Reading to write

The new writing idea I’m developing involves finding out about things I have ideas about but not a lot of information, so I’m reading, both on the internet and in books (oh, hail to the Wellington Public Library!) and writing a little. And there' a lot of thinking going on, and sketching of family trees to keep the generations clear in my head and hence on the page. (Once I inadvertently had a minor character have a baby at age 11, when I didn’t pay enough attention to dates and generations.)

I also plan to get my collection of short pieces, the one I tentatively call Stones Gathered Together, into final shape and published as an ebook. My self-imposed deadline for this is the end of this year, so I must remember to give it attention; the excitement of a new project tends to take over my mind. Here’s a photograph I took that might make it onto the cover. Although design experts say you should not use obvious images on a cover, I do l like this one.

Pleasing news of the week—a story I entered into the New Zealand Flash FIction contest (http://nationalflash.wordpress.com/) has made it to the next round.

My ideas about the new project change as I read, and I’ve never been keen on talking about the content of work in progress, so there’s not going to be a lot of plot revealed in these notes.

Books Books Books, or, What I’ve Been reading

I missed the brilliance so many others have found in Emily Perkins’ The Forrest, as did the five other members of my book group. None of the characters engaged me, not even Dorothy, who loves Daniel all of her life in a way he will never love her, which should have been moving, but I was irritated. At the beginning I enjoyed the detail involving the characters’ senses of things in the physical world, but, while each separate piece was excellent, the cumulative effect was—that word again—irritating. By page 64 I wanted to scream at this:

"He dug a ready-rolled cigarette from the pocket of his jacket. Tiny brown curls of tobacco dangled from the end of the cigarette paper and when touched by the flame from his match they illuminated bright orange and disappeared."

It’s good description, but there have been so many good description of small details by page 64 that the characters are buried under the sensations, the detail, and I’ve had enough. Clearly many others hadn’t, because there have been rave revues from all over the world. (The last time I remember being so badly out of step over a book was when Sandra Coney and I seemed to be the only people who hated Lynley Hood’s biography of Sylvia Ashton Warner.) On page 201 Dorothy throws away a pen without bothering to put its two pieces together, because, “there was nothing left to protect.” That bald statement had a strong emotional impact. I guess that was what I wanted more of, but then, Emily Perkins was writing her book.

Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is actually three books, published in English as one large volume, so I took a break between them and read the whole thing over several weeks. It certainly works as a story and I had a good time reading it. After I finished I wondered whether I had forgotten some details from the early book because some of the things about time shifts and odd creatures and their purpose seemed unexplained. Yet they are probably unexplainable. An over-riding theme about the need for balance between good and evil is played out kind of weirdly, but it was fun to read.

The second of Alison Bechdel’s comic-form memoirs about her parents is called Are You My Mother. Full marks for courage, publishing this while her mother is still alive—with her mother’s acceptance, if not full-scale approval. It gets a little bogged down in the psychology of WInnicott and the author’s therapy, but the portrait of her mother that comes out of it all is satisfyingly complex and interesting.

I’m in the middle of a re-read of Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose and in total admiration of his erudition and ability to handle so many big themes in one book—faith, politics, pride, greed, power, love—along with a murder inquiry.  I’m going  to have another read of  his earlier novel Foucault’s Pendulum and then take on his latest, The Prague Cemetery, which is on my to-be-read pile.

I’m going to aim at more frequent—weekly—entries and alternate reading and writing as topics in separate entries. Maybe I can maintain a schedule.

Write on

The well of writing has been a bit low over the past few moths. Absence of ideas that excite me enough to want to write something has been the issue. I can always make myself write something but I prefer to be driven by an idea that lights up my mind. I have no idea in advance what will do this, it just happens from time to time.

However a couple of things have bubbled up. One of them, which will be a short story I think, is to do with Gertrude Stein and a “what if ….” Such as “what if a Gertrude was born in the forties on a diary farm in the Waikato?” A crazy notion, maybe, but I’m going with it for a bit. It involves a fair bit of re-reading what she wrote and what has been written about her as well as doing some writing "in the style of."

