The book in my hands right now is Departures by a writer I quite simply adore. As I began it, I read this that he wrote:

“Two things to mention at this stage:

1) There will be a story — or story within the story — but not just yet; and

2) This will be my last book.”

Following is an interview with Barnes that begins with the fact that this will be his last book:

I note here that I began my love affair with Barnes’ work with his novel Flaubert’s Parrot.

In 2013, Barnes published Levels of Life that so deeply affected me that I am still pondering how to write about it. Others have done so and my take is likely unnecessary but for my own reasons I do feel compelled to try to do so in time.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

In 2011 the novel won the Man Booker Prize. In 2013, a film came to be, one that I own.

:

When I first read the novel, I felt immediately compelled to write about it but couldn’t figure out how I would get anyone to read my thoughts. So here I am, in Julian Barnes’ honor (and with the hope that I might figure out how to get a fan letter to him!) with a super brief commentary, hardly worthy of its force and staying power.

A totally compelling book of a brief 163 pages can be read in one sitting—how I read it, found it to be un-put-down-able. Much of what has been said about it elsewhere focuses on the meaning of the ending. Without spoiling this for you, I add this commentary: What Julian Barnes has magically created is a first-person narrator who admittedly questions his own reliability. All first-person narrators are subject to this accusation until they prove themselves otherwise—and indeed this one tries quite hard to establish his reliability¹. I argue that he fails. And I argue more key that that is Julian Barnes’ subject: The question of the narrative we choose to tell ourselves.

Some key passages illuminate this point of questioning history as fact and memory as reliable.

If you’ve read, this novel, do consider discussing it with me in comments. And what do you think of the quotes that comment on memory and the stories we tell ourselves?

Consider these quotes from the book, with extensive ellipses:

“If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage.” p.4

…

“I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question, on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others. Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.” p. 44

…

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” P. 59

…

“We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient—it’s not useful—to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.” P. 63

…

“But time … how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.” p. 93

…

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.” P. 95

…

“But we also learn something else: that the brain doesn’t like being typecast. Just when you think everything is a matter of decrease, of subtraction and division, your brain, your memory, may surprise you. As if it’s saying: Don’t imagine you can rely on some comforting process of gradual decline—life’s much more complicated than that. And so the brain will throw you scraps from time to time, even disengage those familiar memory loops. That’s what, to my consternation, I found happening to me now. I began to remember, with no particular order or sense of significance, long-buried details of that distant weekend with the Ford family. My attic room had a view across roofs to a wood; from below I could hear a clock striking the hour precisely five minutes late.” P. 112

…

For me, no matter how one reads the ending of the novel—and there are competing theories. Admittedly, I have my own, but it would be a spoiler. Thus, I defer here and focus on the power of the stories we tell ourselves and the achievement by Barnes of an unreliable narrator, leaving us to consider what we do with our own memories and regrets.

He gives us a novel whose powerful subject is presented in its title: A Sense of an Ending.

I think it’s a terrific, subtle flick, but do read the book—and get to know Julian Barnes.

More to come on Levels of Life and Departures …

Love,

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¹ The difference between believability and unreliability: Distance from the character is when the author creates a character who is believable but whose judgments on the world the reader judges and does not agree with. Such characters may, in fact, not change ostensibly. Instead the reader’s view of the character changes over the course of the telling.

Valentine’s Day will arrive with roses and chocolate. Will Cupid’s arrow strike or, if you’re lucky, re-strike with your true love?

Or, you could be alone.

Love is the answer we are told on this cold day in February.

I know from life experience, a good chunk of it recounted in my memoir (Re)Making Love that people make mistakes, that love fails us or we fail love. I know, as Robert Hass wisely says in his poem “Privilege of Being” that life has limits, that people/ die young, fail at love,/ fail of their ambitions.

If love is the answer, then a letter, not a printed card, is in order. Love is worth words written in your own hand.

T.S. Eliot has been misquoted as saying, “Good poets borrow, great poets steal.” (See footnote)1 Whether you steal or borrow, make any one of these your own.

Here are seven love letters. Choose, use, save, make love.

If you are alone, comfort may come through memory and hope. Some of these, not the best ones, come from my pen; some, various poets wrote; and some I joined my words to in order to create a letter. Rewrite, or make any one of these your own.

Love letter #1: Use when love drives you crazy and we all know it can and will—or has:

“The poet says,
‘To all those driven berserk or humanized by love
this is offered, for I need help
deciphering my dream.
When we love our lord is LOVE.

Frank Bidart, my source, but you, my love, are lord.”

Love letter #2: He told you it was over with the other love. He lied or failed at what he thought was true. Let him know that you’ve moved on:

“It’s true, when we first met, I said I didn’t care about Irene. But I’m inexperienced with affairs. I was relieved when you said you would not see her anymore. I could let go and have. But honesty does not have its price; it has its place. And now that you’ve told me you will be with her again, I let go. I let go. I let go …”

Love letter #3: Your lover is not with you, but memory remains. Fill in your own details: What you ate, what the beloved said. But do recall. Memory soothes and heals:

“Remember when we made love over the lunch hour, shared a pear? You ate a bran muffin. It was nearly three when we talked on the phone and neither of us had eaten lunch. Remember when I said, ‘I think you need to eat’? You said, ‘Your kiss. No need.’ Remember when I said, ‘Your mouth, like no other mouth, like no other kiss, like no other touch?’ Remember …”

Love letter #4: I wrote this for the man I love. You may use it. My lover knows this is so:

“The way we hear that space crafts lock on to a star to orient themselves on journeys through the solar system—that, my love, is how I lock on you.”

Love letter #5: I once gave this poem to a man I loved who betrayed me. It has mixed messages for me, but the poet knows:

The poet is W.B. Yeats: The dream is the open heart:

“He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

Love letter #6: We’re often star-crossed in love. Shakespeare knows why. This exchange from the play Romeo and Juliet is actually a sonnet. Send this to the one who seems unattainable.

Before their first kiss (rhyming as all Shakespeare’s sonnets do in this manner: abab, cdcd, efef, gg), Romeo and Juliet joust in poetry:

“Romeo [To Juliet] If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Juliet Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much
Which mannerly devotion shows in this.
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

Rom. Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Jul. Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Rom. Oh then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do.
They pray. Grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

Jul. Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.

Rom. Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.”
Thus, from my lips by thine my sin is purged. [Kissing her]”

If you are blessed—and I hope you are—then love will come to you as a blessing. John L. Hitchcock, physicist and Jungian analyst, in his book At Home in the Universe: Re-envisioning the Cosmos with the Heart, says:

“This book is a declaration of love. It is not a declaration of my love, but of the fact that love is the heart of the universe ... [I]t is we who submit to the bonds of love. And since love sets its object free—since love is the very basis of our freedom—in submitting to its bonds, we also set free whomever or whatever is the object of our love. In a profound sense … submitting to the bonds of love can help release even God. We can love reality as it is, though it seems to throw obstacles in our way and wound us.”

If this is true, Love letter #7 is for you.

T. S. Eliot tells us,

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

In numerology, the number 7 represents the search. And so I stop at seven love letters with this admonition: The search must never end.

If you are lost, you will be found.

Love,

I ferret out the detail, love the footnote, am never bored and believe it all leads to story. Best advice I ever got? '“Only connect …” —E.M. Forster.

“In Search of a Sleeve-Board” essay published first in IMAGE, special section on the artist and the community. Nominated for Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. Another version appeared on Inner Life that is on pause …

As I prepare for the release of my novel Who By Fire by Empress Editions via and Hachette, I am struck by my search for community. Today would’ve been my sister’s birthday; she died at age 53, and, in a large sense, this is for her in memory and my love for her and for how much she encouraged my writing as her dying wish.

In Search of a Sleeve-Board

I searched in a yellow wood armoire and then a bureau for the small ironing board that was my mother’s, a sleeve-board that my mother used when she sewed. She had had it so long she’d had to re-cover it with a new piece of cloth that dulled with years of pressing seams and basted cuffs. I begin here, a dream actually, about the search for the sleeve-board because the sleeve-board—my mother’s sewing, the dress she made for my last day of third grade, a rosy pink eyelet frock that is now darkened with age to dusty coral and that my daughter didn’t want to wear when it would have fit her—is not within reach. In the dream of the sleeve-board lies an indescribable silence.

In this silence is the writing. In the writing is the longing for and, I fear, estrangement from community.

When my mother died, the word absence became palpable and unbearable. I am ashamed to admit that I was unable to participate effectively in the act of community that follows the death of a Jew—the shiva, when family and friends come to support the mourners. I attended every shiva but was unable to have the conversations that were incumbent upon me. I escaped to a stoop outside the house. I violated the requirement that I not go out of the house until the seven days of mourning had been lived.

In the silence that followed her death, her absence, I have written stories that ineffably recall her even though I have not written stories about her.

I remember her kitchen, the blue-white water mixed from powdered milk she poured inside a Sealtest jar and placed inside the fridge. Her faded housecoat, her rolled down stockings, the piece of floss she crumpled in a tissue in her pocket, the shuffle of her feet in cotton slippers on the kitchen floor, my arms around her knees, blue-flowered cotton in my face, the smell of garlic on her skin. The afghan that she’d knitted and that lay at the end of my bed when I was little. The night before she died, the hospital room. Then after. Going home. The gray afghan I crawled under for the lasting feel of her in weight of wool she’d threaded with blue chevrons while I’d lain blue-pale inside her womb.

The inadequacy of these words in the face of my memory of her is striking. Thus, I’ve come to understand, ashamed as I am, my inability to engage fully in the shiva, to my mind one of the most generous traditions of community in Judaism. I could not bear the conversations that seemed, however kindly, to take a measure of her life.

And yet, that life, as I saw it, appears in the writing.

I could not bear the platters of cold cuts, brisket sandwiches, bowls of strawberries in January, store-bought rugalach, an imitation of her signature pastry that recalled her and defined her absence. People and food seemed to smother her disappearance in presence.

The night before my mother died she said, “358-1965,” the phone number for the apartment where she had lived with my father before they moved in with my sister, after my mother’s stroke. Her phone number and the pressure of her strong hand, determined to finish the work. This hand I’d known when she fitted the filmy tissue-paper pattern on me for the dress I wore to the third-grade party. One firm hand laid the paper on my naked shoulders, the other lay beneath to protect my skin from the pins. To ensure the fit, she pressed the flat of her palms on my shoulders. These same strong hands had pinned, basted and re-basted my wedding dress that was borrowed from a cousin, that had fit but that to my mother’s dismay grew bigger as I grew thinner as the day of the wedding approached. That night in the hospital, she, who’d ensured that my clothes would fit, she, who seemed to me to create clarity with such acts, spoke to me in what I wish to see as code.

The writing strikes me as wishful code. It evokes “the eternal torment of our language, when its longing turns back toward what it always misses, through the necessity under which it labours of being a lack of what it would say. …[A]ll is limited to the exigency of a fervent wish …,” as Maurice Blanchot says in the Infinite Conversation.

My search for the sleeve-board, if you will, requires that I withdraw from the world, with a certain shame. When Ron-the-compliment-man asks me for spare change in Adams Morgan where I live (“Love the haircut,” he says, and I give my change), I see my own destitution in his because I do not give enough—certain shame like the stoop at the shiva. When my cousin Shirley, ten years younger than my mother, more sibling than niece—heavy breasts like my mother’s, barely five-feet tall like my mother, hands, nails pared close, curved in half-moons to grace the hand but not impinge on the task, so like my mother’s—took me to her, held me at the shiva, I knew the shame of unspeakable wish.

The writing does not replace the ethical obligation to community that the shiva honors. But it shares with community the fervent wish for presence.

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Love,

Will Kemp and my transition to watercolors—though I still paint in acrylics …

After my series on poetry and watercolors to illustrate, I want to share my experience with watercolor and, how I learned to paint and draw—even though Will focuses on acrylics, oils and drawing—though I keep begging him to teach a watercolor course.

I’m here to sing Will Kemp’s praises long distance but close in heart—Will lives in Britain and I live in the States.

If you go to his site, you’ll get some basics for FREE and regular—though not overwhelming updates—his emails alone are worth the sign-up. His most recent is titled Why Copying Other Artists Leads to Your Own Unique Style.

