That's the Spirit

What was it like there, in that place you were writing about with such focus that the sense of time became like a sink running over?  That meant you were pretty well inside the narrative, had the characters placed so that you knew if they had to shout at one another or could rely on a stage whisper.  Of course, if the narrative were not fiction, you had the arguments placed in some semblance of blocking so you could tell if they had to shout at one another or could, yep, rely on a whisper.

You're getting at The Spirit of Place for a particular reason; you wish to take on in your own way from D. H. Lawrence, where he left off in his prefatory material to Classic Studies in American Literature.  You have been touched, teased, and inspired by Lawrence's work since you first read it, years back.  You loved his voice then, you listen to it even more closely now because, in this remarkable work of his, he gives you vital cues about how to listen to him; you get the sense of what sort of fellow he was, and you admire his read on America, gained so quickly from his time here and, of course, from his reading of those who came and went before him and helped define the very sense of place he was writing about.

The Spirit of Place has a special place in this nonfiction project, but in anticipation of it, you need to remind yourself that Spirit of Place is a presence in every scene in every story; it captures not only those basic sensual things as humidity or lack thereof, or height or whether the smell is from sage brush or the iodine of the ocean, it is the character of the place, blazing in on the senses of your characters, making them aware of their comfort or discomfort, their sense of vulnerability or safety, their ease or sense of being socially one or two or three down in relationship to all those standing or sprawling or, perhaps, lurking about.  If John, a character, ventures into a convenience store for a Reese's Peanut butter Cup, he must take in the Spirit of that place, register it however briefly, demonstrating among other things the power of the right word.

Spirit of Place is political, ethnic, ethical, social; it is gang turf or the simultaneous off-putting and achievement oriented strand of Rodeo Drive; it is run-down-at-the-heels tenderloin or newly gentrified downtown, it is L.A.'s Bunker Hill, it is Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.  It is all the ambiance of all the places you enjoy, say the Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles on Pico.  The need for Spirit of Place is basic and is to be sketched into stories as though through the literary equivalent of Japanese calligraphy.  The Spirit of Place for the nonfiction work you're contemplating is more attitudinal, more reflective of the Balkanization process going on amongst the political factions; it must suggest and intimate absolute quirkiness and borderline madness rampant not only in the U.S., but which is part of the human condition everywhere.  You are political, no denying that nor is there any sense denying your own quirkiness and idiosyncratic nature.  Nor, since the entire idea is triggered by a  book written by D. H. Lawrence, who has a few quirks and wrinkles of his own, should you want to ignore these.

Pomegranate Surprise

The invitation bore the gracious ease and urbanity of the host, reminding you that your agent was in town and hoping you'd be available for drinks at five to visit and chat. You were already a chum of the host, anticipated the presence of at least one other long-time chum, and even imagined you might just ask for and get something a bit exotic or out of the ordinary for drinks. Of course you responded, with alacrity and celerity, thoughts of Pisco punches or Sazeracs or even a Ramos gin fizz lolling over your tongue.

As you entered, you were handed without being asked a tall, pleasingly frosty glass containing a dark red fluid which you soon divined to be a combination of pomegranate juice, vodka, and a splash of San Pellagrino water. Not bad.

Your agent noticed you from across the room, detached herself from a conversation, and bore in. "We've got work to do. Sometime tomorrow, after six. Pick a coffee shop." A quick calculation led you to readjust watching "Treme" until a rerun later in the week. You picked a spot near where she is staying, confirmed the time, then allowed her to retreat to her conversation.

As time bore on and you were well into your second pomegranate surprise, as you called it, the room filled with individuals, approximately ninety percent of whom you knew from long experience, the remainder were those such as Alan Folsom, whom you'd known from having read. 

The one surprise was the appearance of the actor John Beck, whom you greeted with affection and he you with warmth; you'd not expected him to have known the host, although it appears to you that the host is well traveled and one of those amazing phenomena in American letters, a truly versatile and gifted writer in book, stage play, and screen play who remains largely unknown outside the tent.

