Two Steps Up

Loren was an early riser, relative to the rest of her family, and we'd hang out while I waited for her sister Tina, my best friend, to get out of bed--which usually happened around noon or later. The parents were late sleepers as well, so it was just the two of us up in the house in Wynnewood, doing as we liked. One of the things we liked was to watch Shirley Temple movies. Shirley Temple Theater was off the air by then--it only lasted for three brief years, 1958-61--but somehow we had a taste for her, enough to pursue a learning of her repertoire. We formed our own Shirley Temple Fan Club, with some degree of irony, but that was hard to sustain. Shirley was so enormously talented and charming, and the plots of many of her films sent us out of the television room to an attic in London or an hotel in New York or a southern plantation (yes, we were aware of the awfulness of these plots and settings)--more effectively than nearly anything else. The films were fantastical, and chocked with song and dance, but she embodied innocence and an uncanny ability to make herself heard--a trait alluring to me, I see now.

My favorite was The Little Princess. Shirley's father is lost in the siege of Mafeking, and because her school bills aren't being paid, she must go live in the attic and work at the school rather than being a regular student. (This idea doesn't go away; witness Newt's proposal to make poor students work as janitors in their schools.) I loved her relentless belief that her father was alive, her quest to find him, and the music of the word Mafeking. (When I went to South Africa some years later I very much wanted to see Mafeking--not really a tourist destination.)

Below is another favorite scene. Yes, it is from another era and there are all kinds of things wrong with it in terms of race and class. There remain, however, some points of value; the kindness to a child who doesn't want to go to bed, Bill Robinson's extraordinary dancing, and lesson in teaching.

The emotional content here moves me in two ways, the first being the actual scene shown here, and the second being the depiction of a process of working and learning that feels, if not literally accurate, resonant with what I know of working, learning, teaching. Do the step slowly, move ahead, drop back and do the step again with a bit more speed, move ahead further, and so on. That is still more methodical than I am, but this small scene is an emblem of practicing an art form, any art form. It is the case that for every person now living there has been a great who has gone before us who has figured out all the steps and can be studied as Shirley watches Bill to see how it's done. It is always a great leap forward when a student can look to the geniuses rather than the very goods and see through the perfect creation to the scaffolding underneath.

Loren and I were lucky to have our fan club, because it came about so naturally. There is a great joy in sharing the pleasure of a movie, book, painting, music in the company of another--really sharing it, not just sitting next to each other.  We were young, and it was fun. As one becomes older it becomes harder to reveal the emotion of responding to a work of art at a deep level of being. It's so private to experience moments that resonate with your soul. To show how it feels to read or to watch something meaningful is a self exposure that makes one very vulnerable. Mostly we quickly wipe our tears away, and are sheepish if anyone noticed them. To take an experience that is most usually a communion between artist and an audience of one, and to extend it to an audience of two--two together, in rhythm--is really an experience of love.

Bones and Shooting Stars

The structure. The structure. The structure. I have the story, the characters, the themes, the whole all, but how to put it together? What is the shape, where are the bones?
This is something hard to teach and hard to find for oneself. It's a reason even great writing teachers can't quite pin down what to do. You can take a story handed into a workshop and, in the case of how I approach it, make a few chiropractic adjustments, but that doesn't change the basic structure. That's something that comes up from a writer's depths--be they the depths of intellect or of feeling. Finding a structure is crucial. When an author always uses borrowed structures, a book often founders--not in the reading, but in the writing. The writer needs to feel held in place by her own skeleton.
One of my most sobering writing books is The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and Practice of Writing. It really makes you laugh and cry to dip into this volume. The guy is scary smart, and very moving. Included in the book are prefaces to some of his novels and stories, which read like very sophisticated versions of "Hey, did you get how the house is supposed to look like a face?" He wants you to see what he did, and get how great it is. Sweet! The intros are deeply brilliant and illuminating, and they do add to the work, but they also make me laugh. For example, here are a couple of sentences to his introduction to What Maisie Knew.

Sketchily clustered even, these elements give out the vague pictorial glow which forms the first appeal of a living "subject" to the painter's consciousness; but the glimmer became intense as I proceeded to a further analysis. The further analysis is for that matter almost always the torch of rapture and victory, as the artist's firm hand grasps and plays it--I mean, naturally, {NATURALLY!} of the smothered rapture and the obscure victory, enjoyed and celebrated not in the street but before some innermost shrine; the odds being a hundred to one, in almost any connexion, that it doesn't arrive by any easy first process at the best residiuum of truth.

Okay! So it's not just me who finds this hard. That's a relief! I shouldn't settle for that first easy process--I knew it! Darn, back to the drawing board. I do want to find the best residiuum of truth--who doesn't? I'm tempted to copy out every word of this, because it's both wild and a great teaching tool, but because I can't type and for reasons of blog decency I'll skip down. Later in the essay James recalls his original idea for The Pupil. 

...I perfectly recall...every aspect of the original vision, which struck me as abounding in aspects.  It lives again for me, this vision, as it first alighted; though the prime inimitable flutter, the air as of an ineffable sign made by the immediate beat of the wings of the poised figure of fancy that has just settled, is one of the guarantees of value that can never be re-captured. The sign has been made to the seer only--it is his queer affair; of which any report to others, not as yet involved, has but the same effect of flatness as attends, amid a group fathered under the canopy of night, any stray allusion to a shooting star. The miracle, as miracle it seems, is all for the candid examiner.


This is why it's hard to teach. This vision of the whole, the structure, is queer and individual. Many people have the vision, but then there is the understanding of it, and its execution.  Not for the faint of heart, this writing stuff.