The other idea is, well, too embryonic to say anything about. I need to so some background reading, which is a fun idea in itself. This could turn out to be a short story or something longer, depending on how complicated it gets. Or nothing at all. More some time later.

Keeping on reading

In the meantime, there’s been a lot of reading going on. Margo Lanagan’s Sea Hearts, is not my usual reading, but as fantasy—or realism with fantasy elements or something—goes, it’s very grown-up and compelling. Terrific writing, a highly original story, even if it is based on mythology, achingly good characterisation and a satisfying ending that is neither too bleak nor too clappy-happy. I read it because Margot Lanagan came here for an earlier Writers’ and Readers’ week and I liked Tender Morsels. I think Sea Hearts is even better.

Terry Castle’s The Professor was recommended by a good friend. It’s seven essay/memoir pieces, the longest about her profoundly disturbing relationship as a grad student with a professor. Castle spares neither herself nor the professor. She (Castle) is neurotic, needy, and desperate, the professor cruel, dissociated and manipulative. Tears before bedtime is not the half of it. Something about the very clever telling of this sad tale was disturbing. Nonetheless I was fascinated, compelled along to the end. There’s an element of snarkiness in Castle’s writing which I didn’t like myself for enjoying. Her piece on Susan Sontag, “Desperately Seeking Susan,”is a particularly strong example; I’m not sure it’s enough of an excuse for what at times seems like mean-spiritedness, to acknowledge it in oneself. My friend, the one who recommended the book to me, would not agree at all I think, with what I have said about The Professor. She said it was “brilliant.”

In Anne Enright’s The Gathering one of the siblings in a large Irish family has committed suicide. The protagonist and voice of the novel, Veronica, was particularly close to Liam when they were children. She is married to Tom, who she either hates or loves, it’s hard to tell, and they have two daughters.  Veronica is uncertain. “I need to bear witness to uncertain events,” she says. The book evolves into her trying to know why Liam killed himself, and portrays the family as messy and dysfunctional. It’s wonderful writing, kind of bleak, kind of funny.

I read Joan Didion’s Blue Nights in a couple of hours one evening. It purports to be about the death of her daughter, but really it’s about her own aging. These are both topics of close interest to me, so I didn’t mind. The observations are sharp, the emotion raw. It’s a book I am glad to have read.

Other books I have read recently that are worth the attention are: State of Wonder by Ann Patchett; Look At Me, an earlier novel by Jennifer Egan of A Visit From the Goon Squad fame; The Bear Boy by Cynthia Ozick; and Granta 118: Exit Strategies. The story by Alice Munro in Exit Strategies disappointed me, but I guess not even AM can be brilliant every time.

Consider David Foster Wallace

I might be done for now with David Foster Wallace, having finished his posthumously published, novel-in-progress The Pale King. Which, as I write is embroiled in an internet brouhaha over the fact that it, along with two other books, was a finalist for the Pullitzer prize for fiction and no prize was awarded this year. “Outrageous!” shouts one lot. “I should think not,” opines another, “you can’t give the Pullitzer to an unfinished novel cobbled together by the author’s editor. And, anyway, it's tedious.” There’s even, “Whatever, let’s stop talking about this dead guy.” 

I haven’t read the other two finalists so I don’t know whether they would have been worthy winners, but I would have no problem with The Pale King winning that or any other prize. David Foster Wallace is described by some as a genius, an attribution that bothered him; in a manner most unlike that of Uriah Heep , he seems to have strived to be humble.

I struggle to identify what it is that I find so compelling about his writing. There’s something about his attention to the details of people being people, the internal monologues, the self-consciousness, the uncertainties, that appeals, but it is more than this. Perhaps, in The Pale King,  his capacity to examine the special boredom, the tedium, of workers auditing tax returns in the US Inland Revenue Service, in the context of a change in culture in that Service from the service aspect, of doing necessary work, to a business model. The business model means that the tax returns that will be followed up on are those where the additional income to the IRS, in the form of previously unpaid taxes, is greater than the cost of doing the follow-up. “Bottom line” over “justice”. But it’s complicated. Always, with DFW it’s complicated, and that may be another way in which his writing appeals to me.