Time and pomegranate surprises bore on to the point where a group of you began exchanging reminiscences. It came to you that this was a lovely type of bonding. Your agent, referring to

your host, spoke of having delivered him to a former sales manager of a large paperback house as a million-copy seller, to which the sales manager said expansively, well, if you want to talk about million-copy sales--at which point he nudged you--this one sold us a two-million title he'd actually pulled out of a slush pile. 

 Anyone remember "The Harrad Experiment"? Of course he quickly undercut that with another nudge, recalling the time when you'd worked for a competitor and had presented a project for which you estimated sales of at least a hundred thousand, only to be told, quite archly, here at Dell we like to think in millions. We do not like to acknowledge lesser figures. More stories, more elaborate schemes and speculations, all of which caused you to realize a significant factor to the group ambiance. It was literally afloat with casual good cheer and fellowship; there was none of the tension, competitive edge, nor defensiveness you often feel when the demographic is overrun with wannabes.

Everyone in the room had been at one time a wannabe; you feel comfortable in saying that none of them had settled into a condition of well-fed or, indeed, well-read smugness. Long after the tingle of the pomegranate surprises had abated, you were nevertheless talking about a project in which you'd thought to take on D.H. Lawrence in your plan to write volume two of his "Classic Studies in American Literature," which could surely be taken as some form of hubris, except that the former sales manager squeezed your arm in chiropractic affection. "It has always amazed me that there has been no trace of the kind of thing you're talking about. Even if you fail, you'll have given yourself a gift."

While debating the wisdom of another pomegranate surprise, you actively pushed the work of two wannabes, one a student, the other a client, realizing this, too, was a part of that inside-the-tent ambiance so many wannabes regard with the suspicion that the entire publishing/reading tent is a vast conspiracy--until they are, as Alan Folsom was, and indeed you, and Gayle Lynds were, snatched in.

Just before taking your leave, your agent reminded you, "Tomorrow is a work day, and maybe you should think about coming to my Tuesday night at Borders in Thousand Oaks." One way or another, you reflected, every day is a work day. A gifted client of yours, with one book, a hardcover, from SOHO Press, is having a torturous time getting representation for a worthwhile project. Close to two hundred demurrals from agents. Tomorrow is a work day for him, too. Walking to your car, where Sally awaited you, you realized what you'd just experienced at the gathering was a form of alchemy wherein some of the known rules of the universe had been bent. Somehow, perhaps in just such a gathering, your agent, before she'd become your agent, had heard of you enough times that her curiosity drove her to Google and a search of you.

Sally had been napping when you approached the car. Seeing you, she sniffed for the tell-tale signs of what long experience in such things had taught her, the rumpled cocktail napkin withdrawn from the jacket pocket, the unwrapping, the revelation. Look, Sally, chicken teryiaki. And what's this? Italian salami. And this? Aha, munster cheese. Eat up, old girl. Tomorrow's a work day.

Ghosts in the Book Shelves

There is a kind of bi-polarity connected with writing, playing out to provide you with a stream of new ideas and receptors while you have already chosen a project and moved along its orbit.  These new ideas and receptors that bring you distracting sensations are energizing; you fill notebooks, index cards, the backs of credit card receipts, even, to the amusement of one clerk at the 1-hour Martinizing Dry cleaners, the back of receipts for shirts and pants sent forth to be laundered and such.  

The down side seems to come when you have poured your last bit of enthusiasm into a project, brought it to a close, set it in cold storage for a time before revision and copyediting.  You had better, you think, retrieving the project from cold storage and removed the wrappings, edit with care, fine-tune the copyediting because--here it comes--this is the last thing you will ever write.  All those other scribblings while you were finishing this?  Ah well, they were mere flashes in the night sky, lights from distant stars.  This piece you hold before you is surely the last.  You can feel it's valedictory call, ave atque vale.  You may now take up building models or taking photographs or reading.

While you were finishing a project a month or so back, you came upon an overlooked volume in your shelves, something you had not looked at for some years.  This was the approaching week for you to review what you call a Golden Oldie.  Thus you picked up, as though for the first time, D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, which you fell upon with a whoop and a holler because this reminded you of the part of Lawrence you'd forgotten.  Having spent so much time reading and thinking about his short stories, you forgot what freshness he brought to the cannon of American voices.  Simply put, you were moved by Studies to presume to write volume 2, in which you would pick a dozen or so voices which "came after" the Lawrence panoply.

