Thank you for letting us see your past, unfortunately it does not suit our present needs

Last night you dreamed you went to Manderley again and when you awakened, you spent some time checking out the opening of Rebecca, finding it still had the pull from your earlier readings and the last one of about two years back. Prompted by the integrity of the experience, you couldn't help thinking to wonder if a river still ran through the Normal McLean landscape both physical and emotional. Yes, you are happy to say, the river not only runs through it, the river runs convincingly through it. Two out of two is pretty good as such things go. You have attempted to return to the past via stories you once held close to your heart, only to find there were occasions where it was like trying to initiate and maintain a conversation with a former lover. There are times when such conversations are not only possible, they flow with the natural good intent of both parties and the results are beyond satisfying, they are affirmations of what you were, what you felt, what you believed.

Revisiting a book you once cherished is of a piece with driving through the old neighborhood, where ever that neighborhood happens to be. Parts of California, as parts of everywhere, simply aren't what they were. This was first born upon you when you'd thought to take photos of the homes and apartments you and your family had lived in since that day when you were brought home from the Santa Monica Hospital at Fifteenth Street and Wilshire Blvd in Santa Monica to a modest single-story house at 611 Fourteenth Street, Santa Monica. Little did you know at the time what a big deal it was considered to live north of Wilshire. You wanted photos of this house, the house you'd managed to track down in Burbank, whence the family moved after a time, and then to 6165 Orange Street, where for all practical purposes your cognitive and imaginative processes began to expand and flourish. This display of residences was a birthday gift for your sister, she who had also had considerable effect on your cognitive and imaginative processes. Trouble was, the fourplex on Orange Street was gone, the Burbank house on Providencia was gone, and suddenly you lost your taste for the project, even though there were a few available hits still available. The project skidded to a complete halt when 1455 Michigan Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida was no longer 1455 Michigan Avenue.

The past is simply not reliable that way even though the past is, in some metaphoric way, the way things were for you, but not necessarily for anyone else. Nor is the past book you've read necessarily going to have remained faithful to you in that way books have of being everything wonderful you remembered as opposed to a presence you wanted to remove yourself from with all deliberate speed. This observation obtains as well with books you contracted as an acquisition editor. There are many titles you remain proud to have contracted, others serve as a reminder that your sense of literary taste is not always what you suppose it to be. There are books you were sorry to have missed getting and now, when you see them in the library or used book stores or on line, you are relieved not to have gotten them.

The complete saving grace in this equation is the fact that some books from the past not only contain remarkable discoveries and nuance, they cause you to see how there is yet more to be gleaned, more effect to work its way through you. In fact, there are some books that seem to vibrate in your hands as you read, making you wonder how you could have presumed to understood the work in an earlier reading when this latest reading gave you such riches and delight.

The meaning of all this is that you must not let the past win out just because there were some parts of the landscape that were changed, obliterated, built over. You must engage the past with the same force you use to engage the now, not taking it for granted, not for a moment.

Reliable Narrator or Writer Pursuing a Story?

Time now to turn the light of inquiry squarely on yourself, reminding you as you do so of the many film noir scenes you've watched at various stages of your life in which one or more detectives was attempting to lead a suspect along the perilous border running between the landscape of guilt and the loftier one of exculpation.  The inquisitor may or may not have had a hunch or gut feeling about the relative guilt or innocence of the accused.  He may also have had the cynicism that allowed the belief that all of us are guilty of something.  Or, as some of my lawyer friends have said as the level in the bottle declined, My clients all lie to me in some degree or another.  The inquisitor may simply be doing a job that runs on the duality of guilt and innocent--suspects are one or the other.  Questioning them will bring you and them to one conclusion or the other.  No middle ground.  

Thus the question:  How reliable a narrator are you?  This followed with:  Can your account of an event be trusted?  Add to this the follow-up: Have you a motive or agenda that will color your narration?

The answer to the latter is an emphatic yes.  My motive is to amuse, to inform, to cause suspenseful apprehension, to surprise.  Much as I admire Stephen King, I do not seek to emulate his intent of frightening the reader, although I do not think frightening the reader to be an unworthy aim.

