David Donavel's Blog

Composing my latest novel, Westminster, was a little different from writing the others in that with Westminster I had a clear idea, almost from the onset, of the general shape of the story, which is to say that I knew that the tale would trace the lives of three couples for a period of months. I suppose one could claim that those couples represent youth, middle years, and old age. By “represent” I mean that each is occupied with issues typically associated with those years. That the story is located at a fictional university, Westminster, is due to the fact that I am familiar with academic institutions, having been in school almost nonstop from age six to sixty-six. Write about what you know, we’re told.

It’s also true that knowing the arc of the narrative did not, in this case, proscribe those discoveries that are the delight of composition. I did not know, for instance, that the strength of young Patrick Morse, which is his capacity to immerse himself in narrative, would also be his weakness in so far as that immersion cripples him for normal human interaction. Nor did I know that Edith Summers would be plagued by a lifetime of regret over early sexual misbehavior. Other discoveries—it would be tedious to list them—surprised and pleased me. I don’t know where they come from. I might as well claim that the Muse whispers in my ear, but such talk is, I suspect, out of fashion and, perhaps, pretentious.

When I was completing the final edit of the book, it occurred to me that Westminster is for me more meditation than narrative. While the sub-stories of the characters each move along in a respectable chronological way, the work as a whole is marked by stasis. There is something motionless about it. It’s not as if the story captures time as in a photograph, but rather as if it recapitulates the rhythm or the patterns of the annual seasons. What happens, for example, to Patrick and Elaine, our very young couple, has happened before to both sets of older folk and what has happened to the older folk will, in time, happen to those coming up. This season, summer as I write, is much like all the other summers I’ve lived through and, I am sure, all those summers that came before. Should we forestall disastrous climate change, summers will stretch out in time unchanged for years and years to come, a version, I suppose of the eternal return.

It seems to be that there ought to be a taste of the meaningless in all of that aimless repetition. A carousel better represents time, in this view, than an arrow pointing bravely into the exciting future. Round and round we go always finding ourselves in the same place. And yet, if the carousel image is intellectually absurd, I think it remains deeply comforting. What’s come before will come again and the stately world proceeds at a pace unrushed and familiar. A mark of this comfort might be the increasing delight we take in very young children, as we ourselves grow old. Grandchildren are an unmatched blessing. They are, one feels, a kind of promise, but a promise not made to us individually. They speak of continuity when we ourselves are faced with expiration.

In writing this now, it occurs to me that my prior novel, Penny, a tale more driven by events than Westminster, nevertheless has some of these meditative qualities. Penny, the main character, at last turns her back on a life driven by the ambition to get somewhere, to get ahead. (That unexamined phrase—ahead of whom, ahead of what?) It’s not as if she experiences the kind of epiphany that might lead to her a life of monkish contemplation. No, for the most part Penny is a person going about the regular business of having a job and getting through her days. But the tragic events that transpire before her eyes leave her with the sense that a life of unhurried, quiet comfort is of higher value. She witnesses individuals leaning forward, eager to grab the future, eager to claw their way to some top, and finds in it nothing appealing.

Herman Melville’s wonderful Moby Dick comes to mind as perhaps the paradigm of the meditative novel. It’s written at the ponderous pace of the wind powered Pequod and there are in it long stretches of detailed observation, passages that proceed at what we might call a vegetative pace. When you pick up the book, it’s best to abandon your usual novelistic expectations, for they will not be met. (By the way, I am not trying to ride Melville’s coattails to literary fame. Moby Dick and Westminster are both meditative stories. Beef bourguignon and a Big Mac are both meals. Enough said.) Novels full of plot and mayhem are great fun and they are often fine achievements. I am not sure they usually give rise to contemplation. And if they don’t? Well contemplation is not to everyone’s liking and I suppose the Muse wears as many costumes as there are writers. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the best stories, the best art, provide us with material to think about. As Phillip Lehman says to Patrick Morse at the start of Westminster, “…the great difficulty is having something to do.”

The recent publication of one of my novels, Ashley, has turned out to be the occasion for one of my old friends to discover that I have become a writer here in the second half of my life. His response to Ashley was enthusiastic and thoughtful. He went so far as to compose a short essay on the book, something that no one else has taken the trouble to do and for that I am flattered and grateful. When he e-mailed me, he wondered if I might recommend some of my other titles and so I suggested Goldengrove because of all the novels, that one has found most favor among my small but devoted group of readers. A few days later, my friend, having finished Goldengrove wrote back telling me that compared to Ashley, it was a bit of a struggle. For a moment I was surprised, but I soon came to see that I shouldn’t have been.

If you’re serious as a writer, you end up intending something when you make a book. This is to say that one’s efforts have, as my students liked to say, “hidden meaning.” Of course, the meaning isn’t hidden; it’s all right there on the page, right on the surface. (Students are in the business of learning to see what’s in front of them.) The serious stories are illustrative. They show us something about ourselves. They illuminate experience and the really good stories illuminate most brilliantly. Sometimes stories entertain, and entertain only, and the best of those are excellent achievements: It’s no mean feat to keep one’s audience rapt. But I’m talking about stories that illuminate as well as entertain.

