Fiction Writers Review » Essays

Metaphysical Description, Or How Many Potatoes Make How Much Vodka?

Michael Byers — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:00:02 +0000

While it is hard enough to describe something effectively in fiction¹—how a thing smells, moves, looks—sometimes it is useful to further describe how exactly a thing seems or appears to be, above and beyond any discernible physical characteristics. The ineffable sense of how things are often makes up the best and most memorable aspect of a piece of writing, but it can be among the hardest things to get right. It is useful for writers to remember that often this aspect of seeming and appearing will be conveyed through metaphor; and often the seeming and appearing will touch in some way on the meaning of what is being observed—or will include a mention of a character’s feelings about, or engagement with, the thing observed.

Note that the description of the ineffable sense of a thing will almost always be preceded by a more basic, sometimes quite extended, physical description. The writer in this case takes on the role of Dr. Frankenstein. With Igor’s help, the writer assembles legs, arms, torso, neck, head, and brain. The writer arranges all this stuff on the table, sews it together. But it is still dead (if vivid) matter. Then the writer applies the electricity—describes the mysterious, often quasi-metaphorical sense of a thing—and the thing opens its eyes and comes to life.

For example, in Alice Munro’s 1979 story “The Beggar Maid”, we find Rose, a scholarship student, just entering college. She is compelled to attend a meeting with other scholarship students, and, arriving with an unprepossessing companion at the room where the meeting is held, Rose hesitates outside the door.

There was a little window in the door. They could look through at the other scholarship winners already assembled and waiting. It seemed to Rose that she saw four or five girls of the same stooped and matronly type as the girl who was beside her, and several bright-eyed, self-satisfied babyish-looking boys. It seemed to be the rule that girl scholarship winners looked about forty and boys about twelve. It was not possible, of course, that they all looked like this. It was not possible that in one glance through the windows of the door Rose could detect traces of eczema, stained underarms, dandruff, moldy deposits on the teeth and crusty flakes in the corners of the eyes. That was only what she thought. But there was a pall over them, she was not mistaken, there was a true terrible pall of eagerness and docility.

Notice how Rose’s observation of this long exact list of gross-out sufferings—”eczema, stained underarms, dandruff, moldy deposits on the teeth and crusty flakes in the corners of the eyes”—is implicitly disowned twice (we are told that this is only how “it seemed”) and very explicitly disowned three times: “It was not possible, of course….It was not possible….That was only what she thought.” (And notice further that Rose’s disowning of the list in no way erases the impression the list has made on us.)

But no, Munro is onto something with these disavowals—because it’s true, these physical complaints are not what Rose has seen, not exactly. What she has seen is something else, something further, an impression of something, that she cannot really point to. She has seen “a pall”—literally, “something that covers, shrouds, or overspreads, esp. with darkness or gloom.” But where is the pall? Where is it in the room? Is it hovering “over them”, up near the light fixtures?²

We understand from Munro’s unusual insistence that we are not meant to take this as just a metaphor: “But there was a pall over them, she was not mistaken, there was a true terrible pall of eagerness and docility.” But what is this, really? What is being described here? Nothing less than the sense of how things are, a sudden, almost mystical understanding of the truth about these people. And with this description, zap, the world of the room takes on meaning, and life. The Frankenstein Effect, at its finest.

Munro is a past master at this (and a million other things). In her story “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1961), a group of mentally disabled children arrive at a much anticipated piano recital. The narrator senses something going on:

It is while I am at the piano, playing the minuet from Berenice, that the final arrival, unlooked-for by anybody but Miss Marsalles, takes place. It must seem at first that there has been some mistake. Out of the corner of my eye I see a whole procession of children, eight or ten in all, with a red-haired woman in something like a uniform, mounting the front step. They look like a group of children from a private school on an excursion of some kind (there is that drabness and sameness about their clothes) but their progress is too scrambling and disorderly for that. Or this is the impression I have; I cannot really look. Is it the wrong house, are they really on their way to the doctor for shots, or to Vacation Bible Classes? No, Miss Marsalles has got up with a happy whisper of apology; she has gone to meet them. Behind my back there is a sound of people squeezing together, of folding chairs being opened, there is an inappropriate, curiously unplaceable giggle.

And above or behind all this cautious flurry of arrival there is a peculiarly concentrated silence. Something has happened, something unforeseen, perhaps something disastrous; you can feel such things behind your back.

You can’t, of course—not really—but then again, yes you can. The many tiny details have added up to something impalpable and profound, something that goes beyond description—something that has, almost literally, entered the air of the room.

Almost literally is the point here. On the verge of literalness.

Note that not every description calls for a metaphysical component. Usually this sort of technique is most useful when a character is observing a complicated scenario—an airport concourse, a crammed bookshelf, a busy restaurant—in which a number of objects or people are involved, and where it is useful to convey both a sense of particularity and an overall impression of things. But always when you see a writer deploying the terms

an air of

an atmosphere of

a sense of

an impression of

and other similar shortcuts, you ought to feel the hair rising on the back of your neck, because Dr. Frankenstein is warming up his generator. And things are about to get metaphysical.

The P:V Ratio

If a metaphysical understanding is to be in some fashion arrived at through the medium of the world, then we may note that different authors derive this metaphysical understanding differently. Some writers prefer to assemble more world on the table before applying the electricity that represents a greater understanding.

We may therefore find it suitable to change our underlying metaphor, leaving behind all these dripping body parts our assistant has so obligingly harvested, and propose instead a more congenial potatoes-to-vodka ratio, where some writers prefer to assemble more potatoes (or “world”) and others fewer, to arrive at a given amount of distilled spirit (or “understanding”).

In this new potatoes-to-vodka model, the potatoes, of course, are the physical matter of a story—shoes, ceilings, arguments, sentences, eyebrows, wind, cat hair, Coca-Cola, and jump ropes³, while vodka is the metaphysical understanding derived from these physical things. We may call this a writer’s p:v ratio, representing the efficiency with which a writer typically makes use of the world.

In the following selections, potatoes are set in bold and spirit, in italics.

Alice Munro will, as always, provide a useful—and in this case usefully typical—example. In “Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage”, a middle-aged, unattractive woman shops for a fancy dress, thinking (at this point falsely) that she is going to be married in it. She enters the shop:

Along one wall was a rack of evening dresses, all fit for belles of the ball with their net and taffeta, their dreamy colors. And beyond them, in a glass case so no profane fingers could get at them, half a dozen wedding gowns, pure white froth or vanilla satin or ivory lace, embroidered in silver beads or seed pearls. Tiny bodies, scalloped necklines, lavish skirts. Even when she was younger she could never have contemplated such extravagance, not just in the matter of money but in expectations, in the preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss.

Here the metaphysical understanding has plainly been reached by means of the physical observation. The potatoes of the shop provide a sort of ballast to the abstracted thought, but also provide the means by which to arrive at it. A reasonable amount of world (the rack, the net and taffeta, et cetera) produces in a character a reasonable amount of mind-stuff.

Munro is unique in her ability but not in her technique; most writers’ habits in this regard at least superficially resemble Munro’s, deploying a moderate amount of stuff to arrive at a moderate amount of spirit. And perhaps it is this moderation that allows us to qualify a writer as “realistic”—most of us seem to experience the world at something like this measured pace, after all, as we move through our days both beset by sensory input and at the same time subject to the addled and improvisatory workings of our own brains.⁴ In a similar vein, John Updike observes before he transcends, in “The Afterlife”:

A broad-faced strawberry blonde, she had always worn sweaters and plaid pleated skirts and low-heeled shoes for her birding walks, and here this same outfitseemed a shade more chic and less aggressively “sensible” than it had at home. Her pleasant plain looks, rather lost in the old crowd of heavily groomed suburban wives, had bloomed in this climate; her manner, as she showed them the house and their room upstairs, seemed to Carter somehow blushing, bridal.⁵

If this balance between world and mind allows us to locate Munro and Updike in the solid realistic mainstream of contemporary fiction, what of some others? What happens if you prefer fewer potatoes? What if you prefer more? What if you’re not interested in describing spirit at all? Or what if you’re more interested in meaning than in matter, like some spats-wearing evangelist, waving your hands in the air in hopes of producing something from nothing? Clearly this requires an inadequate, seat-of-the-pants survey.

Tweaking the P:V Ratio

Some writers, of course, prefer to avoid the explicit statement of spirit entirely. Hemingway and his ilk have a very high ratio of potatoes-to-vodka, with Hemingway’s followers arranged around him in a haphazard spatter array. To take a familiar example, Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance” lives almost entirely in the present, physical moment; a man, now without his wife (we gather she has left because of his drinking, among other reasons), puts his household belongings out in his yard and driveway, arranging them for sale just as they have been arranged in the house. A young couple comes along; the girl dances with the man, and is evidently affected by his plight. The story is told in simple, factual terms, with little or no reference to thoughts, feelings, or epiphanic realizations. The story’s final section, in its entirety, goes:

Weeks later, she said: “The guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there in his yard. No lie. We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don’t laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record-player. The old guy gave it to us. And all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?”

She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.

Potatoes? Vodka? It is debatable. The girl is feeling something, of course, as the story suggests, but she can’t express it, possibly because she hasn’t got the equipment to do so. And because she can’t express it, we don’t get an explicit statement of it either. It’s possible to read the whole story as a pile of potatoes, with that last 26-word paragraph serving as the equivalent of the story’s spirit. The story’s last paragraph is in fact the mental result, finally, of a worldly encounter. At any rate, the ratio of potatoes to vodka here is very high, if indeed there is any vodka to divide by.

By contrast, a writer may be particularly interested in spirit—literally so in the case of, for example, James Baldwin, whose stories and novels tend to avoid physical description while dwelling more on abstract concerns. In his story “The Outing”, three boys are on the make in various ways during a church retreat. Then they enter the meeting room:

During his testimony Johnny and Roy and David had stood quietly beside the door, not daring to enter while he spoke. The moment he sat down they moved quickly, together, to the front of the high hall and knelt down beside their seats to pray. The aspect of each of them underwent always, in this company, a striking, even an exciting change; as though their youth, barely begun, were already put away; and the animal, so vividly restless and undiscovered, so tense with power, ready to spring had already stalked and trapped and offered, a perpetual blood-sacrifice, on the altar of the Lord.

We sense here that, as is often the case for Baldwin, conflict is played out in an almost literal sense on the field of the personality, where such matters as identity and the fate of one’s soul are best and most frankly considered. The rendering of the Baldwin’s physical world is often minimal, as though such surface concerns are too trivial to consider.⁶

With these opposing practices in mind, we must now consider a minor and possibly self-evident corollary aspect of this idea, that of scale.

Scale

The scale under consideration here is the differing P:V ratio we find in stories versus novels. We know that novels tend to be richer in their effects than stories; specifically, we find that novelists tend to describe much more matter than a story writer will, but will derive from this matter roughly the same amount of spirit (or sometimes slightly more).⁷ In other words, novelists pile up more potatoes as a matter of course, but don’t derive giant gushing fountains of vodka. Longer descriptions leading to bigger heaps of stuff, but not a concomitant increase in the amount of understanding derived. You can only understand so much at once, after all.

In Couples, John Updike describes Harold little-Smith’s house; Harold has just learned that his wife may be having an affair. This has the effect of rendering his house “more transparent”, and the description that follows is limpid to the extreme, if sometimes verging on the purple. The house is:

…a flat-roofed redwood modern oriented along a little sheltered ridge overlooking the marsh to the south. The foyer was floored in flagstones; on the right an open stairway went down to a basement level where the three children (Jonathan, Julia, Henrietta) slept and the laundry was done and the cars were parked. Above this, on the main level, were the kitchen, the dining room, the master bedroom, a polished hall where hung reproductions of etchings by Rembrandt, Durer, Piranesi, and Picasso. To the left of the foyer a dramatically long living room opened up, with a shaggy cerulean rug and two facing white sofas and symmetrical hi-fi speakers and a Baldwin grand and at the far end an elevated fireplace with a great copper hood. The house bespoke money in the service of taste. In the summer evenings he would drive back from the station through the livelong light hovering above the tawny marshes, flooded or dry according to the tides, and find his little wife, her black hair freshly combed and parted, waiting on the longer of the sofas, which was not precisely white but rather a rough Iranian wool bleached to the pallor of sand mixed with ash. A record, Glenn Gould or Dinu Lupatti playing Bach or Schumann, would be sending forth clear vines of sound from the invisible root within the hi-fi closet. A pitcher of martinis would have been mixed and held chilled within the refrigerator toward this precious moment of his daily homecoming….

The description in the original goes on at about this length again, and includes such additional stuff as a chewed sponge ball, Jonathan in bathing trunks, the liquid branches of the lawn sprinkler, and so on. The overwhelming feeling is of an assembling stillness and a slant-lit suburban glamour—a hushed, beautiful hesitation—until at last:

Marcia would pour two verdant martinis into glasses that would suddenly sweat…and his entire household, even the stray milk butterfly perched on the copper fireplace hood, felt about to spring into bliss, like a tightly wound music box.

Here possibly we may see that a writer’s natural habits align better with one form than with another; in his best work Updike the novelist seems to be much more confident that his gist will come across than does Updike the short-story writer. There is far less—relatively speaking—summarizing and explaining, as though Updike feels confident that surely, given all the matter he has presented to us, we will be able to see what he means.

Turn the ratio down somewhat to discover Ian McEwan at work in Atonement, gathering his many finely described potatoes in order to derive, on behalf of Briony, a rather considerable draft of spirit:

…in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool’s gold, a rainmaking spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel’s skull as light as a leaf.

But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found.

And observe Henry James, masterfully interweaving matter with spirit through the mind of the young and impressionable Isabel Archer, suggesting that to the greatest and most knowing practitioners, mind and matter are really inseparable aspects of a fundamental unity. Notice how difficult it sometimes is, in the following example, to decide which side of things a sentence or a phrase is addressing, and how, for James, matters of custom and perception can be seen to blend:

The foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down. When she had found one to her taste—she was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece—she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library and which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office. Whose office it had been and at what period it had flourished, she never learned; it was enough for her that it contained an echo and a pleasant musty smell and that it was a chamber of disgrace for old pieces of furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent (so that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of injustice) and with which, in the manner of children, she had established relations almost human, certainly dramatic. There was an old haircloth sofa in especial, to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows. The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact that it was properly entered from the second door of the house, the door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a particularly slender girl found it impossible to slide. She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side—a place which became to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror.

As a further and final aside, and related to the example of James, it is worth noting that as the efficiency of narrative distillation increases, and as the ratio of world-to-mind approaches the perfect balance of 1:1, peculiar things can begin to happen. John Cheever’s novels and stories live fruitfully at this stylistic event-horizon, the authorial eye shuttling so swiftly between world and mind that the boundary between the two begins to fade away. In “The Ocean”, one of Cheever’s prototypically imperiled householders fears he is being poisoned by his wife:

I mixed a Martini and went into the living room. I was not in any danger from which I could not readily escape. I could go to the country club for supper. Why I hesitated to do this seems, in retrospect, to have been because of the blue walls of the room in which I stood. It was a handsome room, its long windows looking out onto a lawn, some trees, and the sky. The orderliness of the room seemed to impose some orderliness on my own conduct—as if by absenting myself from the table I would in some way offend the order of things. If I went to the club for supper I would be yielding to my suspicions and damaging my hopefulness, and I was determined to remain hopeful.

Cheever’s rough 1:1 p:v ratio seems to go some way toward producing his trademark sound—a sort of tremulous, searching flight, as a claustrophobic eye shuttles ceaselessly between world and mind in search of an elusive certainty. The feeling becomes one of weird immersion and a kind of synesthesia; the character experiences the world, has an immediate mental reaction, and is then at once experiencing the world again. Fitting perhaps that we find the fraught and frenzied Cheever here, seeing and feeling, seeing and feeling, helpless to prevent his marvelously fruitful mind from making something of everything.⁸

The Visual Aid

Finally, with all these dubious propositions behind us, we can suggest that every writer might be plotted on a p:v graph, giving rise to the highly dubious Figure 1:

Surely we have gone too far with this, and certainly it is entirely wrong to put novelists and short-story writers together, rather as though we have tried somehow to pen up tigers with barracuda, but it is interesting to note the opposing and intersecting groupings, one of which we may very generally see is composed of Worriers—writers less at home in the world, and who have taken the self, or some version of the self, as the subject—while the other is composed of Composed Describers, writers who have taken the world as their subject and, generally speaking, written about society. That this is a byproduct of the individual personalities in question seems plain. We should also note that the very greatest tend to find themselves at rather the far points on the graph, outliers here as elsewhere, and that certain stylistically versatile folks can be imagined to be plotted in more than one place (Welty’s various moods, Updike’s, Faulkner’s come to mind), rather as though they have both a city house and a country one.

But what are we to do with this, then, as writers of prose? Probably we ought to note the relative scarcity of successful examples on the left side of the chart, whose few denizens have managed, like those extremophile bacteria who manage to flourish on ocean-bottom vents or in sulfuric acid pools in the depths of limestone caves, to survive in difficult environments, deriving great hogsheads of spirit from mere armfuls of potatoes. We ought to observe the cluster of sturdy realists trading remarks around the 10:2 mark, with the anomalous Coetzee somehow standing there too, all cool and gray and saying absolutely nothing whatsoever to anybody, and we may further admiringly note the high, plush posts of the great novelists, who manage to furnish their work with not only a great amplitude of matter but also of insight. We will leave it to the poets and especially to those lucky vessels who feel themselves recipients of divine inspiration to aspire to the ratio of 100:100, wherein the great unimaginable gigantitude of the world is, leaf-by-leaf, quantum-by-quantum, infused with the fullness of a supernaturally omnipresent understanding. We here are only prose writers, and we have deadlines to meet, so something like “just enough, not too much” will have to do. A little vodka is good for you, let us be satisfied to say, and too much ain’t.

Notes

1. Person, place, object, situation, idea—they’re all hard.

2. I see pall people.

3. Nouns are especially weighty. Descriptions are usually made of nouns and adjectives. But actions and lines of dialog must also be recognized as potato-esque in their effects, too, and a very good description will usually contain some element of action. Notice where your attention tends to catch and where it tends to slide in this description of Gabriel, from “The Dead”:

He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat.

When he had flicked lustre into his shoes he stood up and pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body. Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket.

Observe Joyce’s well-intentioned attempts to ‘actionize’ the description: “pushed upwards,” “scattered itself,” “scintillated restlessly,” “screened.” But these are tricks, and not very successful. The mind’s eye is most engaged when Gabriel is actually doing something—”he pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body.” And it is least engaged where he is simply being something—”He was a stout tallish young man.” We see what is done more easily than we see what simply is. In this our eye is amphibian, registering change, becoming blind to stasis.

4. This is, it may be argued, the fundamental work of narrative art: the description of the metronomic interaction between the private mind and the constantly impinging world.

