Re-reading Virginia Woolf or the Invisible Edifice of Narrative

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. – Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room

                The benefit of having a squirrel-like attitude towards possessions is finding forgotten nuts of the literary variety come spring. Last week as I was scanning my bookshelves looking for something to read, there it was, on the bottom shelf in the hall, right next to some hardcover editions of early Cormac McCarthy novels and my set of Proust—a battered old paperback copy (probably picked up off the street) of Jacob’s Room and The Waves by Virginia Woolf. I have been vaguely contemplating re-reading her because I’m pretty sure I didn’t get it the first time. All that I possessed from my first reading was  a vague mental picture of women on a ship, seen though some kind of gauzy film that obscured precise outlines and definitions.

 As I started Jacob’s Room this time, I noticed the poetic way Woolf fills in the story quickly. A young man is growing up, goes to college, and is trying to find his true place in the world. A typical coming of age story, right? Familiar, predictable even.  So I started to wonder about what story she was trying to tell. What made it possible for her to write a novel is this genre, usually so personal, without it being about herself?

                And then—one of those aha moments. Anyone can slip into this kind of narrative, using her own imagination, bits and pieces of the lives of people she knows, and possibly a bit of wishful thinking about the life she would have liked to live. We, her readers, enter into the narrative without needing to know these details. We all already know the story. A few short descriptions—a certain type of hat, how the women are dressed at a party, what kind of beverages are served when—and we fill in the appropriate time period, social class, geographic location, and all the other narrative variations that make one story differ from another.

                There are two reasons, I think for this innate understanding of narrative structure. The first one is obvious. We know the story because we’ve seen, read, heard it before. We are all schooled, either formally, or by our own experiences, or both, in how a story works. In Woolf’s case, according to her nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, she had the run of the family library at an early age. She was considered too delicate for advanced schooling, but since she came from one of the most artistic and literary families of her time, she probably learned more from staying home. By the time she started to write, she had read the great English literary figures who had gone before her. Indeed, it had always been the family’s assumption that she would be a writer.

                But I believe there is a deeper reason that Woolf and other authors like her can build a story with just a few words or phrases. It is because we, her readers, live in our own narrative world so completely that we recognize the trajectory of other lives, even in fiction. Think of all of the coming-of-age novels you have read, even the ones forced on you in high school or college. The plots are all the same—the protagonist (sometimes the author, thinly veiled) escapes from some horrific childhood trauma, or just the loneliness of being misunderstood, into the outside world where, after many wryly humorous adventures, he or she finds something meaningful that helps them go on living. Now read a memoir of anyone’s young life, or write your own. Same story! And we never tire of reading these stories, just as we never tire of living them.

                The owner of the metaphysical book store where I used to work has a standard comment whenever anyone complained about life. He would listen to the whole sad story—overdue bills, bad weather, not enough hours in the day—and then reply that, whatever it was, it had to beat the alternative. Maybe that’s why we can’t wait to tell each other our stories, as mundane and, at the same time filled with pain as they may be. The sound of our own voices, or the scratch of pen across paper (I don’t know about the tap of keys because I don’t write that way, nor do I know the feel of moving text with my finger) reminds us that we are alive, when it just as easily could be otherwise.

               

               

Midnight in a Parallel Universe

            I don’t see many movies these days, either out at the theater or at home. One of the saddest things about being a responsible adult is the lack of recreational time, and( I guess it’s obvious) I tend to spend what little I get reading. I did go through an art cinema stage when I was first in college, and there were still lots of funky, relatively cheap movie houses in town. One program I especially remember was a Woody Allen triple bill of Annie Hall, Interiors, and Love and Death. Now that was six hours plus well-spent, and it cemented my love for Allen’s type of humor and his filmmaking abilities. That was back in the 80’s, and, due to the above-mentioned responsibility problem, I have to admit I can’t even name any of his more recent pictures. I guess both he and I have changed, because I really didn’t like Midnight in Paris. I know. I am probably one of the few people (to my dismay, my in-laws are in that number) that can make such an outlandish statement. I mean, look at the awards! My husband says that, as usual, I took it way too seriously, expecting a literary treatise instead of a romantic comedy. Even just listening to him describing the parts he especially liked made me appreciate it more than I did at the theater.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it is difficult for me to imagine those authors—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and especially Gertrude Stein—as characters in anyone else’s story other than their own. I, too had my time, brief but glorious, of wandering around Paris in a literary daydream, trying to catch a glimpse of those lives, which I felt I knew intimately from all of those literary biographies I’d been devouring since about age thirteen. And yet, except at Shakspeare and Co., I never got any closer than I had by reading their books.