So, you might start out more or less groping blindly, the first lines, the first few chapters pointing you in a direction that, often, you can’t see. At this point it’s tempting to quit, to give up the enterprise as a foolish waste of time. But if you keep at it, if you have faith in the muse, slowly the “hidden meaning” starts to come clear. Like an image appearing on photographic paper in an old fashioned darkroom, the pattern starts to emerge and, at last, you’ve discovered what it is you want to say and that initial emergent pattern serves as a guide that takes you right to the end. Next you revise in light of your discovered intention. You patch the narrative so that the early sections are consistent with the later ones. English teachers call this, confusingly, foreshadowing, a term suggestive of immensely clever craftsmanship, when it’s simply recalling that it’s helpful to have Ann lose the bracelet in Chapter 2 since it’s something she finds in Chapter 28. And once the patching is complete, there you have it, the finished work, maybe even a piece of art, complete with authorial intention.

Into the world it goes and after a while, with luck, people read it and, with even more luck, tell you what they thought. Sometimes the pattern you discerned in the act of composition comes through; sometimes it does not. More: What does come through differs with readers. Annabelle likes your character Edward because he reminds her of a kind uncle; Simon finds Edward flat and boring. For you, the bewildered author, Edward was clearly a character beset by satanic pride, someone who could have stepped directly out of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

What’s to be made of this? I think novels are like children. You conceive them, nurture them, shape them as best you can, watch them grow and mature and then you send them out into the world and they are no longer yours. Children, of course, belong to themselves; novels belong to readers. Annabelle is right about Edward and so is Simon. And this is to say that readers are co-creators in making a work of fiction. There is no true and definitive Ashley, no true and definitive Goldengrove. There is text, an object, inert, a bunch of black marks on white pages. Text comes to life in the minds of readers and the life it becomes is gloriously variable. What fun!

A former high school teacher, I used to impose Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome on my susceptible students. The story is usually understood to be a tale of thwarted romance. The old ugly, whining, sickly wife, Zenobia (the name itself is enough to make you want to send her to rehab) does all she can to make the life of Ethan, her poor long-suffering idiot husband a misery and chief among her crimes is her insistence that the dewy eyed, luscious love interest Mattie Silver be sent away so as to keep the marriage between Zenobia and Ethan intact. There is nothing Ethan and Mattie can do; they must obey the horrid witch and so they attempt suicide by crashing their sled into a tree. It’s an idiotic response, especially since the crash turns Mattie into Zenobia Two: querulous, disabled, a mess. Read as romance, Ethan Frome is an irritating, silly story, and one utterly unworthy of the usually competent Wharton. Consequently, I taught the novel as a parody of the standard fairly tale. You know the pattern. The lovelies—Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, all interchangeable—are kept from Prince Charming (another cipher) by the wicked older woman. In the fairy tales the ditz and the wooden soldier marry and live happily ever after. In Ethan Frome, the crone holds sway. In Ethan Frome we see what happens after “happily ever after.”

I am certain that Wharton’s intention is satire, but others, most others, would disagree. And so, whose Ethan Frome is the correct one? There are, one supposes, as many versions as there are readers. You can make what you will of my novels.

They can be found at:

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I wrote Ashley, the novel I most recently posted on Amazon as a Kindle book sometime before 2011. The title character was haunting me in a dim and indirect sort of way and so I thought I might dress her up and send her out into the world. When I read the novel through, I was pleased to discover it a much less humbling experience than I had feared. Ashley holds up, it turns out. There are, and this is to be expected, passages in the story that I would write differently today, these mostly her rambling literary musings, but I left them alone because they are representative of the girl’s strength and her youthful failings. The reader will, I hope, bear with her and see her through to the end.

A few years ago I heard a painter talk about her work. She offered the idea that the blank canvas is both a daunting void and a promise of boundless possibility and then went on to say that starting, that is, laying that first line, the first brush stroke on the blankness, dictates everything that will follow. It shapes the painting even before the artist has decided on a final direction, even before she knows the details. Whether all painters have that experience is not for me to say, as I haven’t held a brush since fifth grade (this excludes those wide items used for smearing color on walls and clapboards).

But I think the power of the first line might be true of writers; it is certainly true for me and I saw this with Ashley. In that book, the first sentence goes like this: “Ashley should have known that no one would care about Hawthorne.” That is not, I fear, destined to be an oft quoted beginning, but it does predict the rest of the narrative. Just out of college, Ashley discovers that her academic strength—she was a highly successful English major—makes no difference to the world at large. Her knowledge of the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne is extensive and deep, but no one cares. Her response to this realization is a critical remark on herself. She should have known. That she didn’t is testimony, I suppose, to the heady exhilaration of finding herself important, if only in the narrow safety of her small college. So taken was she with her own newly discovered academic ability that the question of it’s larger value never occurred to her. Her task now that she is but one of the many fish in the big pond that is Boston, is to repeat the achievement. She must find herself again; only this time she lacks the guidance of a shaped curriculum and the warm attention of her instructors. She is on her own.

