More Madeleines From Reading Team Of Rivals
Lincoln Reviewing The Troops As YouTube Video
In my previous post, Madeleines From Reading Team Of Rivals, I discussed two passages which impressed me by presenting information already known to me in a way that provided new insights. Today, however, I focus on two events that I discovered for the first time in Team of Rivals.
I tend to think of Lincoln in his presidential demeanor - something like this.
Or this
Often, however, when I call to mind more modern presidents (or presidential candidates) I conjure up images of bumbling, stuttering, clumsy creatures because I repeatedly see those individuals perform thusly in awkward, error-amplifying situations on my TV or computer screen.
Imagine viewing the following scene in a popular YouTube video or watching it in the fake newscast of The Daily Show.
So goes presidential dignity.
President As Commando-In-Chief
I did realize that Lincoln had visited his generals on occasion, but I was not aware how close that brought the President (and the Cabinet members who accompanied him) to the enemy’s front lines nor did I have a sense of the hands-on approach Lincoln sometimes took toward military matters.
The Merrimac
When reading these excerpts, keep in mind that the Merrimac, the Confederate iron-clad, had only recently appeared, with devastating results to the Union ships it encountered.
Yep, the night before a major beach assault that he had ordered, the President of the United States traveled via rowboat onto enemy-held territory to scout the best landing site for the troops.
Given my recent post about Lt@14’s completion of Ranger training, I can muster only one possible response: Hoo-Ah, Mr President.
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Madeleines From Reading Team Of Rivals
Goodwin’s Gimmick
I admit that, prior to reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, I harbored the suspicion that the book’s focus on Lincoln’s seduction and subsequent manipulation/enhancement - in the name of the Union cause - of three of his former competitors for the presidential nomination (New York Senator William Henry Seward who became Secretary of State, Ohio Governor Salmon P. Chase who was destined to become Treasury Secretary, and Judge Edward Bates from Missouri who was to be Lincoln’s Attorney General) and a well known lawyer who had humiliated Lincoln years earlier (Edwin Stanton who became Secretary of War) was a gimmick invoked to justify the publication of yet another volume on Lincoln and, in the process, perhaps sell a book or two.
In any case, my high school American History teacher had given our class the lowdown on Lincoln’s psychological campaign to bring his rivals aboard his administration as a sort of palate cleanser for the brain between heftier entrées - just after the six reasons for the Civil War and before descriptions of the Scalawags and Carpetbaggers during Reconstruction.
The reasons for the Civil War and the definitions of Scalawags and Carpetbaggers were on the exam; the story about Chase, Stanton et al wasn’t. So, why bother with a book about something of too little importance to be included on a Sophomore history test at a tiny high school in southwestern Missouri?
Eventually, however, I was exposed to enough positive word of mouth about the best-seller to pique my curiosity and eventually lead me to pop for the paperback.
Now - well, now I’m pretty convinced that my suspicion was well founded - what makes this gimmick unusual is that it turns out to be incredibly effective.
Sharpening Lincoln’s Image
Many reviewers have addressed the the utility of this perspective in presenting the book’s primary story lines such as Lincoln’s election campaign and his management of those in his cabinet. I am offering, instead, the following excerpts to demonstrate the power of this approach to refresh and sharpen the typical, hackneyed image most of us reflexly conjure up when Lincoln’s self-education is mentioned.
For me, that image is the one shown above - Lincoln as young boy lying before a fireplace, reading a huge book. It’s OK but hardly impressive.
Compare that to Goodwin’s sketch of Lincoln’s efforts on his own behalf as contrasted to the advantages of his rivals.
That Lincoln is impressive.
Washington DC At Risk
View From Balloon Of Washington During Civil War
Apart from the multiple-biographies perspective of Team of Rivals, Goodwin has also made certain relatively well known facts about the Civil War more vivid by emphasizing one or another detail.
I could have, for example, correctly answered a True-False question asking if Washington DC was ever imperiled by Confederate troops early in the War.1
Perhaps because no attack actually occurred, I assigned that knowledge to my “How about that?” repository. Goodwin’s emphasis on the severing of the city’s communication with the rest of the Union casts this episode into a new light and increases it impact exponentially.
Suddenly, a fact I knew in my head became a visceral sensation in my gut of the terror the citizens of Washington felt when they could hear the cannon of enemy troops but had no contact with their own armies - or anyone else.
Coming Attractions: I have a couple of other points about Team of Rivals that I’ll be posting in the next two or three days.
