to be haunted and inspired

Ghosts and muses.  Let's think about both.  Last Wednesday in the bookstore,  I ran into  the widow of a beloved Washington man of letters who had also been my MFA advisor.  I have long admired and liked this woman, and as we began catching up, she told me she had recently begun writing about her late husband. It was new terrain, since she had never been a writer before.  Now she sits at her late husband's desk and asks him to guide her.  She's writing about the first few weeks of their love affair - and also the last few weeks of his life.  It was difficult, she said, but also a powerful solace.

So I told her something that happened to me when I was writing my novel I KNOW WHERE I AM WHEN I'M FALLING which is largely about a man I once loved. At the end of the novel, I imagine how he might have died at sea.

I was living in Rome when I wrote a lot of that book and I was also teaching at The American University of Rome.  This particular afternoon, I had been writing the part where I imagined him dying, and having gone very far into my imagination, I needed a break.

 So I stopped writing, and turned my thoughts to a course I was teaching.  Suddenly the opening lines of Dickens' Hard Times came to mind - "Now, what I want is Facts."  It struck me as amusing, and I thought I might begin here, so I turned to the bookcase behind me, to see if I had a copy of that novel.  Turns out, I didn't. 

Bear with me, because here comes the haunting.  Either that, or it was a series of odd coincidences worthy of Dickens himself.  Because when I saw I didn't have a copy of Hard Times, I took down another Dickens' novel, Bleak House and opened the book at random.  To my surprise, I discovered a card, that had been slid into the book many years before.

tucked into a copy of Bleak House

 It came from my former lover.  He had written this card to me.  I opened it and this is what I read:

his message

Astonished, I then found a second card in the book - a Christmas card from the same man.

I have no recollection of the original context

I couldn't remember the original context of that message.   But eager for more apparent 'messages' from beyond the grave, I took at random a second book from the shelf - a book from the same incomplete Dickens' collection,  Child's History of England and Christmas Stories.  

Once again, I opened the volume at random - and my eyes fell on these words:

 A Message from the Sea

"Amanda!" exclaimed my friend in the bookstore, when I told her this story.

"I know!" I replied.  "Which goes to show, we must listen out for messages."  After all, I told her, we can think about them, so why shouldn't they be able to think about us?

"Well," she said, "He better be thinking about me!"

Sometimes we are haunted by ghosts from the past and writing about them breathes new life into them - gives them their second coming.

And muses?  Well, perhaps they are more benign, more gracious. They are the ones we encounter on occasion and for whatever reason, they light up the creative imagination. A friend recently observed that really, a girl need never know that she is someone's muse.  Dante it is said, never met Beatrice.  He only saw her leaving church one morning and from then on he was done for. She was his inspiration!  Does it matter why?  Which is to say, you never know where inspiration comes from. And you should never underestimate the power of the world to throw something surprising in your direction.  Stay receptive! We need to harness the blessings of all our ghosts and muses.

click. like. win

My super supportive friend thinks I should have a larger on line presence.  I need to work it - and keep swinging the bat to get my novel I KNOW WHERE I AM WHEN I'M FALLING  seen and appreciated because, let's just say it has not been a blockbuster.  He thinks my time to shine has come and I should step out of the shadows and into the light.

And although being in the light is where I want to be, I find it so hard to make a conscious effort to present myself over social media.  To get the right kind of traction you must walk a very thin line. You must do it somehow, without bullshit or pretension, or at least without bullshit or pretension you aren't willing to defend forever.  I'm not sure I know how.

 For someone like me, who was brought up to believe that showing off was the absolute worst thing I could do, there's a kind of shame in self promotion. I'm British by birth - old school at that, and it's baked into my DNA.  I never quite learned the American art of the hustle because frankly, although that works in New York, it goes over poorly in other places where I've lived, where understatement, modesty and yes, a bit of old fashioned dignity, are valued more.

My daughter Rozzie says that basically,  when you promote your work, you either have to commit to a mask or be really clear about not having one and being proud of who you are.

Of course all creative artists want people to see what they have to offer. We want readers, listeners, viewers. We want our work to sprout wings, above and beyond ourselves - to soar unattached to us into the hearts of other people, and in that way to be ennobled.

So then to turn around and have to promote - to have to keep saying "look at me" until everyone is sick to death of you, seems to bring it down, you down and everyone else down, subjecting the work to different rules.

Of course, we do what we can. We work hard and put out our best material,  we write to agents and submit to loads of independent presses and post stuff on line and write blog posts like this and update our websites. Then we wait for someone else to approve that it is worthy.

