Writing Influences: Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014)

(Photo courtesy of the Boston Restaurant Blog, October 2009)

Some years ago, I found myself tending bar at a roadhouse called Rick's Tavern on Route 30 in Southern Vermont. Business was slow that winter, particularly after deer-hunting season ended. My primary tasks at the bar were to open the occasional long-necked Budweiser bottle and pour a steady stream of Captain Morgan's & Coke for a young alcoholic companion who had traded his car for a Rottweiler. He named the Rottweiler "Hagler" after the marvelous boxer of the same name. Many of my evenings were graced by Hagler's presence, which made me feel safe. As neither Hagler nor his master was much of a conversationalist, I supplemented bartending duties with reading on those long, cold nights.

I had recently finished Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard and was looking for something else he might have written that combined personal spiritual quest with adventure. The local library had a copy of his most recently published work, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. In truth, I would have read anything that Matthiessen had written.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse turned out to be another in a string of consciousness-raisings that I was experiencing at the time. Among its predecessors was The Empire's Old Clothes, by Ariel Dorfman, my first published translation. When I tried to buy Crazy Horse, I couldn't find it anywhere. I eventually learned that it had been "kept off the shelves for eight years because of one of the most protracted and bitterly fought legal cases in publishing history," (according to the book's jacket flap). A governor of South Dakota and an FBI special agent had successfully censored the book by using the legal system to block its distribution.  The tiny library from which I had originally checked the book out was defying the court order that forbade access to the book, and I remember appreciating that little act of civil disobedience in the interest of free speech and the First Amendment. Though not close to Walden Pond, I wasn't far, either; the presence of Thoreau was evident not only in my surroundings, but in Matthiessen's writing, as well.

Crazy Horse tells the story of two killings that occurred on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and of a man doing two life sentences for those killings. The problem is that the prosecution was unable to produce a single witness that could identify the man as the shooter. He has maintained his innocence for the past 36 years.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse made me think about issues of power, corruption, censorship, sovereignty, and the Constitution. This was the United States, not Chile, where Ariel Dorfman is from, or Austria, where his parents were from. The undisputed public record of the FBI's behavior in this case sowed the seeds of not only the villain in The Shell, but of what some would call the "paranoid conspiracy theories" subscribed to by Colin, the protagonist's grandfather. Colin is a veteran of the Bay Area political scene of the 1960s.

Crazy Horse, and Matthiessen's next one, Indian Country, gave me a picture of people, wisdom, and traditions that were endangered, yes -- Matthiessen's subject more often than not was life-forms in the process of vanishing from the face of the Earth -- but which were still alive. And if they were alive, then there might be hope.

Prior to reading these two books, I'd been thinking about Indians in an historical, anthropological sense. Now I began to think of them as ... people. People who had been living here for thousands of years. People who were no longer living as they once had. I recognized what they had lost as people. I began to wonder what I had lost....

Writing Influences: Latin America

There is a strong thread of Spanish woven into my life. My first memories are of Madrid when I was 3. I had a nanny named Teresa who cared for me when my mother went out to the markets and my father was at work. I consider Spanish as much a mother tongue as English.

After studying Latin for two years in high school, I switched to Spanish. By the end of my senior year I was able to read, but without much understanding, Nada Mas Que Todo Un Hombre by Miguel de Unamuno, and a short book of poems by the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario. Something about reading in another language felt like stumbling into another world, and I was hooked.

In college I took a Spanish literature class and was introduced to the short stories of Julio Cortazar, who is Argentine but did all his writing in Paris. One of his stories became an obsession: "El Otro Cielo," (The Other Sky,) which appears in Todos Los Fuegos el Fuego (All Fires the Fire), first published in 1966.

"El Otro Cielo" tells the story of a young man who works at the Stock Exchange in 20th century Buenos Aires. He sees his conventional future spread out before him and wants to run for the hills. Instead, he disappears into one of the neighborhoods on the seedier side of town and, without much effort, finds himself in 19th century Paris with a girlfriend named Josiane who happens to be a prostitute and who fears for her life because a serial killer known as "Laurent" has been killing prostitutes. The completely naturalistic way the story is told, and the lack of "device" or explanation for how the narrator goes from one world to the other, opened my eyes to a storytelling style that I would soon learn to call "magical realism." Supernatural things happen, but they're accepted as just a normal part of life.

