Seducing the Demon (21 page)

Writing is the first antidepressant. It came before Prozac or Effexor. And it was cheaper. All you needed was a blank piece of paper and a pencil, as my father used to say. If you were lucky, you might even make some dough. But even if you didn’t, you were doing something godlike—emblazoning words of fire on a tablet of stone and handing them to Moses, any Moses. So what if there were a lot of “shalt nots”? Interestingly enough, just writing “shalt not” cheered you up.

No wonder Henry Miller called writers “ingrown toenails” and preferred hanging out with painters.

I think writing elevates my mood because it’s a way of imposing order on chaos. Eudora Welty said in her memoir,
One Writer’s Beginnings,
that in order to tell a story you have to find sequence in experience. Sequence is a way of understanding an experience that has previously been obscure. Of course you will inevitably distort your memories by sequencing them, but memory is already distorted when you retrieve it. Memory is always impure. We tend to make up narratives for ourselves that grow stronger with each retelling. Of course they depart from what really happened because what really happened was not fixed in language. Whatever is not fixed in language drifts away. Once we create a narrative, the underlying events diffuse like fog. A great deal of ink has been wasted on autobiography versus fiction, when the truth is that all autobiography is fiction and all fiction is autobiography. The important thing to remember is that we are narrative-making creatures. In making a narrative, one always employs choice.

Anyway, if you think of writing as something you are doing to cheer yourself up—and to cheer other people up—who cares about purity? Sometimes I think the only happy writers are the ones who think of themselves as entertainers.

Ken Follett is like this. He entertains, but he never lowers his standards. He is very successful and he takes his work seriously and never does less than his best. His research is impeccable. He begins each book by writing a very detailed outline. The first outline is rather rough-hewn. The subsequent ones are more and more detailed. They include everything about characters, setting and plot progress. The outlines are rewritten and expanded until they become detailed patterns for the book. Then he writes it, staying as close to the outline as possible.

Of course there are surprises along the way, but Follett likes them to be small craftsmanlike surprises. He tries to put himself in the reader’s place and plan the most surprise in the reader by having the least surprise in the writer. He is not a depressive. In this way, he writes worldwide best-seller after worldwide best-seller.

To outline or not to outline—that is the question. I think a plot-driven novel probably should be outlined, while a character-driven one needs more freedom. I can’t outline. I start with a character and her predicament, and go from there. Plot is not my forte.

I never know the arc of the story until I am at least a third of the way into the novel. If I have realized my character sufficiently, she will give me my plot. Plot is just a fancy way of saying
“and then.”

Jorge Luis Borges claimed all fantastic literature had only four plots: the mingling of dream and reality, the double, time travel and the book within the book. You could spend your whole writing life on these four and Borges did. So has Umberto Eco—and others too numerous, as they say, to mention.

Once, in a rare-book store, I came upon a book called
Plotto,
which detailed all the possible plots in literature and how to combine them. It seems to me like a project a would-be writer would tackle instead of writing a novel. There was a lot in
Plotto
about killing the king or queen, babies switched at birth and magic spells. The truth is that no plot device will save you if your characters are not believable. And if they are, you can get away with practically anything.

“There are three rules for writing novels,” Somerset Maugham said; “unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.”

The greatest problem of novel writing for me is to believe in the book long enough for it to reveal its secrets. As the writer, I am hardly the best person to know whether I have cast my spell of enchantment on the reader. I go on pure nerve. I have to assume that the reader is bewitched. In order to believe this, I have to be bewitched myself. When the spell breaks, there is always the chance I will take the manuscript out to the incinerator—as Nabokov is said to have done with
Lolita.

Vera Nabokov, however, pulled it out. Or so the story goes. It may also be a fiction devised by Vera and Vlodya to embellish his reputation. Never trust a writer—not even a dead one.

 

 

A few years ago, I took my daughter Molly to see where I lived when I was beginning my first real self-education as a writer. It was a dismal Army housing project in Heidelberg with mustard-colored walls and sad rectangles of dried grass between the buildings.

“I can’t believe you ever lived in such a
dump,”
Molly said. “Where did you write?”

“I wrote in the second bedroom of a two-bedroom apartment with ugly gray Army-issue furniture. It was a fourth-floor walk-up.”

We had come back to Heidelberg to participate in a documentary for German TV about writers who had lived in Heidelberg—like Goethe. But there was nothing picturesque about the place I’d lived.

Molly and I trudged up to the fourth floor and rang the bell. I explained to the harried lady of the house that I had once lived there and she let us in to the squalor. The same dirty oversized furniture. Toys, boots and clothes everywhere. The second bedroom was not much different from my memories of it. The boxy desk. The day-bed. The depressing view of the muddy courtyard. But it was here that I had written the first hurried riffs for
Fear of Flying.
I had scribbled in my notebook “The History of the World Through Toilets”—never dreaming it would find its way into a novel. I had studied Denise Levertov’s poems, trying to figure out why she broke her lines where she did. I had discovered Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and realized that a woman’s daily life could be the material for poetry. I had written poems and stories never dreaming they would ever be read by anyone.

“What a horrible place,” Molly said. “Let’s go.” She wanted to get back to our fancy hotel downtown and play video games. Nostalgia is never what your children want from you. They want absolute love, and unwavering support. They want omnipotence—until the curtain blows aside and you are revealed as the Wizard of Oz. I hated seeing my father’s weakness at the end of his life. When I dream of him now, he is always in his prime. The old man has vanished; the young man is immortal.