I had never painted before or even taken an art class—well, that one at the Smithsonian Institution’s Campus-on-the-Mall where I came out feeling like a total dunce and decided not to give up but was in a total muddle. Will will get you out of such a muddle and get you started. He’s so good that I recommend him for artists who know what they’re doing but want to understand acrylics or oil painting better—or like me, you may be able to transfer what you learn to watercoloring—though I still need more help…

With Will as your teacher, you will never feel stupid or that you shouldn’t try. Will Kemp has been a gift in my life.

His bio: Will Kemp was awarded a Queen Elizabeth Craft Scholarship to study Classical Portraiture in Florence, Italy. He’s designed art curriculums for schools, developed interactive learning resources with the National Gallery, London, and taught students from all different starting points the principles of how drawing and painting work.

I found him at this YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/user/willkempartschool where he has more than 300,000 subscribers— and for good reason—and where he actually replies to comments (when does he have time?) and helps his students: He cheers you on, gives you hope and teaches the basics and more, much more.

Many of his beginning courses are free: I started with his demonstration of a cherry, then his apple. Below is the second painting I ever painted. These are step-by-step YouTube videos. My apple is no masterpiece, but it made me believe I could pick up a brush and invest in the best paints, a palette knife, two or three good brushes. Good, rather than student grade in brushes and paints, matters for your sense of success. Will explains why. He’s right. I’ve tried both. The same is true for watercolor, a tougher medium for success, but cleanup is much easier.

BTW, watercolor brushes must be kept separate from acrylic or oil brushes.

Here is my second painting done on a canvas board! —not the best surface.

After doing only two of these, I eventually bought every video course Will has offered. All of them are super affordable and well-worth every single cent. He lists a few inexpensive though good quality tools. He explains basics, such as how to load a palette knife with just the right amount of paint for the effect you want to achieve when mixing your color. You use a disposable tear-off palette that makes clean-up quick and easy, and he uses only seven paints to get you started. You can even do your painting on an MDF board, but I’ve found that investing in a small pre-primed canvas gave me better results and allowed me to fix mistakes—yeah, a lot of them—more easily.

His easy-to-understand explanations of shadows and how light falls, of how to create three-dimensional objects in your still life will get you off and painting. He explains color intensity: what that means and how to mix paints that don’t turn into mud, but instead glow before your beginner’s eye. Will provides step-by-step photos that you can print from his pdf for the drawings and the various steps in a series of lessons. My prediction, for anyone totally new and making that stab at trying to paint, is that you will feel amazed—and brave.

One of his key lessons is how and why you should use a colored ground, a solid opaque color, to begin. This is what the masters used in their paintings. Will shows you how to get that first layer of paint onto your canvas and how that basic layer will affect everything else you later add.

One of the lessons I did is a gorgeous tea cup with French macaroons that graces Here is Will’s painting. And you can do this!

From his basic acrylic color mixing video course, I early-on painted his lemons.

Here is Will’s painting that I used as my guide:

And here’s my early attempt:

Will’s focus is acrylic painting. He’s also an expert oil painter and has a course on oil portraits that I learned much from even though I can’t use oils in my living space.

He doesn’t teach a full course on watercolor paintings, but in his video Urban Sketching Course, he does use watercolors and I learned bunches. I was able to paint a series of some eighteen letters to my granddaughter when she was only eight years old and away at camp. No, I didn’t use watercolor paper and, yes, I did imitate a gorgeous children’s book This Is a Poem That Heals Fish by Jean-Pierre Siméon, illustrated by Olivier Tallec. In each letter, I repeated the story and painted a small watercolor on my stationary. Here’s one example: I couldn’t have drawn this without Will’s course :

Here’s a small success story I owe almost 100 percent to Will Kemp. In his video course entitled Still Life Master Class, I got brave enough to triple the size of his demonstration, to measure out and resize the proportions and to learn how to create reflections. It’s no masterpiece, but it hangs in my breakfast room and will grace, with Will Kemp’s permission and I give him credit, the cover of the second edition of my collection of short stories The Woman Who Never Cooked.

If you want to experiment with painting, if you want to enrich your life, if you want to make something you never thought you could, begin with Will Kemp. You won’t regret it.

I’m exploring watercolor painting though praying for a Will Kemp course.

I did study with another online watercolorist. Unlike Will, he’s not as prolific with lessons – and in contrast, Will writes you back when you email him once you’ve bought a course or gotten stuck. He’s a gem. Here’re a few of my watercolors, done recently while I still pray that Will will do a watercolor course!

Love,

Charles van Heck is a poet, painter, and educator, taught American Literature—and an early reader of the galleys of Who By Fire, available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Book Shop, a re-issue by Empress Editions via Hachette. An excerpt of his longer review appears at the end of his essay.

Note: Paid subscribers are invited to guest post essays on the arts!

Poetry and Standing at the Edge of the Raccoon World

What do you take with your morning coffee? What do you see in the domestic details of your life? Ours is an object-world that we give scant attention. Heads down, little eye contact as we walk along city sidewalks, or scenery flickers past while jogging, or driving down a country road while listening to the news. How do your morning habits shape the perception of your day?

These questions came to mind as I reread one of my favorite essays, Sam Pickering’s “The Breakfast Table.” Pickering, a retired professor of English at the University of Connecticut, writes;

For decades reading the newspaper at breakfast nauseated me. A glance at the contents, and my mood turned to dun while bile began to percolate, its grounds rough and almost tiny, as if my feelings were being shoveled into a burr mill. That has changed. A month ago, I canceled my subscription to the morning paper. Now at breakfast, I sip a cordial of poetry.

Morning habits have varied for me over the years. The one constant is the pleasure I take in the quiet with a cup of coffee. Mornings are when I am setting myself in order to do my creative work—the thinking hours.

Before leaving home for college and lives of their own, there were breakfasts and school lunches to prepare for my children; cereal was served only on Fridays. During the summer months, I took them to a lake for swimming and a picnic, and home by two or three in the afternoon for a couple of hours of schoolwork to maintain their skills, and for nature walks. For years, I listened to either National Public Radio’s Morning Edition or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s shows. I read The New York Times. Course requirements to meet as a student, then, in later years, employment, both in business and academia. This was followed by the years of research, writing, meetings, teaching, and other obligations. There were mornings when I took long walks along the Huron River, across a meadow, or through the woods, or along city streets. Then there were years when summer mornings became a time for tending the kitchen garden, mowing, and other yard chores. Later, Tim Hortons became my stop for a cup of coffee, to people-watch, converse with strangers, and read. Despite time constraints, I tried to squeeze in quiet moments with poetry or essays that offer unconventional truths, pausing to appreciate the beauty of the writer’s use of language.

Over the past few years, I have read The New York Times, the Wellsville Sun, and CBC News. Perhaps it would be more truthful to say that I peruse the news in the morning, returning to it in the afternoon for thorough reading. This strategy of avoidance of in-depth reading helps me perceive what is good and beautiful in our fractured world, which is in need of healing.

I found my attention drawn to Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking” while I reread Pickering’s. Just as with Pickering, I often return to Thoreau’s essay in which he notes:

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is an equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge.

We read and listen to the news, accumulate facts, and develop attitudes. There is a literal bombardment of demands competing for our attention. The relentless noise is similar to hearing a commercial jingle that continuously plays in our minds. But, are we cultivating ourselves? Do we take the time to think and feel, to address our “negative knowledge?” This isn’t to say we should ignore world events, but rather to ask if we should allow the endless news cycle to limit our vision, prevent us from thinking and considering that, in the words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lotus-eaters”:

There is sweet music here that softer falls/ Than petals from blown roses on the grass

In our busyness, do we take the time to listen to that sweet music? Pickering reminds us that poetry directs our attention from what is trumpeted as imperative, vanishing it from the morning, so one’s perspective changes. Poetry cultivates a sensitivity to the magic of words, language, and how their potential for interaction creates a visual of emotions and the environment we encounter daily, but too often fail to see. Poetry, like literary works, is a creation of images, word pictures. The poet Ellen Bryant Voigt reminds us that the “picture in words,” in the “discursive system of language, (is) the body ‘thinking’ through its senses, the mind embodied― which reflects the paradox of human consciousness: the fact that the mind is body, whether sense organs or cerebrum.”

A poem is a snapshot of an ordinary moment that is worth remembering. The poet is aware of her response, unmasking the inner and outer values of relationships to understand the truth she tells. The use of the personal, first-person “I” can be misleading. Sometimes it is the poet. Other times, it is a character. Often, particularly in modern and contemporary poetry, it isn’t easy to make the distinction. In either context, what is essential for the reader to understand is that the poet is attempting to clarify a moment of life in a structured manner that is ultimately an invitation for us to gain a different perspective that is useful to our lives. As a form of communication, poetry works when it doesn’t favor abstraction or preaching with claims of objectivity. Such poems are pretentious and unconvincing.

We tend to think of poetry and shrug it off as either a form of communication for the young who are learning to express their thoughts and emotions or for the intelligentsia. As W.H. Auden observes, “We are accustomed to a culture in which poetry is the highbrow medium, to be employed for communicating the most intense and subtle experiences, while the medium for everyday use is prose, that it is difficult for us to imagine a society [i.e., before 1300] in which the relative positions were the other way around, a time when verse was the popular medium for instruction and entertainment and prose, mostly Latin, the specialized medium for the intercourse of scholars.”

Our morning hours are winged, they fly off, but can be the most gratifying, shaping our attitudes and perspective for the new day. The words we hear or read stay with us, and open eyes see the unexpected even in what we are acquainted with in our social roles and environment. Poetry isn’t a cure-all for what is ugly and corrupt in society. Instead, it adds texture to our lives. As “Beautiful Knowledge,” poetry makes us more sensitive, observant, and more fully alive to others and the natural world we live on the edge of and race past. We require periods of thoughtful silence to understand ourselves better. In thoughtful silence, we momentarily set aside the drama all around us. As Robert Haas writes in his poem “Iowa City: Early April”:

All this life going on about my life, or living a life about all this life going on,/ Being a creature, whatever my drama of the moment, at the edge of the/ raccoon’s world—

One morning, when your position in the queue for coffee (and a pastry) ends with you at the counter, or the drive-through window, order a poem with your coffee. Then find a quiet place for a few minutes of respite at the edge of the morning rush.

Charles van Heck writes

Charles’s Substack

My personal Substack

By Charles van Heck

Charles’ excerpt from his full review of Who By Fire

Click of the cover to pre-order via amazon

Who By Fire is an engaging, beautifully written novel by Mary L. Tabor. This is a well-written, sensual, tender, poignant, and intelligent love story about family, friendship, faithfulness, betrayal, and healing, told in lyrical prose. She brings a freshness to the age-old theme of adultery with the assurance of a writer in complete control of her craft. This compelling and innovative novel will be one you remember and want to return to for its richly layered perceptions of how human beings navigate their complex relationships. —Charles van Heck

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With thanks to Charles,

As I’ve finished posting the memoir (Re)Making Love and the novel Who by Fire, I want to talk about this question:

How Does Autobiography Work in Fiction?

Let’s start with a fun flick that is actually a cute rom-com that is quite engaging:

This flick raises the question, along with the humor, about the force of fiction that, supposedly, isn’t actually the TRUTH? ——or is it!

You know the line: Truth is stranger than fiction? I have a twist on that. I’ve learned through the writing of three books and a fourth in process as I write this essay that the fictional account of my stories have greater emotional truth and intellectual significance than the factual ones.

As memoir has increased in popularity both in books and movies—“A True Story” being the familiar movie tag—I’ve continued to argue that fiction, written close to the bone, will likely provide the reader or film viewer with a deeper look into the life and soul of the writer if the narrative is worth your time.

Consider this: Leigh Gilmore, author of The Limits of Autobiography, notes that “…[T]he number of new English language volumes categorized as ‘autobiography or memoir’ roughly tripled from the 1940s to the 1990s. (Analysis based on data from the Worldcat database).

Then, this question, key to what I posit here: Do you think self-revelation is part of the process of writing?

My answer: Any serious writer who denies it lies.

I agree with David Shields who argues in favor of self-revelation and to a large extent against the novel that is not self-revelatory. He does so in Reality Hunger through a series of quotes, occasionally his own—unabashedly without full attribution (but that’s another story as he used only the name of the writer for credits).

