Building
the Roaring Bonfire
When I was in graduate school I
began to experience a heart condition that would go undiagnosed for years. I went to the cardiologist. The visit was the first time I went to a doctor
who was about my own age. Now, of course, they are all teenagers. So, this doctor and I chatted as peers. She was in her very first week of practicing
medicine and she confessed to me that she feared she had made a terrible
mistake.
What
would you rather be doing? I asked
Baking
bread, she said. But now I have a fortune
to repay in school loans, so I have to do this.
Do you remember the Talking Heads
song “Once in a Lifetime” from the 1980s?
I hope so. In the video David Byrne hitting himself in the forehead with
his open palm, shouting in terror, as if woken from a dream: “This is not my
beautiful house! This is not my
beautiful wife! My God, what have I
done!?”
Thoreau said, because most of you
in the room know I can’t speak long of these matters without citing Thoreau,
said he hoped not to get to the end of his life and find out that he had not
really lived.
We are here [at this residency] to live, as Thoreau advised,
deliberately.
We are now watching a whole generation
of writers and artists leave us. Since
last summer: W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, Donald Hall, Philip Roth. Much loved writers, or in Roth’s case,
admired, if not loved. There is much
wailing and gnashing of teeth over these losses.
But there shouldn’t be. These writers lead long and extremely
productive lives. They did their work,
said what they had to say. We need not
mourn.
We should mourn the tragedies of
the creative lives that are never lived.
The unwritten books, the young who leave us before they find their true
selves, live their best lives, which, by the way, is what you’re here to do.
Alice Hoffman wrote:
It is the deepest
desire of every writer, the one we never admit or even speak of: to
write a book we can
leave as a legacy. And although it is
sometimes easy to forget,
wanting to be a writer
is not about reviews or advances or how many copies are
printed or sold. It is much simpler than that, and much more
passionate. If you do it
right , and if they
publish it, you may actually leave something behind that can last
forever.
This spring I was writing a long
piece that required mostly research and my main
source was The American Alpine
Journal, a record of mountaineering published every year since the 1902.
I own copies of this dating back to 1966 and the whole set of them is
searchable on-line. I was completely immersed in the work and I had experienced
a kind of thrill that this amazing historical record even exists. And then, I remembered that I’m a part of the
Journals: I’ve been the book reviews editor since 1995. I felt humbled and honored at the same time:
I am a part of this enormous enterprise.
I remembered a passage from John
Cheever’s journals that describes this exact feeling and I went to his
journals, collected in a single volume to find the line. Do you know Cheever’s journal? It’s one of
the most harrowing documents in American letters. He was a profoundly unhappy person, an alcoholic,
in an awful marriage—perhaps his
bisexuality lent to this awfulness.
He would re-read his books, throw them into the fireplace. A truly tortured soul, who experienced just
enough transcendent moments to keep himself alive.
Anyway, I went down the Cheever
rabbit-hole and never found the lines I was looking for. But I found these that I wanted to share with
you:
From early in his life:
We are as poor as we have ever
been. The rent is not paid, we have very
little to eat, relatively little to eat: canned tongue and eggs. We have many bills. I can write a story a week, perhaps
more. I’ve tried this before and never
succeeded, and I will try again.
From
middle age:
To disguise nothing, to conceal
nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our
happiness; to write about my sexual
clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of my discouragement—I seem to
glimpse it in my dreams—my despair. To
write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength
when these are ended: to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized
by a stranger in the post office, a half seen face in a train window; top write
about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good
and evil, the end of the world.
From
near the end:
Literature is the only consciousness
we possess. Literature has been the
salvation of the damned. Literature,
literature has inspired and guided loves, routed despair, and can perhaps, in
this case save the world.
This feeling of being part of
something larger than oneself. Once I was
at the MLA [Modern Language Association] conference and I walked out of my
hotel room and just as I closed the door, a woman walked out of her room, and
it was Toni Morrison, arguably, the greatest American literary figure of our
times. I couldn’t believe it: I felt
like I should crawl behind her, head bowed, and ask permission to touch the hem
of her dress. I was half-stunned to
realize I breathe the same air as she, walk the earth at the same time. What a marvelous coincidence!
She is, by the way, short, and has
magificent hair.
My novel took a long time to write,
a decade, depending on how you count, and a long time to publish, another
decade. Throughout these years, for some
reason, I shared it with no one, not even with Aisha, my wife and usually my first
reader. When she finally did read the
novel, she walked up to me, and asked, “Who wrote this book?”
There is a writing self that is mostly hidden from public
view.
“The
story of your life is not your life.
It’s your story”––John Barth
“A
good book is more intelligent than its author.
It can say things the writer is not aware of.”—Umberto Eco
Do
not call your life by hard names, Thoreau admonished, it is not so bad as you.
Salvatore
Scibona, author of most recently of the novel, The Volunteer, writes this in a recent essay about effort:
An older writer I admire, when asked
the polite question what he did for a living, used to snap, “Nothing.” Yet he worked constantly for more
than fifty years on story after story, nearly all set in the town,
painstakingly described, where he still lives. It must have helped him somehow
to claim his effort didn’t count. Recently, upon coming home from his daily
walk, strong as ever in his legs but so deep in dementia that he no longer
knows his wife’s name, he told her, “There’s an extraordinary town out
there—somebody really should write a book about it.”
And
from the same essay:
Pride comes not from the extent of
our territory but from a belief that the territory is completely ours. No art
with any life in it can be made by insisting like this on self-sufficiency. To write
with only your own power is to make a dead letter if you make anything at all.
The writer Lauren Groff, do you know her work? Her most recent book is a collecction of
stories called Florida, highly
recommended. She recently published a
collaborative work in Tin House with
her friend the graphic artist, Leela Corman.
In her prefatory notes to the project, she wrote:
These
are hard times, my humans. It is a beautiful and life-giving thing to find your
most furious friend, match your brain to theirs, and make art together. Build a roaring bonfire in this deepening
dark.
We are here, my friends, to build
this bonfire together. That is the work
of the next two weeks.
