Memorable Nonfiction 2010

Reading feeds the desire to write, and writing in itself is often an extension of reading. This explains why I read novels above most other works. Since I read so few biographies, memoirs, essay collections, and letters, I’m more selective, though maybe I ask of these works the same thing I ask of novels: that they feed my thinking and get me motivated to write. Three non-fiction books stood out for me this year.

The best biographers give you the life complete, baggage and all, written with no distracting bones to pick with their subject. The biographer takes on the self-erasing task of subsuming themselves in the life story, and sifting through the expected mundanity in order to reveal the exceptional. This could be difficult to accomplish for anyone compelled by their subject and trying to interpret the life, yet a degree of fandom is essential, as well as restraint. One of the best literary biographies for having covered this ground, and yet not shying away from either critical assessment, or candid and sometimes difficult judgment, is Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life. Though I was mostly a casual reader of Cheever’s well-known short stories before I picked this bio up, I came to admire the conflicted writer who, at heart, made a unique and solitary venture of his fictional output over a long and sometimes troubled life. This reading sent me to Cheever’s overshadowed novels.

David Shield’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto had me riffing on its provocations. Like any good book of philosophy, this one forces a reader’s reaction. The numbered paragraphs are widely borrowed from attributed sources and compiled to construct a number of dubious arguments (the novel is dead, “sampling” is the future of literature, truth is more worthwhile than fiction). Nevertheless, the resulting compendium is provocative for the daring of the broad sampling ( a preponderance for several quotable essayists), often rewritten to make Shield’s points, which proves or at least validates that his de-contextualization experiment might just be a hybrid form of memoir-slash-manifesto. Though it also provides a convincing case that the novel is alive enough to provoke diatribes against it.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940, are almost too specific, direct and intimate, like catching one side of an eavesdropped conversation, that a guilty taste of voyeurism is unavoidable. What comes through the young Beckett’s missives is a hubristic certainty, a kind of unassailable arrogance, as well as an authority tempered by doubt and perseverance, as when he declaims to his cousin Morris Sinclair: “Here I strut about, I cannot and will not do otherwise, and have no idea if God helps me or not.” One would have been honored and maybe intimidated to have received from Beckett a multi-lingual letter laced with multiple literary references. But even a partially committed Beckett completist will be curious to thumb through this first of four projected volumes for prime examples of an endangered, if not yet extinct, form of writing from a modern master.

Boxing The Demons

The tradition of maligning short fiction could have begun with John Cheever, following one of his early and persistent influences, Hemingway, though Hemingway might not have made a distinction between novels and stories as greater and lesser forms. In Blake Bailey’s expansive biography Cheever: A Life, it is apparent that Cheever thought writing short stories for the New Yorker year after year was not a worthy path for a serious writer. Yet a handful of his stories seem to have changed the fiction terrain forever after. In the cult of fiction hegemony, it’s sometimes difficult to separate the writer from their mythology, making them superhuman. All the easier if they’re dead. The man who writes his every naked personal desire and whim in his copious journals (published posthumously), and produces an estimable body of work (the stories, numbering in the hundreds, and five novels), is surprisingly humanized when the veneer is stripped away.

It’s as if with Cheever, the themes--family, middle class livelihood, the desire for love, the lift of grace--never changed, and though he turned out sublime stories in “The Swimmer” and “Goodbye, My Brother,” knowing how long he struggled with the first novel, it was clear the major struggle, the ultimate performance, was going to be in a sustained work. The short story becomes a kind of trial run, a small performance.

Here, in Cheever’s first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, is Rosalie, the young boarder at the Wapshot’s house, ruminating on thoughts of her date’s “secretive life”:

The thought of the picnic hamper reminded her of his plain, white-haired mother, who would have sent along something of herself in the basket--watchful, never disapproving, but saddened by the pleasures of her only son. He had his way. His neat, bleak and ugly bedroom was the axis of their house and the rapport between this man and his parents was so intense and tacit that it seemed secretive to Rosalie. Every room was dominated by souvenirs of his growth; guns, golf clubs, trophies from schools and camps and on the piano some music he had practiced ten years ago. The cool house and his contrite parents were strange to Rosalie and she thought that his white shirt that morning smelled of the yellow varnished floors where he took up his secretive life with Ma and Pa.

The prose signals the inner life of a woman who herself has secrets, and has not yet arrived into full self-possession. Mildly glum and resigned, Rosalie sees herself, too, in what she observes. The reader senses Cheever’s compassionate understanding of his character and a desire to reveal her beating heart.

Cheever was committed to the novel as an art form. He was not merely distancing himself in a kind of performance, which short stories really can be, and many novels simply are. In a literary novel, one gets a sense of who the writer is; it’s as if one gets an insight on the ruthlessness of the writer’s psyche.

The writer's sensibility is ever dominant in the biography, but it’s not just honesty, and not only brutal honesty (which would aim to call others on their shit but not necessarily to face it within oneself--a quality popularly known as “self-denial”). This sharpened sense of the interior life of one’s characters comes from first hand knowledge.

Cheever, who fueled himself on gin, whisky, and an unusual amount of self-loathing coupled with a genuine dog-like (dogged?) loyalty to loved ones, is initially conveyed to have the charm of a genial drunk. A self-destructiveness in Cheever’s journey comes in, maybe as more of a passive self-annihilation, through alcoholism. I couldn’t help but think on many occasions, “What a sad, miserable life.” Yet his life had its joys, too.