And many others that follow have their say on my argument:

Here’s John Berger:

Here’s David Foster Wallace:

A serious writer can’t help but reveal even as the lie of fiction operates.

Lee K. Abbott, a writer and teacher I knew well and admired, put the issue succinctly:

My collection of short stories The Woman Who Never Cooked includes three memoir pieces I don’t identify, and I’ll use them here to explain why I argue the fiction is more powerful, more truthful, if you will, than the so-called true story.

First, I give as example a comparison of what is essentially the same story told in fiction and in memoir.

I put aside my novel Who by Fire when I was close to finished and when my husband said, after 22 years of marriage, oh-so-Greta-Garbo, “I need to live alone.”

This event stopped me in my tracks—and, eventually, I blogged my life while I was living it. That blog was picked up by a publisher and became the memoir (Re)Making Love, a book that is like Who by Fire, but it’s a love story that even fiction would probably not find credible.

So, I learned through these two books that the fictional account of my story has greater emotional truth and intellectual significance than the factual one that you can find online in a Valentine’s Day issue of Real Simple Magazine.

Here’s how I learned what the so-called true story didn’t reveal. I’m the reader for the audible.com version of Who by Fire. While reading it aloud in an NPR recording studio, I discovered my own book as if for the first time. I realized I’d written this novel to find the man I must have known on the unconscious level I was losing.

Good fiction, meaning you know while you’re reading that the writer is risking her life, can go to this place of hard truth in a way that memoir rarely can do because of its hold on the so-called truth.

In their book Art and Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland explain our resistance to fiction—or to any art—this way:

“[T]he prevailing premise remains that art is clearly the province of the genius (or, on occasion, madness). … [A]rt itself becomes a strange object—something to be pointed to and poked at from a safe analytical distance. To the critic, art is a noun.

“Clearly, something’s getting lost in the translation here. What gets lost, quite specifically, is the very thing artists spend the better part of their lives doing: namely, learning to make work that matters to them. … [W]hat we really gain from the artmaking of others is courage-by-association. Depth of contact grows as fears are shared—and thereby disarmed—and this comes from embracing art as process, and artists as kindred spirits. To the artist, art is a verb.”

I decided to further prove the force of fiction in The Woman Who Never Cooked’s stories by revising the title character’s name to Olivia in each story. The allusion is to that character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the comedy that takes center stage in the story “Madness and Folly” about my father after he broke his hip—in real life. When I circulated what became the first edition of the ms., the main characters all had different names, based on an agent’s bad advice. I learned that all the main characters are connected, and the book won an emerging fiction award! So there!

In the fiction, I used food and adultery as metaphor for the grief I bore through my mother’s, my father’s, and my sister’s illnesses and deaths. I wasn’t sure who I was. As a prime example, I didn’t know when I wrote the title story“The Woman Who Never Cooked” that I would become that woman.

I was writing direct, tough, purposefully artful exaggeration of autobiography. Curiously, the book only achieved publication after I added two of the three memoir pieces that had been published in literary magazines. All the stories have been published first that way. See my essay: Literary Magazines: Why Bother? I do now think that Substack may be our new literary magazine as so many of the mags I referred to are disappearing at such a rapid rate that it’s hard to keep up. And I have a pretty powerful example with a recent essay that I managed to get placed in Iron Horse Literary Magazine — and that you probably can’t find. But click ☞ here to read it and what I have to say at the end of the piece.

The stories in the The Woman Who Never Cooked, my short story collection, that are memoir are: “Rugalach,” a tribute to my mother; “Losing,” a tribute to my father; and the eponymous closing story “The Woman Who Never Cooked.”

Let’s talk about the fiction and why I’m now convinced each of the other eight stories is more powerful, more truthful than the memoir—with the exception of the title story: “The Woman Who Never Cooked.” I say this about the last because It’s written in third person like a fairy tale. The opening line is, “There once was a woman with 327 cookbooks who never cooked.” Through food, this true-to-its-core memoir tells the story of my mother’s, my father’s and my sister’s illnesses and the effect on living that their trials had on me.

I’ll use, to explain, my story “The Burglar” that won two prizes and was published twice in literary magazines before appearing in the book of short stories. “The Burglar” has his own point of view, visits the woman whose house he robbed and becomes a sort of obsession for the main character—something only fiction can achieve without madness .

Even Robin Hood and maid Marian appear in the story in an Internet game.

But the burglar himself is essential to express the love letter to my then-husband that I wrote in the aftermath of my mother’s death and a burglary that actually did occur in our home while we were away visiting both our children at college. These facts I compress into the story’s essence.

So where’s the truth? Does Olivia actually desire the burglar? Does a burglar come to her home from his on Virgilia, a street near mine where the burglary actually occurred? Does it matter that I still own the locket that is in the burglar’s pocket and that the actual burglar chose all my other jewelry to steal and left behind the locket with its crude seal?

With that fact, the story wrote itself. Locket in hand that my mother had saved with a lock of her mother’s hair sealed inside, I went on the journey of discovery and the result is heartfelt fiction.

Joyce Carol Oates explains the conundrum of literary fiction so often spurned for the “true” story. She asks, “Where do we get our ideas?” (“Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature,” Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books, August 13, 2015.)

“So much of literature springs from a wish to assuage homesickness, a desire to commemorate places, people, childhoods, family and tribal rituals, ways of life—surely the primary inspiration of all: the wish, in some artists clearly the necessity, to capture in the quasi permanence of art that which is perishable in life. Though the great modernists—Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Lawrence, Woolf, Faulkner—were revolutionaries in technique, their subjects were intimately bound up with their own lives and their own regions; the modernist is one who is likely to use his intimate life as material for his art, shaping the ordinary into the extraordinary.”

What I hope I’ve done here and for all the stories I’ve written that are quote fiction is to lift the curtain on that much-misunderstood word. I argue that to dismiss out of hand the truth that close-to-the-bone, self-revelatory fiction reveals is to miss a connection that may reveal those truths that would otherwise remain unspoken.

The reason? Fiction, like all the arts, reveals through artifice and frees the unsayable. Why oh why would any of us who read or go to movies or art museums or photographic exhibits wish to miss that unsayable truth because we want the true story.

Coming next: Letters to My Granddaughter

PS: (Re)Making Love: a memoir posted here is a TRUE story that fiction would have found unbelievable—but still, I posit this argument. Read both that and Who by Fire posted here. Who By Fire will be re-issued soon by Empress Editions, a subsidiary of Simon Schuster in a special edition.

PPS: Now, what I need is a screenwriter for the rom-com (Re)Making Love. Know anyone who could write it? I’m thinking of … who continues to amaze me 💗.

Love to all my dear readers. What do you think about the argument I posit here? Hey, , my love—please read the PPS above—even if you can’t do what I ask. Maybe you know someone? I have so many comments that say this memoir needs to go to the screen!

Robert Hass’s poems in Human Wishes gave me hope when my life fell apart: That personal story I wrote about “live” in my memoir (Re)Making Love, here in full. I write this as a special post, part of ’s The Hope Library.

Misery and Splendor | The Privilege of Being

To read Robert Hass’s book of poems Human Wishes as a whole—not as separate poems, but rather as a group of poems inextricably connected in their meaning to the poet’s search—is to be confronted with human desire in the concrete acts of domesticity, the monumental tragedies of the world, the pain and losses of individuals in the midst of beauty and joy and often the other way around.

In “Misery and Splendor”, the poet describes the difficulty of perfect joining in the sexual act: ‘They are trying to become one creature,/ and something will not have it.’ This poem seems to me to be a predecessor to “The Privilege of Being” where this idea of the desire/the wish for and the difficulty of joining is more fully and beautifully expressed. Hear the full poem read by Hass.

Here’s a partial quote (my bolding):

All of creation is offended by this distress,
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions.

“The Privilege of Being” begins: “Many are making love. Up above, the angels/ in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing …” The poem has 44 lines that range in syllable count from 5 to 18 with no discernible pattern; only eight of the lines use a syllable count under ten.

I think Hass has purposefully chosen the longer line, avoiding the traditional pentameters, hexameters, etc., because the long line is appropriate to the expansive, lush meaning of the poem:

With the angels above who “are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond/ and the texture of cold rivers.” That last line, “and the texture of cold rivers,” —forgive my launch into prosody—scans to my mind with two anapests and a trochee—a pattern that slows the line and emphasizes the startling contrast of the phrase to what comes before. I find this rhythmically affecting, pleasurable. The shortest line in the poem—five syllables—is “die young, fail at love.” This line scans with a spondee foot, followed by a trochee and perhaps a trochee truncation. Again, the meter, though not regular, seems perfect to the meaning: the spondees emphasizing the sadness of “die young”; the truncation with failure in life.

Hass is aware of the meter even as he chooses not to use it in a regular fashion. I argue that regularity is not germane to the meaning that is about the human inability to create perfect form.

Hass contrasts the angels, the lovemaking, the philosophical musings of the poem with the mundane: The man in the poem runs beside his lover, “ready to be alone again … or merely companionable like the couples on the summer beach/ reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes”—a sobering, ironic reflection of the longing in the poem and the impossibility of complete connection.

Only Connect, all sections, come from my heart and soul. If you have already gone paid, my heart goes out to you with my thanks.

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Love,

My reading of this poem, with a small story of why I chose it, is part of Tara Penry’s Poems to Carry in the Blood project.

I read this poem to my granddaughter at her Bat Mitzvah as part of the ceremony where she recited her Torah portion and the essay she wrote to interpret it. The rabbi decided the order of the readings in tribute to her and my reading of this poem occurred before the Kaddish for my son Benjamin Hammerschlag. I will post an essay
about him on November 4^th, the date of his death in 2017.

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

BY E. E. CUMMINGS

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
 ………………………………………………….I fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

“[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]” Copyright 1952, © 1980, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Source: Poetry (June 1952).

Love, with my thanks to ,

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This post is part of a community writing project called “Enchanted by a Book,” hosted by Quiet Reading with Tara Penry. In July 2024, Tara invited writers to spread the joy and revelation of reading and the unique experience of every reader with a book. Find a complete list of participants at the project home page, where new links appear.

Note: This post with a link to my next guest also appears on Inner Life, my collaborative site. If you subscribe to both, I hope you will forgive the dupe. If you’re reading on my usual day to post, go as well to Who by Fire, chapter 5, Evan.

My Brilliant Friend and the Tetralogy: a Theory

The 10-episode final season of My Brilliant Friend will finally debut September 9 (at 9 p.m. ET) on HBO and will stream on Max, picking up more or less where the season three finale left off: in the 1980s, set against a turbulent backdrop of political violence and social upheaval in Italy.

The Epigraph to book one My Brilliant Friend:

"The LORD: Therein thou’rt free, according to thy merits;
The like of thee have never moved My hate.
Of all the bold, denying Spirits,
The waggish knave least trouble doth create.
Man’s active nature, flagging, seeks too soon the level;
Unqualified repose he learns to crave;
Whence, willingly, the comrade him I gave,
Who works, excites, and must create, as Devil." —J.W. GOETHE, Faust, translation by Bayard Taylor

In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, I argue that Elena aka Lenú and Lila are not only mirrored in the four books that are now an HBO popular series, but that the two are the same person. I don’t mean that the novels deceive us. Indeed, two characters strut through all the volumes.

I’m arguing that Ferrante, great novelist that she is, explores the question of identity through these two characters and that the primary consciousness is always Elena’s.

I will attempt to assert that theory here and, if you haven’t read the novels and want to, note that you may find minor spoilers in this essay though I won’t outline the plot.

First, let me address this question: Why would Ferrante do what I argue she does: One consciousness through two characters?

I believe she found this way to be not only clever, but much more profound through a deep dive into how Elena finds herself on her journey as author, lover, parent, and primarily a creative being who pursues her art, despite all odds, including her own tendencies to evade, even in some sense, drown her gift.

She is not the only one who would drown her gift, discount her worth, her writing, her brilliance: All the men she hooks herself to would do so as well if they could.

For this primary reason, I argue that the brilliance of the four novels is the mirror effect of the two characters. Lenú, who authors the four books explores the power of a brilliant, arrogant side of her who is Lila—real name Raffaella Cerullo, called Lina—and here is the first tipoff by Ferrante in her index of characters—but “by Elena Lila.” Here’s the line under “The Cerullo family: “Rafaello Cerullo, called Lina, and by Elena, Lila”

Of course, one might fairly argue that the line I quoted simply means that Elena calls Lina by the name Lila.

