William Gay / via McAdam/Cage Publishing

Novelist William Gay, who died late last month at the age of seventy, was the topic of several conversations I had at AWP this year. Most of the talks centered on Gay’s work, which was sublime, or his soul, which was sweet; we fond remember-ers would all have a sip of beer and nod somberly. He’ll be missed, we’d say.

What else can you do?

But sitting here today, at my post-AWP desk, in the quiet of my office full of books and stacks of revisions that need entering, I’m thinking of William Gay again. I only met him a few times; we never chatted for long. One of the only things I remember him saying directly to me, across a crowded table from my brother-in-law and me at the fabled Ajax Diner in Oxford, Mississippi, is this: “You want some okra?”

Not exactly high literary wisdom, that question, though it is evidence of his generous personality, I suppose. And so, although I’ve read all of his work, I can’t call him a mentor or even a friend, though we shared an agent (Amy Williams), and I well remember the delighted e-mail she sent to me when she brokered his first major book deal, which was also her first. We were all just starting out.

I’m not sure if William ever went to AWP. I’ve never seen him there, but I’ve missed a lot of years. Whether William showed up there or not doesn’t really matter. This matters: For years he toiled at drywall hanging, one of the toughest jobs there is, and, far outside the literary panic-sphere, he worked on stories and novels at night, or whenever he had the energy and inclination. He was a voracious reader; his home in Hohenwald, Tennessee, was filled with books.

And I suppose that’s why I am thinking of him today, after AWP Chicago and all of its ceaseless networking and desperate comparison and nametag-checking bar scenes that affect even those who claim to be above it all. He’s a good role model for me, at this stage in my career, a reminder that the reason we do what we do isn’t because we went to the right MFA program or got solicited by the slutty new literary journal or got noticed at the book fair or drew big crowds for our panels or started a Gawker-worthy dust-up with the critic who condescendingly panned us in the Times. What matters is the work in front of us; what matters is making work that attempts to be as artful and profound as the books that inspired us.

A few weeks ago, I called up my agent and told her I wanted to send out my novel as a partial manuscript. I said this because I wanted certainty, wanted a good contract and a publisher’s deadline to validate the way I was spending my time. She said no. She said, do the work. Don’t think about anything else.

When I texted her a funny, drunken anecdote from AWP this weekend, she said, “Good for you. Now go home.”

William Gay wrote for years without the validation of advances and the promises of pub dates. He just wrote because he had to do it, because he wanted to do it. Whether we write with confetti in our hair or drywall dust in our lungs, it’s being alone at the desk that matters most. It’s the work. We have to do the work.

William Gay proved this better than any writer at work in the last decade. His legacy is not only the impressive body of work he leaves behind, but also those early decades of his life, an almost anachronistic example of pure work ethic, egoless effort, and literary passion that will live forever.

• Read publisher David Poindexter’s tribute to William Gay on the MacAdam/Cage Website.
• You can also read Bruce Weber’s New York Times obituary for the author.
• And here is a remembrance from the Oxford American.

Livesey’s new novel is a modern (1960s) take on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In the introduction to his recent interview with Livesey, contributing editor Steve Wingate describes the literary relationship between the books. He writes:

Though the resemblances are close, including a five-part structure, they are not ponderous or strained. One could labor over the similarities between the characters, such as Brontë’s troubled gentleman Mr. Rochester and Livesey’s troubled gentleman Hugh Sinclair, or Brontë’s ill-fated schoolgirl Helen and Livesey’s ill-fated schoolgirl Miriam. But such comparisons are unnecessary when taking in The Flight of Gemma Hardy, and looking for them instead of letting Livesey’s tale live on its own merely distracts from it.

Wingate continues:

The book’s eponymous heroine Gemma, orphaned spawn of a Scottish mother and an Icelandic father, is in trouble from the start. Thrust into her aunt’s protection when her beloved uncle dies, she is treated as a servant girl and worse. The first movement of the novel, which covers Gemma’s escape from her adoptive family, filled me with unease over her physical and emotional safety in ways I did not expect. She is also a spooky, elvish girl, tending toward a receptivity to the supernatural that Livesey calls “second sight.” The first impression one gets of Gemma is of someone who will be frequently on the run, a delicate but scrappy survivor with no real place in the world who will land on her feet and create one.

In this interview, Wingate speaks with Livesey about such things as keeping the imagination fresh, the role of setting in her work, and learning from Brontë. In response to a question about “borrowing” from her own history and background, Livesey replies:

I knew as I embarked on the novel that I would be making use of my difficult stepmother and the grim boarding school I attended for four years. Only as Gemma began to grow up did I discover that I would be drawing on my deep sense that books and exams were a way to escape my present life. As for the role that my romantic life played in my creation of Gemma’s, I think that’s best left to the reader’s imagination.

Margot Livesey / credit: Emma Hardy

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

“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.

Further Links & Resources

Image: Wikipedia. Used by CC license.

First, there was Ernest Hemingway, Yelper:

Infusion Tea and Coffee House
Category: Coffee & Tea
THREE STARS

I got up late and the sun was already high and I had been drunk the night before. The barista brought me a cup of coffee and asked if I wanted anything else and when I said no she left. The coffee was good and very hot. I sat at the table for a while. When I was done the barista came and cleared my mug and went back behind the counter. I ordered a muffin to go and walked out into the street. By that time it was two in the afternoon and my headache was not as strong as it had been.

Now someone’s taken a page from McSweeney’s and created the Tumblr site Yelping with Cormac, in which “Cormac McCarthy” airs his opinions on everything from Ikea to Whole Foods to the Apple Store. No, really:

The Apple Store
Union Square – San Francisco, CA
Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM

Two stars.

Given the way my uncle died havin a drink directly after his funeral just didnt seem right so I went for a walk instead. One of them downtowns where all there is is stores. Came across a store was a big cube. Two stories tall and all silver. There was folks outside just standin there. Line stretchin round the block. Maybe a hundred people. I saw a man who’d brought his own chair. He had a shirt on with the same logo as the one on the store. I figured he worked there so I asked him what the line was all about. What were all these people waitin for. He told me it was for a apple phone or some such. I said dont these folks have telephones already? He told me they all had apple phones but it was the older one. I asked him what would happen to the old apple phones. He told me about a fella named Craig had a list and everbody sold their old telephones on it. A telephone sellin list.

Well I told him that all made about as much sense as a horse with two heads and he laughed like that was the funniest thing he ever did hear. Said he was goin to twinkle it. I left before he said anythin else that didnt make no sense and I went to the nearest bar and ordered a double whiskey and sat there drinkin it. I guess I sat there for a long time. Wonderin if when Rome was fallin all the Romans was standin in line waitin to get that new chariot or the like. The barbarians at the gates and them just standin there waitin.

No word yet on what the real Cormac McCarthy thinks of his Yelping self. But Yelping with Cormac could be just the first in a string of such sites. Can you imagine Yelping with Whitman? Yelping with Faulkner? Which authors, living or dead, would you like to see on Yelp?

• Thoughts on “parafiction”, where fictional characters blog and tweet
• If Joyce had tweeted Ulysses, it might have resembled this.
• Despite the title, Coffee with Hemingway is not a Yelp review—but it will give you some insight into the (real) author’s mind.

Though we typically focus on new titles for our Book-of-the-Week program, we thought we’d change things up this week in honor of Lethem’s spring visit to Ann Arbor as part of the University of Michigan’s Zell Visiting Writers Series. While in town, he sat down with contributor Roohi Choudhry for breakfast one morning. Of their conversation, Choudry writes:

Now here’s the rub: Jonathan Lethem has talked about everything. A quick Google search will reveal his patient and thoughtful responses to such varied interview questions as “…is relativism your philosophical stance?” and “Do you find incessant rain, like that which at the moment has us hiding and scurrying, defeating or oddly comforting?”

Despairing of finding an incisive question about his work that he has not already addressed somewhere online, I decided instead to follow up on tidbits he’d mentioned during his visit to our program, especially those I found of particular interest to us MFA-types. And also, as a displaced Brooklynite, I indulged in some banter about my favorite city in the world with the writer who captures it like no one else can. (Read on to find out how New York is akin to a “giant Ponzi scheme.”) Lethem is, after all, New York’s most notable exile.

To read this complete interview with Lethem, please click here.

• Read Lethem’s “Procedure in Plain Air,” a story published by The New Yorker in 2009.
• You can also read his essay on Philip K. Dick, entitled “You Don’t Know Dick,” published in Bookforum in 2002.
• Check out Lethem’s website for more information, including upcoming author events.
• You can also win one of three signed copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers.

To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

Grass opens with a seemingly straightforward scene – his eight grown children, gathered at his request around the kitchen table of his home near Lübeck. There’s a tape recorder, and the idea is for his children to talk about their father, who has just turned eighty. But things begin to shift and slide when the narrator, Grass, admits that his children will be using “words he has put into their mouths.” And few pages later, he introduces Maria and her magic camera, which  “takes pictures of things that aren’t there.”