But more: That she feels she should have known shows that she’s gained a critical self-awareness. It would be possible, I suppose, for her to sneer at the ignorance of those she meets in her after college life, but she sees, rightly so, that her unspoken expectation that her literary skills and knowledge would count for something has been an error. The fault, if there is one, lies in her. At the same time, her imagination, filled with the novels and stories she’s studied, gives her a framework by which she can understand, if only partially, her own experience. This may be, of course, one of the finer benefits of an education.

But what will she be? Will she find a place in her world that will bring her the same sense of meaning, the same satisfied feeling of importance that she had at school? That’s the puzzle that occupies her over the course of her story. At the novel’s close, it’s not clear that she’s solved her problem. She may have or she may have given up her quest in favor of the charms of romance or, perhaps, in favor of a quiet acceptance that life is full of unpredictable changes, that the best course is to swim with the current and make do as best you can.

Ashley’s dilemma is not hers alone. It is disconcerting for many young people to be, as it were, ejected by the alma mater (Latin for fostering mother), that is graduated, banished, sent out into the “real world” where you have to figure things out all on your own. You can’t go back and there is often no clear path forward. It’s daunting. It is not clear whether most adults ever come to satisfying terms with the question. How many become self-actualized? It’s hard to say. It may be that most of us simply grow old.

“Ashley should have known that no one would care about Hawthorne.” I did not know, when I wrote that, when I made my initial mark upon my own canvas, where that sentence would lead me. Those words closed some doors and opened others. Here are the opening words of Penny, a more recent novel: “Christmas. No one in the lot. Penny would have it all to herself.” They work the same way. Penny, it turns out, is an isolato, but I did not know that when I placed her, that Christmas morning, in the parking lot of her local wildlife refuge.

I wonder if the opening lines of other novels shape the narrative in the same way. Think of “Call me Ishmael,” the first sentence in Moby Dick. Those are the words of a reserved observer, someone whose role aboard the Pequod remains obscure, a fellow who holds back. He could have declared, “My name is Ishmael” and then we might have had a different tale. The Great Gatsby opens this way: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.” Whatever else it might be, The Great Gatsby is most certainly a story about the effects of advantage. It’s not only a story about class difference; it’s the novel that best explains the meaning of class difference.

There is, for me at least, genuine excitement in staring down the blank canvas, or in my case, the blank computer screen and then, making my first mark. Doors open; doors close. It’s great fun to discover where the open ones lead.

You can download Ashley at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08ZJR44HC
You can download Penny at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FHCMLCH

Or you can visit daviddonavel.com. for the complete list.

The story I’m working on is stubborn. I’m almost at the forty thousand word mark and I still don’t know what the thing is about. What’s more, I don’t know what that means. One possibility is that it will turn out to be a very long book, something that will try the patience of anyone willing to give it a read. Another possibility, this one more alarming, is that it will never take any shape at all. I might be sitting at my desk in two years, thousands of pages into the thing, still waiting for something to happen. A more sensible approach would be to abandon the project, cut my losses, and start on something else. But I’ve got all those words and besides, I want to find out what happens—if anything.

Here is novelist Alice McDermott on the topic of making these stories: “For the first half of the composition of each of my novels I have been consumed by a sense of not knowing what I’m doing, and for the second half I have been consumed by the certainty that I know exactly what I am doing and should not be doing it.” That is both funny and familiar and if story writing were a life and death sort of activity, it would be scary. But it isn’t. In my current effort it appears I’m still muddling around in the first half, working with that sense that I don’t know what I’m doing, that sense of groping in the dark. I think I’m waiting for my characters to tip their hands. So far, they’re being coy. They go to work; they visit with each other; they eat and drink and have long conversations. They have private thoughts, experience happiness and gloom. They ruminate on the past and wonder about the future and then they do it all over again, but not one of them seems to want step up, rob the bank, have the affair, blow up the high school, something cinematic. All of which is to say that they’re a lot like real people, at least in the way their lives seem to meander. Maybe meandering is what the story is really about. That would try the patience of any reader except maybe Proust, and he’s dead.

Yet, for all this difficulty, when I’m busy following them, which is to say when I’m writing, which is to say when I’m discovering what they’re like and what they do, I’m pretty interested. I like them. I like their small time problems. They aren’t spies or gamblers; they have no relationship with the CIA or terrorists. Nothing cinematic. They’re simple people trying to get through their lives. It would be a shame to quit on them, leave them frozen in time like those curious figures on Keats’s famous urn. So I keep pounding away in the faith that the project will find itself.

If it does, if this book goes the way the others have gone, I’ll enter the second phase that Alice McDermott describes. I’ll know what I’m doing. I’ll have a sense of the arc of the story, as the phrase has it, and I’ll gain a hazy notion of how it will all end. The tale will stop wandering. I’ll learn why I picked this set of individuals or, perhaps more accurately, why this set of characters emerged from the obscurity that is my writing brain.