The Pale King, unfinished as it is, is a collection of pieces concerning how people in the IRS deal with the organisation, their jobs at various levels, each other and themselves. There’s no coherent plot, which, surprisingly, didn’t bother me. He captures something of the way many of us profess disdain for the very things we indulge in, like television or buying new things. Also, he sidles into people’s mental states and their relationship to reality—is how I think about myself how others think about me?.

I’ve written two earlier blogs about DFW’s writing (21 December 2011 & 28 Jan 2012).

It’s impossible to give a real flavour of DFW’s writing in short quotes, but here are a few anyway:

“Something has happened where we’ve decided on a personal level that it’s all right to abdicate our individual responsibilities to the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites .”

“Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is .”

“… all accountants wear hats? They are today’s cowboys.… Riding hard on the unending torrent of financial data.”

And I’ve not managed to say or quote anything to show how laugh-out-loud funny Wallace can be.

Memory in memoir and fiction

Why do we remember some things and not others? How come different people (especially siblings) remember the same past events so differently? Is it true that we unconsciously distort our memories to fit our view of ourselves?

It’s everywhere in literature, this consciousness of the vagaries of memory, the elusiveness of truth regarding the past, whether personal or historic in the larger sense. Who was Shakespeare? Was it me or my sister who dropped the bus money home down a drain, given we each remember it as the other? Probably the most famous and most quoted novel about memory is Proust’s but it’s an ever-recurring theme.

When I write fiction I draw on anecdotes and memories from my past, use as settings places I have visited, and create characters from everyone I have ever known. Some of this is conscious, some is not, but my fiction is never ‘about’ me, I am never telling my story, I am making up a story. When I write about myself, as I do in this blog, it is obvious that is what I am doing.

At the moment I am working on a collection of pieces that may well be called Stones Gathered Together. This collection includes short stories that are completely made up as far as I can tell and pieces that are clearly about myself and pieces where It’s not obviously either. Everything I write, I think has something to say about my world view, at times through being in opposition to it. I’m always trying to ‘say’ something in my writing, something that matters. Whether or not the reader sees this is not the point, the point is that it matters to me, it’s why I write. Which is not to say there is always something deep and meaningful there, rather that I had a reason for writing it, it’s never just an exercise. I might be playing with an idea, or with some language, but there’s some internal idea or intent driving me.

Following this are two pieces that might make it into Stones Gathered Together. The first is about me, the second is entirely made up.
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A Rosier By Any Other Name
I was offered the chance to buy a book about Rosiers once. While it purported to be “a history of the name” it was really a cheap compilation of odd bits of information and lists in a hard cover volume at a price I could not afford, and I didn’t buy it.

No family stories went back beyond my grandfather, Henry (Harry) Rosier, a failed farmer who subsequently worked, the story went, on the scenic road through Auckland’s Waitakeres and found a Maori stone adze. The adze ended up with me, and I no longer have it. I think I remember giving it to the Auckland Museum. I hope I did. I knew him as an old man with whom I would walk to watch bowls at the local club when my grandparents came to stay. He would buy us an ice-cream at the dairy on our way home. I liked him better than my grandmother, who cheated when she played cribbage with me. (I learned to cheat back.)

Later, after both had died, I realised he had been a disapproving, critical husband and father, which did not alter the fondness of my memories.

Henry (Harry) Rosier in his garden, 1940s.

I was a Rosier child, and got all the expected jokes, mostly from adults who thought they were being funny or clever and weren’t either. For some fifteen years, while I was married, I used my husband's surname. Returning to my birth name was a pleasure, the only down side being that I then had a different surname from my children.

