Among The Jumbled Heap

I am currently obsessed with Andre Dubus. He is a contemporary American Short Story writer. A heckuva talented writer and a great human. I’ll write more on him later, but I can’t resist throwing out some of his good quotes on writing.

An older writer knows what a younger one has not yet learned. What is demanding and fulfilling is writing a single word, trying to write le mot juste, as Flaubert said; writing several of them, which become a sentence. When a writer does that, day after day, working alone with little encouragement, often with discouragement flowing in the writer’s own blood, and with an occasional rush of excitement that empties oneself, so that the self is for minutes longer in harmony with eternal astonishments and visions of truth, right there on the page on the desk, and when a writer does this work steadily enough to complete a manuscript long enough to be a book, the treasure is on the desk. If the manuscript itself, mailed out to the world, where other truths prevail, is never published, the writer will suffer bitterness, sorrow, anger, and, more dangerously, despair, convinced that the work is not worthy, so not worth those days at the desk. But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a sigle word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer’s soul. If the work is not published, or is published for little money and less public attention, it remains a spiritual, mental, and physical achievement; and if, in public, it is the widow’s mite, it is also, like the widow, more blessed.
~Andre Dubus “First Books”, Meditations from a Movable Chair

Joan Didion is like my older, sarcastic, world-weary sister.

Reading The Year of Magical Thinking is reading the diary of my sister. I see the workings of her mind; I hear the depth of her words, her feelings on the loss of my brother-in-law, her spouse of 40 years. These are things Joan never says at the family reunion. These are the thoughts she ruminates on while sitting in the corner of our grandparents living room, smiling while the family small talks.

When reading the work of a sibling, one tends to either extremes of praise or criticism. Sometimes both. The praise stems from the fact that this is your blood, your kin, and you are proud. Similarly, the criticism arises out of that same impulse. Literature is written by other people not MY sister. You remember scenes from family life, words un-fittly spoken, all the embarrassing incidents of childhood. Of course you also remember how Joan always had a way with words, but this does not necessarily improve your view of her writing.

The mere fact that I feel a kinship with Didion proves the power of her writing. Didion strikes a pose with her words that burns the mind like a brand. Her personal history as laid out in the essays and novels takes on the shape of memory. I read in Magical Thinking about her and John sharing moments throughout their day, and I think of her essay “The White Album” and the years of disassociative thinking, depression. How difficult their marriage at times?! I think of Quintana as a girl in CA while her mother associates with the hippies of Haight-Ashbury gathering material for “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” I remember the characters of “A Book of Common Prayer” and wonder what John and Quintana were doing while their wife and mother entered this narrative world. How did she draw inspiration, where did she get the raw material for these destructive relationships? From John? Quintana?

Didion encourages this line of thinking in Magical Thinking by often quoting from her own work, situating her writing in the story of her life with John. She reveals where she was when she wrote a particular book and how and where John and she lived at that time. She picks a refrain from her novel Common Prayer and repeats it several times throughout Magical Thinking. Thus, Didion’s own words come back to her with new significance and, like a good sibling, I think, “Joan certainly doesn’t lack confidence in her own abilities as a writer.”

Yet, Didion provides a glimpse into her own insecurity as writer and how John helped her overcome this insecurity:

The book from which he [John] read was a novel of my own, A Book of Common Prayer, which he happened to have in the living room because he was reading it to see how something worked technically…’Goddamn,’ John said to me when he closed the book. ‘Don’t ever tell me again you can’t write. That’s my birthday present to you. (p166)

The passage is revealing not only because it illustrates Didion’s feelings of inadequacy about her own writing, but because it reveals John’s character to the us more fully. He was an encourager, and, perhaps more revealing, he believed in those intangible gifts of the spirit. He had given this moment forethought, “That’s my birthday present to you.”

Didion’s world often seems far from my own. She moves in higher circles. She lives in California, Hawaii, and New York City. She and John fly to Paris for Thanksgiving. She has friends all over the globe who offer the use of their beach house or chateaus. She has flown on more private charters than I have on commercial airlines. This distance between our worlds only enhances this feeling of familial connection. Siblings often follow different life trajectories. “My older sister moves among the literary jetset of NYC and LA.” I can hear myself say with both pride, envy, and disdain.

Critics chide Didion for cultivating this highbrow literary persona. Deservingly so, I feel. But her writing fills a niche, a need that is larger than the elite. Again, i think of those early essays, a young Joan trying to make sense out of the turmoil of her times. She grew, and her readers watched her grow. As the sixties faded, she wrote more novels, politically charged novels about women, much like herself, struggling to make meaning out of their time. In those early novels, Didion focused her attention on the politics of the ’80s bleeding into the the ’90s. She was uniquely positioned to offer insight.