With these conceits, Grass ostensibly records his children’s version of his story over numerous recording sessions, each of which is a different chapter. These take place at different homes of Grass and his children, in assorted parts of Germany, with various permutations of his children present. The chapters are bookended with brief comments from Grass (rather, Grass writing the character Grass). The story is presented in vérité style, without quotation marks or any formal indication of who is saying what. It reads like an unedited oral history transcript.

Grass’ children, several of whom are well past middle age themselves, reminisce about their childhoods, meandering through their father’s post-war years, forming a composite of his life as he achieved literary superstardom in Germany and beyond. As his children recount, their childhoods weren’t particularly tragic or abusive; they were mostly dysfunctional, with lots of longing for their father’s interest and attention. As they grow up, some of the children are unaware of the existence of their half brothers and sisters. At one point, they recall Grass moving back in with his first wife, sharing a home with two of their children and his wife’s Romanian lover; they eventually divide the house like the nearby Berlin Wall. For the most part, Grass is absent, distracted, or otherwise engaged. “He wasn’t a play-father,” says one of his children.

Marie is introduced early on, nonchalantly, as the children pass around family photos at one of their recording sessions. She’s based on a real person – a family friend who was a photographer – and The Box is dedicated to her. As the children meander and reminisce their way through Grass’ post-war years, Marie and her magic camera are omnipresent and omniscient. She sees much of the confusion and turmoil firsthand, but her camera penetrates deeper. It produces prints that see the past, the future, alternate versions of the present, and the deepest wishes of its subjects. Its unique powers, along with Marie’s ubiquity, allow her to see the confusion and turmoil caused by Grass’ mental and physical restlessness.  “My box is like the good lord: It sees all that was, that is, and that will be.”

As the children describe them, Marie’s photographs depict innocent fantasies, latent desires, melancholy wishes, and stark alternate realities. There are shots of Joggi, the dog, expertly navigating the Berlin U-Bahn. There are shots of Grass’ daughter Lara and her friends, naked, walking the Kudamm in Berlin. There are shots of a family trip to Brittany that depict the children as young soldiers wearing steel helmets and gas masks among the ruined, long-abandoned battlements, looking not unlike Grass did during the war.

Marie has a different relationship with Grass, and the prints from her magic camera often supply the raw materials for his writing, especially his work after debut novel and international sensation The Tin Drum (1959). The children remember the Stone Age pictures the camera produced that formed the basis of Grass’ 1977 novel The Flounder. They recall it supplying research for The Meeting at Telgte (1979), set during the 30 Years War.

For Telgte, Grass takes the pictures himself, shooting a concrete parking lot. “Because, he said, in this very spot a good three hundred years ago stood the Brückenhof, which will be the scene of the action.”  The prints depict outbuildings and barns with thatched roofs, portrait photos of historical figures at the real Telgte meeting.  “He wanted the box to help him rewind,” one of Grass’ children says. “Historical snapshots,” says another.

Günter Grass is obsessed with the past and has spent a lifetime attempting to come to terms with it. There’s a German word for this: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which literally translated means “managing the past,” and usually refers specifically to the Holocaust. This fuels his compulsion to write. It’s the desire to understand the role his friends, his family, his fellow citizens – and Grass himself – played in this crime. It’s the desire to make a new German society. This isn’t unique to Grass – many post-Nazi German writers fall into this category – but he is easily the most famous.

The Box was preceded by Peeling the Onion (2006), which offered a linear – though lyrical – account of his childhood, war years, and early literary success. In it, Grass revealed that he was drafted into the Waffen SS and saw limited action in a tank unit at the end of the Second World War. Long a critic of ex-Nazi participation in German politics, and perhaps the leading cultural voice calling for Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the book prompted a firestorm of controversy that tainted Grass’ reputation. Mild critics called him a hypocrite, while others called for the Nobel laureate to return his prize. Grass kept his prize and continued to work.

Peeling the Onion is what one might call a typical memoir. There are times when you think Grass might be spinning a yarn: Was the Joseph he met in a POW camp, the Joseph who Grass said sounded like a “grand inquisitor” and quoted Saint Augustine when he beat him at dice, was this really Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict? Still, in relation to other memoirs, it’s not off the charts. In fact, as a reader, you’re always waiting for Grass to…well, be Grass. But he earns and keeps your trust. Perhaps he chose strategy this because of the book’s dynamite revelations. If you’ve positioned yourself as the moral compass of post-war Germany, and you’re going to disclose that you were part of the Waffen SS, Marie and her magic camera aren’t going to help you. This was one case where Grass wasn’t going to play around with the past.

In The Box, I first thought that Grass was being diabolical, using Marie as an elaborate joke that his children play on him as they reminisce, telling him a tall tale as revenge for him making a career of it. One of the children says: “It’s possible even we, sitting here and talking, are just figments of his imagination – what do you think?” Of course, this is Grass writing in his children’s voice, so this is actually true.

Grass – well, the character of Grass – adds fuel to the fire in one of the chapter bookends,  cryptically stating: “Yes, children, I know: being a father is only an assertion, one that has to be constantly corroborated. That is why, to make you believe me, I must lie.”

But Grass is also a writer who once said, “If I say potato, I mean potato.” It’s hard to take him seriously on this point, given his oeuvre is peppered with talking animals; a child who wills himself to stop growing and possesses the superpower-like ability to use his voice as a weapon; and the aforementioned magic camera.

But permit me to twist the phrase a bit: “If I say talking dog, I mean talking dog.” “If I say self-created little person with super powers, I mean self-created little person with super powers.” “If I say magic camera, I mean magic camera.”

Maybe there’s something to this. Let’s apply it to The Tin Drum, Grass’ first novel. He claimed that the only way he would really convey the story of the rise of Nazism and its wake of destruction was to do it from the point of view as a child; this necessitated one that never aged, had the faculties of an adult, and while a little crazy and unreliable, provided an utterly unique perspective.

Marie’s camera is a device that allows Grass to explore the issues of past, present, and future that have always confounded him. Think of it this way: Grass was largely an absent father, but here he is writing about Marie and her nearly omniscient knowledge of his children. He must know something about his children to write a character who knows nearly all this is to know about them:

But you, Nanette, she managed to capture with her box even when I could not be with you, but in my thoughts was right there, holding your little hand that completely disappeared into mine. Mariechen knew our wishes, after all. That made it possible for me to be near you when you had dropped your house key or your pocket money again. I helped you look; it was a long way between home and school. Cold, I would say, warm, warmer, warmer, hot … And sometimes more turn up than had been lost. The pleasure we both took in found objects.

So, the father knows his children after all. The Box is how Grass sees his children (via Marie and her magic camera, Grass’ creation) and it’s Grass imagining how his kids see him (via Grass writing in their voices). He’s a fair and often critical assessor of his behaviors and their impact. The children try to work out what drives him, and it’s clear early on that they’re aware of his preternatural drive, one that’s more powerful than any other force in his life: the pursuit of truth, the reconciliation of past, present, and future. “That’s just how he is. Always was. I have to work through it, he said.”

In the end, I came to believe just about everything in The Box except for Marie’s magic camera. I suppose I could attempt to corroborate the real biographies of his eight children with those that are recounted here. But those are the details that he had no need to make up. As for the magic camera, it’s incidental as well. The point of The Box, at least to me, is that the octogenarian Grass needs to believe that despite all of the family turmoil he’s caused, that his children understand that he was compelled by a greater power – namely, the quest for truth. By writing in a realistic way (despite the magic camera) how his children could come to this understanding and acceptance about their father, perhaps he’s really giving them a blueprint to follow in real life. Or, at the very least, he’s making his case.

According to The Box, Grass’s children, by and large, turned out fine. Professionally, they are successful. Personally, they seem happy. Their childhoods were, like other childhoods, bittersweet, though certainly more tumultuous than most. The world is richer for Grass’ work, but there was a cost. The Box is tragic in this respect, because for a man obsessed with making sense of the past, he now has to account for his own, and there’s more than a tinge of regret. It’s not an apology to his children – as far as Grass is concerned, there’s nothing to apologize for – but it does offer an explanation:  Sure, I could have been around more, but the time we spent, wasn’t it magical?

Further Links and Resources:

The gradual accumulation of detail and story is Ondaatje’s preferred narrative structure; the effect of the jumps from scene to scene and the uneven length of these snapshots of life during the voyage fragment the story even as glimpses of conversation, of interactions first half-described and later completed, tie it together. One effect of this technique is to reveal the characters as mutable figures—just when you think you know who someone is, they may act in a way that’s surprising. And because The Cat’s Table is narrated in the first person from the boy Michael’s perspective, when characters surprise us they often surprise him, and we feel the inherent unreliability of anyone’s understanding of anyone else.