Digging into your Moleskine, you find at least two tentative lists of authors who illustrate the American Literature you are talking about.  Of Course there is Twain, Erdrich, Harrison, Le Guinn, Didion, Urrea.  You are back and forth about Roth.  Ah, but here is a name you interestingly enough  picked from the same shelf on which you previously kept the Lawrence.  Leslie A. Fiedler.  You'd been up until nearly twelve, finishing your review on the new Ha Jin collection and thought not to get much beyond a page or two, but it came to you in one of the manic bolts:  Fiedler begins where Lawrence leaves off.  Not only does Fiedler work through Twain, he knocks American criticism on its end.  In the bargain, he may very well allow you to leave Roth out of the calculus.

Your reading materials for the nonce will be Love and Death in the American Novel, Fiedler's magnum opus, although there are quite a few others of his that must be digested as well.  Amazon has already shipped Empson's Seven Kinds of Ambiguity, which can help you refine your reading approach.  Amazon has also shipped another work you'd thought to read for fun since you have a long history with it, but oh, my, the manic sparks are flying and there may another line drawn through a writer you admire but perhaps not enough for volume two of Studies.  In her (Patricia Highsmith) stead, you are beginning to think about an audacious ad, Smith.  The Smith being Thorne Smith, the book underway from Amazon being Rain in the Doorway.

Interesting way to begin a week, thinking on the manic side of the coin.

Convention Wisdom

convention--an agreement among publishers and readers for mechanical usage such as punctuation; an accepted common wisdom relative to acceptable norms and understandings.

The convention for eating peas generally suggests the use of a fork or perhaps chopsticks--but not a knife. The convention for point of view in a short story was first-person or third person, shifting to include omniscient after the significant contribution of William Trevor in that area. The convention for verb tense in fiction was based on the calculus of past tense representing present moment, with past perfect indicating completed past action, and the imperfect tense--used to, or would--being action occasionally but not habitually done in the past. These conventions apply to Indo-European languages and are not in immediate danger of changing or shifting, but along about the time Bobbie Ann Mason's short story, "Shiloh, appeared in the New Yorker, a convention was developing that allowed Ms. Mason and any other writer who chose, to use the present tense--Fred gets up--to indicate events supposedly taking place before our eyes.

After reading works first written or published in earlier centuries, it is possible to determine the zeitgeist of that century, the use and organization of language being a literary dipstick used to measure the oil. For those who experience difficulties with the conventions of other centuries, say the fourteenth, it is possible to secure a modern--twentieth or twenty-first-century--recasting of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, rendering them in modern convention.

For some time, the conventional wisdom was that the three things not to be written about, particularly with humorous intent, were sex, religion, and politics. In the twenty-first century, it has become nearly impossible to write about politics without mentioning sex and religion; there are clear-cut politics in discussions of religion and sex, there are at the very least gender politics in discussions of sex, but just as often there are religious connotations. Just ask D. H. Lawrence.

Convention has become the elephant in the literary living room; if a particular convention is taken on merely for the sake of being contentious, the result is apt to become polemical, evangelical, or screed, and we all know how these sound. If the taking on of a convention makes for a more illuminated story, the result is apt to become inspirational. Unfortunately, there is too much of the former. In mitigation, the writer has humor.

Counterpoint

counterpoint--the dramatic play of two differing, possibly even opposing themes within the same story; the overall relationship between two voices or agendas in contour and pace; a blending of two seemingly disparate points of view resulting in some added dramatic effect such as irony, satire, humor, or pathos.

Two of the three most obvious examples of thematic counterpoint in literature were composed by Jane Austen (1775--1817); these are Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. The themes are not only sounded in the titles, they are given full orchestration in the thematic use of the characters. 

 Who can forget Elizabeth Bennett as she responds to the chemistry of Fitzwilliam Darcy, each in turn battling against the inner conflict of romantic interest and social position? Another English writer, Aldous Huxley (1894--1963) has a title right on the mark, Point Counterpoint, its opposing themes being reason and passion. 

