Finished Subtle Bodies

I heard Norman Rush read the early airplane scene from Subtle Bodies … mostly Nina’s voice … at Princeton a couple of years back. I’d been a fan since Rush’s Mating. Who doesn’t love a love story set in the Kalahari savannah with lions?

I picked it up--the smoked turkey between two slices of Murakami. I’d finished the three 1Q84 books and had Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki waiting. So I was viewing Subtle Bodies through the prism of Murakami’s kindness, empathy, generosity to his characters. SB leads with edge. Warmth and empathy is missing in my writing and I was on the lookout for more.

It is a very funny drawing room drama. (And it turns out to be kind as well.)

For example, at the end of chapter 39:

She said, “Sitting here in the gloaming. It’s nice.”
“It isn’t gloaming yet,” Ned said.

Expiating the title:

Ned was having a particularly strong reaction to the idea of Joris leaving.  Partly it was selfish because he hadn’t finished the task of putting together what they had all been, with what they were now. And the question was still there of whether their true interior selves—the subtle bodies inside—were still there and functioning despite what age and accident and force of circumstance may have done to hurt them. He meant something like that … that when they had become friends it had been a friendship established between subtle bodies, by which he meant the ingredients of what they were to be …

This is about what you loved in a friend as a friend…. Maybe there was a window in life and then it closed. … there was that window, before anybody had accomplished anything to speak of, when the ingredients, by which he meant the subtle bodies, shown their light.

Rush (through Ned) is saying friendship is between subtle bodies before walls built by experiences, disappointments, achievements shut the blinds and isolate our interior selves from the world.

Then at the climax, the funeral, when Ned finds his eulogy at page 847 of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, and reads out loud to the deceased and to the deceased's mourners about cultivating happiness:

One moment's being uneasy or not, seems of no consequence; yet this may be thought of the next, and the next, and so on, til there is a large port of misery. In the same way one must think of happiness, of learning, of friendship.  We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed.

Looking Like Yourself as Seen by Others

To get started, here's a poem from John Burnside:

II Self Portrait

The one thing you want to portray
is the one thing it lacks.

Awareness, perhaps, the sense of an outside world:
a holly tree, starlings, the neighbour who plays piano,

or somebody out on the staircase, pausing to listen
for longer than you had expected.

You do this again and again, as if your life
depended on nothing,

light filtered up from the alley, the homeward sound
of shoppers and that constant sense you have

of some place less than half a mile from here,
a favourite bar, a pool hall, someone's bed,

the place you could be right now, with snow coming down
through neon, or that baize light on your hands

that makes you think of summers long ago,
the 'water's edge', the 'faint breeze in the pines',

those girls you really loved, before this patient
look-alike paid forfeit to the dark.

Burnside reads this poem towards the end of this Start the Week podcast. Burns explains that the "look-alike" is the poet looking like himself as seen by others.

From near the end of Dear Denise:

Saturday, June 30

This afternoon I visit the Frick Collection off Central Park East. Another destination to pull me into the city and out of my neighborhood. The promise of a nice dinner. Maybe I meet someone. Better chance at a restaurant than in my house watching Tivo’d reruns of House.

I’m sitting on a bench in the West Gallery staring at the Rembrandt self-portrait. A girl sits beside me. I’m writing my memoir , I want to say.

“I need to work on the backstory. The main part, the flow from the big tragedy until now, until the legal resolution and ultimate divorce, is pretty natural. Any reader will have no problem staying with that narrative.”

The girl might ask what happened? What was the tragedy? But if she didn’t, I’d just continue. “There’s a natural suspense. What happens to Denise? Is Libby going to be ok? Someone close to me is saying I have to flesh out the backstory. I have to make my life before clear. Early days with Denise. The first kiss. The wedding. Then our family. Our perfect life together. Even up to the last night: Jack shoulder to shoulder with me on his bed. We each read our own book.”

