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.

George Harrison, born February 25, 1943

 I have written a lot about George Harrison, but nothing compared to the hundreds of hours I spent thinking about him when I was a child--maybe until I was about 24 years old. It may be ridiculous to say that a complete stranger, a celebrity, changed your life, but it can happen--it happened to me. I first saw George on the Ed Sullivan Show less than three weeks after my father died, and all the love I had left in me that was suddenly going nowhere, going only into space, I was able to give to George. (I suddenly had an intense memory as I wrote this of the first weekend I didn't go see my father--the deep disorientation of staying home, of feeling my body want to be elsewhere. Completely confusing days, weeks, years.)
I was too young to have romantic feelings toward him. He was my brother. Every quality in me that my mother found exasperating were things he liked; how excited I got, how chatty, how I followed her (him) around. He wanted to take me everywhere with him! I toured the world with the Beatles and made sure Paul gave George credit for his part in the songs. I had bad dreams about Paul--which all showed up later in the Let It Be sessions.
It's an odd thing to love a celebrity. It has never happened to me again. Of course it is a matter of projection, but what relationship isn't, at least in the early stages. Yet the tug of war between projection and love, projection and love seems to deepen one's self knowledge in a way nothing else does--if you stay in long enough. I learned from George that I don't suffer fools gladly. I could feel that impatience in him, that streak of judgment that sat right alongside his spirituality and his true desire to be enlightened. It seems these aren't contradictory impulses, if Jesus is any example. I have come to think that they are layered emotions existing at different levels of defense. George wanted real love. You want that, and you're going to feel a lot of anger sometimes. Love is so so easy, until you find out what it means; until you discover that it is going to show you all the parts of yourself you have kept hidden, and it is going  to disappoint you if your loved one doesn't have anything in him very deep down. To be in love is to make someone up. To love is to be hammered on an anvil.

I dearly love the photos of George and Patti Boyd. I didn't love her when I was a girl; I didn't want to share. I love her now, though. The two of them together are so beautiful. There is obliviousness to them in all their pictures that has the allure of otherworldliness. A funny thing about the Beatles is that millions identified with and loved them, imagined that they would be finally understood if only they knew them, but to really take these photos in is to understand that even by this age, early twenties, they were already living a rarefied life unimaginable. I've read of George that he never carried a wallet or any money--just as the royals don't. This may or may not be true, but the story says how above the world he was, how it was his privilege to move along pathways open to only a few--the eruvs, the exceptional routes, of the rich and famous. I never imagined this when I was young. I thought him normal, and overwhelmed. But the photos of his house at Surrey where he lived with Patti Boyd show the graffiti he and friends painted on the walls, wild style in the 'burbs, where it was surely an eyesore to some. He dolled up his Mini Cooper with his own signs and symbols--you could see him coming. Patti left him to marry Eric Clapton, though it seems Patti was virtually pushed away by George's transformation into a religious person, his celibacy. I never blamed Patti for leaving. It's hard to blame any rock wives for whatever they end up choosing. It can't be easy, following the boys around.

George is my style icon. He has a chic based on thinness and confidence. If you go through hundreds of pictures of him, you see him dressed in a lot of farfetched get ups, but there's always something there that holds the eye, some sense of a comfort with being a body in the world that, like the impatience, is a bookend to his desire to be "free from birth." None of the other Beatles had this chic; few do. The three photos here are so different, yet all revealing. The disguise photo with the large sunglasses, the bushy mustache, the hippie coat--who wouldn't notice this striking person? The costume with the collar turned up just so, and the hat set on the thick brown hair at exactly the right spot to crown the beautiful face--a deep artless self-awareness. The picture of him in the green doorway defined for me forever how to dress. Faded jeans, a dark blue linen shirt, run down blue espadrilles, messy hair...has anyone ever done better? This photo was taken in the Bahamas when the Beatles were filming Help! I have another one in this series on the wall in my writing room, for everyday inspiration. Absolute glamour. 

It is hard to say now what has meant the most to me about George. I think, in the end, it was his stubbornness--his knowing he had a voice, and his determination to have it be heard, even while competing with two of the great geniuses of the 20th century, John and Paul. I continue to live with tender feelings toward him, begun when I was a very sad child. Thinking about him today hurts my heart, but he helped. 

Thank you, George.

  

Complications

This blog was originally called Walks With Dogs, a title I dropped because I was no longer walking with my dogs the way I used to. I have missed my routine, and that walking meditation. The dogs have, too. My foot has gotten better now, though, enough so that I can walk on it briefly. I wanted to get back to normal. So last weekend I tried to take the dogs up to Mills Reservation. I haven't been up there in months; a combination of snow and my foot injury had prevented it. But it was 68 degrees outside!

I saw we were in trouble when we pulled parallel to the parking lot. The snow had been melting for a few days at my house--now I faced true winter again; ice, thick, white-blue, a landscape in miniature of rolling hills, glowing even under gray light. There were two cars in the lot, though, so I decided I'd join them, and try for a walk. The car crunched over the ice pack, cracked its back. Melt from up the small mountain cut channels through it, and cold clear water sluiced with great force toward the bare street. We began our way up the hill. Immediately I began to slide around--the ground was still sheer glass. (I'd worn sneakers! It was spring at my house.) Tuffy, a snow dog, leaped over all the impediments of slipperiness; I took tiny cautious steps, afraid to fall as I was still recovering from a car accident concussion. Jesse's little feet immediately turned dark with wetness, and the cold shivered upward to her ears. She turned around frequently to give me dirty looks; sorry, girl, I'll make it up to you!