I was on fire about this way of writing, and began experimenting with it on my own. The first of my novels to be put in a drawer (we all have them), Calypsody/ Collapsody, was inspired in large part by Rayuela (Hopscotch), an ingenious novel that Cortazar considered "a failure."

Of course, I eventually learned about Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, along with a host of lesser-known Latin American writers. One of these writers, Augusto Roa Bastos, wrote an untranslatable book, Yo, El Supremo that eventually got me my first literary agent, Tom Colchie.

After receiving a Master of Arts in Comparative Literature, I took a job in publishing and began an informal "lunch-hour salon" once a week with several literarily-minded, aspiring-writer colleagues. I translated a selection of about 10 pages from Yo, El Supremo and discussed my love of Latin American literature at the salon. One of  my colleagues dropped a New York Times interview with Colchie on my desk one day, and before I knew it, I was calling him to see if Roa Bastos was a client. He said the Paraguayan author was not currently a client, but he would look into representing him. In the meantime, he had some other projects in the works and was always looking for translators....

The process of being selected to translate a book - at least for me, back then - was similar to the process my actor friends were going through: I had to "audition" with translated sample pages, and if an editor liked them, he or she would sign Colchie's author and attach me as translator. I had a number of auditions, and discovered a number of authors, including the late Reinaldo Arenas (best known for Before Night Falls), who wrote two books that I consider hidden gems, if not minor masterpieces: El Mundo Alucinante (Hallucinations) and Celestino Antes del Alba (Celestino Before the Dawn). 

I was so taken with the character of Celestino, that I began to imagine the character as a franchise! I've written the first successor to Arenas' novel, in the form of a short story: "Celestino in the Lemon Yellow Nova."

Similar to the books about Africa I talked about in a previous post, my love affair with the "magical realist" style of writing made it possible for me to figure out a naturalistic way for the character of Hawk, protagonist of The Shell, to slip effortlessly from one realm to another and back again....

Writing Influences: Africa

This morning Julie, my co-writer, asked what possessed me to pick up a copy of City of Secrets (Quest Books, 2008) by Patrice Chaplin? The answer was complicated, and led me to start thinking about how to describe all the influences that led me to write The Shell, the first book in our Turtle Island Rising series.

• What drew me to look in the bargain bin at Vroman's Bookstore several years ago and pick up a copy of Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press, 2007) by Tim Jeal? 
• Why did a female co-worker give me a copy of Beryl Markham's West with the Night (North Point Press, 1983) for my 33rd birthday? 
• Why did my 12th grade English teacher take the time to patiently suggest several books to a diffident young man who thought he didn't much like "literature," only to have a passion for literature ignited by one of her suggestions, Cry, the Beloved Country (Scribner's, 1948) by Alan Paton?

The short answer to all these questions is: I don't really know. But I will tell you that I believe that something - guidance, intuition, Fate, call it what you will - led me to all of them.

I was already well into the writing of The Shell when I picked up that masterful biography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, whose real name was John Rowlands and who is best known - if at all - for the phrase, "Dr. Livingston, I presume?" I knew that I was writing an "adventure story," which critic Don D'Ammassa defines as: 

"...an event or series of events that happens outside the course of the protagonists's ordinary life, usually accompanied by danger, often by physical action. Adventure stories almost always move quickly, and the pace of the plot is at least as imporant as characterization, setting and other elements of a creative work." (Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction, Infobase Publishing, 2009)

So maybe it was the blurb by Paul Theroux on the book's cover that made me pick it up: "Magnificent....A superb adventure story." It may also have been the cover photo, which shows Stanley in the quintessential African explorer's garb - pith helmet, rifle, mustache, puttees - standing next to an African boy of about 12 or 13, naked from the waist up. When I finished the book, I knew that the real reason had more to do with a story of "first contact" between Europeans and Africans.

