Writing Under the Influence

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

I’ve blogged about Jane before, and I’m doing it again.

Jane Eyre, that is.  I’ve been thinking about her because I’ve just finished The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey’s take on  Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel.  (Livesey herself calls it a “continued conversation.”) Beginning with the first sentence, Livesey sprinkles similarities to the original throughout her novel, weaving in her own autobiographical details.  In both, we have an orphaned girl, a cruel aunt, a book on birds, a mysterious landowner, a sickly boarding school friend who dies in Jane’s/Gemma’s arms, etc.  In Brontë, of course, what comes between Jane & Rochester is Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, banished to the attic.  In Livesey, the trigger to Gemma’s flight is a convoluted and not very convincing story involving Mr. Sinclair’s addicted sister and an identity swap.  In part because of this, the ending of Jane Eyre—so satisfying, so earned—makes Gemma’s forced happy-ever-after seem pale, even insipid.  And I never quite believed the passion between Gemma and Sinclair in the first place. (Even his name, derivative of St. Clair, seems too lightweight and fluffy, too ephemeral, next to the dark and brooding Rochester, or “roof of a fort.”)

I enjoyed reading Livesey’s novel; it has narrative pull, and as a “Jane geek,” I had fun identifying the allusions and parallels.  Reading Gemma got me thinking about my own childhood, about how the girls we once were grow into the women we become.  It also got me thinking about influence—not only of Jane as the standard bearer of standing up to her man (“Do you think that because I am poor, and plain, I am soulless and heartless?”) but of plots we’ve read on plots we write.

There are only seven stories, right?  The rest is retelling, tweaks, po-mo playfulness, unreliable narrators, commentary.  Love, loss, journey/quest, stranger comes to town…   As writers, we inevitably borrow from what we read, in phrasing and detail as well as plot.  How can we not?  I’m not talking about plagiarism here, but the somewhat conscious, somewhat unconscious shaping of the narratives we “invent” by those we’ve absorbed.

Livesey, like any pro, makes her homage clear.  From the first sentence, we know that she knows that we recognize what she’s up to  Like Joyce Carol Oates’ retelling of Chekhov’s “Lady with a Pet Dog” or T. C. Boyle’s recasting of Gogol’s “Overcoat” in Soviet Russia, Livesey makes her response an obvious one.

Some years ago, I discovered Edith Wharton’s story “Roman Fever.”  I fell in love with its careful plotting, its incisive characterization, its voice.  I loved the surprise at the end, where Wharton reveals the truth that’s been lurking there all along.  I loved the way—through objective detail—she portrays and subverts the power struggle between Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley.

I tried my hand at it.  I came up with a grand, European title—“Pelouse Interdite,” after the signs in Parisian parks forbidding lawn-sitting.  I put two American women (one named Edie) on holiday, spending an afternoon not on the veranda of a restaurant overlooking the Roman Forum but in a park on a quiet Left-Bank street.  They sat, they stood, they bobbed, they weaved, they insinuated and dodged.  Rain falls at a convenient moment, and a policeman interrupts a confession.  For good measure, I added a bomb scare.  Where I struggled—and where, still, the story remains bogged down—was in the “secret” revealed.  This, too, is where Gemma falls short of Jane.

The madwoman in the attic, the paternity of a child—in Jane Eyre and “Roman Fever,” these aren’t narrative tricks as much as psychologically rich and believable elements of character and theme.  My psychology isn’t Wharton’s, any more than Livesey’s is Brontë’s, even with parallels.  If a story based on another is to succeed, I think, it needs to find something new and equally compelling, the way Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber does with the myths of female hopelessness and sexuality in her takes on Bluebeard and Red Riding Hood.  After all, if we’re not adding something new, why bother?

What novels and stories have influenced you?  What plots have you borrowed, consciously or not?  If you taught a course on retold classics, what would you put on the syllabus?

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The Surprise of What We Knew All Along

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

Oops.  I forgot to post last Friday.  I’ve cut down from every week to every-other-week, as some of readers may have noticed—but this is the first time since beginning this blog 18 months ago that I’ve completely forgotten.

Last Friday, October 26, marked the twelfth anniversary of my mother’s death.  She died at 11:35 a.m. on a Thursday, less than a month before “hanging chads” became front-page news and less than a year before my father almost boarded UAL flight 93 from Newark to SFO.  Events of enormous consequence.  Events that ushered in a new world.  I would never minimize the significance of Bush v Gore or of 9/11, but when I think about the changes since both milestones, I think as well about the differences of a world with a mother in it from a world without.

Twelve years is a long time, and a blink.   Plenty of time to adjust, but the enormity that stunned me on the day she died—a world without her in it seemed as alien as a sky without the moon—remains.  I’m used to it, and the implications still sneak up on me.