Footnote
- The correct answer, by the way, is “True, Washington DC was imperiled by Confederate troops early in the War.” ~back~
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Madeleines From Reading If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler
From Summer Reading List to Re-reading If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler
This post began as a list of recommendations for summer reading. As I was writing an introduction, I recalled that the opening paragraphs of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler addressed the same issue - preparing to read a book. After re-reading that section no more than three (four, at most) times, I realized that Heck of a Guy viewers would be better served if the reading list were deferred in favor of this excerpt from Calvino’s book.
For the nonce, consider If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler my recommendation for summer reading.
When publishing a “Madeleines From … ” post, I typically append an elaboration on some aspect of the book under consideration. Other than the explanation of how this post, the summer reading photo, evolved, none will be offered today. Any such exposition would be beyond superfluous and perhaps even counterproductive.
In this case, one either gets the joke or one doesn’t.
An Excerpt From The Opening Of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler
Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally.
Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find. In the old days they used to read standing up, at a lectern. People were accustomed to standing on their feet, without moving. They rested like that when they were tired of horseback riding. Nobody ever thought of reading on horseback; and yet now, the idea of sitting in the saddle, the book propped against the horse’s mane, or maybe tied to the horse’s ear with a special harness, seems attractive to you. With your feet in the stirrups, you should feel quite comfortable for reading; having your feet up is the first condition for enjoying a read.
Well, what are you waiting for? Stretch your legs, go ahead and put your feet on a cushion. on two cushions, on the arms of the sofa, on the wings of the chair, on the coffee table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take your shoes off first. If you want to , put your feet up; if not, put them back. Now don’t stand there with your shoes in one hand and the book in the other.
Adjust the light so you won’t strain your eyes. Do it now, because once you’re absorbed in reading there will b no budging you. Make sure the page isn’t in shadow, a clotting of black letters on a gray background, uniform as a pack of mice; but be careful that the light cast on it isn’t too strong, doesn’t glare on the cruel white of the paper, gnawing at the shadows of the letters as in a southern noonday. Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.
It’s not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. but not you. you know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn’t serious.
So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If on a winter’s night a traveler had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn’t published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop pas the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:
The Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages,
The Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
The Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment,
The Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case,
The Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
The Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
The Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.
Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread and the Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.
With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new).
All this simply means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you have turned toward a stack of If on a winter’s night a traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established.
You cast another bewildered look at the books around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went.
You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn’t only a book you are taking with you but its novelty as well, which could also be merely that of an object fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacked begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the binding becomes dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries.
No, you hope always to encounter true newness, which , having been new once, will continue to be so. Having read the freshly published book, you will take possession of this newness at the first moment, without having to pursue it, to chase it. Will it happen this time? You never can tell. Let’s see how it begins.
Perhaps you started leafing through the book already in the shop. Or were you unable to, because it was wrapped in its cocoon of cellophane? Now you are on the bus, standing in the crowd, hanging from a strap by your arm, and you begin undoing the package with your free hand, making movements something like a monkey, a monkey who wants to peel a banana and at the same time cling to the bough. Watch out, you’re elbowing your neighbors; apologize, at least.
Or perhaps the bookseller didn’t wrap the volume; he gave it to you in a bag. This simplifies matters. You are at the wheel of your car, waiting at a traffic light, you take the book out of the bag, rip off the transparent wrapping, start reading the first lines. A storm of honking breaks over you; the light is green, you’re blocking traffic.
You are at your desk, you have set the book among your business papers as if by chance; at a certain moment you shift a file and you find the book before your eyes, you open it absently, you rest your elbows on the desk, you rest your temples against your hands, curled into fists, you seem to be concentrating on an examination of the papers and instead you are exploring the first pages of the novel. Gradually you settle back in the chair, you raise the book to the level of your nose, you title the chair, poised on its rear legs, you pull out a side drawer of the desk to prop your feet on it; the position of the during reading is of maximum importance, you stretch your legs out on the top of the desk, on the files to be expedited.
But doesn’t this seem to show a lack of respect? Of respect, that is, not for your job (nobody claims to pass judgment on your professional capacities: we assume that your duties are a normal element in the system of unproductive activities that occupies suck a large part of the national and international economy), but for the book. Worse still if you belong–willingly or unwillingly–to the number of those for whom working means really working, performing, whether deliberately or without premeditation, something necessary or at least not useless for others as well as for oneself; then the book you have brought with you to your place of employment like a kind of amulet or talisman exposes you to intermittent temptations, a few seconds at a time subtracted from the principal object of your attention, whether it is the perforations of electronic cards, the burners of a kitchen stove, the controls of a bulldozer, a patient stretched out on the operating table with his guts exposed.
