Trendy But Casual

Place of Refuge

We’ve been in Denmark for ten days so far, all but the first night spent staying at Brecht’s house in Svendborg, about 50 KM south of Odense. I have a residency here for a month. All I have to do is write in Brecht’s study, with its view of Svendborg Sound, and the islands on the other side.

Every day we remind each other how lucky we are to be in this place – this long, low house with its thatched roof, and endless doors and windows – especially now that I remember to duck when passing through any internal doorway. Yachts and ferries go by, birds chatter in the trees, flags twist and flap in the breeze. We keep the radio in the living room on all day, to a classical music station that startles us, once an hour, with the news in Danish. Max and Kirsten, who are on the Board that offered me the residency, live just along the shore and they drop by to help us with important things, like setting the channels on the new TV, so we can watch the World Cup.

Tom has study space of his own, on the shady side of the house overlooking the little yard where we dry our washing. There’s a studio there, for artists who need a larger space to work, where the house’s five bikes are stored, along with the badminton set Tom is determined to use. (Max jokingly refers to this as our "sporting program.")

Every day I’m drawn to my desk, which isn’t something I’ve been able to say, honestly, for much of the past year. Already I’ve finished the Rome book, completed an editing project, and started work on something else. Brecht tried to write a Rome book here as well, in 1938: it was about Julius Caesar, and how Ancient Rome, by preserving slavery, had made a slave of itself. Mine’s about teenagers trapped in contemporary Rome by an ash cloud, while high jinks ensue. Brecht would disapprove, I’m sure. There’s a bust of him on the study’s windowsill, and a photograph of him on the wall, cigar in hand. Elias Canetti said: “Under his gaze you felt like a worthless heirloom, and he, the pawnbroker with his piercing eyes, was appraising you.”

Brecht lived in this house from 1933 until 1939. He left Berlin in February of 1933, the day after the burning of the Reichstag. His (second) wife, the actress Helene Weigel, was Jewish, and he was a known anti-fascist. His books and plays were banned in Germany, and, in 1935, Brecht was stripped of his German citizenship – in absentia.

Brecht and Weigel fled first to Prague, and then to Vienna to borrow money from Weigel’s parents, trying to work out a way of living cheaply in France or Switzerland. Then he received an invitation from the novelist and journalist Karin Michaelis to stay in Denmark. They went first to Michaelis’ house on the island Thurø, very near Svendborg, and she helped them get the money together to buy this house. The price was something like 7000 DK. Brecht and Weigel had borrowed money from both their families, and Brecht had just received an advance to write a novel based on The Threepenny Opera.

This was an old farmhouse, and work had to be done so Brecht could live here with Weigel, their two children, and their maid, Mari Hold. Brecht’s study, where I’m typing this, was the old stable, remodelled so he could write here, and have a private – if primitive – toilet that needed to be emptied daily. This is the little room that now houses the washing machine.

He also got a supplementary stove, to keep the room warm, but the board of the Brecht House, wary of the thatched roof going up in flames, have removed any venue for open fires. The room also has a private door, so Brecht could receive visitors here directly without them walking through the house. One of these visitors, on almost a daily basis, was his long-time collaborator and mistress Margarete Steffin. I’ll write more about her, and Brecht’s other female collaborators, in another post.

We’re very close to Germany here, only 50 KM from the border. Kiel is the nearest German city, much closer to us here than Copenhagen. In a poem Brecht wrote here, he refers to a man who “quietly crosses the street.” He could hear the guns of warships, on exercise in German waters. In the poem ‘Concerning the Label Emigrant,’ he wrote: “Ach, die Stille der Sunde täuscht uns nicht! Wir hören die/Schreie/Aus ihren Lagern bis hierher.”

(“Oh, the stillness of the Sound doesn’t fool us! We hear the/Screams/From your camps over there.”)

Brecht wrote some of his most famous plays, like Mother Courage and Her Children, as well as many of his best, and best-known, poems here in Svendborg. In ‘To Those Born Later’ he talked about the life of exiles, “changing countries more often than our shoes.” Sometimes he called this place “Danish Siberia,” but during his six years here Brecht managed to travel to Copenhagen, Paris, Moscow, New York and London for various projects. Many people visited him here, including his father, and his ex-wife Marianne (with their daughter, Hanne). Walter Benjamin, the Jewish critic and philosopher, made numerous long visits, and stayed nearby for the whole summer of 1938. After lunch every day, he and Brecht played chess under the fruit trees. (A pear tree in Brecht’s poem ‘To Walter Benjamin, Who Killed Himself Fleeing From Hitler.’)

Today we were eating a late breakfast when some German visitors tapped on our kitchen window. We’d been told that Germans, in particular, like to come by to see where Brecht lived. We invited them in, and showed them around. They were from Berlin, and had grown up in the old East Germany, they told us, learning Russian instead of English, but we managed to chat about Brecht and some of his many women – Weigel, Steffin, Ruth Berlau, Elisabeth Hauptmann.  

They took some photos in the study and, after they left, I realized that I’d forgotten to tell them something important. When Brecht lived here, painted on the rafter in this room was the phrase “Die Wahrheit ist konkret” (Truth is concrete). This is a Hegelian idea, picked up by Lenin, and adopted by Brecht.

Reading Hegel and Lenin on this subject reminds me of why I got a C+ – my worst ever mark – for the course “Marxism in Perspective” taken, in terrible error, my first year at the University of Auckland. Aside from a vague notion of what Proudhon was talking about (“property is theft”), I really had no grasp of the subject at all.