I didn’t even know to expect a new novel from Ondaatje until the galley was in my hands. The best kind of surprise—unlooked for, and so all the more valuable. And as I prepared to write this review, something about The Cat’s Table tugged at me. I flipped through some of his other books. It seemed like the right time to re-read Anil’s Ghost, given recent events in Sri Lanka. And there it was: Anil, a forensic pathologist, works with the archaeologist Sarath on a ship in the Colombo harbor. Once a luxury liner, it is now overflow office space. The name of the ship is the Oronsay. As Ondaatje’s writing combines and repeats images, themes, and references, it makes sense to discuss The Cat’s Table in the context of his greater body of work.

2.
I have always loved Ondaatje’s writing for his beautiful sentences and his indelible images, but also for his huge imagination. Larger-than-life plots abound in Ondaatje novels, and even if a reader balks at accepting their plausibility, the descriptions of the events are so entrancing, so bizarre and wonderful, that they have a kind of metaphorical truth. For example, the thief Caravaggio’s escape from prison in In the Skin of Lion by painting himself blue and blending into the prison roof:  “They daubed his clothes and then, laying a strip of handkerchief over his eyes, painted his face blue, so he was gone—to the guards who looked up and saw nothing there.” Or the Bedouin rescuing the burned man in the desert in The English Patient, an “archangel” with a yoke of hundreds of glass bottles hanging from his neck rubs a tincture of ground peacock bones into the patient’s skin to help him heal. I think this is what people mean when they describe Ondaatje’s work as “haunting” in blurbs: the images resist evaporation. In The Cat’s Table, a fabulously wealthy passenger is traveling to England hoping to find a cure for rabies, which he got from a mad dog after a priest he had insulted cursed him. Another passenger keeps a collection of plants, many of them poisonous, under lamps in a hidden garden in the bowels of the ship. Perhaps none of Ondaatje’s inventions are really all that outlandish—in a world where giant squid, and the Lascaux caves, and the brutality of tens of thousands of murders in Sri Lanka actually exist, why should anything else seem surreal?

Over the breadth of Ondaatje’s work, there are two aspects of his narrative style that I love. The first is his juxtaposition of the large gesture with the small, everyday one. In The English Patient, the burned patient was once a man hopelessly in love who crashed his plane in the desert. But when the novel opens, his nurse, Hana, is simply feeding him. She “unskins the plum with her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth.”

In the Skin of a Lion, which may be my favorite of Ondaatje’s novels, follows Patrick Lewis, the future nurse Hana’s father, and his love affairs with two actresses, but the novel is as much about work, the hard, brutal work of the immigrant, as it is about love. Consider this scene when a nun falls off a half-built bridge:

The man in mid-air under the central arch saw the shape fall towards him, in that second knowing his rope would not hold them both. He reached to catch the figure while his other hand grabbed the metal pipe edge above him to lessen the sudden jerk on the rope. The new weight ripped the arm that held the pipe out of its socket and he screamed, so whoever might have heard him up there would have thought the scream was from the falling figure. The halter thulked, jerking his chest up to his throat. The right arm was all agony now—but his hand’s timing had been immaculate, the grace of the habit, and he found himself a moment later holding the figure against him dearly.

Contrast the drama of the nun’s fall with this passage:

Patrick did not speak. The light moved down her arm to the bowl, illuminated her hand which wet the cloth, squeezed it, and moved forward to give it to him. She saw his right hand reach to take it from her. His hand began to wipe her neck. He removed the brown paint, turned her around and slowly wiped the vermilion frown-mark by her mouth, the light close on her face. He rinsed out the cloth again and holding her forehead steady wiped the targets off her eyes, cloth over one finger for precision, the blue left iris wavering at the closeness…so that it was not Alice Gull but something more intimate—an eye muscle having to trust a fingertip to remove that quarter-inch of bright yellow around her sight.

The language, pacing, and tone that describe the nun’s fall and the makeup removal are so similar that they give both events a similar importance—and that’s the point. Critiques of Ondaatje maintain that this drama is all a little much. Although Ondaatje’s writing is somehow never truly sensational, neither is it the quiet revelation of William Trevor, or Alice Munro. As I was working on this essay I found it difficult to re-read Ondaatje’s works one after the other. The level of intensity so rarely drops, and the images ought to be savored, not inhaled, otherwise they subsume and overwhelm each other—taken all at once the work can seem like some kind of faintly lurid carnival show of wonders; read at a slower pace Ondaatje’s inventions and historical re-imaginings seem individually more wonderful.

To find the wonderful aspects, the beauty, in both history and work, is one of Ondaatje’s main undertakings.  In the Skin of a Lion follows characters through pushing logs downriver to a sawmill. When the logs jam the boy Patrick greases himself and dives into the water to places dynamite charges that will free them (“A river exploded behind him, the crows leafing up.”). The immigrant Nicholas Temelcoff swings from girders to build the Prince Edward Bridge in Toronto, (“He knows his position in the air as if he is mercury slipping across a map”), an earlier echo of Kip and Hana swinging in front of the Italian frescoes in that beautiful scene from The English Patient that made it into Anthony Minghella’s film adaption. Later, Patrick works as a leather-dyer: “men leapt waist-deep within the reds and ochres and greens, leapt in embracing the skins of recently slaughtered animals…And the men stepped out in colours up to their necks, pulling wet hides out after them so it appeared they had removed the skin from their own bodies.” In The English Patient, Count Almasy turns again and again to Herodotus, as if that text and its stories are the key to understanding his own life.

The second thing I love is Ondaatje’s willingness to leap, from scene to scene, moment to moment. This includes his jumpy, minimalist conversations. If you don’t know someone well, you may be a little uncomfortable around them, so you speak only briefly. If you know someone well, you don’t have to explain yourself, so you also speak briefly. Ondaatje’s characters often inhabit these two spaces. His leaps in point of view, time, image, and place are, of course, poetic. Ondaatje discusses this tendency in his own work in a new afterword to The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: “One could leap from terror to a close-up of a moth in a bowl, but there had to be some unspoken or hidden link between the two moments—to do with language perhaps or some small spark in a lyric that would lead to conflagration in the prose sequence that followed.”¹

Because of the commercial success of The English Patient, Ondaatje has avoided being labeled an “experimental” writer, yet his earlier books are relentlessly restless in the ways they combine images, their intertextuality, their fragmented narratives and sentences. Two books are especially jumpy and interwoven: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and Coming Through Slaughter (1976).

Of Billy, Ondaatje writes, “What if I tried to write a book that allowed all these angles and subjects and emotions, but they all came from one person? As far as I could see, one voice never really spoke only in one way: it contained multitudes.” The structure of these two books is like a camera panning in a circle. It moves around the main characters slowly, looking at them from all those different angles, occasionally darting away to interview a friend or a lover, a talking head in a documentary. We get glimpses of letters, interviews. Sometimes you can believe what the friends and lovers say, and sometimes you can’t. Slaughter is set in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, and follows cornet player Buddy Bolden’s rise and fall. Both books crash over the reader in waves. There is a willingness to loosen the threads of the narrative so much that the fabric is more transparent than opaque. Instead of reading for the resolution of the story, you’re reading for the scene, the moment. The story pauses, but only barely, pulled along by the shifts between those multitudes. And Ondaatje preserves aspects of this structure—its reliance on short scenes and shifts in points of view—in his later work. Both books also display Ondaatje’s interest, at times frightening even to him, in violence.

3.
Billy the Kid is, of course, one of the most violent figures in the early American imagination, and part of Ondaatje’s treatment of Billy is to rewrite the cartoonish figure he has become and to restore the horror of the actual shooting of other people. From there, the violence of the mind and of music, in Coming Through Slaughter, and the violence of love as well. In Ondaatje’s memoir, Running in the Family, he describes the violence of his father’s dipsomania,² and in The English Patient, the violence of love, the intimacy of wounding someone is a counterpoint to or expression of the guilt the characters both feel. In that book, only Kip and Hana escape violence in their relationship; perhaps it is displaced into the dangerous sapper’s work.

Anil’s Ghost, set in the early 1990s in Sri Lanka and published in 2000, is a litany, a report of violence. The civil war in Sri Lanka between the Sinhalese-controlled government and the Tamil minority, eventually represented by the Tamil Tigers, ended last year with the government’s massacre of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians. It began in the mid 1980s, and also involved a third group of antigovernment insurgents in the south of the country. The character Anil, a forensic pathologist who was born in Sri Lanka but who left to go to school in England and the US when she was fifteen, returns to the country on a human rights mission. There she becomes obsessed with discovering the identity of a single murder victim, a body she calls “Sailor” who was found in a government-restricted area. All around Anil are people who have survived the war so far physically but perhaps not otherwise. Ondaatje describes:

Street bombs, usually containing nails or ball bearings, could cut open an abdomen fifty yards from the explosion. Shock waves travelled past someone and the suction could rupture the stomach. ‘Something happened to my stomach,’ a woman would say, fearing she had been cut open by bomb metal, while in fact her stomach had flipped over from the force of passing air. Everyone was emotionally shattered by a public bomb. Months later survivors would come into the ward saying they feared they might still die…

Thousands of people were murdered, publicly and privately, over the decades of the Sri Lankan conflict. People disappeared. The book opens with a scene of Anil in similarly afflicted Guatemala, her forensic team shadowed by the families of the missing. “There was always the fear, double-edged that it was their son in the pit, or that it was not their son—which meant there would be further searching…The possibility of their lost son was everywhere.”