So, throughout the movie, I had the sense that my heroes were being used. Also, I have never been completely comfortable with the concept of time travel. It is often used as a literary device, a good shortcut when an author wants to ensure that a character has information that they couldn’t possibly get in the normal unfolding of uninterrupted time. My favorite (not from the written page) is from the original Star Trek series. Captain Kirk falls in love in the past and saves the object of his famously fickle affection from a seemingly untimely death which changes the present so much that his entire ship disappears. Cute, but my problem, even as a kid, allowed the special privilege of staying up late with Dad to watch TV, was they why didn’t he disappear, too? I didn’t understand contingency then, but even at that early age, the whole plot line seemed a little too convenient. It felt like cheating.

            Maybe this is my problem with the film Midnight in Paris. The Paris of the 1920’s is so perfect, so visually real and enticing that the conflict, the decision that the characters must make to stay in their own time seems false. What incentive does the protagonist have for deciding to live his present-day life? His fiancée is a bitch, his in-laws are just waiting for him to fuck up so that they can say I told you so. He doesn’t even seem to notice the woman he meets looking at old Cole Porter records. Whereas in the past the he is lucky enough to escape to for a few nights, he hangs out with gorgeous, available women who think he’s cute, and no lesser giants than Hemingway and Fitzgerald tell him he’s a great writer. In what universe doesn’t he just stay there forever?  I would.

Reading Old Paperbacks

Some time back in the early 90's, my tiny city apartment became the second-to-last resting place for old paperbacks. Their former owners had died, or moved on. I have to admit that I bought some of them, because they had been donated to the thrift stores I frequent, and I couldn't bear to leave behind all those collected editions of the great literature of the world. As long as they're still readable, I don't have the heart to throw them away.

I'm not talking about the now-ubiqutous trade paperbacks, with their artistic covers and skyrocketing cover prices. I'm talking about the lowly mass-market ones, now despised by some for their association with romances and bad bestsellers. They sprang into being in 1935, with the almost overnight success of Penguin. Most of the ones that I have date from the '60's, and sport lurid or psychedelic covers. It is impossible to underestimate the explosion of knowledge and art that these books brought to the public arena. Many of them have cover prices of less than a dollar. It would seen anything that cheap that was made that long ago, and out of paper, would be long gone by now, fifty years later.

And yet, many of them are still in circulation, available at library sales and flea markets worldwide.Now I am determined to read as many of them as I can, prompted by the experience of finding a copy of Anais Nin's A Spy in the House of Love that I didn't know I had. If you've read any of my past posts, you can probably imagine that I went through an Anais Nin stage in high school, and you might even surmise that her diaries stated me writing my own journals, of which this blog is a kind of public extension.

Which brings up the whole subject of whether or not knowing the backstory of a novel changes the reading of it--but that's another post...

At any rate, I was entranced by this novel that I had forgotten, and now wonder what other treasure are hidden in the mess. I'll keep you posted.

Reading Literary History

After I finally managed to post my first entry, I began to wonder why it took me so long plunge into the world of blog-writing. Of course, there is the fear of public exposure that I think most of us share, the anxiety dream we have of showing up for an important meeting in our underwear or not being able to find the appropriate classroom on our first day at a new school. I am aware that blogspot is a very public forum (at the same time, I also realize that the chances of large numbers of people actually reading this are laughably small). But I think there’s more to it than shyness or the social awkwardness of one who spends most of her time with books.

