anything off it yet, though I’m very proud of it, and I think it’s good.

A banker would call that a waste of time.

Splooge

Splooge is what I call a first draft.

At least 90% of the splooge is useless.

Splooge is the only starting place I have. (But for a non-fiction work, splooge is generally not required).

My first drafts of fiction don’t look like anything so much as some type of bodily fluid on the page. Stream of consciousness from characters, (who are they?), torrents of unrelated thoughts from hobbled, disparate, omniscient narrators, (again, who are they?), isolated lines of dialogue, agonizingly trite descriptions of place, person, or feeling all in a jumble, full of typos and the red bric-a-brac underlining that Microsoft Word uses to tell me it’s wrong. And mostly, it is wrong.

My son is a good writer, with lots of original ideas that eventually find expression on the page. His problem is getting going, and that, for a long time, was my problem, until I discovered the splooge technique. My son will struggle for hours, sitting at a desk, then roam around, pacing. Getting sips of water from the kitchen faucet is a favorite. Not a word befalls the screen. Not a key is even flirted with. When I hear his heavy foot falls in the living room going past my study, and the kitchen faucet go on and off, on and off, I know that he’s “writing.”

My son is also a great talker. Alas, if most of us could write as well as we can talk, what a literate population we would be. I have wanted to help him, explaining that I contend with the writing process almost every single day. I understand the agony. He doesn’t listen very well, preferring to find his own way through everything, which is a good quality to a point, and will probably serve him well in life. If he encouraged me at all, I would tell him about my splooge system.

I prop myself up, saying to myself that if Jack Kerouc, high as hell on Benzedrine, could write On the Road on a giant roll of tracing paper in three weeks, surely, I, aided by a pot of tea, can get something. If William Faulkner could produce thirteen acclaimed novels and many short stories while working full time as a screenwriter in Hollywood, surely I can scribble a few lines before lunch. All it takes is the doing. I use a timer to keep myself at a desk for at least forty minutes at a stretch and hope for the best. At this stage, it’s kind of out of my hands.

Automatic Writing

Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese writer and philosopher, claimed to have experienced something called automatic writing, which was all the rage among philosophers and intellectuals in late 1800’s. Along with seances and Ouija boards, it was used in the search for para-normal activity. Pessoa said that when doing this automatic writing he felt “owned by something else,” sometimes feeling a lifting sensation in his right arm. He said he experienced “ethereal visions,” and “magnetic auras,” which, I swear, sounds familiar. But while they were looking for messages from the afterlife, I am looking for messages from this life. I don’t know what they are until I write them and give them room to breathe.

All it takes is sitting there letting words just flow, resisting the urge to edit as I go along. If something looks promising, I allow a minute or two to polish it. But only that. I have to move on quickly because what I’m looking for is volume, a profusion of words on the page. I usually get at least a few good words out of twenty, and sometimes it’s just a seed of an idea, a direction. Usually, when putting it down, I don’t at all know that it is a seed, that it has potential to grow. I’ll have to walk away from it for awhile, feeling disgusted that again I’ve gotten nothing done. It’s only later when I see it on the page that it tells me. If the muses are on my side this seed, this spark, will jump out. It will tell me something about the character, or where the story is going. It’s not unlike sifting sand for gold and finding a nugget. I’m always so happy to see it, and I can mine it for a long time, sometimes to the conclusion of the chapter, the story, the book.  

Not everyone is this type of writer. My father once told me a story about art critic and writer Robert Hughes. They were in New York with a few writer friends. There was a lunch, at which everyone had a lot of drinks. They went back to one of the writer’s apartments, my father didn’t say which. But he did witness a sozzled Hughes sit down and reel off about 3,500 words to be faxed to a magazine that night. One draft, a few penned in corrections, done in about 2 hours. And he said Hughes was pretty much always like this, he was full of admiration for the sort of mind Hughes was in possession of.