To move through Ondaatje’s work is to follow the thread of his interests, his themes, or obsessions, or beliefs. To examine Billy the Kid by imagining his violence is to solve his disappearance, the vanishing of the actual gunslinger in the American imagination, to be replaced by a merely rakish outlaw. Anil’s Ghost, the story of events a Sri Lankan-born writer must at some point contend with, is an extension of the ways Ondaatje’s work circles around violence and death. In The Cat’s Table, there is less violence, although there is the metaphorical violence of travel, and the violence of exile. This is exemplified by a storm which Cassius and Michael want to experience firsthand. They convince their friend Ramadhin to tie them to the deck:

We’d imagined lying there conversing in wonder about the lights of the storm at some great height above us but we were now almost drowning from the water in the air—the rain, and the sea that was leaping over the railings and swirling across the deck. Lightning lit the rain in the air above us, and then it was dark once more. A loose rope was slapping at my throat. There was only noise. We could not tell if we were screaming or only trying to.

Michael remembers this moment vividly years later. As he reaches middle age looks back on his life, he circles around such moments. The novel gives us the boy’s point of view on the scenes, but then some reflection from the older character, making sense of his journey piece by piece. In Divisadero, Ondaatje writes, from the point of view of Anna, one of the characters:

All my life I have loved traveling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behavior of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in the past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion…For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered piece of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, make up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

In a book on poetic forms, The Making of a Poem, poets Eavan Boland and Mark Strand write, “While the subject of most lyric poems is loss, the formal properties of the villanelle address the idea of loss directly. Its repeated lines, the circularity of its stanzas, become, as the reader listens, a repudiation of forward motion, of temporality and therefore, of dissolution. Each stanza of a villanelle, with its refrains, becomes a series of retrievals.”

Between them, these two quotations seem to explain a great deal of how Ondaatje makes use of his poet’s sensibilities in the service of fiction. They also address the doubling of narrative, the circling back to conversations, images, themes, that runs through his books. In the Skin of a Lion ends with Patrick and Hana driving together into the night. Patrick is searching for Clara. Anil is searching for Sailor. Anna is searching for Lucien Segura. Michael, in The Cat’s Table, is searching the past. And they may help explain the violence in his work. Sometimes it seems as if there is a cruel balance: to find something, you have to give something up in return.

4.
As useful as the above quotations are when thinking about his work, I will admit to at times being annoyed by Ondaatje’s explanations, especially in Divisadero. The intrusions of what seems more like the author’s voice than the character’s into the text remove me from the novel’s setting. For example,

“The skill of writing offers little to a viewer. There is only this five-centimeter relationship between your eyes and the pen. Any skill in diving or dreaming is invisible, whereas the clockmaker visiting Auch removed his dark cotton jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt….”

Divisadero is partly about two writers, Anna and the French writer of an earlier time, Lucien Segura, whom Anna is researching while she lives in his house. But because of the tone of the passage, I can’t separate Anna from Ondaatje himself, and to be reminded of the creator of this complicated narrative in this way is disrupting. The same paragraph, however, contains one of my favorite Ondaatje sentences: “Soon I was almost within the pleasure of his serious demeanor.” And for this, I can forgive him anything else.

Another critique of Ondaatje’s novels might be that they have, more or less, one tone: serious, dramatic, and often-awed. I can’t argue with this, but I would refer such readers to Ondaatje’s slightest but in some ways most kick-ass book, the poem Elimination Dance (La danse éliminatoire), which is a political, hilarious, weird take on a called dance (e.g. Anyone with a red hat on the floor, except here it is “Any dinner guest who has consumed the host’s missing contact lens along with the dessert”). The “Study Questions” at the back of the book include: “Does the author’s fuck-you tone contribute to the theme of the poem as a whole?” and “Compare Elimination Dance with ‘The Rape of the Lock’—with special emphasis on the use of zeugma.”³ Ondaatje’s poetry is generally more humorous than his prose. “Sweet Like a Crow” proceeds:

Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed

through a glass tube

like someone has just trod on a peacock

like wind howling in a coconut

like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire

across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning,

a vattacka being fried

a bone shaking hands

a frog singing at Carnegie Hall….

But the poems I love most share the tone of his novels. Maybe this only says something about my own value for sincerity. Or maybe I more easily recognize, in his poetry as well, the same circling back to his central concerns. In “The Hour of Cowdust” Ondaatje describes “the hour we move small / in the last possibilities of light…/ Everything is reducing itself to shape…

The boat turns languid

under the hunched passenger

sails

ready for the moon

fill like a lung

there is no longer

depth of perception

it is now possible

for the outline of two boats

to collide silently

It is this collision, of lives and stories, that keeps me returning to Ondaatje’s books, along with the continual surprise, as a result of these collisions, of moving from one narrative to another. Ondaatje insists on a willingness to admit that our own story (or the story of the original main character) may not be the most interesting one, and that when that story reaches a pausing place, we can continue to find meaning in other people, other characters, whose lives branch off from and continue without us. So Caravaggio becomes, three-quarters of the way through The English Patient, the narrative’s focus. So, in Divisadero we leave the cowboy Coop behind to follow the French writer, Lucien Segura. In The Cat’s Table we leave Michael several times to follow other characters. The last chapters of Anil’s Ghost don’t belong to Anil, but to Ananda, a sculptor who helped her by crafting a possible model of Sailor’s head. He is now reconstructing a statue of the Buddha that was destroyed. His final act is to paint the eyes that will give the statue life, but he must do it backwards, as Ondaatje explains:

Without the eyes there is not just blindness, there is nothing. There is no existence. The artificer brings to life sight and truth and presence…He climbs a ladder in front of the statue…The painter dips a brush into the paint and turns his back to the statue, so it looks as if he is about to be enfolded in the great arms. The paint is wet on the brush. The other man, facing him, holds up the mirror, and the artificer puts the brush over his shoulder and paints in the eyes without looking directly at the face. He uses just the reflection to guide him—so only the mirror receives the direct image of the glance being created. No human eye can meet the Buddha’s during the process of creation….

Is this just more fascinating research, or a metaphor for writing as well? The idea that we could not bear the true power of looking directly at someone else, that we are revealed by the stories that circle around us, as well as by our own, is one of the best lessons of Ondaatje’s work.

5.
The more relaxed pace, the slightly less dramatic stakes, and the continuation of the themes of the collisions of lives, and of disappearance and searching combine to make The Cat’s Table enormously satisfying. It seems, in many ways, the best possible next novel Ondaatje could have written: a little gentler than Anil’s Ghost, a little less difficult than Divisadero. Here are more eccentric, fascinating characters: Miss Lasqueti, who keeps pigeons in the pockets of her specially-sewn coat and who may or may not be involved with Whitehall—she periodically throws dissatisfying crime novels overboard in a fit of rage; Mr. Fonseka, the traveling teacher of literature and history who can as easily recite a song from the Azores as lines from an Irish play; Asuntha, an abandoned child who learns to become an acrobat and then is deafened in a fall, and whose father is a prisoner on the Oronsay; Emily, Michael’s beautiful cousin who is being sent to finishing school in England but who seem determined to make her life her own. Watching all these characters, and reporting on them, is Michael, brave and wild and occasionally very homesick. With two other boys on the ship, Cassius and Ramadhin, Michael explores every part of the Oronsay, small boys being endlessly curious and no one’s first priority.

Here, too, represented in Michael and the boys who explore every inch of the ship, is Ondaatje’s own boundless curiosity. The conversation about what amount of research belongs in a novel, and when an author’s enthusiasm for research can overwhelm the narrative is an important one, but often Ondaatje’s research is so interesting that I don’t care how it relates to the narrative. One of my favorite bits of research, from Divisadero: “Gotraskhalana is a term in Sanskrit poetics for calling a loved one by a wrong name, and means, literally, ‘stumbling on the name.’” The title of his book of selected poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, informs you that someone somewhere works for his living by peeling cinnamon. Knowing this is enough: I don’t need the story to contain it.

While The Cat’s Table has a more circumscribed roaming space than some of Ondaatje’s other books, it includes issues of class and race, and the painful, thrilling transition from East to West. The ship stops in the exotic ports of Aden and Port Said, and these images stay with the boys. The three-week journey seems etched in many of the passengers’ memories. The liminal space of the ship allows for confidences and friendships that are still vivid years later. Yet after the voyage, in living their own lives the passengers on the ship lose touch with one another. Cassius slips from his friends’ grasp. Ramadhin also has his own secrets from Michael. In the end, they are unknowable.