My stupidity persists to this day. Something about the word “dialectics” makes my brain glaze; also the words “idea” and “truth” and “system.” Perhaps the reason is my (numerous and glaring) blind spots about mathematics: I’m not fluent in the language; I can’t follow the logic. I exhort students of writing to focus on the concrete rather than the abstract, but that’s something else, I think, to lure them into the specifics of detail, the particularities of a time and a place and a character. (I would have been no use to Lenin, except perhaps to make his dinner.) Maybe it’s the same thing: against generalizations.

Earlier, after reading things and struggling to understand, I wandered into the living room to turn up the radio: one of the Songs from the Auvergne was playing, and I wanted to listen. Tom came in as well, and performed an impromptu interpretative dance, to distract and entertain. “Hegel is b------t,” he told me. “You can quote me on that.”

(And here I should thank Doris Eikhof for the German translation of “Truth is concrete,” and for pointing out that “truth” is a feminine noun in German.)

Something I did remember to tell the German visitors: I’ve read that Helene Weigel, Brecht’s wife, didn’t share his bedroom here. She didn’t sleep in any of the bedrooms. Brecht slept downstairs; so did the two children, and the maid. But every night, Weigel tugged on a rope and pulled a ladder down from the ceiling. She slept in the attic.

When Max comes over to discuss our badminton net needs (part of one pole is missing), he says he’s not sure of the truth of this: the attic is unfinished, not suitable for habitation. I show him one of Brecht’s poems, Zufluchtsstätte, and we discuss the meaning of “Ein Ruder” in the first line. Literally it’s a rudder, but Max thinks it’s also something that horses pulled across fields to rake the soil flat; farmers used them to hold down thatched roofs, to protect them from the wind.

So here’s my attempt at a very, very loose – and free – translation, with apologies to Brecht, the German language, and metrical verse.

 

Place of Refuge

A farmer’s rudder holds down the roof, so wind

Can’t blow the straw away.

In the garden we’ve laid stakes

For a swing-set, for the children.

 

Post arrives twice a day at this place,

where letters are welcome.

Ferries come down the Sound.

The house has four doors, four ways to flee.

 

 

I’ve read interpretations of this poem that talk about the “four doors” as Brecht’s countries of exile – Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the US. But this poem was written here in Denmark, before Brecht had to flee anywhere else. And this is a house of many doors – four when Brecht was here, five now. (There's one at the end of the house, on the left, and French doors on the garden side.) Truth is concrete in this case, I suspect.

As well as the painted motto, Brecht’s studio also featured – back in the day – a nodding wooden donkey on the window ledge. It wore a little handwritten sign: “I, too, must understand it.” This was so Brecht could remember meaning, sense and clarity, I guess. (That would make Frank Conroy happy.)

Today I put down the German book, and we eat leftover sausages for lunch. Max drops by with a stake for the badminton set. In the Sound an old sailing ship heads for the harbour, and one of Max and Kirsten’s grandsons, wearing an orange life jacket, messes about in the shallows in a dinghy. I tell TM that I’m reading German books now, and translating poetry. “I’ve become an intellectual,” I warn him. “Let’s not get crazy,” he says.

 

 

 

 

What I Must Endure

After lunch today (outside: grey sky, gushing river, the peep of a wagtail flitting about):

PM: I'm going to work on my book now.

TM: Which book?

PM: Rome.

TM: It wasn't written in a day.

PM: [nothing]

TM: Why is no one willing to pay for this kind of genius?

Last week I was going to post something about the low weeks in a writer's life - the rejection, the de-commission, the falling-through, the indefinite postponement, the samples and proposals and exploratory conversations that lead nowhere in particular (or nowhere particularly lucrative) - because that's the kind of week I had, with all of the above featured. But why be glum? And why destroy our carefully contrived image as modern-day Brownings (as in EB and R), enjoying some endless glamorous exile in a foreign land, delighting in our mutual artistic-ness and the range of fruit and veg in the local markets?

Our glamorous exile is in Sheffield here at the chilly heart of Austerity Britain, but there's a very good market just five minutes walk away, where I managed to spend sixty-two pence on Lincolnshire sausages yesterday, and where the market traders say things like "that's two pounds in money" (as opposed to olden-days weight), and "that'll be ten shillings!" At the market I've also learned the local word for rolls ("breadcakes"). Exile is educational.

Now I must get back to work, because Rome wasn't ... etc.

 

 

Resolution

New year, new intentions. Or old intentions (get more work, do more work, earn more money) dressed up in optimistic spring shades, swishing their skirts. Plus some abandoned intentions from last year, of course. My short-story-a-day promise collided with my post-surgery indolence, and that was that. I managed to scrape to 236:

226: ‘Music in the Bone’ by Tomas Mac Siomoin
227: ‘The Colonel’s Daughter’ by Robert Coover (2013)
228: ‘A Few Problems in the Day Case Unit’ by Georgina Hammick (1986)
229: ‘My Heart’ by Semezdin Mehmedinovic (2011)
230: ‘Crazy in the Stir’ by Chester B. Himes (1934)
231: ‘Before the Breakup’ by Balla (2005)
232: ‘The End of the Party’ by Graham Greene (1929)
233: ‘When the Glasses are Lost’ by Zrko Kujundziski (2011)
234: ‘The Face’ by Dragan Radulovic (2007)
235: ‘Sugar Cane’ by Derek Palacio (2013)
236:  ‘Last Summer in Marienbad’ by Kirill Kobrin (2011)

Not quite the 365 I intended, but 236 new stories isn't too bad.