5. Updike’s reliance on seemed here and throughout his mighty oeuvre suggests his general preoccupation with the truth that lurks behind appearances, with making sure that everything be understood; and if it is this impulse that gives rise to his occasional overweening anxiety that we get the point of something, it strikes me as a fitting impulse. Very tall, he was terribly gawky as a child, with a gigantic nose, debilitating eczema, a comical stutter, and to top it all off a world-class mind. No one looking at him could have guessed what he really was. No wonder that the Rabbit books feature a man who, on the surface, is mostly unremarkable—a former high school basketball star, a printing press operator, a car salesman, a middling husband and father—and yet who has perhaps the most florid, nuanced internal life of any character ever composed. Related to this, surely, is Updike’s chronic affection for adverbs, those gravitational devices that control the flight of a verb even after it has been set loose. What other author would give us a character who “steered sullenly”? A life that is “majestically rooted”? Why else would he describe a hoard of treasure as “surreptitiously hidden”? Because of a mostly generous desire to make sure we get what he’s saying. That we get him, really, the kid with the big nose and the hideous skin, who also happens to be, as he might say, transcendently alight.

6. This is complicated by the fact that Baldwin’s characters also often struggle against their own bodies in various ways.

7. This is true even when the novelist and the short story writer are one and the same person; Doctorow the novelist has a much higher P:V ratio than Doctorow the short-story writer.

8. That Cheever was subject to the workings of his peculiar brain seems obvious; it has always struck me that the hysterical, sensory-enhanced well-being expressed in so much of Cheever’s work resembles the feeling that accompanies an epileptic’s ‘aura’, wherein the universe seems infused with mysterious meaning. Late in his life, with his brain ruined by booze, Cheever in fact had two epileptic seizures; it is my unsupportable crackpot belief that he had been experiencing mild seizures all his life, and that his habitual drinking may have been, in some small part, a means by which he attempted to reproduce the lovely feelings that unpredictably descended upon him, and which must have seemed, undiagnosed as they would have been, messages from a greater, senselessly benign power. Poor, mean, helpless, brilliant Cheever.

The Deep Eye: On the Embedded First Person

Michael Byers — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:00:45 +0000

The first person is seductive. It feels, for many, like the most natural way to tell a story. We are all first person narrators of our own lives, after all, and surely it is the easiest thing in the world to translate personal experience to the page. That way there is no need to fuss with the peculiar questions that arise when a mysterious and sometimes too-knowing third person narrator appears on the scene.

But the first person is in fact more difficult than the third. As we approach the first person narrator we may discover that it is essentially unlocateable, rather like the electron in orbit around the atomic nucleus. We can approach it, but we cannot actually put our finger on its nature precisely. This has to do with the recursive properties of consciousness, probably, but also with the unavoidable fact that the presence of any teller prompts us to ask how trustworthy the teller is. We never trust anyone telling us anything.

Of course when we write first-person narrators, we must in fact not only locate but convincingly inhabit our speakers, trustworthy or not. If we don’t, our work suffers. We discover there is a subtle but crucial difference between something like “reporting from the scene of a consciousness” and “reporting from within a consciousness.” The former is weak and unconvincing, while the latter feels like life. One finds the difference in how deeply the writer has managed to seat the perspective of the narrator—how firmly we embed the reader in the narrator’s point of view.

A few techniques can be brought to bear to increase the reader’s sense of embeddedness.

Jeffrey Eugenides’s prose is typically lax and underpowered (which accounts for the bagginess and unproductive length of a work like Middlesex). Over and over in that flabby, overwritten novel he can be observed struggling to seat the point of view in Calliope’s head. In the following passage, insufficiencies such as “the next thing I knew” point to a narrator who has not yet arrived on the page, as do such infelicities as “I let it keep burning my lungs because I wanted to distract myself from the pain in my heart.” But amid the wreckage here there are some successes. Our narrator is at a party with some other teens:

The Object’s green eyes were watering. But she took the joint and inserted it between her lips. She leaned toward Rex Reese, who opened his own mouth wide.

When they were finished, Jerome took the joint from his sister. “Let me see if I can master the technical difficulties here,” he said. The next thing I knew, his face was close to mine. So finally I did it, too. Leaned forward, closed my eyes, parted my lips, and let Jerome shotgun into my mouth a long, dirty plume of smoke.

Smoke filled my lungs, which began to burn. I coughed and let it out. When I opened my eyes again, Rex had his arm around the Object’s shoulder. She was trying to act casual about it. Rex finished his beer….

“I can’t see my feet,” I said. “It’s dark in here.

[Jerome] passed me the joint again and I took it. I inhaled and held the smoke in. I let it keep burning my lungs because I wanted to distract myself from the pain in my heart. Rex and the Object were still kissing. I looked away, out the dark, grimy window.

“Everything looks really blue,” I said. “Did you notice that?”

“Oh yeah,” said Jerome. “All kinds of strange epiphenomena.”

The Oracle of Delphi had been a girl about my same age. All day long she sat over a hole in the ground, the omphalos, the navel of the earth, breathing petrochemical fumes escaping from underneath. A teenage virgin, the Oracle told the future, speaking the first metered verse in history….

One of the telltale signals of a first person not yet completely inhabited is often the overuse of simple subject-verb constructions: “I looked,” “I wanted,” “I thought about,” “I remembered,” “I imagined,” “I felt,” and so on. These constructions of consciousness are defensible in early drafts but should be substantially controlled in later ones. They originate from a positive and necessary impulse — to attach what is happening to the experiences of the point of view character — but they are not rendered from within the narrator’s actual experience. Rather, they are reported from a safe distance.

This seems a small point but it is a crucial one, really the crucial one when considering the first person narrator. In life, we do not engage in anything so controlled or constructed as an act that can be described as, for example, “remembering.” In fact, we simply have images and thoughts occur to us, immediately and all at once. There is no process of remembering, only a moment before we have remembered something and the moment after which we have remembered it.

Similarly, we do not really “look” at things. Rather, visual stimuli enter our eyes and brains and make an effectively immediate impression upon us. The things we see are before us at once, unmediated by any agency of consciousness. They are simply there. The verb “look” is, when considered this way, inadequate to describe the speed and immediacy with which images arrive in our awareness. There is no action of “looking” per se. As with remembering, visual stimuli are not there in one moment, and are there the next. Eugenides’s mistake is to describe an activity rather than recreating, through other means, the subjective experience of actually engaging in the activity. After all, it is only someone else who may be said to “look” at something. What we do, in our own minds, is simply experience the result of looking.

But there are two (two and a half, maybe) successful moments in this passage: 1) “She was trying to act casual about it” and 2) “The Oracle of Delphi had been a girl about my same age.”

“She was trying to act casual about it” works because the awareness of the narrator is for once unfiltered. How does Calliope know that The Obscure Object “was trying to act casual about it”? Calliope’s process of information gathering and processing is undescribed. But speaking literally, she has engaged in a long series of complicated mental calculations based on the visual stimuli she has received. She has received visual and aural information about The Object’s stance, facial expression, tone of voice, and she has from these bits of evidence concluded something like a fact about the Object. Whether this “fact” is true is unknowable, as it should be, because this is Calliope’s truth unfiltered. This is a successfully embedded point of view.

In the second example, Eugenides spares us the awkwardness of anything like “At that moment I remembered that the Oracle of Delphi had been…” Instead, he delivers the thought unmediated. In this way the memory arrives on the page in the same way memories arrive to us in life — all at once and unaccompanied by anything like intention. As in life, this thought about the Oracle simply arises. At the instant it is occurring to Calliope it also occurs for us, and in the same fashion.

A small success might also be noted in the first half of the sentence Leaned forward, closed my eyes, parted my lips, and let Jerome shotgun into my mouth a long, dirty plume of smoke. Eliminating the pronoun “I” is a shortcut and a cheat, and Eugenides is likely doing it here mostly to achieve some rhythmic and aural variation (perhaps tired of the “I [verbed]” construction himself). But eliminating the pronoun does work to short-circuit our sense of an action being reported from outside the reporter. It is not much, but it is something, and if we are getting tired, this is okay. But Eugenides undoes his accomplishment in the second half of the sentence: “a long, dirty plume of smoke” would be invisible to Calliope.

We can contrast Eugenides’s struggle with Michael Chabon’s customary effortlessness. The florid, exuberantly demonstrative first-person narration of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh provides a fine example of a point of view deeply embedded in its purported perspective. The novel opens:

At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business. We’d just come to the end of a period of silence and ill will—a year I’d spent in love with and in the same apartment as an odd, fragile girl whom he had loathed, on sight, with a frankness and a fury that were not at all like him. But Claire had moved out the month before. Neither my father nor I knew what to do with our new freedom.

“I saw Lenny Stern this morning,” he said. “He asked after you. You remember your Uncle Lenny.”

“Sure,” I said, and I thought for a second about Uncle Lenny, juggling three sandwich halves in the back room of his five-and-dime in the Hill District a million years ago.

I was nervous and drank more than I ate; my father carefully dispatched his steak. Then he asked me what my plans were for the summer, and in the flush of some strong emotion or other I said, more or less: It’s the beginning of the summer and I’m standing in the lobby of a thousand-story grand hotel, where a bank of elevators a mile long and an endless row of monkey attendants in gold braid wait to carry me up, up, up through the suites of moguls, of spies, and of starlets, to rush me straight to the zeppelin mooring at the art deco summit, where they keep the huge dirigible of August tied up and bobbing in the high winds. On the way to the shining needle at the top I will wear a lot of neckties, I will buy five or six works of genius on 45 rpm, and perhaps too many times I will find myself looking at the snapped spine of a lemon wedge at the bottom of a drink. I said, “I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray.”

The unparalleled excellence of the writing is a joy: “carefully dispatched” is visually and characterologically exact (we can see Art’s father, vested and buttoned, methodically working away at his tidy plate, leaving only the parsley garnish), and “snapped spine of a lemon wedge” shows us what we have not bothered to notice until now, the segmented and organic nature of that unconsidered thing in our glass, and by saying not “glass” but “drink” Chabon also gives us the ice cubes and perhaps the swizzle stick, as well as the shape, size and weight of the glass, the table on which it sits, and some qualities pertaining to the space in which that table stands. These excellences function as keys to the mind of the speaker, arriving as they do unmediated into Art’s consciousness: it’s not “it occurred to me that my father was carefully dispatching his steak” or “I looked at the lemon wedge…”

On a deeper level, note that we can usefully distinguish, on the one hand, between the Chabonian constructions “I had lunch with my father” and “I was nervous and drank more than I ate” and, on the other hand, the Eugenidean “I coughed and let it out” and “when I opened my eyes again.” Eugenides’ efforts to track Calliope’s consciousness moment by moment fail because they do not reflect what it really feels like in a subjective sense to cough or to open one’s eyes. By contrast, Chabon mostly uses the pronoun “I” to report on larger-scale occurrences — things that are happening over a longer span of time — and so avoids this pitfall. Having lunch with one’s father is not an immediate or all-at-once experience. Nor is being nervous and drinking more than one eats. Our experience of these events differs fundamentally from our experience of coughing, seeing, hearing, thinking, and speaking, in that they are events that, with their complicated social and behavioral aspects, must be understood with several sets of mental instruments, including those having to do with family history, taste, manners, and so forth. Most importantly, having dinner is not one experience but a set of extended experiences which can really only be described or apprehended in synthetic terms, while sensual experiences are discrete and immediate. The Chabonian “I” in this sense is a more complicated device, albeit a slightly more removed one, than the Eugenidean.

Notice, too, that when Chabon does use simple subject-verb constructions they are often in some fashion filtered through Art. Even the usually deadly “I thought” is here first improved by “for a second”, which at least acknowledges the fleeting nature of any thought; then “I thought” is redeemed entirely by the thought having nothing to do with anything that has come before, such that even this usually worrisome construction, once successfully moderated in this way, manages to suggest the impinging influences of an unstructured brain. Why is Lenny jugging three sandwich halves? How do they stay together in the air? Why three halves? Where is the fourth? Eaten, perhaps, by Uncle Lenny. But who is Uncle Lenny? We don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know. And then Lenny is gone.

Notice, too, that there is an important distance between “I said” and “I said, more or less”, and there is a very great gulf indeed between a character declaring “I will wear a lot of neckties” in a strictly literal sense and saying “I will wear a lot of neckties” in a fit of metaphorical brio. The passage is so fanciful, in fact, and by its end has so separated itself from any claim to strict literality, that we may reasonably suspect its concluding line of dialog (“I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray”) is not what is actually said aloud, and that in fact what is said aloud is something else entirely that just sounds or feels like “I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray” to Art’s subjective consciousness. There are very few constructed elements to Art’s thinking, and those that are to be found are intentionally undermined, such that the effect (and purpose) of this passage is both to convey the impression of what it is like to be Art and to suggest that our best reading of Art should include not only what he says, but what he appears to mean.

On the other end of the spectrum from Chabon are first-person narrators who might be described as reticent or formal. Reticence and formality can have powerful effects, and often this kind of voice is deployed in the service of hiding some otherwise unmanageable emotion on the part of the speaker. In such a case the habits of the voice itself often become part of the narrative machinery of the story, and the developments in the voice mirror, oppose, or otherwise assist the events on the page. For instance, a voice may work to undermine itself, or will seek to hold off powerful emotion by refusing to attach to what is being reported. Other effects are possible; often a formal or unforthcoming voice is used to depict the mind of someone working to maintain sanity, to prevail over trauma, or to rationalize an otherwise inexcusable act or set of behaviors, as in Jane Smiley’s “The Age of Grief.”

Ethan Canin has deployed many different kinds of restrained voice over his long career. In his early work his narrators were often models of delicate understatement, as is the case with the narrator of “The Year of Getting to Know Us”:

I’m an only child, and I grew up in a big wood-frame house on Huron Avenue in Pasadena, California. The house had three empty bedrooms and in the back yard a section of grass that had been stripped and leveled, then seeded and mowed like a putting green. Twice a week a Mexican gardener came to trim it, wearing special moccasins my father had bought him. They had soft hide soles that left no imprints.

My father was in love with golf. He played seven times every week and talked about the game as if it were a science that he was about to figure out. “Cut through the outer rim for a high iron,” he used to say at dinner, looking out the window into the yard while my mother passed him the carved-wood salad bowl, or “In hot weather hit a high compression ball.” When conversations paused, he made little putting motions with his hands. He was a top amateur and in another situation might have been a pro. When I was sixteen, the year I was arrested, he let me caddie for the first time. Before that all I knew about golf was his clubs – the Spalding made-to-measure woods and irons, Dynamiter sand wedge, St. Andrews putter – which he kept in an Abercrombie & Fitch bag in the trunk of his Lincoln, and the white leather shoes with long tongues and screw-in spikes, which he stored upside down in the hall closet. When he wasn’t playing, he covered the club heads with socks that had little yellow dingo balls on the ends.

At first glance the work here, while very good, appears uncomplicated. But as detail accumulates, something happens. A tone emerges: measured, even distant. One source of this tone is the lack of the speaker’s summarizing judgment. Nowhere does the narrator describe what thoughts or feelings these facts produce in him. He is simply reporting the facts. There is a taffy-like motion here, as the longer the passage continues without the narrator’s summarizing presence in it, the more we feel him pulling away. Apart from the carefully deployed exception (”the year I was arrested”), the speaker is effectively absent. It is the opposite of Chabon’s wildly interpreting Art, who, at the gentlest prompting, erupts in gouts of hyper-responsive feeling. The restraint on display in “The Year of Getting to Know Us” is elegant; Canin achieves this effect through an absence, a difficult feat that accounts for much of this story’s wistful tone.

In the later example of “The Accountant,” Canin’s customarily restrained and semiformal style has hardened into habit and lost some of its nuance. But there is still something to be taken from him. The novella opens:

I am an accountant, that calling of exactitude and scruple, and my crime was small. I have worked diligently, and I do not mind saying that in the conscientious embrace of the ledger I have done well for myself over the years, yet now I must also say that due to a flaw in my character I have allowed one small trespass against my honor. I try to forget it. Although now I do little more than try to forget it, I find myself considering and reconsidering this flaw, and then this trespass, although in truth if I am to look at them both, this flaw is so large that it cannot properly be called a flaw but my character itself, and this trespass was devious. I have a wife and three children. My name is Abba Roth.

This voice, a much less subtle instrument than the one at work in “The Year of Getting to Know Us,” might be said to occupy two zones: 1) the highly built formal zone in which the sentences are long and polyclausal, and 2) the unbuilt, demotic zone in which the sentences are simple and declarative. By occupying both zones in one paragraph, Canin proposes a consciousness that has one half of itself in one zone and the other half in the second. Half of its energy is deployed in constructing a presentable truth, and the other half, like a muttering chorus, relates those facts that can be delivered without polish or interpretation – the real truth, as it were. The voice that propels the short sentences ” I try to forget it” “I have a wife and three children” and “My name is Abba Roth” will be the voice of the flawed, criminal Abba. The other is a mask.

The Retrospective Eye

Several techniques create a first-person eye that, even from a future vantage, create vivid action. Alice Munro provides a subtle, canny example in the opening of “Walker Brothers Cowboy”:

After supper my father says, “Want to go down and see if the Lake’s still there?” We leave my mother sewing under the dining-room light, making clothes for me against the opening of school. She has ripped up for this purpose an old suit and an old plaid wool dress of hers, and she has to cut and match very cleverly and also make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool, ungrateful. We leave my brother in bed in the little screened porch at the end of the front verandah, and sometimes he kneels on his bed and presses his face against the screen and calls mournfully, “Bring me an ice cream cone!” but I call back, “You will be asleep,” and do not even turn my head.

While there is a great deal in play in this paragraph it is the word “ungrateful” that allows us to see this action as being observed from the future. In any retrospective narration, the first-person narrator sees with two pairs of eyes, one occupying the occasion of telling and the other the moment in which the event occurred. The immediate eye relates the details: the “dining-room light,” the “old plaid wool dress,” the lines of dialog, and so forth. The eye that sees from the future is mostly content for the event-eye to do the seeing. The girl whose mother is making her a dress notices, in the moment, that her mother “has to cut and match very cleverly” and she will naturally complain because her mother will “also make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool.” But it is the eye from the future that can declare her past self “ungrateful.” The girl in the past may feel ingratitude, but she will likely be unable to articulate such a thing; surely she will be unable to confess it. It is the work of the future narrator to see that she was in fact ungrateful, and to note it, and thereby to hold that earlier version of herself to account.

[Poetry for Prosers] Like A Good Story? You’ll Love These Four Collections.

Katie Umans — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 13:00:18 +0000

Poetry for Prosers is an occasional column by Katie Umans.

These four recent books of poems should appeal to anyone who loves a good story. Warning: the plots may be absurd or cryptic or surreal—or may slip out the back door when you go looking for them.

Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions Ltd, 2011)
by Aracelis Girmay

Aracelis Girmay’s Kingdom Animalia, borrowing animals for metaphor and mirror, asks how a person can live as the one “pushed or fallen/out of the grave, to live.” The living in her books is big and ecstatic, the contemplations of death also somehow so. Her poems tumble into pleas, odes, and elegies, sometimes seeming to land with the imprint not of the brain but of the heart, at least as it can be summoned through poetry’s music. They are never restrained, jaded, or flattened. The speaker watches “the sea & beach move into each other’s mouths” and cries out “O, god, let us love / like they love.” Because of this largeness, this declarative ripeness in the poems, it’s sometimes easy to overlook the precision and intelligence of smaller images, as in the beginning of “Portrait of the Woman as a Skein,” which asks, startlingly, earnestly: “Tell me what, on earth, / would make you leave your hands / or want to, at the wash-sink? / in the lemon grove? / on the way home from standing, baffled, / in the grocery?” and opens from there.