Occasionally I get a phone call from a Rosier wondering if our families are connected; I have never found it to be so. My grandfather had a brother, but if he has descendents I never knew them or heard from them. Grandad had two sons, one of whom died in his teens before he had children. Two daughters took their husbands’ names. My father had two daughters, none of whose children carry the name Rosier, and no sons.

I’ve never tried tracing my ancestors, not the Rosiers nor my mother’s “Donalds of the Isles.” The Rosier name is, I gather from the internet, originally recorded in provinces of Languedoc, Forenze and Auvergne, in France. Probably, the name was given to growers of roses; rose petals were widely used in medieval times for medicines as well as perfume and textile dyes. (Surnames became necessary with the introduction of personal taxation.)

My grandfather Henry came to New Zealand as a child or young man from England. Rosier was a 17th Century Huguenot Protestant refugee surname in British Isles, from the time of Roman Catholic persecution of protestants in Europe. Many of the refugees were skilled artisans. Early recorded examples of the name in England include Bartholemew Rosier at the church of St Martin Pomeroy in the city of London, April 14 1638 and James Roszier at St Dunstans Stepney on August 19 1804.

In 2008 when I was in Paris—the only time I have been in France—I had my partner take my photo under the Rue des Rosiers sign. I liked the street a lot. One end is Jewish, the other full of gay men, I gather. It’s narrow, with lots of falafel shops, in one of which we had a good lunch.

When my death is noted at the appropriate registry that will be the end of the record of a branch of Rosiers. This does not strike me as in any way tragic. It just is, and I am pleased that Rosier as a name was around long enough for me to have it for a while.
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Long Distance Travel
Caitlin first noticed her at check-in. The woman was wearing matching trousers and jacket in navy blue with a white shirt, a high neckline covering whatever was on the end of the silver chain. The resulting prim look was not reflected in her brisk, assured actions as she lifted her bag up for weighing and produced her passport and electronic ticket.

A window seat meant that Caitlin would be able to pull her bag out from under the seat in front as a footrest and curl up against the side of the cabin for some sleep during the twelve long hours of the flight from London to Los Angeles. The woman in navy took the neighbouring seat. That had to be a laptop bag going under the seat in front of her. She put a small book in the pocket below the folded up tray table without Caitlin being able to see the title.

The woman closed her eyes, breathing evenly, her hands lying in her lap, while the plane finished loading. She stayed like that, motionless, until takeoff and the safety announcement, which she followed closely. At it’s end Caitlin said, ‘Hello, I’m Caitlin. Don’t you hate this long flight?’

‘I have never taken it before.’ Her voice was light, firm, clear, English. ‘Is it really very bad?’

‘Very bad, very long, and another one to follow, if you are going to New Zealand. Which I am,’ said Caitlin. ‘Sister’s wedding,’ she added, ‘I’m a bridesmaid.’ And she pulled a face that she hoped was rueful but not critical. ‘For the third time. One more to go. You see, I’m one of five girls and I’m a lesbian, and don’t believe in marriage. Or civil unions for that matter. But I can hardly refuse to be a bridesmaid when my sister asks me, and this sister is my favourite. I’m the youngest and she’s the one who would tell me things. Sorry, I’m rattling on.’

The woman held out a hand. ‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ she said. ‘I’m Jane Eyre.’ Her hand was cool, soft, dry. Caitlin made sure she didn’t shake it for more than a second in case she gave the wrong idea. Why did she still come out to every stranger in the first two minutes?

‘You could say,’ Jane went on, her hands back in her lap, neatly folded, perhaps a little tightly clasped, ‘that I’m running away from a wedding. He has a wife.’
‘Oh?’ Caitlin wanted her to continue. She wouldn’t mind at all if Jane cried, she had tissues handy for the runny nose the air conditioning usually brought on.

‘I am going,’ Jane went on, ‘to High Grove school for girls in Hamilton. Do you know it?’

‘Only by reputation,’ said Caitlin. Snobby rich bitches, she didn’t say.

