Britishness
Thursday, 5-November-2009I recently passed the Life in the United Kingdom test, which foreigners have to pass to apply for either citizenship or unlimited leave to remain in the U.K. (I’ve been living in the U.K. for three years now.) The test’s purpose is, apparently, to ensure that foreigners are sufficiently British. Sufficiently British to what? It’s hard to say. I brew a decent cup of tea, which should weigh in my favor, but that’s balanced out by my accent, which is unrepentantly American.
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The official study guide claims that the tests have “been a real success” and have encouraged people “to learn more about our culture and institutions.” It claims that the benefits “in creating strong and cohesive communities are clear.” Uh huh. Sure they are. The introduction is so upbeat that it reminds me of the recently developed American method of breaking bad news: For your convenience, we are closed on Saturdays. For your convenience, your water will be shut off between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.
Here’s a smattering of what, for my convenience, I memorized: The patron saints of England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, and the dates on which they’re honored even though these are no longer public holidays. The date on which Hogmanay falls, although the guide doesn’t tell me what Hogmanay is—it’s just some mysterious thing the Scots do when the days get short and the nights get long. The fact that there are four bank holidays, but not when they fall even though these are public holidays and the saints’ days are not. Mine not to reason why, mine but to memorize and regurgitate when asked. (I get no extra credit for knowing enough to mangle that quotation. Or for the tea. I need to answer the questions and nothing more.) The four sports that are popular in Great Britain: football, cricket, rugby, and tennis. Are car races popular? Is gig racing? Are surfing and running sports? Yes, but they don’t count. These four sports are popular because the study guide says so. Nothing else matters.
What’s the point of knowing these things? I imagine myself on a train, sitting across the table from a British couple, and starting a conversation by saying, “Cricket is very popular in Britain, is it not?” I follow this up by reciting the populations of England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland in 2005, followed by the percentages of Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, Buddhists, and nonbelievers in Great Britain and the absolute numbers of white, Chinese, Bangladeshi, and Afro-Caribbean Britons. At this point, the couple across the table discovers an intense need for a cup of tea and leaves for the buffet car, relieving me of the need to remember whether these figures are also from 2005 or, as I suspect, from the 2001 census.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that the book contains some useful information, including emergency phone numbers, what forms of discrimination are outlawed, how to use the National Health Service, and what identification I’ll need to open a bank account if any banks are still functioning. But it does no service to this information to lump it together with a list of every nation in the Commonwealth (Tonga, Fiji Islands, Malta, Vanuatu; Nauru is a special member, although it doesn’t explain what that means). And I question whether testing people on this information is the most welcoming form of presentation.
Now that I’ve taken the test, I’ve discovered that much of what the guide asked me to memorize was useless. Ditto for the government’s web-based list of what you need to know. The questions are fairly general, most of the numbers I crammed into my head were unnecessary, and the study guide could be slimmed down from 145 pages to—and I’m being generous here—20.
When I was a child, the history books in American schools were very much like the study guide: packed with figures and with statements that sounded remarkably like facts although they weren’t necessarily (“The causes of World War I were the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Germany’s invasion of Belgium, and the breakdown of a network of European treaties”). Nothing held these bits and pieces together, and the only workable strategy was to memorize as much as we could and hope we’d chosen the right bits. Outside of class, I was fascinated by history, so I was baffled by my inability to carry anything away from my studying.
It’s easy to make fun of the Life in the United Kingdom test, but I’m deeply suspicious of the assumptions and attitudes behind it. I grew up in the 1950s, during the American red scare, when the most dangerous political insult you could hurl at someone was “un-American,” so this obsession with Britishness worries me. I’ve seen what happens when a country becomes fixated on the purity of its culture, when everything that comes from the outside the culture is seen as either a threat or a step down. Instead of encouraging what’s best in the culture, it encourages conformity, rigidity, fear.
Human cultures are no more static than our languages are, and no purer. They change and they absorb parts of the new. That involves both loss and gain, but they will change, no matter how we try to stop it, no matter what cultural decontamination process a country demands of its immigrants.
As the granddaughter of immigrants, as a citizen of a country of immigrants, and now as an immigrant myself, I’m aware of the riches each wave of immigrants brings to its host country. I’m aware of how much immigrants can gain—and also of how much they lose. I’m aware of the fears that greet them. Immigration brings complexity, and complexity brings fear. Only fearful politicians could possibly have introduced the Life in the United Kingdom test. It may not encourage anyone to learn more about British culture and institutions, and it may not build strong and cohesive communities, but it just might placate someone who would otherwise vote for the ultra-nationalist and openly racist British National Party.
At about the time I became aware of the national conversation about how to maintain Britishness in the face of immigration, I heard some politician—it might have been Gordon Brown, but I wouldn’t swear to that and it’s not on the test anyway—say on the radio that fairness was the essential quality that defined Britishness. That sounded lovely for a second or two, but if fairness is the essence of the British culture—the one quality that distinguishes it from other cultures—what does that say about the cultures of the world? Do the rest of us organize our cultures around something less noble? Isn’t implying that somewhat, umm, unfair?
I once asked a group of community college students in the United States what being American meant. We had read an essay by a Korean-American that used the phrase “being American” as if all Americans had some single way of being in the world. Our discussion was lively and confused and illuminating: None of us could say what being American meant. We’re a nation of many cultures and even more subcultures. No one of them has a monopoly on Americanness. I haven’t heard anyone accused of being un-American in decades. I don’t pretend we’re a model of perfection. We’re not free of racism—far from it, in spite of Obama’s election—and each wave of immigrants is greeted with a new wave of fear and suspicion, and with accusations that they’re not as well-behaved the older waves of immigrants, who in retrospect were just terrific, thanks. We’re not free of nationalism, and many of my fellow citizens will say, without a clue about how offensive they’re being, that America is the greatest country in the world. But in spite of all our shortcomings we are a nation of immigrants, and I love that.
If there’s one gift that, as a foreign resident on British shores, I’d like to offer—other than the recipes for New York cheesecake and the brownie—it’s the knowledge of how to live in such a nation.
hideControl and Magic
Wednesday, 25-February-2009If there’s one thing I know about writing, it’s that I don’t control the process. The more I control, the less interesting my writing.
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With Open Line, which turned out to be a satire (as the publisher put it) of our media and political culture, all I knew at the start was that I was writing about a woman who wanted to quit her job, and as I went on even that dropped away, finally resurfacing when I reached the end. She was one person in one situation, emblematic of nothing, and she was a radio talk-show host not because that placed her at the center of the culture but because I used to host a call-in show and knew it would be fun to work with. I was well into the first draft before I sensed the scope of the story, but it came to me then as a gift, not as something I’d constructed. If I’d worked the other way around, I doubt I could have found my central character’s individuality. Instead, I’d have locked myself into something schematic and deadening.
We bring a network of thoughts, assumptions, beliefs, histories, knowledge, ignorance, and who knows what else to our writing: the entire mix of our idiosyncratic lives and beings. They’re what make our writing interesting.