“& isn’t the heart / an ampersand?” Girmay asks in “&.” Yes. In this book, the heart joins the self to everything it can. The heart exists perhaps only what it can join. The speaker’s loved ones are stretched across countries and continents and generations, so the ampersand is necessary, a symbol both rapturous and rending. At times family includes even people not related to one another, as when the speaker watches an intimate scene between a young man and a distraught woman who is not actually related to him, but who somehow is by the end of the poem.

Girmay’s poems are all about such connections, about the pull of family, the pull of earth, the pull of places one has been, the pull of the body’s own impulses, all the “touches of the disappearing.” Where they pause on politics, as in “Praise Song for the Donkey,” which recalls a moment of destruction in Palestine, it is in the context of how impermanent we already are and just how pointless the acceleration of violence is.

One day, not today, not now, we will be gone
from this earth where we know the gladiolas.
My brother, this noise,
some love [you] I loved
with all my brain, & breath,
will be gone; I’ve been told, today, to consider this
as I ride the long tracks out & dream so good

I see a plant in the window of the house
my brother shares with his love, their shoes. & there
he is, asleep in bed
with this same woman whose long skin
covers all of her bones, in a city called Oakland
& their dreams hang above them
a little like a chandelier
& their teeth flash in the night, oh, body.

—from “Kingdom Animalia”

Something in the Potato Room (Kore Press, 2009)
by Heather Cousins

Though this book is a few years old now, it is well worth bringing to the attention of fiction readers (and all readers) who might have missed it. In Something in the Potato Room, Heather Cousins draws us into a world that is bizarre and full of underside-of-the-rock images: a little bit Edward Gorey, a little bit office satire, and a little bit Heart of Darkness. The poems are bodily—full of saliva and crotches, houses “the color of lips and toenails,” then later mandibles, pearly bones, tendons, headaches.

The lines are like some dark glue that might seep out from the edges of a proper Victorian photograph. In fact, Victorian-style drawings dot the book and occasionally hold the frame of an image a touch longer than the poem.

Written more like a novel than a set of disparate poems, the untitled columns of text follow a protagonist who works at an unnamed museum, the stress of which seems to throw her into a state of hypochondria. She is tended by a cryptic, vaguely sinister doctor who sends her on vacation to clear her head. She buys a house and encounters more menacing mysteries there, but these become, at least, her own. The potato room of the title is a “dark, crumbling walk-in” found downstairs in her new home, one perhaps once used for cold storage. It is in this room that a central gruesome re-birth takes place, propelling the remainder of the book and ferrying the narrator into a kind of purpose with a story that’s all images and yet somehow utterly legible.

I held him. Like sailors
hold oars. Like the starv-
ing hold bread. Like boy
scouts hold knots. He was
pointy and full of scuttles.
He smelled of mushrooms
and placenta. It filled the
small room. Coated us.
An oily dust. My hair and
eyelashes were full of it.

Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie (The University of Akron Press, 2010)
by Joshua Harmon

Here is another slightly older book well worth resurrecting. “Can we just get rid of / Poughkeepsie little by little?” Harmon asks in a rare lighter moment (or maybe it’s the most deadly serious), but before he can get rid of it, he must build it exhaustively, and that he does in eight sections of truly remarkable poetry all devoted to that one city. This is possible and not gimmicky only because Harmon is so talented and does not go simply for a surface catalog of landmarks, nor fall into a detached disdain.

Borrowing openly from literary inspirations as diverse as Baudelaire, The Spoon River Anthology, Homer, and Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” at times Harmon’s vignettes make me think most of the work of a poet he doesn’t allude to—the T.S. Eliot of “Preludes,” with his “conscience of a blackened street / Impatient to assume the world.” Other times they are more like a Bruce Springsteen song pushed up into slightly more rarefied and intellectual language. Reading them you are word-ported to a stagnant and litter-strewn street, perpetually twilight, often cold, where the sealed-in domestic and commercial rituals lend not a sense of community but a sense of something encrypted, of many people working toward many survivals in some fiercely private way. Poughkeepsie and its people make up a kind of tragedy of self-containment (“We’re cutting down our half of the tree, you can do what you like with yours”).

The no-break look and rhythm of the early long poem “The Poughkeepsiad” may be off-putting to some readers at first. “The Poughkeepsiead” is not only one sentence that spans six pages; it is one sentence that barrels along like an avalanche gathering nouns, never culminating in a verb. Sure there are verbs, small actions, embedded in the lines, but the poem seems trapped (productively, in a literary sense) in “a terrain of nearly unbearable enjambment,” to use Ann Lauterbach’s astute assessment on the back cover. It can certainly seem intimidating, as if one would need a flash of instant large-scale understanding to match its ambition, but if you can shake that feeling and submit to the poem’s moments, you will find each astounding in its own right, from the “wire cart/loaded with the music of aluminum / cans” to the “traffic-struck doe kicking limply / beside the road” or someone sleeping “through gruesome / histories of endurance like an eyelash stuck to a cheek.”

For capturing a sense of place, far more often fiction’s work, it is hard to think of a book of poems that is more successful. As animated by Harmon, Poughkeepsie is a realm where knowledge of a place and the visceral feel of it are never far apart, where “it’s going / to get colder: and it gets colder.” At 90+ pages, the book is probably not one to read in a sitting, but open to any page and you’ll find a stunning portrait that speaks volumes about how poems, which so often boast of being timeless and placeless, can also land somewhere and lose nothing.

The automatic garage-door opener 
lifts on a prospect of Poughkeepsie:  
row of parked cars along curb, man 
leaf-blowing each falling leaf,  
sumac growing beneath the overpass:  
if you’re not part of the problem,  
you’re part of the lengthening  
tragedy: we see all the others  
slipped into the bright shapes of endeavor,  
imprints snow slowly fills, but the stray  
detours and workarounds of the secret 
city inside the more obvious one  
elude our plundered adornments  
and church-bell quarter hours

—from “Two Pastorals”

Lucky Fish
by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
(Tupelo Press, 2011)

With Lucky Fish, Aimee Nezhukumatathil makes her second appearance in this column. Considering the critical acclaim she is enjoying, this is probably the least of her recent accomplishments, but I think it says something about the reliable accessibility and charm of her voice, coupled with a joyous curiosity that can be appreciated by poets and prosers alike.

The bright and sun-struck poems of Lucky Fish seem at first to be pure Neruda-like odes to fruits and critters and to all that can be projected upon them, so pomegranates scattered from a stolen tree are the “stormy and still-beating hearts” of the original owners and stars in the sky are “cola-colored.” So the speaker says to a lover “I point my pistil / & blade of leaves to you.” But what’s most satisfying in these poems, and where Nezhukumatathil parts ways from the lusty and satisfied Neruda, is that they are not always pleasure-seeking. Sometimes they are inquisitive, often compassionate, sometimes even gently accusatory. These worlds don’t belong to us. They have their own meaning first, before we read our own onto them. The poems are inhabited, too, by a melancholy note, represented by disconsolate petting zoo animals and caged great apes and a fortune telling parrot who guesses that those to whom it tells less welcome fortunes might “tear [its] red beak / in two angry pieces / like a pistachio.”

The poems lean, too, into the magical, as when a flower eats a farmer in “Corpse Flower” or a boy transforms into a bird in “The Feathered Cape of Kechi.” They are fables and fairy tales, yes, but so, the poet suggests, is a honeymoon or motherhood or being a poet, all such delicate and unlikely states, all reliant on the larger narrative we bring to them, what we tell ourselves we are doing—and why.

The poems are not all nature-driven and fable-like. One of the most enjoyable sequences in the book is about Nezhukumatathil’s own identity. In “Dear Amy Nehzooukammyatootill” and “Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?” she betrays her affection for students trying to figure out her poems and poetry in general. In “Dear Betty Brown,” she strips the affection away to chastise the Texas Representative who suggested that citizens with un-American sounding names should change them to make pronunciation easier for others. The book’s third section is a sustained look at pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood, from a husband who stays “strong as a pepper plant” during his wife’s labor to the early weeks with a baby whose “ears / glow from behind like a church window.” In the haunting poem “The Toy Universe,” Nezhukumatathil zooms out from her son’s toy universe, where “there are smiley faces on trains, / race cars, buses” to the universe of the children “piecing together toy trains / and race cars and buses” in China, living out very different childhoods. In this poem, Nezhukumatathil breaks open the insularity of attentive motherhood. Her poems always seem to be about how much more can be let in, how much farther empathy can extend into world both human and animal, without breaking down our own carefully tended bonds.

She’s been warned not to sleep with moonlight
on her face or she will be taken from her house.

She wears eel-skin to protect herself. She tilts
her face to the night sky when no one is looking.
During the eclipse, eels bubble in their dark

and secret caves. Toads frenzy in pastures
just outside of town, surrounding the dumb cows

in a wet mess of croak and sizzle.

—from “Eclipse”

Katie Umans is one poet of Two Poet Truffles, a chocolate and poetry enterprise that publishes The Concher. Her first book of poetry, Flock Book, is forthcoming this summer from Dzanc/Black Lawrence Press.

Messy Experiments, Elegant Solutions

Celeste Ng — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:00:45 +0000

I.

In a recent-ish piece for NPR, “A Deathbed Story I Would Never Tell,” Robert Krulwich describes an incident in the life of physicist Richard Feynman. It is 1945, and Feynman’s young wife has just died:

The nurse records the time of death: 9:21 p.m. He is empty with loss. What few things she had, he packs up; he arranges for a cremation, walks back into her room and sees that the clock had strangely stopped ticking. The hands are frozen at 9:21, the very moment of her death.

Feynman refused to believe this was anything but coincidence, and that, Krulwich insists, shows the difference between a storyteller and a scientist. As an avowed storyteller, “I couldn’t do that,” Krulwich insists. “I would want to, almost need to, imagine a higher audience for a moment like that.”

This alleged dichotomy—storytelling vs. science—is familiar to me. I grew up in a family of scientists: my father was a physicist for NASA, my mother a college chemistry professor and research chemist, my sister an aerospace and mechanical engineer. And that’s just my immediate family. My point is, though I may be a storyteller myself, I know something about scientists and what makes them tick. Moreover, my dad had a particular fondness for Richard Feynman, and he gave me copies of Feynman’s two memoirs, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think? when I was about eight or nine. They were hilarious, and I loved them.

So the NPR essay struck a chord with me—it’s a prime example of how scientists and storytellers tend to treat each other: like one is from Mars and the other is from Venus. Says Krulwich:

Storytelling is what humans do. It’s part of our nature —but natures, I’ve noticed, differ. I am not a scientist. I don’t have a mind for what they do, which is to stick, doggedly, to hard facts, keeping emotion out of the room. It’s a discipline for them, a way of being, that makes them, well, scientists.

Actually, Krulwich makes a few surprising errors in this piece—for example, Feynman’s wife did not have Hodgkin’s disease, but tuberculosis, and in fact, the confusion over Arlene’s disease is one of the stories (yes, stories!) Feynman tells in his memoirs. But the most surprising error is more fundamental: he mischaracterizes both what scientists do and what storytellers do. We think of science and storytelling as polar opposites: Research versus art. Cold, hard facts versus hot, gushing emotion. But the truth is, they’re not even opposite sides of the same coin. They’re joined together on the same Möbius strip.

II.

Scientists are, at heart, what-iffers. They are pokers and prodders. They are perpetual kids at play in the sandbox of the universe. Every science experiment boils down to this: what if I took this scenario and let it play out—what would happen? The child scientist wonders, what if I mix bleach and ammonia? (Answer: run.) The adult scientist wonders, what if I take this gene and change this little part of it? What will happen then? They may have ideas about what will happen: I think it’ll foam up. I think it’ll protect you from diabetes.

But often, when the scenario plays out, things don’t turn out as expected. The scientist pauses. Hmm. That’s weird. And almost always, the unexpected is more interesting than the expected. Take an experiment by another scientist in Krulwich’s essay, Ernest Rutherford. In his most famous work, Rutherford fired tiny particles at a tissue-thin leaf of gold foil. Based on the understanding of atoms at the time, he expected the particles to shoot through the metal in a straight line, like bullets through fog—and some did. But others riccocheted off at an angle. Some bounced straight back into a startled Rutherford’s face, leading him to say, “It was as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a sheet of tissue paper and it came back to hit you.” Maybe, he realized, they had the layout of the atom all wrong. (They did.)

So when the unexpected happens, as a scientist you perk up in delight. The universe has surprised you. You poke and prod a little further: Okay, so what if I mix THESE two things? What if I change this other part of the gene? You draw up a new scenario, a half-step different from the last, and let it play out, again and again and again, until you manage to pin down one small corner of truth.

Because let’s dispel two misconceptions here here: (1) that scientists steer their work with the precision and efficiency of steamship captains; and (2) that they are dispensers of infallible truths. Nothing about science is efficient. You pick and feel your way, as if through a very large, very crowded, very dark room. And in the end, what you have is your best guess as to what would happen, your most informed answer to this one what if. If you’ve done a good job, others will look at what you’ve done and say: Yes. This is important. And I believe you.

III.

At heart, writers, too, are what-iffers. Where the scientist pokes and prods the atom, the brain, the genome, the writer turns on society, human behavior, the human heart. Every attempt to write a story boils down to the same question: what if I took this scenario and let it play out—what would happen? So-called genre writers do it all the time: What if robots could feel emotions? What if teens had to fight each other for survival? But literary fiction writers do it, too. What if three girls in swimsuits walked into a grocery store? What if a mother found a blood clot in her baby’s diaper? What if a lawyer defended a black man in the deep South from a charge of rape—and his young daughter watched it all unfold? Like an experiment, every good story starts with a what-if.

As a writer, you may have ideas about where the story will go. The clerk is going to get together with the girl in the pink bikini! The lawyer’s going to convince everyone that Tom is innocent! And then you start writing, letting the scenario play out, and things veer off course. Characters surprise you, wiggling their way into situations you did not intend, balking when you try to kill them off, or save them, or make them call their mothers. Out of nowhere, an astronaut brother appears, or a mute old man, or a golem. Suddenly you find yourself in the jungle, at the hospital, atop the Empire State building. The writer pauses. Hmm. That’s weird. And almost always, the unexpected is more interesting than the expected.

So when a story takes an unexpected curve, as a writer you, too, perk up in delight. The universe of your story has surprised you. You expected none of this, and yet you feel, in your bones, that this is right. You poke and prod a little further. Okay, so what if Scout confronts the angry mob at the jailhouse? What if the clerk quits his job? You draw up a new scenario, slightly different than the last, and let it play out, again and again and again. You stick to the hard facts of the story as you discover them, silencing your own emotions, killing your darlings, until you manage to pin down one small corner of truth.

And you fight the same misconceptions: despite the Hollywood image of a writer tapping industriously at the typewriter, nothing about writing is efficient, either. Writers pick and feel their way through the same very large, very crowded, very dark room. And each story, even when it’s finished, is your most informed answer to this one what if, your best guess at truth, anchored in total fiction. If you’ve done a good job, others will look at what you’ve done and say: Yes. I believe you. And this is important.

IV.

Both science and stories struggle to make meaning—however small—from the apparent chaos around us. And sometimes, small truths are enough. Understandably, Krulwich—like many others—wants Big. He wants to feel

as though the universe had somehow noticed what had happened, that some invisible hand slipped into my world and pointed, as if to say, ‘We know. This is part of the plan.’ [...] I just want to imagine that the things that happen to me just might have — and deserve — the attention of the universe.

But can you imagine a story in which the main character’s clock stops at the exact moment his wife dies? Cliche! the critics would shout. Club us over the head a little more, please? It’s so easy to conflate “storytelling” with “symbolism,” or maybe with “sentimentality”—to forget that in the best stories, the meaning is made not in the telling, but in the mind of the reader.

So let me give you another example of science and storytelling. Here’s a passage from Feynman’s memoir: the moment of Arlene’s death, written some 40 years after the fact. He has raced from Los Alamos to Albuquerque—hitchhiking the last 30 miles after not one, but two flat tires—to find that his wife no longer seems to see him, or anyone.

I kept imagining all the things that were going on physiologically: the lungs aren’t getting enough air into the blood, which makes the brain fogged out and the heart weaker, which makes the breathing even more difficult. I kept expecting some sort of avalanching effect, with everything caving in together in a dramatic collapse. But it didn’t appear that way at all: she just slowly got more foggy, and her breathing gradually became less and less, until there was no more breath—but just before that, there was a very small one.

[...] I sat there for a while, then went over to kiss her one last time.

I was very surprised to discover that her hair smelled exactly the same. Of course, after I stopped and though about it, there was no reason why hair should smell different in such a short time. But to me it was kind of a shock, because in my mind, something enormous had just happened—and yet nothing had happened.

[The next day] I called the towing company and got back the car, and packed Arlene’s stuff in the back. I picked up a hitchhiker, and started out of Albuquerque.

It wasn’t more than five miles before … BANG! Another flat tire. I started to curse.

The hitchhiker looked at me like I was mentally unbalanced. “It’s just a tire, isn’t it?” he says.

“Yeah, it’s just a tire—and another tire, and again another tire, and another tire!”

We put the spare tire on, and went very slowly, all the way back to Los Alamos, without getting the other tire repaired.

Tell me that—though he sticks to the cold, hard facts, though he refuses to ascribe any divinely-prescribed meaning to the moment—his heartbreak doesn’t come through here. Tell me there isn’t a small truth here. Tell me this isn’t a story.

Further Links & Resources

Listen to the NPR story discussed in this essay, Robert Krulwich’s “A Deathbed Story I Would Never Tell.”

Curious about Richard P. Feynman’s memoirs? Read an excerpt from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! or pick up a copy of What Do You Care What Other People Think?

[Contrasts & Charms] The Allure of the Sequel

Charlotte Boulay — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:00:48 +0000

I am impatiently waiting for so many sequels! First, I must have another installment of Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief series. My raving about these books has not convinced many friends to read them—to all of you I say: fools! You don’t know what you’re missing. Next, I want Hilary Mantel’s sequel to her wonderful Wolf Hall. I would never have thought that I could be so entranced by Thomas Cromwell, but I am. I know I’ll be waiting a while for George R. R. Martin’s sixth installment in The Song of Ice and Fire, known to HBO subscribers as Game of Thrones, but that doesn’t make the wait any easier. Finally, I’m hoping that Amitav Ghosh’s conclusion to the Ibis Trilogy comes sooner rather than later. Except that’s not “finally” at all—not even close. There are a half a dozen other series whose next installments I’m eagerly awaiting. Why are sequels so compelling?

Of course the market loves sequels because it’s a more reliable way to hook readers than author recognition alone. When you fall in love with a character a cliffhanger will keep you coming back. Look how we all stuck with Lost for so long, despite knowing it could only end in tears. The shift in television from episodic to serial construction is probably abetting our longstanding love of sequels. Much has been written about the novelistic qualities of The Wire, perhaps the most “literary” of any recent TV show in terms of the depth of its characters, its wide-reaching social implications, and its refusal to accept facile outcomes, or to commit to audience-pleasing expectations. If the events of The Wire were written down, I can’t imagine them all occurring in one volume—it’s a series, on screen or on the page.