I write in the spirit of observation, energized by the growing involvement in that observation, finding in it meaning and satisfaction from the truths, untruths, layers of meaning and intent that become apparent as I go.  Of course I present questions to these invented characters and situations, thinking they too should squirm in situations as I have squirmed, sometimes in later recognition of how wrong or foolish I was, other times in amazement at what I have learned from a simple transaction.

Guilt and innocence are neither my pole stars nor my cynical quotas, nor do right and wrong call out to me for representation or dramatization; all these are merely settings within a larger landscape of experience and behavior.  Guilt, innocence, right, and wrong are merely costumes the characters wear while performing their parts in the larger drama of trying to get things done and of their attitudes and composure when confronting the true guiding forces of story--consequence.  Take away their routine, their status, and their dignity, then see how they respond, then start writing because then the story has begun.

Una voce poco fa

The narrative voice begins when we narrow down the focus on the sound of the idea fluttering about in the cage of the mind and try to put some feathers on it, see it as it were, flying about. Next step is to achieve some tactile connection. Thus have we heard, seen, and felt an idea prior to giving it form outside our imagination, treating it as though it had a personality, an agenda, a mission.

At some point, we delegate these qualities--personality, agenda, mission--to others. The musician delegates these qualities to notes and form and tempo. The fine arts person delegates shading, medium, size. And the writer, mindful of qualities, also has things to delegate to ideas.

Things begin for me with sound. Makes sense when I look at the past history of the beginnings I have brought to page and screen and stage, but it also makes sense to me that there is no right or wrong in this process. Ultimately, I do have to see and to feel, by which admission I understand that there are at least two other ways to approach Things, through vision or through tactile awareness. My craziness, if you will, is that I hear voices. Yours may be that you have visions, or that things feel strange or funny or compelling. We not only can but do co-exist; we can live in the same room, hearing voices, seeing visions, feeling feelings each of us has the knowledge that ultimately we need to have all three working in some form of concert. Indeed, that triangulation gives us form, whether the form is a photograph, a painting on a photograph, a woven pattern, a stage play, a screen play, a short story, a drawing, a sculpting.

At some point, consciously or not, we have identified our narrative informant, the One who presents challenges to us that we must seek to engage. I first became consciously aware of mine when I was signed up in a program initiated by Oscar Janniger by which he studied the effects of d-lysergic acid diethalamide on individuals. An hour after ingesting the blue dots from Sandoz laboratories, I strode confidently to the attending nurse to inform her of my belief that I'd been given a placebo and to request my car keys. She nodded thoughtfully, then reached in her desk, where she pulled forth a print of a Hieronymus Bosh and more or less thrust it at me. The way I saw what happened next, I'd been immersed in that riotous landscape, enveloped by it. With the withdrawal of the Bosh print came the awareness that I indeed had not been given a placebo. I followed the nurse to a room where I was to spend the next several hours. What good fortune, I thought, that there was a radio in the room. Alone, I turned on the radio to experience the new effects streaming through me with the companionship of music. Almost immediately I found a spirited performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto in D major. When the time came, I was thrilled to note that the violinist was using the Joachim cadenzas. But before the performance ended, the nurse reappeared to remind me that there was a radio in the room which I was welcomed to use. All I needed to do was plug it in.

I am far from being a musician, to the point of being illiterate at reading sheet music. With this vivid memory in mind of having "heard" such a complex work came the identification of my own narrative voice. Of course I can see things; I most certainly feel them, but most of my working ideas come from the sound of some voice telling me things. Sometimes it is a character--although at the time I do not recognize the presence as a character--introducing herself or himself, almost as though I am at some mixer, wearing a name tag, and being greeted by a stranger who proceeds to introduce himself or herself.

Getting to know characters of my own creation has led me to the adjunct position of editing the work of other writers; I simply set the dial to the questioning mode of what the author wanted as opposed to my own vision. If I can't tell after a while, I need a conference with the author to find out the author's intent and perhaps to offer suggestions that will make the author's intentions more reachable.

The narrative voice has a good deal of work to do; it filters our choices of things, persons, details, places to be included and excluded; it filters attitudes and tone, personality if you will.