Plot, which I love, is nothing by comparison. Some writers claim that only seven plots exist. One writer, at least, narrows that down to three. Two of them are A stranger comes to town and I go on a journey. I can’t remember the third, although you’d think with only three it would be simple enough. Maybe it’s Somebody dies. You’d think A couple splits up would be one of them, but you could file that under either I go on a journey or Somebody dies.
If we really do have only three plots to work with, or a generous seven, then what makes a piece of fiction matter is where we take the plot, or where it takes us. We inhabit a story (A stranger comes to town) and find elements of ourselves in the world we’ve created—our families, our politics, our passions, our half-forgotten childhood nightmares—all of them transformed into something separated from us and with luck more manageable than our incoherent selves. That’s one of the gifts of non-autobiographical fiction: You use the elements of your life, but you give yourself distance. The pain of your relationship with your sister helps animate your character’s relationship to her boss, and maybe you recognize what you’re doing and maybe you don’t but it doesn’t matter. It’s powerful, it’s (relatively) safe, and it works. Your character’s free to tell a truth that you may not be ready for in your own life. You go beyond yourself—or you can if you’re brave enough.
And if you’re lucky your sister won’t be any the wiser.
No two writers work the same way—I taught fiction writing long enough to learn that much—and many writers are able to plan their work more than I can, but they too find elements beyond their control appearing in their work. Because the things we control, the skills we’ve mastered, are nothing more than the tools we use to enter the world where the magic happens.
Researching Cynicism
Thursday, 9-October-2008A research project at the London School of Economics (LSE) has measured Britain’s cynicism level (it’s high) and intoned that cynicism may be bad for democracy. (Observer, September 14, 2008) The study makes a distinction between cynicism and distrust. People who think politicians are merely liars will distrust them but will probably continue to vote. The truly cynical don’t vote. They may boycott products or join pressure groups (this is bad for democracy?), or they may resort to direct action or violence (which are apparently similar enough to group together).
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My own miniscule and unscientific personal survey of U.S. public opinion reports a similarly high level of cynicism. But that’s what happens to people when they’re systematically lied to, messed with, discounted, and ignored until it’s election season, at which point they’re lied to, messed with, discounted, and bombarded with personalities and distortions and phony issues.
Cynical doesn’t begin to cover it.
Help is at hand, though. The LSE project is developing a cynicism index, called the Cyndex, which will let politicians and assorted other communicators measure the impact they’re having on various subsets of society and use it to make themselves more believable. The project hopes to make the Cyndex available commercially.
It’s enough to make a person really cynical. Really, really cynical.
hideNotes from a Book Tour
Tuesday, 24-June-2008It’s weird work, promoting a book. For Open Line, I did a series of readings even though, as I’ve heard for years, no one knows if readings really sell or promote books. Here’s the rundown:
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New York: My first reading was in Brooklyn, at a fairly new independent bookstore. I had no audience, but the bookstore guy (was he owner, manager, clerk? I forgot to ask) was lovely and apologetic. I signed a couple of books for the store, wondering who they’d sell them to since the store was empty the whole time I was there.
My second reading was in Manhattan, at a chain store with my photo in the window, which might have made me think I was someone impressive if I hadn’t known better. The audience was made up of a half dozen friends and relatives and another half dozen browsers, who stayed long enough to make me feel good about myself but didn’t buy books. I stayed to sign books and had to borrow a pen. Great moments in the literary life. The store manager was helpful but no more interested than he had to be. I was convinced that the unsold books would go directly back to the storeroom as soon as I left.
I also appeared on an online interview show (www.titlepage.tv, she added parenthetically, managing with great subtlety to work in a bit of self-promotion) hosted by Daniel Menaker, and this was the real reason I was in New York at all. For moments at a time, I believe that this kind of show actually promotes books: four writers in conversation with a knowledgeable interviewer. Surely it moves someone to buy the books.
Minnesota: I lived in Minneapolis for forty years, edited a Minnesota writers magazine for close to twenty years, and taught writing there for I’m not sure how many years, so the Twin Cities are the one place I can count on pulling in an audience. I read at a literary center with a poet whose work I enjoyed. We had a respectable-sized audience and the reading’s host encouraged questions at the end. Being Minnesotans, the audience members obliged by dredging up a few, but it had a dutiful feel to it that I found painful. I signed a few books but forgot to ask how many sold. Not many, I fear.
At the second reading a former neighbor organized everyone she knows to show up and, with a friend, held a reception afterward. The audience was responsive and I read better than I had before. At the end, they stayed in their chairs so I invited questions, which flowed fairly naturally. When I stopped by the store the next day to sign books—which both the owner and I had forgotten about—the owner told me that to an audience of, I think, thirty (did she say forty-five, or do I only wish she had?) she sold only sixteen books. It could have been worse, though. She once sold thirty to an audience of two hundred. A mystery writer who was at the reading had told me that he promotes his books by stopping at independent stores and introducing himself to the owners or managers, building a relationship. He’d do the same at chains, but even if they had the leeway to promote a book they liked, they’d have moved on by the time his next book came out. He mentioned that instead of arranging readings, many publishers now organize lunches where bookstore managers can meet a writer. Does that help, I asked? Who knows. His books sell solidly, but he still has to organize his own tours and guilt the publisher into paying for them.
At the third reading, I didn’t count the audience but the store had to add chairs. Of course, they hadn’t set up a huge number to begin with, but still, in this business you claim your victories where you can. The reading had been listed in the local free newspaper, with a nice (if mildly inaccurate) write-up of the book, and this may have helped. I snagged a browser, who stayed and bought the book, as did a young guy taking notes on his computer (a sure sign that he was there for a class assignment, which he later confirmed). Again, the audience stayed to talk, although I didn’t invite questions.
Madison, Wisconsin: A friend drove me five or six hours to another independent. It’s a great store but it was also graduation weekend in a university town, although that may or may not have been relevant. Whatever the reason, no one showed up. The clerk was, again, lovely and apologetic and said the manager had enjoyed the book. She told me the store would display it prominently and that it would sell. She was probably right, but I’d have felt better with an audience.
Washington Island, Wisconsin: This was a six hour drive. Or was that seven? The bookstore owner had read the book and loved it. The book signing in the afternoon was lively, and someone told me that it adds to her enjoyment of a book to meet the writer—it gives her a glimpse of the mind behind the work. I’d never seen the point of it before, but she made sense of what I was doing. That evening, ten people showed up at the reading, most of whom had already bought the book. They asked questions and made intelligent comments without being invited. No additional books sold, but the bookstore owner said she’d have no trouble selling the impressive stack she’d ordered. The next morning, I watched her tell someone in the coffee shop next door to her store (who hadn’t said she wanted a copy of the book), “I have a signed copy of Open Line for you. I’ll have Ellen personalize it.” I understood why the mystery writer builds up relationships with bookstore owners and managers. With half a dozen people like this woman behind you, you could conquer the world, should you happen to want to. Or even sell books.
And now I’m home. Does any of what I’ve done help? I wish I knew. The publisher’s publicist is happy: The book’s getting good press, she says. Most of it is confined to the Twin Cities, and without the readings there that wouldn’t have happened. But what about other cities, the ones where I haven’t appeared, or where I did but no one cared? Do I have to run for president, or carry out a massacre, to get some notice?