 Notable among the array of characters in what could be thought of as a run-up to the talky and pretentious 1981 film from Louis Malle, My Dinner with Andre, Huxley presents himself in Point Counterpoint as a novelist who is not very good at getting characters down on paper.

Yet another, wickedly inspired example of counterpoint is found in the Canadian writer, Robertson Davies (1913--95), whose The Rebel Angels appeared in 1981. Long interested in myth and mythology, Davies interests gravitated toward the psychology of Jung. 

 His contrapuntal Rebel Angels appeared to be playing the themes of pure academic research and the effects of mysticism and magic against one another. A significant character in this novel is Maria Theotoky, a graduate student researching Rabelais, which sets the theme of academicism in motion against the likely prospect of her stern discipline being overrun by the overt sexuality and emotional gormandizing of her subject matter. Davies does not stop there. Maria, through her Gypsy heritage, leads the reader into the murky areas of concert-level violinists having their prized instruments temporarily buried in horse dung to impart the true clarity of their voice.

Any seemingly disparate subjects can be employed, provided the characters have sufficient dimension to support the investigation. Of the four examples given, the Davies far outshines even the iconic Pride and Prejudice, suggesting that novels of ideas must have more weight to them than the sense of talking heads in serious discourse. Indeed, the Davies has humor and satire bordering on the blasphemous.

Academic-college-based novels have an open-door policy to thematic counterpoint, the novels of David Lodge and Lucky Jim, the one venture into the medium by Kingsley Amis, added examples of how effective the medium can be. Saved for last is a strong candidate for the most sublime example yet of the effects of counterpoint in story.

D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers engages the theme of a woman of breeding, education, and sensitivity, who meets a rough-and-tumble coal miner at a Christmas dance, falls into a sensual relationship with him almost immediately, then marries him. Together, they produce two sons, each of whom contributes in his way to the counterpoint. 

 The character of Paul Morel has become synonymous with D. H. Lawrence, who was a living example of the unharmonic conflicts visited on him by his mother and father. Watch Paul Morel's relationship with each parent, and then watch his urgent need to leave the atmosphere of the coal mining village and its stiffling effect on him. Now you will have seen and understood counterpoint, the better to use it as a tool in short story, novel, and intermediate lengths, seeing characters for what they represent through articulation of their needs and the circumstances they have built for themselves.

Attitudes along the Margins

attitude--an emotional presence often coupled with a state of mind, resident in a writer and, subsequently, in characters, serving as a pole star for the writer and actor; the resident timbre of a story or portion of a story; the prevalent trait or personality in a story or character.

Attitude is like style; it happens as a result of choices made by the writer and, subsequently, by characters, reflecting an overall view of the circumstances in which characters find themselves, their approaches to coping with these circumstances, their regard for one another, and ultimately for themselves. Writers such as Jane Austen (1775-1817) and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) showed their attitudes toward individual characters and the classes they represented through a narrative voice that was openly admiring, critical, or patronizing, yet each was able to engage readers without making the readers feel they were a target. In more recent years, W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) seemed to follow this path, using his narrative skills to take the reader into his confidence, the better to reveal the spectrum of human foibles to them through the prisms of his short stories and novels.

Attitude emerges from the writer's feelings and beliefs about a subject, whether the topic is political, sexual, or philosophy. One of the first things the reader notices in discovering attitude is the overall tone of presentation, followed by the behavior and relative flexibility or lack thereof among the characters. In some of his work, D. H. Lawrence emerges as if a schoolboy seated in the front row, waving his hand to get the teacher's eye because he, Lawrence, is so enthused by the information he wishes to present. Particularly in his short stories, Lawrence was so assured of his technique that his voice was more restrained, allowing the characters to step closer to the front of the stage.

A writer's preparation for executing a story could well begin with the writer checking in on the resident emotions that push the events of the story to the surface of the imagination. Begin with the notion that the story, however long or short, is like the toothpaste in a tube. The strength of the squeeze is directly related to the amount of toothpaste that comes forth. Attitude resides in the writer's grip: I'll show them, or This will amuse you, or I can't believe people still think this way, or I didn't realize what a good thing I had until I lost it, or...


marginal--a fictional or critical condition resident in a character or concept; a necessary condition of a person or idea to convey the distance from mainstream; the distance from the statistical mean occupied by a character or concept.