In other words, it’s better for you to restrain you impatience and wait to open the book at home. Now. Yes, you are in your room, calm; you open the book to page one, no, to the last page, first you want to see how long it is. It’s not too long, fortunately. Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.
You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don’t say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book.
So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. you prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. you don’t recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself. Here, however, he seems to have absolutely no connection with all the rest he has written, at least as far as you can recall. Are you disappointed? Let’s see. Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost, as when a person appears who, from the name, you identified with a certain face, and you try to make the features you are seeing tally with those you had in mind, and it won’t work. but then you go on and you realize that the book is readable nevertheless, independently of what you expected of the author, it’s the book in itself that arouses your curiosity; in fact, on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.
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Hong Kong Egg Cakes From Reading Calvin Trillin’s About Alice
About Alice - and Ida and Julie
Reading Calvin (Bud) Trillin’s1 About Alice, his loving portrait of his wife, Alice, who died September 11, 2001 and the life they shared, triggered my recall of Studs Terkel’s lament on the loss of his wife, Ida,2 less than three weeks after Julie’s3 death,
Who will laugh at my jokes?
I know what you mean, Studs. And, I’d wager, so does Bud.
An Audience Of One
The notion of an audience of one is promoted by many fundamentalist Christians who focus their energies exclusively on pleasing God and by a number of marketing consultants who instruct clients and devise campaigns to communicate with the individual consumer.
For some of us, however, the audience of one is the person with whom we share our bed and raise our family.
Consider this passage from a column written by Garry Wills two weeks after the death of Ida Terkel:
She alone still called him by his given name, Louis, not his nickname, Studs.
Once, after he had appeared in a panel discussion, he hurried out to the audience to ask her, “How did I do?”
She gave him her quiet smile and said, “You did just fine, Louis.”
Studs also gave Ida his drafts to read prior to submitting them to the publisher and featured her, under pseudonyms, in his stories.
But one reason About Alice is, after all, the subject of this post is this excerpt that resonates with me so intensely that reading it becomes emotionally disorientating:
“You mean I peaked in December of 1963?” I’d say, twenty or even thirty years later.
“I’m afraid so.”
But I never stopped trying to match that evening—not just trying to entertain her but trying to impress her. Decades later—after we had been married for more than thirty-five years, after our girls were grown—I still wanted to impress her. I still knew that if I ever disappointed her in some fundamental way—if I ever caused her to conclude that, after all was said and done, she should have said no when, at the end of that desperate comedy routine, I asked her if we could have dinner sometime—I would have been devastated. …
I showed Alice everything I wrote in rough draft—partly because I valued her opinion but partly because I hoped to impress her. If the piece was meant to be funny, the sound of laughter from the next room was a great reward. The dedication of the first book I wrote after I’d met her, a collection of comic short stories, said, until I decided that the last few words were too corny, “These stories were written for Alice—to make her giggle.” When I wrote in the dedication of a book “For Alice,” I meant it literally. In that sense, the headline on her obituary in the Times was literally true, as well as in the correct order: it described her as “Educator, Author and Muse.” When Alice died, I was going over the galleys of a novel about parking in New York—a subject so silly that I think I would have hesitated to submit the book to a publisher if she hadn’t, somewhat to her surprise, liked it. When the novel was published, the dedication said, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”
Because About Alice is only 78 pages long, appeared as a modestly shorter essay, “Alice, Off the Page,” in the March 27, 2006 New Yorker, and has been heavily reviewed, readers are likely to have already been exposed to this portion of the book. This familiarity may attenuate the importance of these paragraphs as the fulcrum of About Alice. That would be a loss for the reader.
What About Alice Is And Is Not
About Alice is not about Alice’s lung cancer, its first remission, its recurrence, the probability that her parents’ almost constant smoking may have been a causative factor, her forbearance of the debilitating treatment, or any of the other details of her disease or treatment, although that information is provided in the book.
Nor is About Alice a biography of Alice, although her accomplishments, her friendships, and even her physical beauty are laid before the reader.
Nor does About Alice fit on the thanatological bookshelf. The Five Stages Of Grief Elizabeth Kübler-Ross specified (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) appear to be insufficient for some who require one additional step enroute to psychological equilibrium: Publication.
About Alice has little in common with the exhaustively detailed and excruciatingly painful intrapsychic excursion Joan Didion describes in The Year of Magical Thinking, written after the death of her husband, novelist John Gregory Dunne.4
Nor is About Alice the kind of elegant discourse on desolation, loss, and disease represented by the lovely poetry (that I treasure) written by Donald Hall after the death of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon.