The Oronsay will become a haunted hulk of a ship in the Colombo harbor, but in The Cat’s Table it is a vital, floating world, and there is a nostalgia here for the loss of childhood, and for that slightly simpler time in which an eleven-year-old boy would be put aboard a ship more or less alone, for a lightly-supervised three week trip.

The book begins with the ship’s disappearance into the night as it leaves Sri Lanka. It ends with Emily, Michael’s cousin and pseudo-guardian, disappearing “into the world” on the dock in England. But on the pier Michael finds his mother, although he hasn’t seen her in four or five years, and “there no longer remained any sure memory of what she looked like.” Her story is outside the bounds of the novel—it will continue, without us. We the readers, along with Michael, had not realized that he had been searching for her for quite some time.

Published in 1982, before more recent discussions of whether fictionalized memoirs were less truthful or not, the book is not labeled a novel or a memoir. I have no idea where it would be shelved in a bookstore today, partly because there are no bookstores left in my Philadelphia neighborhood where I could check (a long-shuttered Borders dominates one corner). In Running, Ondaatje recreates conversations between dead family members. Did the contents of these conversations come from interviews or journals? Ondaatje writes in the acknowledgments, “…if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.”

A zeugma is “a figure of speech describing the joining of two or more parts of a sentence with a single common verb or noun.” –Wikipedia

[Click "Back" on your browser to return to the essay]

**Special thanks to Preeta Samarasan for her help with this essay.

Further Links and Resources:

“For the writing teacher, the habit of intellectual analysis may become crippling…. As the teacher sees more and more talented students, he may consciously or unconsciously begin to set himself increasingly difficult tasks, distancing himself from his best students’ work by tour-de-force showmanship, pyrotechnics, and subtlety beyond his students’ means.”

– John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist

Such students can, and ought to, change those who teach them. It needn’t be a negative change as John Gardner describes above, in which the brilliant student becomes a nemesis. But such negativity does happen, because our best students tempt us into self-doubt. In the worst case scenario teachers can get paralyzed, both in the classroom and at the writing desk, by the worry that their students’ aesthetic instincts are simply better than their own. This fear may lead teachers into over-intellectualizing the creative process in an effort to give the brilliant student more challenges, which I believe is absolutely inimical to good instruction. And as Gardner warns, this jealous rot can eventually find its way into the writer/teacher’s own creative work.

Writers with a solid practice and sufficient maturity don’t need to worry about trying to outdo our best students. But such students can knock even the most grounded teachers off balance by challenging us, whether consciously or not, to be more articulate and more precise in our instruction. This requires risk and effort. It’s as dangerous to deny that brilliant students require special handling as it is to believe that all students are created equal. Pretending that talent doesn’t exist dishonors everyone in the workshop equally. Here are a few thoughts and observations on dealing with phenomenal students:

Don’t resort to merely teaching technique. The worst thing we can do with brilliant students is to offer them greater technical challenges—exploring a particular form for the sake of exercise, altering point of view for no good reason, etc. Writing isn’t Olympic diving, and there are no “degree of difficulty” points to be earned. Focusing on technique is a cop-out for the teacher; it tacitly embraces the creation of pretty surfaces at the expense of emotional truthfulness, and it gives students permission to indulge in cleverness and call it art.

There is no value whatsoever to false egalitarianism. Everyone in workshop will recognize the best work presented, and teachers need to avoid two poles: (1) not critiquing the piece at all; (2) taking the author to task on every single possible nit that can be picked. Tearing apart Student Z’s brilliant story for half an hour simply because one did the same to Student X’s glaringly unfinished work can smother a whole workshop. Fairness does not mean equal time for pointing out perceived errors.

Insightful praise for good work can be instructive for everyone. I would hate to count the number of teaching moments that get missed in creative writing classrooms because teachers, too invested in egalitarianism and unwilling to play favorites, won’t come out and recognize stellar student work. If it’s blazingly good, we should say so and talk about why. If part of what we do in workshops is train people to read like writers, is there any reason why the texts that help us read more intuitively can’t come from our own students?

Modeling the habits of the writer is more important than modeling structure or style. Gifted student writers will find their way to well-structured tales and compelling voices. But even the most talented may have little sense of how to manage and nurture their projects, how to balance their analytical and creative selves in revision, or how to write their way through (rather than around) the irresolvable knots that rise up in every earnest work of fiction. No matter how impressive pieces are in workshop, their authors must eventually bring them to fruition alone. It’s our responsibility to teach them about the ever-shifting sands that fiction (and its authors) face over the long haul of a project or a career.

Guide brilliant students toward the creative questions that won’t go away. We may not have our best students for long, but we can do them a great service by pushing them toward the thorny questions that will assert themselves with each new project, or even between phases of a single project. Am I revising for the sake of revising? What road does this work lead me down, and what other roads might it also lead me down? Process awareness is a tremendous talent in itself, and there’s no reason to withhold conversations about it from students who are otherwise ready.

Cultivate articulateness about the craft and broad literary citizenship. Brilliant students are more likely to be published and more likely to be teachers in the future; they will therefore need to be more articulate about the craft of fiction so that they can teach it, speak in interviews about it, and craft spectacular grant proposals involving it. We should challenge them not only to be workshop leaders, but also to think about the big picture of their writerly apprenticeship. We should encourage them to figure out where they fit in the republic of arts and letters, since they will probably—through publication, advanced degrees, etc.—need to address such questions more quickly than their fellows.

One last note on Gardner’s warning about brilliant students adversely affecting their teachers’ writing. People who are jealous and overly competitive by nature, and who view writing as a means of getting ahead rather than a process of understanding the self and the world, are likely to fall into that trap. But I don’t think most creative writing teachers are like that. Most of us, if our students turn out to be great writers, will feel overjoyed and privileged to have been among their teachers. If we don’t feel that way—well, then it’s probably time to get out of the business.

Quotes and Notes is a craft essay series by Steven Wingate. His short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. He is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at South Dakota State University.

In Marion Ettlinger’s stark black-and-white portrait of Carver, the author sits hunched forward slightly, his hands crossed at the wrists and resting on this knee. He wears a supple leather bomber jacket, a wool scarf, and a broad ring on one of his fingers. Carver looks comfortable, untouched by life’s rough edges, a slight smirk seems to be growing at the edges of his mouth.

Marion Ettlinger's photo of Carver, from http://www.nancykiefer.com/

I remember thinking, “How could this guy know so much about these characters?”

I was sixteen, and still naively believed that the narrator of every first-person story must be the author himself. Right? I mean, I was writing self-absorbed, autobiographical poems and stories every day. Wasn’t everyone else?

But back then I had no idea of the difference between sympathy and empathy. And, most importantly, I had no idea of what the imagination was capable of.

When I discovered the writing of Andre Dubus in my early twenties—beginning first with his final collection, Dancing After Hours (Knopf, 1996), and then quickly devouring his entire catalog—I discovered complex work that both taught me about the literary craft of compression and point of view in short stories, and gave me a deeper understanding of empathy and compassion as a human being.

As I read Dubus’s work, I also sought out all that had been written about him. In the latter, too often I stumbled upon other writers and scholars seeking to make tenuous links between the characters that inhabit Dubus’s tough yet celebratory stories, and Dubus’s actual life. Such reductive readings frustrated me. By then, I’d come to understand the difference between art and life, between the writer and the writing.

For no other apparent reason than the sake of putting fiction into neat boxes, some scholars seem to regularly seek out the explanation of fiction in the autobiography of authors. These scholars cling to ease rather than aspiring to generate objective knowledge and insights. They claim to admire a writer, yet diminish their work by putting forth essays and papers full of feeble examples of how the author’s work is thinly veiled autobiography.

Dubus himself said he steered clear of autobiography in his fiction. “I’ve always fought writing autobiography,” he told Kay Bonetti in a 1984 interview for the American Audio Prose Library series. ”I’ve felt that there was something wrong with it. I guess in my early twenties I started thinking about my choice of subjects and worried then that if I spent too much time writing autobiography I’d lose touch with the world.”

Unsurprisingly, that conversation with Bonetti eventually got around to Dubus’s literary hero, Anton Chekhov. In Dubus’s own words, we discover that what the short story devotee really sought to achieve with his art were stories devoid of himself. Explaining Chekhov’s reaction to an editor’s praise for his piece “A Dreary Story,” Dubus told the interviewer: “What [Chekhov] wrote to his editor about that story is absolutely true, it is full of arguments and philosophical debates, and Chekhov said, ‘but you will not find me in there.’ And that’s what I like.”

Recently, I sought input from several authors about the idea of autobiography in fiction. Many of the authors I spoke with have themselves, in varying degrees, dealt with their own writing being questioned as to its autobiographical elements.