Maybe that was the story of 2013 for me: not quite, but not too bad. We got to travel to Hamburg and Berlin and Rome again, to Monterrey for my nephew's wedding, and to Spain for Tom's birthday. I went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, courtesy of a Carnegie Grant, to research Jean Rhys for a play I want to write. In May I went home to New Zealand for the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, and we spent Christmas in Tom's hometown of St Louis. I attended the Man Booker Prize in London. We visited friends there, and in Wales, York, and the Cotswolds; we met up with my English cousins in Newcastle, Sheffield, York. With Tom's mother we went back to Whitby and to the Lake District. The Devlin sisters stayed with us (without parents) for the first time. Other firsts: Rievaulx Abbey, Fountains Abbey, Haddon Hall, Bakewell, the top of the Shard. We spent our anniversary in Liverpool, one of our favourite places.

In 2013 we flirted with insolvency; I flirted with cancer; we both got very cosy with the NHS. I escaped the worst colleague ever and a job that pushed me to the edge. We made the happy move to a new job in Sheffield and a flat in an old cutlery factory alongside a noisy little river. In Glasgow I hosted a baby shower for my friend Doris; in Auckland I co-hosted a bridal shower for Martha, now married to my nephew. At the University of Sheffield, Tom took (and survived) a CELTA course in a long, hot July, and I studied Spanish this autumn. We saw more plays than movies. We watched almost all of BREAKING BAD. (The last few episodes have been saved as a new year's treat.)

Two new books published: a YA novel and my first children's book. Two stories commissioned, and a few poems published. A little manuscript fixing and ghostwriting. Too many false starts, conference calls and proposals that went nowhere in particular. Rejections and acceptances. Literary festivals, school visits, and talks via Skype. Interviews with Donna Tartt (phone) and Carlos Ruiz Zafon (in person). Self-doubt, despair, bursts of enthusiasm. Stories and schemes jostling in my head.

Two sparkling friends no longer here: Sarah Mohl and Sarah Doerries. It still feels implausible and wrong to write those words. They're ahead of me now, with my cousin (and godfather) Laly Haddon, and my mother's dear friend Cron Crosby, two towering men who didn't see out 2013.

This year I wasn't planning to make any new resolutions, but today a name swirled into mind: Graham Greene. I'd like to read more of his work, and I'd like to try my hand at writing every day, as he did - though I won't stop mid-sentence when I've reached 500, his usual goal.

So that's my 2014 resolution: Graham Greene. It's all I can manage, given that ongoing resolution - write, work, earn - mentioned above.

Tom Moody and I ended 2013 by getting very dressed up in Mexico. We may not look so well-groomed in 2014, and I will almost certainly not be wearing false eyelashes again at any point. But we'll keep on being happy, and trying to make something of ourselves, in our own haphazard way.

 

Mystery, Manners, Mississippi

August this year was a strange month for me – two surgeries, a lot of lying around, interviews via Skype, a ceremony at the Town Hall, my first children’s book published, a new – fake – blog (Everybody Needs Two or Three Friends), and a trip to Wales. (Wales is a strange country: let’s admit it.) The months in my life, like the days of the week, can blur sometimes, especially when I’m not leaving the house much, and my day is structured around reading, writing, and gorging on episodes of BREAKING BAD.

Much of the first week of September was spent reading Donna Tartt’s new novel, The Goldfinch, in preparation for interviewing her for the Listener. I loved the book, and I loved talking to her – perhaps because I’m such a shut-in right now, and miss conversation. (You can talk all you like to the mothers in TODDLERS AND TIARAS, but really, they’re not listening.)  So poor DT had to listen to my Leontine Price anecdote, and discuss the McDonald’s in Grenada, Mississippi, just off the I-55.

Reading the novel got me very excited about writing again, about the possibilities of story and setting in my own novel. And talking to DT about the notion of mystery sent me back to Flannery O’Connor’s essays in Mystery and Manners. I think I’m going to get my students this year to read “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” at least:

“The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions. It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object that they actually see. But the world of the fiction writer is full of matter, and this is what the beginning fiction writers are very loath to create. They are concerned primarily with unfleshed ideas and emotions. They are apt to be reformers and want to write not because they are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.”

At the end of the essay, she also talks about what writing classes can and can’t do:

“[So] many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.”

This is the hard thing to explain to some students – and clients, and people who ask you to read their manuscript and give them honest feedback. (FYI: what this latter group really want is your agent’s phone number and a fast track to the Pulitzer or Booker: anything approaching honest feedback will displease or outrage them and they will dismiss it as evidence of your jealousy, profoundly limited imagination, and overly commercial – or overly literary – frame of reference.)

I think that in order to write a story – short or long – that transcends competence, you need talent, a story to tell, and enough grasp of the possibilities of language and technique to get the story onto the page in a way that is true to your vision of it. And that’s the key thing: you need some kind of vision. Other readers – teachers, editors, classmates, etc – can help you identify weaknesses and maybe even help fix them. But we can’t supply the vision for your novel or story. Nobody else knows the path through your own particular wilderness. That’s the challenge of art: looking around, learning from other’s examples and experiences, and then forging ahead.

Sometimes people talk to me about their manuscripts, complaining about conflicting advice they’ve been given, and throwing up their hands in despair about working out the best way forward. But that’s the thing about writing – about creating any art, I would imagine. Finding the way is the thing.

As readers of this blog know, I like puzzles – jigsaws, crosswords. I like to hold up the cracker/hat ritual at Christmas by trying to guess the answers to the stupid riddles. (They’re just puns: we can all do it!) Writing fiction is the most interesting puzzle of all to me, because there aren’t clear parameters or start/end-points. It took me several years to work out how best to tell the story in Rangatira: I think it came about when I saw the date “1886” on a photograph of Paratene Te Manu, read about the eruption of Mount Tarawera that same year, and remembered the conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. There are hundreds of ways to tell the same story. At some point, you have to pick one that excites you, one that cracks the story open for you and leads you somewhere unknown and intriguing.