Early in the tour, I was struck—“horrified” is probably a better word—by how few copies of a book any single store sells, and by how many stores have to sell copies for a book to take off. I was struck by how hard it is to make money not just as a writer but as an independent bookstore. Or as a publisher. (I’m sure that goes double for all the good folks stocking books and working the registers at the chain stores.) I’m also struck by how hard the publicists at my publisher—a small independent—have worked to promote Open Line, especially given their limited resources (or is “limited” too expansive a word?), and I remind myself that they can’t control the outcome any more than I can.
hideScott McClellan, George Bush, and Annette Majoris
Thursday, 29-May-2008Early in the long slog that led to the publication of Open Line, someone asked whether its protagonist, Annette, believes her claim that the Vietnam War never happened.
Yes, I answered. And also no.
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It was an important question, so I went back to the manuscript and explored the question from inside Annette’s mind a bit, but it wasn’t long before someone else was asking the same question of the new version. I repeated the sequence another time or two. Finally I asked the question directly in the text, and answered it. Even so, I expect the question to come keep coming up, because it’s hard to accept that a person can believe her own lies. Until now, that is, because former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan just published What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, where he writes that Bush has a tendency to deceive himself if it suits his needs. Bush was “insulated from the reality of events,” he writes, and so believed “his own spin.” Which figures, really. Why else, as someone asked at an Open Line reading this week, didn’t the administration get someone out into the Iraqi desert to hide weapons of mass destruction so they could go ahead and find them? Because they’d convinced themselves that the WMDs were real, that’s why. They believed their own hype.
I don’t know whether to feel smug about that or terrified.
Writing about Vietnam in the Post-9/11 World
Wednesday, 26-March-2008To date, two reviews of Open Line have wondered why I bothered to write about the Vietnam War in this post-9/11 world. If the question had come up once I’d have shrugged it off, but since it’s come up again it may be worth some thought.
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To give the most literal answer, it’s because I began the book before 2001, but that doesn’t really address the question. I did a fair bit of rewriting after 2001, and nothing that had happened made me want to refocus it around more recent events. In fact, after Saddam Hussein’s fall, when his famous weapons of mass destruction couldn’t be found, the story seemed more relevant than ever. Annette’s proof that the Vietnam War never happened struck me as a pretty fair parallel to the prewar proof that Saddam’s unfindable weapons were threatening enough to justify a war.
Why Vietnam, though? I’m not sure I know the full answer. The choice was intuitive, which is a polite way of saying that rational explanations only come into it retrospectively. I do know that the war was a turning point in US culture. It’s a war we lost, a war where we not only did terrible things but watched them on TV and saw them in the newspaper over our breakfasts. It’s not just that we’d like to forget the war; we wish it had never happened. Then along comes Annette to say that maybe it never did. How convenient. How very much like one facts-be-damned strand of our culture.
By now a lot of us wish the Iraq War hadn’t happened, but you can’t play disappearing games with wars that are still—mission accomplished, boys and girls—going on. Distance gave me the freedom to be outrageous, not just about the past but about who we are today. Whether I succeeded or not is for other people to judge; I’m not arguing with the reviewers here—or at least I’m trying not to. But I do want to explore the question they raised.
In the end, I don’t believe that 9/11, the Iraq War, the current financial meltdown, or whatever shock comes at us next makes the past irrelevant. The Vietnam War is part of how we got to this point, and Annette’s way of approaching it reflects the moment we’re living in—as does the assumption that 9/11 made everything that happened before it irrelevant.
On Not Liking a Character
Friday, 8-February-2008Zadie Smith’s On Beauty got great reviews, and deserved them. It’s an ambitious book that grapples with race, class, and if not exactly politics at least politics as played out in academia. I admire it. I admire her. I didn’t, however, enjoy reading it.
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My problem was with the central character, Howard Belsey, who’s such a hapless schmuck that at time I didn’t want to find out what sort of disaster he’d stumble into next. “Pull up your socks,” I wanted to tell him. “Or forget the socks. Pull up your zipper.”
I didn’t like him, and that nags at me. I’m not a disinterested party here. When I was circulating the manuscript of Open Line, I was told it would be hard to sell because the central character, Annette, wasn’t likeable.
Well, ouch. I liked Annette. I still do. She’s shallow, she’s as self-involved as a cat, and she does horrible things with no particular malice, but she’s also got a fast mouth and great energy. She’s funny and she’s vulnerable. I disapprove of her, but I can’t help liking her.
I wonder how Zadie Smith feels about Howard Belsey.
Where I could, I softened Annette (“The less,” my agent told me, “we feel the impulse to send her off to charm school, the better”), but I couldn’t change her essential flaws. Without them, the story wouldn’t happen. And many of her flaws are not just hers but our culture’s. Even if I could make the story happen without them, it would lose its edge.
I spent months fulminating about the narrowness of people who think we have to like a book’s characters. How can we tell some stories—how can we tell the truth—if we have to play nice all the time? Fiction shouldn’t be limited to what’s soothing. Not everything we read has to make us happy.
But I’m asking readers to spend time with my characters. Why am I surprised that they want to spend time with people they like, especially when I feel the same way?
What’s the solution, then? I don’t know that there is one, but sometimes the questions are worth more than the answers. Writers have to take risks with their stories, with their characters, or their work will be too bland to remember. At the same time, if they want readers more than they want a medal for artistic purity, they have to do something to keep them reading.
I don’t know whether On Beauty could have come into being around a more likeable Howard Belsey, and it doesn’t matter at this point. It didn’t, and reading it is worth the discomfort and the work. It’s whole grain instead of white bread. An hour later, you still know you ate something. And if you eat this kind of thing often enough, you may well get a taste for it.
hideParade
Wednesday, 9-January-2008My partner, Ida, and I saw a British production of Parade, an American play, in London a while back, and it was an interesting failure, the kind that got us talking more than a successful production would have.
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The play tells the story of an early-twentieth-century lynching in Georgia--not of a black man this time but of a New York Jew--and part of the failure came from cultural mistranslations. Someone, presumably the director, has no idea what the segregated American south was about, so in spite of a couple of fine moments when the two black characters reflect on what it is to be black in that time and place, the black characters mixed indiscriminately with the white characters at picnics, parades, celebrations, church services, and, most horribly, the lynch scene itself. I wanted to hide my head in my hands out of sheer embarrassment. I also, in the spirit of true triviality, wanted to point out that if you took the English toast rack that sat on the Georgia governor’s breakfast table and asked the first six or eight thousand Americans you met what it was they’d tell you it was a napkin holder. Or a small CD rack. Or something to sort mail. We don’t do that to toast. You’ve got to get the details right before you go public.
At the same time, it was oddly reassuring to see the black/white division that seemed so absolute when we were growing up become foreign enough that it could be, in this other time and place, so thoroughly misunderstood. In equal measure, it was depressing to know how easily, and how quickly, history slips away from us.
