What Do Women Want? (25 page)

—ROBERTSON DAVIES

 

 

 

Despite all the cynical things
writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us. That is also why we pretend to be hard-boiled, saying things like no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money (Samuel Johnson). Not true. No one but a blockhead ever wrote except for love.

There are plenty of easier ways to make money. Almost
anything
is less labor-intensive and better paid than writing. Almost anything is safer. Reveal yourself on the page all your life, and you are likely to be rewarded with exile, neglect, or imprisonment. Ask Dante, or Emily Dickinson, or Oscar Wilde. Scheme and betray your friends, and you are likely to be rewarded with wealth, public monuments, and relentless homage. Tell the truth, and you are likely to be a pariah with your family, a semicriminal to the tax authorities, and damned with faint praise by your peers. So why do we do it? Because saying what you think is the only freedom. “Liberty,” said Camus, “is the right not to lie.”

In a society in which everything is for sale, in which deals and auctions make the biggest news, being an amateur (one who does it for love) is the only remaining liberty. Do it for love, and you cannot be censored. Do it for love, and you cannot be stopped. Do it for love, and the world of money and business envies no one more than you. In a world of tuxedos, the naked man is king. In a world of bookkeepers with spreadsheets, the one who gives it away without counting the cost is God.

I seem to have known this from my earliest years. I cannot remember a time when I
didn’t
write. Notebooks, stories, journals, poems—the act of writing always made me feel centered and whole. It still does. It is my meditation, my medicine, my prayer, my solace. I was lucky enough to learn early (with my first two books of poetry and my first novel) that if you are relentlessly honest about what you feel and fear, you often become the mouthpiece for others’ feelings as well as your own. People are remarkably similar at the heart level—where it counts. Writers are born to voice what we all feel. That is the gift. And we keep it by giving it away.

It is a sacred calling. The writers I am most drawn to see it as such: Thomas Merton, Pablo Neruda, Emily Dickinson. When I am most perplexed, I return to my roots: poetry. I consider myself a poet who supports her poetry habit with novels and nonfiction. I know I am lucky to have supported myself as a poet for twenty-five years without ever writing a book I did not believe in. The novel is more elastic than the poem. It allows for social satire, cooking, toothbrushes, the way we live now. Poetry, on the contrary, boils things down to essences. I feel privileged to do both. I am grateful to have found my vocation early and never faltered. I was also blessed to encounter controversy and criticism early. They forced me to listen to my inner voice, not the roar of the crowd. This is the most useful lesson a writer can learn.

Lately, memoir is all the rage. Once again, we keep hearing dire warnings about the death of the novel. As one who has written frankly autobiographical fiction (
Fear of Flying
), historical fiction (
Fanny; Serenissima
or
Shylock’s Daughter
), and memoir (
Fear of Fifty
and
The Devil at Large
), I think I’ve begun to understand how the process of making fiction differs from that of making memoir. A memoir is tethered to one’s own experience in a particularly limiting way: The observing consciousness of the book is rooted in a historical person. That historical person may be rich and subtle, but he or she can never be as subtle as the interplay among various characters who all grow out of aspects of the author. In the memoir, the “I” dominates. In the novel, the “I” is made up of many characters’ “I”s. More richness is possible, more points of view, deeper imitation of life.

When I finished
Fear of Fifty,
I felt I had quite exhausted my own life and might never write another book. What I eventually discovered was that I was liberated rather than exhausted. Having shed my own autobiography, I now felt ready to invent in a new way. I wanted to write a novel about the twentieth century and how it impacted the lives of women. I wanted to write a novel about a Jewish family in the century that nearly saw the destruction of the Jewish people.

I began with a year of reading history and literature. And when I started to write again, it was in the voice of a woman who might have been my great-grandmother. Liberated from my own place and time, I found myself inventing a woman’s voice quite different from my own. What I took from my own family history were certain historical markers. The family began in Russia and came to America. They were artists, writers, malcontents. But as I started to invent this alternate family history, I found myself at play in the fields of my imagination. Characters sprang up like mushrooms after rain. I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning, to see what I thought and who was going to embody it.

Eventually I found that I had four heroines, born in different decades, and they were all mothers and daughters. Each had a distinctive voice, each a different way of looking at the world. Each was me and not me.

Graham Greene once said: “The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes out of the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in.”

That seems to be precisely right. A novelist can come to this wisdom after shedding the skin of her own autobiography. That doesn’t mean that characters are totally unrelated to the author. They share an affinity. But affinity is distinct from identity. The real person remains fixed. The character can fly.

A character who is not oneself may even access some deep memory in the brain that seemed lost forever. Fictional characters excavate real memories. Flaubert, after all, claimed to be Emma Bovary, gave her his restlessness and discontent. In some ways an author may be freer to expose himself in a character unlike himself. There is liberty in wearing a mask. The mask may become the condition for speaking the truth.