I love sequels the way I loved each season of The Wire: because I so often want more. More character, more plot. Serial narrative can give a writer an opportunity to show us more about a wider range of characters, and to take those characters through many different events. But most of all it just repeats that pleasurable cycle of rising action, climax, and resolution, over and over again. The greatest series are ones where the reader is so attached to the characters that they’re like friends on the best road trip ever—the radio is always tuned to just the right station and you’re speeding down the highway singing together, and you don’t get sick of each other halfway through the dry plains of Kansas, if the writer has done her job well.

I do my favorite wallowing in sequels when I discover a whole series, already published. No waiting! I zipped through Daniel Abraham’s Long Price Quartet on a vacation, and Laurie R. King’s Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell books (eleven to date! oh glory days—) got me through a hot summer and a particularly awful move. I read the first two of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games books one immediately after the other and only had to wait a few months for Mockingjay. That was a few months too many. I get jealous when someone tells me they haven’t read a great big series, like the Harry Potter books, or Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons because they have so much great reading ahead of them, and can skip the torture of waiting for the next volume to be released.

Many of the books listed above could be considered “genre” fiction, although that’s really an empty term. Literary fiction is a genre like any other. Still, fewer works of literary fiction have sequels than works of fantasy, or mystery, and it seems as if the trilogy is becoming the default mode of the young adult writer these days.

There are literary fiction series, of course, even very long ones. Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, and Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. There are the companion novels of Evan Connell, Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, and the aforementioned Sea of Poppies books by Amitav Ghosh. Several of these writers straddle the genre divide between the thing we call literary fiction and its subdivision “historical fiction,” which occupies an interesting place in sequel-land. The reader knows the history, so the cliffhangers depend on character. In the right hands, this doesn’t lower the stakes at all.

And then there are writers who use the sequel in unusual ways, like Ellen Gilchrist’s many books of short stories (Victory Over Japan, Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle) in which one of her narrators, Rhoda, cuts across stories and collections. Or Grace Paley’s stories about the New York City mother, and activist, and friend, Faith. Gish Jen’s first novel, Typical American, tells a story of American identity through the character of Chinese immigrant Ralph Chang. Her second, Mona in the Promised Land, offers a different view on the subject through the eyes of Ralph’s daughter, the temple-going Mona Changowitz. Margaret Atwood juxtaposes Oryx and Crake, the tale of how reckless, corporate genetic engineering led to apocalypse, with The Year of the Flood where apocalypse survivors piece the world back together bit by bit.

There is a difference between tying a sequel to plot and tying one to the change of a character, though. If a book relies on character tropes, if there is a brave heroine, for example, even a flawed heroine, it limits a book’s capacity for revelation. Katniss is always brave. Her actions in The Hunger Games remain utterly consistent with this one trait, and this personality trait proves essential to our understanding of her as someone we can love without reservation. But characters we can love with reservations have a greater capacity for surprise. You read to find out not only what they will do, but who they will become. The best books make us do both.

Why don’t poets tend to write sequels? Well, I suppose in a way they do, but seldom explicitly. It’s difficult to separate the sequel from the use of narrative. Successive volumes of associative poetry often seem more like an evolution. You could think of Marie Howe’s three books as sequels to each other, in the way that the voice in many of the poems continues from book to book fairly consistently, although it addresses different issues and takes different risks in each. More narratively, Jack Gilbert’s books sometimes feel serially connected to me; as I read I trace his relationship with Michiko from its moments of ecstatic happiness through the despair of her loss.

Not every book needs a sequel, of course. As much as I loved Hannah Tinti’s The Good Thief, I don’t need to know about the main character Ren’s life now. The beauty of the novel lies in the completeness of the story, a story that, because it is honest and complex, necessarily has an ending that contains uncertainty in addition to resolution. I don’t want to mar that uncertainty with an “everything turned out all right” phase of the story—a plot problem that Downton Abbey will have to contend with next season. Even if most things turn out all right, in a good, complete novel the ending usually has a touch of bitter with its sweet, and that’s all there is to say about it. Who would want a sequel to Charlotte’s Web? Wilbur won’t be killed by the farmer, but we’ll all grow old and die. And I understand that many authors do not write the sequels I would eagerly read about their bewildering, bewitching characters because they have fully explored their themes through those characters, and now they need new people and new situations to continue to make sense of the world.

In the end I suppose the only really good reason to write a sequel is if the story, including the story of who these characters are and what we can learn from them, remains unfinished. Usually it seems clear when this is the case, but there are always surprises. I know there’s a sequel (unlooked for, and unexpected) to one of my favorite books of the last ten years—Elizabeth Knox’s The Vintner’s Luck. So why haven’t I snapped it up? I’m scared. What if continuing the story of Xas, the fallen angel, somehow ruins his character, so perfectly constructed in the first book? When you have a novel with such a pristine and unusual story, what if the continuation goes off track? And if the sequel is as wonderful as its predecessor, at the end of it I’ll have to say goodbye to the characters all over again.

My fears are somewhat allayed by the reviewer David Larsen, who writes:

Knox’s 1998 bestseller, The Vintner’s Luck, is a category-obliterating tour de force: a literate fantasy, a theological love story, a New Zealand novel set in 19th-century France. It’s a delight on every level and it needs a sequel the way the Moonlight Sonata needs a heavy metal version. So why saddle it with one? The only good answer to this question is a sequel so good it sits on the original not like a saddle, but like a halo; and that is the answer Knox provides.

Sounds like I’d better get to it. It’s a good thing I have something to do while I’m waiting around.

Further Links and Resources

Among the sequel-related topics not discussed here, I’d love to talk about sequels in homage. Though they’re often unwanted by copyright holders of the original works.

Also, hello fanfiction. You are a bizarro world devoted to our greedy need for more narrative (and often more sex scenes). I love that at this point in her career P.D. James has unapologetically written a fanfic sequel to Pride and Predujdice, and it’s on my reading list.

If you publishers would like to send me advance copies of Veronica Roth’s sequel to Divergent or the next volume of Sara Gran’s excellent Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, I’ll be your best friend.

I’ve always wished that Josephine Tey had written more Alan Grant novels. I wish that Douglas Adams was still around to write more about a different kind of detective, the inimitable Dirk Gently. I’d give a fortune for another meeting with the heroine of Kyle Aryn’s The God of Animals.

And you, intrepid readers? What sequels are you eagerly anticipating, or which ones would you pay an author to write, if you had a million dollars and they were amenable?

“Contrasts and Charms” is an occasional column. Read another installment here.

We’re in love. It’s complicated.

Natalie Bakopoulos — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:00:55 +0000

Eugenides versus the marriage plot

In Jeffrey Eugenides’s new novel, The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), Madeleine Hanna is a student at Brown in the 1980s, and the novel begins with her graduation. She has broken up with moody yet charming Leonard, and we soon learn, as does she, that his absence from her life is due to his psychiatric hospitalization.

During their time in college, which the book soon returns to, we discover that Madeleine’s senior thesis is on the “marriage plot.” And because Eugenides’s own novel is both operating within the concept of the marriage plot and breaking its rules, it’s fitting that Madeleine’s position on the subject is not particularly stated or argued. The anti-marriage plot, after all, is still a plot revolving around or careening toward marriage.

But if a comedy ends in marriage and a tragedy in death, The Marriage Plot is simultaneously neither and both. Leonard’s acceptance of his life as one of pain and suffering—depression hurts—is perhaps more tragic than a death, and Madeleine’s father likens her eventual choice to marry Leonard to death. “It’s your funeral,” he says wryly (Thanks, Dad!), and in a sense it is the beginning of the end.

In the traditional marriage plot, the choice of whom to marry gave the woman some power, but a promising, intelligent, Brown graduate is powerless in neither wit nor resource, before or after marriage. What Madeleine is powerless against is Leonard’s depression, a fact she realizes acutely once married since she cannot simply walk away from it. We are left with the sick sensation of being trapped. And this feeling becomes more complicated because Leonard has our sympathies—at least, this reader’s sympathies.

Madeleine is not broody but there is a sadness to her from the beginning: she is a little bit of a loner. When we first meet her, it’s after a long night and she hasn’t changed her clothes, and there’s a coldness from her roommates, not to mention none of that morning-after gossip and laughter that for me persisted way beyond my college years. We rarely see her interacting with other women, and her friendships are not very strong to begin with, or seem to fade away. When she is at Pilgrim Lake, where Leonard has a biology fellowship following graduation, she finds the women scientists either beyond her in age (though this shouldn’t preclude friendship, it may) or intellect (condescending and dismissive).

Still later in the novel, after Leonard goes missing and Mitchell, Madeleine’s other suitor (if we’re using traditional “marriage plot” terminology), is staying at her house, Madeleine spends time with old friends from high school, and here we actually see her enjoying herself, shopping and swimming and reverting perhaps back to her pre-Brown and pre-Leonard self. When they leave, though, “Madeleine [becomes] intelligent again, as lonely, misfortunate, and inward as a governess.”

I can’t help but wonder why a little shopping, tanning, and swimming automatically makes Madeleine unintelligent, but again I’m aware of a little winking, and what I’m focused on here is word “governess”; in this context one can’t not think of Jane Eyre. Though Madeleine is privileged and well bred, in her isolation she is more like a governess, both a part of things and on their periphery. Leonard’s antisocial behavior and lack of desire to hang out with his colleagues had isolated them both.

But whether or not we are sympathetic to Leonard, we see Madeleine is trapped in the relationship.

There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home. The further Leonard receded from other people, the more he relied on Madeleine, and the more he relied on her, the deeper she was willing to follow.

Until he doesn’t allow her to. Leonard’s departure allows her escape. His disappearance has set her free.

***

In his introduction to the anthology My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro, Jeffrey Eugenides writes:

A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims—these are lucky eventualities but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

I would add that “lucky eventualities” are not stories at all. “If you want a compelling story,” writes Charles Baxter, “put your protagonist among the damned. The mechanisms of Hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It’s about what happens when the stories are over.” The Marriage Plot is a compelling story for sure. And its disappointments and sour tricks of fate and biology make it a love story, too.

By writing a marriage plot with an awareness that it can no longer be written, and setting it at Brown in the 1980s, when the sexiness of semiotics reigned in the English department, Eugenides has deconstructed from within, subverting both the “madwoman in the attic” and “the angel in the house,” not to mention their brooding Byronic hero, while remaining hugely aware of their presence. What is interesting is that they take different forms at different times. Just when we think the signs point to one we become aware of another.

If key features of the Victorian novel, particularly as written by women, are, as noted by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their seminal The Madwoman in the Attic,

images of enclosure and escape, fantasies in which maddened doubles function as asocial surrogates for docile selves, metaphors of physical discomfort manifested in frozen landscapes and fiery interiors … along with obsessive diseases …

Eugenides has taken them all, mixed them up, and allowed them to emerge in both new and familiar ways.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar actually appear in the novel, in another layer of winking, and a male writer bringing in their ideas about female writers and female characters is intriguing and exciting, particularly in this book’s context. While Gilbert and Gubar interrogated the way women writers felt compelled or obliged to write their women—as angels or as monsters—Eugenides, not on the basis of his sex but because of the freedom of his imagination and the depth of his insight, challenges this.

In fact, Eugenides has been challenging this all along: we have in The Virgin Suicides the reverent, pious Cecilia and the lusty, rebellious Luxe, having sex not in the attic but on the roof, away and out of reach but also outside the boundaries of the home. Cecilia floats around the house, her own gothic manor, in a shredded old wedding dress and eventually throws herself out the window, impaling herself on a fence. Some might argue that the girls in The Virgin Suicides come off as archetypes, but it is their mystery and the way the boys piece together who they are—the driving question of the novel—that allows this.

Finally, it’s Old Mrs. Karafilis, though portrayed as slightly crazy, who arguably serves as the moral center of that novel. Although she is not hidden away in the attic, she does spend most of her time in the dark and gloomy basement, and her judgmental observation that Americans are overly concerned with happiness may be the most true, sane observation of the book.

And such melding is obvious in Middlesex: Who can forget that beautiful, heart-wrenching scene where the young Calliope looks up the word “hermaphrodite” and finds it defined as “monster”? “What’s wrong with me, Daddy?” she asks.

Many critics of The Marriage Plot have said that all the imagination and witty flourishes, the compelling voice of The Virgin Suicides and the lyrical, witty acrobatics of Middlesex would be hard to top, but it seems that once you consciously try to outdo yourself, your work becomes gimmick. Both The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex grew out of their material; their style seemed right for the subject matter. But what passes for imagination should not only be the boldness of story or the quirkiness of content but the intricacies of the characters’ lives and the way they interact with and bump up against the chosen setting.

***

I should note that I generally don’t like to classify characters as “likeable” or “unlikable.” It seems a strange way to talk about both characters and people. I certainly don’t like when people comment to a writer that their characters are unlikable: would you tell someone their children were unlikable, even if it were true? But as a friend of mine recently said at a reading of her first novel, quoting the writer Stacey D’Erasmo, “I don’t read fiction to make friends.” That said, let’s talk about the characters I like! Leonard I love the most, in all his self-destruction. His most poignant moments occur not in the way Madeleine deals with him, but in the way he deals with himself. Mitchell is my least favorite, and I say this as if he were an acquaintance, and with endearment: he’s the weird quasi-spiritual guy who’s always at parties, starting arguments and trying to pick up girls.

As characters, I adore them because of their complexities even though I wouldn’t necessarily want to hang out with them at that party. As a character I feel for Mitchell in his desperate love for Madeleine, but often I’m left wondering if he’s in love with Madeleine or in love with the idea of Madeleine. This judgment might be based on the novel’s structure—we rarely see them actually interacting—or simply because early in the novel we learn,

Mitchell was the kind of smart, sane, parent-pleasing boy she should fall in love with and marry. That she would never fall in love with Mitchell, precisely because of this eligibility, was yet another indication, in a morning teeming with them, of just how screwed up she was in matters of the heart.

Eugenides at National Writers Series, 10/20/11. Cr: John L. Russell

So, Leonard. Many reviewers and readers seem hell-bent on comparing him to David Foster Wallace, proving their inside knowledge with more subtle variations on, Hey, we get it! We know David Foster Wallace was depressed and wore a bandana! But any time you make such assumptions you miss the actual character’s inherent complexities. Leonard’s own volatility and profound sadness give him dimension and depth; any passing resemblance to a revered and adored and tragic writer may be a nice parallel but does not change the way I read him. It’s the same sort of myopia that makes people so quick to ask, which character is most like you? Most writers will tell you that they are all of them. A novel with one protagonist may more thinly veil it but a polyphonic novel is still written by one person.

Besides the fact that I imagine Leonard to be the Ivy League version of Riggins from Friday Night Lights —what, dear reader, is not to like?—the characters we like, much like the people we fall in love with, the friends we keep, the clothes we wear and the music we listen to, is generally about personal preference. “Madeleine had become an English major,” we learn, “for the purest and dullest reasons: because she loved to read.” Which brings us to the question of taste.

In his essay “On Taste,” Marcel Proust writes:

There are people for whom it is enough to enjoy the books that please them, as they enjoy flowers, fine days, or women. Others, tormented by an inordinate regard for truth, spoil their pleasure by wanting to make sure of its depth and justification. They are forever asking themselves: Is it really my mind which is so delighted by this book, or just my taste for what is in fashion, the copy-cat instinct which makes for so much unanimity in the tastes of a generation, or some other contemptible preference?

The characters at Brown, at least the ones enrolled in the Semiotics seminar, seem a bit “tormented” in this regard, to say the least. The playful satire of the stylishness of literary theories and ideas is wonderful, as is the study of the self-righteousness that arises when literary theory becomes ideology. And here, in these sorts of moments, Eugenides’s wit dazzles. When Madeleine finds a roommate’s boyfriend reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology, she asks him what it’s about, and he tells her that “the idea of a book being about something was exactly what this book was against, and that, if it was ‘about’ anything, then it was the need to stop thinking of books being about things.”

This, alone, is funny. It’s funny! But what’s funnier is the deadpan of the subsequent line: “Madeleine said she was going to make some coffee.” Eugenides is a master of comedic timing. And on the first day of her semiotics seminar, when her classmate states that he cannot introduce himself “because the whole idea of social introductions is so problematized,” I’m roaring. When it comes to books I am analytical and earnest and thoughtful and take great pleasure in the nerdy and intellectual, yes, but this kind of self-importance makes me want to walk into an academic conference and do a keg stand. Eugenides captures the anxiety of thought, or of taste, and the beautiful self-consciousness of a particular type of person. To discuss literature in this way feels a little anhedonic. Overintellectualizing can strip the joy out of life’s great and simple pleasures—much like the anhedonic numbness that often accompanies depression. It is gentle satire at its fictional best: the judgment of wit served up with the compassion of recognition.

Wonderful winking fills the book, but what makes these winks so effective is that they are not just for the sake of the tease. You can’t write a marriage plot any more? The book is a marriage plot. Juxtaposed against trendy Semiotics at Brown. Madeleine is reading and quoting from Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, for God’s sake. And when she notes the campus river that, years before, had caught on fire, she muses: “…how, exactly, do you douse a burning river? What could you do, when the retardant was also the accelerant?” Here, of course, is a wonderful metaphor for her relationship with Leonard, or maybe even Leonard himself, but Eugenides isn’t going to give us that one too easily. He wryly adds: “the lovelorn English major contemplated the symbolism of this.”

Still, Leonard as being his own retardant and accelerant is something to consider. His manic highs and depressed lows almost suggest two different people. Twice he refers to himself as Superman, after he leaves Madeleine alone in the apartment to write. “The problem with being Superman was that everybody else was so slow. Even at a place like Pilgrim Lake, where everyone had high IQs, the pauses in people’s speech were long enough for Leonard to drop off his laundry and return before they finished their sentences.” And then, after a pint of Guinness at one bar he finds himself in a taffy shop, aggressively flirting—okay, harassing—the young girl behind the counter. “Maybe it was her blush, or the tight fit of her sweater, or it was just part of being a Superman in reach of a super girl, but for whatever reason, Leonard felt himself getting hard at five paces.”

And then he swoops back into his apartment like Superman, lifting Madeleine off the couch and into the bedroom. Afterwards, Leonard utters those words that we both feared he would and simultaneously were waiting for, if for no other reason than the book’s title: “Marry me.”

And, dear reader, she does.

From the moment I learn that Leonard is bipolar I am already thinking of him as Madeleine’s “madwoman in the attic,” and in a sense I was let down by the utterance, quite late in the novel: “It turned out Madeleine had a madwoman in the attic: it was her six-foot-three boyfriend.” Only days after reading this line, I was teaching and some students pointed out that they hated when the author gave away what they had felt so proud of themselves for realizing sooner: “Let me feel like the smart one,” one student exclaimed, after reading a Jhumpa Lahiri story. And, even if this never came up, by the time Leonard, at their wedding, toasts to Madeleine as his “ministering Victorian angel” most readers will have made the connection.

