Unless It Moves the Human Heart (3 page)

I forage for another quotation, from Kafka: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

“This is starting to sound mystical,” says Sven, to whom the mystical does not seem to appeal.

“I know. Because often the beginning must just come to you. And I can’t explain it, but it does.”

We speak of the odd selectivity of the writer, and how it is tied to the imagination. Why do some things catch your eye, and some things don’t? You notice a fragment of red wool caught on a hedge. Did the fragment merely drift there, or did it snag on the hedge, part of a sweater belonging to a girl who was walking by? Or was she making love with her boyfriend, the gardener’s son? Or was she raped by a gang of bikers who held her against that hedge, and the red fabric was left to tell of the crime? Or did the piece of wool drop from the sky after an airplane explosion? Whatever its story, the redness stands out against the green hedge, which is natural and permanent, in splendid desolation. The remnant is human, temporary. It may blow away, but not yet, not before you notice it.

“You may be affected by your mood, too. Sometimes you’re receptive to your imagination, sometimes you shut it out. Your phone rings. When you answer, the person on the other end hangs up. If you are not feeling writerly, you dismiss the incident as a wrong number. If you are feeling writerly, the person at the other end of the phone was your high school sweetheart who has longed for the sound of your voice all these years, or a burglar waiting for you to leave the house, or your friend who has a bone to pick with you, but thinks the better of it.”

“Or a telemarketer,” says Donna, “who just can’t bring herself to do her job anymore, and whose conscience doesn’t allow her to bother one more person—”

“And she runs from her office in the bank—,” says Inur.

“In India,” says Robert.

“And flees to Long Island,” says Jasmine, “where she marries—”

“George!” says Suzanne. Her husband buries his head in his hands.

“Even the greatest of our writers can get off to a false start.” I tell them about a public conversation with Edgar Doctorow at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. Edgar told the audience he had written 150 pages of
The Book of Daniel
before he’d realized he had chosen the wrong way to tell the story. He’d written it in the third person, the so-called omniscient point of view. But
The Book of Daniel
is about innocence and its apprehension of injustice. It required the innocent voice, Daniel’s. So one morning Edgar tossed out the 150 pages and started all over, letting the boy Daniel tell the story. I also wanted the class to understand that Edgar was happy to start from scratch, because he had picked the wrong door the first time.

“And how did he know which door was the right door? Because he remembered—”

“What the story was about,” drone three or four.

“Did he really throw out all those pages?” asks Robert. The class looks dismayed.

“You think that’s hard to do? You’d be surprised. When you know something doesn’t work, and you chuck it, the feeling is pure liberation, nearly as good as doing something right in the first place. Actually, the feeling is better because the elimination of the wrong choice fortifies the rightness of the right one. Never wed yourself to a piece till it’s finished and you’re satisfied that all the parts work together. Often the section you prize the most, the one you’ve fallen head-over-heels in love with, turns out to be expendable. Toss it. What you thought was married bliss was really a one-night stand. You’ll be deliriously happy to discover how thrilling it feels to get rid of something that does not fit your story—just like life.”

“Can you hedge your bets,” Diana asks, “and file away the thrown-out parts for use in another piece of work?”

“Writers do that all the time. But I tell you, in my experience, we’re just fooling ourselves. Whenever I try to wedge my discarded beauty into another piece, the transplant fails. The unworkable withers in the desk drawer. We’re always better off starting fresh.”

“I’m amazed to learn that E. L. Doctorow ever had to clear his throat,” says George.

“Happens to the best of us. And once you do it, you’ll be surprised how fast you move. Good writers always know when something is wrong with a piece. They may kid themselves for a while, but the mistake eats at them until they have no choice but to act. They may not know what exactly is wrong, but it bothers them to death. It rattles the dishes at night, and bangs the shutters. And when they finally correct it, when they write that perfectly clear, just right sentence, they’re off. They hurtle down the slope.”

“Should we use an outline?” says Donna.

“Never. The trouble with using an outline is that you’ll follow it.” They titter. “I’m not joking. You’ll cover everything you’ve put down in one portion of your outline, all the while aiming for what you’ve put in the following portion. All you’ll be doing is reading a road map. You’ll never surprise yourself with a sudden turn.”

“I’m confused,” says Diana. “Are we on a road or a ski slope?”

“When class is over, Diana, remind me to kill you.”

“But won’t an outline keep you orderly, so that you’re clear to the reader?” asks Jasmine.

