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From
time to time The Book Review has invited both new and established
writers to comment on various aspects of their craft: their imaginative
and autobiographical sources, their practices of composition, the origin
of their sense of vocation. These essays are intended to provide a
forum for writers to consider the rewards and perils of their craft.
A
nightmare recurs since childhood: Facing a friend, I struggle for words
and emit no sound. I have an urgent message to share but am struck
dumb, my jaw is clamped shut as in a metal vise, I gasp for breath and
can not set my tongue free. At the dream's end my friend has fled and I
am locked into the solitude of silence.
The
severe stutter I had as a child, my father's impatience and swiftness
of tongue, his constant interruption of me when I tried to speak?
Or
perhaps another incident which also has to do with the threat of the
Father and the general quirkiness of my French education: One day when I
was 9 I was assigned my first free composition. From infancy I had been
tutored at home in Paris by a tyrannical governess, the two of us
traveling once a week to a correspondence school whose Gallically rigid
assignments (memorization of Asian capitals and Latin verbs, codifying
of sentence parts) were hardly conducive to a fertile imagination.
''Write a Story About Anything You Wish,'' Central Bureau suddenly
ordered. Filled with excitement and terror by this freedom, I began as a
severe minimalist:
''The little girl
was forbidden by her parents to walk alone to the lake at the other end
of the long lawn. But she wished to visit a luminous green-eyed frog who
would offer her the key to freedom. One day she disobeyed her parents
and walked to the lake and immediately drowned.'' (The End)
''Pathetic
dribble!'' the Father stormed on his daily visit to my study room.
''You dare call that a story! What will become of you if you can't ever
finish anything!''
It was a warm May
evening of 1939, the year before he died in the Resistance. The love of
my life (my father was himself an occasional scribbler) was warning me
that I should never write again. I still remember the hours I spent
honing those meager sentences, the square white china inkwell into which
I squeezed the rubber filler of a Waterman pen, the awkwardness of
ink-stained fingers as I struggled to shape my letters (I was born
left-handed and had been forced to use my right), the tears, the sense
that my writing was doomed to be sloppy, abortive, good for naught.
So
it may have begun, the central torment of my life, my simultaneous need
to commit fantasies to paper and the terror that accompanies that need,
the leaden slowness of the words' arrival, my struggle with the clamped
metal jaws of mouth and mind. An affliction deepened by that
infatuation with the written word that possesses most solitary children.
For books had been the only companions of my childhood prison,
particularly such stirring tales of naval adventure as ''Captains
Courageous'' or ''Two Years Before the Mast,'' which fueled dreams of
running away to sea and never being seen again. Then came the war, the
flight to America, the need to learn a new language. English was learned
as a means of survival and became a lover to be seduced and conquered
as swiftly as possible, to be caressed and rolled on the tongue in a
continuous ecstasy of union. English words, from the time I was 11 on,
were my medium of joy and liberation. I fondled them by memorizing 20
lines of Blake when 10 had been assigned; I wooed them so assiduously
that I won the Lower School Spelling Bee within 10 months of having come
to the United States. (I was the only foreign scholarship student at
the Spence School; shortly after the contest a delegation of Spence
parents descended on my mother, who was supporting us by designing hats
at Henri Bendel's, to verify that we were true emigres and not usurpers
from Brooklyn).
I continued to court
my new tongue by struggling for A's in English, by being elected editor
of the school paper, which a predecessor had artfully named Il
Spenceroso. Omens of a ''literary gift'' continued to accrete - a prize
in Bryn Mawr's Freshman Essay Contest, the Creative Writing Award at
Barnard for three stories of a strictly autobiographical nature. Such
portents brought no security. I fled from myself by being a compulsive
talker, a bureaucrat, polemicist, hack journalist. I had taken no more
than two courses in literature beyond Freshman English, thinking I was
smartass enough to learn it for myself. One of the other courses had
been a creative writing class that earned me a C-for first-person
fictions about situations I knew nothing about - I seemed always to be a
middle-aged alcoholic actor seeking salvation in a Bowery church. After
that fiasco I had sought refuge in rigor and formalism - physics,
philosophy, medieval history. There was a curious furtiveness about the
way I continued to carry on my love affair with literature. I copied
entire paragraphs from Henry James or T.S. Eliot into private notebooks
out of sheer delectation in the texture of their prose. In a stretch of a
few solitary vacation weeks I would memorize 200 lines of Marvell for
the pleasure of speaking them to myself during nights of insomnia. Why
all this reluctance and covertness?