I’ve read lots of competent manuscripts written by people who are deeply frustrated by rejections – from writing programmes, agents, publishers. The thing is, there are a lot of great manuscripts that get rejected too. Even published great books may be rejected by the majority of readers (not to mention reviewers, if the book gets reviewed at all); the writers may remain obscure to the world at large. Other people may not like you, or get you. There are so many writers, and so many books. Don’t do it to get love or acclaim or prizes or money. And don’t pretend, like the mothers on TODDLERS AND TIARAS, that you’re doing it because it’s just a lot of fun, fun, fun.  

Time for a story update:

196: ‘Territory’ by David Leavitt (1982)

197: ‘Oil Field Vignettes’ by Jim Thompson (1929)

198: ‘Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip’ by Charles Bukowski (1944)

199: ‘April in Paris’ by Ursula Le Guin (1962)

200: ‘The State of Grace’ by Harold Brodkey (1954)

201: ‘The Geranium’ by Flannery O’Connor (1946)

202: ‘The Debutante’s Return’ by Jay McInerney (2008)

203: ‘A Day in the Open’ by Jane Bowles (1945)

204: ‘Tam-O’-Shanter’ by Donna Tartt (1993)

205: ‘Housebreaking’ by Sarah Frisch (2012)

206: ‘Yellow Woman’ by Leslie Marmon Silko (1974)

207: ‘The Use of Force’ by William Carlos Williams (1938)

208: ‘Happy Endings’ by Margaret Atwood (1983)

209: ‘My Life with the Wave’ by Octavio Paz (1949)

210: ‘An Act of Vengeance’ by Isabel Allende (1990)

211: ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ by Angela Carter (1979)

212: ‘La Sainte-Vierge’ by Daphne Du Maurier (1959)

213: ‘Charisma’ by James Salter (2013)

214: ‘The Country of the Blind’ by H. G. Wells (1904)

215: ‘The Sailor-Boy’s Tale’ by Isak Dinesen (1942)

216: ‘This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen’ by Tadeus Borowski (publ. 1967)

217: ‘The Assistant Producer’ by Vladimir Nabokov (1943)

218: ‘The Overcoat’ by Gina Berriault (1991)

219: ‘Where the Tides Ebb and Flow’ by Lord Dunsany (1910)

220: ‘Boys’ by Rick Moody (2000)

221: ‘Tell the Truth’ by Nicholasa Mohr (1975)

222: ‘Mines’ by Susan Straight (2003)

223: ‘Guests of the Nation’ by Frank O’Connor (1954)

224: ‘The Chrysanthemums’ by John Steinbeck (1938)

225: ‘Meet the President’ by Zadie Smith (2013)

The usual rules apply, by the way – only stories that are new to me, and no repeated authors. Of late I’ve been leaning a little hard on a few anthologies. Though I’m chafing at my own restrictions, I feel honour-bound to stick with them (at this late stage, as Kath and Kim would say).

I’m also worried that my home-bound recuperation means TMiddy is spending too much quality time in my presence. He’s starting asking me things like: “Did you know that Chad Lowe is Rob Lowe’s brother? Did you know that Zooey Deschanel has a sister?” Normally, his points of reference are Scientific American and the TLS. I may be a destructive influence on his mental development.

Please visit my alter-ego, Jane Shore, over at Everybody Needs Two or Three Friends. And please remember that it’s satire, and an invented character, and American spelling. The opinions expressed are not mine, or those of any normal person. For example, I would never get inspiration for a wedding from Paula Abdul (her marriage #2), even if autumn is my favourite season.

David Sedaris is a Good Guy

One of my former students, Eddie Brennan, sent me this story today. Eddie was on the postgrad (MLitt) program I set up in Stirling, and is a very accomplished comedic writer. David Sedaris is one of his big heroes and influences, so recently Eddie went to hear him read at the festival in Edinburgh.

Eddie reports:

"I met David Sedaris again on Saturday and had an amazing ten-minute chat with him before his show. We were talking about the MLitt and he was really interested in it so I gave him one of my stories, Poseidon. Would you believe it, he shook my hand and thanked me for it! 

It's the last story in my dissertation and suitably crude and silly. I told him it was a sort of homage to one of his stories called Big Boy. 'Oh! That sounds fun,' he said, laughing. 'Seriously, I'll read that later.' That was 40 minutes before the show.

After his reading he always holds a Q&A session with the fans. Someone asked him if he'd learned any new interesting Edinburgh words this time in Scotland. Sedaris keeps a little notepad in his shirt pocket and he pulled it out. I nearly wet my pants when he consulted it and said, 'Yes I have. I just learned the word "jobbie!" That's a turd, right?' Jobbie was in the second line of my story! Isn't that just amazing! 

Then, when I read how he signed my book, he had written, 'Eddie, we meet again, author.' How cool is it when your hero is just actually so decent, so down to earth and so worthy of being your hero?"

I like David Sedaris.

Some new posts up on Everybody Needs Two or Three Friends, y'all. I'm much more assiduous over there.

 

Halfway

There are towns called Halfway all over the place - for example, one just south of Sheffield, another near Llandovery in Wales, where our good friends the Keyser/Devlins live. Living in a town called Halfway might feel like living in limbo - as in limbus, the edge of hell, etc, rather than the bendy-backed Trinidadian dance.