Christopher Tilghman, author of the novels Mason’s Retreat (Random House, 1996) and Roads of the Heart (Random House, 2004), as well as the story collections The Way People Run (Random House, 1999) and In a Father’s Place (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), is unequivocal about his feelings on the matter of fact versus fiction in Dubus’s short stories.

“On the subject of using personal material in fiction,” says Tilghman, “I tend to think of Andre as one of the least autobiographical writers I know.”

In 1987, Tilghman became a founding member of the writers’ group that met nearly weekly in Dubus’s living room until his death in early 1999. The group eventually became known at the “Thursday Nighters,” a term coined by Tilghman. Dubus chronicled some of the group’s particularly difficult growing pains in his essay “Letter to a Writer’s Workshop,” collected in Meditations from a Moveable Chair (Knopf, 1998).

“If there are specific incidents in any of his stories that were drawn from life, his literary and spiritual project simply subsumed them. Whatever residue of personal experience that survives is simply not recognizable as autobiography,” continues Tilghman. “And to the contrary point, Andre seemed to have used fiction as a way to place and observe himself within situations that, thankfully, he never did experience in his waking life.”

It is not voyeurism that readers seek in Dubus’s stories, says Tilghman, but the pointed “horns of ethical dilemmas” that Dubus’s stories thrust readers between. “Many of his characters take action that we might think of as unlikely or distasteful or unlawful, but they do it because they think it is the only thing to do.”

When Tilghman met Dubus back in 1987, he was a young writer struggling to find his voice. Today, he is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Virginia. At UVA, known as the school Thomas Jefferson built, the legend of William Faulkner’s stint as a writer-in-residence in the late 1950s still looms large, as does the legacy of a certain alum: Edgar Allen Poe. Today, the acclaimed novelist and short story writer Ann Beattie serves as the university’s Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing.

Like Tilghman, Beattie was close to Dubus. In the winter of 1987, she joined E.L. Doctorow, Gail Goodwin, John Irving, Stephen King, Tim O’Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Yates for a series of benefit readings in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to raise money for Dubus after he was struck by a car and handicapped. A decade later, Beattie joined Dubus for several readings together while he was on tour for what would end up being his final story collection, Dancing After Hours.

For Beattie—whose recently published novella Walks with Men (Scribner, 2010) had many reviewers pondering whether or not the author had raided her own memories of living in New York City in the 1980s in order to write the book—the question of autobiography in an author’s work is much less interesting than many other more intriguing questions.

When Beattie was in college in the late 1960s, the New Criticism model—eschewing the biographical and sociological in favor of close reading and the work itself—was a prevailing wisdom. Then, for a time, she questioned such an approach. “When I became a writer, I found this increasingly….odd,” says Beattie. “Why were we living and working, if not to admit that we were peculiar? Not that I think the key to fiction is ‘Is it autobiography disguised?’ but rather that readers might think there was a ‘key’ to better understanding the work, and that that ‘key’ turned in the lock of ‘writer’s life’.”

“If readers do think this—as opposed to people who speak about literature, who want, justifiably, to move closer to the text, but who may therefore be led into a kind of thinking that involves verifiability—they’ve been misled about what fiction is. Both parties have misunderstood,” asserts Beattie, whose newest collection The New Yorker Stories (Scribner, 2010) collects her forty-eight pieces that appeared between 1974 and 2006 in that bellwether of American short fiction; the book was named to the New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2010 list.

“Fiction mystifies the writers of fiction,” says Beattie, explaining:

They—they, alone—are quite capable of displaying the ‘facts’ of their lives, yet doing this holds almost no fascination for any fiction writer, EVER.

So while fiction writers don’t write blindly, neither do they think that facts should be warped into art. They have taken a huge step away from facts in order to write fiction. In that space—in that gap—true make-believe, true fiction, occurs. It occurs as much for the writer as for the reader. It seems to me that it’s interesting additional information if an incident really did, in point of fact, happen to the writer, but the more interesting question is: So what? Why did that capture the writer’s interest, as opposed to 1,000 other things that really happened?

The author Edie Clark has long been awed by not only the incidents and characters that captured Dubus’s interest and empathy, but by Dubus’s seemingly prophetic vision.

Clark, the author most recently of the essay collection States of Grace: Encounters with Real Yankees (Benjamin Mason Books, 2010), traveled for years from her home in New Hampshire to attend the weekly writer’s workshop at Dubus’s Massachusetts home; Clark’s searing memoir of losing her young husband to cancer, The Place He Made (Villard, 1996), was written and drafted during those workshops.

“What always struck me so deeply about Andre,” says Clark, “was how some of his stories turn out to be his life, rather than the other way around. Like he was prescient.”

Clark served for many years as the fiction editor of Yankee magazine and published many stories and essays by Dubus, as well as work by Donald Hall, Stephen King, John Updike, and Monica Wood, among many others. In particular, Clark remembers an eerie, seemingly prophetic Dubus story that came across her desk.

In 1986, Clark had Dubus’s story “Blessings” in production for the next issue of Yankee. The story, later collected in Dancing After Hours, revolves around an horrific boating accident, a shark attack, and the subsequent aftermath for the survivors. “I recall counting the number of times the word ‘leg’ appears in that story,” says Clark. “Twenty-seven different times. And, of course, while we were putting that story into print, Andre lost his leg and the use of his other. I don’t think he ever put that together as the rest of his life was so dramatically changed but it wasn’t the first time I saw this, that what happened in his stories preceded what happened in his own life.”

Watson and the Shark, by John Singleton Copley

But, of course, Dubus’s stories don’t always fall into this prescient category—a category, it could be said, that exists for an honest writer engaged in writing about their own fears and the what-ifs of life. In Clark’s opinion, Dubus both used kernels of his life as seeds for stories, and he listened closely to the stories of others to inspire his art. For years, Clark kept a long quotation from Dubus’s essay “Marketing” (from Broken Vessels, Godine, 1991) tacked to the wall beside her desk. The quote, the essay’s opening paragraph, reads:

I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice. We can sit all night with our friend while he talks about the end of his marriage, and what we finally get is a collection of stories about passion, tenderness, misunderstanding, sorrow, money; those hours and days and moments when he was absolutely married, whether he and his wife were screaming at each other, or sulking about the house, or making love. While his marriage was dying, he was also working: spending evenings with friends, rearing children; but those are other stories. Which is why, days after hearing a painful story by a friend, we see him and say: How are you? We know that by now he may have another story to tell or he may be in the middle of one and we hope it is joyful.

“Andre thought deeply about life,” says Clark, “and about what happened to his friends, because he cared but also because he wanted to understand how the world worked.”

In Dubus’s own remarks we find how consistently he looked outward to find the stories he wove, such as in a 1985 interview with Thomas Kennedy for Revue Delta. Dubus was open about the very simple inspiration that led him to write Voices from the Moon (Godine, 1984), a story that is both his longest novella and very likely his masterpiece: Dubus told Kennedy that he came upon the story’s plot while reading the Boston Globe one day.

The nine chapters of the 126-page Voices from the Moon alternate between Richie Stowe, a serious twelve-year-old who plans to become a priest, and the other members of the boy’s family. The story takes place over the course of a single day and is centered on the revelation that Richie’s divorced father plans to marry the ex-wife of Richie’s older brother—the father’s own former daughter-in-law.

“Woman in her 20s who wanted to marry a man in his 40s who was her ex-husband’s father,” said Dubus on the newspaper article. “Against the law in Massachusetts and in some other states. That was the whole thing. I tried to make up the characters who went with them.”

In the end, Clark doesn’t believe that it matters either way whether the kernel of a Dubus story came from his own experience, a friend’s life, or from a newspaper article. “The point is,” she says, “that Andre recognized transformative moments in life, whether in his own or in that of his friends, and turned them into art. He understood what it means to be human.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford is renowned for capturing the transformative moments in life. He is also no stranger to having his fiction confused for his life.

“It’s happened to me a lot,” Ford told me recently, “that novels and characters I’ve written have, by readers, been confused with my life and self. In one way, I suppose, it ought to be flattering. It means the illusion of the book was fairly complete, or at least it seemed ‘true to life.’”

While Ford solidified his reputation as a master of the American short story with his early collection Rock Springs (Atlantic Monthly, 1987), it was his 1986 novel The Sportswriter (Vintage) that thrust his fiction into the American consciousness. The voice of Ford’s narrator Frank Bascombe, an American Everyman set adrift in New Jersey, has resonated with readers both in the States and abroad. Ford has since taken Bascombe through the subsequent novels Independence Day (Knopf, 1995) and Lay of the Land (Knopf, 2006).

Ford, who included Dubus’s story “Killings” when he edited the anthology The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (Granta Publications, 2007), has been charged by some critics with using Bascombe as a mouthpiece of his own views. The author, however, insists that very little, if anything, about Frank is autobiographical.

“I’m always trying,” says Ford, “to give Frank responses to things that I’ve never had—and maybe once I’ve seen them ascribed to him, wouldn’t want.” If he slips and lets a little Ford into Frank, he sees it as a weakness that needs correcting. “I think to myself,” he says, “’Gee whiz, what a failure you are. Is that all you can do, just to give him some point of view, some opinion, some response that you yourself have already had?’”

