It's Your Loss

Something that is lost to you--a person, a place, an object, even an opportunity--is a ghostly satellite, orbiting about you, perhaps wanting to be found or rediscovered, sometimes seeming to remind you with a pang that it is lost.

You often find yourself looking through your clothing for a particular fountain pen, a green Italian Stipula, with its fine, flexible nib, and the small precious gem embedded in its holding pin.  It has been lost longer than you possessed it, long since a symbol for the meaning of loss.  If you at one time had something and no longer recall it, the person or item or opportunity or even idea is still a part of you to the point where you might at some future time dream of it or be reminded of it.

If you have lost it and find yourself missing it, whatever or whoever it might be, it is still an active part of you; it defines you to yourself.  To put an enormous leap of metaphor into play, loss is the engine of the Cosmic Archaeologist, the detritus and jetsam of your life as you have lived it.

There is a small saucer of about an eight-inch circumference, residing now in your kitchen cabinet.  It was purchased on some kind of whim at a garage sale by your late wife.  Its heftiness is mitigated by its umber/adobe color and a symmetrical pattern of daisies defining its edges.  When time came for toast of muffins or something appropriate for a dish of that size, you always tried to get it for yourself because of the energy it brought into the house of being an artifact from the mealtimes of another family, perhaps even two or three others.

Thus do things grow in meaning and connection.  Now it has the added energy of having been purchased on a whim by someone who is lost to you.  It pleases you to think the dish will well outlast you and find its way to yet another home.

Your great archaeological friend accuses you of romanticizing artifacts, "which," he reminds you with a twitch of mustache and beard, "are for all practical purposes junk or garbage."

All is not lost for him; he loves his Mac Air notebook, his bicycle, and a canoe he is building in his backyard.  He radiates the love of and pride in his wife and daughters.

You love and feel comfort from the things you have deployed about you, your dog companion, Sally, the hundred books you'd thought to bring here with you that grew even before they were transported and have begun to sprout beyond the shelves, as mushrooms appear after a soaking rain.  You love wandering the ghostly corridors of lost things and people and those particularly memorable lost beings, Sam, the cat; Blue, Edward and Jed, the bluetick hounds; Molly, whose parts were as imaginative as a patchwork quilt; Maude, the cat; Armand, the cat; and briefly Nell, the splendid Cattle Dog.

Through loss, you have understood your way beyond mere possession or presence, and into the rich vibrancy of story, the stage upon which awareness is played out.

Up? or Down?

Depending on its length and complexity, the narrative story has at least one elephant on hand in its living room.  The writer may be the last to discover it.  With some frequency, these observations relate to and describe you.

The elephant is, in fact, discovery; you, in fact, write many things to find out why you were motivated to do so in the first place.  Even when you write things as a direct result of some assignment or, as in the case of your obligation for a book review of a thousand or more words per week since early 2005, you invariably discover something you had not connected before the writing began.

All of this is to say that writing for you is certain to be a connective process, bringing together pairs of opposites, competing forces or theories, or themes which at first blush seemed disparate.  It is further to acknowledge that discovery is an important ingredient even after you have discovered a larger, more global reason for having written a particular piece.  In many instances, the discovery you are aiming at is the discovery that you could, in fact, write about a particular subject or draw two seemingly separate subjects to some point of connectivity.  In this case, the discovery is the happy note of proving to yourself that you could acquit yourself with some measure of satisfaction.  Yet other discoveries include the glowing resonance of seeing how a process works, including the process of a particular individual's particular motivation.

There is another, more delicious discovery in which you have gotten away with something, perhaps something naughty, just as well something one or more persons came down hard against as being difficult to the point of impossibility.  Who would not cherish the feeling of doing the impossible?  You surely do.

It may lead to momentary humiliation or self-reproach to recognize you've only just discovered some item or awareness you wish you'd known twenty-five years--even fifty years ago.

We write to discover who we are, what our friends and associates are, which associations we have followed too blindly or with too little devotion and enthusiasm.  We write to discover what triggers our enormous fondness for lemon meringue pie; just when you think you understand your fondness for banana cream pie (your father's favorite), you understand your urgency to be more what he was, but you also understand that you have been paying unrealized  homage to him.