I’ve been reading a lot of literary histories that cover the first half of the 20th century, and I just feel so much more at home in the atmosphere they describe—one in which literature and what people were writing was of major concern. I can read for hours about who lived where in New York, or who knew who in Paris, and then construct a about how wonderful it would be to live the literary life—mornings writing, afternoons in the café, and nights in rapt conversations in bars and salon. But, after a little of that, I start questioning my own premise. For although it’s easy to quote statistics about how little most people read these days, or the failure of our education system to impart even the most basic literary knowledge to our youth, I can’t help thinking that these problems (if they are defined as such) are perennial, and not simply a product of our digitalized , 21st century lives.

Somehow, I have a feeling that it would be difficult to find an example of any historical time when the number of people who read and talk about, say contemporary poetry was more than a small percentage of the population. First of all, such a group would necessarily need to spend large amounts of time sitting around reading, and how do you pay for that?

This is made clear by reading memoirs from the aforementioned period in American literature (my favorite)--the years between the two world wars. Early expatriates, like Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein were living off of family money and their (wildly different) salons were well-established in Paris by the end of the World War I. Communication was slow, but manuscripts could still make it back to the tastemakers in New York, and there was plenty of cross-pollination between the two literary capitals. I have always been more attached to Paris, maybe because I read about it back in the early, formative years of my life, and maybe also because many of the leading players were women. I’m romanticizing, but it seems the perfect nexus in which to create literature.

Our own time sadly, does not. For me it’s impossible to imagine someone like Djuna Barnes working at Starbucks or Ernest Hemingway spending all day in front of a computer screen. (Many of the people involved did have to work for a living, of course. I just bought a biography of Janet Flanner, who wrote a column about Paris for the New Yorker.) It is well within the realm of possibility to imagine that you favorite pierced and tattooed barista, or that Financial District refugee is full of wild poetry, if only they had the time to immerse themselves.

Remembering Fritz Leiber and Margo Skinner

I was thinking the other night about my short stint as assistant to Fritz Leiber and Margo Skinner. It was, like many of my work situations, a missed blessing. Of course I needed the money, any money—for even shy writer types need to eat, breathe (which for me means allergy medication) and pay rent. I was well into my thirties by this time, so I was more than familiar with what is usually summed up by one sentence in literary biographies. “He (or she, as in my case) worked as a waiter, tutor, and auto mechanic.” I mostly temped, which in those days usually meant answering the telephone, and sold T-shirts to tourists. Once in a while, I had a paying theater gig. Theater was what I had studied in college. I didn’t think about writing anything except a journal until I was almost thirty, and hadn’t started my bookselling career yet.
But, as I’ve already written (see “My Life as a Roving Bookseller.”) I had always been a reader, and the kind of lives writers lived held an endless fascination for me. Fritz Leiber was an actual well-known writer, who just happened to be hero and mentor to the guy that I was dating at the time (and am now married to). He had recently found a full-time day job, so I took over the assistant’s work.
And that brings me to the mixed part of the blessing. Margo Skinner, Fritz Leiber’s partner, as we say these days, was an unapologetically difficult person for me to be in the same room with. First of all, she smoked cigarettes like crazy, and wouldn’t allow anyone to open any of the windows, for fear that somehow her cats would fall out. The air purifier that I bought to try to provide myself with breathable air was woefully inadequate for the task, and five minutes into a two to three hour “visit” I would have a blinding headache.
But that was only the surface reason for my discomfort. It was something I could only put my finger on after reading Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents, about Paul Theroux’s relationship with V.S. Naipaul. Staying something bothers you about a person usually says more about you than it does that person. Margo was not upset by the fact that she was a drunk and lived in a type of squalor that is not based on poverty. If I was horrified (which I was), it could only be because I had a tendency to want to tell other people how to live, or was possessed by a deep-seated fear that someday I would end up in the same dire straits.
Fritz had already suffered a stroke, and had always been a man of few (spoken) words. He was still writing a monthly column for Locus magazine based on the Farmers’ Almanac listings of moon phases and planetary movements. They were oddly lyrical, quirky little pieces about 500 words long. It was a painfully slow process to produce them. Fritz's speech had been affected by the stroke, and was so slow that I could type from his dictation. This was before the personal computer, so everything we worked on was typed on an IBM Selectric, and mistakes had to be corrected with Wite-Out. I have never been a particularly accurate typist, so this work put me in a state that was a strange combination of boredom and anxiety-ridden panic.
After two or three days, a rough draft would be produced. Then the world would begin—the work of writing. I would read the piece aloud, very slowly. For long stretches, it would seem as if he wasn’t even listening.
Then suddenly—“Change ‘almost’ to ‘closely resembling,’”
The air would electrify, as if the voice had come form some unearthly source. And, even though the smallest change meant a complete retyping, I would be ecstatic. Whatever he changed would always be exactly right, exactly the opposite of a hastily-written, throwaway article, done because the writer needed the money. However small, however difficult, it was literature.
“Read it again,” he would growl.

