Sunset, Sunday, 11 October 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

A note on how e-mail and, perhaps even more than that, Facebook, have altered the playing field for writers. “West Hollywood,” a poem from 1982 that I posted the other day, originally had two exclamation points that were very important to the piece – but my spouse observed, and I realized she was right, that these would not register the same way now. I took them out.

Exclamation points are now anything but exceptional in everyday communication. I started adding them more and more to my own e-mails, simply from the awareness that without them most of my correspondents might think what I was saying sounded flat, cold or even angry. They’re almost useless!

We agreed Walt Whitman might have a tough time if he were writing today.

Sunset, Sunday, 20 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

This is what they call ‘Mostly Cloudy’.

Sometimes I wonder what Thoreau would have done, or how he might have done, if he’d been in the position of issuing blog postings every day from Walden Pond. I mean, wouldn’t there have been quite a few days when he would have been unable to think of anything more to say than “Jesus, it’s cold!” or “Harvested 3 bu. beans ... swam across pond ... listened to bullfrogs”? 

Henry David strikes me as the deliberative sort, probably not the easiest or most fluid of writers. He wrote about half of Walden while he was living at the pond, between 1845 and 1847, but then went through seven drafts before publishing the book in 1854. As you probably know, it was a failure, commercially.

But I do wonder also if it might not have helped Thoreau to have the kind of daily imperative to communicate that many of us feel today. Thoreau took time to distill and compress, and in a sense elevate, his experiences into the book so many have come to know. But he also said, after Walden was published:

Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day.

I am happy to know that Thoreau could write this even as he was sitting in a house filled with unsold books. But speaking for myself, I know that if I’m a hero, it’s only in my own mind, and so I am strictly my own imaginary hero. And I find that learning how to write a ‘good journal’, and particularly to both write and publish in real time, can be extremely challenging. Those who can do it – hello again, Stephen Fry, Andrew Sullivan, James D. Griffioen, among others – these may be poetic heroes for our time.

Sunset, Saturday, 19 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

I think in raving yesterday about trivial aspects of the writing (and painting) process, I may have missed much of the reason why Sarah Bruce commended Stephen Fry’s post to me in the first place. But that’s what happens to arrogant, self-absorbed, preoccupied, creative people (guilty on three of four counts) – we often miss the point. 

Much of Fry’s post was about how difficult writing usually is. Or, not so much writing itself, but getting it done, putting it all together, and especially when we’re talking about big projects like books. I hope I don’t overstep by quoting this much Fry:

... [M]y friend Douglas Adams ... [pointed] out that the reason I had never managed to finish a novel was that I had never properly understood how difficult, how ragingly and absurdly difficult, it is to do. “It is almost impossibly hard,” he told me. “It is supposed to be. But once you truly understand how difficult it is,” he added, ..., “it all becomes a lot easier.” ... “A writer,” said [Thomas] Mann, “is a person for whom writing is more difficult than for other people.” How liberating that definition is. If any of you ... have ever been put off writing it might well be because you found it so insanely hard and therefore, like me, gave up ..., regretfully assuming that you weren’t cut from the right cloth, that it must come more easily to true, natural-born writers. Perhaps you can start again now, in the knowledge that since the whole experience was so grindingly horrible you might be the real thing after all.

Of course, as one would hope and expect, Fry goes on to say that if you’re encouraged by this and therefore become able to complete your project, it doesn’t guarantee anything about either the quality or the success of the finished product.

I have only one book under my own name – I’m currently in the throes of deciding whether my revision of it is good enough to publish. Aside from that, whether as a ghostwriter or rewrite editor or hybrid designer-producer-writer-editor, I’ve helped others write somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 to 100 books. (I have no idea of the exact number, it could be 71 or 119, because I have little vested in most of the projects and, with a few exceptions, pretty much forget them when they’re done – I don’t even have a list of them anywhere.) I find writing and rewriting intrinsically ‘easy’ but that’s deceptive – this is difficult (?!) to convey, but it’s both a challenging process and one that comes naturally. I tend to discount everything that goes into it. So I can forget the truth of what Fry is saying. But by the time an entire book is about done, one knows just how hard it’s been – especially if money and time are running out! It’s usually excruciating by the end.

I gained a real awareness of the blood, sweat and tears involved in my book-writing jobs a few years ago when I called on an old colleague, Jack Scovil, of Scovil Galen Ghosh literary agency in New York, who was present at the inception of my first assignment in 1973, and asked for advice in negotiating a ghostwriting agreement. Concerning my near-fatal tendency to undercharge, Jack said:

“Don’t forget, it’s you who are going to be doing all the back-breaking work.”

‘Back-breaking’ ... exactly! And ... amen.

Sunset, Friday, 18 September 2009

William Theodore Van Doren. Stony Point, Albemarle County, Va. Oil on paper, 16 x 20.