But oh, this Henry James is so so lovable! Having picked this book up again to refer to for this post, I am drawn in. He's so serious. Reading these introductions makes me think of the wonderful bit in one of Virginia Woolf's diaries where she says the problem with Lord Byron was that his wife didn't laugh at him enough, so he became Byronic. I laugh when I read this stuff, even though I am completely enthralled. What a little pumpkin pie, that Henry James.

The point being, the bones. Every work of fiction must have them, and so they must be searched for, excavated from below the themes. Or spotted as a shooting star. Whatever. I finally found the bones for my book, and pretty clever they are. Or so I thought until I mentioned it to someone who said the fatal 'have you read such and such?' That doesn't scare me like it used to. It's the marriage of structure and material that becomes an original piece. As long as its queer, it's going to be okay.

Flaubert exposes himself

I have spent the last hour writing a short piece on Madame Bovary. It has been a swift explosion of my thoughts over many years. I am posting this before I edit it for its commissioned purpose--to capture the raw work of morning. It may contain errors, forgive me. I touched the pages of the book as I wrote this. I wish I could write all day.

 I offer to you the great French novel Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert. I have enjoyed it, studied it, taught it, learned from it. There are nights when I lie awake thinking of Flaubert trying to work out how to make these scenes. No one before had ever focused on description and dialogue as he did. He wanted the events in his book to have the sensation of reality, and to hide the hand of the author. If you read the letters he wrote while composing the book, a seven year full time project, you will empathize with the effort, the endless work, of trying to figure out how to put on paper what he imagined. Many of the techniques he used and the effects he created had never been made before.
Flaubert was an inventor, both of literary form and of himself. His friends were becoming famous and he wanted to join them, so he moved from Paris to his mother's house, where he'd both have no distractions and be taken care of, and he wrote his book. He took the subject from a conversation he'd overheard at a party--a provincial doctor's wife had killed herself. Writing about French country village life wasn't his dream; he hoped to write a classic that spoke to the classics of the ancient world; he considered Madame Bovary a practice book.
In the US there is a tremendous emphasis placed now on having the protagonist be a likable character. I cannot hear this request without thinking of President George Bush spoken of as a man with whom you'd like to drink a beer. We have lost our way with this notion of likeability; Flaubert didn't abide by it. Madame Bovary is never likable, though in moments she arouses empathy. Her portrayal is deeply knowing and honest. The likable person couldn't be so rash, so reckless in the name of desire, so destructive, so certain of her right to her own impulses. Does the truly likable person want so much to be someone and somewhere else? When I am told of the necessity of likeability, I hold her up to make the opposite point. Look at Emma. She isn't good, kind, friendly, pleasant, thoughtful, caring. There is nothing about her that would appeal to a town now and any more than she did to the Rouen of the 1850s. Yet there are moments when she shows the side of her character attracted to spirituality and beauty. They aren't particularly emphasized, and they do not win the day as they did for Lily Bart in The House of Mirth; Flaubert intended to write a Realist novel, not a dream. Yet she is moving in her struggle. These glimpses of the possibility for her to be more reflect the truth of most humans. We might be more, yet we rarely are.
Flaubert said "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." I interpret that to mean that Emma Bovary is a proxy for him and his desires, including the drive to express himself in language. There is much here about the influence of novels; at one point Emma is forbidden by her husband and mother-in-law from reading them, as they are clearly contributing to her depression. Letters are written between the pairs of lovers with great self-awareness about the project of influence via words. There is an ambivalence toward writing throughout, its attraction and limitations. Madame Bovary is a reader and a writer of love letters, a writer of her life. The relation between her and Flaubert is knowing. Few of us have the nerve to examine ourselves with such an open eye, to expose our shallowness and sentimentality, our materialism and our passion for people who don't deserve it, our cruelty.
Yet it seems to me that every book does exactly this. We see another person, an author, through the scrim of his words. The choices are either false or true, craven or noble. Rarely are they completely honest. Flaubert wasn't particularly good, but he was shockingly honest. If you copy this book by hand, you will learn how to write a novel.

Midnight Swims: A Legacy

I am writing, I am writing. For the past few months I have been teaching, and slipping in a little writing now and then, but now I am reversing the schedule.
Writing loosely, freely. I was talking to a friend the other day about the blocks that come up, and how many of them have to do with the lack of time--wanton, wastable time. When I was young I never felt blocked at all. I had every night after the house went to bed to sit in my room with my black candles and my records and write poem after poem, then copy them with my quill pen, burn the edges of the paper and drip wax on them to make them look like ancient artifacts.  This took a lot of time, but it was time that passed without notice. 4 a.m., 5 a.m. Then the dawn, mine alone, the way any poet feels.
It was a deeply pleasurable way to be, and it is a muscle memory. After all these many years I have finally reproduced a scenario where I might feel like that again--a room of my own. I am not the first to point out the advantages of such a place for a writer. For the last 25 years I have longed for it. Now--it's here. A bed, a desk, a window. This has taken me back to my old ways.

Not burning parchment or using sealing wax--but writing in messy letters without my glasses on so I can't read or judge. Pressing into a story, then tossing all the crabbed pages aside and writing into it more truly and deeply. Wasted pages, wasted time. Daydreaming indolently. It takes this, to get down to it. It is the fun, the pleasure, when there is the time for it. The nervousness about not getting another chance lifts, and the notion of a writing block is as odd and quaint as it sounded to me when I was a teenager. How could that be? Words were a lazy river, plentiful, mine to dip into and walk away from, dripping. Completely natural.