Marginal characters are highly provocative of story; they may take on agendas that will further remove them from the mainstream or nurse some desire to move closer to it; they may provoke envy or discomfort among those in the mainstream. Marginal ideas are equally fecund; ideas seen as conventional wisdom become threats or shibboleths to be accordingly shunned or promulgated. Many of the characters of literary and genre fiction began as marginal; some gravitated to the ironic conclusion of mainstream, others continued to enhance their marginality. A diverse array of historical and contemporary fiction address the existential condition of marginality, The Swiss Family Robinson, for instance or Robinson Crusoe serving to represent enforced separations from the mainstream, The Lord of the Flies represents quite another result as mainstream characters shift away from their societal armature. The political satire Catch-22 could be seen as an ironic triumph of the marginal man, and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit could be seen as another commentary altogether on marginality.

Start with a character who is out of the mainstream, say a high school student whose parents have moved her to a new city where she has to start making new friends. There is a group of students who attract her, but they are tight-knit, jealous of their status. Add to the calculus a member of the in-group who is drawn to the outsider. Result: story under way.

One of the more productive dramatic clashes is the formula of the marginal wanting to become mainstream and the mainstream envying the constraint-free status of the marginal.

The Key

There are a number of keys to be found in my desk, most of which have a purpose I readily remember, but among my trove there is a key that unlocks no recognition or memory whatsoever.

There are two basic approaches to cleaning house, the guilt-driven approach, which is perfunctory in nature, usually involving a quick vacuum and shifting piles of newspapers and magazines from one room to another; and the writing approach, which is more intense and thorough as the writer considers the implications of the current writing problem and accordingly processes or denies it.

I was in the latter, methodically cleaning my desk, when I came upon the key. Still no clue, and so I moved it to another room, which is a step taken toward discarding it entirely, avoiding future embarrassments of recognition.

The image of the key has remained however to trigger by association its literary association the roman a clef, which is the second of two French words having literary significance. The other, of course, is denouement or unknotting, a term we learn early on in our attempts to claim the more formal tools of writing fiction for our own toolkit.

Roman a clef is a novel with a key, meaning that the characters and incidents are slightly changed but not so much that knowledgeable readers will mistake the intent that they relate to real persons in real situations. In recent years the roman a clef has been given the wax job of cynicism whereby its contents must be truer than the biography because the identity and circumstances needed to be altered.

One of the more famous of romans a clef is Summerset Maugham's The Moon and Six Pence in which the Maugham character Charles Strickland bears more than passing similarity to the post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin. It is a compelling enough story although far from the polished technique of other Maugham novels and, particularly, the gem-like hardness and clarity of his short fiction. Nor does it compare well to another Maugham roman a clef, Cakes and Ale, which takes its title from a memorable line in Twelfth Night. Cakes and Ale, which Maugham stoutly denied was based on real people and real events, is argued to be an accounting of the final years of the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, his widow, and her subsequent romantic liaison with another novelist, Horace Walpole, best described as the Tom Clancy of his day. The Walpole-like character was mercilessly skewered, rendered as a feckless bumbler, and by indirection the widow of the late great novelist was added to the shiskebab skewer, her taste in taking up with such a man placing her somewhere between the onions and tomatoes. The matter actually came before an English court, which found Maugham's protestations interesting, given that there was another character in the novel, a medical doctor named William Ashenden, who spoke with a stutter, walked with a limp. Maugham, you see, had a medical degree, spoke with a slight stutter, and walked with a slight limp. Maugham also went on to write a novel called Ashenden, or The Secret Agent. Maugham was known to have had a deep reverence for Thomas Hardy. Thus the delicious gossip and speculation attendant on the roman a clef.

Another of my favorite romans a clef is Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow, in which one of the important characters, Mark Rampion, rings true to Huxley's friend, D. H. Lawrence, while another character bears comparison to John Middleton Murry. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night is widely recognized as a prism refracting the lives of two of Fitzgerald's expatriate friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and I still recall one of my undergraduate professors at UCLA inducing me to read the novels of Thomas Love Peacock because they contained so much, as he put it, delicious and accurate scandal. In my dear friend Barnaby Conrad's novel, Matador, the protagonist, Pacote, bears an eerie resemblance to the famed Spanish torero, Manolete. Indeed, Conrad and Manolete were friends. Yet another UCLA prof, knowing of my interest in Hawthorne, urged me to read The Blythedale Romance in order to get a sense of the individuals with whom Hawthorne lived and worked while in residence at the Utopian society called Brook Farm.