Ford, who says he came to Dubus’s stories later in his life, notes that even when kernels of fact occasionally find their way into fiction, they are quickly mutated by the very act of storytelling. “Of course, these bits of oneself migrate into pieces of fiction—both advertently and inadvertently,” says Ford:

But they never get there in a pure state. Events are events; people are people. But characters are made entirely of language, and come onto the story’s stage through a process of authorial choice, misadventure, fortuity, editorial acumen, and really a lot of other courses—all of which fundamentally change them from being real people, assuming they were real people to being with—which frankly they mostly weren’t.

In fact, Ford finds the act of attempting to wedge real people into fiction to be harmful to the creative act:

Writing real people into fiction is hazardous, as many writers have pointed out, and I myself know to be true. Real people, whom you might want to install in your story, turn out to be intractable. They tend to stay themselves and be hard-sided, and not the infinitely mutable fascicles of language real characters (versus real people) are. Made-up characters are lambent, they mutate, they surprise, they act out of character, and are therefore to be prized—for this freedom alone.

In the end, Ford believes such reductive readings of fiction do not merely minimize his work or that of his peers, but diminish the human potential of the mind. “The assertion that characters in fictions are just real people put onto the page offends me by selling the imagination short, by reducing all things fictive to the personal, to the known, to the flesh—as if that’s really where reality lies. It’s not. Reality’s dull, dull, dull without the imagination to show it the way outward from itself,” says Ford.

Are biographical readings always wrong? No. Are biographical readings but one limited lens through which to explore fiction? Absolutely.

Writers discover and tell stories for reasons that often remain a mystery to the writer themselves. Dubus himself could only speculate on why many of his characters so often struggle with loneliness, heartache, violence, adultery, rape, murder, and abortion. “I think honest writers write about what bothers them,” he once opined.

“My guess is that surprise is the variable,” speculates Ann Beattie when she considers what it is that captures a writer’s interest and sends them spelunking into the depths of a story:

You can be surprised at the simplest, most ordinary things, like that the houseplant wasn’t done flowering; that it was winter and it snowed; that you boiled water and put something in the pot and, by golly, out came pasta. So: writers are not special creatures, hyper-aware and hyper-sensitive. Rather, they are ordinary or dumb creatures, who—for whatever reason—have decided not much is lost if they are to be vulnerable, and to make something of their surprise when confronting ordinary life. To look at ordinary life in an unusual way—a lingering way—tinges it. If the color and contrast takes, that’s what fiction is. Fiction is like a big, absorptive blotter.

In the end, no one—no scholar, nor his children, family, or friends, not even the author himself—can truly give us impartial insight into Dubus’s fiction. Fiction need only be true to itself.

On February 23, 1999, the day before Dubus died, he gave a brief interview to Greg Garrett. When asked how he wrote dialogue that is “so real,” Dubus insisted that it wasn’t in the least bit real; it was, he said, human speech purified to a poetic rhythm. “We’re not trying to be real,” Dubus told the interviewer, on what he did not know then was the last afternoon of his life. “We’re trying to be better than real. We’re trying to be true.”

During the symposium, I was somewhat disturbed by the constant assumptions by many of the presenting academics that Dubus’s masterful fiction was simply thinly veiled autobiography.

After the symposium, Ed asked me to contribute an essay to the special Dubus tribute edition edition of the Xavier Review published in December 2010. I appreciated Ed’s support in allowing me to contribute an essay that, in some ways, sought to debunk the work of other Dubus scholars. I thank the Xavier Review for first publishing this essay, and supporting its republication here.

The Stakes Are Absolute

Three Questions on Andre Dubus with Todd Field

Todd Field, image via Wikipedia

With the 2001 film “In the Bedroom,” director Todd Field became the first person to bring Andre Dubus’s fiction to life on the screen. Field worked with co-writer Rob Festinger to adapt the screenplay from Dubus’s taut short story “Killings.” After premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, the film went on to earn five Academy Award nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay.

On the evening of February 23, 1999, Dubus called Field—who was well underway with “In the Bedroom”—to wish him an early “Happy Birthday.” The next morning, Dubus died of a heart attack. Field was the last person to ever speak with him.

Field and I spoke briefly about his interest in Dubus’s prose, and his work adapting it.

Joshua Bodwell: Of all Dubus’s work, why did you to select “Killings” to adapt into a feature-length film?

Todd Field: The most exciting thing as a reader is to come across someone’s material—a short story or novel—that you can’t stop thinking about—to become haunted by an impression. In 1992 I was a directing fellow at the American Film Institute. The first year we were allowed to make whatever we liked so long as the running time wasn’t in excess of thirty minutes. We weren’t permitted to show our work outside the conservatory, and so there was no fiscal obstacle of having to secure standard literary rights. That year we were required to make three films. The first two were original, but for the third I wanted something to adapt, and someone recommended Andre Dubus. The first book I got my hands on was Collected Stories and it was like discovering a new country where all the relatives you’ve never met live. Two days later I’d camped on three of Andre’s stories— “Killings,” “Delivering,” and “The New Boy.” Of the three, “Killings” was the most powerful in terms of theme and breadth, but for those same reasons it was definitely not a 30-minute film. “Delivering” is the story I ended up adapting, and to this day is the film I’m most fond of in terms of execution and process. But “Killings” kept on nagging at me. In large part because Matt Fowler reminded me so much of my father, a man you would never imagine violating his own nature in such a way. When it came time to make a feature length film there was no question that it would be anything but “Killings.”

Bodwell: One of the major changes you made in adapting “Killings” into In The Bedroom was making Frank Fowler an only child, whereas in the story he had a brother. Can you talk about that decision?

Field: The stakes are absolute for the Fowlers, leaving them just each other, without any other immediate family, to mitigate their grief. This is something I witnessed first hand when, sadly, one of my dearest friends, an only child, was murdered at twenty-one.

Bodwell: Could you talk a bit more about why you feel that your film adaptation of “Delivering” was so artistically satisfying?

Field: “Delivering” is a wonderful character study that explores, over the course of a single day, some of the complicated dynamics of brotherhood. In this case an older, stronger brother trying to sort out how to protect his younger, not particularly athletic, sibling from something he knows will hurt him emotionally. But that same afternoon the older brother too becomes worried about the physical safety of their father. In the end he decides he must inflict physical pain on his younger brother to get his father’s attention, ultimately, at least in his mind, saving them both. The story is really perfect, and Andre, who would sometimes take years working on a story, told me that “Delivering” was really the only time he ever sat down and wrote something in a single sitting. That didn’t surprise me, because it does have a peculiar kind of momentum. We all experienced something similar making it. “Delivering” was photographed and edited very quickly in just four days.

Further Links and Resources

From “The Times Were Never So Bad” from Edward Delaney on Vimeo.

1. Aspirations and reassurances

From the beginning I’ve felt like a bit of an imposter as a contributor to this site, whose title suggests that its reviewers may be fiction writers themselves. I’m a poet. I tried to write short stories in college, and they were not very good. Some were truly terrible. And yet I read fiction every day. I read some poetry most days, but fiction, always. I love narrative, and characters, and paragraphs; I just don’t write that way. And many of my fiction-writer friends read poetry. Does it go without saying that we should all be reading both? Holding fiction and poetry up to each other might function as the kind of comparison Anne Carson describes in her amazing book Economy of the Unlost:

With and against, aligned and adverse, each is placed like a surface on which the other may come into focus. Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky.

I once promised myself that I wouldn’t start reading books about reading books, because it seems like exactly the kind of wormhole I might get stuck in for far too long, but I do love reading lists. I love Goodreads, which lets me look back and reflect on a year of reading, and which is currently telling me that I am seven books behind my goal for the year. Is this helpful? Probably not. I feel behind in my reading anyway much of the time.

A friend of my mother’s calculated the speed at which she reads and then the number of books she finishes in an average year. She came to the conclusion that she didn’t have time for potboilers—not if she wanted to read deeply and well for the rest of her life. This approach to reading seems admirable but also makes me anxious and sad. I love potboilers AND literary fiction. In different ways, could I consider them both reading “well”? In addition, this approach seems to take the pleasure out of reading, much the same way Joe Queenan’s book-a-day adventure seemed to me, or Paisely Rekdal’s attempt a few years ago to read five books of poetry a week. Her account is actually a highly entertaining read, though a response from poet and critic Stephen Burt is one I return to for some reassuring and practical advice on actually reading lots of poetry.

Even though I’ve sworn off Francine Prose and her ilk, I can’t seem to get away from thinking about what it means to have a reading list at all. My current favorite reading about reading is contained in Words in Air, the collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s and Robert Lowell’s letters to each other, in which they often discuss what they’re reading, which turns out to be everything. Bishop and Lowell sustained a correspondence over thirty years, 459 letters in all.

