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My second wife is young, the age of my first son, who played guitar too long and has made nothing of his life. She is beautiful, and sparkles like jewels when she is wearing none: skin like gold, white teeth and clear blue eyes. We have two small children. The more I see other children, the more I think mine are the most attractive. Since I realized I was too old for guitar and married, I have had two good lives, with two good wives. I am a lucky man. When I ride in the country, not in circles but moving forward, all alone, I think what could happen to leave behind a widow. Nothing much would have to happen; my brother is younger than I, and already dead. But sometimes I think I will fall from the horse, hit my head or break my spine, with no one to help. I would leave the widow that much sooner, and she would marry again and have two lives, too, with two husbands. She is young enough for that, the way she shines. And then sometimes I think I can outlive them all.
the last line kinda moves me
[...] I had not wanted a dog, but the children loved him. It was true they did not fight so much now. The day my wife brought him home, my daughter held the dog in her arms and said, “This is the happiest day of my life.” Children are whores. They will say anything. But I thought it could be true.
lol
Des Esseintes' Last Book
after Huysmans
It was red, which pleased him. Small
and hard, it fit in his palm
as if it loved him and was listening
to the strange, murmurous thumps
of his ambivalent heart. How sleekly
the pages brushed his skin, like sunlight
after a late afternoon bathe, when
suddenly the world is believable
and for an instant he does not want to die.
Yet the empty shelves still sing to him, those slim
alabaster brides, calling him in
from the garden, raising a glass of light.
Through the brambles, one breaks out onto
a rock-cut stair down to the sea.
pretty
As for the relationship of my fictional characters to me, their author, I suppose it would depend on which characters you mean. Each has a slightly different relationship, I believe—I hope. I assume you mostly mean the protagonists, who sometimes have the burden of having a couple of things in common with me and sometimes don’t. I’m never writing autobiography—I would be bored, the reader would be bored, the writing would be nowhere. One has to imagine, one has to create (exaggerate, lie, fabricate from whole cloth and patch together from remnants), or the thing will not come alive as art. Of course, what one is interested in writing about often comes from what one has remarked in one’s immediate world or what one has experienced oneself or perhaps what one’s friends have experienced. But one takes these observations, feelings, memories, anecdotes—whatever—and goes on an imaginative journey with them. What one hopes to do in that journey is to imagine deeply and well and thereby somehow both gather and mine the best stuff of the world. A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way. [...]
[...] In general, if a person were to watch me work—which I am grateful no one ever has—I suspect it might look like a lot of cutting and pasting of notes, stopping, starting, staring, intermittent flurries (as the weatherpeople say), sudden visitations (by invisible forces), the contemplation of the spines of various dictionaries and reference books stacked behind the computer, and much reheating of cold coffee (a metaphor and not a metaphor). But what it feels like is running as far as I can with a voice, a tuneful patch of a long, nagging idea. It is a daily struggle that doesn’t even always occur daily. From the time I first started writing, the trick for me has always been to construct a life in which writing could occur. I have never been blocked, never lost faith (or never lost it for longer than necessary, shall we say) never not had ideas and scraps sitting around in notebooks or on Post-its adhered to the desk edge, but I have always been slow and have never had a protracted run of free time. I have always had to hold down a paying job of some sort and now I’m the mother of a small child as well, and the ability to make a literary life while teaching and parenting (to say nothing of housework) is sometimes beyond me. I don’t feel completely outwitted by it but it is increasingly a struggle. If I had a staff of even one person, or could tolerate a small amphetamine habit, or entertain the possibility of weekly blood transfusions, or had been married to Vera Nabokov, or had a housespouse of even minimal abilities, a literary life would be easier to bring about. (In my mind I see all your male readers rolling their eyes. But your female ones—what is that? Are they nodding in agreement? Are their fists in the air?) It’s hardly news that it is difficult to keep the intellectual and artistic hum of your brain going when one is mired in housewifery. This is, I realize, an old complaint from women, but for working women everywhere it continues to have great currency.