“Don’t worry about the reader. Worry about the story. Your story will determine its own orderliness without your planning it out step by step.”

“I have trouble figuring out what jobs to give my characters,” says Nina.

“Because it’s the last thing we think of. When creating a character, we usually start with the soul and then work outward from there. But it’s a lot smarter to start with what the guy does for a living. There’s a reason McTeague was a dentist. In Ann Petry’s
Country Place
, the town stud runs the filling station.”

“You said that we know what has happened in a short story before it begins,” says Ana. “Then how do we know where to begin our story?”

“It grows out of the understanding of your characters you’ve already developed. You begin your story knowing everything about your people except what is going to happen to them.”

When they read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” they will see that it begins one afternoon, when something is about to happen to the despairing Seymour Glass. But they will also see that this beginning comes at a moment of impasse. It is the beginning of an inevitable end. After reading a novel, we often wonder what happens to the characters after the final page. We can imagine Pip’s future, or Mrs. Verlock’s, or Count Vronsky’s. That rarely happens with short stories. In a way, they begin with an announcement of the end. After the last page of a short story, there is no more Seymour Glass, and no more Maria either.

“So in effect you begin a short story by saying, ‘We’ve come to this,’ ” says Ana.

“I wish I had said that.”

“You will,” says Kristie.

“I have a very hard time figuring out what to write,” says Jasmine.

“Some days I simply cannot write,” says Inur. “I can spend
weeks
clearing my throat.”

“You ought to write every day if you can, even if it’s a single sentence. But you can’t force it. And you can’t force subject matter. On the other hand, you can be proactive and find ways to allow your mind to be receptive to whatever may come its way.” I tell them about Friedrich Schiller, who used to fill a dresser drawer with rotten apples, and begin his writing day by breathing in the fumes.

“
Mrs
. Schiller must have loved that,” says Suzanne.

“The trick for a lot of writers is to create a state of mind where you are not thinking about writing. Rather create a state of reverie, a dream state. Dreams are where other people escape from reality. But for the writer, dreams
are
reality.”

“What do you do to achieve that dream state?” Sven asks.

“Take a walk. That’s what Dante and Nietzsche did—they wrote on long walks. Wallace Stevens, on the other hand, dictated his poems to his secretary at the Hartford Insurance Company, where he worked.”

“Do
you
use any rituals,” Kristie asks me, “when you prepare to write?”

“Nothing elaborate. I start the morning with coffee, toast, and orange juice. Then usually, a bowl of Special K, with slices of banana or not. Finally, a shot of heroin, and I’m off.”

“What if we’re out of heroin?” asks Diana.

“Paddle about in a kayak. Ride a bike. Create a situation in which you look outside yourself. Something inside yourself will come to you.”

“I find that’s true,” says Robert. “But the something that comes to me is freakish.”

I agree with him. “But you may find that what started out as freakish eventually shows itself to be part of something universal. That often comes later in the piece, after you’ve started writing.” It all comes down to that difference between invention and imagination. John Irving is a master of invention, but very little in his work displays a larger imagination. Imagination ties the freakish, as Robert calls it, to the eternal. “As writers you have to remind yourself that people are always strange. They don’t need to have three nipples, or four ears, or be able to swallow the ocean in one gulp to be strange. And the great moment in writing something is when you realize that the wonderful, unheard-of event you just made up is part of the wonderful, heard-of event of life itself.”

“So what’s the purpose of writing?” Donna asks. “To discover what is permanently beautiful?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes writing shows us what is beautiful, sometimes what is evil, sometimes what is ugly or petty or stupid. Writing is at heart a criticism of life, as Matthew Arnold said. And you can only criticize life effectively by using something recognizably within life, not something so way-out that it flies off the earth and never returns.”

Suzanne looks skeptical. “Do you really believe in that mysterious receptive state you referred to?” she asks. “Most of the fiction I’ve read comes off as perfectly planned and worked out.”

“Does it not? Not only that, it charts the sequence of things, how the events follow logically. So it all seems very neat. But it isn’t neat. The orderly, sequential story you read probably came out of an initially mysterious moment, and a trance. And to your point, Suzanne, the final product probably wound up looking nothing like what the author originally envisioned. Some writers talk about their fiction getting away from them—how their characters take on lives of their own and go their own ways, as if rebelling against the author. That actually happens in Flann O’Brien’s
At Swim-Two-Birds.
It sounds wild, even nightmarish, but all the rebellion of characters really means is that a writer’s vision changes as he gets deeper into the work. One of the things you’ll find about this odd pursuit of ours is that you begin to trust change. Writing keeps you liberal. It shakes up your ideas about everything. Half the fiction we love, maybe more, looks nothing like the pictures their authors started out with.”

