Left Handed Writings, Right Handed Thoughts

Truth is a Subjective Matter

One of life’s great truisms is the fact that we rarely see what is in going on in our lives at the very moment that we are living this experience. I remember a poignant (in retrospect) moment one month before my marriage in 1985 when, during a weekend in West Cork (my first wife was Irish), she turned to me and asked if we were doing the right thing, marrying each other. Seen now, five years after our divorce, I cannot help but think: she did have a point, as we were – on certain levels – not the person either of us was searching for. But still the marriage went ahead. We were together twenty five years. Two extraordinary children came out of this union – and there were periods of true happiness.

But the other truth of the matter: she was absolutely correct from the outset. As much as I tried to dodge the truth at the outset, what she said that day in March 1985 was so perceptive. Yet a ceremony and a party had been arranged. We both did think, on a certain level, that this was love. Whereas the truth was… Read more »

EXPOSITIONAL THOUGHTS

One of the many interesting facets of writing fiction is the fact that, unless you are beginning a novel which starts when the central character is born (“David Copperfield” springs to mind), the fact is: you are generally starting the narration in the middle of events. In my new novel, “Five Days”, the opening scene takes place in the radiography department of a regional Maine hospital where my narrator, Laura, works as a technologist (i.e., the person who does the scans, the x-rays, etc). As the reader learns about Laura’s work – and two potentially distressing cases that are booked back-to-back on the morning in which the novel starts – the narrative begins to hint at other things going on in her life; certain complexities and sadnesses that seems to be lurking near the surface, and are (having been sublimated for many years) now beginning to cause her distress.

By the end of the second chapter we are au fait with some of the difficult dynamics in her life – two adolescent children in various stages of distress, one at college, the other about to also leave the nest within the year, and a marriage that is flat-lining. By the end of the third chapter we know even more about certain past events that have shaped her life – but though hints are given, much is held back until far later in the novel when…

Well, I am going to say no more about what transpires as the narrative shifts into a different gear, and an accidental meeting with a seemingly grey man at a weekend radiography conference in Boston sets her life on a hugely different trajectory. But we do eventually learn – deep into the novel – certain hidden stories and truths that have brought her to the place she finds herself now: so wanting some sort of change from a life that has become ossified.

Now I mention all this because the expositional aspect of fiction writing is, structurally speaking, one of the most challenging… and, as such, most interesting, component of structuring a novel. How do you grab the readers’ attention, move the action forward, and simultaneously begin to inform us about the back story that the central characters were living before the novel started? It’s a bit like getting involved with somebody: bit by bit you learn about so much that happened to them before you showed up on the scene. And typically not everything comes out at once. Secrets or deep wounds or all sorts of other shadowy stuff may not be revealed for some time. 

In a novel you always must avoid the temptation to show your hand too early and reveal all. People are a mystery, after all – especially to themselves. Exploring the mystery of an individual life is my central fictional obsession. – especially a life at moments of crisis. All novels, in one way or another, are about crises, just as (and this is to borrow a line from the brilliant British psychoanalyst Adam Philips’s new book, “Missing Out”)  all love stories are about frustration.  As such, exposition is key to laying the ground work of the problems that are going to arise and send the narrative down a different trajectory. But, for me, the cardinal rule of constructing a novel is: never give too much away too soon, and always surprise yourself by not completely knowing where the story will lead you.

Writing fiction is what I call a structured improvisation: you have a sense of the road ahead, but you also know that, during the writing of the book, it is going to bring you places you never saw coming. Surprise yourself and you will surprise the reader. And always remember one basic rule: everything (even the most seemingly banal subjects) is interesting. Because every individual life is, in its own way, a novel.