You write to discover how little you know about the things you believe you know the most.  You write to identify yourself to your writing self, the better to get along with all the individuals you write about.  You write to discover how each individual feels at times as separate and removed as you, thus creating a closeness you often ignore entirely.

The discovery of how things work and do not work should be as well defined in your stories as the characters in them and their relationships with one another and the Cosmos.

You write to discover your bigotry, to expose it rather than cover it up because in the act of disguising it, you are hiding things of yourself from you.

You write to discover how to listen; only through listening to "them," your characters, can you get any sense of how much a shaping force it is to love something, to pursue it, to make it a part of you rather than trying to pull prepositions on it, which is to say showing it up or talking it down.

Home

Three recent novels, all written by women writers, resonate in your recollections as vibrant examples of narrative voice.  The novels are Karen Russell's Swamplandia, Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog, and Bonnie Jo Campbell's Once Upon a River.  Although their voices are wildly different, they are the major unifying theme in the comparison; the voices, to abuse a metaphor, are the tails wagging the dogs.

Embarking on any kind of list of your favorite narrative voices--say the Parker novels of Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark, or the tone wrought by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker, you are brought to conclude that narrative voice is the ingredient that props up the story until the thermals of event give it lift and, ultimately, flight.

The better narrative voices have the coltish feel of minor league baseball, the near poignancy of the junior high school band, the keen ache of appetite experienced by the tourist at the buffet table.  There is always something slightly off, yet never irritating in its off-ness.  If anything, its being off adds to the appeal--makes you yearn to believe it is telling the truth, with only a pardonable few stretchers.

The right narrative voice leaves you with the sense of regret you get after eating two ballpark hot dogs, only to realize you have had each without sauerkraut.

The draw of the effective narrative voice is its resonant frequency of the outsider looking in, the dying-to-play kid who is not chosen in a pick-up game at a park; it is the sound of a writer wanting to sing love songs to something no one ever thought to sing a love song to before.  It is a young girl, breaking up with someone she's gone steady with for years, realizing this may be the biggest mistake of her young life, but thinking there is someone somewhere she can love even more than she loves this one.

The effective narrative voice is the sound of banter between an elderly couple that makes you want to eavesdrop on their conversations until you discover the secret that allows them, after so many years, to tease and play rather than throw darts.

The way to get at the narrative voice is to love your characters in their entirety, wanting them to mess up not from schadenfreude but rather as a way of showing you how they get out of the mess,and what risks they take to get into another.

It is the sound you listen for when you write; it is moments when you are listening to Ravel or Theolonious Monk and it comes to you that you wish for your sentences to behave that way.

For most of your life, you have lived in areas where mourning doves sound their territorial cries.  When you first heard them and asked your mother what creatures made those sounds, you were afraid for a few moments until she answered you.  Their name sounded right, the way cinnamon sounds right and oh, how grand to be told the nut you held in your hand was an ah-l-mond.

Of course narrative voice is idiosyncratic; it is the equivalent of the first tin of watercolor paints you were given as a youngster.  It is the comfort of hearing :
"TOM!"

   No answer.

    "TOM!"

   No answer.

   "What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!"

   No answer.

It is every bit as mysterious as  the opening line in Hamlet.

"Who's there?"

It is the thing you strive for each time you work the movement of an opening scene or a beginning paragraph of an essay; it is the work, speaking to you, calling you home.

That's funny, they don't look Jewish.

You are browsing with some interest among the journal entries of Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), recently published by Yale, alternately liking and identifying with many of his observations, becoming more interested yet as he ventures his opinions on writers you've read.  His self-awareness is attractive, his judgements keen. In voice and aggressive approach, you are reminded of the late, lamented John Sanford (1904-2003).

They are of the same generation, each born into a Jewish culture, each in fact writing autobiographical accounts using the word Jew in the title, a coincidence beginning to have an effect on you as you pursue the notion that each man was highly political, Sanford at one point even more to the left than Kazin, but neither a self-styled religious Jew.