The Frick has many portraits, El Greco, Vermeer, van Dyck. Portraits of women by Lawrence and Gainsborough. I sit with the Rembrandt in front of me. “I lived in Holland. Many, many times I’ve been to the Rijksmuseum, to the Van Gogh. I have history with the Dutch masters.” I take another tack. “Self-portrait is memoir. At first glance Rembrandt seems fatigued. You can see his eyes, his life has known sorrow.” He is not showing a reflection of the past; he is showing his present. He had known fatigue but he is not tired in portrait. He is calm, resolute. “Like the painter, who looks for himself on the canvas, I write this memoir.” His oriental robe, red sash, is ostentatious. Is the portrait true to his self? Is it a purely private truth or did he try to make it visible to his audience?

“When Jack was just a baby,” I continue, “he was ugly. His face was all scrunched up. Big head. Looked just like a pug, or like Winston Churchill. Big head, big brain, we said. And at about eight months, the ugly duckling turned. He became Adonis. We loved him ugly. We loved him handsome and beautiful.”

“But love,” I would ask the woman, tacking upwind. “What do you think about love?” My voice would challenge. “You think love is always wonderful, always benign, always a good thing?” She’d be silent in the force of my questions. “Denise loved him too much .”

I wouldn’t be saying this. I wouldn’t be talking about Jack that way. Not to someone I didn’t know. Not to someone I just met.

₪

In Burnside's poem the problem with self portrait (introspection) is that it isolates the Self from the Others.To address this, Burnside layers in the outside world (observed and remembered): snow falling, the sound of shoppers or a piano.... We are social creatures. Without the outside world we are only partially ourselves, even as we strive to emulate the Self seen by others.

If our Self is defined by others, mine started with my parents, my sisters. Over time my others switch to Denise (behind Denise my colleagues at Lucent) and to Libby and Jack. In the memoir, I've lost Jack. I am breaking free of Denise and a yearning for new Others. In this scene I discuss Rembrandt and my memoir with an imagined woman.

In my memoir, I include letters to Denise. She is one reader, one Other. I hope you will be another. Even at the time, I knew those letters would make the backbone of my memoir. I knew they would stand watch against all the portraying and enacting in the narrative that surround them.

Book Fatigue

I'm in the last 30 days of the book and I'm tired.  If the "art" of my book is depicting my grief, then I've read one too many fragmented emails to my daughter or to friends.  I don't know whether my fatigue matches the Reader's, and I should pay editorial attention to it.  Or is it just that I've been at these two rewrites for a year?

Since the clear conventional wisdom says I have too many words, when in doubt, cut.

I'll try the incremental approach--much like I do everything else. First I'll prune the bush. As close as I can to the trunk. What dies will eventually fall to the ground.  A strategy.  One that keeps me in it until The End.

In my session today, my therapist John, said he'd read my memoir as if it was a novel. Rick Rofihe, one my fiction workshop teachers, said I used "novelistic" techniques to tell my story. I guess my new agent query letter should reflect something of this. In one of the many ways this memoir is unconventional, the narrator (I) tells a story, with a protagonist and an antagonist, a beginning, middle and end covering a specific period of time, the year after Jack was killed.

Book Length

My word count is ~150,000. A quick survey of blog posts recommends 110,000 as the top end that I should shoot for. That seems consistent with guidelines from a couple of book contests I'm looking at--a maximum 400 pages. Check out Blue's indefeasible blog for example word counts, for example, on PEN/Faulkner Award winners.  Coincidentally, this 2008 post from Blue seems like her final post.

If I cut the epilogue, my word count is 148,292.

If I were to do some book-wide deletions, among areas to consider are:

• all email (Libby/lawyers ...)
• fugue ... no I think the sensual/physical companionship is important
• all excerpts from books (Damasio ...)
• dramatic cuts redundancy and chit chat from letters
• Sadoff visit
• long letters on the Dad's and on anger
• Lucent stuff ... Craig said interesting
• rework the "long" stuff ... when I read it it feels like a slog even to me
• Houston Law Review article
• bail argument
• Munchhausen

Here is one argument for self-publishing.  I can make a Director's cut.  I can rage war on my manuscript to submit it to contests, and then add content back in.  It won't be a complete waste of time. I'm sure that forcing myself to 70 pages would yield some very good ideas.