Political Fictions is the fruit of Didion’s maturity as a writer. She writes not as historian or pundit but as citizen, a unique citizen, to be sure. She is a person who has not lived as the rest of us. She is a person with special access and privilege, one who has lived life across the country and the globe. She has enough leisure to read the Times and to discuss the times. She has no prescriptions only observations. Her thoughts are sometimes jumbled, often poignant, and ultimately revelatory. She lifts American politics and culture up to the light, and lets the many colors reflect in the readers’ minds.

Magical Thinking is the denouement of the Didion corpus. This book represents the end of Didion’s career as she has known it, for this book marks the end of her marriage and her career has been intimately connected to her marriage. What comes next must be something different.

At the end of Magical Thinking, Didion describes her experience of trying to write a new piece now that John is dead.

It was the first piece I had written since 1963 that he did not read in draft form and tell me what was wrong, what was needed, how to bring it up here, take it down there….I realized at some point that I was unwilling to finish it because there was no one to read it. I kept telling myself that I had a deadline, that John and I never missed deadlines. Whatever I finally did to finish this piece was as close as I have ever come to imagining a message from him. The message was simple: ‘You’re a professional. Finish the piece.’

Magical Thinking is ultimately a testament of the power of others in the writer’s life. It is the story behind the book dedication. In Didion’s case, it is the story behind the forty plus years of her life as a writer. The book is a powerful and personal testimony of a grief observed. This much is true.

But true to her work as a whole, Didion once again gives us her life as an example of the whole of life. Throughout my readings of Didion (and I think I can say I’ve read every scrap now), it is her humanity and her vulnerability that most impress. I see this most at work in the essays, where that close first person talks to me like a sister. Her novels are convoluted flights of fancy that bore, but those essays sing.

So as my sister Joan moves on, I wait to see what’s next. I wait with that same mixture of pride, envy, and disdain that permeates all my reading of Joan’s writing.

Looking at journals as I prepare to move, I came across this sonnet I wrote some time in ‘97 or ‘98. Forgot I used to write sonnets.

Twenty tippled years from today, sitting
On a rough hewn and slatted porch, musing
With a mason jar in hand and sipping
Gin with a ragged smile, grown more puckered
By the years of smoke filled neglect and kisses
Stolen between odd jobs assigned to me
By my comrade, my patron, Saint Golious,
Twenty tippled years and I will think about you.

Twenty years of liquid truth will not wash
Away the remembrance of things past and thoughts
Marcel and Billy would both be proud to own.
Thoughts of hard laughter, hard drink, hard times.

“Wanting to know absolutely what a story is about, and to be able to say it in a few sentences, is dangerous: it can lead us to wanting to possess a story as we possess a cup. We know the function of a cup, and we drink from it, wash it, put it on a shelf, and it remains a thing we own and control, unless it slips from our hands into the control of gravity; or unless someone else breaks it, or uses it to give us poisoned tea. A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.”

~Andre Dubus, “A Hemmingway Story” from Meditations from a Movebale Chair.

Fury: a novel © 2001 by Salman Rusdie

Fury is my first Rusdie novel, and my only excuse for having spent twenty years now as a reader of contemporary fiction without once reading Rushdie is: “I don’t like the guy.” Nothing to do with his writing, about which I knew nothing, everything to do with the man. A plump toad of a man who hacked out novels simply because he had time, money, and access to a keyboard. A man with a trophy wife. A man whose fame, it seemed to me, rested on one book he was fortunate to have written that inflamed one quarter of the world’s population.

So I thought.

Now I know.

Rushdie is a wordsmith. His prose flows like a swill of fine scotch, thick and smooth with a slight bite, and you can almost taste the way the words aged in that graying cask of a brain.

Fury is that classic story of contemporary Western literature: the middle-aged man breaking down. Other writer’s have certainly told the tale better, with a better grasp of the plot (Updike’s Rabbit, and nearly every thing Bellow wrote), but what Rushdie brings to the tale is his turn of a phrase. The first line proves the point:

Professor Malik Solanka, retired historian of ideas, irascible doll maker, and since his recent fifty-fifth birthday celibate and solitary by his own (much criticized) choice, in his silvered years found himself living in golden age.

This is the Rushdie charm. In one eloquent sentence, he has elucidated th character of Malik Solanka and drawn the reader in with curiosity. “A doll maker? Ohhhh, celibate?! Much criticized, but why? A golden age?” Yet Rushdie’s words are writing checks he can’t cash.

The story disintegrates, the character’s dissolve into a mass of half-formed themes and plot twists. In only 239 pages there is: not one but two (morally twisted) spring-winter romances; a murder mystery, crisis of fatherly duty; numerous attempts to tie the whole damned thing into contemporary culture, and a hapless stumbling onto the stage of geo-political conflict. Ambitious, to say the least, but ultimately unsatisfying.

But now I’ve read Rushdie. I understand his charm. I have been told , and I believe, that Fury is not the best example of his work, but reading it has expiated my hatred for the fellow.

I’m still glad that Padma left him, though.