A writer who cannot transform their torments, or cannot get far enough past the source to risk a possibility for some more contented life, is trapped perhaps by their own image and expectations. Cheever is frequently characterized as a narcissist--the tragedy in such a figure is that they are their own worst enemy. They can never fully lift themselves up; there is no solid source within. Life has to be reconstituted incessantly from the next ego stroke. This is the forest for the trees analogy: one cannot see the world from staring at their own life for so long. Yet the ability to draw from life seems to be a therapy, too.

In trying to understand what draws me to novels that have a gravity, perhaps honesty is the prevalent quality: emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Maybe it’s as accurate to say, this is the writerly aspiration, or should be; what one should want to project in the best of their work. It’s the built-in bull-shit detector not even simply to oneself, which is where Hemingway’s seems to have short circuited; Hemingway was perpetually boxing his demons (in both senses of the word). The result is often transparent: retarded self-defensiveness posing as confidence, otherwise known as machismo. For Cheever, boxing his demons was more like having this box in an attic room where he could occasionally look in on it with cautious surprise and curious wonder.

Cheever’s struggles were not just something he could write himself out of, nor like so many celebrated writers who have followed him, was he satisfied with intellectualizing the grist for his mill (which is, ironically, perhaps an effort at self-preservation). The Wapshot Chronicle reveals he had the wisdom to acknowledge this, while reinforcing the complexity that centered him. This flawed human being, however tragic, was able to get his hands around the heart.

Under the Knife

Prescriptions for writing abound. “Eliminate repeated words.” “Never write a boring sentence.” These come from the Gordon Lish school of writing via n+1. In the Lish arena, the student would be asked to read their piece aloud until they came to a boring sentence--called out by the master with great mocking fanfare, undoubtedly--and the student would be forced to sit down.

In my fiction, I was eliminating repeated words because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Also, I had an editor once return a story with repeated words circled. As for never writing boring sentences, it’s never easy. Of course you can hold up these ideas to the point that you lose the sense of the writing, if you had it to begin with.

And that seems to be a prescription, too, to be clear about what you are going to write before you begin.

Another good idea might be to eliminate as many words as possible--I’m not talking about repeated words, but excess words--avoiding wordiness. Maybe you pare it down and rewrite it a few times. I’ve sometimes shied away from this procedure, if only because a first draft sometimes has a rhythm inherent in the linkage of sentences as written. Perhaps even a poetry.

Why is it that poetry is so often invoked in fiction writing--what does it mean exactly? I suspect I have a bias against poets because they can be so precious about their work, romanticizing their little gulag. Poetry is rarely exciting, to me. Poets seem like the martyrs of the writing universe.

Yet, I like poetry in fiction, if I understand it correctly.

What does it mean to say a fiction writer’s writing is poetic?

I look at E. L. Doctorow, because I’m reading Loon Lake at the moment. Besides the actual use of a kind of verse in the novel (although I’m not sure if it’s bona fide verse, in the sense that it’s made up for a fictional work), here is a passage that I would say is poetic:

“They were hateful presences in me. Like a little old couple in the woods, all alone for each other, the son only a whim of fate. It was their lousy little house, they never let me forget that. They lived on a linoleum terrain and sat in the evening by their radio. What were they expecting to hear? If I came in early I distracted them, if I came in late I enraged them, it was my life they resented, the juicy fullness of being they couldn’t abide...”

This also happens to be the opening to the novel. Which is where you are going to notice poetry and in a sniff decide if this is a book you should read, should a reading of such be your thing.

It’s not a fellow writer’s thing. He occasionally laments how writing is literary or maybe that’s too literary because he believes he is secretly a blockbuster writer who has a commitment to providing airport fiction as he sees this as the only way to break in to publishing.

I don’t get it. Those airport reads bore me. But I’ll also admit that sometimes the literary stuff bores me, too. The problem with those (non-literary) books is that there’s no love of language. Maybe there’s a bit of craft in storytelling--there would have to be, it seems--but generally the work feels mired in a lack of spirit.

Getting back to revision...How do these approaches necessarily lead to good prose?

The Lish school as I’m calling it seems to approach the writing on the level of sentence and word choice, which is fine, but what happens when you need to stretch your legs--which is where all good fiction should inevitably go? (this can be argued, and I’ll shortly contradict myself...) I think of this because another writer who I’ve been looking into again lately (leave it to the NYTimes to get me to dust off my shelves), Donald Barthelme, seems to write in this style that Cheever had a hilarious comment on (“The stuntiness of Barthelme disconcerts me. . . . Blooey. It’s like the last act in vaudeville and anyhow it seems to me that I did it fifteen years ago” (this in the Bookforum review of Cheever's ouevre)). What is it about this style that feels like McSweeney’s co-opted as if it were a province of their (some might say) elitist identity? I think this is what we talk about when we talk about being clever. It’s whatever no one gets, or gets in only their way, but that a clever writer can imitate enough so that only a select few think they get it. So many journals claim and decry cleverness in equal measure, that it ruins it for those writers of us who don’t necessarily look at what we do as trying to be clever; maybe that’s the point, that if you actually are good at what you do, not everyone is going to get it. They’re only going to see you as a wannabe... Maybe I’m hypocritically doing the same thing criticizing McSweeney’s.

I never thought of “Seven Dreams Under the Knife” as clever. I had a woman run away from me when she read it. (How’s that for intrigue?) But this is also a woman who had plastic plants and scant aesthetic taste and thought my minimally appointed rooms here in the Mission resembled Van Gogh’s room at Arles. Initially, I was flattered by these revelations; upon reflection, I’m guessing that it was a perception of “cleverness” dogging me.

Maybe I could have stretched my legs on that piece, but after all the prescriptions about revision, I considered it done. I saw it as a gem that I didn’t want to do anything more with than see published. Which, however humbly, it is, finally.