MY WAY IS THE RIGHT WAY

I have been wondering recently about the need that some people have to be right at all costs. Conviction politicians- especially those who say, “There is no way but this way”, always terrify me – whereas I respect someone who operates in the world of realpolitik and understands that most human situations are profoundly nuanced. Just as I have always been just a little dubious by anyone who tells me that their ‘faith’ – religious or otherwise – is the key to the most important metaphysical truths in the universe. And then – on a more banal basis – there are those among us who have to win an argument at any cost, or get all defensive or victimized when it is hinted that they may be in the wrong. There was an expression that was popular among the Nixonian moral majority during the era of Vietnam and campus mayhem: Read more »

THE MOVING CONFESSIONAL BOX

A woman next to me on a flight last night wanted to talk. Being something of a human sponge – if you tell me a story I’ll use it, and I have always maintained that there is nothing more interesting than other people’s lives – I would have been primed and ready to listen. But I had work to finish, I was tired after a charged weekend, so I politely indicated that I needed to write and fell into the republic of words.
 
But part of me then regretted turning back to my laptop. All stories compel me. And who knows what she would have told me. The grim story of her life to-date? Some crucifying sadness that she carries with her? A letdown, a disappointment, a marriage or key relationship that went wrong or south or both? A secret she has rarely shared with anybody… but, as Blanche du Bois notes in a certain great American play, “I have always relied on the kindness of strangers….”
 
Travel is a mobile confessional box – and my narrative travel books and essays are peppered with encounters with individuals whom I encouraged to unburden themselves to me (as Joan Didion once noted, ‘writers are always selling somebody out’). But the fact is, we all have a great need to unburden ourselves of so much. One of the many reasons why Graham Greene remains, for me, such a central writer is because he married the Catholic need for confession with a larger existential concern: seeking some sort of forgiveness in a profoundly unforgiving universe.
 
The truth is, I have yet to encounter someone while traveling who imparted to me a happy story about their life. It’s what my character Laura notes in my new novel, ‘Five Days’ – if you look up any thesaurus you will find far more synonyms for unhappiness than for happiness. We are far more bound up in that which bedevils us than that which pleases us.
 
Then again, happiness is an elusive concept. I consider myself a reasonably happy man, but one with assorted attendant anxieties and complexities (like everybody else). But when a reader once asked me why my novels always deal with people in the midst of a gigantic struggle, I replied: “Isn’t everybody in the middle of a gigantic struggle? And don’t we all read to remind ourselves that we are not alone?”

DINING ALONE

I was stood up by a friend last night for dinner. He emailed later, informing me that he left a message on my cell. But no message was received. So I ate by myself in a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen (I’m in Manhattan for a few days). And the respite from conversation was actually rather bracing. After all, there are pleasures inherent in a dinner alone. 

It was a pleasure I first discovered in my mid-teens, when I fled an increasingly fractious and unhappy household (and two parents acting out Strindberg on the Upper West Side) and would get a student ticket for the NY Phil or the NYC Ballet or something off-Broadway, and also would take myself somewhere cheap but interesting to eat beforehand. My budget for these evenings – we’re talking 1970-2 – was between seven and ten dollars, the ticket and meal included. And I always had a newspaper or a magazine or a book with me. Back then, I could even get away with ordering a beer or a glass of wine (even though I was underage – but I was tall and looked almost the legal drinking  age of eighteen back then… or, at least I told myself that). With reading material leaning up against a glass, I could not have been happier. Especially as – like most artsy kids in the midst of that hormonal and clique-ridden nightmare called adolescence – I felt myself to be strange, awkward, singularly different, very much an outsider.

Little did I know that such perceived ineptitudes would help me formulate an independent identity that would, in turn, so inform my fictional universe. Just as the ability to sit by myself in a restaurant, a book or notebook in hand, would later so become my modus vivendi as I began to travel and write. And I have spent so much fruitful time over the years in a strange city, or some nowhere corner of the planet, alone at a table, drinking something with an alcoholic content, trying to get the day’s events and encounters down in my notebook, or simply indulging in the pleasures of having a book propped up against a glass and nothing pressing to do that evening…

Loneliness has overtaken me at many junctures in my life – at school, at certain junctures in college, and at key moments in several important intimate relationships. But the pleasures of eating alone have never been lonely ones. And yes that extreme Jansenist, Blasé Pascal, did get it so very right when he said (and I paraphrase here): All of man’s problems derive from the fact that he cannot sit alone quietly in a room. 