Sometimes people stop by and say good job.  At other times they tell you that yes, it is worthy. And at the best of times  they fall in love with what you do.  I will never forget when an agent told me that I had given her the book that she loved.  But the book she could sell? That would be something different.

After all, the work has to make someone money.  So the one who you are waiting for to approve that it's worthy is the one who sees the dollar signs.  People also like to see that someone else has given your work the stamp of approval before they give it a try, and you can bet they'll come flocking when they see you've already got a long line of fans. 

Ultimately, what I find difficult is making the switch between the self  I was trying to be when I wrote the book and the ego who has to bullshit and tempt unsuspecting readers into my little lair.

Do I want unsuspecting readers? Do I need all the clicks and likes to make me legit, to get my work read?  This is the internet age, after all. A good friend in the London theater world tells me that roles are often given to actors on the basis of the biggest twitter following.

I feel grateful and humbled when on its own steam, my little book finds its way into people's hearts. How unexpectedly beautiful it was when the high school girlfriend of my ex - (main character Angus in my novel) wrote to me and we made a connection; when I heard from a former student from all those years ago who had never forgotten me, and never knew I was going through the trouble I describe in the novel; when a woman wrote that she found companionship in my book while going through hell with her son; when a reader told me she read my book deep into the night, and found in speaking to her own experience.

A lot of the media hype we are subjected to  - the tweets and the click bait and the Facebook likes are nothing more than white noise.  So, quantity over quality? Sure.  But I definitely need to find some balance between utter obscurity and the industrial scale click bait attention seeking I find so unpalatable.  Would love to hear your thoughts on this, so please, post them below.

about the real and the pretended

There couldn't have been a better escape from winter in Washington than reading A Room with a View.  It was this month's selection with my Classic Book Discussion Group.  I may have read it in my twenties, but the charm and wit of this novel had been superseded in my mind by the film adaptation with Helene Bonham Carter and Maggie Smith.  For one thing, it's a young book. Forster was not yet thirty when he wrote it, so although it has many layers, his touch is playful, his wit and observations very fresh.

Forster was gay but his novel Maurice, a love story between two men, wasn't published until after his death.  As Pamela pointed out today in our discussion, it's easy to see Lucy Honeychurch's "muddle" through the lens of Forster's own search for love.

He writes so touchingly about the real and the pretended - but his sense of humor is never far away. 

From the moment Lucy meets the Emersons at the pension in Florence and they offer Lucy and Miss Bartlett their rooms with the view of the Arno, a distinction is made.  Miss Bartlett sees this as a breach of etiquette – but it's a kindness they cannot decline after the Emersons have heard their complaints about their own rooms.

To the observers of propriety, generosity works as a strike against them. The other guests see Mr Emerson as unrefined, eccentric and socially beneath them.  They are not invited to join excursions to galleries and churches because “they don’t understand our ways. They must find their level."

Lucy is secretly pleased by them.  Mr Emerson is a straight shooter and a modern thinker, and when she faints and young George walks her back to the pension after the murder in the piazza,  it's not only another breach of etiquette, but a real life experience which links them.  The veneer of etiquette is stripped away and something inside her switches on.

Oh, but what a muddle! "It isn't true. It can't all be true. I want not to be muddled," she says aloud to herself.

And there's so much humor in the minor characters.  What about Miss Lavish, the literary hack, who swoops in and picks up Lucy's experience after the murder in the piazza? Her book is to be about love murder abduction and revenge and Lucy is correct in her fears that Miss Lavish sees in her the makings of the ingénue.  But Lucy is a naif, taking things in and experiencing them genuinely - having her awakening.  Forster gives us real feeling and pretended feeling, false politeness and honest self expression.

Cecil of course, is all about manners, affectation, book knowledge and feelings borrowed from books. When he sees Lucy in Rome, he is struck by a new complexity in her, which is the result of her genuine awakening with George Emerson.

The dichotomy between indoors and outdoors, rooms with view and those without is so enchantingly implemented, when Cecil tries to take Lucy off the path and into the woods.  He wonders why she's reluctant, and declares that she's only really comfortable with him in a room.

"She reflected a moment, and then said, laughing: 'Do you know that you're right? I do. I must be a poetess after all. When I think of you it's always as in a room. How funny!" His subsequent attempt at romance is clumsy, he who has “depths of prudishness in him” and their embrace is absurd – contrived.  But yet it privately disturbs him that he's unable to pull it off because “passion should believe itself irresistible.”