My father would have taken about a week to write an article of the same length. He was often called a genius, but he wasn’t. He was a dogged worker, and he was happiest working. He loved to edit and refine. He told me with pride that he wrote the opening chapter to The Snow Leopard thirty times. Never satisfied, he would make multiple corrections to what were supposed to be final galleys of a book. He’d find something that needed to be changed, and it would be changed, at quite a cost to the publisher. He “drove them crazy,” my stepmother Maria said. He had great integrity about the writing. Writing was the center of his existence, and that’s what made him so good.

He said that the first draft is always the hardest. In this we were the same, though it is probably true for most writers. When I told him of my splooge style, these crazed looping non sensical paragraphs and lines, pages of them, and my ostensible kinship with the long dead Fernando Pessoa, I got a totally blank look.

The ways to approach a blank page are infinite. A Hughes type, a genius, might have all his facts and his reactions to them and his overall theme assembled on a continually rotating RAM in his brain, that can emerge fully formed. William Styron was said to have produced one perfect or near perfect page a day when he was writing. My father worked on the fictionalization of the Edgar Watson story for many years, producing a trilogy during the nineties, and, approximately ten years later, Shadow Country, a new rendering of the three. Some said he spent too long on Watson, but then he won the National Book Award.

When trying to explain my system to him, I didn’t add the next steps, because it was such a far cry from what he did it was almost embarrassing.  

Had I had the courage I would have explained what happens next to splooge, usually after a bit of time away. I read it over, looking for signs of life, meaning of course, the story and the people in it and what will happen. These spindly clay figures are the only ones who can tell me what to do. When editing is going well the character that I have in my mind begins to take shape on their own. This person that I know, and that I might always have known, tells me whether or not they would have said that line, or done that particular thing. All I have to do is tune into their channel and stick with it. If I am very lucky, 30% of that second draft will be some kind of scaffold that gives me the shape of the scene and the people in it.

We know that we think something, we just don’t know what it is. We know there’s a story in us, characters inside us trying to get out, but we aren’t familiar with them yet. There are many selves inside us. Some are ghosts, some are not. Maybe finding them is a circuitous, mysterious thing, not too far flung from trying to make contact with the dead. It isn’t too far a leap for me.

If you are that type too I would say, keep at it until you break through. Until you find the thread of life that traces through the 2,000 words you splooged. Keep at it. You very well might find something there.

Paperclips

Today I got the right sized paperclips. I got a box of big metal ones, all shiny and new, and lined up like French beans. Weirdly thrilling, these little implements for writing. Real things are much more satisfying than say, a new computer to wrestle with. I had been struggling with dinky plastic coated ones, having to shove two at a time onto sections.

I am just getting some traction on novel after staring at it in a stupor for a few hours. Remembered what friend Amy Jenkins said about fiction, that her novel would SNARL at her after she'd been away. That's certainly true. Remembered what my father used to say, "The writing life is like a bowl of honey, you just have to lick it from a thorn." 

I try also to remember what Graham Green said about his own work, that the next scene, or the direction of the plot, or what a character would do was always formulating in his mind while away from his desk, always, even if he wasn't actually thinking about it. Hard to tell if this is going on.

I remember these things because I'm at crucial juncture, 63K words in, where a bit of sag has developed. I'm like Wile E. Coyote trying to bridge a canyon with a plot that stretches some 83,000 words. One way or another, it must be surprising, or touching, or informative enough, or tense, or funny, or some combination of all, or the reader will fall yowling to the canyon floor, or worse, just put the book aside with the others they never finished.

"Only Connect." In art, in life, it is such a simple concept. Yet devastatingly difficult on the page. One gets over complicated, wanting to say it cleverly. Yes, that can suffice, but surprisingly, it is sometimes the simplest small sentence, at the right swerve in the paragraph, that connects and completes it. If it's true, life floods in, miraculously. 

The paperclips sit on my desk, beckoning, and eventually they'll go on clumps and stacks of paper. Little things that are so pleasing. The plastic box is clear, and makes a satisfying click when closing. It's almost as good as the day I got a pack of ten gel markers in a kaleidoscope of colors, for editing.

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