And then what? McDermott’s certainty that she “knows exactly what she’s doing and should not be doing it” is disturbing. Taken in a benign sense, I suppose it could mean that the story has decided to head down an artistic dead end. This might be true even if the tale were a page-turner, for many stories that are compelling are nonetheless forgettable. We enjoy the ride, but once we’re off the bus, the thrill is gone. Like sporting events or many films, the value of such books never rises above entertainment. And that’s not bad, but it may give rise to authorial certainty that one ought not be making exactly that tale.

Having the sense that one is one the wrong track, however, may mean that the entire story making enterprise is empty, a darker prospect. The fun in story telling, as in story reading, is finding out what happens next. For the reader, that often takes you right to the end. The writer however, as McDermott suggests, knows what’s up. Writers may start in the dark, but they finish in the light of day and knowing how it’s all going to work out also means that the fun, or much of it, is over. And so, why push forward? The world is glutted with stories. And now, with the advent of electronic publication and the democratic Kindle, anyone who can buy a computer and follow directions, can be a writer and published to boot. Maybe we should quit. Maybe writing stories is not at all what we should be doing. I think of that. Maybe my time would be better spent volunteering at the local wildlife center or supporting sensible candidates for public office, activities that might show positive results, rewards of a concrete sort.

Maybe. On the other hand, I tell myself and I think this point of view is as correct as its opposite, the world does need stories. What comes to us from past are, in part, the stories. Out of the thick matrix of individuals making art rises, in every era, those novels or plays, paintings or music that, for whatever reason, last. These become our ways of understanding who we were, where we came from, and who we are. These are the “documents” that shape our collective and individual imagination and help us comprehend our own experience, which is always a daunting task for each of us. I know it is doubtful that anything I create will last, be remembered, rise to august heights, but what I produce, whatever it’s value, is part of the mix, part of the matrix of our time, the soil, so to speak, of our years.

I don’t know how great works emerge. I think that process might be as mysterious as the emergence of character and plot in any individual writer’s work. But I think it fair to say that unless writers and other artists push through, finish the job, and get the work into the world, we will have no opportunities for anything to emerge at all.

My “emergencies” can be found at http://www.amazon.com/David-Donavel/e...

In his darkly humorous moments my father put forth the notion that human beings amounted to little more than an elaborate alimentary canal. Our task, he maintained, was to worm our way though an embarrassing quantity of food until we, in turn, became food for worms. Of what people referred to as the higher faculties, he had little to say and, I suspect, less regard. Dad was no Pollyanna. It will not surprise you that he was not a churchgoer.

The other day I turned 68, a cause for celebration, to be sure. People my age like to observe on the occasions of birthdays that having one is better than not. Well, we all clamor for more time and that’s true even if my father was right. While we may bear discouraging similarities to the worms, we also have these big brains, which are a curse and a blessing.

Lately, and not just because of the birthday, I have been thinking of myself as an old animal, which may be simply another version of my father’s conception. The comparison occurs to me, I believe, because as I age, I spend an increasing amount of time and effort on body maintenance: regular sessions at the gym, occasional physical therapy, visits to the cardiologist, the dermatologist, the primary care fellow, and, of course, hours in various dental chairs. (This last so that I can continue to worm my way through all that food.) Like an old and worn out family pet, I seem to require an increasing amount of physical care. We don’t put our dogs or our retirees down without good cause.

This isn’t self-pity, or if it is, it’s not personal. If you are not an old animal right now, with luck you’re destined to become one. Eventually, something will betray you: the knees will fail, plaque will clot your arteries, you’ll need to have the cataracts removed. The list goes on and on and on.

Still, despite the undeniable, if limited, truth of my father’s depiction, and despite our vulnerability to afflictions, the prospect is not entirely dark. Unlike the worms or that grey-muzzled dog asleep in the corner, we make things. If we turn all that food into shit, we also turn it into airplanes, cities, cameras, kitchen utensils, computers. This list, too, goes on and on and on. Look around you. Of all those things, to my mind, among the most encouraging are our artistic productions.

Right now the radio is playing something by J. S. Bach. It’s remarkable that I can be tapping away on my computer while listening to Bach. But the real wonder, of course, is the music itself. And Bach is merely one example. Think of the compositions of that child, Mozart or the symphonies of deaf Beethoven or, in a similar vein, the poetry of poor blind John Milton. Any artist or artisan is or becomes an old animal, an alimentary canal, as my father would have it, but those whose bodies or minds are afflicted—Van Gogh comes to mind—underscore the miracle. It’s as if, despite the fact of our being a fragile construction of bones and blood, we squeeze from our bodies the most remarkable creations. Who says you can’t wring blood from a stone? Of course you can. We do it everyday.

I am considering here those higher faculties about which my father was, in my presence at least, silent. He’s long gone now or I’d send these musings to him. I can only speculate on what he might say about them. I will observe that he, too, was a maker. A welder by trade, he spent each day of his work life—or most of it—building things. We, his family, never got to see much of it, but there was one occasion where we did. For a brief time, our neighborhood organized itself into an association of some improving kind and one of the projects was to build a ball field for the hordes of children who would come to be called baby boomers. We had the land and it was easy enough to mow it, level it, and pace out the base paths. My father’s contribution was an immense backstop, a three-sided welded construction of pipe and chain link fence that turned our field into something genuine, something in which the neighborhood could take some pride.