West with the Night had the same appeal: an eyewitness account of a still wild Africa about to disappear forever. Markham's memoir also spoke to a childhood fantasy of adventure and romance that my co-worker, Torrie, could have known nothing about: bush pilots in East Africa.

Cry, the Beloved Country is an emotionally-wrenching tale of what was called apartheid in South Africa and racism in the United States. The book provided me with a strong picture of the basic humanity of all people and caused me to look more deeply into the causes and persistence of injustice and intolerance. I was presented for the first time with the image and challenge of "writer as social activist."


All three books, though set on a different continent and read at different times in my life, informed my approach to writing an adventure story, set on my own continent, that has at its heart a message about humanity and justice.

Agent Search Yields New Author Discoveries

Part of the task of finding an agent is researching the kind of books and authors each agent represents. In the process of researching agents, I discovered a couple of wonderful books and authors I'd never heard of before.

PATRICK ROTHFUSS
The first of these was Patrick Rothfuss, who is represented by Matt Bialer of Sanford J. Greenberger Associates. Rothfuss has published only two novels so far, both ranked as New York Times Best Sellers. (How one achieves this ranking is a subject for another column.) Rothfuss's books, The Name of the Wind (2007, DAW Books) and The Wise Man's Fear (2011, DAW Books) are the first two volumes in THE KINGKILLER CHRONICLES. They are definitely in the fantasy genre, which "commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting, and since the publication of The Lord of the Rings, is dominated by its medievalist form." (Wikipedia entry on "Fantasy").

Readers who enjoyed Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series are in for a treat when they embark on The Kingkiller Chronicles. Rothfuss has created a fascinating world which, in a sense, picks up where Potter left off. Protagonist Kvothe finds his way to the University, where he studies to be an Arcanist. The words Rothfuss invents are tremendously creative; the cultures that he creates are sophisticated and sublime -- the Adem, a mercenary culture with whom Kvothe spends time in The Wise Man's Fear, for example, are like Samurai or Knights Templar, and yet wholly different: morally, they adhere to a strict warriors' code, the Lethani, but sexually they are uninhibited; though their faces remain impassive, they've developed a highly expressive sign language; and in their society, women are considered the superior fighters. In fact, all the female characters in The Kingkiller Chronicles are more fully developed than in most fantasy fiction, at least in my experience: from the elusive Denna, to the complex Devi, to the hermetic Auri, to the enchanting (literally) Felurian, to the harsh but exciting Vashet, there are many facets of the Feminine presented and explored with respect and creativity, though I'd be interested to hear a female viewpoint (The Geektress provides one on THIS blog entry).

One final word about this author and this series. I had never heard of DAW Books, the publisher of this series. What an amazing track record! And despite the fact that their website is "hosted" by Penguin Books, which presumably distributes their books, I was heartened by their statement that:

DAW is still a small private company, owned exclusively by its publishers, Elizabeth R. Wollheim and Sheila E. Gilbert. Betsy and Sheila are strongly committed to discovering and nurturing new talent, and to keeping a personal 'family' spirit at DAW—something they feel is all too rare in today's world of international conglomerate publishing."

GRAHAM JOYCE
The second of the authors I discovered during my agent search, Graham Joyce, is represented by Douglas Stewart at Sterling Lord.

Joyce is a Brit, and a multiple British fantasy novel winner. The thing is, his novels are less fantasy than magical realism, and he himself doesn't like the label "magical realism." He says (and I'm quoting his Wikipedia page here), "that his lineage is tied more closely to writers of the English “weird tale” such as Arthur Machen or Algernon Blackwood. He calls his style of writing “Old Peculiar.” I'm reading his book about midwives in the Midlands called The Limits of Enchantment (2005, Atria). It's SO good. Set in the Sixties. "Hedgerow Witches" are what people call the protagonist, Fern, and her wise woman adoptive mother, "Mammy."

A previous title, The Facts of Life (2003, Atria), is set post-WWII and again involves a "coven," of sorts: seven women who take turns raising a young boy, conceived under unusual circumstances. There's a bit of the "weird," and a great deal of superb characterization and intrigue.

