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?

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.