And, wonderfully enough, About Alice is almost devoid of advice, a crucial differentiation from the genre in which Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven currently star, the set of spiritual instructions manuals, and the more sectarian didactic books such as the Handbook of Death and Dying (2 Vol. Set). 5
an outrageously happy marriage.
Striving To Impress and Happy Marriages
My contention is that spending ones days striving to win the admiration of an altogether admirable wife (or, I suppose, the admiration of an altogether admirable husband although I’m less sure of that) may not guarantee an outrageously happy marriage but does make that status extraordinarily difficult to avoid.
Striving to impress that one beloved individual also ensures a certain focus. I noted at the beginning of this post that Alice Trillin died on September 11, 2001. It happened that she died in New York. That others in that city perished that day is, appropriately and tellingly, never referenced by Trillin in About Alice.
About Alice is a glorious book that anyone who has been or wants to be in love deserves to read.
About Julie
My only bitterness from reading About Alice is that Trillin’s skills and audience far exceed my own. Julie played George to my Gracie as Alice did for Calvin, and I’ve spent the more than 30 years since I met Julie, including the years we were both married to others and the years since her death, trying to win her admiration, sometimes managing to do so. My whinging regarding About Alice is limited to my realization that Julie deserves, but I can’t provide, accolades of the sort Trillin bestows on Alice in this book.
Outrageously happy marriage,6 not so incidentally, is the phrase I’ve habitually used to describe my life with Julie in conversations, in this blog, and even as part of my online dating profile.
I’m willing to share it with Calvin and Alice.
The Title
Those familiar with the Heck Of A Guy blog know that I routinely title posts dealing with books in the format of “Madeleines From Reading X,” referencing Proust’s culinary memory stimulator. In this case, the title would have been
I once read, however, in Trillin’s book, Family Man, about “… Hong Kong egg cakes - delicacies whose taste I [Calvin Trillin] once described as what a madeleine would taste like if the French really understood such things.”
Given my long-standing fondness of Trillin’s writing and my rapture with About Alice, I decided that, for today only, a menu substitution was called for.
Besides, that’s the kind of clever gesture that would amuse and, maybe, impress Julie.
Hong Kong Cakes, also called gai daan jai, are a bit like waffles.
Proust’s emblematic pastry:
Trillin’s preference:
Footnotes
- As most readers know, Trillin is the author of more than a dozen books as well as innumerable columns, essays, and magazine articles, others serious discourses, and still others rather silly and delightful fiction. ~back~
- Ida (Goldberg) was a compassionate and energetic activist who worked for political and social causes, in relief efforts, and with children. She was known for her fearless stances against those forces she considered oppressive. Studs, in fact, reported that he was jealous that her FBI file was thicker than his own. Two online eulogies from the Chicago Sun-Times provide a concise summary of her life and work: A bright spirit we can only hope will live on and Ida Terkel, 87, social worker ~back~
- Julie Showalter was the fiercely intelligent, sexy, and loving woman and prize-winning author with whom I had a outrageously wonderful 20 year marriage that ended with her death in late 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. Many posts on this blog are about her, our unlikely romance, and our life together, and still others consist of her writings. Information can be found at Julie FAQ. ~back~
- Calvin Trillin is a close friend of Joan Didion and spoke at John Dunne’s funeral. Dunne, in fact, in his memoir, Harp, wrote that he had at one time arranged that, should he suddenly die, Calvin Trillin was to inform his and Didion’s only child, Quintana. According to a review of About Alice Didion noted that “Trillin was one of the few people who understood how she felt, able to laugh with her at the remarks others would make. She remembers him coming over to console, not with advice, but with food.” ~back~
- I am willing to stipulate that these inspirational and “how-to” books are helpful to some since I can’t otherwise explain the 5-star ratings on Amazon. Personally, however, I find them cloying and counterproductive. Go figure. ~back~
- Actually, there was a rotation consisting primarily of “outrageously happy marriage,” “phenomenally happy marriage,” and “outrageously wonderful marriage.” ~back~
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Madeleines From Reading Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird
Exploring Julie’s Office
I found a copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird during one of my intermittent attempts to reorganize Julie’s Office, the room in our home where Julie wrote, paid bills, did 
bookkeeping, emailed her friends, read, and gazed out the windows into the woods behind the house. And, although it was little more than a storage closet (albeit a room-sized storage closet with its own closet and great views of the woods and the fountain) for almost five years after Julie died, it’s become my preferred site for writing posts such as this one, reading, watching TV and videos, and listening to music.