I had not heard of Atria Books founded in 2002, either. It's no wonder. Though I worked in the New York publishing world a number of years ago, the upheaval and consolidation that seemed to be well under way back then has continued, unabated, into the present. The tricky thing about publishing has always been: how to support great writing, craft wonderful books, and still make some money. Atria Books seems to be doing okay: with the Dalai Lama and Lauren Weisberger (this links to Sidewinder L.A.'s cheeky discussion of ChickLit) on your list, how could you go wrong, right?

How do I love thee? Let me count the drafts

"Out West" Photo taken by ancestors
on honeymoon in the 1920s.

The dirty little secret about writing great fiction is that, except in very rare cases, it's a lot more work than anyone who has never done it can possibly imagine. 

This is probably no secret to accomplished artists in any discipline, whether sculpture, dance, poetry, acting, photography, fashion design, cooking, yoga -- the list is long. However, accomplished artists don't want you to see the work, they want you to experience the fruits of their labor without thinking about that labor. (Be wary of Anne Hathaway's acting skills - she's too attached to having you see her acting).

I remember reading an interview with an agent - I can't remember who it was now, but I'd like to think it was Molly Friedrich, of the Friedrich Literary Agency, because she's such a straight shooter (this interview and this article from Poets & Writers should convince you) - that said something like, "Don't even begin to approach agents about representing your work until you've written at least seven drafts."

Like anyone with a normal ego, I immediately thought to myself, "Of course, that doesn't apply to me. I'm a good writer. Molly's addressing her remarks to schmucks and hacks. Certainly not to me." It will come as no shock to the aforementioned accomplished artists that Molly was, in fact, talking to me.

What counts as a draft?

Great question. I don't know if there is a definitive answer. For one thing, when you write using a word processing program on a computer, you tinker far more with your manuscript than in the days of typing on paper - or maybe not: maybe you just waste a lot less paper (remember the stock image of the writer angrily tearing a page out of the typewriter carriage, crumpling it up, and throwing it in disgust toward the wastebasket? The camera pans back, the wastebasket is overflowing and the floor, it turns out, is ankle-deep in crumpled pieces of rejected writing). 

You may count your drafts differently, but here's how I count mine:

• First draft. You're really satisfied with what you've written, not the least bit embarrassed by any of it, and you want to know if you're delusional, or if it's as good as you think, so you share it with several readers whose opinions you value and trust.
• Second draft. Your readers have gotten back to you; they validate that there's much to like in your manuscript, but they have some edits and some suggestions; you sort through these, take most of them into account, and take the well-intentioned but irrelevant (in your mind) with a grain of salt, produce an "edited" version of your manuscript and share it with a different group of readers.
• Third draft. This latest group of readers begin to give you the feedback you really wanted to hear - "Clark, this is really great! It's going to be a bestseller! It's so much better than [insert name of current hot book at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List]!" Now we're talking! But your readers don't stop there: "There are just a couple of things, though, that I had questions about." Those couple - or dozen - things happen to be the very things YOU had questions about, too (whether or not you admitted it to yourself). The questions force you to think more deeply about certain characters and decide whether the cloak and dagger section in the middle - which you had such fun researching and writing - is better suited to a Pink Panther movie than this particular novel. You face some hard truths, you remember the old saw about "murdering your darlings," and you cut and rewrite and reshape and refocus, and share the resulting manuscript with yet another set of readers.
• Fourth through nth drafts. From among your rapidly dwindling stable of readers, Fate now provides one who is not only a great editor, but who is also uncompromising. She really thinks you may be onto something, if you're willing to work for it. It is through work on these drafts, each of which your editor insists you complete before giving it to her to read, that you begin to have a glimmer of what it really means to be an author.

Understanding Archetypes: Thomas Moore

In my last post (Freedom and Reality), I said that I tried to employ a "multivalent and archetypal" narrative style in my writing, as opposed to the 19th century "realist" style developed by authors as diverse as Gustave Flaubert and Henry James, and still used by a writer like Jonathan Franzen (who appeared on the cover of Time magazine after the publication of Freedom, with the headline "Great American Novelist").

Just after I posted "Freedom and Reality," I ran across a chapter by Thomas Moore, "Imagination is More Weighty Than Fact," from his book Original Self (2000, HarperCollins). This chapter spoke not only to my problem with "realism," but also serves to define the terms multivalent and archetypal style.