Or sit alone at a table, dining alone.

PAST TENSE

Passing through security at Paris Charles de Gaulle earlier this week – having to pull out my computer, my toiletries, divest myself of my boots, my belt, all metallic objects – I couldn’t help but remember air travel in the pre-hijacking 1970s, when everyone and anyone could walk to the departure gates, a lit cigarette in hand, a cocktail in the other, and air travel was a straightforward business, without all the Kafka-esque trappings of bureaucracy and high security that it is today.

Nostalgia for the past is, of course, a function of age. To get older is to frequently cite times past as better ones. There’s a whole school of conservative thought that is rooted in the past tense; the idea that, say, Victorian values were the right ones (as Madame Thatcher noted on several occasions) – overlooking the fact that Victorians hanged children for pick-pocketing and had a rather Hobbesian view of the human condition, especially when it came to the tragic squalor of its impoverished citizens. And the notion of the American small town as the repository of national virtue and family values (hello Norman Rockwell) has been attacked as a misnomer from every American writer from Sinclair Lewis onwards (by the way, I just re-read Lewis’s “Main Street” – which remains, for me, a key work in the twentieth century American canon. Along with ‘Babbitt’ and ”Elmer Gantry”).

Why this sugar-coated nostalgia for times past?

THE FAIRY TALE CALLED ‘PARADISE’

When was the last time you closed the door on the world and didn’t step outside your abode for twenty-four hours? For that matter, when was the last time you spent twenty-four hours out of contact with the world? By which I mean: no phone calls, no emails, no surfing the net, no illuminating of the radio or the television, no engaging with another human being at all? When was the last time you went twenty-four hours without having to put your hand in your pocket to buy something? When have any of us totally disconnected from day-to-day life and embraced one full day of enforced solitude? I got thinking about all this as I was musing in my head about a possible short story concerning someone who – after a particularly bruising series of episodes in life – decides to divest himself of all contact with ‘le monde entier’. But try as he might, as far away as he runs from his life, he simply cannot escape the outside world. Because it always impinges on us.

There is, of course, a great crazed tradition in American life of a certain breed of back-to-the-land, wildly libertarian lunatic who decides to hole up in a cottage in the nowhere reaches of Idaho (to pull a western location of out the geographic hat), determined to live off the land, free of bills, outside the tentacles of federal and state governments, self-sufficient, dependent on no one. And underscoring this quasi-demented dream of an existence upon which no one can intrude or have import there is a rejection of the idea of society and its manifold rules. But society is also a civilizing impulse. And the notion of community is also one which is rooted in the notion of connection. Which is why no man is an island and all that. We all, at some juncture, want to leave the world. The entire corpus of western literature is filled with reveries about disappearing to a desert island and imposing radio silence on the crazed business of life. From “Robinson Crusoe” to Gauguin to Houellebecq, the fantasies which attach themselves to the notion of a ‘terre inconnu’ somewhere at the georgraphic end of the rainbow” has been omnipresent in the human imagination. Shakespeare frequently used the idea of an island apart from life – in both “Twelfth Night” or “The Tempest” – to muse on the illusion of paradise, and the fact that wherever more than one person is present, worldly dilemmas are also present.

My father – a man who often railed against the way his life turned out – frequently spoke of a great missed opportunity: a juncture right after the Second World War when the American government was offering sizeable tracks of land for little money up in Alaska for any citizen wanting to build a homestead.

“I could have escaped all the workaday crap – paying the rent, paying the bills, going to a goddamn office, wondering what all this is all about – if I’d been smart and taken myself up to Alaska”.