That alone would have kept us talking for days. We grew up during segregation and were both minor league activists in the civil rights movement. I’m a New York Jew and Ida’s a white southerner. Like everyone else of our time, we’ve been marked by American racism. I doubt anyone gets away unscathed these days either, but that’s a different question. The point is, this is not an issue we can ever feel neutral about. But we sat through Parade unengaged, and this is another interesting way that the play failed. If it had moved in closer to the central characters, as it did finally toward the end, I think it could have worked, but the author got trapped by the events and followed them like a chess game. History can do that to a writer. It took me most of the intermission to figure that out. With so much was at stake, why didn’t I care?
I’m not saying that we can’t tell a larger story without sacrificing emotional intensity, but it’s hard not to get trapped by the knight-moves-two-forward-and-one-to-the-side of history, by the what-happens-next and how-did-that-happen of it. If the author had moved in closer and left the political chess playing in the background, I might have been more fully engaged. If the author had taken another step back, on the other hand, something amazing might have happened. There were hints of this when a Civil War-era southern (need I say white?) lady, complete with parasol (or has my memory added that?), drifted on and off the stage. Somebody--either the author or the director--seemed to be reaching for a way to bring in the mythology that fueled segregation. Forgive me if I’m cataloguing the obvious here, but after seeing Parade I can’t take the past for granted. The mythology I have in mind is that the purity of white womanhood had to be defended from the animal lusts of black men who would rather ravish (sorry, I can’t write about this without getting all nineteenth-century on you) a white woman than gain his civil rights, a decent job, some common respect, and the vote; that the prewar era was a golden age but then the Yankees came and stomped all over everything that was good and pure; that the slaves were treated well--they were just like part of the family--and they were happy that way, like children. I could go on, but you get the point. It takes an elaborate set of myths to justify keeping a whole category of human beings down.
If that mythology had made a more powerful entrance, it could have electrified the production, not just wafted across the stage trailing a room-deodorizer scent of magnolia. Look at what Tony Kushner did in Angels in America, which manages to take the mythology of the Mormon Church and the McCarthy era and bring them to life, along with Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg, without sacrificing any of the characters’ personal intensity. Granted, two of the characters are, arguably, hallucinating, and that helps if you’re bringing mythology to life, but still he pulls it off, and it’s stunning.
It’s relatively easy and safe to tell a small story, even one set against a large background. It’s harder when you reach for something more, and braver. What’s hardest and most worthwhile, though, is to back away and see the ghosts of our history not just as figures drifting across the stage but as powerful players in our lives.
hideLanguage, Loss, and Metaphor
Wednesday, 9-January-2008My mother died in June 2005 at the age of ninety-three. For some time--and it's hard to say how long because I can't draw a line and say it began here--a series of small strokes had been chipping away at who she'd once been. I called her one day, six months or a year before she died, and the woman who took care of her told me she hadn't gotten out of bed for two days. Maybe I could convince her to.
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I doubted it but when my mother took the phone I asked why she wouldn’t get out of bed.
“I can’t explain it,” she said, meaning not that it was beyond the reach of my understanding and not necessarily that she didn’t understand it herself but that she had no words for it anymore. They were gone, dissolved, out of reach. I’m reaching for a metaphor here because I have no other way to express what was happening, but none of them bring me any closer to understanding the way language had unraveled inside her head. I’m writing about the loss of language and what do I have to work with other than language? I can’t know what it was like for her and she couldn’t tell me. It’s as fitting as it is ironic that I’m pushed toward metaphor--that rarified literary game--because as words became harder for her to get hold of she occasionally spoke in unwilling metaphors.
I taught writing for some years, and when I talked to my students about metaphor I tried to present it not as a literary device--some arcane trick they had to master if they hoped to pass in literary society--but as something the human brain creates naturally. When I look back on what I said, I don’t think I was wrong but that doesn’t mean I knew the first thing about it either. All I had in mind was the power that objects and processes can take on when our emotions overflow their ordinary channels, the way saying something relatively safe can open the possibility of communicating something unsafe, the way one thought can enlarge another thought that seems to be unrelated until suddenly and stunningly it doesn’t. I was thinking, in other words, of the undamaged brain. If I talked at all about saying the unsayable--and I can’t remember whether I actually used that phrase--I meant it (in the weakest sense of the word) metaphorically. I had never spent twelve seconds of my life wrestling with what unsayable means in its literal and most physical sense: not what we’re afraid to say, not what we’re forbidden to say, not even what we haven’t yet put words to and so allowed ourselves to think about clearly, but the physical impossibility of putting something into words and communicating it to another human being.
When my mother was younger, she was a tenant organizer in New York and a fine public speaker. Someone who worked with her told me once, with only minor exaggeration, that if you woke her up in the middle of the night, stuck a microphone in her hand, and told her to make a speech, she could not only do it but do it well. She was one of only two people in New York that the real estate mogul Harry Helmsley refused to debate on a radio program.
And now she couldn’t explain why she wouldn’t get out of bed.
“Are you in pain?” I asked.
No, she wasn’t in pain.
“Discouraged?”
The word I wanted was depressed but I couldn’t get myself to say it.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
I should have tried synonyms but I was only too happy to run away from the question.
“Tired?”
She said something I couldn’t make out, something longer than yes or no.
I was fairly sure I should keep offering words but I didn’t. The question-and-answer format felt condescending--to me, if not to her--and I couldn’t see a way to change that short of ending the conversation. I told her that if we were voting I voted for her to get out of bed. She said something else I couldn’t catch, then said she loved me. I said I loved her. We said this to each other a lot as words became less useful and our conversations narrowed down. Almost everything that made my life interesting had become too complicated to tell her about. So many things had moved out of bounds that I might as well have been leading a secret life. To keep her on the line an extra few seconds, I’d sometimes tell her that it was raining, it was snowing, the weather had been gorgeous all week and the crabapple tree was in bloom. My partner was fine, I was fine, the dogs and the cats were fine. Every so often I got lonely enough to admit that one of us was sick, although when she’d been fully herself I kept that sort of information to myself if I could. She and my father worried about us out of all proportion to whatever passing illnesses we had. But with conversation hard to sustain, a head cold gave us a moment of connection. If everyone on my end of the line was healthy, we were left with the blandest reassurances. We said “I love you” in every conversation because it was one of the things we could still say. We said it to make up for everything that was closed to us.
It never crossed my mind to ask her how she felt, trapped with such a sparse collection of words. I don’t know whether she would have understood the question or whether she could have answered it if she had. I shied away from acknowledging what we both knew was happening as if somehow she might not have noticed it, although she’d been reporting unflinchingly on the process for years.
This time when she said she loved me she gave her voice an unusual intensity, as if she expected it to be the last time we talked and she wanted me to remember it. She had so little left that she could give me but she was still my mother and still struggling to give.
It wasn’t the last time we talked, though. I called the next day and she’d gotten up, taken a shower, and gone back to bed. A few days later she got up again, and sometime after that I went to visit. I live in Minnesota and she was living in California, two blocks from my brother.