“So that original, mystical inspiration is misleading?” Robert asks.

“No, Robert. It actually shows itself to be more mysterious than you thought. What you understand of it at the outset is simply different from what you understand of it in the end.”

The windows frame a light snowfall. I look at it a moment, pause for effect, then burst into song: “Happy Birthday to You.” They give me the he’s-gone-nuts look I’ve come to cherish over the years. I sing it again. “Happy Birthday to You. Anyone had a birthday recently? Anyone
about
to have one?” Two or three raise their hands. I choose Sven. “Let’s all sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Sven.” He looks less pleased than confused.

“Now here’s what I’d like you to do for your short story. Hear the song ‘Happy Birthday’ in your minds, and start to write. Don’t worry if, when you’re alone, the story doesn’t pan out. For the present, just sit back and see what comes of listening to this irritating, celebratory song you’ve heard all your lives.” I sing it again. “Now write.”

I watch them lean back for a minute or two, then lean forward, and go at it. The classroom is still, save for the motion of their hands on paper. This is how we begin.

Chapter 3
My Story, My Self

T
hat year I taught at the Kennedy School yielded the most unusual student I ever taught, the hardest nut to crack, and, in the end, one of the most rewarding. Anurada came to the essay-writing class after a tour in the Marines in Iraq, where she served as the lone woman in a hand-to-hand combat unit. She stood about five-four, and weighed no more than 110 pounds. And except for the standard-issue student outfit of a T-shirt and jeans, she looked quite feminine, with a touch of the tomboy. When she was seeking a subject for her essay, naturally I urged her to write about her Marines experience, but she refused. I asked again. She continued to say no. “Play to your strength, Anu. You have a unique story.” She said no. “You’re squandering once-in-a-lifetime material.” She said no. This fruitless exchange went on deep into the semester, until it occurred to me that I should treat her the way her other recent superiors had treated her, and simply give her an order to write the essay. I became her CO. She came through with a stunning piece that was framed by her antiwar work after her tour of duty.

Know thyself. The Greeks didn’t restrict that piece of advice to writers, but writers cannot do without it. In embracing what she had most strongly resisted, Anurada did not merely find her subject in her life in the Marines, she found who she was. That is what I want for all my students. Eventually, they will discover that their writing validates their lives. Somewhere in Inur’s exotic family history is an authentic self with an authentic story and an authentic way of telling it. The same is true for Ana’s rarefied upbringing, and for Veronique’s work photographing street crimes, and for Jasmine, who “has never experienced anything,” and for Donna, Kristie, and Robert, who have spent most of their lives on Long Island, and for Diana on her parallel bars, Nina in her library, Suzanne and her Quonset huts, George in his limousine, and Sven in his warplanes. The stories they discover in themselves will not depend on their adventures or the lack of them, but on more hidden things, like the fear of loud noises and their capacities for viciousness and betrayal and yearnings for nobility and feelings about justice—all the generally human things that define us. They may not make their self-discoveries during the time they work with me, but it is my business to spot the revelatory moments in their writing, and to pause and say “Here you are.” When I find something essential in their work, I am helping them get a glimpse of themselves. And when they learn to spot these things on their own, they will string the moments together sentence after sentence, and will begin to feel the shaky exhilaration of being a writer.

In the fourth week of classes we turn to their stories with such questions as the nature of beginnings hanging in the air. I tend to conduct my courses like a juggler with a dozen dinner plates spinning on sticks at once. When one plate wobbles and threatens to fall, spin it some more. Keep them all going. No topic in writing is independent of any other, and nothing is ever done with.

“Let’s look at Diana’s ‘A Candle in the Forest.’ ” Diana used “Happy Birthday” to make a story about an ill-matched couple. It begins with the narrator overhearing his girlfriend Elizabeth being serenaded on her birthday by friends. The narrator is imprisoned upstairs with a broken foot. He’d broken it running downstairs, in an effort to escape the house and his girlfriend, Elizabeth:

Maybe I had no reason to leave, though I told her I was running down the stairs because I’d left my headlights on. Lizzy has expectations for me and I shouldn’t feel overwhelmed. She thinks I should get my master’s and teach college, says my talents exceed typing up the Sunday real estate section of the
North Country Post-Standard
. She thinks I should learn to cook more than spaghetti noodles and frozen vegetables. She says that my scruff makes me look homeless and hates that my hair is longer than hers. “What are you, a rock star?” she scoffs. I like my hair. But maybe she’s onto something. Maybe I should be teaching myself French and reading Proust like she does every night after dinner.