Such as:  I forgot to post to this blog last Friday.  I registered that twelve years had passed; I lit a candle to mark the occasion; I mentioned the anniversary to several people.  No big deal, and yet the biggest deal of all. Hardly earth shattering, my forgetting to post reminded me how grief never goes away.  It changes its stripes, but it never vanishes.

One evening soon after learning that Mom had stage IV lung cancer, I put broccoli on the stove for dinner.  I trimmed the woody stalks, cut the florets into roughly uniform size, poured them into the steamer basket, set it on the stove, turned on the flame, left the room.  About ten minutes later, I smelled something funny and went back to investigate.  I’d forgotten to add water to the pot.

Not long after, after a swim, I stood under the shower—the one along the wall where swimmers rinse before and after laps, the one in full view not only of anyone in the pool but of the lifeguard and the passers-by on the other side of the windows.  I let the warm water beat against my shoulders, cascade down my neck.  And then I did what felt completely natural—I was in the shower, after all:  I pulled the straps of my suit from my shoulders and started rolling off the wet Lycra.  I’d gotten as far as my waist when I realized what I was doing.  I don’t think anyone saw, but I got the message. Distraction lurks everywhere.  You are not yourself right now.

This is a long-winded way, perhaps, of explaining my absence from the blogsphere last Friday.  Some might say, an excuse.  My mom died twelve years ago.  Neither excuse nor explanation is necessary, of course—and neither brought me to the keyboard this morning, to post on a Monday.

I think of other recent out-of-the-ordinary events.  The wonderful yoga studio around the corner, closing.  A warm day at Stinson Beach in late October, complete with sightings of starfish, anemones, and nudists.  The Giants’ winning the World Series for the second time in three years (not to mention the fact that I recognize all the players and refer to them by nickname).  The fact that I just celebrated a year of marriage with the man I love, the man I’d thought at times I’d never meet and then—gloriously, blessedly—did.

I’ve long ago accepted the fact that I can’t share those, or other, events with my mother.  And that’s fine, really. But next time I tell myself that loss attenuates over time—which it does—I’ll remember the heel-of-the-hand-to-the-forehead realization that brought me to this topic at the keyboard this morning:  It’s always a big deal.

I’ll be back on track on Friday.  Or that’s the plan.

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Cleansing the Palate

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

Last night, at a reading in Sausalito at the wonderful Why There Are Words series curated by Peg Alford Pursell, I ran into a former student.  We chatted during the break, and she told me that since taking my class, she’d applied for and been accepted to three MFA programs in creative writing.  This made me happy.  I asked what she was working on, and she mentioned writing flash fiction.

Flash fiction has always made me nervous.  Not because I don’t like it, but because it intimidates me.  Maybe it’s the word “flash,” which makes me think of Flash Gordon, which makes me think of comic books, which makes me think about how in fifth grade I liked only the corny ones, featuring Archie and Veronica and Betty.  Maybe “intimidates” is the wrong word.  Maybe my resistance to the term “flash fiction” is that I write long, I write wordy, I write (too much) back story.  The thought of getting in and out that fast—well, I don’t do it.  I’d love to write a 100-word story, but I think of it as an exercise more than an end in itself.  More reason to try, I know.   Maybe I’ll surprise myself, but I feel about short-shorts the way I regard the luge—Wow!, but not for me.

This former student writes long, too, she said, and does the short, 100-word pieces as palate cleansers.  We talked some more and then said good-bye.  I’ve been thinking about palate cleansing ever since.  Sorbets.  Light, slightly astringent, neutralizing.  Another metaphor might be cross-training: writing a short-short as balance, or complement, to working on the marathon of a longer work such as a novel.

Then, this morning, I found the latest PW (as in Publishers Weekly) Tip Sheet in my in-box.  Usually, after glancing at the subject line, I move these to Trash.  This morning, though, I clicked open The Top Ten Essays Since 1950.

Personal essays are my palate cleansers.  I have loved the form since discovering the essays of Mary Cantwell in Mademoiselle back in the days when women’s mags published literary writing.  Since then, I’ve written plenty of my own.  They’ve impressed, wowed, stunned, and knocked me out—but they’ve never seemed foreign, never out of my skill set.

I’m not suggesting that I do them as well as the names on Top Ten Since 1950 list do—far from it.  Just that I keep trying.  I haven’t been on skis in, well, I can’t remember how long.  Give me a cup of cocoa; I’ll wait for you by the fire, as I re-read the ten essays listed.  Yes, “sorbet” sounds too light, too melting-on-the-tongue, too much water content for the meat in these pieces.  But there’s someone refreshing and, yes, cleansing about reading a good essay.  The best of them are explorations, soundings – as the original French verb essayer (to try, to attempt) suggests.  My former student referred to writing short, but I find reading short (nonfiction) leaves me with a welcome tartness, a sharpening of the senses, a lively jolt.

Here are the top 10 since 1950, chosen by Robert Atwan (editor of the Best American Essays series).  No surprises, but all worth looking at again and again.  Read more about why Atwan chose what he chose here.