We had a few more final goodbyes, usually on the last night of my visit. She saw me to the door once, a tiny, white-haired woman standing inside the frame of a junior-size walker.
“The next time you see me,” she said, and paused.
I waited while she searched for words.
“I won’t be here.”
I couldn’t help it. My mind snagged on the idea of seeing her even though she wouldn’t be there and I laughed. She laughed. It seemed like a natural enough thing to do. For some years she’d been telling us she wanted to die. She’d been too active, too competent, too focused to be satisfied with a life whose whole purpose was to sleep, get dressed, eat, read the paper, and sleep again. She’d been an organizer. She’d been a communist--part of the generation that joined during the Depression, and she remained a member until sometime after the U.S. party took a position against Gorbachev’s reforms, when she finally resigned. She could be a formidable political opponent--I heard that from someone else she worked with, who was still fuming about a battle he’d lost to her--but her commitment to the people whose rights she fought for was as genuine and as deep as any I’ve known. When my brother and I were young, she talked to us about trying to make the world a better place. It was a simplified explanation of the life she and my father had committed themselves to long before we were born, but it was also exactly what she meant. Now she could no longer try to make the world a better place, so what was the purpose of her life? Especially since she had to wait out her final years without my father, who died ten years before she finally did.
So I had learned from her to talk comfortably about death, and to accept her longing for it. I don’t remember what I said once we stopped laughing. Something about hoping she was wrong, probably. Something about knowing she wanted that. Something about how much I’d miss her, although I had no idea how deep the missing would run. It doesn’t matter what I said. I’d been saying the same things for years, in one form or another. They didn’t change a thing but I said them anyway. They were an attempt at connection, a form of acceptance.
The next time you see me I won’t be here. As words slipped out of her reach, she sometimes came at ideas slantwise, from directions that surprised me. The ideas inside her head were richer than the poverty of her speech allowed her to express, although I doubt her thoughts were varied or as deep as they once had been. She spent an entire evening once trying to explain an insight she’d had into her family. What she needed to put together was a single longish sentence, and the first time she tried she got part of the way through, telling me she’d been thinking about her mother and it had occurred to her--. And there she stopped, as completely as if she’d run into a wall. In my arrogance, in my loneliness for the person she used to be, I didn’t expect whatever this was to be a new thought, although I was prepared to act as if it were. It had been a long time since we’d talked about anything new and I assumed her thoughts had narrowed down as much as her language.
She tried the sentence again and stopped in the same place. She was frustrated. I was frustrated. She gave up but came back to it later, starting in the same place--she’d been thinking about her mother--and pushed a few words past where she’d stopped the first times through, until finally, about the time I was saying goodnight, she crashed through the barrier and found the rest of the sentence: She’d been thinking about the twelve-year gap between her older sister and herself and it had occurred to her that her mother might well have had a miscarriage, or several miscarriages, between them, and that she was precisely the kind of Victorian lady who would have kept that a secret.
That thought, so laboriously set in words, made more of a connection between us than we’d had in years. My mother was still in there. Her mind was working: in near-silence, in isolation, without the back and forth that, as I think of it, keeps us human, but it was still working.
I don’t know if that’s a cause for hope or for despair.
The last time I saw her other than in the hospital where she died, we had another final goodbye. By then I also thought it might be final. It was again the last night of my visit and for some time she’d been telling me to go home--back to my brother’s house, where I was staying. Even then she remembered that I went to bed earlier than she did and that I was running on midwestern time. Even then she was trying to take care of me. I kept saying I’d leave soon, I wasn’t tired yet.
When I finally started to say goodnight she said, “Stay put.”
She didn’t mean don’t go--that much was clear from the context, from her gestures. It was one of those slantwise approaches.
“Stay put?” I said.
She waved one hand through the air in a vague and uncharacteristic gesture.
“In an anarchist sort of way,” she said.
For a split and disorienting second I thought the century-long hostility between the anarchists and the communists had been resolved. Then I took the phrase to mean metaphorically speaking, although I’ll never know entirely if I was right. We said goodnight. We said “I love you” all over again. I searched for some way to tell her how much I meant that and couldn’t, any more than she’d been able to find the words she wanted. Less, because I didn’t find any slant from which to approach my meaning. I kissed her and she was impossibly tiny, impossibly frail. The next time I saw her, she was dying.
Her last advice--her last demand--draws me back regularly: Stay put, in an anarchist sort of way. My partner thinks she was telling me to keep on being who I am, that she was saying she approved of me, and of course I like that interpretation. It’s the meaning I hold closest. But what she actually said is richer than that, and less certain. It’s full of resonances and echoes, of contradictions and possibilities, of meanings beyond any single meaning. It’s metaphor: a multilayered message exploding at me out of near-silence.
This essay originally appeared in The Threepenny Review.
hideNotes for My Memoir
Wednesday, 9-January-2008[James] Frey appears to have fictionalized his past to propel and sweeten the book's already melodramatic narrative and help convince readers of his malevolence. "I was a bad guy," Frey told [Oprah] Winfrey. "If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways.""A Million Little Lies: Exposing James Frey's Fiction Addiction"
www.thesmokinggun.com
A winter Sunday. Pale January sunlight slanting through the living room windows. Etc. Enough detail to establish my physical presence in a real place. I review my agent's e-mails about my novel. In my most recent rejection, the editor said she liked the novel but that fiction isn't selling well.
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This has become a pattern: The editors like my writing, or they like the concept; they say it’s smart or intriguing or something else flattering, but in a word, no. They can’t make us an offer. Fiction isn’t selling well.
What does sell? Nonfiction, of course.
What choice do I have but to turn the novel into a hard-hitting, relentlessly honest memoir of my most humiliating moments? The protagonist, Annette, and I are the same age, give or take a few decades, although I admit that we have different histories and differ in a few other details that the literal minded may quibble over, but those are small things. “Annette, c’est moi,” as Zola once said.
Unless that was Flaubert? Or Louis XIV?
Whoever. The point is that we both come from New York and we both landed in Minnesota. We both, at some time in our lives, hosted a radio call-in show. And I have poured any number of my less savory characteristics into this person, along with a few that I borrowed but filtered through my very own mental processing system so that Annette is, philosophically speaking, me, is she not?
Well, she’d better be, because no one wants to read about the parts of my actual life--what the literal minded would consider my actual life--that I’d be willing to make public. But, hey, I’m as willing as any other writer to make sacrifices in the name of art. So I walk to the drugstore and buy a package of dye for my hair. (Annette would never allow herself to go gray.) Cold wind from the north cutting through my jacket; a few additional telling details here. Subway sandwich wrapper blowing past my feet, or doesn’t that have the right gritty feel?
When I return home I stand in front of the mirror and consider a tiny facelift, just for the publicity photo the publisher will want. I pull the skin taut on my neck and I look years younger but I’m just not sure about the facelift. It might be inauthentic. I return to my computer (pale January light slanting through the unwashed windows; no, through the single cracked window; decide later how gritty setting needs to be; remember to end parentheses and pick up beginning of sentence) and use Word’s Search and Replace function to substitute “I” for both “she” and “Annette.”