''You're
writing pure junk,'' Charles Olson had stormed at me during a summer
workshop at Black Mountain when I'd handed him my prize-winning college
stories. ''If you want to be a writer keep it to a journal.'' The giant
walrus rising from his chair, 6 feet 7 inches of him towering. ''... AND
ABOVE ALL DON'T TRY TO PUBLISH ANYTHING FOR 10 YEARS!'' Another
paternal figure had censored me into silence, perhaps this time for the
best.
I
followed Big Charles's advice. I kept my journal in New Orleans where I
dallied as if I had 10 lives to squander, drinking half a bottle of gin
a night as I followed a jazz clarinetist on the rounds of Bourbon
Street. I remained faithful to my secret vice in the dawns of New York
when I worked the night shift at United Press, writing World in Briefs
about Elks' Meetings and watermelon-eating contests in Alabama. I
remained loyal to my journal through a myriad of failed aspirations
while flirting with the thought of entering Harvard's Department of
Architecture, of going to Union Theological Seminary for a degree in
divinity. I persevered with it when I moved to Paris to earn my living
as a fashion reporter, dallying with a succession of consummate
narcissists to whom I eventually gave their literary due. I continued to
write it when I fulfilled one of my life's earliest dreams and spent
five years as a painter of meticulously naturalistic landscapes and
still lifes. By then I was married and had two children. And since I
lived in deep country and in relative solitude, encompassed by domestic
duties, the journal became increasingly voluminous, angry,
introspective. The nomad, denied flight and forced to turn inward, was
beginning to explode. One day when I was 33, after I'd cooked and smiled
for a bevy of weekend guests whom I never wished to see again, I felt
an immense void, great powerlessness, the deepest loneliness I'd ever
known. I wept for some hours, took out a notebook, started rewriting one
of the three stories that had won me my Barnard prize. It was the one
about my governess. It was published a short time later in The New
Yorker, one year past the deadline Charles Olson had set me. It was to
become, 12 years and two books of nonfiction later, the first chapter of
''Lovers and Tyrants.'' The process of finishing that book was as
complex and lengthy as it was painful. It entailed a solid and delicate
psychoanalysis which forced me to accept my father's death. Epiphany
achieved, I was able to write the novel's three last chapters -my first
genuine attempt at fiction - in a mere six months. I may have had to
bury my father to set my tongue free.
AND
yet what kind of writer have I become, six years and two novels later?
Few scribblers I know have struggled so hard for so little. I am too
many things I do not wish to be - a Jane of all trades shuttling back
and forth between scant fiction, voluminous reporting, innumerable and
unmemorable literary essays. I feel honored by yet undeserving of the
appellation ''novelist.'' I am merely a craftsperson, a cabinetmaker of
texts and occasionally, I hope, a witness to our times. My terror of
fictional invention has denied me that activity which from childhood on
has been the most furtively longed for, which has proved to be (when I
finally began to tackle it) the most deeply satisfying.