“Do you like that paragraph?” They nod and smile. I ask them why.

“Diana gets so much into it,” says Veronique. “The status of the narrator. His boring job. How he thinks about Elizabeth. How she thinks about him. Her highfalutin’ education. His humor. Even his appearance. It’s all in one paragraph.”

“What is a paragraph, anyway?” asks Suzanne.

“Damned if I know. I used to think I knew what a paragraph was until a few months ago, when I did a piece for the
New Yorker
. My editor, Dorothy Wickenden, changed my entire view of a paragraph simply by editing the piece a certain way. I wrote three paragraphs, and Dorothy would yoke them into one. And it read much better.”

“But a paragraph is just one idea, one complete movement,” Ana says. “You write one movement. Then you go on to the next.”

“So I thought. But Dorothy showed me a wholly new way to look at a paragraph, which also turns out to be a more modest way to write. When you write a paragraph as a complete idea, as Ana suggests, or as a complete feeling, and then you stop, it’s as if you are saying to the reader, ‘See? Aren’t I smart? Don’t I look pretty?’ But if you compile a bunch of thoughts, as Diana did here, you draw less attention to the writing. You pile on the information, half burying the gems you’ve come up with. At my decrepit age, I finally may be learning how to write a paragraph.”

Ordinarily I do not refer to something I’ve written, as I did with the
New Yorker
piece, unless it fits the discussion and is of immediate use to the students. The effect is to call attention to the fact that they are being taught by a professional. But that is not entirely bad. They like it, and I make use of it, though I try not to abuse the privilege. Writers who teach get away with things other teachers do not. We are placed on pedestals that we often erect ourselves. Professors of subjects with longer histories and thick syllabi do much more work. They drill the pilings. We paint the frescoes. Yet it is us the students adore. When they read about writers in books, we look heroic—disheveled, glamorous leaders of corrupt-yet-desirable lives. Michael Chabon’s
Wonder Boys
presents a perfect picture of the writing teacher in Professor Tripp, whose very name bespeaks the drugged-out, irresponsible, adventurous existence. His wife leaves him, he knocks up the provost, and he is finally fired by the department chair, who happens to be the provost’s husband. But there is not a student at his university, or anyone who reads about him, who would not trade places in a trice.

Still, you have to be careful playing the dual roles of teacher and writer. As a teacher, you may not bear the features of the bloodless Ichabod Crane or the buffoonish professor of
The Blue Angel
, but you’re sort of a fictional character yourself. Writing teachers who think of themselves as writers who dabble in teaching implicitly condemn the work they’re engaged in. The old saw that writing cannot be taught is a back-door put-down of the teacher. And the idea cheats the students.

Every teacher eventually finds the most comfortable method or manner of teaching, which is inevitably an extension of personality. At Harvard I took a poetry-writing seminar with Robert Lowell. Lowell’s teaching method was a dry and distant severity. “This is not very good at all,” he would say with that high-pitched, complaining, nearly whining southern patrician voice of his. “This is very weak”—of nearly all the students’ poems we brought before him, like tithes. Yet Lowell’s method succeeded because it was consistent with who he was, coolly distraught and more than a little scary. He was also the greatest poet in America at the time, and when he liked a line or even a word in your poem, you knew you were getting the goods. Late in the term, when his bipolar condition was starting to veer toward its depressive state, he would become uncritical, and would say nice things about everything we wrote. That depressed
us
.

Not being of Lowell’s temperament, and not being the greatest anything in America, I could not get away with teaching as Lowell taught even if I wanted to. I actually tried it one year, doing my level best to sound like John Houseman in
The Paper Chase
, without the English accent. I was absurd. The students learned nothing, except, perhaps, the art of ridicule. The method that suits me is praise laced with broad, and transparently good-natured, insults. The insults merely goad, but the praise is sincere and frequent, and it is more practically useful than it sounds. If you find things you like in a student’s work, and you celebrate them, then the things you don’t like—the really awful parts—will seem anomalous mistakes uncharacteristic of the writer, ones they can correct. The students will side with you against their own weaknesses. If, on the other hand, they begin to think they can’t do anything right, they will get worse and worse. No matter how cheerfully they appear to take your criticism, or how mature their attitude, they will think to themselves, “I can’t do this.” Or they’ll write defensively, anticipating your familiar objections, and be dull within safety.

