Writing is Damn Hard

• Peace by Richard Bausch.  For a few months this year, it seemed the best books I read were short ones -- novels of less than 200 pages that seemed to have a narrow scope but which, really, had enormous depth. This was one of them. The present tense of the story is simple: three American soldiers during World War I climb a hill in Italy, led by an old man who may be friend or may be an enemy, to scout for enemy troops. They go up the hill and then, some of them, come back down again. Beneath that, however, the book dealt with the price of prejudice and the value of mercy.
• The March by E.L. Doctorow. Although this novel is a few years old, I hadn't read it until I heard that Doctorow was coming to town to give a talk and receive an award.  It's about Sherman's march through the South near the end of the Civil War. There are a number of reasons that it's an amazing book but perhaps the primary reason arises from Doctorow's ability to write from so many points of view -- a young slave girl who was the product of her mother's sleeping with the master of the plantation; Sherman; a young Confederate soldier; a previously sheltered Southern woman who becomes a nurse for a Yankee doctor.
• The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III. One of two post-9/11 novels on the list (the other is Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, below.) It's a compelling story from multiple perspectives -- a fictionalized version of one of the terrorists who flew a plane into the World Trade Center, a stripper he encounters, a poor and unfortunate soul who gets over his head in trouble when he makes a foolish mistake at the strip club.
• Matrimony by Joshua Henkin.  The novel is a model of efficiency as it covers with amazing care and depth roughly twenty years in his characters' lives in just a scant more than 300 pages.
• Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. The American madness in Vietnam from several perspectives. If you had doubt that we were still publishing big novels with grand ambition, you should read this.
• The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey. I've read every novel Livesey has written and this one seems her best. Told from four points of view in four sections, it gives us an ever-deepening understanding of an event that closes out the first section.
• Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles. Another small book -- 180 pages -- the novel is, on the surface, a letter of complaint the narrator writes to the airline while he waits, stranded in Chicago's O'Hare airport while he's trying to get to his estranged daughter's commitment ceremony. In the midst of the complaint, however, the narrator goes through his entire life -- every messy, failed year of it.
• Last Night at the Lobster by Stuart O'Nan. Another seemingly small, quiet book -- but riveting. It centers on the last night a Red Lobster Restaurant will be open and centers on the manager who tries to cope with a major storm, a lost love, finding a Christmas present for the mother of his child, and a workforce who doesn't see the point in doing anything.
• Netherland by Joseph O'Neill. The book is deceptively quiet -- especially for a novel that deals with the post-9/11 world--and who would have thought that a novel with cricket at its center (and cricket in the US at that) could be so riveting.
• Final Salute by Jim Sheeler. The one work of non-fiction on  my list.  The book centers on the soldiers whose job it is to inform next-of-kin that a loved one died in battle. I read it for personal reasons -- after my son had come home from a year in Iraq and I had spent nearly every day of those 365 expecting someone like the figures in Sheeler's book to knock on my door.  You can't read this book without crying.

Courage

Listening to an interview with the firemen from Station 11 who worked to rescue people when the I-35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis,  I was struck by their courage. One man talked about walking through the wreckage, aware that a concrete pillar could fall at any second, killing him. Another talked about being paralyzed by fear for a moment--his legs would not miove although he wanted them to. It struck me, as I continue to struggle with my little book: if a fireman can work his way across concrete rubble, keeping one eye on the pillar towering abvove him, sensing that the rubble would shift, that a tremor could send several tons of concrete spilling onto him, crushing him to death--if a man can do that and keep going forward, to save the life of another human being--I can keep going with my book. Failure in a single day of bad writing is not final, not fatal. To have fear of the blank page (screen) is absurd and embarrassing. .. and even idiotic in the context of real bravery.

Herding Cats

Recently, I found myself staying overnight in a hotel while I had some work done in my house. I have a cat and couldn't leave her at home while the workers were there, so I had to bring her with me, carting her to the Comfort Inn around the corner in a pet taxi.

For most of my stay, I let her have the run of the room but on the afternoon of my stay, I needed to go out and have some lunch. I knew that someone from housekeeping would be coming to the room while I was gone and I didn't want my cat to be loose in the room when the person came by. I didn't want her to be a bother to whoever it was.

