Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (20 page)

I suppose I could say I wouldn’t mind going back and doing it again; but at my age going back anywhere and doing anything again begins to feel a bit hypothetical.

I should have kept a diary, but I didn’t. There was a lot of hill climbing, some of which tested me to the limit. Climbing hills on a bicycle can be a great school of stoicism, if stoicism is what you are after. I’m not prepared to believe that all that effort, all that suffering, teaches one nothing.

In the pile of mail waiting for my return was a long letter from a woman in France. It is the third letter I have had from her in the course of some fifteen years. I have never met her. Her letters run to twenty or thirty pages each, in an attractively flowing cursive handwriting. They are for the most part about herself, her loneliness, her troubled relations with her grown-up son, her difficult relations with men, and about me, that is to say about the image of me she has constructed from my books.

She is well aware that the
vous
to whom she writes is a construct and may bear little relation to my own construct of myself. Now and again she opens the possibility that I will respond and make contact with her. She likes to think we are soul mates of a kind. But she does not fantasize much about our meeting, or at least does not write about it.

Sometimes she seems to be saying that what she is doing is supplying me with a character (herself) to use in some future book. In other words, she seems to be asking me to give her new life by making her into a heroine.

She is by no means a fool. She is able to maintain a nice distance from her need for another life without denying the validity of that need. But there is something she does not see, and will not see, I suspect, unless I tell her, which I certainly won’t do (a) because I don’t want to open the floodgates of a proper correspondence, and (b) because it would be too cruel—namely that I am not much interested in her thoughts about herself or about me or about life, that she would stand a better chance of becoming the heroine of a book if she would send me a long, minutely detailed description of a typical day in her life.

There is a point to be made here about novelists and the sources of their inspiration, namely that half the time (most of the time?) they aren’t interested in fathoming the unique, individual essence of their model, just in taking over some interesting, usable quirk or feature of her: the way the hair curls over her ear, the way she pronounces the word “Divine!,” the way her toes turn in as she walks.

As for me, I must say I prefer making up characters from scratch. It feels more like the real thing that way.

All the best,

John

October 22, 2010

Dear John,

I’m glad you made it back in one piece—if only barely. Struggling up a mountain on a bicycle is not an activity I would relish, and when I think of how much you must have suffered, my heart swells with compassion for you. I doubt that sort of pain would teach me anything, and I admire you for having the guts to push yourself to the limit and feel that all that effort is to some purpose. Mental stoicism, yes. Emotional stoicism, yes. But self-inflicted physical torture is altogether mystifying to me. My idea of a good bicycle trip would be to pedal through the lowlands of Holland or the flatlands of the American Midwest—with the wind at my back.

I have not been to the Cévennes—but to areas very close by, and I have experienced the intense beauty of those landscapes. There are few better places in the world, I feel, perhaps none. Some painful climbs up some difficult hills, then, but also the pleasure of breathing that air in the welcoming post-summer weather, and suddenly the whole adventure becomes worthwhile . . .

I have received some long letters from readers, but never twenty or thirty pages long, and certainly not three long letters from the same person. Again and again, however, people have either written to me or said to me: you should write my story—or my mother’s story, or my grandfather’s story. I have never known how to respond. Writing a novel is all generated from within, and I can’t imagine how a novelist could ever appropriate a stranger’s life into a book. I’m with you: making up people from scratch feels more like the real thing.

