Writing What I Know

An old friend commented on a chapter from the novel I'm currently publishing to the web, Learning to Limbo. He said: "How do you come up with this stuff? It's amazing!"

"I lived it," I replied. And it's true. Much of Learning to Limbo follows Mark Twain's advice to "write what you know."

Such advice might seem sorta stupid. How can we write about things we don't know, right? On the flip side, there's this quote from P.J. O'Rourke:

“Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered  the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp.   Please, talented scribblers, write what you don’t. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?”

(O' Rourke's example isn't the best: Homer was more of a compiler and adorner of campfire stories that had been around for centuries than he was an originator of those stories.)

One of my favorite novelists, Saul Bellow, based much of his fiction on real life experience. With the exception of  Henderson The Rain King, (Bellow's hilarious meditation on anthroposophy), Bellow's novels follow the arc of his own life, from the youthful Adventures of Augie March, into middle age with Herzog (Bellow really was cuckolded by his wife and best friend), on to his 60s with Humboldt's Gift (he really did have a friendship with a poet, Delmore Schwartz, whose life closely mirrored the character of Humboldt Von Fleischer). Even Otto Sammler is a mouthpiece for Bellow's philosophy in his later years.

John Irving fans know that he tends to include much of what he knows – wrestling, New England, Vienna, private schools like Exeter, his experience as a professional creative person (writer, but also actor, organist, children's book author etc.) – in his novels. Sometimes reading an Irving novel is like spending a week at his summer house going through family photo albums, over and over. To some, Irving may be a case of "write what you know" run amok. 

I'm not nor ever will be in Bellow's or Irving's league. In fact, it wasn't until I was 45 that I began to conjure real stories, often inspired by events in dreams and blended with my own experience. 

Hack

In my first published novel, Hack, I put a portion of myself, and my life, into the body of my best friend, the late Ted O' Connell, and turned him into an unemployed landscape painter named Henry Griffin. I do, in fact, paint landscapes, often while listening to Miles Davis's Bitches Brew. 

What else did I write about in Hack that I knew, or was actually true in one form or another?

I really did have comforting dreams about my childhood sweetheart, who appeared to me as sort of an angel. I used her physical characteristics for Hadley Scofield, but what I knew of her adult personality didn't give me enough to go on, so I embellished. We really did play with Sherri Lewis puppets in first grade: Lamb Chop and Charlie Horse, and we refer to each other by those names to this day. 

Mr. San Anselmo is a real person, though I haven't seen him in years. His real name is Mark. And all Marinites should know that the character of Razor Rick Morgan is a blend of George Lucas and Metallica's Kurt Hammet, or one of those other emperors of Lucas Valley. 

I have never driven a Fat Boy or even been on a Harley, but the Hadley Schofield character really did race motorcycles in her youth.  We did drop Orange Sunshine at Alpine Dam, several times. And I'm told that a spinet was dumped off the damn into the reservoir in the 70s. 

Russell Chatham is a real painter, though I don't know if there's an exhibit at the Oakland Museum that's dedicated to California turn-of-the-century plein aire painters, or if E. Charlton Fortune's work hangs there. 

The only access to the cabins on Pinecrest Lake is by boat, or footpath. It is true that women's menstrual odors infuriate bears. Also, there is a golf resort in Tubac, AZ, which I've played several times. It is where the first half of the movie Tin Cup was filmed. 

I really did have a bisexual girlfriend, once – a Francophile – though I can't claim to have participated in a "frisky three-way." And there was an art gallery on San Anselmo Ave. next to Ongaro's Plumbing: The Bradford Gallery. 

And the rest of it: Karl, Rex Wilcox, Cyril, Herte, Barbara Bassett, etc. is all imaginary, though based in varying degrees on people I know or have seen in the movies. The plot is entirely imagined as well, though I admit to borrowing the disguise idea from the movie, Mrs. Doubtfire (RIP RW).

Learning to Limbo

Unlike Hack, most of the setup plot in Learning to Limbo is autobiographical. I was out of work as a result of a startup going belly up, and we did move from San Anselmo to Indianapolis as described, even though I had a job offer from Sun and could have stayed.  We did have a close friend die from ovarian cancer, and she really did refer to herself as The Practical Princess. 

We did live in a wonderful four-poster in Wellington Heights, Washington Township, Indianapolis for about a year. The outfit I joined in Indy was subsumed by it's parent, and we really did move to Ridgefield, CT. My son is really a naturalist and teacher of primitive living skills, and I really did fancy myself a songwriter for many years. I built an awesome treehouse in Connecticut, but nobody fell off the deck. 

The rest of Learning to Limbo is made up. Basically, I took this cross-country professional odyssey and used it to satirize the corporate experience. I also used it to juxtapose the banality of corporate existence with human experience: family drama, affairs, and other things that matter more than corporate double talk. I haven't read up on how much an author should admit to being real in a work of fiction, but I do know that readers can tell when an author is writing from a place of personal knowledge, even if that knowledge is of something imagined, or not.