In Heidelberg, I remembered what a sanctuary this dreary housing project had been to me. Far away from family, graduate school and the chaos of my family in New York, I had found a cocoon in which to educate myself as a writer. From the outside, it was dreary. In my memory, it was the oasis in which I blossomed. I wasn’t anybody then. I was Erica Mann, age twenty-three, wondering if she could write anything worth reading. But there were no expectations weighing me down, either. I look back at that time and realize how utterly free I was.

Molly and I did go back downtown to the elegant hotel suite where the TV producers were putting us up. We were photographed all over the picturesque old town as if the cobblestones and curved bridges and ancient Schloss were what made Heidelberg inspiring. I don’t know about Goethe, but Heidelberg nurtured me because it was there that I was left alone to read and write. It had nothing to do with the Schloss or the Alte Brücke.

There is in writing—or any creative work—a kind of fuck-you impulse. Part of the energy comes from sheer rebelliousness.
I’ll show you!
a writer
says. I am not who you think I am.
Sometimes you have to get mad just to begin. You think you are all alone in this—but battalions of dead writers who faced the same challenge are shouting in your ears. (Margaret Atwood calls writing “negotiating with the dead.”) You have to drown them out when they keep you from hearing yourself. They are alternately encouraging and stifling. You have to invent a voice that will make all their voices obsolete. You can’t do this without grit, aggression, a kind of madness. No one really asks for a new book, but you need to write it. And your need will eventually infect your reader.

If you want to be a nice person, don’t write. There’s no way to do it without grinding up your loved ones and making them into raw hamburger. It’s hard to do it and keep a social schedule. The essential chapter will sometimes arrive on the night of a dinner party. Your job is to be always ready. Writing is not a life. It is, as Graham Greene said in the title of his autobiography, “a sort of life.”

I work most happily when I have nothing on my schedule, when I am in my Connecticut house alone with no need to go anywhere but for a walk or a swim. And I love writing in friends’ houses where the telephone calls are not for me, or rented houses in different time zones. One reason Venice was productive for me was the six-hour time change from New York. By the time anyone phoned from New York, I was out swimming or walking. Yet I’m a gregarious creature. I don’t want to escape all the time. And how can I be a satirist without going to parties where all the hypocrisies we live by are exposed?

 

 

For me, writing a novel is never a linear process. Sometimes it takes years of meandering, wandering around the world and writing pages to be tossed away.

Fear of Flying
began originally in a very different way than it now does. In fact, it was an entirely different book—narrated by Isadora’s first husband, the madman—based, of course, on my first demon and my first husband. I got just so far in it and I realized that this character was a pastiche of all the Nabokovian narrators I had loved. So I stopped and had no idea how to begin again. In the meantime, I wrote poetry. It was in poetry that I developed the courage to write in the voice of a woman.

When I had enough poems for a book, I began sending the manuscript around to various contests that promised first-book publication. For a number of years my manuscript came close, but no cigar. So about three years into the process, I sent the book to a bunch of university contests and one commercial publisher. And that was when Holt, Rinehart and Winston (as it was then called) picked up my first book of poems,
Fruits & Vegetables,
and published it, in 1971.

My first publisher, Aaron Asher, wanted a novel, of course. (In those days of yore, publishers actually published
poetry
hoping for novels.) So I showed him my Nabokovian pastiche, then called
The Man Who Murdered Poets.
It was a doppelgänger story about a mediocre poet who murders a great poet because he believes he can take on his powers that way.

“This is a publishable novel,” he said, “but I won’t publish it and someday you’ll thank me. Why are you writing in the voice of a male madman?”

I didn’t tell him all the things that raced through my head—but the truth was that basically I thought nobody would be interested in a woman’s point of view.

“Go home,” he said, “and write a novel in the irreverent female voice of those poems.”

It was just the kick in the ass I needed at that time.

I’m often asked how my family reacted to my writing. My father was proud of my fame. My mother told me I was writing her obituary. And neither of my sisters has ever quite forgiven me for being a writer. Any writer has to be tough enough to take the condemnation of family. My older sister says, “You should have waited till we all were dead.” No use to say, “But then I would have been dead myself.” The dead can do many things. Writing is not one of them.

It’s not unusual for different family members to have different views of the family history. If you’re the writer, you’re the one with the ability to assert your point of view in print. If you’re funny, it’s always at someone’s expense. Humor is never benign. Of course the other members of the family will take issue with your viewpoint. How can they not? Perhaps this why my daughter boycotts my books. She wants me as Mom, not as a writer. This is understandable. And now that I have a writer daughter, what a perfect revenge on my own writing life! Reading her, I feel like all the people and events in my life have been put into a Mixmaster, whirled around by fierce blades and spiced with whole chiles. The mother in her first novel goes to Europe instead of taking her addicted daughter to rehab. Do I resent that? No. That is her narrative not mine. Molly must have felt terribly alone—despite the fact that I was there—and she objectified this in the character of the mother. Writers do that. I’ve done it myself.

I realize it’s a compliment to have a daughter who followed in my footsteps. She has her own ironic voice and she completely twists and exaggerates events we shared—but hey, that’s what writers do. She writes nonfiction that’s as fictional as anything I’ve ever read. She has a way of showing the absurdities and hypocrisies of human nature, and for me that is more important than my petty ego.