Might
I remain brainwashed, along with many of my generation, by the notion
that fiction is the noblest, the most ''creative'' of all genres of
prose? No avocation has better clarified that issue or my identity as a
writer than the business of teaching. I stress to young colleagues that
some of the greatest masterpieces of our time have been works of
nonfiction or hybrid forms which defy classification - James Agee's
''Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,'' Edmund Wilson's criticism, Peter
Handke's ''A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,'' all of Roland Barthes's work. I
urge them to shake loose from the peculiarly American fixation on
novel-writing. I tell them that the obsession to write The Great
American Novel might have done more harm to generations of Americans
than all the marijuana in Mexico. The syllabus for the course I taught
at Yale last fall sums it all up:
THE
WRITING OF THE TEXT: This is a seminar in the reading and writing of
literature which I hope can remain untainted by the word ''creative.''
It is dedicated to the premise that a distinction between ''fiction''
and ''nonfiction'' is potentially harmful to many aspiring writers who
will progress more fruitfully if they are encouraged to think of their
writing as pure ''text'' without worrying about what ''form'' or
''genre'' it will fall into.
Reading
Assignments: F. Scott Fitzgerald's ''Crack-Up,'' Max Frisch's
''Sketchbooks,'' Flaubert's ''Dictionary of Accepted Ideas,'' Elizabeth
Hardwick's ''Sleepless Nights,'' Boris Pasternak's ''Safe Conduct,''
William Gass's ''On Being Blue,'' Maureen Howard's ''Facts of Life.''
The
first thing we must do when we set out to write, I also tell my
classes, is to shed all narcissism. My own decades of fear came from my
anxiety that my early drafts were ugly, sloppy, not promising enough. We
must persevere and scrawl atrocities, persevere dreadful draft after
dreadful draft in an unhindered stream of consciousness, persevere, if
need be, in Breton's technique of automatic writing, of mindless trance.
And within that morass of words there may be an ironic turn of phrase, a
dislocation that gives us a key to the voice, the tone, the structure
we're struggling to find. I am a witness to the lateness of my own
vocation, the hesitation and terrors that still haunt all my beginnings,
the painful slowness with which I proceed through a minimum of four
drafts in both fiction and nonfiction.
Question:
Why do I go on writing, seeing the continuing anguish of the act, the
dissatisfaction I feel toward most results? Flannery O'Connor said it
best: ''I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I
say.''
I write out of a desire for
revenge against reality, to destroy forever the stuttering powerless
child I once was, to gain the love and attention that silenced child
never had, to allay the dissatisfaction I still have with myself, to be
something other than what I am. I write out of hate, out of a desire for
revenge against all the men who have oppressed and humiliated me.
I
also write out of love and gratitude for a mother and stepfather who
made me feel worthy by hoarding every scrap of correspondence I ever
sent them; love and gratitude for a husband of exquisite severity who
still edits every final draft that leaves my typewriter. I write out of
an infantile dread of ever disappointing them again.
I
write because in the act of creation there comes that mysterious,
abundant sense of being both parent and child; I am giving birth to an
Other and simultaneously being reborn as child in the playground of
creation.
I write on while continuing
to despair that I can't ever achieve the inventiveness, irreverence,
complexity of my favorite contemporary authors - Milan Kundera, Italo
Calvino, Gunter Grass, Salman Rushdie, to name only the foreign ones.
They are certain enough of their readers' love (or indifferent enough to
it, since the great Indifferents are the great Seducers) to indulge in
that shrewd teasing and misguiding of the reader, that ironic
obliqueness which is the marrow of the best modernist work. It is not
only my lesser gift that is at fault. Behind my impulsive cataloguing,
my Slavic unleashing of emotion, my Quaker earnestness to inform my
readers guilelessly of all I know, there still lurks the lonely,
stuttering child too terrified of losing the reader's love to take the
necessary risks.
Yet I remain
sustained by a definition of faith once offered me by Ivan Illich:
''Faith is a readiness for the Surprise.'' I write because I have faith
in the possibility that I can eventually surprise myself. I am still
occasionally plagued by that recurring nightmare of my jaw being clamped
shut, my mouth frozen in silence. But I wake up from it with less
dread, with the hope that some day my tongue will loosen and emit a
surprising new sound which even I, at first, shall not be able to
understand.
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