A digression: our family went on holiday to Fiji in 1975, and the best night of all (in my nine-year-old opinion) was the evening during a boat trip through the Yasawa islands, when we all rowed ashore for a barbeque, sing-song and limbo contest.

This is my sister, me, and my brother on that holiday. We all look pretty much the same now.

We've halfway through the year - more than halfway, if July 2nd is the midpoint. That means I'm halfway through my reading project for this year, a short story a day. Unwittingly I've duplicated one author - Steven Millhauser. My story #143 was his 'Thirteen Wives' from a recent New Yorker, forgetting that I'd read his 1998 story ‘The Visit’ as #61. So I've replaced it with 'Miriam' by Truman Capote, his first published story; it appeared in Mademoiselle in June 1945, not long before his 21st birthday.

Today is July 13th, the 195th day of the year. Here's the list from 161-195:

161: ‘A City of the Living, A City of the Dead’ by Nadine Gordimer (1982)

162: ‘The Lone Ranger & Tonto Fistfight in Heaven’ by Sherman Alexie (1993)

163: ‘L Is For Lovers’ by Mary Lavin (1943)

164: ‘A Summer Day’ by Jean Stafford (1948)

165: ‘Two Kinds’ by Amy Tan (1989)

166: ‘The Place of Its Quietude’ by Luisa Valenzuela (1988)

167: ‘Migration’ by Ray French (2010)

168: ‘The Moths’ by Helena Maria Viramontes (1985)

169: ‘Night Women’ by Edwidge Danticat (1991)

170: ‘From A to Z’ by Susan Glaspell (1909)

171: ‘The Music Box’ by Malachi Whitaker (1929)

172: ‘Zelig’ by Benjamin Rosenblatt (1915)

173: ‘Loser’ by Val Mulkerns (1978)

174: ‘The Other Woman’ by Sherwood Anderson (1920)

175: ‘The Triangle’ by James Stephens (1913)

176: ‘The Dark Arts’ by Ben Marcus (2013)

177: ‘A Protagonist’s Nemesis’ by Lydia Mischkuling (2009)

178: ‘Malcontent’s Monologue’ by Daniel Batliner (2012)

179: ‘The Indian Uprising’ by Donald Barthelme (1968)

180: ‘Distant View of a Minaret’ by Alifa Rifaat (1983)

181: ‘Before the Breakip’ by Balla (2005)

182: ‘Bettering Myself ‘ by Ottessa Moshfegh (2013)

183: ‘Sold’ by Wendell Berry (2011)

184: ‘Young Goodman Brown’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1835)

185: ‘The Smallest Woman in the World’ by Clarice Lispector (1960)

186: ‘The Management of Grief’ by Bharati Mukherjee (1988)

187: ‘Wilshire Bus’ by Hisaye Yamamoto (1950)

188: ‘The Accident’ by Gao Xingjian (1983)

189: ‘The Santosbrazzi Killer’ by Heidi Julavits (2009)

190: ‘Cherry’ by Su Tong (1996)

191: ‘Wunderkind’ by Carson McCullers (1936)

192: ‘The Vengeance of Nitocris’ by Tennessee Williams (1928)

193: ‘Because of the Waters of the Flood’ by Mark Helprin (1969)

194: ‘Mademoiselle Claude’ by Henry Miller (1931)

195: ‘The Daring Young Men on the Flying Trapeze’ by William Saroyan (1933)

 

I'm still trying to range in time and geography, and not to repeat authors, or to read stories I've read before. The 1994 anthology First Fiction is proving very useful. Of course, it's easy to read off-piste - when I have a new George Saunders collection in hand, say, I'm not going to stop at one story - but for this project I can only count one per author. Also, I've become obsessive about finding the original publication date. One story I read last week - 'Snapshot' by Akos Kertesz - I haven't included because I can't locate its original publication date anywhere. I found the story in Present Continuous, an anthology of contemporary Hungarian fiction from 1985, but I don't think it was published there for the first time.

Yes, I've turned reading a short story into a way of wasting time doing 'research.'

My lovely Tulane colleague Barry Ahearn has recommended 'The Walls of Avila' by Evan S. Connell. (I've only read Connell's nonfiction - specifically Son of the Morning Star, which incited a GAC obsession that included a trip to West Point to see his grave.) Any other recommendations, especially of stories in translation, would be welcome. I still have five months of story-reading to go. Next month, when I'll be laid up for weeks after a foot operation, I'm also embarking on reading as many English novels as possible. It'll be my very own Festival of Britain.

 

It's Not About You

I need to write some sort of extended article or essay on the various uses of second-person narrative in fiction. (Yes, I really need to!) Maybe after I finish writing this novel - novels pay better than rants on point of view. But yesterday I was moved to write to the Comments editor of the Guardian about a piece on second-person in that day's paper. Though it pains me, here's the link to it.

The writer of the piece (Iowans: remember how Marilynne Robinson used the word "piece" when she didn't want to concede something was a story?) is mainly talking about blogs, but gives various examples from fiction and seems to suggest that the 'internet' is culprit for the use of second-person in stories and novels. Much as I love to blame the internet for its many crimes - like me knowing anything at all about the Kardashian family, or students being able to contact me at weekends and to address me as "hey" - I don't really think we can add use of the second-person to its list. Can't we just go back to the good old days when everyone blamed Lorrie Moore?

Anyway, here's what I wrote to the editor, for filing in the Guardian's bin:

Dear Comment Editor,

Morven Crumlish in today's paper (Saturday 6 July 2013) is making a very basic error: misreading second-person fiction. The "you" in a second-person story by, say, Junot Diaz is not supposed to be you-the-reader. It's a narrator who's talking about him- or herself, but in a way that suggests alienation from the events described, or emotional/ironic distance.