Distracted

Last Wednesday the Seattle Public Library and Smashwords offered a workshop on self-publishing: I Typed "The End." Now What? How to Turn Your Manuscript Into a Book. This was as disruptive to my revision process as Tony Hoagland's workshop where he insisted our journal writing should be in complete sentences.  Tony is not someone one can ignore.

One of the first things I had to do was go through my manuscript and delete the double spaces at the ends of sentences. And learn to compose new sentences without them.

This morning I've been trying to decide what size book I should publish: 5 1/4 x 8, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, or 6 x 9.

Yesterday I activated the Kindle app on my phone and laptop. I downloaded calibre.

I can't stop pouring over the Joel Friedlander's The Book Designer blog.

I've barely noticed the S&P 500's decline (not true). Why am I doing these things instead of writing? I'm returning to Beth Jusino's self-publishing workshop Wednesday night in Ballard for Selling Your Self-Published Book: Getting Your E-Book in Front of Readers.  Will I see you there?

Finished the (this) rewrite

About two weeks ago I finished the rewrite.  Since then I've been going through the draft mostly to catch up to the way I handle tenses ... the present of 2006 & 2007.  The past in moments of reflection.  I've also cleaned up some formatting.

Now I'll read through it again and hopefully tidy up some stuff.  I have left lots of comments and highlighted sections in the manuscript that I know I have to return to.  I don't know how other writers do it.  Do they force themselves to stay on a page, in a paragraph until that get the revision perfect?  Or do they plow ahead and hope a light bulb will go on sometime and the revision will be obvious when they return?  That's my method.  But it may lead to endless rewrites.

I think it is also time to resume sending off query letters to agents.

I gone through all my comments, deleted about 100 which were taken care of in the last couple of revisions.  I have ~200 left to consider.

More of the Richard Ford branch I pruned

Thursday, June 21

In Ford’s book now, Frank is sitting at a bar browsing the pages of a free advertising rag, “The Buyer’s Guide,” and comes across a framed box entitled “Profiles in Real Estate Courage.”  The story celebrates Frank Frantal getting back in the saddle selling real estate, a year after his son had been killed by a drunken snowmobiler in eastern PA.

In this strange state I for this moment find myself, and for reasons both trivial and circumstantial (the bar, the booze, the day, even Frank Frantal), my son Ralph Bascombe, age twenty-nine (or for accuracy’s sake, age nine) comes seeking an audience.[1]

It may go without saying, but when you have a child die—as I did nineteen years ago—you carry him with you forever and ever after.

I was with Ford here.

Though what has happened is that my life’s become alloyed with loss.  Ralph, and then Ralph being dead, long ago embedded in all my doings and behaviors.  And not like a disease you carry, that never gets better, but more the way being left-handed is ever your companion, or that you don’t like parsnips and never eat them, or that once there was a girl you loved for the very first time and you can’t help thinking of her—nonspecifically—every single day.  And while this may seem profane or untrue to say, the life it’s made has been and goes on being a much more than merely livable life.  It’s made a good life, this loss, one I don’t at all regret.  (The Frantals could not be expected to believe this, but maybe can in time.)

I was with the Frantals here, furious at the presumptuous words.

---

[1] Ibid., pg 344.

I had these excerpts in my memoir draft, because they were in my journal from 2007.  It was part of my unfolding life.  I was reading psychology and neurology books, that year, looking for an explanation.  I also read poems and novels.  Richard Ford wrote about losing a son; it resonated.  Richard Powers, The Echo Maker, resonated--a loved one gone crazy.

So why delete it?  This part is in June, towards the end of the book, and while it may depict my grief to the reader, I've already done quite a bit of that by now.  The reader will be looking for climax and denouement.  And I didn't have one ... Frank, his dead son Ralph, the Frantals didn't lead me to one ... and the reader might feel a bit jerked around if this late in my story I include these excerpts and then don't come back to them for any resolution whatsoever.

Now years later, I might write that alloyed with loss is an excellent way to describe my life after Jack was killed.  And perhaps after a full nineteen years I could echo Frank and say it's made a good life.