Ferrante is no trickster. She sets me on the path of knowing that these two are one and the same in the journey of identity on page 1 of the first novel in the tetralogy. What she does here the HBO series chose to omit. In my view, that is a mistake in the series.

On page one of the first book, Lila has disappeared. Ferrante places the stance of the narrator when both characters are sixty-six years old as the story opens with the assertion that Lila has disappeared. Or, I argue, that Lenú, our narrator, has come or is on the verge of “becoming,” a fully realized identity who no longer needs her alter ego.

We find this Lenú at the close of book four.

Elena tells us on p. 2 of book one My Brilliant Friend: “It’s been at least three decades since she told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace, and I’m the only one who knows what she means. She never had in mind any sort of flight, a change in identity, the dream of making a new life somewhere else. And she never thought of suicide, repulsed by the idea that Rino [her son, who is forty at the book’s opening] would have anything to do with her body, and be forced to attend to the details. She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take for granted that she has a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in the world.” (This paragraph appears on the second page of the novel’s opening text.)

Without revealing the plot, I continue to argue that by book 4 The Story of the Lost Child, Elena, our narrator, has emerged full force as a separate and fully realized identity. She says about Lila on the last page, “Here’s what she has done: she had deceived me, she had dragged me wherever she wanted, from the beginning of our friendship. All our lives she had told the story of redemption that was hers, using my living body and my existence.” (Ferrante’s italics)

Could Ferrante be any more clear about what she is about than this revelation before the unfolding of the tale begins and at its close?

I add, the very fact that Ferrante chooses to remain anonymous somehow, arguably, supports my theory that the discovery of self is key to identity. No name will serve for that search.

I argue that with all the layers of these extraordinary books, the essence is identity, how we find ourselves and flourish.

I don’t know that anyone else has argued this. And, of course, I could be wrong.

If you’ve read the novels, do tell me: What do you think? Did you love them?

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My P.S.: In the film of Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, director Maggie Gyllenhaal splits the “mother” into two roles. As a mirror of the interior monologue in the novel, Gyllenhaal decided to use two actresses: one as the main character and another as her younger self. Exploration again of identity?

An added note of similarity among the novels: Ferrante uses dolls in The Lost Daughter, and she uses them in the quartet: The Neapolitan novels. Perhaps that imagery works to parallel the mirroring in the quartet and in this novel as well as Gyllenhaal’s interpretation as director of the film.

Here’s an excerpt from Gyllenhaal’s interview with Kara Swisher of The New York Times:

Kara Swisher: This movie is told through two interwoven timelines … the present day mother of adult children who’s holidaying solo in Greece, played by Olivia Colman, and the young mother who’s steeped in the mess of childhood tantrums and a budding career, played by Jessie Buckley. You split the mother in two, effectively, correct?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe I split the mother in two in order to ultimately bring the mother together, you know? I mean, I think we’ve been used to for, you know, in most of the films and books and representations of motherhood, splitting the mother in two, right? The bad mommy and the fancy mother.

So I think, for me, I was listening to your intro where you were saying that she’s an unnatural mother. I don’t think I agree with that. I think even the concept of an unnatural mother is, it’s just something to be thought about, weighed in your hands. She uses that— that’s a straight lift from Ferrante, that phrase. And I was really compelled by it. And in fact, I think it’s sort of— it’s almost like a puzzle that can’t be solved. It’s, of course, if she’s an unnatural mother, well, what is a natural mother? That’s the expectation on us.

Swisher: Yeah, that everybody should be one. I think she was actually saying uncomfortable, uncomfortable or awkward, or it doesn’t come naturally, like other things, which I think is interesting. I think the more disturbing sentence was motherhood is a crushing responsibility and the word crushing. But let me ask you, Leda calls her an unnatural mother. You don’t actually think she is, in other words.

Gyllenhaal: I don’t, no. I think it’s way too simple. I think what that is meant to do in the movie is kind of reverberate against itself. If she calls herself an unnatural mother, well, what is a natural mother, you know? And I think when you are asking sort of, how am I seeing the movie now or what is the purpose or the intention, I mean, and there’s a lot of answers to that question, but one of them is to normalize all sorts of feelings, not just about mothering, but also just in general about being a woman in the world so that if you have a whole bunch of those feelings in aspects of yourself, you don’t then feel that you’re monstrous and unnatural.

Interview with Maggie Gyllenhaal on directing The Lost Daughter

PPS: With my thanks to Mary Nash, reader and friend, I’ve now also read Days of Abandonment, Ferrante’s earlier novel published in 2005. I have another theory for your unbelief, surprise and comment:

Elena Ferrante and Jane Austen have more in common than you might think: Though the styles are quite different and Austen gives us happy endings, both understand anger and write anger with precision and power, stories that resonate and last.

Note: If you’re reading on my usual day to post, go as well to Who by Fire, chapter 5, Evan.

You can start reading the novel anywhere, skip around, and go back to the beginning.

You can Support Who by Fire with a one-time donation (no paid subscription!)— with my heartfelt thanks.

Love,

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It’s summer, so let’s chat about the creative process while I’m posting the novel Who by Fire: Start here if you missed the beginning. A variation of this essay appears on Inner Life, where I introduce Elizabeth Bobrick, my next guest on that site.

Why make art, something “other” when faced with the dilemmas of existence, with, as I’ve said in one of my stories, “all the ways life betrays the living”? —not from the perspective of a philosopher, but from that of a writer of fiction and literary memoir and my own search for a moral framework—for a narrative of hope.

In my memoir (Re)Making Love, for better or worse, I turned again and again to Friedrich Nietzsche’s works—along paradoxically and laughably too! with a bunch of rom-coms—believe it or not. The draw to him was inexorable.

He questioned the foundation of the moral thought that preceded him. He did it big-time with his oft-quoted assertion, given to the madman: “‘Whither is God,’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. … God is dead.’”^[i]

I quote him as a searcher. “‘[W]ill to truth’ does not mean ‘I will not let myself be deceived’ but—there is no choice—‘I will not deceive, not even myself’: and with this we are on the ground of morality.”

Nietzsche’s questioning resonates for me because he asks, Is a coherent narrative for our lives possible? And if we’ve got no clear answer, what then?

Let’s go back to the “royalty” of the canon: Kafka, Woolf, Joyce.

All reflect on the philosophical struggle that comprises the loss of coherence. They write and, in doing so, perhaps they answer.

As to what I call ‘moral ambiguity’, here’s some critics who argue the modernist writer (Woolf, Joyce) moved inward and away from society. Here’s some research (bear with me):

The critic Peter Faulkner argues that “modernist writers fail to see man socially and historically, and so make his alienation, which is a social process, into an absolute.”^[ii]

The critic Randall Stevenson argues, “Once narrative places ‘everything in the mind’, a sense of significance can be restored to individuals: it becomes once again possible to consider ‘what a terrific thing a person is’—regardless of how diminished … their actual lives in the modern industrial world may be.”^[iii]

The critic Stephen Spender starkly expresses the issue: “In the works of the most characteristically modern writers contemporary civilization was represented as chaotic, decadent, on the point of collapse, anarchic, absurd, the desert of non-values.”^[iv]

I don’t agree with Spender’s view as it relates to Woolf and Joyce, but I think he’s right about where Kafka leads us, as I cast back to him. Kafka, most certainly was an adherent of Nietzsche.

The critic Gerhard Kurz notes the importance of Nietzsche to Kafka: “The study of Kafka’s relation to Nietzsche was long obstructed by Max Brod’s [friend, biographer and literary executor of Kafka’s body of work] denial of such an influence. The relation first came to light in 1954, when Erich Heller named Nietzsche as Kafka’s ‘intellectual predecessor.’ [Kurz explains that Kafka met Nietzsche through his friend Oskar Pollak.].” Kurz asserts, “Kafka remained faithful to Nietzsche’s thinking until death.”^[v]

Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathrustra is referenced three times by Joyce in Ulysses, showing, at the very least, that Joyce had read Nietzsche.

We know that Woolf read Joyce, with mixed commentary.

The dilemma you and I face and that Woolf, Joyce—and Kafka address is: How to decide what we ought to do when alone, separated from society, and believe society may not offer a set of shared values that work.

Virginia Woolf in her essay “On Being Ill,” said, “Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. … Here we go alone, and like it better so.”^[vi]

In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay looks out on the constant stroke of the Lighthouse and says inside her head, “It will end, it will end.” She addresses the question of existence and asks herself, “What did it all mean? To this day she had no notion.” The novel’s middle section, “Time Passes,” separates the action of the novel and all the characters from society. The inexorable power of time and nature rule in “this silence, this indifference, this integrity, the thud of something falling”, and, in this context, three deaths occur in brackets: Mrs. Ramsay, rather suddenly; her daughter Prue Ramsay, in childbirth; her son Andrew, in the war.

In Ulysses, both Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are exiles. Bloom is an outsider, a Jew, cuckolded by his wife, shunned by others, the object of derision and anti-Semitism. Stephen, recently returned from Paris, is the loner, struggling with refusal to take the sacraments, with his art, with his dissatisfaction with the politics of Ireland. It’s Stephen who says, “That is God. ... A shout in the street.”

K. in The Trial is the most cut off from the world. The novel opens with K. excluded from society by the accusation of guilt. We find no actual events in the novel. The Trial takes place devoid of time or place.

The movement to the self was perhaps inevitable and technique followed: Interior monologue and what came to be known in Joyce’s work as stream of consciousness that arose from a philosophic need to move narrative inside the domain of the “self.”

Ulysses intimidates readers because of its lack of clear narrative thread—though I argue we always know what day it is and what time it is. Those who dismiss the novel argue fairly, I think, that Joyce purposely impedes a clear linear narrative thread.

I argue that Joyce questions how one finds the narrative of one’s own life.

This question is bleakly explored in Kafka’s The Trial, where the move to the interior is extreme. Kafka doesn’t allow the reader to know for sure we are inside someone’s consciousness. K.’s seemingly impossible world could be the “real” world.

What faces us is the struggle to find meaning in the face of Nietzsche’s “undeceived” morality, a nothingness, if you will.

Here’s Elizabeth Bishop to close.

Why do you make art? Summer vacation chat. Why not?

Love,

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^[i] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, The Gay Science, “The Madman,” ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Penguin Group, paperbound edition, 1976).

^[ii] Peter Faulkner, Modernism (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1977).

^[iii] Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (Hertfordshire, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992).

^[iv] Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (California: University of California Press, 1963)

^[v] Gerhard Kurz, “Nietzsche, Freud, and Kafka,” trans. Neil Donahue, Reading Kafka, ed. Mark Anderson (New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1989).

^[vi] Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, Volume IV (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967).

Seven stories by Alice Munro briefly discussed for the memorial

via invitation from Tara Penry

In my life of reading Alice, I’ve covered nearly all fourteen books and taught many of the stories when I was a professor of creative writing at George Washington University.

In my tribute, I discuss seven of the stories that I chose to teach and use fragmentary notes, not to explain, but to intrigue —plus an eighth story that I include with a link to The New Yorker because it is so timely in this year of our loss of a woman’s rights over her own body. (I note here that “Menesteung” that appears in Best American Short Stories of the Century is brilliant; I still teach it regularly, so I omit it here because I don’t want to scoop what I do with this incredible short story.)

“Labor Day Dinner” from The Moons of Jupiter; also anthologized: The loss of connection, the hope of love unfulfilled, the deadly acceptance that hangs onto longing … A gorgeously layered story, as are all of Alice’s stories, that focuses close-in on Roberta, magically done with interior work, with flashback, and with Alice’s use of omniscience so rarely used in the modern day short story and so effectively done.

“Deep Holes” “Some Women” and “Face” from Too Much Happiness, winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize: The first two: You gotta read them to understand the depth, the greatness and the ability to reach into the souls, hearts, dreams and losses of women. “Face”: A first-person story with a man as narrator. Risk and security. The novel-like feel that characterizes Alice’s work. Primal injury. Freudian trauma. The father who will not look at the child with the birthmark on his face. A childhood girl, the central “drama” when the rupture with the girl occurs, her action misunderstood as cruel. The girl doesn’t see our main character as needing to be hidden though hidden he has been, in most ways, all his life. A loving gesture revealed.