When I think of him dismissing himself and the rest of us as a can of worms or when I find myself feeling a little discouraged by the way the animal continues to age, I console myself with thoughts of that backstop. Yes, Dad, we are hopeless consumers and in the end it might not come to anything but pain and dust, but even you were a maker, a guy who built things, made something from nothing.

My own constructions can be found at: http://www.amazon.com/David-Donavel/e...

Play

Hanging in our kitchen are two prints by Jack Vettriano. They are well known. In one, an elegantly dressed couple is dancing on sand flats near the ocean. In attendance are two others, perhaps a butler and a maid each holding dark umbrellas against the evening wind and rain. The couple is elegantly dressed. He is entirely in black, a while collar showing his costume is formal and she is in a red evening gown.

I like to imagine that the other print is the next morning. We are on the same flats, the sun shining through some haze, perhaps clouds left over from the evening before. Two young women attired in modest sundresses are searching the sand, perhaps hunting shells. One holds a white sunshade; the other has with her a fellow dressed in long trousers, a white shirt, and boater who is holding an identical sunshade above her head.

We’ve had them for years. I see them everyday, but never grow weary of them. They are especially helpful in January when weather for such excursions seems as if it will never roll round again.

They are entirely fanciful, full of play. I am almost certain that the artist never witnessed what he’s depicted, not in his real breathing life. Still, there is something true about them. Or it might be more accurate to say that they express something true, a sense of what it is like to wander near the sea in open spaces, the air clean and salty, some mix of remembered experience and imagination that brings us pleasure.

The famous Wordsworth dictum that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” comes to mind. Attractive as I find those Vettriano prints, I think that if I were ever to find myself magically transported to either scene, I wouldn’t like it much. Too much wind and rain in the first. You can tell by the way the maid is trying to keep her cap in place. And in the second, if it is the next day, the likelihood is that we’re up early because we couldn’t sleep in. Too much champagne? We’ve made romantic errors? We’re worried about the family at home? So the prints, like a Wordsworth poem, are not intended to reproduce experience, but to fancifully, playfully, represent something essential about it, and at a distance.

The prints mean that I don’t have to join those dancing, umbrella-carrying figures, not in my own breathing life. And in my own fanciful view of them, I can siphon off all that I know might be unpleasant about that beach. I can squeeze from memory and imagination, from perhaps emotion recollected in tranquility, the pleasure I desire and the pleasure alone, distilled, free of real life complications. Which might be to say that I can enjoy the atmosphere of the scenes in itself. Vettriano has done that for me.

Epicurus teaches that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure and beauty. Henry David Thoreau, in a noteworthy and, I believe underappreciated passage in Walden, claims that “children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.” Sometimes Thoreau can be a curmudgeon as he demonstrates in the second portion of that sentence. The first part, to my mind, is remarkable for it suggests, with Epicurus, that play is our raison d’etre.

At the insistence of my intelligent and interesting son, I am currently reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I’m a little old for such an adventure, I think, but despite my own tendencies toward the curmudgeonly, I am enjoying my treasure quest with Bilbo Baggins and that troop of dwarves. But, as with the prints on my wall, the journey through the pitchy Mirkwood is not one I want to take in my literal breathing life. Like most, I think, I have an aversion to goblins and giant spiders and that is to say that I, like Bilbo, prefer my Hobbit hole: my warm bed, and my full larder to physical hardship, however adventuresome and romantic.
I will finish the book partly because reading about those fierce creatures is, of course, quite different from having to face them myself. This is an instance of having my cake and eating it, too, I believe. I can sit secure in my Hobbit hole in my breathing life, while another part of me can strike out into a wintry unknown rife with terrifying danger. I have the luxury of having to deal with neither the wind and rain on the dance beach nor the dragons and trolls.

As children, we entangle ourselves in games: sandlot baseball, checkers, hide and seek, and countless others of our own private devising, nameless engagements indulged in with others and on our own. Adults call this play and, taking our cue from them, we do too and later we come to devalue those experiences in favor of something called work. But it is to play we are drawn all our lives, however guiltily, and that play has such magnetism for us ought to be taken as a sign that our grown up assessment might be mistaken. We might look at it this way: play is deeply serious without being consequential while work, full of consequence, is so often trivial.

To look at pictures, read poems and stories, to listen to music and dance, to visit with family and friends, to swing our golf clubs, raise flowers, go fishing or ice skating, what is all that but play? It is all vastly pleasurable, intensely serious, and gloriously without purpose, a delightful waste of time.

The figures in the picture dance as did Vettriano when he painted them, as does Tolkien when he makes a Hobbit, as do we all when we have the great good fortune to set aside for a moment our getting and spending, and attend to, as Epicurus says, the pursuit of beauty and pleasure.