True enough, the roman a clef is a kind of historical core sampling. I first picked up and read Robert Penn Warren's All the Kings Men knowing it was based on the legendary Louisiana populist, Huey Long, thinking to get flavor rather than actual fact, because at that time I was more interested in flavor than actual fact.

The point I raise here begins in the form of a rhetorical question: Don't we all write romans a clef at some point in our career? We pull characters in from the sidewalks of our memory, subjecting them to casting calls as we prepare the dramatis personae of our novels and short stories, luxuriating in the convenience of being able to borrow a trait from one character, add it to the physique of another, and the ethnicity or lack thereof in yet another. We reset frustrating events in our life so that there is no longer the frustration of missed opportunity but rather instead the challenge foaming forth from met expectations. We return to fond memories, sometimes those involving persons no longer alive, rewriting them with the same tantivy we used in signaling a bartender for another round at some magical gathering. Years after the fact, I set down convivial events in a variety of places, but so many of them really began in The Old Spaghetti Factory and Excelsior Coffee House on Green near Grant in San Francisco, or in the Brass Rail on C Street in Virginia City, Nevada. Having got their essence to my liking, I lift them out of time and place and context and place them where they will do me the most good, in my current work, with a quick nod to the real individuals and events and places of the past.

Roman a clef. Novel with a key. The key opens the door to the inner landscape where all truth had its big bang at the moment of the individual writer's birth, spinning, expanding ever outward toward a common human destiny.

Today's Question

So the question is, Who are you when you write? This question has subsets such as Who are you writing to/at? What is the source of fun achieved when you become the person you become when you write? Do you think you would be more or less effective if you were someone else when you write? Is writing for money preventing you from being who it would be better for you to be when you write? And of course the trick question, Are you writing for money or for a living?

It's important for you to understand that you have to be able to "get" to the person you are when you write in order to give your writing self the maximum opportunity for growth. You have to get there without defensiveness or explanation, which is to say it is not only all right to be an angry person when you write, it may become necessary for you to be angry when you write? Or--dare I use the word?--sentimental. Or cynical. Or amused.

Try deciding the frame of mind of the writer of the next thing you find yourself enjoying, getting caught up in, when you read. The reading sample may be fiction or nonfiction; no matter so long as you feel a response to it.

Next question: What do you hope people will experience when reading your work? (Your answer to your own question is An audacious sense of being entertained , followed by the sense that this is leading them somewhere beyond entertainment.) This hope of yours should be followed with a concern on your part that you are not becoming pedantic or lecturing.

Now you may be ready for a zinger of a question: Are you so concerned about wanting to get things right that you let style trump execution? Do you polish the original you out of your text for fear that your text may not be crystalline or whatever else the hell you want your text to be?

Story may be enhanced by style--I mean, look at what Joyce does with "The Dead" and what Flaubert does with "A Simple Soul." If those don't get you, look what D. H. Lawrence does with "The Rocking Horse Winner." So you're going to let those three admittedly splendid stories keep you from finishing yours for fear that you could never hope to match them? Where's the risk? Where's the commitment? Go ahead, be a sport: Cut loose. Care about what you're doing and do the caring in a way that defines you. Truth is, you will never get it as good as you want it, a fact that should humble but not discourage. Remember the injunction of Beckett. Fail again. Next time fail better.

How old were you when you first got an idea for a story that was so daunting, you thought it was completely beyond reach? (Maybe sixteen.)

What happened to the story? (Never got written.)

What happened to the stuff you thought you could handle? (It got written)

Where is it now? (I think some of it is in the garage. Or maybe the water tower in the back yard.)

How do you approach stuff like that now? (Pleased as hell to be off on something new.)

Where will it all end? (So long as it doesn't end up in the garage or water tower, it doesn't matter.)