As writers I think we all do it; while the plot and causality and the characters we’ve crafted are moving us in a certain direction, sometimes those insights are as organic and free as the wild first draft. The reader may have already gotten it because it’s so beautifully there, but the writer might not realize it until that moment. This may not be the case here: I wouldn’t put the double-feint past Eugenides, more of the book’s winking. Leonard is both Rochester and Bertha, Heathcliff and Catherine. The moodiness, sexual prowess, and self-aggrandization of famous Byronic heroes could easily be DSM-IV diagnosable as bipolar disorder. But in the Victorian novels Madeleine so loves, only the women are mad.

Madeleine is the novel’s protagonist but Leonard is her shadow (oh, and what to make of Mitchell, then, with his own adventures and searching, which though I don’t discuss here are certainly rich and worthy of attention). Leonard has the duality of a super hero, a face to the public and a face with which he saves the world. When Leonard decides in Paris to buy a cape I both groaned and cheered at Madeleine’s poignant confusion. What to make of this now, she must be asking. But every superhero needs a cape, after all. I picture the Heathcliff who exists in my mind, shielding his craggy face from the rain with his cape, an image I might have in my head from the movie or from an old book jacket or from something I’ve completely imagined, I don’t know. There is Rochester in his riding cloak, his face stern and his brow heavy. Leonard is the modern-day Byronic hero, from his often troubling sexual energy to his brooding soul and cocktail of anti-depressants: a true superhero, with two fully-formed identities in conflict.

The Marriage Plot contains less elegiac longing than Eugenides’s previous novels—Mitchell excepted—but that doesn’t mean it lacks pathos. Madeleine’s demeanor is generally calm, overly so, and her mood swings have to do with Leonard, a byproduct of the huge emotional space he occupies in her life. She grows depressed, then marries him in an almost maniacal state, fueled up on the endorphins of sex and attraction.

But this relationship leaves scant room for her emotions, and yields a cool passivity, at once believable and heartbreaking. I want her to throw something, I want her to walk into a taffy shop and behave inappropriately, and in all those beautiful boutiques in Paris I want her to buy something extravagant and weird.

But she can’t. Her yearning has been, in a sense, muted, frozen, like the campus of Pilgrim Lake and so many chilly landscapes in the novels she adores. She can’t even have a fiery, mad alter ego because Leonard fills that role, too, both charge and chief. But within her burns, at least at times, her physical desire. The marriage comes out of all that sexual energy, and Madeleine, with her obsession over what love is, wonders: “Did it all come down to the physical in the end? Is that what love was?” And it’s in this physical rapture that Leonard and Madeleine become engaged. Very slowly and all at once. I can’t help but think of Darcy’s observation in Pride and Prejudice: “A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.”

Madeleine does not see her leap immediately. It’s not until after they marry, while on their honeymoon in Nice, that, “The weight of marriage pressed down on her for the first time.” Funny, because the second Leonard uttered those words, “Marry me,” their weight takes over the novel.

Eugenides never abandons the meta-awareness of his novel being a novel about novels. Mitchell asks Madeleine at the end of the novel:

From the books you read for your thesis, and for your article—the Austen and the James and everything—was there any novel where the heroine gets married to the wrong guy and then realizes it, and then the other suitor shows up, some guy who’s always been in love with her, and then they get together, but finally the second suitor realizes that the last thing the woman needs is to get married again, that she’s got more important things to do with her life? And so finally the guy doesn’t propose at all, even though he still loves her? Is there any book that ends like that?

Madeleine tells him no, and he asks if she thinks it would be a good ending:

And Madeleine kept squinting, as though Mitchell was already far away, until finally, smiling gratefully, she answered, “Yes.”

There you go. Now, of course, there is.

Deconstruct love all you want, deconstruct the novel, tell yourself it’s not important, that these stories have been told before, that people have fallen in love before. But we all know the satisfaction, admit it or not, of a well-told story with an enthralling climax and a thoughtful resolution; we know the heart-stopping clatter of love. We can declare love insignificant. Through force of will, we can disavow it. But the second our vigilance flags we’re thrown back in, in thrall to it, in spite of ourselves. Barthes may paint love as a silly, laughable thing, but even so I can’t help but think of the male politicians who rail about homosexuality as an abomination and are later found getting blow jobs from boys in airport bathrooms. Hate and scorn always have a bit of love involved; love a touch of repulsion. One chapter’s epilogue references Plato’s Phaedrus: “the lover is intolerable (by his heaviness) to the beloved. “ Indifference is love’s true enemy.

Hate and scorn and love. Madeleine’s loves embody urge and uncertainty; she hovers always in-between. Leonard blazes at his seductive height – his most dangerous state – at manic extremes. In the aforementioned essay, Proust pities taste-questioners as those who “grope painfully on in quest of beauty, the mock of those who enjoy books as they enjoy flowers, fine days, women, and call these anxious migrant lunatics and neurotics . . . an anxiety quite as taxing as a high fever to these souls athirst for what heaven alone, perhaps, can grant, for what here below only artless simple-mindedness can lend.”

Perhaps true beauty lies in being en route: to enjoy a book with the simple pleasure of a fine day, but to also feel the racing pulse of inventiveness and endeavor. With wit and sincerity, Eugenides takes the two – lover and beloved – and marries them into one satisfying recombinant jewel.

Further Links and Resources:

If you’re a NYRB subscriber, read Lorrie Moore’s New York Review of Books essay on the pleasures of watching Friday Night Lights: “Very Deep in America.” (Or Willa Paskin’s roundup in New York Magazine for a very brief overview.)

New York Magazine’s fascinating piece on the complicated friendships and (sometimes) rivalries between Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and Mary Karr: “Just Kids” by Evan Hughes.

Click here to watch FWR’s editor-in-chief, Jeremiah Chamberlin, in a live, on-stage interview with Jeffrey Eugenides as part of the National Writers Series in Traverse City. Note: To skip the introductions, fast forward to the 15-minute mark.

Present Everywhere, Visible Nowhere: Flaubert’s Eye for Detail

Travis Holland — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:00:19 +0000

A gentle rain was falling onto the river at Croisset. From the parlor, the voices of Liline and her governess, Isabel Hutton, could be heard softly reciting their English lesson. Are you going to Paris? No, this year we are going to Etretat. Are the summers beautiful in Etretat? Yes, they are very beautiful. And what might one see in Etretat? So many things. To old Narcisse, drowsing in a spindle-backed chair by the enormous kitchen window, a feather duster enfolded in his long arms, their voices sounded like the singing of some marvelous species of bird. The watery white afternoon light lay like glazing on the thick knuckles of the valet’s hands where they loosely clasped the blue feather duster, and on Narcisse’s wrinkled, papery eyelids, which trembled ever so slightly as he slipped closer toward sleep, or as close to sleep as his various duties allowed, even on a day as unsprung, as timeless, as this. High on its wall-mount behind him, on a tongue of thin black metal Narcisse had overheard M’sieu Gustave alternatively describe as resembling a butterfly’s coiled proboscis or a clockspring, the bell-pull was for the moment silent. Hours might pass without it ringing. M’sieu Gustave, upstairs in his study, would be hunched over the green desk now, goose quill in hand, enwreathed in clouds of blue pipe smoke and the strong sweet scent of hair tonic—lemon and vanilla. Every morning Narcisse loyally assisted in the generous application of this hair tonic, which M’sieu Gustave hoped against hope might miraculously restore his once lustrous but now fast-receding hair, and every afternoon, after the lightest of lunches with his mother and Uncle Parain and his beloved niece Liline, M’sieu Gustave would close the study door, fill his pipe with tobacco, dip quill into inkwell—a porcelain frog, which amused old Narcisse to no end—and write. On the table beside the window, bathed in rain-light, the golden Buddha smiled. Over the whole of the manor house then a deep quiet descended.

“What a bitch of a thing prose is!” Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter to his lover Louise Colet in 1852. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”¹

For nearly a year, Flaubert—“M’sieu Gustave,” to his valet Narcisse, napping under that bell-pull in Croisset—had been hard at work on a novel that would, upon its serial publication in the autumn of 1856 in the journal La Revue de Paris, ignite a firestorm of moral indignation, eventually landing Flaubert (and editor Laurent-Pichat, along with the journal’s printer, Auguste Pillet) in a Paris courtroom, charged with endangering public morality. That novel, Madame Bovary (this essay refers to the Lydia Davis translation, Viking 2010), would become the first masterpiece of so-called “realist” fiction—a label Flaubert himself resisted—in which the author essentially disappears behind what Flaubert called a smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose.

Emma Bovary, the novel’s putative heroine—or anti-heroine, depending upon one’s sympathies—seduced as much by her own romantic illusions as she is by the callow, calculating Rodolphe Boulanger, strolls arm-in-arm with the reader to the very edge of the abyss, and then over that abyss. Without authorial judgment, without moralizing, in meticulously, beautifully turned prose, Flaubert vividly describes her fall. “Novelists,” writes the critic James Wood, “should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him.” But in 1857, few were thanking Flaubert, least of all Ernest Pinard, the imperial prosecutor who sought to have Madame Bovary banned:

“Who in this book can condemn this woman?” Pinard argued, readily answering himself: “No one.” Admirable though the book was, at least in terms of Flaubert’s considerable artistic talent, Pinard pronounced the author’s apparent lack of morality “execrable,” declaring: “Monsieur Flaubert can embellish his paintings with all the resources of art but with none of its caution; there is in this work no gauze, no veils—it shows nature in the raw.”

And how exactly did Flaubert go about his dangerous art in Madame Bovary? What does “nature in the raw” even look like, as far as fiction is concerned? Take this passage, fairly early in the novel, in which Emma and her husband Charles are invited to a ball at the opulent château of the Marquis d’Andervilliers, in La Vaubyessard:

It was very lofty, paved with marble flagstones, and the sounds of footsteps and voices echoed through it as in a church. Opposite rose a straight staircase, and to the left a gallery that looked out on the garden led to the billiards room, from which one could hear, at the door, the caroming of the ivory balls. As she was passing through it on her way to the drawing room, Emma saw men with serious faces standing around the game, their chins resting on their high cravats, all of them decorated, smiling silently as they made their shots. Against the dark woodwork of the wainscoting, large gilded frames bore, along their lower edges, names written in black letters. She read: “Jean-Antoine d’Andervilliers d’Yverbonville, Comte de La Vaubyessard and Baron de La Fresnaye, killed at the Battle of Coutras, October 20, 1587.” And on another : “Jean-Antoine-Henry-Guy d’Andervilliers de La Vaubyessard, Admiral of France and Knight of the Order of Saint Michael, wounded in combat at La Hougue-Saint-Vaast, May 29, 1692, died at La Vaubyessard, January 23, 1693.” Then one could barely make out those that came after, because the light from the lamps, directed down onto the green cloth of the billiards table, left the room floating in shadow. Burnishing the horizontal canvases, it broke over them in fine crests, following the cracks in the varnish; and from all those great black squares bordered in gold there would emerge, here and there, some lighter part of the paint, a pale forehead, a pair of eyes looking at you, wigs uncoiling over the powdery shoulders of red coats, or the buckle of a garter high on a plump calf.

Here we have the subtlest of seductions, without gauze or veils. To Emma, through whose eyes we witness this scene, and into whom Flaubert has all but vanished, it is all so romantic, so beguiling. The lofty entrance hall, echoing like a church, and those serious, smiling, “decorated” men standing around the green-clothed billiards table, making their shots. And of course the decorated men hanging on the wall, the noble dead, burnished in their martial (and one suspects amorous) triumphs by the light from the lamps hanging over the billiards table. This is Flaubert at his soft-pedaled best, “present everywhere and visible nowhere,” as he famously put it in a letter in 1852, allowing each deliberately chosen detail to speak for itself, without comment. Where once these decorated men might have hacked at each other with swords, thus earning themselves some measure of glory (an attenuated, rather silly glory, we can almost hear Flaubert murmuring), now they can only knock little ivory balls around a billiards table. Later, as dawn approaches, with the music of the dance “still humming in her ears,” Emma stands looking up at the windows of the château, imagining the guests in their rooms. “She would have liked to know what their lives were like, to enter into them, to become part of them.” Windows, one soon finds, are a returning motif in Madame Bovary; and no wonder, since the novel is itself a window, clear as glass, into Emma Bovary’s soul.

It was this very idea of fiction as a crystal clear window that Pinard was railing against. By what moral compass was the reader to navigate the world illuminated by this novel and its “execrable” creator? Up until the publication of Madame Bovary, authors were more than happy to be that compass. But not Flaubert, apparently. Pinard was not only arguing against this one novel but against the extraordinary vanishing act Flaubert had performed. This is the spring Flaubert in no small way ushered in. This is his gift to us.

But had Flaubert really disappeared? How exactly can an author be both, as Flaubert himself put it, present everywhere and visible nowhere in fiction?

In How Fiction Works, James Wood counters the occasionally heard criticism that realism, as form, is not really so realistic after all, contriving as it does to compose what is and always has been a rather messy world into a daisy-chain of scenes which invariably (one hopes) build, through conflict and rising action, to a moment of epiphany or change. “Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life-sameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.” In other words, the author hasn’t simply become a camera, mindlessly clicking on one image after another. The author is still and always with us, quietly, deliberately pointing the way. It’s helpful to remember that Flaubert was wary of being labeled a realist, and rightfully so. Perhaps it is better to imagine him at Croisset, at the window of his second-floor study with its big white bearskin rug and green-clothed writing table and gilded Buddha, and yes, even that little porcelain frog inkwell, looking out past the tulip tree and yew hedges to the Seine. “I have sketched, botched, slogged, groped,” Flaubert had written with no small amount of frustration in 1852. “Oh, what a rascally thing style is. I don’t believe you have any idea what kind of book this one is. I’m trying to be as buttoned-up in it as I was unbuttoned in the others and to follow a geometrically straight line. No lyricism, no reflections, the personality of the author absent.” Absent but nonetheless present everywhere, like God and the Devil, in the details.

And this is precisely how Flaubert could be both present and nowhere at once in that billiards room with Emma Bovary—in the very details he’s given us. Again, these details aren’t merely photographic; they’re not a simple accretion of seemingly random props present only to fill a scene: footsteps and voices in a marble-flagged entrance hall, a billiards table, the light-burnished portraits fading into shadow. I’m talking about fiction at its best now, fiction which is artistically capable of keeping any number of plates spinning in the air. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and in much of the finest literature that has followed, from Chekhov to Babel, Welty to Bellows to Munro, those details we encounter in scene are details the author has scrupulously and deliberately chosen (or instinctively, blessedly stumbled upon) that go beyond the mere surface of things. Yes, they paint a vivid scene, often beautifully, but look a little closer and you’ll discover that the solid ground you’re standing on is in fact ice. And under that ice, in the dim green light, another story is being told.

Take this marvelous passage from John Banville’s novel, The Infinities, in which young Adam Godley is waiting for a train to deliver a somewhat unwelcomed guest:

He stands on the platform in the shade. Why is it, he wonders, that railway tracks always give off a smell of kitchen gas? He looks about. Nothing has changed here since he was a child, so far as he can see. The metal canopy overhead is painted yellow and edged with a wrought-iron filigree and must have been put up a century ago or more. The station is lovingly kept. There are pots of geraniums on the window-sills of the waiting room, the benches set at intervals along the platform are freshly varnished, and on the wall a stylised hand pointing the way to the lavatories is painted in bright-red lacquer with a shiny, thick black outline. But where is the station master, where is the cross-eyed porter with the black hoop thing that porters carry on their shoulders, who used to be a fixture of the place? The emptiness is eerie. He paces for a while, then sits down on one of the benches; the new varnish with the sun on it is hot and gummy to the touch. Beyond the tracks the grass is sere and ticks faintly in the heat. Beyond that again the broad reach of the river is a whitish-blue drift throwing off fish-scales of platinum light. The silence buzzes. Down on the track a ragged grey crow hops jerkily from sleeper to sleeper, looking for something, does not find it, gives a disgruntled croak and flaps away. The surge of heedless happiness that rose in him as he drove along the lanes has all subsided now. He has shattered the sunlit surface of the day, like a clumsy gardener putting his foot through a vegetable frame to the humid tangle of things beneath. He gets up from the bench and paces anew, more agitatedly this time.

Notice how quietly Banville introduces a note of unease into this sunlit idyll with that rotten-egg “smell of kitchen gas.” It’s a lovely detail, unexpected and strange, and delicately rich with menace. Immediately Adam looks around, as if knocked slightly off balance, and sees everything is as it should be, as it’s always been, “so far as he can see.” In other words, the visible surface of the morning is still intact. The old iron-edged roof, the pots of geraniums and varnished benches, that painted hand pointing to the bathrooms. But where is everyone? Unnerved, Adam paces, then sits on one of the sticky benches to wait. The dead grass “ticks in the heat”—another marvelous, sly tightening of the screw of disquiet, as is the ragged crow down on the tracks, “looking for something” it does not find. A shift has occurred, as surely as if a cloud had crossed over the sun. “The surge of heedless happiness that rose in him as he drove along the lanes has all subsided now. He has shattered the sunlight surface of the day…” and abruptly gets up to pace again, “more agitatedly this time.”

With its rigorous, poetic attention to rhythm and sound, it’s a passage one could well imagine James Joyce or even Flaubert writing, and yet Banville’s book was published in 2010. Call it what you will—realism or lifeness, or simply the artist quietly, attentively at work, whispering in our ear: we are there with Adam, waiting uneasily on that hot, sun-beaten platform, with the faint smell of kitchen gas in the shimmering air and the dry grass ticking beyond the tracks.

Another example of this attentiveness to telling detail is Pat Barker’s deeply affecting 1995 novel, The Ghost Road, in which we witness the death of the British poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed in the final months of the First World War while trying to cross a canal under machine gun fire. Here, only moments after the battle, we come upon the terrible scene:

On the edge of the canal the Manchesters lie, eyes still open, limbs not yet decently arranged, for the stretcher-bearers have departed with the last of the wounded, and the dead are left alone. The battle has withdrawn from them; the bridge they succeeded in building was destroyed by a single shell. Further down the canal another and more successful crossing is being attempted, but the cries and shouts come faintly here.

The sun has risen. The first shaft strikes the water and creeps toward them along the bank, discovering here the back of a hand, there the side of a neck, lending a rosy glow to skin from which the blood has fled, and then, finding nothing here that can respond to it, the shaft of light passes over them and begins to probe the distant fields.

It is a scene Barker renders with both pathos and restraint, with this image of the dead sprawled along the canal after the storm has passed, their “limbs not yet decently arranged.” These young men have quite literally been left behind, not only by the battle still raging in the distance but by time itself. Already, one senses, the world is moving on. The rising sun, creeping near, discovers them, just as we have discovered them. Briefly, in that rosy glow that rises on the hands and necks and faces of these young men who in death have suddenly ceased to be themselves and are now simply the scattered, anonymous dead—in this glow we see the last flickering echo of life. The shaft of sunlight lingers on them, just as our eye might for a moment linger over a black-and-white war photograph in a book, before turning to the next page. It is not only Wilfred Owen then who has been effaced here by this Flaubertian-smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose. Barker too has vanished, or at least faded, right before our eyes.

