Today I am posting regretfully little because I am on deadline. The deadline is not my own; it’s someone else’s. I’ve been helping with a book for a while. Some day, when I’m allowed to, I might tell you which one. You’ll just have to trust me for now when I say you might be jealous.
Here, for today, are some shorter thoughts on items that caught my eye this week:
1. Before I knew very many writers I assumed that most of the true artists among them held themselves above the fray of publicly insulting each other. I thought of writers as all writing away in romantic, if rather ill-equipped, little garrets, and never having time to read their contemporaries, let alone have opinions on them. I thought writing would appeal to everyone’s better qualities, lifting them above petty jealousies. I am, as you may have guessed, a wonderfully naive person. In related news, here’s John Irving hating on Hemingway, via Melville House.
2. In a totally odd pairing I hadn’t known about before, apparently Joan Didion once came to Bret Easton Ellis’ defense, back when Simon & Schuster dropped American Psycho for being too controversial. She herself was annoyed with Simon & Schuster for letting several of her books lapse out of print, and objected to their refusal to publish Ellis. Which is why, apparently, her collection After Henry is dedicated, in part, to Ellis. The other dedicatee is the titular Henry Robbins himself, who was Didion’s editor at S&S for many years.
3. Letters of Note posted a letter from Hemingway to Fitzgerald. Hemingway (I refuse to call him Papa) instructs Fitzgerald that he has been insufficiently transformative in his depictions of Nicole and Dick Diver (based on Gerald and Sara Murphy) in Tender is the Night:
I liked it and I didn’t. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald (goddamn it Dos took it with him so I can’t refer to it. So if I make any mistakes—). Then you started fooling with them, making them come from things they didn’t come from, changing them into other people and you can’t do that, Scott. If you take real people and write about them you cannot give them other parents than they have (they are made by their parents and what happens to them) you cannot make them do anything they would not do. You can take you or me or Zelda or Pauline or Hadley or Sara or Gerald but you have to keep them the same and you can only make them do what they would do. You can’t make one be another. Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen.
That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
Goddamn it you took liberties with peoples’ pasts and futures that produced not people but damned marvellously faked case histories. You, who can write better than anybody can, who are so lousy with talent that you have to—the hell with it. Scott for gods sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises. You could write a fine book about Gerald and Sara for instance if you knew enough about them and they would not have any feeling, except passing, if it were true.
Lately the discussions have all been about whether non-fiction can be somewhat fictional, but here this rather inverts the question, no? I know of any number of writers who do this, of course, who lift circumstances from their real life and transform them into fiction and I am not sure it is worth being shocked about, exactly. On the other hand it does seem a bit appropriative, particularly if you’re just letting your own psychoanalysis of these figures run amok in the fiction.
4. Though this piece in the New Yorker‘s Book Bench is lovely, it seems to me obvious that the only possible answer to the question “Can We Ever Know Susan Sontag?” is no. I’ve been flipping through the second volume of her journals too and the thing that strikes me most about them is an urge for self-presentation that makes me distrust the accuracy of the recording. Not to get too Butlerian on anyone but the whole text is just a performance, scribbled notes or not. I was thinking how funny it is that Sontag’s notebooks are readable to outside audiences. If you contrast what Joan Didion says about her own notebook in her essay on notebook-keeping — “the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking” — and in my humble opinion that’s the far more honest answer.
And I write all of that as someone who adores Sontag and her aspirations to seriousness, even if I don’t always agree with her.
5. Speaking of writing about real people, this is a terrific interview of Alison Bechdel by Maud Newton. It begins with Bechdel making this provocative statement:
Yes, as I learned during the research for Are You My Mother?, and also instinctively from my experience being a human, mothers are just more difficult than fathers. It’s a much more fraught and complex relationship for everyone whether you’re male or female because this is someone who you’re physically a part of. And so it became very confounding for me, trying to sort that out. The psychoanalyst who I write a lot about in the book, Winnicott, wrote that the mother must be dismantled whereas the father can be murdered.
I’d be curious to know how many memoirists would agree with that. Or even, you know, just regular people. I mean, there is the obvious objection that not everyone is “a part of” their mother in quite the way Bechdel means here, though I wonder if you could still maintain that the mothering relationship is a fraught one for everyone because of the emphasis society places on it. I haven’t read Are You My Mother? yet because I still have not achieved my life goal of becoming the kind of person to whom book publicists automatically mail galleys of all the best books. But perhaps it answers the question I post; I love the note in this interview that Bechdel’s mother, upon reading a first draft of the book, automatically reads it as “meta.”
Hopefully that will keep you all busy today, and apologies, but I will see you next week.