It required those five years1 to defuse all the emotional time bombs stashed in the area - Julie’s correspondence, our financial records, her book and story drafts, our kids’ school materials, keepsakes, documents, photos, and a subset of her books, especially those dealing with writing and those that had a personal significance for her.
Given its subtitle, “Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” I initially assumed that Bird By Bird fell into the didactic category. Now, I’m not so sure.
At this point, I should note that Bird By Bird is not a book I would have chosen on my own. Lamott’s writing has always struck me as too self-consciously spiritual, too self-consciously Christian, too self-consciously moralistic, and, well, too self-consciously self-conscious. This is, I admit, an undeniably unfair criticism of essays and books that are, after all, often listed as memoirs and are, by design, introspective pieces. Still, my immediate reaction to her expositions on “faith,” “redemption,” and “holiness” is, to borrow the strategy most frequently utilized by King Arthur in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, “Run Away! Run Away!”
I also have an instant aversion to anyone described as “one of our most beloved writers.”
Nonetheless, as I had done many times after finding one of Julie’s books that I had not read, I opened it with the intent of skimming through enough to determine whether it should go into a basement-bound box or my “read sometime when I don’t have anything else to read” stack. I finished it within 24 hours and now harbor a begrudging admiration for Lamott.2
I also found Julie’s penciled ticks at these passages:
Passages From Bird By Bird
Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud . . . When you have a friend like this, she can say ‘Hey, I’ve got to drive up to the dump in Petaluma — wanna come along?’ and you honestly can’t think of anything in the world you’d rather do. By the same token, a boring or annoying person can offer to buy you an expensive dinner, followed by tickets to a great show, and in all honesty you’d rather stay home and watch the aspic set.
Now, a person’s faults are largely what make him or her likable. I like for narrators to be like the people I choose for friends, which is to say that they have a lot of the same flaws as I. Preoccupation with self is good, as is a tendency toward procrastination, …for instance, I have a friend who said one day, “I could resent the ocean if I tried,” and I realized that I love that in a guy.
In general, … there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.
Annie Dillard has said that day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more. This is a radical proposition that runs so contrary to human nature, or at least to my nature, that I personally keep trying to find loopholes in it. But it is only when I go ahead and decide to shoot my literary, creative wad on a daily basis that I get any sense of full presence, of being Zorba the Greek at the keyboard. Otherwise I am a wired little rodent squirreling things away, hoarding and worrying about supply. Arthritis forms in my hands and in the hands my mind is using to shape things, in the hands of that creature in the cellar who wants and needs to use all of his favorite rags in the ragbag he works from.
You are going to have to give and give and give, or there is no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.
We are wired as human beings to be open to the world instead of enclosed in a fortified, defensive mentality. What your giving can do is to help your readers to be braver, be better than they are, be open to the world again.
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
Footnotes
- Despite my deliberate efforts over the years since Julie died to refer to this room as “The Downstairs Office,” I still find myself calling it “Julie’s Office.” ~back~
- More precisely, I admire the Lamott who authored Bird By Bird; I’m still not so hot on the Lamott who wrote some of those other things with her name on them. ~back~
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Madeleines From Reading A Long Way Down
Nick Hornby’s novel, A Long Way Down, revolves around four individuals who bump into one another (literally in some cases) atop a building where each has independently arrived with the intention to commit suicide. They decide to defer taking their lives and, instead, form an especially odd gang, lending each other mutual support and understanding.
One of the characters, Maureen, stands out as unusual even in this group. Maureen’s entire life consists of caring for her child who is so neurologically impaired that he can’t even recognize her existence. While Maureen’s personality is established only over time, one of her internal monologues seems to me especially poignant:
What I’ve come to realize over the years is that we’re less protected from bad luck than you could possibly imagine. Because though it doesn’t seem fair – having intercourse only the once and ending up with a child who can’t walk or talk or even recognize me – well, fairness doesn’t really have much to do with it, does it? … And once you have a child like Matty you can’t help but feel, That’s it! That’s all my bad luck, a whole lifetime’s worth, in one bundle. But I’m not sure luck works like that. Matty wouldn’t stop me from getting breast cancer, or from being mugged. You’d think he should, but he can’t.
While the content of the knowledge itself is sad to the point of evoking pathos, it strikes me as exactly the type of self-acknowledgement, shunning the false hope proffered by notions of luck or magically administered cosmic justice, necessary for one to become an adult with the potential for living with dignity.