When Diaz was asked why he'd chosen second-person for his story 'Miss Lola' - published in the New Yorker last year - he explained: 'I really needed distance from this story. Every time I wrote in the first person it was just too close. Tried third person, but that flopped as well. Second person ended up being the only way to get through. I guess I wanted my narrator to be “in” the story, but also to be able to comment on his younger self a little.'

A famous example from the (pre-internet!) 80s is Jay McInerney's BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY. The opening lines are: 'You are not the kind of guy who would be  at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge.'

We readers aren't supposed to think that WE are the person at a nightclub in NYC, taking vast amounts of cocaine and about to lose our job, etc. The second-person narrator is observing his own out-of-control life, unable to cope with the trauma he keeps hidden from readers for most of the book, the death of his mother.

Sure, Lorrie Moore - also famous for using the second-person before the internet 'inspired this shift in writing style' - employed it in a different way in her 1985 collection SELF-HELP: she told the Paris Review that she used 'the mock imperative of the second person' in part 'to satirize formally the idea of advice and a culture of advice.' But again, I don't think someone reading 'How to Be an Other Woman' (for example) will think it's about anyone but that character, Charlene, and her particular situation. Again, here's the opening: 'Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie. First, stand in front of Florsheim’s Fifty-seventh Street window, press your face close to the glass, watch the fake velvet Hummels inside revolving around the wing tips; some white shoes, like your father wears, are propped up with garlands on a small mound of chemical snow.'

When we read stories like this, we do not have, as Morven Crumlish contends, the 'understanding that you are in the same clique as the writer.' We don't have to relate to things we're reading, or identify with characters in a story or novel. As she points out, we should not only read 'content that speaks so directly and without conflict to your own experience.' But I doubt that Junot Diaz is expecting us to live the life of a Dominican-American young man, or that his (very wide) readership is part of his 'clique.' I doubt that Lorrie Moore cares whether the reader is a woman or has even been to New York. Most fiction writers want as many readers as possible, not just readers who happen to share an age, gender or geography with a particular character. Like much good fiction, these stories bristle with vivid and particular detail, bringing into focus worlds that may be very alien - in time, place, experience - to a reader.

I can't address the 'confessional journalism' to which Morven turns in her piece, but please reassure her about the second-person narrative in fiction: it's not all about us!

Best wishes,

Paula Morris
Fiction Writer-in-Residence,
University of Sheffield

Oh yes - I invoked the job title! This always works in Britain. When I taught in Scotland, I sent a job-titled email to the Edinburgh Lit Festival, asking to chair some sessions - based on my experience at chairing writers (like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Monica Ali, Tash Aw, Peter Ho Davies, Tea Abreht, Kate Grenville, etc) in other festivals - I received ... hmm, no reply at all.

 

Drinking, Writing, Reading, etc

TMiddy is in the first week of a month-long intensive CELTA course. It's strange to have him gone for the flat for so many hours every day. I find myself adopting a 50s housewifely persona - making him a pistachio and strawberry cake on Monday, getting up early today to wrap up a slice in greaseproof paper for him to take in his school bag. Planning the menus for the week and trekking off with a backpack to the supermarket so I can have his dinner ready - well, ready-ish - when he gets home every evening. I've even learned how to use the washing machine, which is apparently much simpler to operate than feared. If there's a spontaneous outbreak of ironing and dusting, I may have to go to the doctors.

When he rings me at the break, I ask him if the others are being nice to him, if people are sitting with him at lunchtime, what he bought at the station for his lunch. (A good housewife would make him his lunch: next week, I promise!) I tell him that I've been watching the ducks, the moorhen and the yellow wagtails out the window, as though he's been sent away to boarding school and needs updates about his pets.

In between bursts of domestic enthusiasm, I'm working on a novel. Can you guess where it's set?

Yes, you've guessed it. We've just returned from three hot days in Rome, revisiting some of the sites for the novel and getting obsessed with hooded crows.

And for Tikileaks followers, especially those who were SO concerned during my last trip to Rome that we were not properly hydrated, don't worry.

But now I must step away from the beer, and the baking, and write. Also read: here's an update on my one-story-a-day project.

141: ‘Sugar Baby’ by Chinua Achebe (1972)

142: ‘Abandoned Children of This Planet’ by Kenzaburo Oe (1996)

143: ‘Thirteen Wives’ by Steven Millhauser (2013)

144: ‘Sunday at Home’ by Stevie Smith (1949)

145: ‘My Wife is a White Russian’ by Rose Tremain (1984)

146: ‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street’ by Mavis Gallant (1963)

147: ‘Third Time Lucky’ by Rachel Ingalls (1986)

148: ‘Samson and Delilah’ by D. H. Lawrence (1916)

149: ‘The Wedding of Zeina’ by Ahdaf Soueif (1983)

150: ‘Camilla and the Horse’ by Christina Hesselholdt (2008)

151: ‘Mamasita’ by Jayne Anne Phillips (1975)

152: ‘How I Became a Holy Mother’ by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1976)

153: ‘Child’s Play’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard (1975)

154: ‘As A Wife Has A Cow: A Love Story’ by Gertrude Stein (1926)

155: ‘My Father, the Englishman and I’ by Nuruddin Farah (1997)

156: ‘The Time-Keeper’ by Elspeth Davie (1980)

157: ‘Amor Divino’ by Julia Alvarez (1997)

158: ‘The Passion of Marco Z—‘ by Anne Leaton (1976)

159: ‘Zoo Story’ by A. M. Homes (2013)

160: ‘The White Doll’ by K. Arnold Price (1985)

No repeated authors yet, but I'm starting to get nervous. Maybe by December I'll be reading flash fiction from Borneo. Recommendations are always welcome.