My own dancing can be found at

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In his short book, The Educated Imagination, Northrup Frye lucidly offers some ideas about what literature is (and is not) and what uses we might make of it. It is an interesting project not because stories are likely to vanish from our culture, but because it is not immediately clear why outlandish tales such as King Lear or Moby Dick or perhaps particularly Paradise Lost, with it’s talking snakes and opposing angelic legions, matter. Frye has some ideas on the topic and if you’re up for a good read and interested, I recommend the book.

It will come as no surprise that in such a study he also has some comments to make about writers and it is these, I find, that stay in my mind largely, I suppose, because now that I’m retired, I think of myself as a writer more than I ever have before. (Identity appears to be grounded in activity, after all). Early in the book, Frye makes the observation that literature does not improve with time; today’s writers are not better than their predecessors, just different. Jane Austen is neither better nor worse that F. Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner and while ranking authors might be an amusing way to spend an afternoon, it’s an empty game, one best lift to those magazines that constantly claim they’ve found the world’s ten best beaches, nightclubs, dog parks etc, etc. etc. He then goes on to say:
writers don’t seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstition of all kinds. And you certainly wouldn’t turn to…poets for guidance or leadership in the [modern] world. You’d hardly go to Ezra Pound, with his fascism…and anti-Semitism. Or to Yeats, with his spiritualism and fairies and astrology. Or to D.H. Lawrence, who’ll tell you that it’s a good thing for servants to be flogged because that restores the precious current of blood reciprocity between servant and master (25).
Later he adds:
…the poet is not only very seldom a person one would turn to for insight into the state of the world, but often seems even more gullible and simple-minded than the rest of us. For the poet the particular literary conventions he adopts are likely to become, for him, facts of life. If he finds that the kind of writing he’s best at has a good deal to do with…a white goddess like Graves…or episcopal sermons like T.S. Eliot…these things are apt to take on a reality for him that seems badly out of proportion to his contemporaries (89).

Now, I find this a little humbling. Who wants to think of himself as more gullible, more susceptible to superstition than, say, his barber? But I also find it to be a helpful corrective. As a student, I often found myself in trembling awe before the “altar of literature.” Milton, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Wharton, Melville, Hawthorne, were larger than larger than life. They were divinities, abundantly wise, compassionate, insightful, human beings elevated and when I stood before some building (I can’t recall which one) and saw their names chiseled into granite, it made perfect sense. And now I come across Northrup Frye explaining to me that some of these people—maybe most of them—are individuals we might regard as crackpots.

Well, why shouldn’t they be? In my blog entry on the muse, I confess that much of the writing I do comes as if from the ether. And Frye himself notes that “much of a writer’s best writing is or seems to be involuntary” and cites the famous dictum by D.H. Lawrence: “don’t trust the novelist; trust his story”(92). I don’t mean to say that literary composition is magical, a product of inspiration, something that comes to people as if in a dream. It isn’t. At least it isn’t in my case. I stake out hours for the work and once I sit down I don’t get up until I’ve written at least a thousand words. And I read a bit to keep my hand in and from what I’ve learned about the habits of other writers, I see that I conform to the pattern. Still, for all the grunt work that goes into composition, much of it feels out of my control, as if I were engaged in automatic writing.

Making the stories is a combination of perseverance and, for want of a better phrase, following the muse, and I think it’s fair to say that the muse would not sing to me—however faintly—if I didn’t stick to it. And I suspect that’s the case for others, too, writers and painters and musicians, all who pursue the arts and athletes, too, which is to say that LeBron could ring up all those points if he didn’t spend some grunt time shooting and shooting and shooting. Talent, whatever that is, would not be enough. But, and here Frye’s observations seem especially apt, none of this blesses me, or others, with any separate elevated wisdom. Yes, I can make stories, such as they are, and it’s a pleasure to do so and I hope they are at least readable. But that does not mean that I any less foolish than anyone else, my barber included. Like I said: humbling.

Still, those names do deserve to be carved in granite. They do, but in a way different that I imagined when I was much younger. Milton, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Wharton, Melville, Hawthorne, and many others, comprise what we might call a writers Hall of Fame, a literary Cooperstown and we ought to honor them, as we honor baseball players, for their prowess in a narrow field of human endeavor. As a writer I suppose I wish this were not the case. It would be handsome to believe that making stories is the most important project a person can find in life and that writing endows one with special insight, sage-like wisdom, deep compassion and grace. But it isn’t and it doesn’t. It’s one project among many, nothing more, and while it may offer a slim chance at a pathway to grandeur, even that at its best is a narrow road. As I said: humbling.

My efforts at grandeur can be found as Kindle books at the following: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&f...



