Characters That Lift Off the Page

Molly Friedrich, a top notch New York literary agent, says, “First of all, is there anybody out there who doesn't know that the easiest thing to sell is plot? But the thing that everybody wants is an original voice. And the thing that's kind of stuck in the middle is character.” To my mind, the reason to write a story is to become the witness to its characters. What lives on after you finish a book isn’t the plot. Voice, that of the writer, the narrator of the story, may be extremely important. But once I put down a book, what I take away is indelible characters. If I don’t care about them, I am not going to remember their story.

There is an objective criteria for great work, work “that may interest people in 2052,” as Irene Nemirovsky says. But it doesn’t mean that I am going to read every single great book. I’m going to read the ones that answer my questions, that have characters I can love and ponder, that point me in the directions I need to go. Thus, in my case, I will read Colette, whose most important character is Sido, her mother. But I am probably not going to read Slaughterhouse Five, no matter how important Billy Pilgrim’s life and death are deemed by all.

Often the main character is the author himself. Just as, in meeting people, presence quickly tells you who someone is, good books lead you quickly into the presence of the author. The love they lavish on their characters becomes what we feel. Who doesn’t long after Caddy Compson, as her brothers Quentin and Benjy do in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, though we are never allowed to hear her voice. I loved the passionate character Aksinia in Quiet Flows the Don, as Sholokhov must have. Whenever I go back to his books, I skip everything except the parts in which she is found.

James Salter

Don and I are reading Light Years together, the luminous prose of James Salter. I don’t think he meant the character of Nedra to take over the book, but she does. The book becomes Salter’s homage to a beautiful, fully alive woman. She is partly imagined, but he also knew a woman upon whom the character is based. In Burning the Days, his memoir, he says of the woman he knew, “I loved her, her frankness and charm, the extravagance and devotion to her children. I never tired of seeing her and listening to her talk. She smoked, drank, laughed raucously. There was no caution in her. … Hers was a singular life. It had no achievements other than itself. It declared, in its own way, that there are things that matter and these are the things one must do. Life is energy, it proclaimed, life is desire. You are not meant to understand everything but to live and do certain things. Despite all I had written about her, there was more.”

I don’t claim anything for my characters at the moment, except that I know and love them. Line, Marty and Paul begin their lives in The Pastor’s Kids and, Deo volente, continue into several other books. To achieve great characters, one must give oneself to them, but also have the craft with which to do so. We shall see, as the Norwegians say.

Where is John Bayley When We Need Him?

Most people know John Bayley, if at all, as the husband of Iris Murdoch, portrayed in the movie Iris based on his memoir of her. Because of my early involvement with Pasternak and other Russian writers, I knew him long before that from his criticism, with a special affinity for the Russians, published in the New York Review of Books. A professor at Oxford University, he has spoken for over 50 years with great authority on the vast subject of world literature. He comes to it with a perspective which I find both instructive and validating.

For instance, in an essay on Czeslaw Milosz published in the NYRB, 1981, and reprinted in The Power of Delight, his collected essays, he points to what seems unique in Milosz: “the reality of the thing, the return of the thing … Things, in the sense in which the nineteenth-century novel both assumed and created them have not been central to the American literary consciousness. In their place have been legends and ideas and consciousness itself.” He goes on to note that American artists seek relief from freedom, but that in Milosz, who survived youth in Lithuania/Poland during World War II and was later a professor at UC Berkeley for almost 40 years, ideology had died a natural death. “Life itself, and the reverence for it, becomes then the precious thing to be explored and celebrated,” writes Bayley.

Bayley returns again and again to the significance of Pasternak. In 1967, he sees him as the natural heir of Tolstoy. He writes in Tolstoy and the Novel “Pasternak shares with Tolstoy the power of transforming and humanizing the actual and the terrible, not by shutting himself away from it but by remaining unexcited by it. Neither has an ambiguous relation to violence, or gives way to the novelist’s temptation to dispense it as an earnest of truth. … The main thing about Zhivago is not that he is a doctor or even a poet, but that like Pierre and Levin, he is a good man – a good man buried alive in an age in which men have ‘come to themselves half-conscious and with half their memory gone’. It is his task to show how they can be made whole again.”

I could go on quoting Bayley! His insights are expressed so clearly and are so appropriate to the discussion of literature in contemporary America. [We have a Brazilian student staying with us, and Don reminds me that American may mean much more than a citizen of the United States. Camila says, however, that Brazilians also use “American” to mean “coming from the United States.”] Garth Hallberg brings up the question “Why Write Novels at All?” in an essay in the New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/magazine/why-write-novels-at-all.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=garth%20hallberg&st=cse] which points to the writers currently holding sway here, and their ambiguity about what they are doing. He finds it rare to find characters that acknowledge the existence of others, that “require me to imagine a consciousness independent of my own, and equally real.”

