I am an early riser. Even when I am traveling, as I was last week, I feel that if I do not see the sun come up, then I have missed something important in my day. There is no other time of day when I feel more hope or more blessed. There are mornings from time to time when I sleep in an hour or two, but they are becoming fewer and fewer now because invariably on such days, I feel groggy and cloudy for the duration, usually simmering a headache on top of feeling as if I wasted the best part. I am energized in these hours by exercise. If I am not running, then I am at the gym. When I committed to fitness and better health a number of years ago, I chose to work out in the earliest part of the day in order to minimize the disruption of our family schedule and to simply get it done before I had amassed hours of excuses to justify skipping it. Now, I cannot imagine things any other way.
A good many of these early morning hours can be filled with the same haze of drudgery that finds us all and hangs about from time to time. On a lot of mornings, standing in the glare of the street lights shining down on the municipal parking lot where I meet my two running buddies, it can feel a bit like Groundhog Day, as if we had been making the trip around our five mile loop over and over again without stopping. There are few of these kinds of days for me, though. I am one who tends to take comfort in routine, the discipline of doing the same thing at the same time day after day in pursuit of a larger goal. But then, there are also the days that come careening out of nowhere, that shake you with an unexpected flood of pleasantness and your mind seems clearer and you breathe fuller and you are reminded of the good in the world.
In the midst of our family's low-country road trip last week -- we traversed the South Carolina and Georgia coasts for a few days -- I was treated to one of these simple and glorious mornings when so many small things just sort of fall into place. On the Wednesday of our week away, I woke just before sunrise and headed out for a run. Five miles of cruising around an island town by my own locomotion before anyone else had bothered to roll over made me feel as if I was the only man on Earth. After the run, I took a stroll on the beach, drying off in the breeze and enjoying the immense solitude of a wide and never-ending stretch of sand. Afterwards, it was a hot shower and good coffee and good quiet as my wife and our daughter finished their sleeping-in. And, a fantastic book, of course. As I have said before, it is the small pleasures in life that I relish.
As much as I love the South and the rural area that I call home, I am a ready and willing traveler and savor opportunities to visit cities. I am especially a fan of New York and I am especially a fan of good New York novels. It had been a while since I found one -- probably since Pete Hamill's Tabloid City, but my latest read, Amor Towles' Rules of Civility is a best-in-class. I am greatly intrigued by Towles as an author. He is not an author by trade, as his day job is his work in a Manhattan based investment firm. He wrote the book in the course of a year, devising a plan that echoes the grinding work toward a goal like I mentioned above, allowing himself two weeks to write and revise each of the twenty-six chapters of his book. Consequently, the story itself begins on New Years Day in 1938 and charts an auspicious year for its main character and the series of deliberate decisions and chance encounters that end up setting the course for the rest of her life. I enjoyed this book so much that it quickly became one that I wanted to read a little more slowly, prolonging the time I was able to spend with it. For someone who knows and loves New York, it was like a time machine tour of the city with visits to underground jazz clubs, dark, smoky bars, Westside apartments overlooking the park, jaunts out to the Hamptons and enough other spots in Manhattan to likely guide an entire weekend long tour. And, in what has become one of the markers for me of a really good New York novel, there is at least the mention of one of my all-time favorite places in the city, the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station.
And, of course, it is Towles' prose that is exceedingly satisfying, even as much as the setting in New York during a time charged with the anticipation of a great turning point in the history of the country and of the world. His writing is rife with clever metaphor and is delivered with a wink-and-a-nudge kind of humor that also makes good use of the slang of the day. You might be able to tell that I had fun with this book, but for all the sheer enjoyment, there is much to contemplate here about life--the connections that are forged in our lives and then fade from view, about the early parts of adulthood before the decisions we make set us down certain paths of no return, and about how things are hardly ever exactly as they may seem. There were a number of favorite passages I could have shared, but the one I will leave for you is particularly fitting, I think, given my own discussion above about an "ability to take pleasure in the mundane."
"My father was never much for whining. In the nineteen years I knew him, he hardly spoke of his turn in the Russian army, or of making ends meet with my mother, or of the day that she walked out on us. He certainly didn't complain about his health as it failed.
But one night near the end, as I was sitting at his bedside trying to entertain him with an anecdote about some nincompoop with whom I worked, out of the blue he shared a reflection which seemed such a non sequitur that I attributed it to delirium. Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee. Only decades later would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice.
Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane--in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath--she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger. What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be treated lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one's simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticement.
In retrospect, my cup of coffee has been the works of Charles Dickens. Admittedly, there's something a little annoying about all those plucky underprivileged kids and the aptly named agents of villainy. But I've come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine."
I am drawn to stories about immigrants. I am not sure why. I live a mere hundred miles or so from the place where I was born and raised. Still yet, journeys and themes of leaving home resonate soundly in stories told by my family. I grew up hearing about the immigration of my father's great grandparents to this country. Today, in fact, on a wall in my office hangs a print of an oil painting of the very ship on which they traveled. I look to it as a reminder of their toil, the cost of their hope for something better and to remind me when the pursuit of my own dreams seems too difficult to overcome that others before me have suffered far more.