The Healing of Howard Brown, and others

The novel I'll publish next, The Healing of Howard Brown, is autobiographical in the sense that it attempts to work through the shock, pain, confusion, grief, and general altercation in the state of affairs following the deaths of one's parents. I experienced all that and more in 2008/2009 when my parent's checked out, along with a fair amount of inelegant behavior in the remaining family. But, like Bellow's attempt to work through being cuckolded by his wife and best friend in Herzog, the setup or situation is just a backdrop. Like a theater set, it provided me with context for the dispositions of the characters, as well the rich soil needed for the seeds of conflict to sprout and flourish. And, while The Healing of Howard Brown draws a great deal of inspiration from my labyrinthine Southern ancestry, the actual "healing" of the protagonist is, I'm sorry to report, purely fictional. 

Based on my experience to date, I can say that those stories that draw from my own life could be considered "low hanging fruit." The settings, the imagery, the characters, and to a lesser degree the plots of my first three novels are drawn from experiences that, being mine, are always relatively close at hand. I wouldn't go so far as to say that drawing from my own experiences has made it easier to write, but I would say it gives my imagination access to events, and people, and the associated imagery and emotions, that are immediate and close at hand. 

The other current novels in various stages of disrepair – Chasing Byron, Bury Me With My La-Z-Boy, and The Bolinians – are almost pure flights of fancy, though the historical references in each of them are real enough. 

Chasing Byron, set in the same locale of eastern Louisiana as Part II of The Healing of Howard Brown, challenges the historical fact that Byron Nelson won 11 consecutive PGA tour events in 1945, a record that still stands. It attempts to be both a portrait of the postwar, Jim Crow South, and a fantasy about The Gods of Golf and their supernatural influence on the protagonist, young Wyatt Johnstone. 

Bury Me With My La-Z-Boy was begun during NaNoWriMo, (National Novel Writing Month) and is a combination genre mystery and zombie thriller, also set in eastern Louisiana. The Bolinians, which is in it's infancy, is historical fiction that chronicles the adventures of a traveling band of Russian/Miwok dwarves and their Russian leader (and biological father), former fur trader Dmitri Pavlovich, as they interact with the real people and historical events of Northern California in the19th century. 

I don't know if the low hanging fruit novels, where I am "writing what I know" in a relatively strict sense, has made those stories any better or more engaging than the stories that are more removed from my direct experience. Hopefully I'll be around long enough to find out. It's always possible that some other idea will come along – like the "aspirational" story of the old man, given a year to live, and his band cronies touring the USA in a Country Squire caravan. I suppose that there's only so much writing we can do about what we know, since there's only so much we can know. Then again, a new dream is born in my overly noisy noggin almost every night, and if I can just remember to jot a few things down there may be limitless things to know and write about. Until, of course, there isn't. 

Read Learning to Limbo, 

online and in serial, 

right here, right now!

*********** 

HACK, on Amazon

Saul Bellow: The Polka in The Bathroom

Herzog by Saul Bellow

Viking Press 1961

It was about this time last year that I read/listened to The Adventures of Augie March. It was an inspiring experience because in many ways what Bellow does with Augie’s voice, similar in some ways to what Walker Percy does with Binx Bolling,  is very much what I’m after in The Healing of Howard Brown. Both voices are so completely natural and honest in their portrayal of thoughts and actions that I got the feeling that I was in a darkened parlor with a roaring fire listening to the characters tell their story.    

Like Augie, Moses Herzog has a distinct voice, different of course in that Herzog the novel is sometimes narrated in third person, and also dramatically different in tone: Augie is brash, confident, optimistic and agreeable; where Herzog is defeated, taciturn, lost, angry, and confused to the point of doubting his own sanity; exactly how we might expect a guy who’s wife has been fucking his best friend then kicks him out of his own house to feel.

In Herzog Bellow plainly draws from current experiences in his own life, which may be one reason the novel has such authenticity, honesty, and raw power. Obviously not all writers use real events and people in their lives to fuel the creation of their fiction, but the parallels between the real events of Bellow’s own life and Moses Herzog’s story are in plain view:

“At its heart is Bellow's profound shock at discovering, a year after his separation from Sondra, (Alexandra Tschacbasov, his second wife) her affair with their mutual friend, Jack Ludwig. The last of their circle to know he had been deceived, Bellow lapsed into deep depression and produced an intensely self-justifying hero who was tearful, cuckolded, and utterly humiliated. Moses Herzog, a Jewish intellectual is essentially precipitated into intellectual and spiritual crisis by the failure of his marriage.” (www.saulbellow.org - The Saul Bellow Journal)

Reading Herzog I got the feeling that Bellow was to some degree engaged in an act of literary catharsis

as a form of therapy. Moses Herzog is an intellectual at work on an academic analysis of Christianity and The Romantic Period, and he has something to say about the writings of every philosopher in history. Herzog’s compelling need to view his own suffering in the context of historic philosophical ideas is almost comic given that the primary source of his suffering (to use a term that Bellow might have employed were he writing today) is pussy. He can’t live with it and he can’t live without it, and Bellow makes it clear that all the philosophical salve in the world can’t comfort the cuckold, even if Herzog deserves to be cuckolded, or perhaps because Herzog deserves to be cuckolded.