Bayley brings all sides of the question into his capacious critique. During the time he has been writing, the totalitarian governments of Russia and the Slovakian countries have been a foil for Western literature, and these are what he knows best. In 1990, Bayley reflected on the paradox of Pasternak’s art, which “is at once totally popular and totally narcissistic.” He thus discriminates, considering Pasternak’s poetry better than the novel Doctor Zhivago. But he also says, “the novel, as D.H. Lawrence saw, is ‘incapable of the absolute,’ and gains in its own ways from its lapses and imperfections.”

We are struggling out of a cultural trough, I believe, looking for the wave that will next crest. The search for the self which Western literature developed in art, now indeed seems like a prison. Bayley notes that Milosz “is not after himself, but after that old European goal of cultivation and understanding, enlightenment and humanitas.”

See what I mean? Bayley points us in the right direction.

Writing Rough

Longhand is defined as “ordinary handwriting, in which letters, words, etc., are set down in full, as opposed to shorthand or to typing.” I have always loved cursive and remember spending hours in high school classes practicing my penmanship, particularly my long name! (I was recently told that “k’s” are funny. My name has lots of them! People have asked me more than once if it was Finnish.)

Acquiring some speed in cursive, I took pounds of handwritten notes throughout college. I never learned shorthand, so most of them were readable, taken down in Shaeffer’s cartridge pens with blue ink. At the time, I was convinced that writing down as much of the teaching as I could was helping me to learn it. These notes have not survived, but I do have letters written home at that time, in that watery blue ink!

Recently I’ve been interested in the kinds of work for which I use longhand as opposed to typing. Keyboards have now become so ubiquitous in our lives that schools hardly bother to insist on handwriting skill. But pens and notebooks are cheaper to carry around than computers. You can use them in the sun and longhand has an intimate physical quality. Sometimes other physical aspects of the writing get onto the page, like the tracing of a leaf shadow, or a splash of your coffee. When I get close to a finished written product, of course I use a keyboard. But for rough notes, for journals, for thinking, I like handwriting.

Journaling, the addiction that has sustained me since I read “The Diary of Anne Frank” as a teenager and took up the practice, is usually done by hand. As opposed to weblogs, which are intended for publication and thus in readable print, journaling is private. Because I find I am not going to edit the cheap spiral bound books I carried everywhere with me, I now use the classic Moleskin notebooks. Like writers everywhere, I am grateful to the Italian company who revived them! Necessarily chronological and linear, there is no database searching in these journals. But I do reread them to find out what ideas I’ve had (and lost) at different times.

Though they weren’t new to me, I wasn’t immune to the flare-up of writing practices which Natalie Goldberg set off in 1986 with her book Writing Down the Bones. She advocated emptying the contents of your mind into notebooks, just to find out what you thought. Her central idea was to keep the hand moving; don’t control it or censor your thoughts. It might result in pedestrian, everyday thoughts, but you might also surprise yourself into deeper self-knowledge. Of course, “writing practice” as Goldberg described it, was done with handwriting.

Yesterday, as Don and I drove back from dismantling a film set in San Francisco and other errands, we wrote a short script he needed for the promo film he is shooting today. As he talked, I wrote a longhand version of the script in a tiny notebook. I carry versions of this notebook everywhere, for lists and notes. Organizing the work when we got home, Don said, “Okay, if you type it up while it’s still fresh, I’ll unload everything!”

What I found in working on The Pastor’s Kids was that, when I wasn’t sure what I was doing or what details were going into a chapter, I would sit somewhere writing rough, at speed in longhand, whatever thoughts and ideas I had. These pages circled around characters and ideas, going beyond and under what actually got into the chapter. Notes about time and place, details I wanted to capture, references which brought back whole incidents, things I didn’t want to forget. I shoved them all rudely onto paper. No ability to search here either, but the brain doesn’t need it. It is holographic, in the sense that each piece of the brain’s memory contains some information about the whole. A visual detail, a smell can bring back whole pieces of one’s past.

And what do we make of the fact that a handwritten document is a holograph, written entirely in the handwriting of the person under whose name it appears? Does each piece of handwriting contain a bit of the whole? Perhaps!

Reality Hunger

For more than ten years, Don has wanted to make a movie showing the seductive, even insidious, effects of letting media take over our lives. We recently discovered the French thinker Baudrillard, who said we live “sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real.” People now are more interested in the reflected life they watch on screens, in Facebook, in movies and on television. We are losing the ability to relate to the world and to each other except through a secondhand cultural life dispensed to us by the media. In this world we find ourselves agreeing with one or another political position, clinging to the ideas of one or another culture hero or celebrity, at the mercy of streaming ads for fashions, travel, technology and theories about economics, health and education.