But we do borrow from life, there’s no question about that. Personal experiences (often microscopic ones) or the experiences of people who are close to us. In one of my early books (
The Locked Room
), I went so far as to use a real person as a character and call him by his real name—a friend of mine from my days in Paris, Ivan Wyshnegradsky, an eighty-year-old Russian composer of quarter-tone music. He was dead by the time I wrote the book, and I wanted to honor his memory by bringing him to life in a work of fiction—even if all the events I recount about him were based on fact. In my soon to be published
Sunset Park
, the scene at the beginning of the second section is taken directly from life: December 31, 2008, when Siri and I attended the funeral of the daughter of friends of ours who had committed suicide in Venice earlier that month. I could cite other examples as well, but even more interesting is the use of historical figures in novels. You did it with Dostoyevsky in
The Master of Petersburg
, and on a much smaller scale I did it with Tesla (
Moon Palace
) and Dizzy Dean (
Mr. Vertigo
). And then, too, we have both used
ourselves
as characters in novels (
Summertime
,
City of Glass
), even if those selves are not precise representations of who we are outside the pages of those books.

On the other hand—and here I can speak only about myself—there is no instance in which I have taken a real person, changed that person’s name, and then put him or her into a novel. I mean the whole person, a character with identical physical properties, an identical history, and a soul identical to the model. Many novelists have done this (i.e., the notorious roman à clef), but I am not one of them.

And yet, as you so aptly put it, we are constantly stealing interesting, usable quirks or features. The shape of a man’s eyebrows, the timbre of someone’s laugh, the birthmark on a woman’s neck. All the rest seems to spring forth unbidden from the deepest recesses of the imagination.

Another aspect of novel writing (and novel reading) that I often think about is the question of space. As a reader, I sometimes find myself struggling to situate the action, to understand the geography of a story. This might have something to do with my impoverished visual imagination. Rather than project myself into the fictive settings the author has described (a small town in Mississippi, a street in Tokyo, a bedroom in an eighteenth-century English house), I tend to put the characters in places I am personally familiar with. I hadn’t realized I was guilty of this habit until I read
Pride and Prejudice
in my early twenties (a book with almost no physical descriptions) and found myself “seeing” the characters in the house where I lived as a boy. An astonishing revelation. But how can you see a room in a book if the author doesn’t tell you what is in it? You therefore make up your own room, or graft the scene onto a remembered room. This explains why each reader of a novel reads a different book from every other reader of that novel. It is an active engagement, and each mind is continually producing its own images.

When I write, however, it seems that the process is reversed. The spaces in my novels are entirely concrete for me. Every street, every house, every room is vividly real in my mind—even if I say little or nothing about it. I might not mention where the sofa is, but I know exactly where it is positioned in relation to the other furniture. It is all about grounding the imagination in the specific, I think, which allows one to believe—or delude oneself into believing—that the things one is writing about are actually happening.

I am curious to know if any of this resonates with you—both as reader and writer.

With friendliest good thoughts,

Paul

P.S.: There is a highly entertaining American film about cycling from the late seventies—
Breaking Away
—which you might want to take a look at. A terrific sense of place (Bloomington, Indiana), which is rare in American films.

P.P.S.: Paulo Branco was in town last week and said he would like to have us on the jury again next year—a jury composed exclusively of writers. I am more than game.

November 11, 2010

Dear Paul,

You mention that Paulo Branco might again require us for jury duty in Estoril. That would be nice. November is the month of the year, as I remember.

I know the film
Breaking Away
—in fact, I think I own a copy. It becomes a bit formulaic toward the end—the working-class hero racing against the preppy students—but I agree, the locale and social environment are splendidly evoked.

When it comes to cycling up hills, be assured, I take as little pleasure in it as you would. As for the sense of achievement that is supposed to accompany arrival at the crest, my experience is that it is much overrated. What drives people to run or cycle long distances remains a bit of a mystery to me. Nevertheless, thousands of people do it every day, all over the world.

At the risk of seeming precious, I would link it to the question, Why write? Samuel Johnson said, in effect, that one would be a fool if one did not expect payment for one’s labor. But I find myself spending hours polishing pieces of prose to a sheen well past the standard for publication and hence payment.