But once there he would have, no doubt, be preoccupied by other pressing concerns – like keeping the homestead lit and heated, surviving the brutal Alaskan winters, keeping himself fed.

The impulse to run away to the proverbial edge of things – to unplug, to divest, to free oneself from life’s infernal demands and material trappings – has always been an ongoing one. It is one of those fairy tales that is such an intrinsic part of the human condition, and which we think will be an antidote to all the responsibilities and ties that so define our lives.

But the truth is: in raging against all these responsibilities we are really raging against the choices we have made, and the cul-de-sacs that we have constructed for ourselves. After all, with very rare instances, nobody put a gun to our head to force us to embrace work we don’t really like, get married, have children, indenture ourselves to a mortgage, etc. We are almost always the architects of all that. As such, whenever we dream of running away to the ends of the earth, the subtext underscoring this fantasy is layered with the dark realization: try as we might we can never run away from ourselves.

BENEVOLENCE

At Montreal Airport, awaiting a flight to New York. Freezing rain. Deep tangible greyness. And having just negotiated the usual security labyrinth I cannot help but remember when, back in the mid-seventies, I would frequently walk to a boarding gate with a lit cigarette on the go and something alcoholic in hand. I recall a transatlantic flight in 1979 from Dublin to New York during my Abbey Theatre years when the very brilliant economics editor of The Irish Times, Paul Tansey, sat with me on the emergency exit hump of one of Aer Lingus’s jumbo jets, smoking like idiots, downing a ceaseless supply of miniature bottles of Jameson’s whiskey, and one of the air hostesses giving us a plastic cup filled with water to use as a makeshift ashtray. Paul was one of the most intellectually gifted and wittiest people I’d ever encountered – and nine months later he helped jump-start my ambitions as a writer when, upon my return to Dublin from three insane weeks in a sunstruck Egypt, he commissioned three pieces from me on that endlessly compelling and unnerving corner of northeastern Africa – thereby giving me my first foray into print journalism. That was the year my first radio play was broadcast on the BBC – and again it was an encouraging producer, Robert Cooper (who, like Paul, was just a few years my senior), who accepted the play for production and got my first creative work on the air (and on the BBC no less – I was so chuffed). Read more »

Looking into the Future

I am writing this on the eve of the American presidential election – an event that will soon be regarded as historical in a matter of months, let alone days. Having been shuttling between the US and Europe for the past few months I have only been half-inundated by the endless on-screen and on-line speculation about the outcome… and by the way that we are now so obsessed with pollsters, polling trends, whether a debate or a single misspent comment will recalibrate the momentum of a candidate, and whether all this mathematical data actually amounts to anything when it comes to the realpolitik of the election booth.

Now not being a political commentator, let alone someone who regards himself as a sage when it comes to electoral matters, I am not going to offer my proverbial two cents when it comes to assessing the direction of the 2012 Presidential campaign. Rather, what interests me most here is the way we are always so obsessed with knowing that which we cannot know – the ongoing human fascination with the future, and somehow being able to define that which is actually indefinable. Read more »

JAZZ AFTER DARK

A brutally hot night in the city of Chicago – and I am sorely in need of a drink and some jazz.

The concierge at my hotel says that the answer to these immediate needs are just around the corner from us. A club called Andy’s – which a different group every night. And a final set that starts at midnight.

Jazz is such a nighttime activity. And one which I grew to love during my somewhat solipsistic, but always interesting adolescence – when, to escape the ongoing domestic warfare of my parents, I became a culture vulture. Happily my hometown was a skinny little island called Manhattan – and as I was thirteen in 1968, not only was the city a hotbed of counter-cultural creative activity, but a wonderful intellectual playground of independent cinemas, intellectual bookshops, edgy out-there theatre companies, dance companies, pop art, and – of course- jazz clubs. Read more »

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