The line between novel and autobiography has never been as blurry as it is in our century. And this is probably a good thing. The novel endures because it is a supremely elastic form. It mimics truth. So if we are most convinced by autobiography in our age, even fiction will mimic that genre. Genres themselves matter less and less. The most enduring books of the modern era are, like
Ulysses,
full of exposition, narrative, dramatic writing, and even poetry.

What I require of a book is that it kidnap me into its world. Its world must make the so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must trigger the nostalgia to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.

How rare this is, and how grateful I am to find it. The utter trust that exists between reader and author is like the trust between lovers. If I feel betrayed by the author, I will never surrender again. I must believe in the author’s honesty in order to be swept away.

Movie companies may sell “product placement”—the Coke can in the shot, the Nike sneaker on the star’s foot—but an author who did this would lose all credibility. We expect ethics from authors if not from politicians. We want them to be authorities—the place where the buck stops.

This is why it is so hard to start a new book. You must find the right voice (or voices) for it—the timbre that convinces even the writer of her own authority. Sometimes it takes years to find the tone of voice that unlocks the story.

The books we love best kidnap us with the first line. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show” (
David Copperfield
). “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter” (
Huckleberry Finn
). “There were 117 analysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them” (my own modest contribution). It’s a question not only of an arresting opening—the writer’s best trick—but of letting the main character’s quirks show at the same time. And it’s easier to do in first person than in third. But third person also relies on voice. All writing does.

You must do it for love—as I began by saying. If you do it for money, no money will ever be enough and eventually you will start imitating your first successes, straining hot water through the same used tea bag. It doesn’t work with tea, and it doesn’t work with writing. You must give all you have and never count the cost. (“Sit down at the typewriter and open a vein,” as Red Smith said.) Every book I have written has subsumed all the struggles of the years in which I wrote it. I don’t know how to hold back. Editing is what I do later—cutting perhaps hundreds of pages. But in the writing process, I let it all hang out. Later I and my editor chop. When the book is finished, I feel empty and bereft. I have to wait for the words to fill me up again.

Generosity is the soul of writing. You write to give a gift. To yourself. To your reader. To God. You give thanks for having been given the words. You pray to be given words another day.

Laurence Sterne knew this: “I begin with the first sentence and trust to Almighty God for the second.” Amen.

 

 

 

 

People always ask where poems
come from—and the truth is that not even the poet knows. Especially not the poet.

A line comes into your head. Or an image. If you are waiting in attentiveness for a poem to knock on your skull, you catch the line and write it down. Or maybe you catch only a fragment of the line and then allow it to suggest another and another and another. Sometimes the line or fragment waits for years in a notebook for you to pick it up again. Sometimes it is lost. But as with a dream fragment, it is important to catch whatever you can. By its toes if necessary. The rest of the body may follow.

“The Buddha in the Womb” started like that. “Bobbing in the waters of the womb” came into my head. And then the poem followed. Or I followed the poem. It is hard to tell whether the poet follows the poem or the poem descends like Mary Poppins on a kite string.

What was the occasion for the poem? A headstand. I was practicing yoga. Inverted in the headstand, I thought: What if I were pregnant and the fetus was right side up because I was upside down? Paradoxes breed poems.

So I am balanced on my head. I love seeing the world upside down and experiencing the rush of blood to the brain—a cheap, natural high. And then an imaginary baby appears, glowing behind my solar plexus. His little skull glows with the light, the energy, the
prana,
that I have transmitted by imagining him. Any form of creation is an energy exchange. Creation breeds light and heat.

I was definitely not pregnant. I did not even admit I
wanted
to be pregnant. But I was at that dangerous age in a woman’s life—early thirties—when twenty years of clockwork menstruation have made their point: “You were born to breed and die and the heart breaks either way” (as I said in another poem written then).

So I was toying with the
idea
of fecundity if not with fecundation itself. And I imagined a pregnant me in the headstand posture, wondering about the creature within.

 

The poem I pulled out with the first line is really a poem about our spirit’s passage
through
flesh to get
beyond
flesh. It asks: Why make a baby if we are only spirit? Why make a baby if we are doomed to die? And it answers: Because the soul expands through creation even if the created thing is impermanent. Permanence is not our business, but creation is.

And
who
is the creature we create, really? The creature is “infinite hope,” a “little godhead,” the promise of future life. The creation may be a poem, one’s own Buddha nature, the hope of outlasting the fate of ordinary mortals, who sing and die. The point is we create because we
must,
because we are creatures whose self-definition implies creation.

We are makers, mothers, fabricators, poets. Even if our creation does not endure, our need to create is eternal. This passion to create defines our humanity. It explains why we resonate with a creator-godhead. We share the urgency to replicate ourselves, to make creatures and name them, to set them in the midst of predicaments and tell their stories. “Since flesh can’t stay, we pass the words along,” I said in a poem called “Dear Keats.” And I still believe it. Words are our antidote to mortality.