“Runaway” and “Passion” from Runaway: “Runaway”: Carla’s story. The bargains we make and that there is no place to run. “Passion”: “Grace’s view of her place in Maury’s world, the subtle sensuality in Alice’s work, the cost that comes with getting away. Grace paid a price, a price she ultimately was willing to pay.

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain” from Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Marriage: The story Sarah Polley read in The New Yorker on an airplane and decided to make into the film Away From Her with a luminous performance by Julie Christie.

Note: The New Yorker thought Alice’s stories too long and cut portions. Her confidence by now firm, she replaced all the cuts when the story was published in her collection.

I add here that Alice, in this story, uses the technique I term “modular” fiction, characteristic of so many of her stories, meaning the story is not driven by the seeming orderliness of a time-driven chronology and the result is always meaning that strikes the heart.

For all of you passionate to write, late-starters and workshop attendees, read Alice if you have not. And remember this revelation from Alice’s daughter’s book Lives of Mothers and Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro1: “‘Boys and Girls’2 was one of her favorite stories, though not her best technically because of a certain disjointed quality she couldn’t correct. With this story, going against her usual instinct not to discuss her work, she brought the unpublished manuscript to a creative writing class at UVic …. One of the group’s participants, Lawrence Russell, attacked the story savagely, saying it was something a typical housewife would write. She wasn’t able to write anything for about a year after that episode.” —if one can even imagine such for this prolific genius. I know that Grace Paley had a similar experience—but even worse, from a creative writing professor.

My point: Rejection, misunderstanding are part of the process. Don’t give up. Look for a teacher who understands the difficult and weighty task of teaching and mentoring.

Here’s a link to her 1998 short story “Before the Change”3 that has abortion as part of its layered subject of not being seen and secrets that plague us.

Love,

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A special Sunday post: I posted my memoriam as part one of our tribute:

Here is

“A Pocket Full of Fool’s Gold.”

“Yet, fooled with hope, men favor the deceit.”
 (John Dryden, 1631-1700)

At 35, I left a more pragmatic, lucrative career in public relations to pursue life as a full-time writer: first as a journalistic freelancer and later as a book author. I blame The New York Times for giving me hope I could one day write a novel. On April 28, 1985, the Times published my essay “A Hometown Boy Returns” about a bittersweet return to Harrison, N.Y., years after an abrupt and painful departure. The article’s publication heralded a forthcoming bestseller, or so I naively thought.

 During the next decade, I would discover the often sobering realities about such great expectations. Writing a novel, like other ambitious quests, is about faith and hope, false promises and often fool’s gold. Most likely, your rewards will be more modest than you imagined. However, if you are fortunate, you will have guides to inspire your journey.

My memorable mentor was Lee K. Abbott, a master teacher and short story writer. From Lee I learned of the “imagined real world” and “willing suspension of disbelief.” I took classes from him when he was on the English faculty at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He was a tall, lean, dark-haired Westerner with a piercing gaze, sardonic wit and hearty laugh. This son of a career soldier was raised in New Mexico, where his magical tales took hold. Because I was older than most of his students, we related more as “grown men” (he being five years and one week older). We spoke of marriage, careers, children, and the mystical game of golf. But that’s all back story to the real narrative: my pursuit of the writing life.

Lee instructed me in the ways of the “liar’s art,” helping to shape my craft and bolster my confidence. By 1990 I had published a couple short stories and completed a young adult novel, The Tough Get Going, while working as a full-time freelancer. When I couldn’t secure publication, Lee offered a figurative pat on the shoulder and a daunting prediction: “It’s usually a third, fourth or fifth novel that is the breakthrough book.”

Despite his own schedule of teaching, writing and speaking at writers conferences across the country, Lee continued to read and critique my work, encouraging me and reminding me of the rigors of authorship. When I felt like giving up, he said:

“Remember, no one can knock on your door and order you to stop writing.” The lesson was clear: It was up to me to endure or surrender those dreams. My quest continued.

In my late thirties, Lee again changed my life by planting the idea of graduate school and a new career path in academia. This remarkable conversation occurred over a nondescript lunch near Lee’s new home in Columbus, after he had become professor and director of the creative writing program at Ohio State University. He told me in no uncertain terms that unless I was that one in a million author who wrote a blockbuster, it was highly unlikely I would ever find the necessary time and focus to develop my craft while balancing a young marriage and burgeoning consulting business. In retrospect, I believe Lee sprinkled fairy dust on me that day. His idea seemed so farfetched yet intriguing. Could I become an educator and serious author on the cusp of 40?

My wife was more than dubious; she flat-out refused to support such fanciful notions. As time passed, the deep fissures in my marriage were revealed, and the center could not hold. That dreary spring of separation, I applied to several MFA programs and was rejected by all but one. A year passed and my divorce was finalized. With Lee’s commiseration, unwavering support (via chats and countless reference letters), and his prediction of better days and better angels ahead, I again applied to both fiction and nonfiction graduate writing programs.

In fall 1992, I set sail for the University of Oregon (UO) to specialize in narrative nonfiction and, hopefully, secure a second career as a writing professor. Some said I was in a post-divorce midlife crisis. What did I hope to gain by going cross-country to become a full-time student? The questions came from family, friends and within. This was a risky venture, considering my age, the rigor of academic life and emotional baggage I carried—a failed marriage and unfulfilled expectations as a novelist. But I was bolstered by Lee’s treasured communiqués, inscribed with his distinctive salutation (“Amigo”) and valediction (“Thrive”).

In 1994, I earned my M.S., Journalism with honors from the University of Oregon, specializing in literary nonfiction. I joined the adjunct faculty and secured enough freelance work to be barely above the federal poverty line. But I had newfound confidence. I dusted off my young adult novel and began reworking it into a family saga. Delamore’s Dreams, which eventually reached 30 chapters and 175,000 words, was about a prodigal son and his estranged father fighting for respect in 1960s metro New York.

After two years as a forty-something adjunct in Oregon, I secured a tenure-track post at Ball State University in 1996, where I taught undergraduate and graduate classes in writing and literary journalism. Now just a three-hour drive from Lee at Ohio State University, I could thank him in person for his unfailing support through the years. We spoke of do-overs in writing and matters of the heart, and, of course, our love of golf.

Unable to secure a mainstream publisher for my “big novel” after years of submissions, rejections, rewriting, resubmissions and more rejections, I went the print-on-demand route. In 2005, Delamore’s Dreams was marketed as a trade paperback. It may have lacked the traditional imprint of legitimacy, but it was nevertheless a published first novel! I felt grateful for completing the quest I had begun 20 years earlier after my essay had appeared in The New York Times.

Lee received an inscribed copy of my novel, and he assured me it was the first of many more to come. Again my indefatigable mentor had been prophetic. As he had predicted, I embraced the academic life, wrote several more books, and  found a “better angel,” which he had envisioned years earlier.

In June 2022, I celebrated my 25th wedding anniversary to Mykie, the long-shot beauty and former single mother of three boys, whom I had met as a struggling grad student in Eugene, Oregon. Today, I’m a veteran stepfather, proud grandfather of six, and professor emeritus. By accepting the challenge of a midlife reinvention, I achieved more as an educator and author, husband and father than I ever imagined back in 1992 when I blazed a trail to the Northwest, a journey inspired more than any other by Lee K. Abbott.

I now have 45 years of freelancing, hundreds of articles and a dozen books to my credit, plus more in the pipeline. Yet, given my age (70) and largely unknown writer status, some would advise me to shelve my aspirations for recognition by the literary community. But I persist, a man with a pocket full of fool’s gold, who is heartened by tender mercies—such as when an old pal emailed me after reading Delamore’s Dreams. He said his wife “could not put my book down.”

Though my story has a happy and hopeful ending, it saddens me that Lee died of cancer at age 71 in 2019. One of my profound regrets is that we never got in that round of golf we’d often talked about. But if I can honor my hallowed mentor with a legacy of persistence, perseverance and late-life reinvention as an author, then I will feel fulfilled despite being unable to ever repay a lifelong I.O.U. to Lee K. Abbott.

Mark H. Massé is a longtime freelancer and author of fiction and narrative nonfiction.

Mary adds a craft talk link by Lee at Colgate University. It’s long-ish but entertaining and so worth it, no matter where you are on your journey.

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Thank you, Mark.

Love,

Lee K. Abbott: October 17, 1947 – April 29, 2019

This memorial will appear in two parts: Mine and — his coming soon.

On Blindness: A memoriam

I read this at Lee K. Abbott’s memorial fall 2019 at the Ohio State University faculty club—by invitation from his friend and colleague Lee Martin.

In workshop one day Lee told this personal anecdote: As a small boy in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he grew up, he woke one day blind. The diagnosis: hysterical blindness.

The anecdote was remarkable for its revelation from this extraordinary teacher because he rarely revealed intimacies in the classroom but, I suspect, often did in his brilliant short stories.

I quote him on this last point from an essay he wrote in 2015 for the lit. mag Puerto Del Sol, “All stories are true stories, especially the artful lies we invent to satisfy the wishful thinker in us, for they present to us, in disguise often and at great distance, the way we are or would want to be.”

As memoir has increased in popularity both in books and movies—“A True Story” being the familiar movie tag—I think Lee would argue that fiction, written close to the bone, will likely provide the reader with a deeper look into the life and soul of the writer, but more important, the reader if the story is worth your time.

Here is Lee’s advice: “A good story should cost the writer more than time and ink.”

And since he wrote no memoir, though he did give strikingly sharp interviews, I’ve never forgotten those wise words. I think what Lee posits here is that self-revelation is key to great fiction. He might add, sharper and more eloquently, something like this, Okay, Didion, now that dame can get away with anything. He loved the counter position in any discussion. So, I give him that here. And add that his love of debate made him a devoted and damned good teacher of what many say cannot be taught and what I argue often is not taught. A lot of gabbing around the seminar table and not much instruction.

This was not Lee’s way and all of us who studied with him know this.

In Lee’s workshop and in his office and through the years of friendship with this remarkable man that began when we were both fifty: me, the student-to-be and he, my teacher-to-become. At age fifty, we were both at a pretty good perspective to make assessments of one another.

Lee K. Abbott taught me how to open my eyes, how to see what works, how to study the underbelly of how a story gets made even if I never understand the magic of its hold on my heart and mind.

That makes me think that the reason for his self-revelation about blindness that one day in workshop was stated to make us realize that blindness is key to learning. That’s how he taught and maybe even how he lived and loved:

Take away everything you think you know, read everything you can get your hands on and then search for the not-knowing way to get going on the page and in life.

Be blind so that you can open your eyes and see.

His work in both that classroom, in the privacy of his office where he did many independent studies—one with me over one full semester that stays in my heart—and in his short stories speak to his point about not only sight or the lack of it but the way to get “truth in fiction.”

Hear now his voice from one of his short stories. So many filled with images of a father, a looming figure, boozy and full of anger and advice. From “The End of Grief”:

“We looked at each other, seriously and carefully. He was my father, he expected something of me, and there was a part of me that should know it. From his bent-forward shoulders and his narrowed eyes and the quiver in his cheek, I understood that all this Bataan stuff, the horror stories and the painstaking attention to detail and the grainy, time-worn photographs, had been an expression, unmistakable as slaughter itself, of nothing so much as love and memory and death and my relation among them.”

And here we stand, in grief and memoriam, for this man, who expected something from us, who expected us to go blind in order to see.

José Saramago at end of his novel Blindness, where everyone surreally loses their sight, closes with these words at the start of a run-on sentence, when the crowd is shouting just three words: “I can see, said those who had already recovered their eyesight and those who were just starting to see, I can see, I can see, I can see, the story in which people said, I am blind, truly appears to belong to another world.”

 In the darkness of loss here are Lee’s words that come from his world in “Dreams of Distant Lives”:

“The other victim the summer my wife left me was my dreamlife, which like a mirage, dried up completely the closer we came to the absolute end of us. … I had been a ferocious dreamer, drawing all I knew or feared or loved about the waking world into my sleep life.” And later in that story, our narrator says, “I think I sang, or wish I had sung, and now—in the wistful half of me that’s putting this on paper—I hear that singing again, as if I were out on the [golf] course at night, and say to myself, as a stranger, that there is a man singing over yonder, in a scratchy voice that certainly has some liquor and cigarettes in it, and that man is happy.”