I could barely inch forward. Even on the side of the gravel pathway, on the snow, the crust was slippery. Tuffy could tell his companions weren't enjoying this as much as he was. He turned down a side path and looked back to see if that was okay. I'd try it. Crunch crunch, we were on the equivalent of the frozen surface of a pond. The ice occasionally gave way, and my heels tipped down. I half enjoyed it--sensations from childhood, the first delight of breaking ice, the strange disconnect between mind and body as the shoe fills with cold water. The memory of how exciting it was not to know the world, to be in a constant process of discovery of the rule of cause and effect, and learning that nature is in charge.

Then the ice became even less stable, and soon I plunged through and was up to my calves in cold water. Time to go home. I called to Tuffy, who'd run ahead. He turned around and looked at me with some alarm--mirroring my own alarmed voice. I'd picked up freezing Jesse--we must have looked forlorn to the eyes of the dog up the hill. I calmed my voice to coax him down. He came reluctantly,  and we walked back to the car, through ice water. Tuffy was disappointed at the brevity of the adventure. Jesse was glad to be back in the front seat, with heat pointed at her. I was exhilarated, but also flummoxed by the hostile conditions. I had imagined spring.

During this whole adventure, I was still thinking about Olive Kitteredge, Elizabeth Strout's book of connected stories. I'd taught it over a couple of classes as part of the course that pairs with our reading series at Rutgers-Newark. One of the most striking features of the book is how Olive is portrayed. Often, she isn't the protagonist, yet she isn't a peripheral character either, except in a couple of stories, where she is basically a walk on, a character in the town.  She frequently occupies the unusual role (for the eponymous character) of being the complication. In classic story plotting, after the character's goal is set, there is a major complication, an overriding oppositional force. This is very often Olive herself, and the ways in which she complicates a story reveal who she is.

For example, in the story "Incoming Tide," a young man called Kevin has returned to town with a plan to shoot himself under a tree at the house where he grew up. He's sitting in the car looking at the bay when Olive Kitteredge gets in and sits next to him. Most of the story is taken up by their conversation. We don't go in to Olive's thoughts, but only see her through Kevin's eyes, and therefore can't quite be certain of why she is so persistent with him, why she won't move on. She brings up the subject of suicide; she knows Kevin's mother had committed suicide. She tells him "that was the case with my father." A bit later Kevin asks:

"How'd he do it?"He rubbed his hand over his thigh.
"My father? Shot himself."

She goes on to describe how her father left no note, and how hard that had been for her mother. The conversation gives Kevin the mental space to remember the existence of the world outside himself.

At the very moment Kevin became aware of liking the sound of her voice, he felt adrenaline pour through him, the familiar, awful intensity, the indefatigable system that wanted to endure.

He quickly turns away from this temptation, but Olive still persists with him, won't leave him alone. She's still stubbornly sitting there when the opportunity arises for him to save the life of another--always a redemptive act, in fiction--and she urges him to move, to step up. For all her prickliness and her blunt speech, she has become his conscience in that moment--undepresssed, and sane.

In a similar way we get other aspects of her in other stories. She is characterized by the effect she has on a particular situation. This is very smart, and works to allow us to know her well, so that by the time we come to stories where she is the protagonist, she is a fully rounded character. This strikes me as being an economical and effective way of putting together a connected of connected stories. Her acerbity and no nonsense ways also serve to counterbalance the deep sweetness of some of the events. Olive provides relief from our own urge to sentimentalize the stories. Perhaps she served as a stabilizing force for the author as well.

In my anecdote above, I have a goal of taking a walk with the dogs in the reservation. The major complication is the abiding presence of winter, even on a warm day. The temporary spike in temperature cannot get around it. If I were writing this as a story, I'd render the description in ways that would have the ice take on symbolic value, and the dogs' varying responses to the environment would acquire meaning.

Interruption

When an accident happens, and you are a mordant person, ever at the ready to laugh at your own small vanities, you might remember the sense of industriousness you had that morning when you set out to work exceptionally early, your bags packed with all your work, carrying a few more items to decorate your new, wonderful office, and two meals, as you would be there until late. 

Industrious! Well, that was smashed to humility.

I had a car accident. I stopped at a red light and a car plowed into mine from behind. He "wasn't paying attention," and hadn't seen the light. We were in Newark. I signaled to a police car and was given a central accident number to call. That voice on that line told me police don't come out to accidents unless an ambulance is needed. Neither of us was badly injured. I wrote down his information, and we parted ways.

I stayed at work, though my colleague Tayari told me tales of brain injury and urged me to go home. By evening I knew she had been right. I had a bad headache, felt very sick at my stomach, and doubt I made much sense in class. 

The next morning I went to the body shop--both kinds. The doc confirmed I have a concussion and should rest my brain. Just when I had the notion that I could watch French and German movies and understand them without subtitles? Killjoy!

The headache and nausea remain. I have misplaced my insurance card. The back of my car looks like a jack o' lantern mouth.

But Egypt...Egypt...Egypt...