When my agent took on my novel, she told me it wouldn’t be easy to sell because Annette isn’t a likable person, and I admit that this bothers me--not that Annette isn’t likable but that once we reposition the manuscript I won’t be. But it’s a sacrifice. For my art. No one wants to read about a nice person. They want blood on the floor. They want hard drugs, jail time, family dysfunction, smoking in restaurants, a whiff of redemption at the end. The market, in its wisdom, has spoken, and what can we do but listen?
I do not, in fact, smoke, but I return to the drugstore and buy a pack of Camels. Cold wind, etc., and the sun sinking low behind the neighboring houses, lending the scene a desolate--; no, a gritty urban--.
Work on that later. Long shadows, then night. A streetlight that blinks off as I pass.
I huddle in the drugstore doorway and call a photographer friend on my cell to ask if she can meet me outside Denny’s and wait to snap pictures when I’m thrown out for smoking. If I refuse to either leave or stub out my cigarette, what can they do but have me arrested? If I’m lucky, I’ll get pushed around a bit.
If the memoir doesn’t sell, maybe the humiliating tale of a writer driven to recast a novel as nonfiction will. All my misjudgments and character flaws unflinchingly exposed, aspiring urban grittiness laid in heavily as background, an implied condemnation of the publishing industry, which pushed me into this. Some sex. Remember to add sex.
I call a friend who might consider having sex at Denny’s.
This essay first appeared in Minnesota Literature.
hideThe Guideline Blues: Tips on How to Enter Contests
Wednesday, 9-January-2008Contest season is upon us—and I say this with no idea when it will be read since contest season is just about always upon us. So, in honor of the many writers who are proofreading their manuscripts and trying to make their word processing programs print consecutive numbers on unrelated files, I hereby offer the compiled wisdom of the staff from the writers organization where I used to work, the Loft. We were on the receiving end of countless contest entries and a nearly equal number of panicky questions about same. This wisdom applies to contests in general but has been gleaned mostly from the Loft’s experience as a contest sponsor. It won’t help you win a contest—that depends on a fortuitous combination of your writing and the contest judge—but it should make it easier to send out your work.
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Content
What’s appropriate to send to a given contest? At the risk of stating the obvious, read the guidelines—and believe them. If the guidelines ask for fiction, don’t type “fiction” on a section of your journal and drop it in the mail, hoping the judge won’t notice anything odd about it. Don’t send your science fiction to a contest for romances just because two of the characters are, well, sort of attracted to each other in a subconscious kind of way if you allow for the fact that neither of them is actually an organic life form. You get the point. It sounds absurd, but people do it all the time, and they’re wasting their time, postage, paper, and—if there’s an entry fee—money. Don’t think of guidelines as something to outwit; think of them as—well, as guidelines: something intended to guide you through the process of putting your work before this particular judge. If you don’t have work that’s appropriate to a given contest, then don’t enter. The literary world is awash in contests; wait for one that suits your work.
What should you do if your name’s irreversibly entangled in line three of your manuscript and the guidelines tell you to submit your work anonymously? Change the name in the manuscript or leave a blank if you can. (If you do substitute another name, you’d be wise to make it clear that you’ve done that.) If the piece falls apart when your name’s taken out or changed, then shrug your shoulders tragically and admit that the piece isn’t appropriate for this particular contest. Either send something else or don’t enter.
What should you do when you’re not sure whether the contest is appropriate for your work? The answer depends on the contest. Where I worked, staff were willing to answer questions about contests, but our answers were, of necessity, general—we couldn’t read your work and offer opinions; we just didn’t have the time. Many organizations, however, refuse to take calls about their contests, so you’ll be on your own. Again, read the guidelines and take them seriously. If you’re still in doubt, hand your work and the guidelines to your hardest-nosed friend and ask whether he or she thinks they’re a good match.
What should you do if three days after you mailed your contest entry you complete a brilliant rewrite and want to substitute it for your lame earlier draft? Nothing. Most contests will not accept substitute entries. Processing the entries is already complex and chaotic, and the staffs of most literary organizations are already overworked; if they add one more element of complexity to the process, they’ll dissolve. Chalk this one up to experience, or to fate, or to luck. If your manuscript wins and publication is part of the prize, you can ask about substituting the rewrite then.
Preparing the Manuscript
What should you do about page numbers? The Loft got more questions about page numbers than about any other aspect of contest guidelines. If the guidelines ask you to number your pages, then yes, you should number your pages. Even if you’re a poet; even if you’re submitting three separate short pieces of prose; even if you’re submitting a novel excerpt. If they ask that the numbers be in the upper right-hand corner, put them there; if they don’t specify where they want them, you can assume that they don’t care; put them anywhere and don’t lose sleep over it. Yes, the numbers should be consecutive. Yes, they should begin with one. No, the cover sheet is not considered part of the total number of pages.
What should you do if the guidelines ask for twenty to twenty-five pages and your piece is twenty-six pages, or fifteen? You have several choices here. 1) Send a different piece. 2) If the piece is too long, find sections that can be cut without making the whole thing collapse and send in the shortened version. 3) If the contest doesn’t include publication, include a synopsis of the full piece, explaining that you’re sending an excerpt from a longer piece; this synopsis will count as part of your twenty-five pages and should be numbered. Consecutively. Beginning with one. If the contest does include publication, do not send an incomplete piece; return to suggestions 1 and 2. 4) If the piece is too short and the contest doesn’t include publication, include all or part of a second, unrelated piece. If it does include publication, return to suggestion 1; if you don’t have a second appropriate piece, do not enter this particular contest.
Do not use enlarged or reduced type (or margins, or spacing) to make your piece fit within the number of pages allowed, hoping no one will notice. Someone will and your entry may well be disqualified. Twelve-point type and one inch margins are pretty much the standards. Skip the fancy type faces. Use something easy to read. All prose should be double spaced and all poetry single spaced. Do not leave the pages unnumbered and hope no one will notice that you’ve slipped in a few extras, or left a few out. Someone will and your entry will etc., etc. Do not assume that the processors will simply pull out an extra page or two if they’re serious about enforcing the length limit; they’re far more likely to pull out your entire entry and say nasty things about you while they do it.
What if you write long poems and the guidelines say “one poem per page”? Don’t worry. This means no more than one poem per page. Unless the guidelines set an upper limit on the length of a single poem, it’s not a problem when a poem runs more than one page.
Do you really have to send multiple copies? If the guidelines ask for more than one copy, yes, send more than one copy. Few contest sponsors can afford to copy your manuscript for you. The extra copies may allow the sponsor to keep a copy on file for possible publication or in case a package is lost on the way to a judge, or may allow it to send one copy each to several judges. Again, sending the wrong number of copies is a good way to get your entry disqualified.
What should you do about stapling your manuscript? Most of this is pretty simple, really. If the guidelines ask you to staple your manuscript, then staple the manuscript. If you’re sending two copies, staple each one; don’t staple them to each other. Don’t use paper clips, binders, spiral notebooks, looseleafs, needle and thread, or roofing nails unless the guidelines call for them.