James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son” (1955)
Norman Mailer, “ The White Negro” (1957)
Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964)
John McPhee, “The Search for Marvin Gardens” (1972)
Joan Didion, “The White Album” (1979)
Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse” (1982)
Phillip Lopate, “Against Joie de Vivre” (1986)
Edward Hoagland, “Heaven and Nature” (1988)
Jo Ann Beard, “The Fourth State of Matter” (1996)
David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster” (2004)

What about you?  What refreshes you, as a writer and a reader?  When immersed in a longer work, do you dip into something shorter from time to time?

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Vacation Reading, Part 2

Posted on September 28, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

Six months ago, I posted about vacation and what books to bring along.  Since then, we’ve chosen a destination and leave in three days.  I’ve been stacking up books for weeks.  A few are the ones I thought of back in March, when we were debating Wyoming over Carmel (we decided on neither).  A couple weeks ago, at a local bookstore—Alexander Book Company, one of the few, treasured indie bookstores still in S.F.—I found Diane Keaton’s memoir in paperback.  Perfect!  Sometime over the summer, I picked up my husband’s bedside reading and found myself immersed in details of the French Revolution.  I’ll read more about Marie Antoinette in the Conciergerie while on the beach, I thought.  And just last week, I started The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer.  Not finished yet, so I’ll have to add it, too.  Can’t forget the latest Donna Leon, which husband and I are reading aloud to each other.

So here’s my list, as of 10:40 a.m. Friday.  We’ll see what it is by Monday morning, when we leave for the airport.  And how many unread New Yorkers I add to the heap.

Why Religion Matters by Huston Smith
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey
Fighting Fire by Caroline Paul
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Then Again by Diane Keaton
A House With No Roof by Rebecca Wilson

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Rediscovering Rilke

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Lindsey Crittenden

this post is a slightly edited version of a post that appeared on August 20, 2012, on the Good Letters blog

In college, I took a yearlong class on Western Civilization.  Certain images stand out: reading Oedipus Rex on the lawn outside the Life Sciences building and overhearing a student pronounce “Khomeini” with the same initial sound as “challah”—this would have been a month or so before the taking of American hostages; getting an A+ (my only in college) on a paper applying Civilization and Its Discontents to D. H. Lawrence’s story “The Prussian Officer”; hearing a T.A. refer to Shakespeare’s “two-backed beast”; covering entire paragraphs of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet with my pink highlighter.

In Woody Allen’s disappointing (imho) latest movie, To Rome With Love, the aspiring-actress played by Ellen Page quotes Rilke (“You must change your life!”) as yet one more example of the character’s pretension and shallowness. But when I was eighteen years old and studying in an empty classroom of the architecture building, those words electrified me. When I read for the first time, sentences such as You ask whether your verses are any good, I held my breath. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

I’ve hung onto my pink-highlighted paperback copy, as well as the hardcover with lovely endpapers that my mother gave me a few years later for my 23rd birthday. I’ve kept the book on my night table, taken it with me on retreats, read it—a paragraph, a page, the whole thing—when I felt stuck.  During a painful time, when every waking moment terrified me, I came across the dragons and felt myself open up to something larger and wiser and more eternal than my fear:

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Several months ago, one of my online students wrote to me about discovering Rilke’s Book of Hours.  I began reading the “love poems to God.” One every morning, as a lead-in to sitting in silence.

I’ve practiced centering prayer on and off for years, as I first learned about it through the teachings of Thomas Keating, a Cistercian monk.  Readings words may seem antithetical to the task of centering prayer, which invites us to let go of words and anything our minds might get attached to.  But many of the poems in Book of Hours lead directly into that kind of contemplation.

For example, I, 3 (the poems are numbered, not titled; the translation is by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy): “…when I lean over the chasm of myself— / it seems / my God is dark / and like a web: a hundred roots / silently drinking.”

Or, from I, 6: “You, God, who live next door— / If at times, through the long night, I trouble you / with my urgent knocking— / this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom…. / As it happens, the wall between us / is very thin. Why couldn’t a cry / from one of us / break it down? It would crumble / easily. / it would barely make a sound.”

I don’t read German, or understand much beyond a few articles and simple nouns, but each morning, before reading the English, I whisper the German original. I know I’m garbling the pronunciation, but it doesn’t matter. I like the sounds, just as I do when reading Dante aloud. German holds more fraught associations than Italian does—not only those of 20th century atrocities but of my own history as the descendant of German immigrants in the 1880s.  But all that falls away into assonance, consonance, rhythm, pure sound.  As I whisper the German, I know that the English translation sits right there, across the gutter of the page. My glance can slide right over and give me instant comprehension. But I wait.

I recall the unspoiled enthusiasm I once felt, the dry-throated awe, as an eighteen-year-old with a pink highlighter in hand. It’s that, too, that I want to get back to.

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