The more we use it, even in quotidian things, the more the narrative voice helps us even when doing things like buying a new tire or looking for an antihistamine in a drug store; the narrative voice is the voice we have cultivated as a trusted friend and collaborator. None of this Gilbert and Sullivan or Laurel and Hardy off-stage rivalry. The narrative voice is the reliable narrator of our life and our instrument. It is just as reliable when it encourages us to click a shutter, use a pencil instead of a charcoal, or first person instead of third. It is us, narrating to the select audience of us. And there is no more reliable narrator for us. We may marvel with and be envious of someone else's narrative voice, but in every sense of the word, the best we can do is listen to our own.

There's a Story in Here if I Can Only Find it.

I was up rather late last night, reading for this week's review column and being pulled into the lateral thoughts of the comparison between the subject of this novel, the American Civil War, and the one raging in Iraq, making the calculus between the number of those contemporary individuals who still favor us being in Iraq in the first place and those wishing us out of there post haste. Thus another American Civil War of sorts, seething, boiling, giving lie to the notion that a watched pot does not in fact boil.

The first reassuring sips of latte at Peet's got my attention but were still not sufficient to get me all the way awake and so I am not a particularly animated contributor to the conversations going on at the table.

Of a sudden, a book appears before me, artfully dropped from above by Jerry Freedman as he moves on to the order line. "You haven't heard of this guy?" he calls from the line.

The book is a paperback reprint of Off Minor by John Harvey.

Never heard of him, I mouth toward Jerry, who, stunned, nearly retreats from the order line, a serious risk now because the place is beginning to fill up big time with those who want to start off their Friday uncranky and if you are not Jonesing for coffee or tea, you have already started your Friday uncranky and cannot possibly relate to those who do, that is unless yo happen to live with one.

"I can't believe," Jerry says, "you don't know him."

This has possibilities. I take another sip of latte, then open the book, whereupon I see added possibilities which set the stage for the dramatic tension and enthusiasm and clash of creative electrons in the linear acelerator that this rag-tag group of writers, teachers, editors, house painters, and retired dentists who have become writers generate.

Soon the subject has shifted to Jerry having spent something like three years in an actor's workshop, a notion that has been a shibboleth of mine for some time. Writers of fiction can profit from actor's workshops, not only in the technique of dialogue, which is its own language, neither English nor street or dialect nor Gullah, nor American; it is the language of story, which is the language of clash, confrontation, development, being caught up in a sense of inevitability. It is the clock ticking in the background, informing the players that action and decisions are necessary. It is the visual presentatio by evocation of the gap between what a character thinks and what the character says.

We all of us agree that Hillary looked pretty good last night. Then, after a beat or two, "But managed."

"There's no there there."

"There is, but it doesn't make you feel it."

"The unreliable narrator."

A chorus of agreement.

He, on the other hand, was not directed. He was on his beliefs and it showed.

"A reliable narrator."

Thus we had shifted to being casting directors.

This was not a surprise, we had all of us cast him some weeks back, and we were thinking character and how character plays out. We were thinking no wonder story is so important because life is merely colliding energy, quarks and atoms and ghosts that creak in the day and night while story has structure, some structure apparent in a fabric of events where there are vectors and agendas sprouting like unwanted hair on middle-aged men.

The Palimpsest of Memory

1. If a thing is worth doing, it is really worth doing well?

2. Does memory improve or degrade an event?

3. Does memory improve or degrade a person in an event?

4. How does our version of an individual or event square with a performance of that person and/or event featuring that person?

5. Which is more important in our recollection of an individual or an event involving that individual, ambiguity or agenda?

6. Why is it unseemly to speak ill of the dead?
a-Adolph Hitler, for instance
b-Richard M. Nixon, for instance
c-Henry Kissinger may not be dead, but he is toast.

7. How are we able to impeach a president for lying about sex and not be able to impeach a president for lying about causus belli?

8. At what point do we want to upwardly embellish a pleasant memory?

9. At what point do we want to add more vitriol to an unpleasant memory?

10. At what point does memory of a person or event become a handicap?

Bonus Questions: Even if we are telling events as directly and guileless as possible, does it follow that the reader will believe the narrator?

How can the writer learn to imply that any given character is telling the truth?