What if your manuscript is too thick for your stapler? Go to a copy shop with industrial-sized mega-staplers; plead or pay for permission to use one. Note: If the guidelines tell you not to staple your manuscript, don’t staple it.
What about cover sheets and entry fees? If the guidelines ask for a cover sheet or an entry fee, then send a cover sheet or an entry fee. (In the absence of any instructions to the contrary, a cover sheet is a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 paper (in the U.S.; the dimensions are a bit different in the U.K. and I haven’t a clue what they are elsewhere) with your name, address, and phone number[s], and the title[s] of your work.) Leave out either one and your entry is likely to be disqualified. It all comes down to this: The guidelines mean what they say. Follow them.
What does it mean when the guidelines request an SASE? An SASE is a self-addressed, stamped envelope, and it’s often abbreviated in guidelines. Publishers and contest sponsors request them because they can’t afford to keep in touch with you any other way; mailing costs mount up quickly, and nonprofits especially have no slack in their budgets these days—if they ever did. Your SASE should be 1) business sized to make folding the response easier or large enough to return your manuscript if manuscripts will be returned; 2) unsealed; 3) stamped; and 4) addressed (correctly) to you. It should also have the correct postage. When I worked at the Loft, we received a surprising number of sealed SASEs (not to mention a few without addresses or stamps); we appreciated the effort to save us some work, but we were trying to return something in the envelope, either guidelines or a list of contest winners, so we needed access to the inside. Find some other way to be thoughtful.
Many guidelines say “manuscripts will not be returned.” In this case, your SASE should have enough postage for a single sheet of paper—a list of winners. If the contest is willing to return manuscripts and you want yours back, be sure that your envelope is large enough and that you’ve attached enough postage.
If the guidelines ask for an SASP, send a self-addressed, stamped postcard; this is usually used to confirm receipt of your manuscript; many contests are willing to send SASPs back but don’t require them. You don’t need to write anything on it except your address.
What about things the guidelines don’t mention? Don’t worry about them. If the guidelines don’t tell you whether to staple your manuscript, you can assume the sponsors don’t care. Follow a standard format (double-space prose, single space poetry; no more than one poem per page; standard type and margins) unless the guidelines ask for something else, and don’t drive yourself crazy worrying about whether it’s acceptable to type your name in capital letters.
What should you do if you miss the deadline? Resolve to do better next time. Don’t ask for extensions, exceptions, or favors; no contest that hopes to be fair can grant them.
What should you do if today’s the deadline and your manuscript isn’t copied, or if your stapler’s run out of staples? Go to a copy shop; invest in a box of staples; if necessary, stay home and eat chocolate. On the day of every Loft contest deadline, somewhere between one and a dozen people showed up at the office asking for help with copying, assembling, or stapling, and we had to tell them that we couldn’t help. It would have been a disservice to other entrants if some people received help in the preparation of their manuscripts.
Working with the Judge
How can you give your manuscript the best possible chance? As a Loft staff member once put it, your goal when you enter a contest is to avoid causing the judge physical pain; it will detract from his or her enjoyment of your manuscript. This means your manuscript should be cleanly printed—or cleanly typed and copied; that is still possible—and thoroughly proofread. Don’t send your work out until it’s as clean and professional looking as you’re able to make it. Judges have all the normal human failings, and swarms of misspelled words in your manuscript may obscure the beauty of its language or convince the judges that you have no respect for your work.
Judging Your Own Work
How can you tell if your work is good enough to send out? You probably can’t. There is no single standard by which literature is judged. Winning a contest depends not only on the quality, craft, subject, content, attitude, and strength of your writing, but on whether your writing finds a judge attuned to your particular sensibility. If you believe you’ve got a good piece of writing, send it out; if six months and three rejections later you read it and still believe in it, send it out again; if on sober reconsideration it falls apart, then stop sending it out.
Periodically, writers asked staff members for advice on work they wanted to enter in a contest: Was it good enough? Did it need work? Was it hopeless? Human nature being what it is, people will probably keep right on doing this, but any opinion they received would have been meaningless, since the contests were carefully structured so the staff had no control over who the judges chose. If Writer X lobbied the staff so subtly and so persuasively that every last staff member agreed that X was a genius and should win every award handed out during the next fiscal year, it might have done wonders for X’s ego but wouldn’t have done a thing to help X win a contest. The staff did not pass on recommendations, gossip, or bribes to the judges—and the judges wouldn’t have let themselves be influenced if anyone had.
A Final Bit of Advice
How should you approach contests, then? In the end, you can’t control the outcome of a writing contest any more than you can control the rest of your life. The best you can do is this: Read the guidelines carefully, follow them, and send your best work in its best possible shape. Don’t drive yourself crazy, and don’t let the guidelines drive you crazy. Then wait and see what happens.
Good luck!
This essay first appeared in A View from the Loft.
hideWrestling with Form
Wednesday, 9-January-2008I like to think I’m doing something natural when I work on a novel—writing something whose form and content both grow out of the life around me. This is, of course, complete bullshit, but we all need an illusion or three to keep ourselves going.
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The novel feels natural to me because I’ve lived my life in a culture of stories that end when all the threads are brought together, when the problem’s solved, when the characters change either themselves or their circumstances, or when circumstances change the characters. They learn or refuse to learn. They conquer or are conquered. They move on. Or life moves on and they don’t, but that’s a resolution too. I can set the book down and say, yes, it’s finished. There’s nothing left to say, or ask, or wish for. I can turn off the light and go to sleep. And that is a totally artificial construct. Life doesn’t give us an ending. A person’s story resolves, but only for a moment. A mother is reunited with her long-lost daughter, but the next day she finds out that the kid’s older than she was when she was lost, and traumatized, and angry, and frightened, and silent, and the mother has no idea how to be a parent to this new version of her child, and she’s angry herself, and frightened. New story, or an extension of the old one. Where does any story end? Endings are artificial. If you want a happy ending, it ends with the reunion. If you want something more disquieting, more thoughtful, you give the reader a glimpse of the new landscape of their lives. Or maybe it begins there.
If life is a long strand of film, the writer has the scissors. Every story has to begin somewhere. It has to end somewhere. Unlike life. A story is, by its nature, artificial, and maybe the purpose of art is to, by its falseness, make us think about the shape of our lives, because our lives themselves are shapeless--just one damn thing after another, as some sage once said. Any meaning we find is there only because we impose it, or pick it out from a swarm of detail. Another writer, another person living a similar life, would pick out another pattern and find it just as true. Or just as false.
I recently finished reading Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, which doesn’t follow any traditional pattern that I recognize, and although the writing’s fantastic and the story’s both fascinating and important, I was impatient with the book. It didn’t have the impact I thought it would have had if it had taken a more traditional form. I missed the rise and fall of the novel-as-I-know-it. I missed the sense that events were leading into each other, and building toward something. I wanted to lose myself in the story, and I couldn’t. Sure, I could mount an intellectual defense of why Ondaatje might want to break out of the traditional form, but it wouldn’t make me love his work.