Within a year of Flaubert’s death in 1879, Croisset was gone. The white-walled villa where he had written Madame Bovary, which for decades had served Flaubert so well as an island of domestic tranquility and peace, was sold to a consortium of investors and promptly gutted to the rafters. In its place they erected an enormous red-brick distillery, to which barges regularly delivered loads of coal and grain, docking down by the water’s edge. Where once eel fisherman had cast their nets, now a huge factory pipe poured an endless stream of reeking white foamy runoff into the river, while tall brick stacks, lit by the ugly light of softly hissing gas lanterns, spewed smoke into the air round the clock. Gone was the garden with its flower beds and yew hedges and glorious tulip tree, where M’sieu Gustave, when he was not laboring away at his desk upstairs, was often seen by the neighborhood children lounging on sunny afternoons, contentedly smoking his pipe. Years later, one of those children, now grown to adulthood, remembered that time at Croisset:

For me, he was a being like no other, exotic and fantastic, a mysterious personality whom I regarded in a confusion of wonder and respect. I never believed he was Norman. He was Persian or Turkish, Chinese or Hindu, I couldn’t decide which, but for sure he came from some distant place and had a distinctive nature. The fabulous accoutrements made me think he might well be a prince… When my nanny wanted to treat me, she’d walk me past his front gate, where I’d gaze at him smoking his pipe, slouched in a large armchair. I’ll always remember with tender emotion his pink and white striped culottes and his house robes, the floral design of which were pure poetry.

In life and in fiction, detail is everything.

From his study earlier, Flaubert had watched his greyhound Julio swim out to greet the boatman paddling past. A glittering golden-silver thread sketched itself on the brown river behind the dog as the slow current carried them along, and where the boatman’s oars dashed the water’s calm surface, the sunlight seemed to shatter like little glass globes. Standing there in his flowered Bokharan robe, a gift from his good friend Turgenev, with the mess of his great, unruly manuscript behind him on the green-clothed table—Bouvard et Pécuchet, on which he had labored now for three long years and saw no end to—Flaubert had felt the bones in his right hand throbbing, a deep smoldering ache that, along with the rheumatism in his knees and the pain in his swollen feet, rarely went away these days. Along with the pills Flaubert took for epilepsy and gout and his wretched, rotting teeth, his physician Fortin had prescribed a daily walk, but it was the garden with its weedy flower beds that had finally drawn him away from his writing this afternoon. Crouching painfully now, he pulled clump after clump of spiky dandelion. If only old Narcisse were here to help. But Narcisse, half blind with age, had returned to the bosom of his family years ago. Gone too was Flaubert’s mother, buried in Rouen, and Uncle Parain, and dear Liline, along with her English governess. A bumble bee, emerging from the soft purple throat of a lily, its black legs furred with pollen, lit for a second on the long sleeve of his robe, circled the bright red embroidered flower there, then buzzed away. Asleep on the warm flagstones, Julio’s paws twitched, a little ripple flowing up and down the muscles of his slender legs. The greyhound was dreaming, but of what? That boatman perhaps, his round red face, the oars creaking on the gunnels. What a little fool you are! Go back! Swim home before you drown! The long sun-emblazoned thread unfurling behind Julio as he swam toward shore. His beating heart.

EDITOR’S NOTE: All biographical information has been drawn from Frederick Brown’s “Flaubert: A Biography’ (Little Brown & Co., 2006). The translation of Madame Bovary is from Lydia Davis’ 2010 edition (Viking).

Further Links & Resources

Read a review of Lydia Davis’ translation of Madame Bovary in the New York Review of Books.

See Lydia Davis’ one sentence story “The cows” in claymation right here on the FWR Blog.

A New York Times review of The Ghost Road by Pat Barker.

Here is John Banville, reading from The Infinities by the seaside:

A Story Teller’s Story, A Poet’s Beginnings

Debra Allbery — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:00:01 +0000

Somewhere in my files is an abandoned poem called “The Three Stories My Mother Told Me about Herself.” My mother not being a storyteller by nature, nor one given to confidences, these were cautionary tales—lessons learned, now presented for my benefit. The first, on the wisdom of doing what you are told, was about the time she was supposed to wait after the picture show for her father to come walk her the three or four miles back to their rural southern Ohio home, because there were gypsies camped in the woods. But my mother, displaying a disobedience, or, at the very least, a daring I never witnessed in her as an adult, struck out boldly on her own. Her father, on his way to meet her, saw his daughter coming, hid in the trees and then jumped out to frighten her—to startle her, she said, back into her good common sense.

The second story, on being grateful for what you have, concerned the December in the late 1930s when my mother and her six siblings got off the school bus to find that their farmhouse had burned to the ground. My grandmother stood there by the smoldering foundation holding the only things she managed to grab as she ran out—the family Bible and two dresses on hangers. Everything else was lost, including their savings; in those early post-Depression years, my grandfather did not believe in banks. The neighboring families took them in by twos and threes that winter and (she always presented this as a fitting conclusion) gave them gifts of new Christmas ornaments.

The third wasn’t really a story but, rather, ingredients toward one, which I combined and recombined—a collection of mementos from my mother’s high school years. Her senior yearbook, with its twenty graduates—all those smooth, expectant faces gazing out and up toward a future that even in my childhood, of course, had long since settled into circumscribed lives centered around coal mines and factories. My mother’s radiant photograph captioned in iambic tetrameter: “She leaves a string of broken hearts.” And all the little mementos and keepsakes she kept in a small cedar jewelry box, its neat brass clasp opening with a whiff of past-preserved: twin black Scottie magnets which seemed ever to repel each other, a broken gold watch whose pinching wristband seemed itself a reproach to my encroachment.

What I was drawn to in these stories were all the wrong things. The dark pressured suspense of gypsies in the woods, molten mounds of gold and silver in the snow and charred timbers. The perplexing symbols of those two dresses or Christmas ornaments decorating loss (for years I rehearsed what I’d rescue if our house caught on fire). Souvenirs as synecdoche. Behind it all, the reminder of the utter unknowability of someone I was with every day, the vastness of the absences in a family’s past. The primary lesson, I suppose, was what reticence can teach, or at least coax forth—how we construct another’s life to the extent we can from remnants and fragments, much as I used to try to piece into a whole understanding my mother’s countless letter drafts to her own mother from the scraps in her wastebasket, revised until she’d written out anything that might cause any worry, revised until they said almost nothing at all. Torn in half, torn in half again. We are all fine here, she’d write in her tidy run-ons, the weather is unusually warm. Or sometimes just her full name, written over and over down the page. If, as Eudora Welty learned in her own childhood, one secret is often offered up in place of another, in my own family—which was loving and secure but also securely contained, each of us keeping our own counsel—I was another degree removed from those secrets, trying to assemble a story from whatever images and objects were offered or found or forgotten.

∞

My husband, Matthew Fontaine Maury Gildea, grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, because his parents drove there from Charlottesville for their honeymoon and decided to stay. Both my husband’s parents were Virginians, centuries back on his mother’s side. He was descended from French Huguenots, the Fontaines and the Maurys, who had come to Virginia in early 1700s. We have John Fontaine’s memoir, written between 1710 and 1719, on our shelves, there are plaques honoring his forebears on the walls of the Huguenot church in Charleston, and outside Charlottesville you can still see the marker on the site of the boarding school run by Fontaine’s grandson, the Reverend James Maury, where the promising and privileged boys he taught included Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and James Madison. History weights my husband’s very name, the first Matthew Fontaine Maury—Reverend Maury’s grandson— being “the Pathfinder of the Seas,” the author of The Physical Geography of the Sea, the first American to systematically chart wind and ocean currents. In my own family, I knew the names of my great-grandparents—and that’s the edge of my map; anything prior to that becomes a dissolve, a blank page, terra incognita. When my mother told me the fire story, I longed to look into that rescued Bible; I felt sure it was the repository of what would otherwise be lost, and perhaps now indeed has been.

∞

I was born in Hocking County, Ohio, where both of my parents had been born and raised, my mother in New Straitsville and my father in Enterprise, but we lived during my early childhood in a larger town called Logan. My memory of southern Ohio has a noirish pall over it, all semi-darkened rooms and parlor silence; outside, a perpetual light rain scented with coal, cinders always crunching underfoot. When I was seven, the auto-parts factory where my father was working closed down, so he and his fellow workers drove all around Ohio together looking for work. My father was eventually hired at the Ford plant in Sandusky, by Lake Erie, and so we moved four hours north to our new home in Clyde, about an hour south of Toledo. The distance from family was significant for my parents; we returned to Logan often on weekend trips. I recall that for a while, when we’d drive south to visit my grandparents, I’d feel excited, alert, as, just past Columbus, we crossed the terminal moraine—the line where the glaciers had stopped and the land shifted dramatically from dead flat to rolling hills. Over time that too receded, and instead of feeling I was returning to the place I was from, I began to feel that I was from nowhere at all. And that didn’t trouble me; it kept every road open.

∞

So it was that I grew up in Sherwood Anderson’s hometown, Clyde, Ohio, which had served as the model for his seminal collection of linked stories, Winesburg, Ohio, published in 1919. In the front matter of the collection, there’s a map which is still quite true to the town’s layout, if skewed in scale, a kind of through-the-looking-glass glimpse. I used to turn just to that map, that visible connection with a place I walked every day—Main Street and the alley behind, Buckeye Street (eventually my family’s own address), Waterworks Pond—sensing some kind of larger resonance just by its transmutation, and often just transparent translation, into tales. Winesburg’s “Hern’s Grocery” was a thinly-disguised Hurd’s, the small grocery on Main Street where my mother sent me in the summertime to buy bread and milk. Herman Hurd had been Anderson’s boyhood friend; as Herman died in 1963, before we moved north, the shopkeeper I remember must have been his brother, Hiram. Herman’s son Thaddeus, an architect, became the town historian, the founder of the Clyde Heritage League, and a highly respected if, to me, rather forbidding figure (my memory substitutes photos of Ezra Pound).

In many ways, Clyde in the 1960s still resembled the town that Anderson had known (he left it in 1897), a place anchored by a stubborn stasis and insularity which was both comforting and exasperating. The Presbyterian Church’s bell tower was screened in by then (no longer having, if it ever did, the stained glass window Reverend Hartman broke in “The Strength of God”). But the town still had its hitching rails in place along Main Street when I was little, many of the streets were brick (I loved the cobble-cobble of tires passing over them), the dime store its original pressed-tin ceiling. And there was a long-defunct grain elevator in the middle of town, right by the railroad tracks that people had once believed would transform Clyde into a Cleveland or a Columbus. [Above image courtesy the Sherwood Anderson Foundation]

Instead, it became, as the city-limits signs still proclaim, America’s famous small town. If Clyde in itself wasn’t very distinctive—a single block of downtown with three stoplights, the fathers all working at Whirlpool or Ford or GM, the mothers at home endlessly making their ends meet—at least it could take pride in imagining itself as representative or definitive, a model, an emblem. Not that the townspeople generally were aware of Anderson’s book during the time I was growing up there, or the acute depiction of their town in it, its sympathetic but clear-eyed portrait of largely inarticulate, isolated lives marked by stunted ambitions, limited resources, thwarted desires. Anderson, in later years, recalled the reception of the book as hostile: “The people of the actual Winesburg protested. They declared the book immoral….” He writes of New Englanders burning copies outside of their town library, just as I’ve heard was done in 1919 in Clyde. Walter Rideout makes a persuasive case for Anderson’s revisionist account as a defensive reaction “to the erosion of the fame Winesburg had helped to bring him”; the reviews, as well as the letters he received around the time of publication, were actually predominantly positive. But what I knew firsthand in the 60s and 70s was that “Winesburg” was largely unchanged, and that Anderson, in his hometown, was unknown.

Anderson himself wasn’t a presence for me until I was twelve or so. My father was then, and remains, a champion reader—voracious and speedy, and not so much indiscriminate in his tastes as democratic. He was a regular patron at the library, where he favored hefty historical novels (I remember him dispatching Herman Wouk or R. F. Delderfield doorstops in no time), but he also would buy paperbacks by the pound in the nearby town of Fremont—John MacDonald, Ross MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, Larry McMurtry, Elmore Leonard—and would read through a grocery bag of them each week at the Ford plant where he worked a brass tumbler at twenty-minute intervals. I had settled on writing as my calling by the time I was eleven, and it was around that time that he bought a college literature text at a garage sale for me for a dime. Red cloth binding and about four inches thick, it included some Anderson’s stories—“I’m a Fool,” “I Want to Know Why,” and “Death in the Woods.” My father pointed out Anderson’s name in the table of contents and said, “This man grew up in Clyde.” It’s difficult to describe the enormity of the impact that had on me then, and thereafter—the possibility it fostered in me, the nascent sense of kinship. “I’m a Fool” and “I Want to Know Why” left me with an empty and unsettled sadness, but “Death in the Woods” felt like a folktale. I was as drawn toward the narrator’s need to tell the story as to the story itself. It would become a kind of touchstone for years; returning to it and reentering it, understanding more of what it had to offer, I began to see it as a barometer of my own growth as a writer, and a measure of how much farther I still had to go.

∞

In the Clyde Public Library, an oil portrait of Sherwood Anderson, a broadstroked rendering in umber and ochre based on a 1923 Stieglitz photograph, hangs over the fireplace in its rotunda reading room. I spent quite a bit of time reading opposite that painting while I was growing up. And then in summers when I was in college, I was employed at the library as a page. W.S. Merwin has written of those “angels” which all burgeoning writers need to encounter along the way, the teachers and kindly adults who take an interest at critical moments, who tend a passion with their direction and respect. For me, that angel was Marjorie Buck, the head librarian during my school years. She spoke softly and always very precisely, and had both a librarian’s thin-lipped primness as well as a generous and listening deference. She steered me early on from the YA books toward Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and to Frost and T.S. Eliot; she allowed me to borrow books that didn’t circulate, including the full four feet of the Harvard Classics and a beautiful gilt-edged, leather-bound set of Conrad that was kept in a locked cabinet in the basement. In a town full of recreational readers checking out the same handful of mysteries and bestsellers over and over, she would quote Shirley Jackson, P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh. She confided to me when I started working there that for years she had kept the subscription to Poetry magazine active solely for me—no one else had ever checked it out.

Marjorie was also unlike most women in town in that she had gone to college, and, as her husband was from Germany, had traveled widely in Europe. She told me a story once that I think Anderson would have enjoyed: at a meeting of the Clyde Garden Club everyone was asked to write down on a slip of paper the place where they would “most like to live in the entire world.” Marjorie said that was a difficult decision for her (Paris? Florence?), but she ultimately, loyally, decided on Stuttgart, where her husband had grown up. She then collected the slips of paper and read them aloud, and was startled to see that she was the only one in the room who hadn’t written down Clyde, Ohio. “Imagine,” she said to me, her smile both gently sympathetic and genuinely baffled. Imagine.

∞

Anderson’s A Story Teller’s Story, published in 1924, was his first of three overtly autobiographical works; he also published Tar: A Midwest Childhood, a semi-fictional account, in 1926, and his Memoirs. Really, all of Anderson’s autobiographical writings could come under the heading of “semi-fictional”—Anderson was by nature an embellisher, a teller of tales—he revised fact or fiction by repeating it aloud, retooling the narrative toward better effect with each new listener. But the basic players in his own story were these: the hardworking, gaunt, self-sacrificing mother who dies young; the ne’er-do-well footloose yarn-spinner musician father; the meager, hardscrabble childhood; the romantic, dreamy, misfit siblings; and young industrious Sherwood—“Jobby,” the go-getter whose own silver-tongued talent leads to success in advertising and business and a profitable marriage, but mires him in an empty life which he then dramatically abandons for art. His exit from the paint company he owned near Elyria, Ohio in November, 1912 was one such moment that grew in the retelling—the dramatic departure from the business world, the refusal to be a “mere peddler of words,” as Kate Swift will later warn George Willard in Winesburg from becoming.

The event does have firm basis in fact. Anderson had already written his apprentice novels Windy McPherson’s Son and Marching Men, and the stress of his strained marriage and family life, and immersion in work that felt dishonest to him were all increasingly taking their toll. He dictated a letter, then wrote a cryptic note to his wife saying, “There is a bridge over a river with some cross-ties before it. When I come to that I’ll be all right.” He walked out of the building, and turned up in Cleveland four days later. The story he made of this psychological crisis was that it marked his immediate departure for the writing life. Of course, it wasn’t that clean a break—it took about three more years for him to head to Chicago and fully embark on a writer’s life, and even then he had to return to advertising occasionally. But metaphorically, certainly, it was a division line, his own terminal moraine, a gesture that was more than telling. In recasting that gesture as a poem, I tried to imagine the missing days in that fugue state, while letting him tell his story the way he had parsed it out through his Winesburg characters. My own orienting insertion was my grandmother’s Logan farmhouse, whose roof had a great W N spelled out in slate shingles—the mark of its builder, William North, my father told me. I wondered as a child what person would ever dare leave so large a signature.

∞

What drew me from the start to Anderson’s fiction was his plain speech; his effort to honor, give name and voice to, unacknowledged lives; the poetry he recognized in the commonplace: “There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.” Anderson’s work derives from the oral storytelling tradition, but what made it distinctive, what makes it—at its best—riveting still, were its lyrical modernist undercurrents and its psychological acuities: the curtailed, halting, pulsing rhythms of speech and what those currents carry; what is revealed through what we suppress or what is generated between what we juxtapose—what simple words and their colors can convey and what rises out of language’s failure. (“It had the appearance of fumbling,” Faulkner wrote, “but actually it wasn’t. It was hunting, seeking.”) His voice was as familiar as a relative’s to me: those dovetailings of naivete and down-home turns of phrase and exaggeration’s swagger, laid over a solid foundation of humility, compassion, decency—in stories marked by the struggle between silence and expression, ineffectuality and control, desire and denial. His prose strives toward a purity—as Faulkner said, “The exactitude of purity, or the purity of exactitude, whatever you like”:

His was not the power and rush of Melville, who was his grandfather, nor the lusty humor for living of Twain, who was his father, he had nothing of the heavy-handed disregard for nuances of his older brother, Dreiser. His was that fumbling for exactitude, the exact word and phrase within the limited scope of a vocabulary controlled and even repressed by what was in him almost a fetish of simplicity, to milk them both dry, to seek always to penetrate to thought’s uttermost end.

For all these kinships I felt, I discovered early on that what I didn’t share with Anderson was a need to invent myself through story. My impulse rather was to seek out others’ stories in my own—an inclination toward essence rather than elaboration, toward metaphor more than description, suggestion rather than narration. Which is not to say that Anderson didn’t also incline toward poetry: he did publish three books of Whitmanesque verse. But Anderson, like Faulkner, wrote his best poetry within his prose. “It is a job for a poet”; “It needs the poet there,” he wrote in “Hands.” Such was the case throughout his fiction. His unsaids and untolds were what spoke to me most strongly, how a poet’s tools operated beneath those passive (“it needs”) gropings for “truths.”