I suppose I would excuse myself by saying, “I’m not the kind of person who puts defective prose out into the world,” as I would say, “I’m not the kind of person who gets off his bicycle and walks” (who gets off his bicycle and walks
even when no one is looking
)
.
That, I think, is the interesting part. Few readers are going to appreciate what goes into getting a paragraph exactly right. No one is going to see if you get off your bike and walk, or for that matter if you give up and freewheel back down the hill.
But that’s not me, that’s not my idea of myself!

You write about knowing precisely where the fictional sofa is in your fictional room, even though no one in your book is going to sit on it or even spare it a glance. I think I may be a little less thorough. The room in which my fictional action takes place is a pretty bare place, an empty cube, in fact; I import a sofa only if it turns out to be needed (if someone is going to sit on it or look at it), and after that the dresser with the set of cutlery in the top left-hand drawer without which we cannot have the butter knife with which the heroine is going to butter her toast.

At the time he was teaching literature at Cornell, I understand Vladimir Nabokov used to require his students to draw floor plans on the basis of the information supplied by the novel they were reading in class. The weak Nabokovian thesis would be that the novelist should not provide internally contradictory data (a carpet that is red on one page and blue on another). The strong thesis would be that there should be enough data in the text for the student to draw plans and diagram the physical movements of the characters, scene by scene.

I see some similarity between the strong thesis and the received wisdom of playwriting or screenwriting classes that the writer should be able to jot down the entire back story of each of his characters, if only as an aid to the actors, even if those back stories will in no form emerge in the film or play itself.

If this is the industry standard, I fail. For none of the adult characters of my books do I have much idea of, for instance, what sort of childhood they had, just as I have not the faintest idea what is going to happen to them after the last page.

Since I last wrote, you have had congressional elections in the U.S., and the Republicans have resurged in force. I won’t ask you to explain. But this is beginning to look like an interesting moment in history (and I don’t just mean U.S. history).

Since about 1970, a pretty mean vision has been propagated and encouraged and allowed to take over the direction of the planet, a vision of human beings as machines of self-interest and of economic activity as a contest of all against all for material spoils (economy: properly the
nomos
of the
oikos
, the regulation of the household).

As a consequence a debased notion of what constitutes political life has come to prevail, and has in turn given rise to a pretty contemptuous view of what constitutes the practice of politics. Thus the same politicians who did nothing to counter the mean vision of social life get to feel the fury and contempt, the furious contempt, of voters who see them as little more than machines of self-interest themselves. The word “trust” has lost all purchase. If today a politician were to utter on a public platform the words, “I ask you to trust me,” he would be laughed down, no matter how sincerely he meant it.

Yours in dark times,

John

November 12, 2010

Dear John,

Yes, the midterm American election results were unfortunate—but after an all-out propaganda assault on Obama and the Democrats by the right and the far right for the past two years, not unexpected. The time is dark, certainly, the news is grim, certainly, but I try to ward off terminal depression by taking the long view, the historical view, and console myself with the fact that we have been here before. Not just in the recent past—the right-wing election blitzes of 1994 and 1980, for example—but the late forties and early fifties as well, when the Republicans, who had been out of the White House since 1932, grew ever more insane in their attacks on Roosevelt, the New Deal, and “un-American” left-wing thinking, which brought us the Korean War, McCarthy, and the ideological hysteria of the cold war. Before that: the horrors of World War II and the miseries of the Great Depression. Before that: the ferocious, frequently violent battles between capital and labor. I could keep going back, all the way to the founding of the republic. A strange, pendular motion, oscillating between those who believe in American exceptionalism (we, not the Jews, are the chosen people, n’est-ce pas?), unfettered capitalism, the dog-eat-dog mentality of every man for himself, and the others, who believe in what you and I would call a just society, who honestly believe that human beings are responsible for one another. Today, one group has all the answers; tomorrow, the other group kicks them out. In the big scheme, there has been a certain measure of progress (the abolition of slavery, social security benefits, civil rights legislation, legalized abortion), but progress always comes slowly in this too large, too fractious country. Three inches forward, two inches back; three inches forward, five inches back; two inches forward, one inch back.