Not long ago, an editor sent a novel manuscript back to me saying that a traumatic event at the beginning of the book needed to be present later on. What I’d done instead was let the characters patch their lives up as best they could and go on. People do that, the editor acknowledged, and maybe I should consider writing the story as memoir—if indeed it was one, she added with the wisdom of a post-Frey publishing world. As a novel, it just didn’t satisfy her.
Indeed, however, the story wasn’t anything close to memoir, so that was out. I’d been aware, as I worked on the novel, of the power of that event looming over everything that followed and I’d wondered what to do with it. Why shouldn’t my characters shove the trauma aside and go on? We do, most of us, if we can. Emotional resolution is a myth of pop psychology and novels. We carry our ghosts with us, and we spend a lot of time asking them if they couldn’t please keep it down, we’re trying to sleep. But the novel, as a form, demands that we come back to this event, and do something with it.
So I find myself asking if form isn’t inherently false—satisfying, but false. Have I committed myself to writing a series of reassuring lies?
Initially, I wrote two scenes in response to the editor’s comment, in which my characters came to terms with what happened. They were neat and tidy and wrong, and I dumpted them.
But the form demands resolution.
It took me a while to realize that I was using “resolution” in two different ways: the pop-psych way, which demands that the characters resolve their issues and find some sort of peace, and the literary way, which demands only that the characters come back to the issues and that something change. It asks that they be affected by what’s happened, and that what’s under the surface be brought into the open. In real life we struggle long and hard to avoid that, so even though it’s artificial in fiction, it’s more than just a convention. What gives art its power is that it takes us outside our ordinary lives and our usual evasions and lets us see differently. See what? Anything. Ourselves, our lives, our deaths, our society, a field, a fireplug. If we look deeply enough at anything, we are changed by it.
As I write this, I’m struggling to bring my characters back to the event in a way that acknowledges how deeply it’s marked them and shows how they’ve chosen to carry that scar through their lives. Without the artificial demand of the form, I’d have missed that. Like my characters—like myself in real life—I’d have hidden from the pain that confrontation and discovery causes, and been the poorer for it.
Conspiracy Theories 101: The Bastards Are Lying to Us
Wednesday, 9-January-2008Partway through the first draft of Open Line, I began to wonder where the idea for the book had come from. I don't mean why I began it, or how: I had just finished work on a novel and set out to write one-page summaries of three novels that I didn't plan to write. It was an exercise, like playing scales. I began the first one with a radio talk-show host who wanted to quit her job and went on the air with some ridiculous claim. What, I asked myself, was crazy enough? The Vietnam War never happened. It was all a massive government cover-up. The idea was so absurd, and had such great energy, that I forgot about the other summaries and sat down to see where this one would take me.
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But that didn’t answer the question. What kind of maniac comes up with the idea that the Vietnam War never happened, and why did the idea have such energy?
Not long after that I was reading Stanley Karnow’s magnificent Vietnam: A History, because every nut theory needs a solid grounding in fact, and when I came to the section on the Tonkin Gulf incident, it hit me: Of course we believe in conspiracies. The bastards are lying to us every time we turn around. I didn’t stop to ask what bastards I had in mind. Most of the time we don’t know, and not knowing only increases our paranoia.
The Tonkin Gulf incident involved two American destroyers claiming to have been attacked by North Vietnamese vessels, and President Johnson used the incident to stampede Congress into a resolution of support for the war. Only later did it come out that there was no attack--the ships’ sonar had been functioning erratically--and that the government knew that but used the story for all it was worth, which was quite a bit.
The incident itself wasn’t news to me and neither was the way it had been used. I lived through that period. What was new was the context. I had never stopped to think about what it means to be lied to constantly.
We live in a culture of lies. Cigarettes don’t cause cancer. Evolution is only a theory. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Jessica Lynch was a ninety-pound hero. Human activity isn’t the cause of global warming. Agent Orange is only a defoliant. Wonder Bread helps build strong bodies eight ways. Lies are so thick on the ground that only the most determined of us can make out, underneath them, the actual shape of the world we live in. In Britain, a July 2007 poll reported that 74 percent of the public agreed that much of what they saw on TV, even when it looked real, was made up; only 22 percent trusted what they saw. This followed a series of scandals at the BBC (none of them, in my jaundiced view, earthshaking) demonstrating that the 74 percent had it right.
It’s a recipe for paranoia.
I grew up in the fifties, in the midst of the Cold War and the McCarthy Period, when trust in our government--oh, hell, that’s so important I’ll capitalize it: Trust in Our Government--was the national religion. Question that and you were an abomination, maybe even a communist. After Watergate, I remember thinking that things would never be the same. The government had been publicly exposed as a sinister (and absurd, and only moderately competent) liar. The belief that the government knows best was dead. I assumed that meant things would get better, that Americans would be more skeptical, not that a swath of us would simply relocate our credulity.
Why not, though? We’re busy. Most of us don’t have the time or the skills to research what’s going on around us. It’s tempting, it’s easy, and it’s comforting to take our opinions from people who seem to know what they’re talking about. We know that our government (and everyone else with power) lies to us and that our lives are driven by forces we don’t control and can’t necessarily name. Vice President Cheney meets with a group of people he won’t identify and lo, energy policy is (apparently) set. Lobbyists approach the members of Congress and bills are written, campaign donations made, backs slapped. Okay, I don’t really know if it works exactly that way, I only know that something important is going on out of sight. And that’s my point. This is the real working of government (and of business, while we’re at it), after the public drama of campaigns and promises is over for another season, and we can’t see what’s happening. It’s a paranoid’s nightmare. A group of people in suits talk to each other in a boardroom somewhere, or play golf, or chat on the phone--what do I know about how it happens?--and a drug your grandmother needs in order to keep walking, or your child needs in order to keep breathing, is put on the market at an astronomical price even though it was researched with government funds, so no, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus and if insurance doesn’t cover it they’ll either have to pay for it themselves or do without. Sorry. Is that a conspiracy or just business as usual? These actions shape our lives, create the landscape through which we move, and we have no idea when they happen, or how, or even if, never mind who the actors are.
Fiction writers are fond of saying that we lie in order to tell a deeper truth. Conspiracy theorists may not be deliberately lying--I have no idea--but they are expressing a deep cultural truth: The bastards are lying to us. Something’s going on out of sight, and it’s important. That’s why conspiracy claims have such traction. They may be fabrications, they may be misunderstandings, they may be a mix of paranoia and prejudice, but they express a deeper, even more disquieting truth.
Conspiracy theorists thrive on a rich bloom of detail, on the improbability of actual fact, and on questions they don’t have to answer. They call on us to think for ourselves and they provide us with a framework within which, all too often, we can slot details into place, happy in the illusion that we really are doing our own thinking, although all we’ve done is traded one form of ignorance for another. They tell us who really shot Kennedy, that Wellstone’s plane was sabotaged, that the Jews knew about 9/11 beforehand and stayed out of work that day, that the black helicopters are coming, that two planes didn’t bring down the World Trade Center, a controlled explosion did, that no human has ever set foot on the moon. Pick a theory, any theory, and the facts, if you’re careful in how you select them, can be made to support it.
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