Also, if anyone knows a great deal about the goddess Minerva, please get in touch. TMiddy is no help this month - he's too busy putting on his business trousers and setting out each day to learn things. When he gets home each night, he looks at the noticeboard to see what I'm cooking for dinner. Next week, he says, he wants menu approval.

Sun + Shower

My mother-in-law has been in England, at our mercy for ten days. So, of course, we imposed some of our favourite Northern places on her: Chatsworth House and the Peak District; York and Whitby; and the Lake District - Windermere and Coniston. We also persuaded her to eat half a Cornish Pasty. (Half is enough.)

It was so sunny in the Lakes we got something approaching a tan. Very unusual. The picture above was taken after nine at night from Orrest Head, where TM and I clambered after dinner.

Tom's mother flew back to St Louis today, and on Sunday we're off to Rome to stay with NZ friends for a few days. I really want to finish the Rome book within the next month or so, and need a (hot) blast of the real thing. At least this time I won't have awful, petty people scouring the Internet for incriminating evidence ...

Story update: it's day 172 of my short-story-a-day challenge. I'm still reading, and still trying to range in time and place. Here's the list up to 140.

101: ‘The DeWets Come to Kloof Grange’ by Doris Lessing (1951)
102: ‘The Genial Host’ by Mary McCarthy (1942)
103: ‘The Schartz-Metterklume Method’ by Saki (1904)
104: ‘Another Life’ by Paul LaFarge (2012)
105: ‘A Replacement’ by Peter Mathiessen (1953)
106: ‘The Joycelin Shrager Story’ by Tom Disch (1975)
107: ‘Ideas’ by Patricio Pron (2009)
108: ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson (1948)
109: ‘The Music Shop’ by Gyrdir Eliasson (2009)
110: ‘The Test’ by Angelica Gibbs (1940)
111: ‘The Perfectionist’ by Patricia Highsmith (1974)
112: ‘Scale’ by Will Self (1994)
113: ‘How Old, How Young’ by John O’Hara (1967)
114: ‘The English Lesson’ by Margaret Bonham (1947)
115: ‘Lappin and Lapinova’ by Virginia Woolf (1939)
116: ‘Pirpo and Chanberlan, Murderers’ by Bernardo Atxaga (2006)
117: ‘Minnie’s Room’ by Mollie Panter-Downes (1947)
118: ‘Natives Don’t Cry’ by Kay Boyle (1935)
119: ‘The Convolvulus Clock’ by Ruth Rendell (1985)
120: ‘Two Hanged Women’ by Henry Handel Richardson (1934)
121: ‘The Adult Holiday’ by Elizabeth Spencer (1983)
122: ‘The House of Clouds’ by Antonia White (1928)
123: ‘The Lesson’ by Toni Cade Bambara (1972)
124: ‘Looking for a Rain God’ by Bessie Head (1977)
125: ‘The Giantess’ by Suniti Namjoshi (1984)
126: ‘The Lottery’ by Marjorie Barnard (1943)
127: ‘The Passion of Marco Z’ by Anne Leaton (1976)
128: ‘The Petrified Woman’ by Caroline Gordon 1963
129: ‘Every Move You Make’ by David Malouf (2006)
130: ‘Paper Children’ by Elizabeth Jolley (1983)
131: ‘For a Foreign Master’ by Borivoje Adasevic (2000)
132: ‘Levitation’ by Cynthia Ozick (1982)
133: ‘An Unpleasant Reminder’ by Anna Kavan (1940)
134: ‘The Weeping Child’ by Jane Gardam (1975)
135: ‘Diego’ by Julia O’Faolain (1982)
136: ‘The Sisters’ by Pauline Smith (1925)
137: ‘Weekend’ by Fay Weldon (1978)
138:  ‘Everyday Use’ by Alice Walker (1973)
139: ‘Death of a Son’ by Njabulo S. Ndebele (1987)
140: ‘Down the Quiet Street’ by Es’kia Mphahlele (1954)

But now for the real point of this post: the bridal shower my sister, niece and I threw for my nephew's lovely fiancee, Martha, when I was back in Auckland. For those of you planning a bridal shower any time soon - much nicer than hen nights, because they involve biscuits, scones, ginger gems, etc - here are some game ideas. The first is a quiz we devised called FAMOUS BRIDES IN HISTORY. The guests were put into teams of four or five; we mixed up ages and nationalities of team members, to make it more fair/fun. I would have made the questions even longer, and all about the Tudors, but I was overruled. Also, Martha is Mexican, hence the Mexican questions.

Here's the quiz, with answers below.

1. Cleopatra considered herself to be married four times. Her first two husbands were her younger half-brothers: Ptolemy XIII and Ptolemy XIV. She had a child with her third husband, Julius Caesar. What was the name of the Roman who became her fourth husband?

2. How many times was Elizabeth Taylor married?

3. Who was the second bride of Henry VIII?

4. In 1745, the sixteen-year-old Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst, the eldest daughter of an obscure Prussian prince, was married in Moscow to the heir to the imperial Russian throne. Under what name did she become best known?

5. Who, in 1985, became actor Sean Penn's first wife?

6. Which Mexican artist had a turbulent marriage to fellow painter Diego Rivera?

7. In 1880 an English writer born Mary Anne Evans married a man twenty years her junior. During their honeymoon in Venice, he tried to kill himself by jumping out the window and into a canal. What was the pen name of this writer?