She encounters George outdoors again in England, for the first time since their meeting in Italy.  And because he is natural – because there is no affectation in him,  Lucy cannot help but be pleased. Even his awkwardness goes straight to her heart.

In the marvelous scene where they play tennis – involving Lucy’s brother Freddy, Cecil refuses to participate.  He has never been one for games, so that while George is trying to win, Cecil keeps interrupting by reading what turns out to the book Miss Lavish wrote in Florence.   "He had been rather a nuisance all through the tennis, for the novel that he was reading was so bad that he was obliged to read it aloud to others”.  I love the way that quoting this book is the only authority Cecil has in the conversation.

Only when Lucy breaks off her engagement to Cecil does he open a window, and when he does, poor thing, it is dark outside.  And here's another reason the novel has aged so well: when Lucy breaks it off with Cecil it is not to be with George – but to be her own person. Even though George loves her and has awakened her, she believes she must never marry.   She reflects that “the contest lay not between love and duty.  Perhaps there never is such a contest.  It lay between the real and the pretended.” 

And who could not be charmed by Mr Emerson's final words to Lucy. “I taught him to trust in love. I said: ‘ when love comes that is reality.’ I said: passion does not blind. No.  Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.”

You have to agree, it is sheer perfection!

the candle burns down to its nub

Trumpocrasy by David Frum was the first book I read in February.  I had the privilege of hosting Frum at Politics and Prose, and before the event, I sat with him as he signed books in a thick red pen. I offered him a standard black, which he refused. "This book was written in blood!" he explained.

Frum is the man who coined the phrase "Axis of Evil" when he was George W's special adviser and speech writer. Trumpocrasy describes the chaos of Donald Trump's  administration, in which Frum sees reason to believe that "we are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered."

Unlike Michael Wolf's Fire and Fury, which is a gossipy book about an abhorrent and deeply unqualified man,  Frum's book focuses on Trump's policies - on his systematic unraveling of the Republic by degrading its national dialog; on how he has paralyzed the state by staffing his administration with self-seekers and incompetents; on how he has refused to fill key positions in the State Department... and so on. 

But yet we still dream, and Laura Wides Munoz The Making Of A Dream is about several dreamers coming of age, and the coming of age of a movement.  Also more hopeful and nuanced was Patrick Sharkey's Uneasy Peace about American cities, where the crime rate is lower than it's been for decades - but how if we look at the poorest segments in the population, we will see how over-policing has damaged and abandoned the most vulnerable segment of our urban populations.

 I had the opportunity to speak with both these authors at the bookstore, and found them intelligent and honest, well meaning, and yes, also pure somehow. It gave me hope for our times.

Last week I also met Vegas Tenold and read his book Everything You Love Will Burn. Tenold is a Norwegian socialist - a bald white guy who lives in Brooklyn, and he credits his Norwegian bald male whiteness with his success in infiltrating several alt right groups. He wants to understand what makes these people tick.

I cannot imagine anything more depressing than what he put himself through to write this book. That is, he devoted six years of weekends to hanging out with leaders of the KKK  and the likes of Matthew Heimbach, leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, whose text message on the morning of Trump's victory gave him a book title: "Wisconsin goes to Trump. Everything you love will burn! LOL smiley face."

It's the "LOL Smiley face" that  make this a message for our times. WTF!

February is cold and depressing and now it is over. Dogs are tracking mud into the house and the winds have been uncommonly high.  But I visited my wonderful family in  San Francisco and read  Barbarian Days by William Finnegan, about which I could certainly write more.  Except what I really want to write about is Embers by Sandor Marai, an extraordinary Hungarian novel only recently translated into English - and recommended to my book group by Alice, one of our most active members.

Embers was a high point of this month's reading to be sure. It's the story of memory and friendship and also the loss of friendship. Two old men meet for dinner in a Hungarian castle and look back on THE story that defined their lives - on their boyhood friendship and a relationship with a woman, on things unspoken, ruminated upon, deeply felt and experienced in echos. I understand that the literal translation of the original Hungarian title is "the candle burns down to its nub" - which while less poetic than "Embers" is an apt metaphor. Serious passion, even though relinquished, continues to burn into old age, extinguished only by death.

Things unspoken can still be articulated and I enjoy the peace and concentration of being back in the sculpture studio. I think I like myself better when I'm sculpting. Words don't always help, so I listen to the clay.