A word about Moore and his mentor, James Hillman, and then excerpts from "More Weighty Than Fact."

This comes from the jacket flap for Original Self: "Thomas Moore was a monk in a Catholic religious order for twelve years and has degrees in theology, musicology, and philosophy. A former professor of religion and psychology, he is the author of Care of the Soul, Soul Mates, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, The Education of the Heart, and The Soul of Sex."

I first ran across Thomas Moore's name in a book of James Hillman's collected writings called A Blue Fire (1989, Harper and Row), "Introduced and Edited by Thomas Moore." I first learned about James Hillman from a 1990 interview with him conducted by Michael Ventura in his "Letters at 3AM" column in the L.A. Weekly (which Ventura talks about here). My co-writer, Julie, had the opportunity to hear James Hillman speak at a mental health conference several years ago. He died about a year ago. This New York Times obituary describes his life and work fairly accurately. The final paragraph speaks to the subject of this post:

“Some people in desperation have turned to witchcraft, magic and occultism, to drugs and madness, anything to rekindle imagination and find a world ensouled,” Mr. Hillman wrote in 1976. “But these reactions are not enough. What is needed is a revisioning, a fundamental shift of perspective out of that soulless predicament we call modern consciousness.”

To help me get through a particularly dark period in my life, I repeatedly alternated three audiobooks: The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder (more on that in a future post), Anatomy of the Spirit by Caroline Myss, and Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore. Of the three, Moore's was the most freeing.

So, finally, here is what Moore says in Original Self about imagination and modernism:

"It is difficult for a modern person, influenced by the myth of fact so embedded in our thoughts and values, to realize the importance of imagination. We are educated to prove our intuitions with empirical experiments and studies. Anything not verifiable by investigation of the senses we consider suspicious at best.

"This materialistic view of things gives us a half-life, a partial view of experience. The images of memory, dream, and fantasy then become useless, if not interfering. We distrust intuition and imagination as superstitious, a charge that quickly wounds our modern notion of intelligence. These other powers make us feel inferior, and we can't wait until our suppositions are proven by some sort of hardware or research design.

"This half-life existence, where imagination and ideas are ignored, comes from a surrender to a purely physical and literal understanding of events. In the currently accepted view, as long as you do the right thing, it makes little difference what your reason is. But this, says T. S. Eliot, is the greatest treason, a betrayal of our humanity, because the interior life counts. Without it we are indeed machines that can be manipulated genetically and given new mechanical parts. In this half-life there is no hope for immortality of any kind because only the current situation is real. In this half-life there is nothing of weighty and enduring interest, because the soul is ignored as unproven - the very thing that gives life ultimate value and makes it all worth living."

Freedom and Reality: Birds, Books, Central Park, and the Quantum Bullet

I just finished listening to the novel Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (2010, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The book was read superbly by David Ledoux, who was named an AudioFile Best Voice in Fiction for his performance of this novel. 

One of the reasons I decided to give Franzen a second chance (I'd tried to read his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, FSG 1988, and lost interest) is that I saw him recently in an HBO documentary called "Birders: The Central Park Effect." I rather liked him in that movie, which features a woman named Starr Saphir, who's been leading birdwalks in Central Park for over 30 years. In fact, I went on two walks with her when I lived in New York, and fell in love with birds. 

From a PBS "Nature" website for the documentary
"Pale Male," about a Central Park Red-Tailed Hawk,
who has been seen alive and well since Hurricane Sandy...

Here's what a Slate contributor says about Franzen and the Central Park Effect. The Slate article mentions a New Yorker essay about birding by Franzen that I remember vaguely reading. Franzen's New Yorker article, "My Bird Problem: Love, Grief, and a Change in the Weather" (August 8, 2005), it turns out, is like a "treatment" for his novel Freedom. (The New Yorker also published two excerpts from the novel: "Good Neighbors," 6/8/09; and "Agreeable," 5/31/10).