I know nothing of eternity and make no assertions on that score in the face of Lee’s death, in the face of the heartbreak of absence. But I do know that Lee K. Abbott sang. He sang on paper in story after story, he sang in classroom after classroom, and his voice resonates and echoes for all of us who have known him.

I loved this man from the first moment I met him when I thought, foolishly, that I was interviewing him in his office before accepting his offer to study in his creative writing department with him and all who stand here with me to honor him.

I close with the closing words from his story “Love is the Crooked Thing,” words spoken as love song to the woman in the story: “Yes, I was holding her just as you would hold your own hope if it had heart and leg and tongue.

“At last, I said I intended to expire in that spot she imagined so completely—that spot, as I comprehended it now, where I am young and beautiful and eternally loved even though I am dead.”

Yes, Lee K. Abbott, you are eternally loved even though you are dead.

Love,

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First, a quick summary of both films that won’t do them justice to serve as why the films may be too easily dismissed for the awards I argue they deserve.1

The Banshees of Inisherin tells the story of two men in a falling out, a friendship gone bad on a small isle that looks out onto Northern Ireland.

The Whale tells the story of a 600-pound man eating himself to death while he tries to connect with a daughter he left when she was eight and he fell in love with a man who’s died and whose sister is his nurse.

But here’s the brilliance: Both films strike the heart while both surprisingly play with triteness to superlative, surprising effect. Character drives both and overturns not only the use of overused metaphors but also flies in the face of the current rage of Marvel Comic films. The latter give us larger than life characters grounded on a genre device that closes á la “deus ex machina” in almost every case.

The two films I argue for here vie, perhaps hopelessly, for the Oscar. Both control the trite and build complex characters not easily summed up, as I did in my opening paragraphs. That’s something the Marvel Comic violence-driven films, at least to my mind, cannot achieve.

The latter excite. The former move.

Both The Banshees of Inisherin and The Whale, like the Marvel Comic genre flicks, stir us with exaggeration, with overstatement, and the overdone, but The Banshess and The Whale do it to grand effect.

In The Banshees of Inisherin, we get Colm who plays the violin and writes songs, followed by his inexplicably and by his own hand cut-off fingers, while we fall in love a bit with a donkey that lives in Padraic and his sister Siobhán’s house. In The Whale, we have 600-pound Charlie whose eating scenes are their own exaggeration.

Brendon Gleeson plays the violin-playing, song-writing Colm who rejects Colin Farrell’s Padraic, a sort of dolt who seems not to get the obvious. Have they been “rowin”? Northern Ireland and the civil war, cannon and rifle fire in the distance, remain throughout the film on the horizon like an easy metaphor. Padraic says, “Good luck to ye. Whatever it is you’re fightin‘ about” —and here we have what might seem to be the trite metaphor of the film, viewed by many as simple parable. But in the hands of McDonagh and the actors, the film and this metaphor rise to character-driven tragi-comedy.

Branden Fraser startles with his heartfelt Charlie’s desire to reach his daughter Ellie, played with force, beauty and anger by Sadie Sink. The marvelous Hung Chao plays the nurse, who loves Charlie. She circles in and out and tightens the stories while Charlie’s some-time friend Thomas, an evangelist full of both feeling and fakery, and Mary, Charlie’s former wife and Ellie’s mother, give insight to love that never dies. Spirituality and its rejection operate on levels that ultimately shoot into the brilliance of lives lived and loved and that can only be described as light—literally, figuratively and remarkably.

The Banshees of Inisherin gives us beautiful sunsets and green scenery while The Whale gives us a two-bedroom apartment and a small porch. Outside are clouds and rain.

Inside both stories are folks with heart: Conflicted, frail, dull, even, in the case of Padraic, played with the touch of the Irish by Farrell; force, played with the touch of the artist by Gleeson; heart, played by Fraser, only with his face and a large realistic prosthetic body that can barely move.

McDonagh directs with a sense of character and the beauty of scene. Aronofsky directs with the echoing metaphor of a closed-in set that parallels the locked in fat body of Charlie and a timeline that begins on a Monday and ends on a Friday.

Both directors get my kudos for understanding what the visual adds to their complex, seemingly one-note characters who exceed what they seem and break us apart.

The Whale gives us the complex interplay of characters who care. Charlie’s daughter’s anger drives the film—as does her need to be loved while she plays rejection in a full-throated performance.

One can tell almost immediately that The Whale is based on a narrative that was written as a play before Hunter wrote the screenplay. I say that because of the power of the slant dialogue, the use of poetry, of the novel Moby Dick that easily could have been a too-easy metaphor but comes into its own much as the too-little read novel has done. We even get Charlie counting his daughter’s prosaic writing in the rhythm of iambic pentameter. Right on the mark, as the film reaches near Shakespearean tragedy.

The Banshees of Inisherin gives us dull Padraic played with endearing charm. His dullness is denied lovingly by his sister who in sweetness lies to him and ultimately makes her own escape from the small world of the island to the larger one where she’ll read.

In the middle of all this Colm bloodies the film again and again and reflects on the senselessness of the war they watch from afar. At the same time, he and the small isle with its beauty captured cinematically by McDonagh and his cinematographer Ben Davis turn us inexorably toward art, toward why we must not live without its praise and spirit—and to why friendship ultimately cannot be denied.

What will the Oscars do? Based on the awards so far, deny best picture for either of these remarkable films.2

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Part Three of Lesson 17 on Starting Late in Write it! How to get started follows.

Love,

You care about literature. You may want to get published. Do you say, “Literary Magazines: Why bother?”

I say these little guys take risks that matter—or used to, anyway, when readers could find them. They found emerging talent, unknowns, new voices.

An NEA study of the literary world concluded a long time ago: “Most writers of literature, including those who go on to prominence, will [first] find their way into print through small presses.”

If past is prologue, we can learn (photos of authors above bolded names):

It took Faulkner thirteen years to see his first short story in print. “That Evening Sun Go Down” was published in The American Mercury, then in Best American . In that short story, we’re introduced to the Compsons who people The Sound and the Fury. “A Rose for Emily” appeared in Forum. Both magazines rejected earlier stories.

William Saroyan’s tour de force of voice, “Resurrection of a Life” appeared in Story (where you’ll also find me) and then in Best American. I argue that Saroyan’s story could not have found a home in a commercial magazine. His play The Time of Your Life won the Pulitzer.

Bernard Malamud: “The Girl of My Dreams” appeared in American Mercury and “The Mourners” in  Discovery, both after his novel The Natural. “The Girl of My Dreams” ran alongside a poem by Kenneth Koch at the beginning of his career and another by Adrienne Rich when her bio still said, “Miss Rich is married and lives in Cambridge, Mass.”

William Gass: “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” appeared in New American Review. His story that breaks form, was chosen by Best American and appeared alongside Philip Roth’s “The Jewish Blues” and Grace Paley’s “Faith in a Tree.”

Ian McEwan appeared in New American. That mag. published three of his stories before he published his first novel. He went on to win the Booker Prize. His story appeared alongside stories by Grace Paley, E. L. Doctorow and Angela Carter.

Pam Houston published in Fish Stories before “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had” appeared in Other Voices and was chosen for Best American and then by John Updike for Best American Short Stories of the Century.

Jhumpa Lahiri: Salamander before her book Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer in 2000. The title story appeared in Agni and later in Best American.

T. C. Boyle: “Poison,” Hawai’i Review.

Jane Smiley: “Jeffrey, believe me,” appeared in TriQuarterly before she had a book.

Ann Beattie: “Winter: 1978”in Carolina Quarterly reprinted in Best American.

John Edgar Wideman: “Two Stories,” The North American Review. He decided in 2010 to self-publish. The blog aalbc.com gives an overview of his career. Publisher's Weekly continued to review his self-published work and did a story on his decision to go rogue, as the (are we down to two?) big houses might assert.

Mary Gaitskill: “A Crazy Person” appeared in Open City after her collection Bad Behavior and a novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin.  She’s on Substack with Out of it.              

Nicholson Baker: “Harold Munger’s Story,” Story Quarterly. His bio, quoting him, says, “he is not working on a novel.” The Mezzanine, his first novel, appeared in 1988.

Colm Tóibín, Booker Prize winner for The Master: “Silence” from The Empty Family appeared in Boulevard Magenta—blogger and poet Michael O'Dea gives us the scoop on this small pub.

Drunken Boat: T.C. Boyle and Alice McDermott wrote tributes to Eugene O’Neill. Robin Hemley, former director of the nonfiction writing program at U. of Iowa, published a lyric essay “Twirl / Run”. Excerpt from my memoir appears in this mag.

All my short stories in The Woman Who Never Cooked appeared first in literary mags. Frederick Busch named my collection the finalist for the Associated Writers Program Book Award.

If you’re a struggling writer, go here: Council of Literary Magazines and Presses for a super list.

Have things changed? I argue that they may have at the close of this essay that first appeared in Iron Horse Literary Magazine, but that you probably can’t find unless you click ☞ HERE.

Credits: Most photos via Wikipedia

Note to my subscribers: I’m creating sections so that, Write it! How to get started will have its own section and other writings can appear under new headings like this one. Another new section will be (Re)Making Love: a memoir (coming soon). If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll still get everything and, if you’re a free subscriber, you still get many posts free. I do hope you’ll consider helping me with $5 for a month and a bunch less for a year. Love to you all, no matter what you decide. ~Mary

The remake of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 mini-series, Scenes From a Marriage, streaming on HBO was directed by Hagai Levi, teleplay by Levi and Amy Herzog. Daniel Bergman, one of the executive producers, is the son of Ingmar Bergman, who created the original Swedish TV series that was later a film, also available on HBO.

Daniel approached Levi some years ago about doing the series.

By “conceit,” I’m referring to Hagai Levi’s decision to break the fourth wall in all the episodes, with a decided difference in how he does it in the final episode. At the start of the first four episodes, Levi begins with a view of the set the stars Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaacs enter. In the final episode, he closes with a break in the fourth wall that shows the actors getting into robes and leaving the set, arm in arm and with much real-life affection as each enters his dressing room.

Play acting over, real affection is our view—and that metaphor resounds.

Levi’s choice to use the conceit of “breaking the fourth wall” provides insight into the essential conflict in Bergman’s accoladed series.

That choice in every episode has been criticized by the critics who remain bemused—while highlighting women’s liberation, independence, and divorce.

I assert the brilliance of the conceit.

Most titles for the episodes are exactly the same. I was struck by the title “The Illiterates”.

Here’re the titles from the original six-part Bergman series. Levi used all but the second in his five episodes—and perhaps that omission is in itself revealing. I’ll explain more as I proceed.

1.     “Innocence and Panic”

2.     “The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Rug” (not used by Levi)

3.     Pauline –“Poli” in Levi’s remake –as he has reversed the roles of the two main characters.

Levi gives the role of the partner who leaves the marriage to Mira (Jessica Chastain) along with most of the inclinations and intentions of Johan (Erland Josephson) who leaves Marianne (Liv Ulmann) from Bergman’s original, increasing the emotional weight of loss for Jonathan (Oscar Isaacs) in Hagai’s version. Important to point out here that in both versions the emotional weight and the significance of what occurs in the marital relationship weigh heavily on both partners and in both versions.

4.     “Vale of tears”

5.     “The Illiterates”

6.     “In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House”

On “The Illiterates,” in an interview with Ben Travers of Indiewire, Levi said, “There is an episode … when Mira says that they’re illiterate about breakups, not about divorce, not about marriage.”

Having watched both the original and Hagai Levi’s remake, I assert that Levi has done a sterling job of recreating and increasing the intensity of the original. The performances by Chastain and Isaacs are marvelous, moving, and both hold the viewer with immersions in the roles.

I loved this new series, Levi’s courage in taking on a Bergman masterpiece, and bringing new depth to the roles.

The deeper conflict that Hagai Levi reveals is our understanding today of the ease of breakups and the prevalence of divorce. What he and Bergman both explore is the way we’re illiterate about the complexities of love that lasts.