So my friend Sarah Bruce was very enthused today about Stephen Fry, writing to me about him and also talking about him on her blog, and of course one of the things she said was (not that she would ever put it like this), ‘OMG am I the last person on earth to discover Stephen Fry?!’ to which I say ‘HAHAHA Sarah! – uh – well, actually, no – I didn’t know a thing about him until I got your e-mail!’

Which is a little bit funny because I now find one of Fry’s literary heroes is the late P.G. Wodehouse, who was one of ‘my’ authors when I worked at Scott Meredith Literary Agency in the early 1970s. I even got to speak with ‘Plum’ – then around 92 years old – on the phone! – a rare sort of thing in a business where we editors who did much of the real work were kept hidden from celebrity clients.

(Norman Mailer presumably never knew I was the only person to read his somewhat inflated manuscript for Marilyn – I was sequestered in a quiet corner for a day to read at top speed and report back so Mr. Meredith could tell Mailer what he thought of the book. Scott told me he told Mailer I had read it but, literature, show business and Scott Meredith being what they were, this was almost certainly not true.)

Anyhow, I digress – my favorite hobby. The British TV series Jeeves and Wooster, in which Mr. Fry co-starred, was of course based on the P.G. Wodehouse Jeeves books and stories.

The Stephen Fry post Sarah particularly wanted me to read had to do with the writing process. Fry says:

Many writers are, like me, fascinated by process. From an early age I wanted to know whether authors worked by morning or night, whether they typed or wrote by hand and if so on what kind of paper, whether they had their backs to the window, drank wine, sat, stood or lay on their backs with their legs in the air.

This set me off on a bit of a rant. Probably much of it is just posturing about things Fry might really agree with, but here, slightly edited, is what I said to Sarah:

I’m in such a funk about what I write ... I can’t tell today where I am on some of the things Fry talks about. I know I don’t find ‘process’ interesting in the least. I pretty much don’t care how anyone writes, just what. Isn’t that interesting (the difference)? That doesn’t mean I won’t spend ungodly amounts of time considering whether to buy a pink notebook or a green one, or both, and if I buy both, which one to write on TODAY – etc., etc. But I’m all about enjoying the results. This is true in painting, too. Process schmocess, I’d be happier if there were none! (Not true, but it sounds really outrageous, doesn’t it?) I become fully engaged in the process of painting – as you’ve seen, I get paint out of my brush by painting stuff out on my shirt, on my hands, my face, I end up with six brushes in one hand and three in the other, I walk away, run back, sit, stand, lie down, kneel, I get completely lost in it but I don't think it’s the interesting part. It’s not what it’s about. This is very unfashionable to say but I like the destination a lot more than the journey, meaning: I really live for the creation. The thing that results from it all. If it’s true, or if it’s right, then I have the pleasure of enjoying it just as much as anyone else. It seems like something apart from myself, something really unexpected – like, wow, how did THAT get here? I still feel that way about some things I did 35 years ago. So for me the creation becomes a sort of permanent talisman, not just a keeper but a keepsake that keeps on keeping on – that nourishes, supports, encourages, inspires me to ... to what? ... to put up with the [expletive deleted] process!

The Green Barn (17 May 1984)

Breathing in and out the bird’s song
I sat on the wooden step
Four miles below the sun
Within the mown fields
Of middle May.

Breathing in and out the bird itself as he was singing
I sat on the sun-warped step
Exchanging atmospheres
With middle May
And acres of grass.

I am he who sits in middle May, deciding
To write.

On the fourth anniversary exactly
Of my father’s death
A heart attack at fifty-three
I now thirty-five begin again
Knowing that we never cease.

I of course remember the day
At age fifteen
I set out to paint on canvasboard the local barn,
The green barn
Newly painted
In the orchard hills.

The apple trees were years removed
Shoulders of earth showed hollows and curves
And waves of grass I climbed to meet,
Breasting them with canvasboard.

I tried to paint that green barn.
I used a palette knife.
The greens I made seemed repulsive to me – they were for the green fields, the green of the barn would be impossible without the right green of the flowing fields –
I painted in a sweat
I felt in despair the flowing fields were falling, slipping, even running away with every stroke,
With sweat, sun, bees, greens, no-good greens and so much desperate humid heat and sweat and sun I walked home,
I walked home, balancing the plastered board over barbed wire and gullies and through honeysuckle and under branches until
In the desolate back yard of Dad’s eternally half-finished patio and half-finished hull of a boat (he’d work on it seven more years before selling it not quite completed),
I scraped it all off.

Never again.

Never.

Never again the scraping doubt.
I wish I had that painting today,
I could make it right.
I could make it fourteen million different ways,
In oil, watercolor, pencil or pastel –

Or, like this:

The green barn,
Once a red barn,
Now a gold barn in the summer light,
A gold barn filled with silver blue,
The green barn painted sunlight green over gold and violet reflections,
Floats in the fire green, the sky green, the hard green, white, yellow and wet flowering and dry green
In the me green, heart green, hands and eyes green or turning green,
In the bird and turtle green,
Red and violet and gold.