All quotations are from: Frye, Northrup, The Educated Imagination, (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1974)

In response to a study that suggested that reading literary fiction might improve one’s social skills, novelist Louise Erdrich said, “Writers are often lonely obsessives, especially the literary ones. It’s nice to be told what we write is of social value.” However, I would still write even if novels were useless.”* We writers are eager to believe that what we do has some value apart from giving readers a chance to waste an afternoon every now and then. But what stuck with me when I read this was not the core idea in the study, encouraging as it might be, but Erdrich’s characterization of writers as “lonely obsessives.”
I was doing errands this morning, out in the world buying parts for a broken lamp and the fixings for baked ziti and after my last stop I piled into the car, put the key in the ignition, and tried to turn the beast on. I couldn’t get the key to turn for a moment. I withdrew the key and looked at it because in my errand running haze I thought for a split second that I had picked up the key to the other car, also a Subaru, which would explain why it wouldn’t turn. But of course, such an error was impossible. I was not at home and that was the only key I had. I jiggled the steering wheel and voila, everything returned to normal. Except me.
Because I started to pay attention to what had happened inside my head. I wasn’t worried about the foolish mistake. I wasn’t worried at all. I was intrigued that my mistaken idea occurred to me as image. That is, a visual of the other set of keys popped into my consciousness as an explanation for my little difficulty. And I rejected that explanation immediately. Like I said, the error and the correction took place in the shortest amount of time, way too short to have conducted any of those small and rapid mental operations in language. It was only later that I went through the comparatively laborious process of finding words for all this.
And of course it makes sense that immediate experience precedes the words. Before our species could speak, we were animals fully equipped with excellent sensory apparatus. Indeed, each of us recapitulates in our infancy that journey our species made from not speaking to being clever users of language. The words, to some extent, are a way to capture and then perhaps communicate raw experience. You might say that language is an experience-processing program.
But we do more with language that speak it. We also listen to it, write it and read it. And when we do those things, it is as if the entire process is reversed. Instead of taking raw sensory experience and translating—if that’s the right word—it into a code accessible to anyone who understands the specific language that appears on the page or screen, writing is a way of using code to create experience, albeit second hand or virtual or vicarious.
Now, no one would claim that experience mediated by language is the same as the immediate and real thing. That’s why going to France is more fun than reading travel books. But for many of us, it might be the case that the experience we have as a consequence of reading, especially reading, occupies as much space in our personal memory or, what can I call it, Rolodex? hard drive? as the real thing itself. Take, for a couple of examples, Abraham Lincoln and Shakespeare’s character, Hamlet. Anyone today thinking about those two figures will conjure up images, feelings, memories, and so on. But no one today has ever laid eyes on either one and in the case of Hamlet, no one has laid eyes on him ever, not even Shakespeare. Are they real? Well, we know Lincoln lived because we believe the people who tell us he did, which is perfectly reasonable. (It’s nutty to deny all of history and geography, science and whatever else simply because you haven’t had first hand experience of it). So, we can say that Lincoln is real. But what of Hamlet? My guess is that he’s better known than Lincoln and yet he never lived in the same way. And yet he’s real, as real to us today as Lincoln—which is odd since he’s fictional—only more famous.
At last, both Hamlet and Lincoln and so many others and so much else we know exist as images in our minds that were first simply words, simply language, sounds or marks on the page out of which we conjure meaning. I find this all quite remarkable and I know that whatever thinking I am capable of on this topic is rudimentary compared with those whose life work it is to study our relationship to language and meaning. I know that, but I’m still swept off my feet by a flashing image of keys, and by the idea that Hamlet, that fraud, that fiction, is vividly alive for perhaps millions.
Sometimes I think about baked ziti and then sometimes I think about stuff like this. I’ll not write about ziti and you may find this dull or odd or commonplace. I don’t know. I do suspect that I think about language because of my own writing and maybe, as some have been kind enough to suggest, I need to get out more. Again, I don’t know. Perhaps this is one of the things Erdrich meant by “lonely obsessive.”
My own fraudulent, fictive figures can be found in the novels I’ve placed on Amazon as Kindle books. Look for them here: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&f...


*(http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10...)

Every so often, someone sponsors a fund raiser that involves spending time with local athletes. We’re invited to buy a chance and if we win we get to have lunch and a game of golf, for example, with, say, Dustin Pedroia, the Red Sox second baseman. The television advertisements for these lotteries seem pitched a note higher than usual, as if these are particularly exciting prizes, as if anyone would jump at such a prospect.

That excitement always leaves me feeling odd. I have no desire to have lunch with Dustin. None. But sometimes, looking at the television hype, I feel as if I ought to. I wonder at my deficiency. Apparently other guys—for I think this is mostly aimed at males—are aching for such an opportunity. I wonder about that. I wonder what they’d talk about and the dialogues that I imagine are absurdly thin. They’re idolatrous on the part of the prizewinner, bored and tolerant on the part of Dustin. And strained. I also think, uncharitably, that the prize is attractive mostly as a kind of trophy once the day with celebrity is finished. It’s not something anyone would really like to do, but rather something guys might like to mention to other guys at work or at the bar. But, as I said, that’s uncharitable. I guess I simply don’t know why the idea is attractive.

This is to take nothing away from Dustin Pedroia or any other athlete or accomplished celebrity (for I would like to take something away from those figures whose celebrity consists primarily in being celebrated). Like most New Englanders, I like watching the local teams and of all the athletes I enjoy the play of Tom Brady the most. But I still don’t want to have lunch with him. And, to push this a bit harder, I don’t want to listen to him after the games. It makes no difference if the Patriots win or lose. He’s outstanding as a quarterback but only average as a guy who talks about quarterbacking. This assessment might account in part for the way I envision the talk during the prize lunch.