The notion you are curious to pursue began forming as you read of Kazin thinking of himself as an Emersonian Jew, pushing beyond the synagogue and into the landscape of the individual who was born into a particular culture that stresses moral responsibility of the individual.  You are thinking to spend more time with these journal entries of Kazin, because they begin to suggest a theme for you to follow that, as you think about it, takes on at first a cautionary hand.  You soon recognize that cautionary hand is the hand of defensiveness, warning you away from the pursuit of thoughts, reading, and writing that can lead you beyond where you are now and into the very thing you admire about him--self-awareness.

John Sanford and Alfred Kazin say the same thing--to an extent, so does Philip Roth:  A Jew must be an outsider, even to Judaism.

"Every original Jew turns against the Jews,"  Kazin writes.  "They are the earth from which the spirit tries to free itself.  The vice of Jewish solidarity--it is an unexpressed compassion without love.  The glory of being in the truth, Jewish or not Jewish, is to find a love higher than solidarity."

The writer reaches for, seeks the love that comes from the revelation he or she encounters through the discovery of what it is to be an outsider.

If Kazin thought himself an Emersonian Jew, it comes to you that your particular role model, Samuel Langhorn Clemens, AKA Mark Twain, is a conflicted Jew who found his particular Ark of the Covenant in the works that most troubled him to write, works in which he could not disguise his status as outsider, and with it, he did for the language and storytelling what that quintessential Jewish writer, Geoffrey Chaucer, did for the English language first some six hundred years ago.

To be a writer seeking the rituals and rewards of revelation is to be an outsider, is to be  Jew.  Your own experiences with your cultural and writerly Jewishness are excellent cases in point; you are proudly the outsider in both.

Appropriately, those are other stories.

Picking the Wrong Characters

If your characters are no account, they will stay close to home, indulging themselves on routine comforts and activities while they pursue the mischief of banality.  If your characters are of any consequence at all, they will fall in love with all the "wrong" things and people not available to them at home; they will stumble into ways to mess with the Cosmos.

Too much has been said already about giving readers characters they can relate to, form some sort of emotional bond with, thus do such characters as Captain Ahab or, for that matter, Captain Queeg or, to push the point, Captain Spaulding run against the grain.  In their cross-grained existences, they join the likes of Jane Eyre, Randle P. McMurphy,Raskalnikov, Selkirk-Crusoe, and Julian Sorrell.  They also suggest that there is more traction and potential for discovery with a character who steps away from the shadow cast by the conjured ideal of a paradigm man or woman from one of the Abrahamic religions, as visualized by, say, a Unitarian minister or even a Congregationalist, which is to say nothing beyond the occasional hymn and even the occasional dip into the wassail bowl at Christmas.

Look at how much more fun it is to write about Ratso Rizzo, Mink and Flem Snopes, and Robert E. Lee Pruett.  Look at the effect the civilized world had on Huckleberry Finn who, after all was said and done, couldn't stand it any more and had to light out for the territory.  See what lovely agonies came from John Yossarian and Rebecca Sharp and Holden Caulfield and not to forget Lenny Small.

As writers, we have two choices, to be doomed to a life of characters manufactured to fit a publisher's sales report or to acknowledge the edge at which our writing life has set us and create individuals from our own mold.  It is an irony of high order when you hear of beginning writers being advised to write what they know because most of what they know is the feeling of being somehow other and different.  This, you argue, is the first step toward the advancement needed to secure expertise in any craft--recognition of the self as caught in the interstice of wanting to play with the other kids but being fearful you don't know any of their games or skills and that the ones wherein you shine will seem somehow out of synchronization with the rest of humanity.

That's Your Story and You're Stuck with It

 You frequently ask two questions in class:  Who's telling the story?  Why?

Even though you place particular emphasis on that last question, you are invariably met by the glare of your own energy being reflected back at you.

It is not as though you hadn't asked the same questions of yourself countless times.  In your own defense however, you thought your response was more focused.

The teller or tellers of a particular story make all the difference in the way it resonates with the reader and some potential for human understanding is released.

Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson brought their own artistry to the David Mamet screenplay of the James M. Cain film, The Postman Always Rings Twice.  A splendid example of the creative teamwork that informs a motion picture.   But even with all these extras, adding to the tone of the finished product, the 1981 version was lackluster when compared to the 1946 version with John Garfield and Lana Turner.  Lange is so much more the consummate actor than Turner, but when Turner-as-Cora tells Garfield-as-Frank that she can't stand it when her husband touches her, she has transcended acting and brought an important story point to life.