8. How old was Marie Antoinette when she married Louis XVI in May 1770?

9. Pippa Middleton was Kate Middleton's maid of honour. How many bridesmaids did Kate have?

10. How many times has “singer” Jennifer Lopez been married?

11. Who was Helen of Troy's husband when she ran off with Paris and started the Trojan war?

12. Which of Rod Stewart's wives was born in Auckland?

 13. Nicole Kidman is married to country singer Keith Urban. Who was her first husband?

14. Which Mexican-born actress married French billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault – first in Paris, and then in Venice?

15. Who was married three times in this times, in this order: the King of France, a Scottish Lord, and an Earl who probably murdered her second husband?

16. When did a thirty-three-year-old Eva Braun marry fifty-six-year-old Hitler?

17. Which actress married the future president of Argentina in 1945?

18. Which Hungarian-born actress said: “A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished!”

 

Answers:

1. Marc Antony

2. Eight: Conrad “Nicky” Hilton; Michael Wilding; Mike Todd; Eddie Fisher; Richard Burton: Richard Burton; John Warner; and Larry Fortensky.

3. Anne Boleyn

4. Catherine the Great

5. Madonna

6. Frida Kahlo

7. George Eliot

8. Fourteen

9. Four: Lady Louise Windsor; Grace Van Cutsems; Eliza Lopes; and Margarita Armstrong-Jones

10. Three times: Ojani Noa; Chris Judd; and Marc Anthony

11. Menelaus of Sparta

12. Rachel Hunter

13. Tom Cruise

14. Salma Hayek

15. Mary Queen of Scots: King Francois II; Lord Darnley; the Earl of Bothwell

16. 1945: April 29. They committed suicide the next day.

17. Eva Peron

18. Zsa Zsa Gabor

 

Here are some extra-credit questions you could add:

19. At the end of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, how many Bennet daughters are married?

20. Which Persian bride told stories to her husband to save herself from execution?

21. The Chinese actress Jiang Qing was better known by what name after her 1938 marriage to a major political figure?

22. HIGH SOCIETY was the last film of which American actress before her marriage (to a European prince)?

23. Which young Italian bride moved into Indira Gandhi's house in 1968?

24. In THE SOUND OF MUSIC, who tries - and fails - to become the bride of Captain Von Trapp?

25. There were three Bronte sisters but only one got married: which one?

 

Extra -credit answers:

19. Three: Lydia,  Jane, Elizabeth.

20. Scheherazade.

21. Madame Mao.

22. Grace Kelly.

23. Sonia Gandhi, wife of Indira Gandhi's son Rajiv.

24. The Baroness, Elsa Schroeder. (FYI: the best character in the film)

25. Charlotte Bronte.

Another game we played was to design Martha a going-away outfit. Each team - Green, Blue, Yellow, Purple, Red - was given a bizarre drawing of Martha (drawn by me, with photo-head attached, hence bizarreness), plus a bag of paper and fabric scraps, glue, bows, tape, stickers, etc. I tried to buy glitter as well, but my sister had enough of that all over the floor when her children were small.

The teams had about 20 minutes to come up with something. The results were fantastic.

Do try this at home.

Also, make Afghan biscuits.

Just a suggestion ...

 

Seasons, Stories

Leaving New Zealand, where it was autumn - as demonstrated in my sister's back garden:

 

… to Sheffield, where it’s early summer. This is our new place, on the ground floor of a former cutlery factory:

I realize, to my horror, that I haven’t updated the story list for ages. I’m still reading a short story every day, trying to range in time and place. Here’s 75-100.

75: ‘Bulldog’ by Arthur Miller (2001)
76: ‘Cell Phone’ by Ingo Schulze (1999)
77: ‘Hoodie in Xanadu’ by Ann Beattie (2010)
78: ‘The Custody of the Pumpkin’ by P. G. Wodehouse (1924)
79: ‘Madame de Treymes’ by Edith Wharton (1907)
80: ‘Goldfish’ by Raymond Chandler (1936)
81: ‘The Dragon’ by Muriel Spark (1985)
82: ‘Death of a Son’ by Njabulo S. Ndebele (1987)
83: ‘The Cost of Living’ by Bernard Malamud (1949)
84: ‘Sea Story’ by A.. S. Byatt (2013)
85: ‘The Landmarker’ by Louis Auchincloss (1964)
86: ‘Angels on the Inside’ by Dulce Maria Cardoso (2011)
87: ‘The Letter Scene’ by Susan Sontag (1986)
88: ‘Associations in Blue’ by Christa Wolf (2003)
89: ‘It’s All Up to You’ by Sylwia Chutnik (2011)
90: ‘Twenty-Two Stories’ by Paul Theroux (2008)
91: ‘Wars in Distant Lands’ by Najem Wali (2008)
92: ‘Suicide by Fitness Center’ by Joyce Carol Oates (2008)
93: ‘The Ecstasy of Alfred Russell Wallace’ by Daniel Mason (2008)
94: ‘Story in Harlem Slang’ by Zora Neale Hurston (1942)
95: ‘The Surrealist’s Daughter’ by Kristiina Ehin (2011)
96: ‘Something That Needs Nothing’ by Miranda July (2007)
97: ‘Nine Years is a Long Time’ by Norah Hoult (1938)
98: ‘A Long Night at Abu Simbel’ by Penelope Lively (1984)
99: ‘Welcome to the City’ by Irwin Shaw (1942)
100: ‘Vienna’ by Deborah Levy (2013)

And for those of you who've read RUINED, here is a picture of (the real) Marilyn the cat.