My Life As a Roving Bookseller

Like many lovers of literature, I first discovered the world of books at the public library. There wasn’t a single book store in the little town I grew up in—no cafes where people sat around drinking coffee and reading, no hip poetry readings. With no TV in our house, and only one movie theater in town (and, of course, no internet yet), the library saved me from my family’s one shelf of TimeLife books and children’s classics. The library was multitudinous abundance. I remember running my fingers over the packed shelves, title after title, and feeling down my spine, the tingle of delicious anticipation. I was free to take them home, pore and puzzle over them until I was done, returned them and get more, forever. I vowed to read everything in the children’s section--in alphabetical order, thus demonstrating an early appreciation for how books are best arranged. Soon my nascent editorial voice began to make itself heard, allowing me to skip over the Hardy Boys in favor of Ozma of Oz.

Far too soon I reached the Z’s, and felt for the first time that panic of having nothing to read. The local librarian must have caught wind of my dilemma. She allowed me to begin in the adult section, having surreptitiously asked my parents’ permission, and I was truly launched into the world of literature. I soon became aware that there were books that were considered “classics,” necessary reading for the educated, and I diligently began to plow my way through my first backlist, probably one of those long litanies of titles from the back pages of old Penguins or Modern Classics.

What could have motivated an eleven-year-old to tackle the likes of Vanity Fair and Down and out in Paris and London? The details of much of that early reading are lost to me now (freeing me to re-read, if I so choose), but how I felt while doing it has never left me. I fell into those other worlds as if I were plummeting down a deep well. I was no longer a young girl from a tiny little town in rural California. I was a wily French peasant (Balzac) or Elizabeth Bennett or a randy college professor from the back East (Updike, among others). I was literally gone for hours, and on weekend I read more than I slept, ate, or talked to my family.

The next time I had that feeling of limitless literary possibilities, I was in Paris, and walking into Shakespeare and Company for the first time. I was in the same world as my heroes the expatriate Left Bank writers, poets, editors, and publishers of the early Twentieth century. The aged bookseller, famous for sometimes letting itinerant writers crash on the premises, must have thought I was yet another crazy youngster from the sticks, for the few seconds that I registered in his mind, before he returned to that deep river of words in which he lived. He was happy to sell me a somewhat battered copy of Madame Bovary, gruffly rebuffing my sad attempt at conversation, and I was back out on the street. I was complete—I had a book.

I came to make my life in San Francisco pretty much the same way. I seem to be perfectly suited to spending much of my time in a very small room, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves more or less crammed full. The business part consists of a telephone and a computer/cash register with the occasional strange visitor who may or may not have some vague connection with the written word. I move books from place to place: out of boxes into lines of alphabetical order; out of people’s hands into neat plastic bags; on to the hold shelf, banded and tagged with the names of mysterious future customers.

Lately, I have (finally) begun to wonder why, why I do it, and why it seems so important. It seems we are getting further and further away from the idea that books are important or have value in this world of instant information. Perhaps we are confused about their basic nature, just as we sometimes confuse information with knowledge. (I am sometimes shocked by how what I don’t know is defined by what I haven’t read.) I have seen the light that goes on in people when something they have read excites them and they have to talk about it. I’ve felt that feeling myself.

What would happen if that kind of excitement was celebrated instead of ignored? What if there were actual physical places (not online) where a good conversation, an open-ended exploration of the ideas embodied in our common literature, was taking place? Would you want to participate?