∞

I’ve given this essay the title “A Story Teller’s Story,” and I’ve referred mostly to Winesburg, but the destination of the journey is “Death in the Woods,” the first story by Anderson that I read, and the one to which I’ve returned most often. It appeared initially in a magazine in 1916—so, written around the time he was writing the Winesburg stories—then was related again in Tar in 1926, and then was included in Death in the Woods and Other Stories, in 1933. It’s set quite clearly, given the placenames, in Clyde. The story, in first person, narrates the life of a woman named Mrs. Grimes, once a servant girl but now an old woman who lives on a farm with her abusive husband and son. On her way back from town where she’s gone to buy food for the men and the livestock, she freezes to death, and a pack of wild dogs make a kind of ritual circle around her body. The narrator lets us know then that he observed this death as a boy, with his brother. Tells how the brother related the story when they get home, of his dissatisfaction with the brother’s account. The story is his effort to do the story justice:

The scene in the forest had become for me, without my knowing it, the foundation for the real story I am now trying to tell. The fragments, you see, had to be picked up slowly, long afterwards.…
The whole thing, the story of the old woman’s death, was to me as I grew older like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood.

It’s fascinating to compare this version with the one that appeared five years earlier, though Anderson continued to revise it, repeatedly, after its appearance in 1933. What he appends to the 1933 version is his sense of the inadequacy of the story he’s just told: “I am only explaining why I was dissatisfied then and have been ever since. I speak of that only that you may understand why I have been impelled to try to tell the simple story over again.” If that sense of distance between the story I need to tell and the story I’m able to tell called to me at the earliest stage of my apprenticeship, it does so no less now. The restless effort to honor a life by piecing together its facts and remnants (like torn letter drafts, isolated keepsakes) and sketching the boundaries of its mystery, the desire to give voice to that life, the recognition that what’s unknowable and elusive might be conjured in the effort—those were ambitions I recognized and admired.

Death in the Woods

The story is about the storyteller,
about getting the telling right.

The narrator is recalling the winter
he and his brother, just boys, found a woman

frozen to death in the woods.
She’s been made old before her time

by a hard life, hard men. She’s beautiful
in death, of course. Her clothes worried

from her body by a pack of dogs
that have circled her dying, left an iced zero

around her in the clearing. It’s that circle
in the story that always gives me solace,

the drumbeat of that path, the dogs running
nose to tail. And the boy, now a man,

can’t stop telling this story. He invents a life
for the woman in an effort toward honor,

he erases it and starts again because
to be done with it is a disservice. The point

of the story is to keep her cold mystery,
keep that circle drawn around her

higher and higher, a glass wall, keep everyone
from getting any closer.

(Section 4 of “In the Pines,” Fimbul-Winter 74-75)

It’s the Anderson of “Death in the Woods” that feels most like my forebear, my kin—if Melville is Anderson’s grandfather, I’ve long felt that Anderson is mine. A print of that Stieglitz photograph, the one which was the basis of the painting presiding over the reading room in the Clyde Library, was the first picture I hung when I moved into my Warren Wilson College office. Anderson’s fiction, the landscape of his stories, is the place I come from—in the same way that I’d later feel I came, as well, from the worn, industrial landscapes and perspectives of the poems of James Wright, who said, “The spirit of place…isn’t simply image but presence…the genius of place.” And if place, as Welty says, is our source of inspiration and knowledge, if a writer’s honesty begins there, she also allows, “You can equally be true to an impression of place.” That impression, for me, has now been shaped by Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Virginia, Michigan, Texas, and North Carolina, as well as Ohio, and it’s been informed over the years by so many other writers. If I came into writing feeling largely without history or place, writing became a means of discovering both; it also became, as it did for George Willard, a means of discovering a way out, the road ahead. Sherwood Anderson gave me a map.

Further Links and Resources

The Sherwood Anderson Foundation awards grants to developing writers.

The American Studies Department at the University of Virginia has created a hypertext version of Winesburg, Ohio.

You can purchase books by and about Sherwood Anderson at your local indie bookseller.

Creative Defiance

Ellen Prentiss Campbell — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:30:00 +0000

The most powerful earthquake of recorded Japanese history struck March 11, 2011, and triggered a devastating tsunami. Waves cresting at 23 feet slammed into the eastern coast. Images of apocalyptic destruction flooded the media: ruptured roads, crumpled cars, houses crushed to matchsticks, blazing fires, ships tossed inland, and desperate survivors seeking loved ones. Worlds away, I searched my bookshelf for Pearl S. Buck’s The Big Wave, a book I first read as a nine-year-old during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and to which I still return at difficult times.

The brief volume’s slim spine almost disappeared between bulkier neighbors. On the cover, three brush-stroked birds skim a cresting wave; a few more lines suggest a fringe of evergreens straggling down a jagged cliff into the surf.

I opened the frail paperback. Across the flyleaf, my name and childhood address staggered in block letters. Tucked inside was a sheaf of folded wide-ruled notebook paper: my youngest daughter’s third-grade homework from a dozen years ago, when she read my heirloom copy. Now, I began again to re-read Buck’s tale of Jiya, the lone survivor of his family after another Japanese tsunami.

Warned by a “strange fiery dawn,” Jiya’s father insists his youngest child leave the rest of the family on the beach for safety on the mountainside. Jiya takes shelter with his friend Kino’s family on their farm, and the boys witness the tsunami’s terrible beauty:

The purple rim of the ocean seemed to lift and rise against clouds…With a great sucking sigh the wave swept back…dragging everything with it, trees and stones and houses…the beach was as clean of houses as if no human beings had ever lived there.

Devastated by grief, Jiya is fostered by Kino’s family. Kino cannot imagine how his friend will ever be happy again, but Kino’s father promises that “life is always stronger than death.” Time passes, “split in two parts by the big wave.” Jiya grows up farming beside his friend. He falls in love with Kino’s sister, Setsu. “Happiness began to live in him secretly, hidden inside him.” However, when Jiya sees people re-building the fishing village, he becomes restless and announces his need to return to the seaside. Kino’s father supports his intention and pays him wages for farming. Jiya buys a boat, strings nets, and builds a house on the shore for himself and his bride Setsu. The house is a copy of his childhood home, except for one innovation: windows facing the sea. “I have opened my house to the ocean,” he tells Kino on the last page. “If ever the big wave comes back, I shall be ready. I face it. I am not afraid.” Although Kino fears for his friend on the beach, his father reminds him no one is safe anywhere and says, “To live in the midst of danger is to know how good life is.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)

The Big Wave drew on Buck’s recollections of a sojourn on the Japanese coast. In 1927, she and her husband – both professors at the University of Nanking – fled China to escape the violence between the Nationalists and the Communists. They settled in relative safety on the slopes of a volcano in Unzen, Japan. While there, she witnessed a tsunami sweep away the fishing village below, learned of prior tidal disasters in the community over the centuries, and watched the villagers rebuild as before, on the same beach. Buck explains in her introduction to my 1962 Scholastic Books edition that she wrote the story shortly after World War II, because children everywhere had learned that “death comes even to the young.” She wrote it to help children learn to “live in the presence of death, as we all do, young and old.”

The book arrived on my fourth grade desk in my monthly book order. How had I chosen it from the Scholastic Book Services flier? It was likely that my mother, a primary school teacher, knew of the book, a winner of The Child Study Association Children’s Book Award. I don’t recall her prompting me to select it, though later she stockpiled multiple copies of the same fifty-cent Scholastic reprint as a sympathy gift for students or friends suffering a loss.

As it happened, the book fell into my hands just when I needed it most: in the autumn of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That weekend in October 1962 felt ominous in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Despite the blue of the fall sky and the golden leaves of tulip poplars, I felt a shivery sense of threat. Some of my friends’ families left town, but we remained at home. I retreated to my bedroom and lost myself in my new book and the familiar comfort of reading: inhaling the aroma of cheap paper and ink, turning the rough pages.

Buck’s description of the thatched houses on the beach – “frail wooden houses the big wave could lift like toys and crush and throw away” – particularly resonated with me, as I hid from Castro up in my bedroom under the eaves. That afternoon, my own home also felt flimsy, frail, and under threat.

Our house was a contemporary modular design, a franchised kit house called a Techbuilt designed by Karl Koch, an architect inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright and, like Wright, by Japanese architecture. Floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding glass doors unified the interior with the natural space outside. No attic, no basement, no place for a fallout shelter. No place to hide. Our house was as open as the house Jiya built on the beach with big windows facing the sea. And my parents’ house, like Jiya’s, was built by survivors to prove that life is stronger than death.

West Hill Drive (1999)

Growing up in Illinois, my parents had never seen a dwelling like a Techbuilt. As newlyweds, they moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, so my father could attend graduate school on the G.I. bill. They shared a small flat with a dour elderly woman before moving to the relative luxury of an attic apartment above the school where my mother taught. Then they visited friends renting a Techbuilt in Lincoln. They fell in love with the airy, open-plan house.

After my father finished school, they moved to junior faculty housing on the campus of Haverford College. I arrived, and my brother, Hugh, followed eighteen months later. We might have grown up as faculty kids, in a rambling Victorian on College Circle. But, when I was three, my brother died. Hugh’s death – though I cannot recall it – was the transforming event of our lives, the big wave demarcating our “Before” and “After.” I grew up in a family defined by the unspoken understanding that life is precious, and provisional.

We moved to Bethesda, Maryland where my father had accepted a job offer at the National Institute of Mental Health. Barely three months after losing Hugh, my mother was pregnant again, and she and my father were preparing to construct their own Techbuilt.

I cannot remember the hours they spent dreaming that house into existence, playing with a three-dimensional planning kit my father designed, so they might juggle modular room-blocks in various patterns and configurations. Now, I marvel at the bravery required to invest in the future with a pregnancy, a move, a new house, a new job – all so soon after losing Hugh.

My mother would say they did it because you must. Like Kino’s father, she believed that life is stronger than death. Now, when I think of her giving The Big Wave to bereaved friends and students, I wonder if she knew and empathized with of Buck’s own maternal history: the author’s biological daughter profoundly disabled due to phenylketonuria, seven adopted children, activism on behalf of orphans considered unwanted. My second brother, Don, was born in January, 1957. All children are prized, but Hugh’s death rendered Don’s life even more precious to my parents. As Kino’s father says, “Every day of life is more valuable now than it was before the storm.”

My parents planned, broke ground, and built their house after Hugh’s death in the manner of all survivors: out of necessity, denial, and hope. Like Jiya, they put windows in their house – a sheer skin of glass the architect intended to “provide bright sunlit rooms…bringing in the whole outdoors.” We moved into the new house in April for my mother’s thirty-third birthday. She remembered being so happy she could not sleep. Even after many memories departed her in the fog of dementia later, she remembered the white blossoms of the native dogwood tree shining beyond the curtain-less expanse of glass.

Weeping Cherry / photo credit foliosus

Those sheer glass walls might have felt insubstantial to me that weekend in October 1962, but my parents loved the open house and its wooded setting. They sited the house with respect to the sloping lot in a forest of pine, tulip poplar, dogwood and beech. Even as parsimonious children of the depression, they splurged and hired a landscape architect. Lester Collins had studied in the Far East and designed according to ancient Japanese principles with reverence for topography and symmetric balance. For a child the best feature of Collins’s design was not the moss garden nor the patio’s expanse of blue-gray gravel, but his meandering circuit of irregular wood-chip paths through the trees. My parents worked hard to implement his vision: spreading wood chips and gravel, transplanting and encouraging native flora. They planted bulbs every fall in the early years to multiply, naturalize and eventually carpet the woods with snowdrops, crocus, wood anemones, scilla, and daffodils.

Earlier in that October week of the Cuban Missile Crisis, my father had received a mail-order treasure: a bushel of daffodil bulbs from Holland. He summoned me outside for yard work on that brilliant, ominous fall day. With typical resolve and common sense, he intentionally brought me out into the world. Like Kino’s father, mine would have said, if he were more of a talker – “To live in the midst of danger is to know how good life is.”

Many years later, my father described planting those bulbs as an “exercise in suburban defiance” and claimed with his trademark wry humor that the bulbs had indeed proved good deterrents. “No missiles yet,” he said.

No missiles yet, but house and woods and flowers have vanished. When my parents moved from their beloved Techbuilt on the eve of my mother’s seventy-fifth birthday – a departure necessitated by the gathering storm of her dementia – the daffodils were in bloom. I gathered armloads. The new owners never missed the stolen flowers; the white dogwood bathed in moonlight never kept them awake. They never even slept in the house before smashing it, shattering the windows, bulldozing the acre of trees and flowers to build their own dream mini-mansion surrounded by sod and asphalt.

Although only bricks and mortar and the flowering woods were lost, I grieve for the house. No missiles, no tsunami, just the tedious work of a bulldozer; the commonplace destruction of one house so another can take its place. In comparison, how unimaginable the grief wrought by the big wave which swallowed Jiya’s family and village, or the March 2011 tsunami.

Aerial view of the Fukushima I plant area in 1975, showing sea walls and completed reactors via National Land Image Information (Color Aerial Photographs)

The March tsunami drowned twenty thousand, cracked the Fukushima Daiichi plant, and triggered a continuing, insidious wave of devastation. Six months after the tsunami, Prime Minister Naoto Kan bowed and announced his resignation amidst the widening tide of nuclear contamination discovered in crops, fish and beef far beyond Fukushima Daichi’s immediate locale. Now, despite the invisible and uncertain threat, evacuees are returning to the region just outside the no-entry radius; perhaps needing to jump-start life despite lingering uncertainty, residual danger. Schools in Fukushima scrape the surface layer of contaminated soil away and store it in plastic-lined pits: an inadequate solution. Children play there again. No one knows the long term effects of playing on the tainted ground.

I can’t stop thinking about how the destructive impact of this most recent tsunami has not yet ended. After every tsunami the threat of recurrence remains; as Kino’s father said, “On any day ocean may rise into storm and volcano may burst into flame.” But after the March tsunami, an active danger persists – radiation. Radioactive cesium may persist for three hundred years, bound to earth, in the silt in water.

But the children go back to the playground. We must let them play, Pearl S. Buck and my mother might say, even when the world is ruined and dangerous. My brother Hugh’s memorial at Haverford is a sandbox beneath a gnarled Osage orange tree. Children dig in the sand and clamber on the tree where we once played.

Before returning my shabby paperback copy of The Big Wave to the shelf, I read my daughter’s homework penciled in her careful beginner cursive a dozen years ago. She was nine, about my age at first reading, and Jiya’s and Kino’s age when the big wave struck. She wrote:

Ellen at Home (1962)

When Kino’s father says “we love life because we live in danger” he means they love life because they will not always have it. Also that they will not be able to enjoy life when they are dead…I agree with Kino’s father because they will not live forever.

Planting bulbs, building houses are both acts of creative defiance; gestures we make, knowing we can’t live forever. Writing is the ultimate act of creative defiance. I think of Pearl S. Buck on the slopes of a volcano, writing a story of loss and survival. Her voice lives on in her story of resilience and re-creation and will long outlast my fragile copy of The Big Wave.

Further Links and Resources:

Read more about architect Carl Koch and his Techbuilt homes in a 2010 article on the Dwell Website.
Read more about Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman author to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, on the University of Pennsylvania’s English Department Website.

The 2011 Sozopol Fiction Seminar: Part II

Jeremiah Chamberlin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:00:09 +0000

Saint Alexander Nevski Cathedral in Sofia / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

Editor’s Note: We continue this year’s Sozopol Fiction Seminar retrospective with work by Molly Antopol and Lee Romer Kaplan. Read Part I here, featuring writing by John Struloeff, Jane E. Martin, and Michael Hinken.

The Messiness of Translation: A Conversation with Miroslav Penkov

by Molly Antopol

Molly Antopol / credit Jeremiah Chamberlin

During our time together on the Black Sea, in the gorgeous seaside town of Sozopol we spent a good deal of time discussing issues of translation. Because of Bulgaria’s relatively small market, and tiny percentage of their writers being published in English, it’s a topic that resonates for Bulgarian writers on a very practical level. The subject really came to a head for me when the group returned from Sozopol to Sofia. It was there, during a roundtable discussion about “The Future of Translation,” that I encountered Miroslav Penkov, whose stories I had already enjoyed in a number of American journals.

Penkov was born in 1982 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, and arrived in America in 2001, where he entered the University of Arkansas, earning a BA in Psychology, followed by an MFA in fiction. His debut story collection, East of the West: A Country in Stories, has recently been published in the U.S.US by FSG, as well as in translation in ten other countries. In Bulgaria, his own translation of the stories will soon be published by Ciela, under the title “На изток от запада.”

After spending a week in Sozopol thinking and talking so much about Bulgarian literature and translation, Penkov put flesh on the bones by describing what it was like to write a book about Bulgaria in English—and then to translate it into his native language himself.

"Future of Translation" panel, Sofia. From left: Kapka Kassabova, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Rana Dasgupta, Miroslav Penkov. Not featured: John Freeman. / CR: Simona Ilieva

Back home in San Francisco and missing my new friends and Bulgaria, I read Penkov’s collection and fell in love with the book. These stories give much to admire: they’re ambitious in terms of structure and scope, beautifully written but never showy, and the global forces that shape the characters are as much a part of the narrative as their inner lives. Penkov writes directly about history and politics, but somehow maintains a lightness to his prose—indeed, these stories are both emotionally fraught and laugh-out-loud funny.

The Sozopol Fiction Seminars provided me with a much more complex way of seeing Bulgarian literature, and translation more generally. I left Bulgaria challenged by a host of new questions that I hadn’t even known how to ask before visiting. Shortly after I returned home, Penkov was kind enough to answer some of these questions. Excerpts from our exchange are below.

Interview:

Molly Antopol: One of the things I admire most about these stories is how big they feel—larger political and historical issues seem to extend so naturally from your characters’ everyday lives. Were you purposeful with this during the writing? Did it emerge naturally? Or would it simply feel impossible to write about Bulgaria without social and political concerns making their way into the stories?

Miroslav Penkov: I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to write Bulgarian stories without considering history and politics. Some of the finest examples of Bulgarian short fiction concern themselves with the everyday life of ordinary people—say, peasants in the countryside—and turn a deaf ear to the politics of the day. But I would say that for me, at this time in my life, it is impossible to write about Bulgaria without getting the past involved. At this time in my life, I cannot help but feel, much like some of the great writers of the American South – Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter – that to understand the present, we need to first make sense of the past; that the two are linked inseparably.

We all know that in writing fiction following a line of cause and effect is paramount. One thing occurs and leads to another. A character interacts with his surrounding world and out of this interaction the story’s plot is generated and the story moves along. But I believe that when it comes to history, this cause and effect connection can be reversed, that the present can not only influence our understanding of the past, but can also shape this past. I believe that out of our present we can invent and create personal versions of a past that, in reality, might never have existed. I don’t mean this in some scary Orwellian way, of course. I’m talking merely about discovering personal truths in history, achieving a personal understanding of the past that might not be applicable to someone else.

