Building the Roaring Bonfire

                                                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.