Levis’ break of the fourth wall pays homage to Bergman’s achievement by showing us that these are “scenes” from another theatrical version. In the last episode of the HBO series, he does this incredibly effectively. Mira repeats to Jonathan this line: “In the middle of the night, without much fanfare, in a dark house in the middle of the world.” When asked by Jonathan: “What’s that?” She replies, “It’s from a movie.” It’s a line that Johan says to Marianne at the end of the Bergman series.

But the meaning is even more powerful for what these characters have experienced.

Breaking the fourth wall causes the viewer to step back from the play acting, to take the whole of what we’re seeing and examine our suspension of disbelief—kudos to the whole production for that achievement as each episode locks us totally in its hold.

But, perhaps, most important, is that Levi focuses us on play acting.

He causes us to check ourselves. Yes, we know for sure we’re watching a fiction that seems real. That observation is like a boomerang. We must look at his attempt in the abstract. In an interview with Ben Travers of Indiewire, Levi says, “… I kind of want you to think about it [the drama] in a more abstract way and in a way be able to project it on yourself.”

He asks us to look inside ourselves and ask key questions about what love that lasts is worth.

Most important, these “Illiterates” are play acting their way through a love that has bumped up against trouble: Another attraction, the boredom of the everyday-ness of marriage.

I think he chose not to use “Sweeping Things Under the Rug” because he doesn’t need that “telling.” He’s got more to play with about the nature of love and the “plays” we create for ourselves. He has no need for this title. Something bigger is under Levi’s rug.

What becomes clear in every episode is that despite Jonathan’s and Mira’s assertions that they’re meant to be apart, they delude themselves. They proceed to do everything they can to preserve the love they’ve broken. They do so without getting formally back together.

Too easy is the explanation that monogamy is dead. Bergman had five marriages—and that may have been his view. But I don’t think it’s Levi’s, despite his admission that he has experienced a divorce.

The power of the new HBO series is its intense focus on love that inexorably lasts, its worth. Levi intensifies the effect because in our day divorce is so common whereas in Bergman’s day, the opposite was true. As an aside, the Bergman series was credited with dramatically increasing the divorce rate in Sweden the year after the series ran.

The play acting of the characters, as each asserts the rightness of the breakup—even as they continue to be drawn to one another—is emphasized in Levi’s remake with his use, just one example, of Purim as the anniversary moment that Jonathan recalls for him and Mira. Levi, a Jewish Israeli, has given Jonathan a deeply Jewish past. Purim is the holiday for dress-up, for play acting, much as these two characters have play acted the truth of their love by disputing it only to affirm its importance.

Don’t miss Jonathan’s nightmare in the fifth episode that totally mirrors Marianne’s in the Bergman series. I won’t explain: “spoiler.”

After her similar and disturbing nightmare, Marianne, in the Bergman series, asks, “Have we missed something?”

Yes, these characters in scenes from their marriages have missed this: Play-acting as a metaphor for reality. And the reality is love that can last—despite breakage.

I speak from experience. See the memoir (Re)Making Love, available on Amazon.

Closing quote:

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Photos: Bergman, Levi, Chastain, Isaacs via Wikipedia

Photo: Rug Photo by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash

Why make art, something “other”, when faced with the dilemmas of existence, with, as I’ve said in one of my short stories, “all the ways that life betrays the living”?

Some thoughts on the struggle for meaning, for a narrative in our lives, and the question I pose for all of you putting pen to paper. I ask this not from the perspective of a philosopher, but from that of a writer of fiction and literary memoir and my own search for a moral framework—for a narrative of hope.

In my memoir (Re)Making Love, I found myself turning again and again to Friedrich Nietzsche’s works

—along paradoxically and laughably too! with a bunch of rom-coms—believe it or not.

The draw to him was inexorable.

He questioned the foundation of the moral thought that preceded him. He did it big-time with his oft-quoted assertion, given to the madman: “‘Whither is God,’ he cried. ‘I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. … God is dead.’”[i]

I quote him, not as a non-believer, but as a searcher. I’m Jewish by heritage and tradition—not observant, not even as well-schooled as I could be, but a believer nonetheless.

Nietzsche again: “‘[W]ill to truth’ does not mean ‘I will not let myself be deceived’ but—there is no choice—‘I will not deceive, not even myself’: and with this we are on the ground of morality.”

Nietzsche’s questioning resonates for me because he asks, Is a coherent narrative for our lives possible? And if we’ve got no clear answer, what then?

Just for the heck of it, let’s go back to the “royalty” of modernism—heady stuff: Kafka (Arguably predates modernity), Woolf, Joyce. I’m not saying everyone who writes will read these folks, only that I did and have some thoughts.

Yep, that’s Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses:

All, (Marilyn, too, I bet!) reflect on the philosophical struggle that comprises ‘moral ambiguity”.

They write and, in doing so, perhaps they answer the question I pose.

As to what I call ‘moral ambiguity’, here’s some help from critics who argue the modernist writer moved inward and away from society.

Here I go with some research (bear with me):

The critic Peter Faulkner argues that “modernist writers fail to see man socially and historically, and so make his alienation, which is a social process, into an absolute.”[ii]

The critic Randall Stevenson argues, “Once narrative places ‘everything in the mind’, a sense of significance can be restored to individuals: it becomes once again possible to consider ‘what a terrific thing a person is’—regardless of how diminished … their actual lives in the modern industrial world may be.”[iii]

The critic Stephen Spender starkly expresses the issue: “In the works of the most characteristically modern writers contemporary civilization was represented as chaotic, decadent, on the point of collapse, anarchic, absurd, the desert of non-values.”[iv]

I don’t agree with Spender’s view as it relates to Woolf and Joyce, but I think he’s right about where Kafka leads us. And Kafka, most certainly of the three novelists was an adherent of Nietzsche.

The critic Gerhard Kurz notes the importance of Nietzsche to Kafka: “The study of Kafka’s relation to Nietzsche was long obstructed by Max Brod’s [friend, biographer and literary executor of Kafka’s body of work] denial of such an influence. The relation first came to light in 1954, when Erich Heller named Nietzsche as Kafka’s ‘intellectual predecessor.’ [Kurz explains that Kafka met Nietzsche through his friend Oskar Pollak.].” Kurz asserts, “Kafka remained faithful to Nietzsche’s thinking until death.”[v]

Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathrustra is referenced three times by Joyce in Ulysses, showing, at the very least, that Joyce had read Nietzsche.

Considering how well-read Woolf was, I find it hard to believe she was unaware of his work.

The dilemma you and I face and that Woolf, Joyce, Kafka address is: How to decide what we ought to do when alone, separated from society, and believe society may not offer a set of shared values that work.

Virginia Woolf in her essay “On Being Ill,” said, “Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. … Here we go alone, and like it better so.”[vi]

In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay looks out on the constant stroke of the Lighthouse and says inside her head, “It will end, it will end.” She addresses the question of existence and asks herself, “What did it all mean? To this day she had no notion.” The novel’s middle section, “Time Passes,” separates the action of the novel and all the characters from society. The inexorable power of time and nature rule in “this silence, this indifference, this integrity, the thud of something falling”, and, in this context, three deaths occur in brackets: Mrs. Ramsay, rather suddenly; her daughter Prue Ramsay, in childbirth; her son Andrew, in the war.

In Ulysses, both Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are exiles. Bloom is an outsider, a Jew, cuckolded by his wife, shunned by others, the object of derision and anti-Semitism. Stephen, recently returned from Paris, is the loner, struggling with refusal to take the sacraments, with his art, with his dissatisfaction with the politics of Ireland. It’s Stephen who says, “That is God. ... A shout in the street.”

K. in The Trial is the most cut off from the world. The novel opens with K. excluded from society by the accusation of guilt. We find no actual events in the novel. The Trial takes place devoid of time or place.

The movement to the self was perhaps inevitable and technique followed: Interior monologue—something I’ll talk about in Write it! How to get started. Click below for the first lesson.

Interior monologue or what came to be known in Joyce’s work as stream of consciousness arose from a philosophic need to move narrative inside the domain of the “self.”

We’ll be talking technique in your work.

Ulysses intimidates readers because it lacks a clear narrative thread—though I argue we always know what day it is and what time it is. Those who dismiss the novel argue fairly, I think, that Joyce purposely impedes a clear linear narrative thread.

I argue that Joyce questions how one finds the narrative of one’s own life.

This question is bleakly explored in Kafka’s The Trial, where the move to the interior is extreme. Kafka doesn’t allow the reader to know for sure we’re inside someone’s consciousness. K.’s seemingly impossible world could be the “real” world.

Nietzche, Kafka, Woolf, Joyce articulated moral ambiguity: The struggle to find meaning in the face of Nietzsche’s “undeceived” morality, a nothingness, if you will.

Remember this and take heart: The very fact that you, the writer, puts pen to paper, demonstrates a longing for a world where moral decisions can be—indeed, perhaps must be—made.

So, together, let’s answer this question: Is art a path away from nihilism?

I close with Elizabeth Bishop:

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Footnotes and credits:

[i] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, The Gay Science, “The Madman,” ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Penguin Group, paperbound edition, 1976).

[ii] Peter Faulkner, Modernism (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1977).

[iii] Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (Hertfordshire, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992).

[iv] Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (California: University of California Press, 1963)

[v] Gerhard Kurz, “Nietzsche, Freud, and Kafka,” trans. Neil Donahue, Reading Kafka, ed. Mark Anderson (New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1989).

[vi] Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, Volume IV (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967).

Credits

Photo: Photo Make Art by Enzo Tommasi on Unsplash

Photos: Book covers via Wikipedia

Photo: Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses courtesy of OpenCulture openculture.com 

I’m not a political writer, but instead a literary fiction, memoir writer and teacher who appears here with “Essays on the arts film, answers to q’s and a course: Write it!, This Writing Life and (Re)Making Love: a serial memoir

But on July 21st, 2022, as the January 6th hearings proceeded in prime time, I felt I must speak out as a citizen of my country:

It is time for the United States of America to do a “DoubleTake”.

In the January 6th hearings in Congress on June 16, 2022, J. Michael Luttig, a retired conservative judge, appointed by Republican president George H. W. Bush in 1991, gave a powerful statement. He is the judge that Vice-President Mike Pence’s team reached out to when President Donald Trump pressured Pence to challenge the legality of the vote count that elected President Joe Biden. The judge’s advice was that such a step would not only be illegal but would imperil our democracy.

Here is part of what he said on June 16, 2022, shortly after Memorial Day:

“Members of the House Select Committee – A stake was driven through the heart of American democracy on January 6, 2021, and our democracy today is on a knife’s edge. America was at war on that fateful day, but not against a foreign power. She was at war against herself. We Americans were at war with each other – over our democracy. January 6 was but the next, foreseeable battle in a war that had been raging in America for years, though that day was the most consequential battle of that war even to date. In fact, January 6 was a separate war unto itself, a war for America’s democracy, a war irresponsibly instigated and prosecuted by the former president, his political party allies, and his supporters. Both wars are raging to this day.

…

“The war on democracy instigated by the former president and his political party allies on January 6th was the natural and foreseeable culmination of the war for America. It was the final fateful day for the execution of a well-developed plan by the former president to overturn the 2020 presidential election at any cost, so that he could cling to power that the American People had decided to confer upon his successor, the next president of the United States instead. Knowing full well that he had lost the 2020 presidential election, the former president and his allies and supporters falsely claimed and proclaimed to the nation that he had won the election, and then he and they set about to overturn the election that he and they knew the former president had lost. 2 The treacherous plan was no less ambitious than to steal America’s democracy.”

The full statement can be found online via CNN and other publications.

Now is the time for not only our legislators, but, indeed, our attorney general and all Americans to do a “DoubleTake”.

This word “Double-take” not only appears in Seamus Heaney’s long book-length poem The Cure at Troy but also became the title of a well-known and now, sadly, long-gone, as of 2005, literary magazine DoubleTake, established in 1995 by child psychiatrist, Harvard professor and prolific author Dr. Robert Coles.

When I studied the magazine closely, David Parker, the magazine’s publisher, told me that after giving the magazine its title, Robert Coles’ son showed him the poem The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney. Parker then went to Farrar Straus and got permission to quote the poem. Robert Coles told me, however, that he’d been friends with the poet for a long time and that Seamus Heaney was quite pleased.

That excerpt from The Cure at Troy opened every issue of the magazine.

I offer here that Heaney was prescient and he needs to be heard along with Judge Luttig—and everyone else who has testified.