If there is one strong similarity between Augie and Herzog, it’s their mutual vexation with the opposite sex, and many more recent critics often consider Bellow’s treatment of women misogynistic. If the mean spirited portrayal of Madeline in Herzog is any indication of Bellow’s own attitude towards women - and we might assume that it is given his own real-life relationship troubles over the course of five marriages - we have a classic example of art imitating life. But to be distracted by these accusations of misogyny, regardless of how old-fashioned Bellow’s troubles with “broads” and admissions that they wield a mysterious inscrutable power that is impossible to rationalize, is ultimately a waste of time. And while a feminist might say “sure you can say that because you’re a man”, there are messages of hope and redemption in Herzog for both men and women that far outweigh the protagonist’s indictment of his ex-wife.  

When Moses Herzog reflects on his attempts to balance his desire to be a “marvelous Herzog” in the context of the betrayal that has just befallen him, the flip-flop in sentiment and subsequent anger is portrayed so naturally we can’t help that Bellow was simply recording the way he felt about his own messed up situation:

“...but this was the cruel difficulty of a man who had strong impulses, even faith, but lacked clear ideas. What if he failed [at being a marvelous Herzog]? Did that really mean there was no faithfulness, no generosity, no sacred quality? Should he have been a plain, unambitious Herzog? No. And Madeleine would never have married such a type. What she had been looking for, high and low, was precisely an ambitious Herzog. In order to trip him, bring him low, knock him sprawling and kick out his brains with a murderous bitch foot. Oh, what a confusion he had made - what a waste of intelligence and feeling!” (p. 93)

We might guess that the author has experienced such anger directly in his own life, given it’s power and sincerity. Would an author who had been happily married and had nothing but pleasant, smooth relationships his whole life be able to conjure such emotions? Is it the ability to portray such feelings without necessarily having felt them what separates the great authors from the not-so greats? Could Bellow write this novel from Madeleine’s point of view? I doubt it.  

In Herzog, Bellow takes aim at the negativity and pessimism of the great thinkers and intellectuals: Shapiro, Banowitch, Hobbes, Freud, Dewey, Whitehead, Nietzsche, Heidegger Spengler, Darwin, Rousseau and more. I wonder if Bellow took to the old books in an attempt to soothe his own roiling heart, and, discovering no comfort there, used his experience to create Moses Herzog. Herzog’s summarized reaction to his own analysis of these thinkers and Rousseau in particular is spelled out forthrightly:

“We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.”

At the core Herzog is simply appealing for humans to start treating each other with compassion and empathy, to “repent” for having employed pain, to get our heads out of a “suffering” mindset and into one of illumination. This kind of message, delivered in the context of Herzog’s almost archetypal tale of betrayal and personal redemption, is what makes Herzog one of Bellow’s greatest novels.

If we were to simplify an imagined approach to writing fiction into a formula, it might seem that Bellow would periodically take stock of his life, then examine his experiences and thoughts in the light of various famous philosophies with the consistent intent of debunking them. Part of what makes Bellow work is exactly his ability to blend the ideas of the supposed great thinkers in with the everyday thoughts and events of everyman, particularly everyman in a state of moral crisis.

For example after a long description of Madeleine and Herzog’s dismal failure to work together

in restoring the house in Ludeyville, Herzog doing all the work himself to save money while Madeleine spends like a drunken sailor on unnecessary junk and bounces checks all over the place, Herzog reflects:  

“[Herzog] appeared to know how everything ought to go, down to the smallest detail (under the category of “Free Concrete Mind,” misapprehension of a universal by the developing consciousness - reality opposing the “Law of the heart,” alien necessity gruesomely crushing individuality, un-soweiter). Oh, Herzog granted that he was in the wrong. But all he asked, it seemed to him, was a bit of cooperation in his effort, benefiting everyone, to work toward a meaningful life. Hegel was curiously significant but also utterly cockeyed. Of course. That was the whole point. Simpler and without such elaborate metaphysical rigmarole was Spinoza’s Prop.  XXXVII; man’’s desire to have others rejoice in the good in which he rejoices, not to make others live according to his way of thinking - ex ipsius ingenio.” (p.123)