Well, I have no relationship to her. I’ve never met her. And as for her work, I came to it too late probably for it even to have been an influence, which fills me with despair. I am merely a big fan. She is a great artist, alive and among us, and still writing as well as she did at the start—if not better, which is really saying something, since if you look again at Lives of Girls and Women, her first book, you will see it is a masterpiece, not like any other first book I can think of offhand. (You will also find in it many of the elements of Love of a Good Woman and other later fiction—the obsession with drowning, the allure and menace of men, the erotic moment as narrative pivot and the glimpses of wickedness that only the young are able to act upon to save themselves; the middle-aged must attempt to endure, make do, compromised and complicitous, with what they know.) Her later fiction is quite bold structurally—its handling of time is fearless and satisfying and not to be imitated. She seems over and over again to be writing a kind of ghost story. She is also witty and cruel (that is, unblinking) and painterly. Although she writes of the provinces, she is the least provincial writer I can think of. I’m not sure that this is always understood about her.
on Alice Munro
[...] looking at my life I can see there are the standard childhood years of feeling a little unseen, which is misunderstanding of a fundamental sort and which typifies the female experience and is actually good for writing (as well as espionage) but bad for life. Most things good for writing are bad for life. “May your life be not very good material” is a blessing I offer students and small babies. Another writer friend of mine is fond of leaning over bassinettes and offering “may you never be reviewed by Michiko Kakutani.”
[...] the moment you give yourself permission to do it, which is a decision that is both romantic and bloody-minded—it involves desire and foolish hope, but also a deep involvement with one’s art, some sort of useful self-confidence, and some kind of economic plan. One’s life, especially one’s artistic life, is an interplay of many things and the timing of encouragement—from teachers or parents—is also one of the most important elements. Although both my parents are creative people in their way, I was not especially encouraged by them, which might have been good. I certainly don’t blame them. I think they believed you threw things at your children— lessons, books, music—and then let the children sort it out, that if you were too present or too committed to a child’s accomplishment in any area, the child would run away. This, of course, is not really true. Or rather it’s not extremely true. But I received most of my initial encouragement in college, from professors, and by then I was ready to absorb it. I didn’t have the financial freedom to be a writer and have always struggled with that, but I also knew I didn’t want to find myself sixty-five years old and ruing the moment in my youth when I became prematurely practical. I wasn’t at all sure whether I would be able to survive as a writer for the rest of my life. But I decided to keep going for as long as I could and let someone else lock me up for incurable insanity.
similar to what im always saying to myself about being bold while i'm young and still have the guts
He sighed with relief, listlessly checked his watch for the third or fourth time and frowned at the continuing nonappearance of his train. As he did so, his right hand semiconsciously sought out his gut, cupping and probing the surplus flesh as though searching for a key to its existence, some way perhaps to disentangle himself from it. Four years ago, at thirty-one, he had been slim, even skinny. Back then, not in truth so long ago as it seemed, his twin passions had been the flesh and the mind. More specifically, his loose-hipped girlfriend, Lucilla, and Carrying the Can, his PhD dissertation on television comedy. But ever since The Can had been published to quite favorable reviews, leading to both his appointment as Lecturer in Ocular Studies at the University of the Metropolis and, on the strength of his elation, to a proposal and consequent engagement to Lucilla, his feelings had begun to alter. All the energy he had once expended on lust and learning had been diverted into his feelings for food. He did not binge and purge, he was not exactly a problem eater, but dinner, he realized rather sadly, had become his favorite part of the day-more important than either the work that preceded it or the sex that, albeit less and less these days, came afterwards. The real turning point, he knew, although he shuddered to think of it, had come three years earlier, five months after the publication of The Can and as he was beginning research for his next book project, when it had become plain to Chester, suddenly and painfully plain, that he had reached the limits of his own cleverness. He was sitting in his office one afternoon reading an article on the phenomenology of video nasties when he realized with a start that it made no sense to him at all-the prose seemed, all of a sudden, as dense and pathless as an old-growth forest.
[...] His father, an electrical appliance salesman, was in himself a man of moderate wit and cheerfulness, but his profession had encouraged him to explore such unnatural extremes of affability that by the time he returned to the family home at six or seven o’clock he had nothing left for his wife and children but brevity and sourness. [...]