Some really great advice for writing short stories is to get in, get out, and not linger. But I wanted to linger. I wanted these stories to flow really large across land and time, to gain momentum, feed off past and present and future, and move not only forward like rivers, but rather backward and forward simultaneously like whirlpools. As you can guess, in short fiction this is often a recipe for disaster. Consider for example the title story, “East of the West.” It’s a story that takes up more than thirty years of the narrator’s life, that concerns itself with a million wars, with communism and its fall, with the narrator’s love for his cousin, with the tragic death of the narrator’s sister and her fiancé, with the death of everyone close to the main hero, and on and on and on. A good workshop might tell you that all this is more than the story can handle, that all this makes the story lose focus. But I don’t think of the short story only as a fragile thing, as something only glimpsed in passing.

How long after living in the states did you begin to write fiction in English?

Miroslav Penkov / CR: Simona Ilieva

I arrived in the U.S. in 2001 and there was this schizoid fragmentation in my mind when it came to my writing. On one hand, I wanted to be a writer. On the other, I couldn’t quite understand how I would start writing in English. On one hand I gave myself an impossible deadline – to get a story published by Christmas of my first year; on the other – I was sincerely convinced it would take me ten years before I could start writing in English. In reality, I started writing in English immediately. Within the first month of my arrival, I had translated a story I’d published in Bulgaria and sent it out to a sci-fi contest. The story was returned to me with a kind instruction that I should double-space it, print it on one side of the page only, and resubmit.

There are things about writing that transcend language and culture. Creating convincing characters is one such thing. And writing in English has been a good thing for me. Because my “command” of English doesn’t come close to my “command” of Bulgarian, I’m less likely to make pompous moves in my English prose, less likely to try to be too cute and smart, to try to dazzle the reader with a spectacular turn of phrase. Writing in English has made me pay closer attention to individual words (something that was not so obvious when I first started), it’s taught me to choose only the right ones, to check my ego at the door and surrender myself to what is often the simplest, most elegant way of unfolding a sentence in service of character (something that was even less obvious back in the day).

While working on the collection, did you feel like you were translating these stories from the Bulgarian in your head into English?

John Freeman, Editor of Granta, Future of Translation panel, Sofia / CR: Simona Ilieva

No. Such translation used to happen in my head early on, when I was just beginning to learn English in high school. You babble like a baby and search for the right word in your head. You feel stupid, because you can’t express yourself, and the scary thing is that your interlocutors too often perceive you as stupid, which is, often, a mistake. It’s this feeling of stupidity and embarrassment that prevents me from ever wanting to learn another language. And, of course, laziness.

But after a few years of studying, I started thinking in English and such word-for-word translation was no longer necessary. And yet, in writing I wanted my prose to have a distinct Bulgarian feel (which, in all honestly, it will have regardless of whether I want it to or not). I like, for example, how Hemingway can make his foreigners speak an English that on the page sounds like Italian, or Spanish, distinct, foreign. And I wanted to invest my prose with such oddity, especially because seven of the eight stories in the book are first person narratives. I wanted to come up with as many distinct Bulgarian voices as I could, strong enough to cross an ocean of language and speak to the American reader convincingly of this distant and unfamiliar world.

Living in the U.S. and writing about your native country, did you have specific (real or imaginary) readers in your mind? For example, did you find that you had to explain certain parts of Bulgarian life to readers who had never been?

Audience Members at the Future of Translation Panel in Sofia / CR: Simona Ilieva

I think it’s dangerous to write toward satisfying a particular reader, but I also think it’s silly not to consider who you might be writing for. Over the years friends would ask me about Bulgarian literature and I would say – yes, yes in Bulgaria we have divine poetry, and some really great prose. Would I recommend an author or a book then? I sure could. But you’d have to learn Bulgarian first. Why? Because nothing has been translated, or if it has a) the translation might be poor and b) the book is most certainly out of print. So I wanted to write such a book that would show Bulgaria—its history, people—a book which, when someone asks, “Hey, how about that country of yours?” you would say (if you’re Bulgarian in the U.S.), I have a book for you. Of course I realize how pretentious I’m sounding. But the sad truth is that until you come up with good translations of Bulgarian books that stay in print, until more Bulgarian writers start writing in English, this book will be one of very few books in English about Bulgaria by a Bulgarian.

Were there particular challenges, technical or otherwise, that you struggled with when writing these stories? And are there parts of writing that come easily to you?

Challenges? How much time do you have? First of all, there was the question of self-belief. I always knew that I would be a writer, but I didn’t always believe it. When I first started writing in English, because I was so poorly read, I was aware of only two other writers who’d written in a tongue that was not their mothers’: Conrad and Nabokov. This was a big psychological weight, but luckily I was younger, very naïve, clueless, stupid, and because of this courageous; and—because of this—I didn’t pay much attention to this weight; I simply wrote. Then, there is the challenge of people telling me that no one in America would read anything about Bulgaria. Many friends and teachers have genuinely supported and encouraged me while I wrote the stories. But plenty others, and I have no idea why they wouldn’t just keep this opinion to themselves, would come to me and say, flatly—no one will read about Bulgaria here, no American will care. I still don’t know how true this is. Sometimes, like when you sent me the questions for this interview, I feel hopeful. Other times, I feel very low.

And then—and this would be the final challenge I’ll mention for lack of time—there comes the writing itself. I had a really, really difficult time getting the majority of these stories to a place that made both me and my editor happy. I don’t presume to give aspiring authors any advice, but I’ll say this—don’t expect to get a story done on a first draft, don’t feel discouraged when you don’t get it right on a first draft and try to find joy in rewriting, because writing truly is rewriting. Amen.

Your collection is coming out in eleven countries—congratulations! What was it like to translate these stories yourself for the Bulgarian edition?

Boris Deliradev + Angela Rodel, Translators and Interpreters at the Future of Translation / CR: Simona Ilieva

Absolute agony. And I’m still working, I have two more stories to translate. I’m pleased with the results. I think that certain parts sound more alive in Bulgarian, more colorful, messier in a good way. For reasons that I mentioned above, I tried to make my English prose economical and elegant. But I cannot employ such economy in Bulgarian. In Bulgarian these first person narratives are somewhat messier, somewhat more deeply rooted in dialect, and that’s the only way they could work. Had I chosen to strive for elegance and economy in Bulgarian, I would not have been able to create convincing Bulgarian voices. So, reinventing these voices has been a really agonizing experience, because I also don’t want to rewrite the stories and get away from the original. The whole endeavor has been torturously slow. I wrote them faster than I’m translating them. But then, what’s the rush (other than a deadline from a publisher, that is)?

And as far as the eleven countries… It all happened so unexpectedly, so fast. I think it caught everyone by surprise. But these wonderful publishers across Western Europe (and Israel, I should not exclude them) seem to have really liked the stories. As far as my Slavic brothers… no interest so far. So, Slavic brothers of Russia, Poland, Serbia etc. – why you no want my book?

Who are some of your favorite Bulgarian writers—and are there particular writers who haven’t yet been translated into English, but who you wish would be?

See? The inevitable question. There are two Bulgarian writers that I like who write in English. I recommend Kapka Kassabova and her memoir Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria. I also recommend Nikolai Grozni’s memoir Turtle Feet, which is not about Bulgaria, but about his days as a Buddhist monk in India. He also has a novel coming out, Wunderkind, which I’m excited about. That one, it seems, will be all about Bulgaria. Years ago, in the university library in Arkansas, I found Anton Donchev’s now classic novel Time of Parting. I recommend that one, as well. I also recommend what I consider to be the greatest short story collection in the known universe: Wild Tales by one of my all-time favorite writers, Nikolai Haitov. These are stories written in such peculiar dialect that even translating them into conventional Bulgarian would kill most of their beauty. But there is a translation out there (Unesco Collection of Representative Works. European Series) and the translator, Peter Owen, has done a really good job, considering he was attempting the impossible. Kapka Kassabova, whom I mentioned earlier, has recently translated short stories by Deyan Enev, a Bulgarian writer I really like. The book, Circus Bulgaria, was published in the UK.

What I wish for is that someone would publish an anthology of Bulgarian short fiction, starting with the classics and moving forward in time. I was able to find one such anthology in the library, but the translations were pretty stiff and unconvincing. We need a duo like the terrific Pevear-Volokhonsky to do for Bulgarian literature what they’re doing for Russian.

What are you working on now?

I’m fighting with the Bulgarian translation of the stories. I’m at the end of the rope, I’ve hit a massive wall, and somehow I have to make myself go on. Thank you for lending me a compassionate ear. Then I’d like to write a novel. I really like short stories, but for me the novel is what writing is really all about.

2011 Fellows at Red House Cultural Center, Sofia. From left: Rayko Baychev (BG) Michael Hinken (US) Paullina Petrova (BG) Yana Punkina (BG) Jane Martin (CA) Molly Antopol (US) Petja Heinrich (BG). Not pictured: Ivan Landzhev (BG) John Struloeff (US) Lee Kaplan (US)

Stealing Poetry

by Lee Romer Kaplan

Lee Kaplan

I’m a fiction writer for a reason: there’s safety in imagined worlds. I’ve chosen two professions—acting and writing—in part because they make use of my own stories without exposing them. In fiction, you can speak your truth without telling your personal truth.

In Sozopol, however, I ended up sharing a hotel room and my own stories with my Bulgarian counterpart, the lovely and brave Paullina Petrova. Despite our very different histories, Paullina and I connected because we’re both rewriting ourselves, as women and as artists, after years spent trying to be anything but fiction writers. My avoidance of the writing life led me first to theater, then to law school, and more recently to education. This past year, I taught composition, creative writing, and literature to community college students in Manhattan while my behemoth of a novel sat in the proverbial drawer, awaiting revision. Paullina’s avoidance tactics seem less obvious, if equally effective: she runs a business and a household, and cares for two young children.

The first time I saw Paullina—a petite woman with a dark blond ponytail and covetable baby-blue platform sandals edged with metal studs—we were waiting to load our suitcases onto the bus from Sofia to Sozopol. That first morning, unsure how profound the language barrier might be, we didn’t speak. A few hours later, the bus stopped for lunch at a roadside restaurant, and I noted the “Nationalization” of the Fellows’ seating arrangements that soon unfolded: Americans at one table, Bulgarians at another. Not unexpected on the first day, of course—and by the end of the seminar we would all be sitting together—but at that moment, there were still borders between us.

Paullina on the Bus / CR: Jeremiah Chamberlin

Happily, literary translator Angela Rodel—an American linguist who came to Bulgaria on a Fulbright seventeen years ago and has lived and worked in the country since 2004— offered to make the introductions. The Bulgarians, who’d been having an animated discussion in their native tongue, fell silent as she and I approached. Ivan and Yana, the two most fluent in English, engaged me in conversation, but Paullina just said her name, which I didn’t quite catch, and smiled. We didn’t yet know we’d be paired as roommates, and so after a few pleasantries we said goodbye and once again boarded the bus.

In fact, I didn’t learn that Paullina would be my roommate until she was—that is, until Elizabeth Kostova noted the two of us standing next to each other in the lobby of the Hotel Diamanti, gestured first at me and then at Paullina, smiled, and asked if we’d like to room together. I think we both nodded assent, blushed, and looked at our feet. We stumbled upstairs to the room together, lugging our bags, both trying to be polite, engaging in unintentional slapstick, each of us saying, “After you,” and the other replying, “No. Please, after you.”

During my adolescence and young adulthood, I moved house constantly, shuttling between Israel and the US, and for a time, Europe. I rarely stayed in one place long enough to call it home. This constant uprooting forged an urgent need to claim new spaces as my own; in Sozopol, as soon as we entered our room, I began to unpack, careful to take exactly half the space in our shared armoire and bureau. Paullina dropped her bags by the sliding glass door to our patio with a view of the Black Sea, mumbled something I didn’t understand, and when I wasn’t looking, quietly left the room.

View of Black Sea from Balcony / CR: Lee Kaplan

I didn’t know what to make of my new roommate’s abrupt departure, and so continued putting my things away, wondering whether she felt as awkward as I did about sharing a room with a stranger. Fifteen minutes later, just as I finished unpacking, my roommate returned, holding aloft a plastic bag filled with beautiful, fresh red and yellow cherries.

“Wherever did you find such lovely cherries?” I asked. In answer, Paullina held out her hands, full of fruit. “Duvduvanim,” I said. “That’s cherries in Hebrew.” Paullina repeated the word and laughed, a mischievous, knowing laugh that’s impossible to describe, but which once heard, cannot be forgotten. She told me the word in Bulgarian, and we sat in companionable silence for a while, absorbed by the pleasure of eating perfectly ripe cherries.

Paullina then insisted I take the double bed. For herself, she chose the daybed, a single. Later, she told me that she preferred having a small bed all to herself, a luxury for a mother of two, who’d been sharing a bed with her children’s father, her first and only sweetheart, since she was a teenager. Later that night, we lay in our respective beds, listening to the sea, and eventually, despite the considerable language barrier, began to tell our stories. We discovered commonalities. Not only do we wear the same size shoe, we are the same age. The people who love us call us by similar nicknames: her “Polly” to my “Lili.” We’re both aspiring novelists who don’t (Polly) and cannot (me) write short stories. The novel excerpts we submitted for translation into each other’s languages both feature young boys who embark upon magical journeys and have complicated relationships with their fathers.

Dinner on the Terrace of the Diamanti Hotel / CR: Jeremiah Chamberlin

We also discovered difference: Polly studied mathematics and I can hardly balance my checkbook. She’s the mother of two gymnastics-loving little girls, whose father’s been her partner, in work and love, for twenty years. Previously engaged but never married, for now, I’m single in New York City. Paullina’s lived only in Bulgaria; I came of age in Northern Israel and Berkeley, California, and have lived in the Middle East, Europe, Mexico, the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York.

And then there’s this: for both of us, adolescence marked the turning point in our sense of ourselves as writers, but in entirely different ways. My adolescence sparked my writing life, but for Paullina, her teen years marked the end of her life as a poet, and initiated a twenty-year moratorium on writing until she discovered prose, and, very recently, began the first of two novels-in-progress.

My seventeenth year was spent during the Lebanon War on Israel’s northern border. By that age, I’d lost friends in the war, and I’d begun to question long-held beliefs, asking whether it was indeed tov lamoot b’ad artzeinu—good to die for one’s country—as I’d been taught in school, a question that haunts my writing still. I wrote earnest, and sometimes awful political poetry and songs about the impossibility of peace in a world so bound by history and violence. Paullina, living in what, for a little longer, would still be Communist Bulgaria, was writing love poems, two of which were published in a children’s literary journal, despite her lack of “connections,” which means that the work itself must have been very good.

Not long after the first of the two poems was published, late on a weekend afternoon, Paullina received a call summoning her to the office of the editor-in-chief. Upon arrival, she was handed an anonymous letter addressed “Dear Comrade Editor,” which accused Paullina of plagiarism, an act she explained to me by using the phrase “stealing poetry.” When she got to this point in the story, I laughed, because it struck me as absurd. Accused of stealing poetry? It sounded like a Kafka story. But Paullina assured me she’d been threatened with “consequences” if she did not confess to having copied a famous poet’s work and submitted it as her own.

She refused, courageous child, insisting the poems were hers. The editor then asked if he should call the now doddering poet’s wife, and appeared surprised when Paullina said yes. The poet’s wife responded that the poems, though good, were not in fact her husband’s. Despite this, the editor, who did not apologize, informed Paullina that her work would never again be published in the journal’s pages. “Cut down,” as she put it, Paullina resolved to stop writing, and for twenty years, she did just that—not writing a verse, except in the invitations to her children’s birthday parties.

After Paullina fell asleep, that first night in Sozopol, I thought about my favorite Yehuda Amichai poem, which speaks to those moments when “the waters are pressing mightily.” I thought about Paullina at seventeen, and how writing—giving words to our beliefs and imaginings, our secrets and truths—represents what Amichai calls “daring”: “how much daring is needed to love on the exposed plain when the great dangers are arched above.”

Sunset Over the Black Sea / CR: Jeremiah Chamberlin

And I thought about the fact that though I consider myself a secular Jew, I come from a tribe that traces everything—light, the separation of sea and sky, the names we call ourselves, all varieties of human suffering—back to “the word,” or perhaps more accurately, the written word. I thought about how writing fiction keeps me safe, allows me access to other lives, and sometimes, how scary writing feels, especially when I think about finishing my novel, the fear that the book will not be good enough, or attract intense scrutiny of my life and my character, or anger people I love. These thoughts stayed with me for the remainder of our time at the seminar.

After Bulgaria, I returned to New York for just three days before leaving for the first of two artists’ residencies that would take up the remaining three months of the summer. When I applied for those residencies, I said that 2011 would be the summer of my novel revision. But even as I typed those words, I was afraid they might not be true. My dear friend and mentor, the only person who’d read the book and knew where I was heading, had died before being able to provide feedback on the manuscript. I had no idea where to start, how to impose structure on what felt like an unwieldy, too long and mostly non-linear manuscript. Now at Ragdale, the second residency, which will end in three short weeks, I’m writing this essay as a way to stave off returning to the novel. And so, I am thinking about Polly, and about her courage, imagining her at seventeen, and the fierce grace with which she told her story of being accused of stealing poetry, and about the way her poetry was stolen from her. I am thinking about why we write, and why sometimes we’re afraid to write, and who Paullina and I would be if we weren’t writers.

Lee and Paullina read on the last night in Sozopol / CR: Jeremiah Chamberlin

Since our talk that first night in Sozopol, Polly and I’ve begun a longer conversation about being women who write, and how the energy for writing often gets channeled into care taking, and making a living, and loving the people in our lives. We’ve each expressed just how joyful and terrifying and magical it is to allow ourselves time and space to write. I wrote myself into adulthood, even though I stopped for many years, too. Now, I’m channeling Paullina at seventeen, taking strength from her courage, and facing my manuscript. Maybe the key is feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Maybe the way in is just making my way in.

Molly Antopol is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow and current Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, American Short Fiction, The Mississippi Review Prize Stories, Nimrod’s Prize Stories, Croatia’s Zarez, and on New York Public Radio and NPR’s This American Life. She lives in San Francisco, where she’s finishing up a collection of stories and beginning work on a novel.

Lee Romer Kaplan spent her early years in Berkeley, California and Northern Israel. While studying at Haifa University, she taught theater and literary arts as conflict mediation tools in a program for Muslim, Jewish and Christian youth. She’s performed, written and directed shows with theater companies in the US, Israel, and Europe. In addition to an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, Lee holds a law degree from University of California at Berkeley, and practiced as a civil rights and poverty lawyer for five years before returning to the arts. For now, she lives in New York City, teaches writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College and is on the teaching artist roster at Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Her upcoming debut novel, The Flight of the Lesser Kestrel, takes place primarily in Jerusalem during the first Lebanon War.

The 2012 Sozopol Fiction Seminar: May 24 – 27

Ten scholarships, valued at approximately $1,600 each, will be available to attend the 2012 Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Sozopol, Bulgaria. Funding will support five fiction writers working in English and five fiction writers working in Bulgarian. Scholarships will cover tuition fees, room and board, in-country transportation, and 50% of international travel expenses. Writers of any nationality are eligible to apply.

Application deadline is March 7, 2012.

For more information, or to apply, please visit the EKF Website.

2012 faculty members: Elizabeth Kostova (US), Barry Lopez (US), Deyan Enev (BG), and Krassimir Damianov (BG/ES).