“George, will you look at this sentence of yours?” I read aloud from his short story called “They say it’s your birthday”—“ ‘He was home, where all his roads ended and began.’ ”

“What’s wrong with your sentence, George?” And before he comes up with something for the hell of it, I shout, “Nothing! This is a perfect sentence. Clear, undecorated, revealing, powerful. You are capable of perfection! Congratulations!

“Now compare it to your second paragraph:

No party favor or decoration brightened the Spartan rooms. Every window had closed blinds, atop drawn shades. Wherever a blue slit of melting gelatin sky might slip through, antique newsprint was carefully taped across it to block the gaps of burning sunshine. Sheets were draped over every wall monitor, every house appliance eye was cloaked with a concealing cowl or cozy. Two oil lamps with smudged glass flues glimmered on the table. In each room, rafts of tall, thick candles glowed dimly.

“Okay, George. You tell me what’s wrong with this. We only have a week.” We cover all the examples of overwriting, which constitute most of the paragraph. “Here’s why I’m pissed off at you, George. The substance of this passage is riveting. The windows, the blinds, the newsprint, the cozies on the appliances. Nouns, nouns, nouns. You’ve got all your nouns ready to do the work. Why am I pissed off, George?”

“Because I just should have simply said what’s in the room,” he says. “I do get it, you know. Sometimes I can’t help myself.” Suzanne pats his arm.

Some students’ stories have used the happy birthday idea, some have not. Ana has written about a woman, recently divorced, who dreads a visit from her father, a gallant roué. He arrives with “his Latin dash intact.” Inur’s story tells of a woman, lonely in her marriage, who depends on store catalogs for her social life. Jasmine has written a strange, Edgar Allan Poe–like story of one man so obsessed with another, he takes over his life. Suzanne’s story is about a strong Irish woman whose husband dies when she’s pregnant with their son; Kristie’s, about a woman ditched by her boyfriend and snowbound in Vermont. Veronique has written a tender story about a boy named Arthur whose father remarries after the death of his mother—Arthur’s helpless loneliness. Sven has written a long, ambitious story about a couple of guys who wind up in a bar in Aberdeen and get told a story—a story within a story. It doesn’t quite work because the outer story is more effective than the inner one. But Sven is a clean writer. I tell him to give more thought to his subject, and then to start with what surprises him.

“Robert, would you give us your first paragraph?” He reads:

I peer out my window as my mother pilots our station wagon effortlessly away from the monotony of expressway traffic through the graceful curves of the beautifully named Meadowbrook and onto the freedom, mobility and relative exclusivity of the Northern State. It is summer, 1959, and we are mobile, and living Robert Moses’ dream. The Chevrolet is huge and blue and packed with promise. My mother is at home, here on the parkway, filled with the confidence of her ability to drive, to navigate away from where she came. Poppy, who taught her this and so much more, says she drives like a cowboy, and she delights in confiding this to me, her tow-headed son.

“What do you think of this?” The class goes over some of the successful particulars in the passage—the mother “piloting” the station wagon, her “confidence,” her ability to “navigate,” her driving “like a cowboy.” We note how much Robert gets into this first paragraph. The place. The time. The character of the mother and her relationship to her watchful, innocent son. Most of all, the “promise” of the situation, and Robert Moses’s dream, which was the dream of Middle American happiness won at the expense of minorities and the poor. All this Robert packs into a car ride, in a Chevrolet, on the Meadowbrook. We speak of how the feel of the entire story is encapsulated in its beginning, so when the piece eventually widens to include the whole family, it is as if we are being told of an entire world. We appreciate Robert’s ability to draw character with a picture—“My father’s pipe was a disgusting thing: a cracked, charred wooden bowl at the end of a smelly, denture-worn plastic stem.” We feel the freedom Robert felt on Jones Beach as a boy. America, the whole of it, good and bad and self-deluding, breathes in his story.

Donna’s story, a fable for adults, begins with “Happy Birthday to You” sung to Mr. Elephant by the mice in his employ. The mice work in a mousetrap factory. “They punched in Monday through Friday at 8:00 a.m., and were home by 4:00 in the afternoon.” The class talks about how “punched in” signals that this is a fable for grown-ups. The piece involves mouse complaints about working conditions, a petition demanding more food for the workers, mouse rights as opposed to elephant power, and eventually the moral: Mice need to learn how to get their own food, and to think for themselves.