Herzog’s intellectualism and his tendency to use this or that philosopher’s credo to justify his own behavior is, I think, a double-edged sword.  While it expertly puts some rather dense thoughts into digestible layman’s terms, as in the passage above, it may also alienate those readers who have a thin, cursory knowledge of the great thinkers, or remember their names but not their work (like me.) If the reader has never heard of them there are long passages in the novel that would make no sense at all. In a sense Bellow has over-intellectualized Herzog the man as to make a dimension of him inscrutable to the average guy, which is unfortunate because the plot around what we would recognize as  one common version of The Midlife Crisis is entirely accessible and relevant. Then again the literati are apt to eat it up. So when I read that Herzog was on the NYT Bestseller list for almost a year I was surprised. I certainly don’t recall my Mom and Dad discussing it with their friends over Friday night cocktails. (Then again my Mother, from Chicago, was blatantly anti-semitic and my Father, from the south, had never met a Jew.)

But then Bellow brings Moses down from the mount to the bathroom to prepare for dinner with Ramona:

“He tuned in Polish dance music on the small transistor radio on the glass shelf over the sink, and powdered his feet. Then he gave in for a while to the impulse to dance and leap on the soiled tiles, so of which came free from the grout and had to be kicked under the tub. It was one of his oddities in solitude to break out in song and dance to do queer things out of keeping with his customary earnestness. He danced out the number until the Polish commercial ...He mimicked the announcer in the ivory yellow floom of the tile bathroom - the water closet, as he anachronistically called it. He was ready to go for another polka when he discovered, breathing hard, that the sweat was rolling down his sides…” (p. 158)

Aha! The intellectual is a private dancer! To polkas. In the bathroom no less! Adding this dimension to Moses Herzog is, as they say in business today, a “game changer.” From here on out we might begin to look at Moses in a slightly brighter light.

Listening to the audiobook version of Herzog is challenging because it can be difficult to distinguish between the first person narration of the protagonist’s letters versus the protagonist’s thoughts, also in the first person, versus the third person narrator’s telling of the story. It’s no problem on the page; the letters are all in italics. The narrator of the audiobook, Malcolm Hillgartner, makes a perfect Moses Herzog and a hilarious Sandor Himmelstein, and he handles the other characters beautifully. He makes a very subtle shift between Herzog’s letter writing voice and the voice of his thoughts, but it’s easy to mix up who’s who as you listen to the story. After listening to several dozen audiobooks that last few years, this is the first instance where I would recommend reading vs. listening.

But on the page Bellow gets away with jumping back and forth from first to their person with such subtle agility, it makes me wonder why they didn’t hire two voice talents just to keep the narrator and Herzog distinct. Here’s a small passage that exemplifies the seamless, punctuation-less transition from first to third and back again. And Bellow moves the POV around like a game of catch all through the novel.  

(The italics are mine - used to delineate Moses and the narrator.)

“I don’t blame him, thought Moses as Taube slowly and lengthily described her ailments. Papa couldn’t bear such an expression on the face of his youngest son. I aged. I wasted myself in stupid schemes, liberating my spirit. His heart ached angrily because of me. And Papa was not like some old men who become blunted toward their own death. No, his despair was keen and continual. And Herzog again was pierced with pain for his father.”  (p. 253)

Unlike the volumes and volumes of criticism written about each of Bellow’s novels (there are over 200 critical essays regarding Herzog alone on www.saulbellow.org, aka The Saul Bellow Journal) I look at Bellow’s writing as his way of facilitating the examination of these big emotional upheavals for the primary purpose of making peace with them and putting them into a workable context. But I came across an abstract that made me feel like a hack literalist that is completely unaware of the subtle nuance of Bellow’s complex, multi-tiered art. Consider this intellectual’s interpretation:

"Argues that H employs discourses that center around disease, beneath which lies a racialized, specifically black, discourse. Argues that Bellow is not simply a racist writer, but rather one for whom the outside world can only be experienced through his own Holocaust experience. Hence racial blackness in the novel accentuates his introspective tendencies and causes him to be interested in little else. In H, Moses suffers from the disease of the single self. The invisibility of racial blackness in literature does not always denote an absence. Moses carries within himself the power of blackness which threatens to engulf him. Jewishness and blackness carry connotations of disease. As a romantic novel, His pitting the disease of his Jewish cerebral activity against the healing power of black sexuality. This is playing two stereotypes against each other. Given its proper historical and cultural dimensions, blackness may, after all, cure the disease of the single self."

Varvogli, Aliki. "'The Corrupting Disease of Being White': Notions of Selfhood in Herzog." Saul Bellow Journal16.2/17.1–2 (2001): 150–64.

Well. I guess that kind of sums it up, doesn’t it? I think if Saul Bellow were alive today, an abstract like that just might do him in. But at least he would die laughing. 

Don't be a bum
Go on and goose that thumb!

Don't be a cow

Go on and buy that baby now!