But the self-evident world beneath the context of meaning and references provided by our profane culture is still there. A ground of being more luminous, more magical and powerful than any indirect experience of it exists. The architect and mathematician Christopher Alexander believes people see reality in terms of Cartesian mechanics, assuming everything is a machine. “With the onset of the 20^th-century mechanistic world-picture, clear understanding about value went out of the world,” he writes. In this world, we see each other’s significance as objects, not the shining reality of each other. In this world, as Alexander says, “nothing matters.”

I just read The Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, a prolific author, seen as “one of the most celebrated writers of his generation.” Despite his narrative gifts, the book demonstrated conclusively that “nothing matters”! It seemed to me that Chabon took a bunch of cards with items on them and threw them randomly into the text. One of his characters speaks for him, saying “I closed my eyes and tried to clear my head of this proof of the uselessness of Albert Vetch’s art, of all art and energy and human life in general.” Most of my book club agreed that they were wholly uninterested in reading the work of a person with this view on life! I see this view in many modern writers and feel sad for them.

The answer is in attention. Baudrillard retreated into silent witness to the self-evidence of the world, paradoxically using photography. In his view, the silent, still photograph can sometimes give us a sense of what the world is like in our absence, unobstructed by the layers of significance we lay upon images. Alexander posits a “ground” of reality. For Alexander, “value is the measure of the degree of connectedness a given place, or thing, or event, has with the ground.” He sought methods of determining value, finding it a definite and fundamental part of the universe. For him, “art is not merely pleasant or interesting. It has an importance that goes to the very core of the cosmology.” In the new view of the world Alexander promotes, everything matters.

We are seeing people’s hunger for value, and the real ground beneath us in many different places: in the provenance movement in which people want to know exactly where their food is coming from and how it was handled; in the popularity of bluegrass music people make themselves; in the Occupy movement in which people are trying to bring the economy back down to human scale and find new relations to each other; and in the fact that so many young people support Ron Paul, “strongly rejecting traditional American hubris in favor of Paul’s more empirical views on foreign policy.” [David Sirota, Salon, November 28, 2011.]

Don and I are working on a movie called Nothing in a Rectangle Is True which deals with these issues. You can experience it on a Facebook page [ironically enough!] in which our characters interact, questioning the hold the object-oriented dominant culture has over us. http://www.facebook.com/nothinginarectangleistrue

My project, So Are You To My Thoughts, is also undertaken squarely in loving attention to particular fictional times and places, to the growth of my protagonists, Line, Marty and Paul. Born into a wholistic mono-culture steeped in value, which sustains them in their search for individuality and diversity, I hope to see them become full and bountiful grownups. We are all fractals for the expanding universe. I write in the attempt to come face to face with the ground of being. 

Hootenanny

According to Todd Gitlin in “The Sixties,” “Folk music was the living prayer of a defunct movement, gingerly holding the place of a Left in American culture.” A socialist party organizer named Myles Horton ran the Highlander Folk School in the hills of Tennessee from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s, where workshops were given for civil rights workers, and folk and gospel songs were learned and spread around. Striking North Carolina tobacco workers had a song called “I Will Overcome,” which, spread through the Folk School to Pete Seeger, became the anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

All this would have been news to my parents. Staunchly anti-Communist as we all were during the Cold War, they nevertheless warmed to folk music. The earliest records I remember were folk songs by Marais and Miranda on old 78’s. Josef Marais was from South Africa and once he met his wife Miranda, they had a successful partnership singing and playing South African traditional folk ballads as well as others. How well I remember “Train to Kimberly,” with its sounds imitating the train, a song made by native South Africans who watched the first trains running up to the diamond mines. I find here http://www.maraisandmiranda.com/, that the lullaby I’ve always used “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” may also have come from them!

One of the few things on television my Dad came out of his study to watch was the Tennessee Ernie Ford variety television show, which ran from 1956 to 1961. I see it as a pre-cursor to the folk music hit scene in the 1960’s. Like his earlier radio show, it included country and western and pop songs and a gospel song at the end of every evening. We owned some of his gospel albums and I can still hear Tennessee Ernie’s voice singing songs such as “Faith of Our Fathers.”

Ian & Sylvia

Folk music came out of the woodwork and spun a hit show across the television networks called “Hootenanny” from 1963 to 1964. My Dad set up a reel to reel magnetic tape recorder above the television set and taped all the shows! We kids learned how to use it and I remember many evenings holding my littlest sister as she fell asleep to the music of Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, The Chad Mitchell Trio.