I decided to put her in the pet taxi but when I tried to pick her up, she ran into a corner, and under a bed so I couldn't reach her. For a moment, I tried to coax her out but she stayed there, obstinately.

"She's a cat," the thought struck me. Cats live on their own time; you can't train them as you might a dog. A cat has to decide she is going to give you attention. A cat has to decide to come out of the corner and from under the bed.

I walked away, sat in a chair and read the paper for a moment. She emerged, walked across the room and laid on the carpet at my feet. It was easy then to pick her up and put her in the taxi.

It strikes me that sometimes ideas for the novel are like that--sometimes you work and work and work and try to force them to come but they don't. They crawl into a corner and under a bed and all you can see is the mere hint that they're there. You reach and cajole and they stay out of your grasp.

So, sometimes, you have to walk away--not forget about them, but sit and wait patiently for them to show themselves, to give themselves up to you.

It's not that you've surrendered. It's just that you're trying patient listening instead of brute creative force.

Baseboards

One of the reasons I dislike painting so much is that I can’t do it without making a huge mess: while I think I get more paint on the walls than on myself, the floor and elsewhere (I am still not certain how I ended up with white latex paint on the bumper of my Jeep, which was in the garage while I was painting upstairs) the ratio (paint on wall:paint everywhere else) is probably not a good one.

Because of that, when I recently painted every room in my house, it meant that I had to replace all the baseboards.  Now, I am not a talented, nor a patient, handyman. My father was not much for working around the house; his father and brother were extraordinarily handy—both my grandfather and my uncle were factory men, men adept at making things with their hands. My father, for some reason in that family, was a man for whom intellect was more important—he was a reader, someone who studied philosophy at a Jesuit college before going to a Jesuit medical school, a person who worked calculus problems to help himself relax. As a result, when I was growing up, our tool set at home consisted of a hammer and a handful of screwdrivers shoved in a kitchen drawer; we used them to hang pictures and tighten screws that might work loose in a doorknob. For anything more complicated, we hired people to do them.

As I came close to finishing the painting in my home, I recognized that I had to do something about the baseboards: baseboards with paint spatters are not going to make a good impression on anyone who might walk through the house with an eye toward buying it.  I thought—sure, I can do them myself. I thought—I have not the faintest idea of how to install baseboards.

Once, when I was at one of the big box hardwares, buying still more paint, I picked up one of the reference books they sell, about finish carpentry. Standing in line at the checkout, I read through the chapter on baseboards: miter saw, coping saw, measuring angles: it all seemed impossibly complex. A small table in the upper left hand corner of the page advised readers how long it might take someone to install baseboards in a ten-by-ten room. Four hours for an experienced person, it said; eight, for a novice.

The book cautioned that corners in a house were not necessarily precisely ninety degrees. To make an accurate joint, then, meant measuring and calibrating a miter saw to the precise proportion: it was not just 45 degrees and 45 degrees. It could be 47 degrees and 43 degrees.

I put the book back and went home, still unsure what to do about my baseboards.

Several times, I went to the hardware and wandered around the tools department, picking up miter boxes and miter saws and putting them back down. I priced electric miter saws. I wandered through the lumber section, looking at baseboard. I went home.

Finally, I asked someone for a bid on doing the work for me.  He did a rough calculation of the linear feet and said it would be $2,000 if he pulled up the old baseboard and installed the new; a thousand if I pulled up the old baseboard.

It meant I had to install the baseboards myself.

For a week, I went to the hardware, wandered around the tools department: a hand saw and miter box or an electric saw? Hand or electric? Once I waited for twenty minutes for someone to help me in the department, so I could ask what tools I should buy, what I should know about installing baseboard and, for twenty minutes in the cavernous big box hardware, not a soul came by to help me. I went home.

The thing is:

I was afraid of baseboards. I didn’t think I could do the work. I didn’t think I was adept enough to make the measurements correctly, or to cut the wood cleanly.  I avoided it.

I’d never know.

I set up the miter box and saw, took out my measuring tape and measured one kitchen wall that ended at an outside corner. I realized that I would have to compensate for the fact that the corner angle would mean that the outside edge of the baseboard would be longer than the inside edge, so I made a guess, marked the baseboard, cut it. . .and was half an inch short.  I measured again, realizing that if I measured the length of the beveled cut, I could figure out how much to add to the wall measurement to obtain the length of the outer edge of the baseboard. I checked the measure, cut the baseboard. . .and was short, again, by a fraction of an inch.

