When you’re mired in your work you can feel yourself change.

Over the last few months of writing I’ve developed a new and curious interest: the biographies of famous writers. I find that the Penguin Lives series is perfect for this given that they offer well-written and well-rounded volumes no more than 200 pages each. So far I’ve read:

Edmund White on Marcel Proust
Elizabeth Hardwick on Herman Melville
Edna O’Brien on James Joyce

The Cycloptic Genius

In Chekhov’s The Sea Gull, Trigorin says:

You know how it is with obsession. The moon, for instance—day and night someone thinks only of the moon. Well, I have a moon. Day and night I’m obsessed—I must write, I must write, I must write. I barely finish a novel when I must write another, then a third, then a fourth. I write without stopping, at lightning speed. It’s the only way I can write. What’s bright and beautiful about that?

I’m nearing the halfway point of my second draft. So far the revision process has mirrored the initial writing process. When I first started at the beginning of June it was agonizing. I only managed a few paragraphs per day when I was working through the first chapter. This was after two months of not writing at all (a mistake I have sworn I cannot make again). After a week or so I started to fall back into the habit of writing and before long I was managing to write every day. I worked through the first seven chapters in June and it felt wonderful. But I’ve noticed something. The more time I give to the novel, the more I want to give. The more I pour over my outline and tap my pen against the paper the more I feel it isn’t enough. Each time I work through a neglected plot hole I feel such a rush of endorphins that I immediately crave that feeling again. For every sentence I’m proud of I want to write a hundred more like it. I fantasize about a life without sleep. Going to work has never been harder because that’s eight hours I could have spent in a booth at The Bad Waitress picking apart and reassembling the next chapter. I want to attack my manuscript with a pen and post it flags from dawn to dusk and then spend the night locked in my office rewriting those chapters I’ve decimated. It’s an image pregnant with irrefutable romance.

It is romantic, isn’t it? At least it’s easy to label it as romantic because it seems embedded in the tumultuous arc of great writers stretching back to the ancient days of biography. It’s a romance that tempts me and every day I think about foregoing a night’s sleep or spending a weekend at a coffee shop. It has me on a constant lookout for benevolent organizations eager to spend money on young and unknown writers so they can focus on nothing but their writing and cultivate what obsession has given them. I feel like my novel gets better with each thought I put into it, with each thread I rip and stitch back into place, but those solutions only give me a greater thirst. You get what you give so why not give every last moment, every last thought, every last sigh and groan and expletive? The idea of letting even one imperfection slip by is horrifying. A novel is so much work. I want to write it in the most violent way. I want to write until both of us are broken—muttering and bleeding on the ground.

Life will just have to adapt.

So I finally got around to writing blurbs and selecting passages from the other books on my list. Of course they continue in chronological order. Please note that this means the order in which I was exposed to them, not the order in which they were written.

This was a very valuable exercise. Perhaps I should give it another go in five years and see what the list looks like then.

SUMMER 2006 (continued)
James Joyce – Ulysses
Speaking of experimental, Ulysses was another eye-opener, as they say. When I first read it in 2006 the vast majority of it went over my head. Well, to be fair, when I read it now (which I am, currently), most of it goes over my head, but even more so then. Even though I didn’t have even the remotest understanding of what was going on in every episode I walked away from Ulysses feeling wholly inspired, and I still do. It’s possibly the most grandiose literary stunt in history, at least in context. To be honest I’ve probably imitated this book more than any other, in both structure and prose. As I read it today I set it down now and then and ask myself if any writer in history has had more command over the English language. It does literature like nothing else.

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipent lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5,000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

William Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury
I don’t even know what to say about Faulkner. The man writes prose like no other and does so with absolutely no fear. The Sound in the Fury is dense and difficult and because of this extremely rewarding when all the pieces finally fall together in your head. I’ve said before that he has a run-away prose style and within it is all the madness and terror and honor and love you could ever hope to find in a book. It’s one of those books that makes me tremble but also fills me with a desire to do something just as fearsome. I want to have written a book that makes a young author tremble. Everyone needs goals, ja?