Looking back, I find that “Hootenanny” sparked controversy in folk circles, unbeknownst to those of us out in the hinterlands. Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie were the first to publicize the term “hootenanny,” but Seeger was asked to perform only if he provided information about his past involvements with the Communist Party. He refused and many folk singers boycotted the show as a result. Seeger’s first appearance on network television was on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1969. By then I was long gone. I heard the legendary Seeger in the flesh only once, hosting and singing in impromptu folk/blues concerts below the Lincoln Memorial at the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. in 1968.

Connecting the Dots

Perhaps it was appropriate that I was much more involved in literature than politics as a young person, as in northeast Iowa we were far from the seats of power. Nevertheless, American politics did have its effect on us. We avidly listened to news discussions and debates on television on winter afternoons, read what we could in magazines and discussed current events in school. It just felt so far away!

Thus I was delighted to run across someone only slightly older than me, who had lived and worked in Washington, D.C. from 1966 through 1974. Judith Nies published The Girl I Left Behind: A Narrative History of the Sixties in 2008 as an explanation for her daughter of the political life she had led and why she left it. In direct, vivid prose she describes her education and her work, telling stories of the people she met and her growing understanding.

She had three very interesting jobs in Washington, first working for The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, where she met some of the activist women who had campaigned for and finally won the vote for women in 1919. Telling their stories, she connects their influence to the amazing women who were instrumental in preventing atmospheric nuclear testing and stood up to the House Un-American Activities Commission in 1961 saying, “We are a movement, not an organization,” and then to the “second wave” of feminists.

From 1968 to 1970 Nies worked for a coalition of ten congressmen who were opposed to the war in Viet Nam, coordinating hearings on the war which resulted in two important books which she edited with Erwin Knoll, War Crimes and the American Conscience and American Militarism. Her last job in Washington was for congressman Don Frazer and the Women’s Equity Action League, working on examining how American leadership is selected and trained. The book wonderfully describes her growing understanding of privilege as it relates particularly to those who develop America’s foreign policy.

Judith Nies’ book connected many dots for me on the atmosphere of those early days as well as what it would have been like to be smart, working class, and yet have aspirations toward foreign policy work. My family had a strong, empathetic interest in foreign affairs. My parents housed Displaced Persons after World War II. We were always interested in what missionaries traveling through our area had to say. And perhaps the literature that we read so avidly opened us to the understanding of others as well. But no amount of study could give me the insights Judith Nies received from being on the scene. I recommend her book.

Fit Company for Themselves

In addition to editing “The Pastor’s Kids,” I’ve begun to let the sequel creep into my consciousness. I know what will be in it to some extent, but I haven’t let myself imagine the actual incidents. In a way, this, the “making up” part, is my favorite part of writing. First though, I’m dealing with the title.

For a while the second book has been called “Bound Away” from the American folk song “Shenandoah.” Bruce Springsteen has a version I’ve been listening to:

            “Shenandoah, I love your daughter

            Away, you rolling river

            I’ll take her across the water

            Away, bound away

            Cross the wide Missouri.”

But if you don’t hear it as part of the song, you might think it was a matter of “bounding away” like a rabbit across a meadow. My characters actually make the transition from a 19^th Century to a 20^th Century world view in this second book. But it isn’t without a certain amount of anguish. No one bounds away with delight. It is more a matter of being dragged, taken away.

I toyed with phrases from Simon and Garfunkel lyrics, which show the pain of beginning to be your own person, such as in “Kathy’s Song”:

“And so you see I have come to doubt

All that I once held as true.

I stand alone without beliefs

The only truth I know is you.

And as I watch the drops of rain

Weave their weary paths and die,

I know that I am like the rain

There but for the grace of you go I.”

Or the lightness and attempt to hold the sweetness and irresponsibility of youth in “The 59^th Street Bridge Song” (if you can’t hear the melody as you read these lyrics, look the songs up on YouTube!):

“I've got no deeds to do,

No promises to keep.

I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep.

Let the morning time drop all it's petals on me.

Life, I love you,

All is groovy.”

But Line, Marty and Paul just aren’t there yet. In the second book there is still a formality which hasn’t fallen away from their lives. Intellectually they are moving into open space, but tradition holds them. In the second book, Line and Marty go to college and Paul finishes high school. They are full of ideals inherited directly from their European ancestors, and they know no others. The epiphanies that come to them they don’t yet understand.

An English proverb states, “Learning makes people fit company for themselves.” A liberal arts education doesn’t help one earn a living as much as it helps one’s understanding and love of life. Line, Marty and Paul were treated to such an education in the early 1960’s. Thus, I believe the title “Fit Company for Themselves” reflects the cultural story space in which we will find them in the sequel to “The Pastor’s Kids.”