I took a third length of baseboard, measured, checked the measure, cut the wood—and it fit.

• You get nothing written by avoiding it, by being too afraid to sit down at the computer. You only write by writing.
•  At some point, you have to say: if I am going to find out if I can actually write a novel, I have to do the writing equivalent of buying wood and a saw, of measuring, of cutting, of re-measuring and re-cutting if the first cut is incorrect.
• Even if you make a mistake, and the measurement is off and the baseboard doesn’t fit, the length of baseboard is not wasted. The first length of baseboard I cut was a shade under six feet.  That first and second piece I cut did not fit in the space for which I intended it but I will need many shorter lengths of baseboard in my house: a three foot section in my bathroom, an eight-inch section to wrap around the corner wall between my kitchen and my hall. The two pieces I cut incorrectly will serve to make those shorter lengths. As writers, we are always writing sections that don’t work; we are always starting pieces or sections of longer works that we excise, or are creating characters in one place who belong in another. Like the lengths of baseboard that didn’t quite fit, we can take those pieces—those scenes, those characters, those lines of description or dialogue—and plug them into somewhere else, a more appropriate place.

W H Hudson

In 1928, Asa Don Dickinson--who was then the librarian for the University of Pennsylvania--published The Best Books of Our Time. It was an ambitious project--and one that perhaps only a librarian--a lover of cataloguing and organizing--might have undertaken.

In it, he ranks the authors of the first quarter of the 20th century according to the number of times their works were cited in any one of 61 different literary references of the day, ranging from The Book Review Digest to the New York State Library's annual list of the best books of the year, to John Drinkwater's Outline of Literature to a list compiled by a woman named Harriet C. Long, who won a prize from Scribner's magazine for the "best list of books by American authors."

Dickinson's method is simple: he counted the number of times a particular book was mentioned in one of his references, awarded its author a point for each mention, and then ranked the authors according to the number of "endorsements" his or her books earned.

Many of the names on the list are familiar even today, almost 80 years after Dickinson published his book: John Galsworthy (most famous for his Forsyte Saga) ranks first, with 197 endorsements, followed by H.G. Wells (172), Arnold Bennett (137), George Bernard Shaw (123), Edith Wharton (118), Joseph Conrad (110), Booth Tarkinton (103) and Rudyar Kipling (79).

The writers who rank ninth and tenth, however, are fairly anonymous today: W. H. Hudson and Joseph Hergesheimer. (Eugene O'Neill ranks eleventh.)

Hudson, according to The Best Books of Our Time, earns his place from a dozen books. The most popular is Green Mansions, which Dickinson describes as "A symbolic idyll. The tragic love of a young naturalist and a native girl in the forest of Guiana." Galsworthy, himself, praised it:

"Immortalizes as passionate a love of all beautiful things as ever was in the heart of man. In form and spirit the book is unique."

Other of Hudson's work also earns considerable praise. Athenaeum descibes Far Away and Long Ago as "like a mixture of a Conrad novel and Robinson Crusoe," while Booklist calls A Hind in Richmond Park, "An engaging book, embodying all that is most delightful in Hudson's art."

And yet, 78 years later--and 84 years after Hudson's death in 1922--few remember him. While a google search for him yields a few brief biographical entries in several encyclopoediae, he and his work are obscure. A search of the New York Times database finds the last article about him appeared in 1956, a roughly 50-word report that Argentina was turning the cottage where he was born into a museum.

He certainly is no longer in the league of Shaw, Wharton or Conrad.

For writers, the fact that Hudson--like many of the writers on Dickinson's list (Margaret Deland? James Branch Cabell? Percy MacKaye? Zona Gale? M.S. Watts? Romain Rolland? W. F. Moneypenny?)--is little remembered today, however, is good news.

It means no one is watching us. If no one is watching us, then, it means we have permission to fail; we have permission to attempt work we may not be able to pull off.

I can sit at my computer today and write anything I want. I can write for myself--not for posterity, not for fame, not for money (my eating, my buying gasoline, my paying my electric bill--none of that depends on whether I finish my novel). If I can write for myself, then, I can write badly: I can write badly today, tomorrow, the next day, the day after.

I can write badly until I learn to write well.

No hurry.