But, I am not sure if it is necessarily this particular connection that draws me to books like the one I just finished, Forgotten Country, by Catherine Chung, who is of Korean descent and whose main character is a child of Korean immigrants. I am also a big fan of books about immigrant families to this country from India. Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake and two books of stories, Unaccustomed Earth and Interpreter of Maladies, has long been a standout for me. Lahiri's books and stories, as well as Chung's novel, are written from the perspectives of second generation immigrants, children of those who left their homes and who were born here or were very young when they arrived. Thus, they are caught in a middle, of sorts, often the only reliable guide for their parents through American culture and the English language. They are trapped irretrievably in the ways and customs of their native land, but struggle with a certain desperation to be truly American while at the same time remaining loyal to who they are. I suppose the unavoidable tension and conflict this dichotomy creates is what makes for all that good fiction.
After all, aren't we all simply trying to find our place in this world? Is that not what it comes down to in the end? Where do we fit? How do we get there? And, mostly our answers to those questions are not ever going to be clear cut or distinct. I find as I get older that there are few things in this world that are black and white. More often than not, we find ourselves in the gray area. Thus, we have compelling novels coming out of this kind of struggle, a struggle that is multiplied by a stark sense of being on the outside, when you do not speak the language or look very much like your neighbors.
And, isn't it perplexing, the fact that this country, created almost solely by people not from here, can be so terrifyingly strange and vicious to those who continue to long to live among us and with us? I am far removed from the initial infiltration of all sides of my family into this country, but it is telling that the story of my forebears' journey is still told, still held up among their descendants as vitally important to who we are. Five generations later their story remains one of seeking something better. It is the same quest for freedom and opportunity that brings anyone here.
The themes and issues related to immigration are not necessarily central in Chung's Forgotten Country, but they are unavoidable. Really, this is the story of a family, and the reader knows Chung has hit a vein of truth because they will recognize the same strains of discord and discontent that wind their way through all families. We see the worst and love the best of the people who populate our personal lives. It was the last few chapters of this novel, though, that moved me more than any writing has in a while. We know early on that the father in this story faces a near inevitable death from cancer, so I am not spoiling the book for you when I share that the last few chapters are about his slow wilting towards the end. The novel is worth reading if not for anything else other than the stumbling upon of intensely affecting passages like this:
"Here's a secret. You think there are limits, you think it can't get worse, there's just dead and that's it, but there's worse. There's your father's mouth, open, but he can't speak, and instead he makes sounds no person should make. There's the sore you discover on his back the size of your fist, and you don't know how long it's been there or how you missed it this whole time he's been lying there, arched and stiff, looking at you, everything in his face begging for help . . .
. . . The price you pay now is his mouth open, which is screaming and not screaming, the price is the gurgle in his throat, the tendons in his neck stretching and aching, and yes, yes, for the first time you wish for his death because you finally know you have been asking too much, and that neither of you can bear it."
I wish I could remember for certain which of Ernest Hemingway's books I read first. My best guess, about which I am nearly ninety percent sure, is that it was The Old Man and the Sea. What I do remember is this: the first time I read him I was changed. It was the first time I read something and became fully aware of the power of words. Before Hemingway, I read for a kind of passive enjoyment, but after Hemingway I was a serious reader. I also came to love short stories because of Hemingway and it was in reading his work that I first felt stirred to write something of my own.
Through my high school years I read everything I could by Ernest Hemingway and prowled used bookstores for old and battered copies of books by him that I already owned. Of course, it was in those years that I became overly serious anyhow and so, thinking of myself as a serious reader, whatever that means, and as some sort of artist was simply a part of trying to understand where I fit in the world at that age. As a young man it was nearly impossible to avoid devouring the overwrought masculinity of Hemingway and his characters. Fishing for marlin, hunting lions, drinking, cussing, soldiering, shooting, being noble and literate and gigantic -- it was a veritable wonderland for a teenage boy. It was not possible, of course, to model my life after his. But, it was altogether possible to model my writing after him and to learn from him that writing is work and takes discipline and sweat and that it asks you to give something completely of yourself.
I made my pilgrimage to his Key West home when I was seventeen and stared with awe into his writing room, taking deep breaths, trying to soak something of him into my soul. I walked slowly around that place in pure disbelief that I was standing where he had stood and where he had lived a piece of that mythical life of his. To this day I am hindered by an overdone reverence for him. He was a man who loomed large in life, but who looms ever larger as a legend, so much so that penetrating into the truth of who Hemingway was is no longer possible, but there are glimpses. Last year I read one of the more amazing books I have ever read, Hemingway's Boat, by Paul Hendrickson. In focusing on the years Hemingway owned his beloved Pilar, Hendrickson was able to cut a little closer, I believe, to the core of who Hemingway really was.
I came across recently a well known interview of Ernest Hemingway by George Plimpton, one of the founding editors of The Paris Review. Here is where Hemingway talks about his iceberg theory of writing -- that, like an iceberg, the largest and most important parts of a story lie underneath the surface. You see here also the Hemingway attitude and contempt, but there are snippets that are fascinating for what he says about writing and his writing process. You know from reading this blog that I am a student of the craft of writing, the art and process of it, and this interview is one of the very few records we have of Hemingway discussing it at length, if that can even be said. For, as Plimpton notes in the introduction,
"Many times during the making of this interview he stressed that the craft of writing should not be tampered with by an excess of scrutiny--'that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.'"
This near superstition that Hemingway had about his work is prevalent in his words here. He sees writing as both craft -- mysterious, artistic -- and discipline -- work.
I certainly hope you will read the interview, but here are my favorite excerpts.
"When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again . . . It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through."
"As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come."
"Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work."
"Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it."
PLIMPTON: What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?
HEMINGWAY: Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.
"But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness."
"It is hard enough to write books and stories without being asked to explain them as well. Also it deprives the explainers of work. If five or six or more good explainers can keep going why should I interfere with them? Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading."
"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."
"From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?"