• In Freedom, a husband and wife break up, though they seem to love each other very much. In "My Bird Problem," Franzen talks about his break-up with his wife, whom he seems to have loved very much. 
• The mid-40s husband in Freedom has an affair with a 27-year-old woman; Franzen, who was in his mid-40s when "My Bird Problem" ran, admits to having an affair with a 27-year-old woman. 
• In the New Yorker article, Franzen admits to wanting children, but seems to meet women who aren't ready to, or don't want to, have children. The husband in Freedom, Walter, starts a population-control organization with his 27-year-old lover, Lalitha, who doesn't want children (though Walter and his estranged wife, Patty, already have two). 
• Walter -- whose background is Swedish Lutheran, like Franzen's -- is obsessed with bird conservation, to the point where he does a deal with a Texas oil billionaire to start a preserve in West Virginia for the cerulean blue warbler, the billionaire's pet endangered species. Franzen admits in "My Bird Problem" that some of his finest birding experiences occurred on a huge private ranch in Texas. 
• In the New Yorker article, Franzen takes an extended camping trip throughout the United States with his wife, in an attempt to salvage their marriage. Walter takes the same trip with Lalitha before she is tragically killed in a car accident.

Cerulean Blue Warbler
(Photo by Phil Swanson)

I had a lot of trouble figuring out whether I liked Freedom or was put off by it. I was definitely fascinated by the novel, which is 19 unabridged CDs long (576 pages in the hardcover edition). Part of the reason I'm fascinated is because Freedom is a classic 19th century realist novel in the style of George Eliot (Middlemarch) or Stendahl (The Red and the Black), with Henry James's minute attention to character detail (Portrait of a Lady). One example: Walter and Patty's son, Joey, 21, estranged from his parents, secretly gets married and accidentally swallows his wedding ring six months later, just before he boards a plane to Argentina with a woman he intends to sleep with. Franzen describes Joey's thorough search through his own feces for the wedding ring in minute, excruciating detail.

Alexander von Humboldt

The realist novel emerged in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and concurrent with the great 19th century expansion of the sciences (think Darwin, Edison, Bell, Pasteur, the Curies, and von Humboldt, to barely scratch the surface). It makes sense in that context.

Freedom appears in the midst of the greatest ecological crisis faced by man (dinosaurs and other creatures faced as great an ecological crisis in their day), combined with a myopic focus by world leaders on extracting the last cent of the last drop of disappearing resources to keep the global economy from collapsing in advance of total ecological collapse -- and deals well with that reality. Dealing with it by employing classic 19th century-style reportage and "unreliable" narration (large segments of the novel appear in the form of a third-person "autobiography" written by Patty) is a bit like relying exclusively on the daily paper edition New York Times for one's news. The spectrum is so narrow, and there are so many sources of news these days.

Can we really still write novels this way? And, should we?

The benefit of well-written realist novels like Freedom is that one can go back to them 25, 50, or 100 years later and get a vivid sense of exactly what life was like for a certain segment of humanity during the period covered by the novel. Some of the details about the characters' backgrounds or the time-frame covered in a particular passage of Freedom were so accurate and relevant to my own experience (part of my background is Danish Lutheran, by way of the Midwest), that it was like a mirror being held up to my memory of a time,  a place, or a person.

I'm curious about the narrative choices Jonathan Franzen makes because The Shell is being written during the same time period as Freedom. I have chosen to borrow from various genres in order to engage a wider audience in the questions of our time, but I employ a narrative style that is multivalent and archetypal. Classical Newtonian physics, upon which the certainty of science was built, has given way to quantum physics, which deals a lot more with uncertainty. In our time, objective facts matter less than the mythos that informs those facts. Like the great authors of fantasy (Tolkein, Lewis, L'Engle, and LeGuin), the "magical realist" authors of the mid-20th century (see Writing Influences: Latin America) stumbled upon a way to tell stories that freed narrative from the constrictions of Realpolitik, using imagination to augment "history" and open a portal to a richer, more multidimensional experience of life. Wilson Harris of Guyana (whose Palace of the Peacock freed the novel from all its realist shackles), has said, "My writing is quantum writing. Do you know of the quantum bullet? The quantum bullet, when it's fired, leaves not one hole but two."