If I love a book, fiction or poetry, then in an interview with an author, I’m just as interested in how they answer the question “what are you reading?” as in other details of how they created the characters, etc. What I’m not saying here: feel like you have to read as much as Elizabeth Bishop and/or Robert Lowell. Or, read everything that they read. What I am saying is that while I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the many things I need or want to read, the way these two poets talk to each other about reading is so wonderful that it makes me feel enlivened and refreshed.

In 1960, Bishop wrote to Lowell:

You ask if I have ever found “reading and writing curiously self-sufficient.” Well, both Lota and I read from 7 a.m. intermittently until 1 a.m. every day, and all sort of things, good and bad…And then I’ve always had a daydream of being a lighthouse keeper, absolutely alone, with no one to interrupt my reading or just sitting—and although such dreams are sternly dismissed at 16 or so, they always haunt one a bit, I suppose.

Dozens of letters (and hundreds of books) later, we find Lowell in 1962:

I’m either getting soft, or good books are suddenly pouring out. K. A. Porter’s huge novel [Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools], very grim, and the only long novel since The American Tragedy [Theodore Dreiser] that needs to be long…Randall’s essays are very dashing and satirical and sad…Then Wilson’s Civil War book [Edmund Wilson: Patriotic Gore], his best I think, with Plutarchan portraits of Lincoln, Grant, Justice Holmes, etc. Then Alfred Kazin’s great heap of essays, surprisingly tougher and less long winded than he is…(Oh, and wonderful, Isherwood’s new novel, particularly the end) [Down There on a Visit].

And in the same letter another great listing account, this one of poets:

Damn the young! My students, after I gave them a laborious six weeks on Pope, Dryden, Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, etc. turned out to have read only one poet before Hopkins—Donne, of course. I feel taken in the flank. I am all pointed to explain the new poetry as a continuation, change and revolution of the old. But no one reads the old, except English professors. I’m on a Wordsworth and Blake jag. I’d like to do poems that would hit all in one flash, though loaded with subtleties of art and passion underneath. Or great clumsy structures like Wordsworth’s Leech Gatherer, that somehow lift great sail and catch the wind [Wordsworth, "Resolution and Independence," 1807].

I stand reprimanded. I will go review my Dryden at once. (My Donne also, why not?) But how these lists reassure and stimulate me is their ambition. Of course we must all read the art of our own time. And, equally, of course we must read the poets before Hopkins, and after him. And then we must read some more. But instead of seeming didactic or overwhelming, in the context of the letters these lists are entirely natural and funny. And don’t think, well sure, if I lived in my Brazilian retreat (like Bishop) I could read Dryden whenever I wanted—read the letters. There are plenty of children and construction projects, and mental breakdowns, and travels in there as well. It’s the clarity of why to read certain things that stands out:

But isn’t it strange how those Rimbaud sonnets (early poems, that is) sound so gay and healthy and normal beside Baudelaire?

Elizabeth Bishop via poets.org

As well as the complete and total integration of the art of reading and writing with the rest of life:

(And have you read Art and Illusion by one Gombrich?—it is fascinating.) I find it is time to go to market. What kind of plan do you have for your opera, or is it an opera? Now you must teach Harriet to swim—or have you? It is just the age to learn. I believe in swimming, flying, and crawling, and burrowing. (Bishop, July 27th, 1960)

Here is Bishop on the hardboiled novelists of her time:

I wonder if you’ve read all of Raymond Chandler?—I like him better than Dashiell Hammett—real poetic, sometimes.

And Bishop on Salinger:

I HATED the Salinger story. It took me days to go through it, gingerly, a page at a time, and blushing with embarrassment for him every ridiculous sentence of the way. How can they let him do it?…Perhaps Seymour isn’t supposed to be anything out of the ordinary, nor his poems either, so that all that writhing and reeling is to show the average man trying to express his love for his brother, or brotherly love? Well, Henry James did it much better in one or two long sentences.

I suppose this isn’t a surprising opinion. Bishop, who wrote fiction herself—you can read it in her Collected Prose—would not have admired Salinger’s style, or his showy intellectual references. She was concerned with accuracy, both of description, and of emotion. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been so impressed with Franny and Zooey if I had read Henry James first. Or perhaps it’s impossible to be impressed with Franny and Zooey if you read it for the first time as an adult.

Robert Lowell via poets.org

Lowell writes:

Your Brazil has lovely Bishop touches, the humor of the opening, and everywhere you seem to dampen the hollow enthusiasm of the man who comments on the pictures…Then like Moby-Dick and Paradise Lost, those long stretched of organized information, which I wonder at and envy…

I would never have thought to compare Bishop’s Brazil poems (published in the first section of her book Questions of Travel) to Moby Dick, not least because I haven’t read Moby Dick; it’s been on my long list forever. But it’s just one instance of many of the line between fiction and poetry blurred, or perhaps one instance that shows very clearly how, to these two poets, in terms of what was vital and interesting, no line was there at all.

While Lowell and Bishop are both frequently hilarious, they are also huge gossips. Bishop, a bit isolated in Brazil, sometimes takes particular pleasure in news of other writers:

In the last N.Y. Review I see a long interview with Sartre, on his 70th birthday—perhaps you’ve seen it?…and whether one likes him or not, he says some really interesting things about his life, friends, approaching blindness & so on. (Apparently he is almost blind—but of course has had only one eye all his life, to begin with.) But can you imagine a worse fate for your declining years than being read aloud to by Simone de Beauvoir? Always loyal—nevertheless, he does say she “reads too fast.” Coitado!¹

One of the many wonderful things about letters is they can give as wide a range of voices as a busy, interesting novel. It’s good to have Lowell’s manic lists and Bishop’s dry, chatty wit running around in my head, as well as some of their more sorrowful letters, recounting struggles with finances, illness, love, and writing.

2. One way of coming into focus

I dislike winter. One winter when I lived in Michigan I decided to try to embrace the season. Instead of huddling in whiny complaint, I would immerse myself in wintry novels. I read Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, a literal-minded first choice. I started Anna Karenina, thinking to wallow in the descriptions of the wintry Russian plains, but abandoned it. I finally read it last summer, in the midst of a heat wave. It wasn’t exactly a failure of synchronicity, though, because unsurprisingly Russia has many seasons—as scenes of Levin enthusiastically scything the fields on his estate show. I don’t know why I equated it with winter. I keep trying to make my favorite writers match the seasons: spring—Keats. A sticky August—C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining; late summer rains—Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Sometimes it works better than others, but that’s my own little push-back against the “must-read” lists, my way of organizing what cannot, and probably should not be organized. This summer I’m looking forward to David Grossman’s To the End of the Land, for no other reason than the book’s cover is scattered with hot, bright poppies.

For now I’ll jump ahead to autumn, which always brings to mind one of Robert Lowell’s most famous poems, “Skunk Hour” (dedicated to Bishop). You probably already know it, but it will stand to be re-read again this year. I think of it every time I pass a coitado skunk crushed on the highway, or when I call the cat inside in the evenings and that pungent scent is on the breeze.

Skunk Hour

[For copyright reasons, I can't publish the whole poem here, but you should read it, or, if you click the link above, Robert Lowell can read it to you. An excerpt is below.]

A car radio bleats,
‘Love, O careless Love . . . .’ I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat . . . .
I myself am hell,
nobody’s here—
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

What a cast of characters! Chief among them, the poet himself, worried about his mind, in his own hell, alone except for the skunk performing her fierce, absurd, frightening, motherly scavenging. That’s fall all over—panicky and mean, coming on despite anything we do.

I’m more likely to re-read Bishop in the spring—the wonderful “The End of March.” For fall, “The Moose” always comes to mind, but it’s the final poem in Bishop’s last book, Geography III, that actually takes place in autumn, the season she died, on October 6, 1979, of a sudden brain hemorrhage, alone in her apartment, after writing a letter. Perhaps it helps to know a little of Bishop’s biography to understand this poem fully: that she had lost her lover, Lota, to suicide some years earlier, and that she experienced other significant troubles. It’s a poem that speaks in Bishop’s usual precise, sincere language about the passage of time, and the difficulty of reconciling the past with the present. But perhaps you don’t need to know any of that. Perhaps you are sitting in your room, trying to write, early in the morning, and the small, ordinary details of the scene taking place outside as the darkness slowly recedes gently lead you, too, to an awareness of something larger, whether it comes to you in lines that stretch to the right margin or otherwise.

Five Flights Up

[This is only an excerpt. Please click the link above to read the complete poem.]

Still dark.
The unknown bird sits on his usual branch.
The little dog next door barks in his sleep
inquiringly, just once.
Perhaps in his sleep, too, the bird inquires
once or twice, quavering.
Questions—if that is what they are—
answered directly, simply,
by day itself.

Bishop & Lowell spent time together in Stonington, ME

Further Links and Resources

[Click "Back" on your browser to return to the essay]