‘I had hoped,’ and here Jane sighed, a deep, tired sigh, ‘to never teach in a girls’ school again But such, I fear, is my fate.’

Remembrance of Things Past

If there was a theme to the 2012 Wellington’s Writers' and Readers' Week, part of the biennual International Arts Festival, then it is encapsulated in the title of Proust’s magnum opus, which I have cheekily used as the heading of this blog entry.

Kate Grenville, I discover, wrote 23 drafts of Sarah Thornhill, which I have yet to read, though I have read the earlier, A River Runs Deep. “Books about the present,” she says, “sit in the past” and she has been engaged with writing novels drawing on her family’s Australian history. “Sorry business,” she tells us, “when spoken by Aborigines, refers to what you do when some-one dies, to mourning.” So, saying “sorry” has a particular meaning in that context, one not obvious to a New Zealander. She talks, too, about her words being precious to her, taking them seriously, wanting to get her writing, “more than right enough.” Her first draft is random, drawing on sources, without necessarily an actual story line and it’s subsequent drafts that meld it into shape.

Alan Hollinghurst, however, writes his first draft slowly and doesn’t do much rewriting. “The Stranger’s Child", he says, “is about time and its workings and memory and its failings.” He also says, “Books creep up on me in little pieces.” Later, we look up Tennyson’s poem, “In Memoriam,” because he talks about it.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s East German beginnings seem relevant to her concerns about “who is the ‘me’ in me, how am I built up?’ and how ‘our stories of ourselves can be broken,’ for example, if we grow up in a family and later discover our birth origins lie elsewhere.

(Jenny E may be my new-author-discovery for this W & R) She spoke of writing about characters who “turn in on themselves” and how part of everyone is kept internal, for their own self. Her book Visitation, which I am yet to read, focuses on a particular house, drawing on one that was important to her as a child, but not about her.

Jean Gabriel Vásquez left his homeland, Colombia, for Paris, because, “books happen there.” He talks about how the USA’s “war on drugs” created the mafia in Colombia, and how history and politics “invade a private life” and shape an individual morally. He sees a role for novelists in working to make it hard for the forces of forgetfulness at large in the world, referring to Colombia as an “amnesiac country” where people try to forget difficult times in its history. (He and Kate Grenville would have made a good panel pairing.)

There were others, of course: Patrick Evans regretting the lack of “consequential writing” in New Zealand. (Writing, I think he said, about those things which must not be spoken of.); Germaine Greer, making the case for Shakespeare’s Wife as a tour de force in Stratford; Michael Hulse writing poetry from a place of asking questions; Kim Scott, searching on the inside to illuminate what is happening outside; Denise Mina, charming everyone and offering her set of bullet points about how to write comics (which she does, along with an impressive range of crime fiction). And more, always more.

The to-be-read pile has grown, but not by as much as some years, and I figure I’ll be back in 2014.

And the reading continues

This publishing business does chew up the hours, but reading has been going on.

August by Bernard Beckett is a discussion about free will in a novel. Two people in some undisclosed future time are having this conversation while stuck upside down in a crashed vehicle. Flashbacks elucidate the discussion. It appealed to the part of me that likes any discussion of ideas, although the story was somewhat overwhelmed by the weight of the ideas. The need of two of the characters—in-the-flashbacks to outdo each other was interesting, too.

Emma Donohue’s Room was compelling. Hood, (1995) an earlier novel, a coming out story, not so much. On the evidence of the newer novel being more succesful, for me, than the earlier one, I’ll certainly read her next.

Stella Duffy’s Mouths of Babes (2005) is a good read about lesbian detective Saz, her partner and their baby and a promise that is inevitably broken. The most interesting aspect of the book for me is how the person to whom the promise is made reacts when it is broken. (To say more would ruin the plot.)

Other books I have read I will be writing about in other places, to which I’ll refer in a later blog entry.

With Writers and Readers Week in Wellington on the horizon I am looking forward to discovering a new author or two, as well as hearing from some favourites like Kate Grenville.