At the January 6th hearing, Judge Luttig closed his statement with these words:

“In order to end these wars that are draining the lifeblood from our country, a critical mass of our two parties’ political leaders is needed, to whom the remainder would be willing to listen, at least without immediate partisan recrimination. The logic for reconciliation of these wars being waged in America today dictates that this number needs to include a critical mass of leaders from the former president’s political party and that those leaders need to go first. All of these leaders then need to summon first the moral courage and then the political courage, the strength, and the patriotic will to extend their hands, and ask of the others – and of all Americans – ‘Can we talk? America needs us.’

“While Memorial Day is still fresh in our minds, we would all do well to remind ourselves of the immortal words spoken to the West Point cadets at the United States Military Academy a half century ago: “Duty, Honor, Country.” Those three sacred words of profound American obligation were spoken on that occasion to reassure those who had given their lives for their country in the past, and who would give them in the future, that their sacrifice would not be in vain. Those words are as apt today for this occasion as they were on that day for that occasion, if not more.

“Then we need to get back to work, and quickly. We need to get back to the solemn business of preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution of the United States and the United States of America.

“The hour is late. God is watching us.”

I close with the excerpt from Seamus Heaney’s poem that the magazine titled as follows:

Doubletake

Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
or lightning and storm
and a god speaks from the sky.

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.

Seamus Heaney, Nobel Laureate 1995, excerpt from The Cure at Troy

I close with this note for readers of my newsletter: If you don’t agree with me, feel free to say that. What we need is not only action, but also reasonable exchanges.

And this: I will be adding a lesson on why writers of prose (memoir, fiction) should read poetry and a lesson on why literary magazines matter. Look for them both!

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credit: Flag watercolor by Mary L. Tabor

Riddles of Existence: “On Re-Reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

A retired Navy physician wrote me recently with thoughts, questions about the novel and took me back to Woolf’s evocative novel To the Lighthouse.

He said, “The themes of meaning, loss, desire, and time are abundantly clear, but part of the allure of Woolf’s writing is the philosophical nature of her themes and the mystery that surround them.”

I address exactly that in an essay “Moral Ambiguity: Why We Make Art” that appears here:

Inner Life

Moral Ambiguity

Dear friends, As we begin our collaboration with others here, I examine this question as an introduction to my thinking (This essay, considerably changed here, appeared early and briefly on my personal Substack). A shoutout to John Pistelli who writes…

Read more

3 years ago · 13 likes · 19 comments · <Mary L. Tabor>

I wrote about Woolf’s To the Lighthouse when I had the flu, was stuck in bed and re-read the novel I’d read when I was in my twenties—great book to read in your fifties, btw.

The novel resonated for me. If you’ve read it or—more likely had to read it in college, it might not have resonated for you. So, tell me what you think about that or anything else below. I love to tango in the comments. So, let’s dance: talk to me.

The Navy physician went on to argue what he calls “The Woolf Riddle.” I’m not sure what he means by “riddle” as my view is that the elusiveness of the novel is its strength.

Let’s examine my reader’s specific questions about the novel (slightly rephrased for clarity here):

1.     Why does Lily Briscoe, the lovely artistic house guest, move a tree to the center of a painting she works on outside on the lawn of Mrs. Ramsey and her husband’s summer home on the Isle of Skye in Scotland with a view of the lighthouse from the window and at bay’s edge?

2.     Why does Lily at one point place a salt shaker in the middle of the kitchen table in the Ramsey’s home to remind her of what she will do with her painting?

My reader argues that Lily Briscoe seeks unity: Here’s what he asserts, “I think the answer has something to do with the theme of unity, as in the unity of everyone at the kitchen table, compared to the unity of the table and the tree … .”

My view is this: To focus on “unity” strikes me as the direct opposite of what Woolf is about in To the Lighthouse. I pose in response this problem for readers of great fiction or, in fact, viewers of great art:

To try to make so-called “symbols” in creative work “speak” is to misread the originality of the questions posed. All great art and, indeed, philosophical thought, ask the primal question: Is a coherent narrative for our lives possible? And if we have no clear answer to that question, what then?

Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse, allows Lily Briscoe, the struggling artist, to help us. Lily paints against all odds. Note: Mr. Tansley, another character in the novel, and also a house guest at the summer home, has told Lily this, “Women can’t paint, women can’t write … ”

And here is Woolf’s answer: Lily continues through the novel to do just that, to paint. And, of course, we have the direct paradox of the novel itself: Woolf writes. So, clearly, women can write—and paint.

To try to place the word “unity” on what Lily does, as my reader appears to assert, by placing the salt shaker in the middle of the table is to misread Lily’s journey to finish her painting. Whether or not the tree ends up in the middle of the painting is Lily’s choice. Her choice to create is, to my mind, a large part of finding her way through existence, knowing as Mrs. Ramsey tells us, “It will end. It will all end.”

And as to that kitchen table: Mrs. Ramsey’s son Andrew explains to Lily what his father’s books are about: “Subject and object and the nature of reality.” Here’s how that struck Lily, “Heavens, she had no notion what that meant.” Andrew explains, “Think of a kitchen table then when you’re not there.” In Lily’s mind this table ends up scrubbed and in a pear tree. The vision of the table remains at the end of the novel, in Lily’s mind as “something bare, hard … uncompromisingly plain”—much like existence revealed in the novel.

To try to find the answers to my reader’s so-called “riddles” is to refuse to acknowledge that the work of living is, as my father once asked before he died, the struggle to find meaning and to answer the question, “What am I here for?”

This is the question we as human beings who know life has limits, the ultimate limit being death, must ask as we move forward through our years. The search for meaning with this knowledge is the work of creating, of making something.

You may think, Why should I try? Write? Finish what I started? You gotta be kidding. Who would care?

Annie Dillard gives us the answer in Living by Fiction—and yes, I used this quote in Lesson 2 of “Write it! How to get started”. But, geez, Annie is sooo good.

Credits:

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1927.

Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, Columbia University Press, 1993.

Annie Dillard, Living by Fiction, Harper & Row, New York, 1982.

Have you given up finding the right guy, the right gal? Do you think there’s nowhere to meet anyone anymore, that men are still boys, that women want commitment and children and big weddings—all promised on date three? That men, gay or straight, don’t want monogamy, let alone marriage?

Golly, why even bother?

What to do? I have an odd answer: go to a movie, read a good book. Do both. You will be changed and that change will have a ripple effect. The butterfly effect. Edward Lorenz, who worked on the physics concept, the chaos theory, gets the credit for this phrase entering our vernacular. I’m no physicist but here’s my way to understand it: The unheard move of that delicate wing whispers on the wind. It ripples and is heard somewhere else. Some say a flick of the wing can start a hurricane.

Come with me now as I’m off to the flicks with a book in my pocket. To understand me, and maybe you don’t care, but keep reading anyway: I love the romantic comedy (aka Rom-Com) and Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory that is full of his love of the butterfly. I love the paradox: stuff like what I just asserted that doesn’t seem to fit together but does—or might.

When my heart was broken, a long story that I documented in a quirky memoir, I went to the Rom-Com for wisdom. Now that my heart is healed, I still love them, but now I look for movies that cross the genre boundary and I reread Lolita, the much banned and misunderstood novel, for hope.

The best films cross the boundary of genre, as in Rom-Com, and become literature as in Lolita. When that happens I believe in LOVE, yeah, the all caps kind.

Let’s define one term here. Hitch, Something’s Gotta Give, French Kiss are, for the more literary among you who wouldn’t dare venture to one of these, Rom-Coms. Here’s how they work: two cynics meet, neither believes love works and one or both have been hurt or screwed by believing the open heart is a good thing. So one, or in the case of Hitch, both have shut down. The fairy tale ending doesn’t exist and they both know it. Familiar dilemma?

The thing about great flicks, the ones that cross the boundary to, let’s just call it film-literature, is that the subject is almost always, even if not fully apparent, about the paradoxes of love.

Two movies worth seeking out prove this: The Debt and Beginners.

The Debt, billed as a thriller, was not critically well reviewed by the heavy hitters. I disagree. It’s a daring story that uncovers the lives of three retired Israeli secret agents and provides an original slant on the difficult subject of the Holocaust. The power of this film lies in its cast, both those in flashback and those in present action, who reflect on each other.

John Madden directed. You might remember him from Shakespeare in Love, a flick he directed and that some have called a Rom-Com romp. I think it’s original, full of panache, literary.

In The Debt, Madden ensures that the viewer lives the agents’ experience through the struggle of layered conflict. In this case, the power of what remains withheld is a lie. The heavy-hitting critics say the movie wears you out, but that’s John Madden’s point: in the dark theater I lived the experience of the conflict as Madden entwined past and present, the way memory works. We see the same story retold in the main character’s struggle, the role played forcefully by Helen Mirren in the film’s present action and vulnerably in her memory by Jessica Chastain. Memory, in our unconscious joins past and present by revisiting the past over and over again. Its butterfly wings change us if we listen to the unheard whisper.

I was changed by this film because the key conflict, the ethical problem of the lie, is complicated by the paradox of love, love between two men and one woman, love between the one woman and the man she truly loves and her love for the child fathered by one of the two.

Beginners did not play widely when first released but garnered an Oscar for Christopher Plummer*. Netflix it. I loved it so much I saw it twice. This flick, written and directed by Mike Mills, operates with the deftness and concreteness of a poem. The performances are terrific, but it is the screenplay that stuns. The story and the editing work a bit like The Debt, back and forth through memory.

Here’s a trailer: click the link > Beginners and you’ll also see that you can watch this flick on YouTube.

Ewan McGregor tenderly plays the main character whose father, played with candor and wit by Christopher Plummer, came out, “I’m gay,” after his wife died. We know right off the bat that this character has also died. McGregor’s character can’t seem to find love. His parents’ marriage circles back and forth in memory of childhood. He’s overcome by grief. We watch him care for the dying and paradoxically vibrant- living, loving father.

The movie is transformative because the characters, even Arthur, the Jack Russell terrier, are specific, non-generic. We know their conflicts and we know that love is the answer.

Both these films cross the boundaries of genre. Is The Debt a thriller? Can Beginners even be defined? Both flicks read like literature because the viewer is changed. And the territory of both movies is love.

Love defines us, who we are, who we wish to be, when we fall short, and when we succeed in the deeply human journey we call life.

Love is the chaos theory when you’re trying to find it and sometimes when you’re in it, as I well know.

The book in my pocket is Lolita. The blurb on the front of my copy (see my photo above) reads: “The only convincing love story of our century.” —Vanity Fair.

Nabokov closes the novel, a book once banned for its pederasty, with a prose elegy to the voices of children at play and to the unheard voice of Lolita from that concord. Nabokov’s flawed hero, for lack of a better term, speaks at the end of the novel of the children’s “vapor of blended voices,” of the “spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or clatter of a toy wagon” and his elegy on the sounds of childhood ends this way:

I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from the concord.

Nabokov, who loved the butterfly, has made the point that love corrupted destroys the child and we must be child-like to love passionately, deeply.

The ripple effect of the unheard broken wing does not whisper. It screams.

If you are discouraged by love, if your heart has been broken, if you’ve become cynical about finding love, know you can be changed by a great film or book. You will walk on the street anew and the flick of your wing will sing. Someone will hear.

*Christopher Plummer, born in Toronto, Canada, won a best supporting Oscar in 2011 when he was 82 for his role in Beginners.

Note for readers and wanna be writers: I teach Creative Writing here in the section Write it! How to get started. Free chapters begin these lessons—so you get an idea of how I teach—then you’ll hit a paywall with occasional free posts: $5 for a month, discounted big time for a year. “With a little help from my friends,” as the Beatles love to sing, we’ll both soar.

Or, I can help you one-on-one for a small fee, via Zoom, an Eight-"session"-course (each session includes 11 parts) with slides and more experiments than in the lessons here.

Email me at 

marytabor@substack.com

for details on how I work and we'll set up lessons.

I taught variations of this course at George Washington University, in the undergraduate and graduate MFA/Ph.D. creative writing program at the University of Missouri and at the Smithsonian’s Campus-on-the-Mall.

I’m the author of of Who by Fire a novel, the memoir (Re)Making Love and The Woman Who Never Cooked: Short Stories. 

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