All this is to say that what is interesting about Pedroia, Brady and others is their work. When they are at the top of their games, they are dazzling. It might be argued that those moments represent a confluence of athletics and art, moments when the player and the game are inseparable. One is reminded of the lines from W. B. Yeats’s “Among School Children”: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?” If those athletes did not give us such samples of near transcendence, of near perfection, we’d pay them no mind and would never purchase chances for lunch and a round of golf.

If this is so with respect to athletes, it is also the case with respect to writers. Of course, as far as I know no one is out there peddling chances for lunch with Philip Roth or Richard Russo. If they were, the conversations might be brighter, for writers are wordsmiths after all. But the talk might not be. It might be as strained and difficult as those at the athlete’s table and it’s easy to imagine the same mismatch of idolatry and tolerance.
As with the athlete, it’s the work that matters. We know the names of the writers—and musicians, dancers, painters and so on—because of the work. It’s the finished thing that shines, that leaves us enchanted, spellbound, charmed, those words borrowed from magic. It’s the art that counts, not the artist. It’s the performance that matters, that distills and perfects effort. The artist, sloppy human that he or she is, fades, recedes into the quotidian, the humdrum of eat and drink, of sleep and visits to the dentist, the world so familiar to us all. And what a relief that is. Imagine the impossible strain of living each moment at one’s Super Bowl, World Series, and Great Gatsby best.

Lunch with Brady? Lunch with Russo? No thanks. I’ll tune in on Sunday and watch Brady pick apart his opponent’s defense and I’ll read the next novel that Russo produces and will do these things with pleasure. But I’ll leave them both alone at lunch and if they have the usual good luck, they can share the meal with people who love them for the faulted, frail creatures that, aside from their shining moments, they must be.

“I know a woman who compared writing a novel to knitting an argyle sock the size of a football field. I think that is very apt. It’s just such a struggle to shape it all up.” That quote from novelist Sue Miller is both amusing and correct. It is indeed a struggle to shape it all up and with every one of my books I often felt I was going at it blind, banging out the words, seeing where they would take me and hoping that the thing would eventually right itself. The good news is that the books always took some kind of shape although, to push Ms. Miller’s metaphor, sometimes the sock fit better than others.

Currently I’m working on a new one. It has multiple narrators and—this is the new part at least for me—they are all speaking as if to a counselor or judge or perhaps the reader herself. That is, so far, each character is presenting his or her case, trying to explain individual understandings of the mess their lives have become. Right now I’m about 35,000 words into it—my usual length is between 80,000 and 100,000 words—and as always when I’m at this point, I’m not sure where the story will go or even, really, what it might prove to be about. But the situation intrigues me and the characters are interesting in their outrage, pain, disappointment, and sly self-serving justifications for their madness or bad behavior and I want to see what happens to them.

On the weekend I was speaking to a painter friend. I made the observation that no matter how many books I make, each one is new, each one knotty in some way or another. It’s as if pattern for the argyle sock keeps changing, but, of course, there is no pattern. She offered the notion that her paintings were the same; each one, she said, was at some point like a problem child up there on her easel making trouble. Hers is another metaphor and not far removed from the image of that immense argyle sock. But it’s curiously apt in that the novel or the painting not only begins to have a life of its own, but it’s a life that the painter or writer, the parent I suppose, begins to cherish. Just as you want a problem child to shape up, so do you want the painting or story to do the same. “Come on,” you say if only in your private mind, “make something of yourself.” The difference, of course, is that with paintings, socks, or novels, the consequences of failure are minor. Delete the file, unravel the yarn, trash the canvas and start again. But it’s not as easy to quit as it may at first seem. As with real problem children, you stick with them, see them through if you can.

Despite that nearly parental attachment to the project, the book or the painting, there is terrific liberation in knowing you can turn your back on the enterprise at any moment. I could spend my writing time reading all those books on my long list or taking walks or fooling around on Facebook. I could become even more of a bother to my wife and children. I could perfect my culinary skills and gain even more weight. I could go birding or join a service club, volunteer at My Neighbor’s Table or just take long naps. The world is rich with opportunity, especially for those of us in retirement.

As I said, there is liberation in knowing I could quit. But oddly and ironically, that knowledge and the liberation that comes with it may provide the very push that keeps me at it. Since I don’t have to keep writing, I will. Or at least I think I will. Since there is no one telling me I must continue, I can for nothing depends upon it. Liberation. Freedom. The freedom to and the freedom from join here in a strange motivational dance. If the book never takes shape, if the argyle is never finished, if the problem child fails to come around, well, it will be okay. And no one will ever have to witness the failure, if there is one, except me. My dear and patient wife will not have to find polite things to say about the raveled yard because she need never see it. So I will push on because, as I said, those characters are so interesting and I do want to learn what becomes of them.

Some of the novels that did shape up can be found as Kindle books at: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&f...