When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

SPRING 2008:
T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land
This isn’t a poem with whom to fuck. To be fair I was first exposed to it in the spring of 2006 but I couldn’t read past the first section. I tried again a short time later and failed. For some reason I was drawn to it in 2008 and I read it repeatedly for several days. It’s incalculably difficult and in all aspects terrifying. Even Eliot’s footnotes (he footnoted his own poem) are dense. To be honest I don’t know what to say about this poem to make it appeal to anyone, which is I suppose why it gets the reputation it does. I love it because it’s brutal. I love it because I’m a Modernist at heart and in truth I can’t think of a better representation (with Ulysses being a possible exception—published in the same year no less).

Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms

SUMMER 2008
Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary
At first I had to ask myself if my appreciation for Madame Bovary stemmed from my having encountered it at the right time in my life. I wasn’t making any attempt to go back to school, I was struggling to pay my bills, I was shacking up with my boyfriend and not paying rent, I was missing credit card payments. Then I discovered Emma Bovary, a woman condemned to bourgeois existence by her own ignorance, suffering and only digging more deeply her grave. Then I talked it over with a few other people who pretty much agreed that this is one of the greatest books every written. It’s so painstakingly perfect that I almost want to give up. It’s intimidating. In terms of craft it really developed my sense of character psychology. At first Emma seems like a very simple black and white character, but the more you learn about her and the more you watch her spiral out of control you realize she’s incredibly complex and frighteningly real. I think that’s a perfect model for a human being and thus the perfect model for a character. It’s how I strive to write my characters.

He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike him as original. Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believe but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

FALL/WINTER 2009:
Cormac McCarthy – Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West
This is the only book to appear on this list that I have read only once. Once was in no way enough and I plan to read it again very soon. Out of all the books on this list I find this one to be the most intimidating. This is the book on my shelf at which I stare longingly and hopelessly and wonder if there’s really any point in trying. But it also fuels my desire to create the best work of art that can possibly be wrenched from my fingertips. It pushes me toward perfection. McCarthy takes a genre as dead as the western and breathes incomparable life into it and turns it into not a novel of adventure but an epic tragedy of violence and death and evil. It might be my favorite on this list. It’s unparalleled. There’s nothing like it.

Oh my god, said the sergeant.

A rattling drove of arrows passed through the company and men tottered and dropped from their mounts. Horses were rearing and plunging and the mongol hordes swung up along their flanks and turned and rode full upon them with lances.

The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the gray riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid’s horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw than the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes white with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.

I know that’s a lot of excerpt. I just couldn’t help myself.

So that’s the top ten influences for me. Not necessarily my favorites per se. Many of them are, but that list looks a little different. I’d love to hear from others. Everyone has different tastes these days. What are your influences?

Having just finished it on my lunch break, I can honestly say it’s a great work of short fiction. Read it. Here are two passages:

A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thoughttormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day. Listening tonight to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a less spacious age. Those days might without exaggeration be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as this we shall still speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.

and

She leaned for a moment on his arm in getting out of the cab and while standing at the kerbstone bidding the others goodnight. She leaned lightly on his arm, as lightly as when she had danced with him a few hours before. He had felt proud and happy then, happy that she was his, proud of her grace and wifely carriage. But now after the kindling again of so many memories, the first touch of her body, musical and strange and perfumed, sent through him a keen pang of lust. Under cover of her silence he pressed her arm closely to his side: and, as they stood at the hotel door, he felt that they had escaped from their lives and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure.

For January I have chosen a short story by James Joyce (which also sometimes qualifies as a novelette due to its length): “The Dead”. It’s his most well known short story and I think we should give it a shot. Don’t let it scare you: this is long before Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. From what I can see (I haven’t read it yet, and am excited to do so), it’s fairly traditional in its style.

Stop by and talk about it. I’ll make hot chocolate.

| Forum Topic |