Sexual tension is a powerful force, but it is not of itself story, it is a trigger.  When Cora tells Frank those words, she has caused the destabilizing event that sends the story careening toward its destiny.  The Garfield-Turner telling set the bar.  Nicholson,Lange, Mamet and the director, Bob Raphaelson, could not put Humpty Dumpty together again.

How to get the right characters as your narrator?  Look for the ones who have the potential to surprise you, to have that instinctive knowledge that they have bet more than they ought on an outcome, or those who are too confident of their plan to achieve their goal.  Better still, someone who has a hidden agenda that remains hidden until it is thought to be safe.  Ah, how we are misled by our thoughts.

Sibling Revelry

 When you get to thinking about an opening scene for a short story or novel, either your own or someone else's, you get into an immediate and active argument between your writing self and your editorial self.

No question about it,your writing self is the older of the two, big brother, as it were.  The consequences of this sibling rivalry result in the big brother thinking he knows more because he's been around longer, thus the nudges, tweaks, and occasional insults.  The editorial self is easy to spot.  Shorter, younger, he's had to become scrappy in order to hold his own.  He takes a smug pride in being able to cause the writing self to make a public fool of himself.  Nothing funnier than a self-confessed expert being caused to take a pratfall or nosedive.

The writing self wants to start stories with some kind of ironic confession from one or more characters, the opening tropes of Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier for an example, or the splendid set-up paragraph of John Phillips's one and only novel, The Second Happiest Day, for another example.  Mind you, both of these exert an immediate destabilization on the narrative; each is a true hooker.

But the editorial self is big on the dramatized destabilization incident, wants to keep big brother--the writing self--out of the story, begrudging him even this tiny bit of rhetorical play.

Waiting this morning for Jerry Freedman to show up for breakfast at the outdoor cafe you've begun to frequent near your lodgings, you noticed two men in their late forties, engaged in an animated conversation.  As you sometimes do in such cases, you took sides, largely from irritation at the voice of one of the men.  You cast him as the chairman of a department of literature.  The one you favored became someone who'd applied for a teaching spot for a specialty in the historical novel of the nineteenth century, which would allow you Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, certainly Melville, and Hugo. Not to forget Twain.  Your character would also take on the twentieth century, which would allow you Dreiser and Crane.  Of course you'd thrown in Cather, Wharton, Mitchell, and Grace Metalious, she of Peyton Place.  Your character's main thesis would be to come at each with a Marxist interpretation.

Your story would begin with the chairman concluding he could not hire your favorite character because the Marxist and Feminist approaches to criticism were so repugnant to him.

This is all in the background, because the two men have scarcely had time to share one exchange of dialogue the reader could hear when they are set upon by a third man, perhaps early forties, who, from his behavior and demeanor, is clearly overwrought.  The intruder accuses the applicant of having embarked on a passionate and demonstrative affair with his wife.  At first the intruder demands, then quickly tries to shift to a more civil negotiation, asking the applicant to please break off the affair so that the accuser can set about saving his marriage.

The applicant is at first bewildered then attempts to convince the accuser that he has made a mistake--he is not engaged in an affair with the man's wife--he does not even know the man's wife.

After some lengthy argument, the accuser finally appears convinced, asks for, then begins to beg for the applicant's pardon, pressing round after round of apology on him.  Once again, the applicant reassures him, deftly avoiding the accuser's attempts to pay for the breakfast the applicant and the department head are in the process of eating.

After seeing the accuser off, and being presented by the waitress with a large box of brioche and croissant as a gift from the accuser, the applicant is stunned to learn that the chairman is impressed with his performances, and is reversing his decision not to hire him.  "She must be an amazing and captivating woman,"  the chairman says.

"You were sitting right here,"  the applicant says.  "Surely you can't believe I know his wife."

"A masterful performance.  I can see you're someone who will have no trouble engaging his students."

The editorial you loves such opportunities to tweak the writing you.  Loves it.