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GURGANUS
Plot confuses beginning storytellers by sounding so extruded, mechanical. Simply put, plot is what your characters most want and whatever they will do to get it. I am always attracted to characters having a hard time. Fiction can be summarized as “and then something went terribly, terribly wrong.” The more specific the hero’s trouble, the more unconventional his wish or obsession, the greater chance the story has of saying something new and helpful. Empathy is a writer’s pilot’s license. Without it, you are grounded. You aren’t creating characters. You’re judging them.
The twentieth century said, Nothing and no one is fully accountable anymore. Nothing can be trusted. But the outrageous fiction I love often passes as reliable truth-telling. Huck Finn, Bartleby, Lolita, Gatsby, Beloved. The very word narration derives from the Latin gnarus, meaning “to recognize or know.” So a narration is a knowing, a narrator a knower. A know-nothing narrator has no value to me. Confused narrators? They’re both endearing and essential. But someone setting out to mislead, he’s not my tour guide of choice. You shouldn’t travel with people you don’t truly love or whose credit cards bounce. Ergo, if I’m going to invest my life in inventing stories, I want them to have lasting value and as much meaning as I can possibly impart. They should be difficult but reliably so. And it’s no embarrassment if they’re about something.
INTERVIEWER
Let’s talk for a second about that sexual candor in your work. How have you arrived at such intrepid portrayals?
GURGANUS
Long research, sleepless nights. I want to offer my characters some sexual risk taking, a reflection of the way I once lived my life. I’ve learned so much about others, in and out of bed. Tennessee Williams swore he’d never created a character to whom he was not sexually attracted. I always urged my students to let their characters have erotic existences on the page. We put the poor things through such tortures, why not let them score a few Fridays and Saturdays per annum? What a protagonist eats and wears and how he decorates his rooms and treats his parents—yeah, all that’s important. But what she wants sexually and what she’ll risk to get some of it on a given weekend—that’s a fast, amazing way to show her true hidden identity. I’m pleased to see young novelists now risking far more sexual honesty. What subject is more mystical and entertaining? Most sexual exchanges are far more awkward, and therefore more endearing, than what you find online. Ordinary folks’ groping attempts I usually find far sexier than a couple of tanned models going at it in Malibu. A writer, a real writer, must be fully committed to those people somehow created on his pages. He cannot stand apart from them, cannot cartoon or disdain them. They are not quite villains, they are hardly saints. They are all citizens different from each other, each with a peculiar mission, varying sets of merits and flaws. They are partial talents striving toward something, but what? For sure, it’s a fascinating exercise, creating others and then trying to be responsible both for and to them.
I like to be up by six thirty. I guess I do this as proof to my father—dead for decades—that writing is really manly labor. He himself was an early riser. Like him I prefer those hours when dew is everywhere and birds are first auditioning their day’s likely song. I’m sure that if God created Eden he did it all with a single dawn. Early-hour innocence promotes ambitious, unrealistic hopes. You’ve just been dreaming. You have strong coffee and a piece of fruit. You reread what you got down yesterday. It’s important to leave yourself a handhold on the cliff you are inventing. Most days involve rewriting, boiling out the cornstarch, essentializing a gesture, paring down dialogue that’s grown too wordy or explicit. On schedule you go through familiar rituals that’ve at least produced satisfying results. Most days such work can go on till two or three. Then you get to do your banking or shopping or gardening. You again become a citizen of the sloppy capitalist realm after shoring up the secret world you’ve been home inventing in black and white.
When writing first drafts, the only music audible should be your own language and pulse—the metronomic drumbeat of your personal digestive percussion section. But, later, when I’m typing in handwritten changes, what sometimes speeds my fingers and cheers me is listening to solo keyboard work—played by Oscar Peterson or Glenn Gould, Monk, or Gershwin’s piano rolls. Reading the work aloud is another trade secret that can’t be stressed too often. Every sentence must make logical sense while offering its appropriate ghost song. Even someone reading your work silently should be always registering its music. I prefer chamber works. I love four instruments in conversation, arguing before briefly agreeing. That’s closer to the spirit of my work. Bach, Mozart, and Brahms are some of my friends I daily hear and learn the most from.
INTERVIEWER
I’m continually baffled by this. If the sentences don’t work—in their unexpected exactitudes, in their rhythms and freshness, in their allusiveness and connotative complexity—how does the story work? Is the story not being told with sentences?
GURGANUS
Exactly. And then there are writers whose sentences always surprise with their inevitable loving precision. Henry Green, early Evelyn Waugh, Walt Whitman, Toni Morrison, Chekhov, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Flaubert, Nabokov, Montaigne, Dickinson, Agee, Beckett, Melville, Günter Grass, George Eliot, García Márquez, our lists go on and differ year by year. I keep the works of my current deities in easy reach. Scanning even one of their living sentences can resurrect me like CPR. People talk of plot and character, but too few genuflect to the beauty and power of the actual single sentence itself.
<3
Allow me to apologize for my self-absorption. My virus
is your virus, ours is a virulent commonwealth.
We breed them together, refine them, borrow them
from friends and strangers, camels and bats,
as my body fights its infection the global corpus
combats our latest invader—retrovirus, ebolavirus, coronavirus—
we are besieged, we sicken, we counterattack, we die.
But illness leads you inward, away from the tribe,
the clan, the calculus of multitudes
vs. singletons that constitutes American thought.
Interiority is a mode of social distancing.
Here, in the hospital, I am me, alone, a being
frightened of its own mechanical failings,
like a bystander trapped in a broken elevator.
I feel, to myself, like a construct, a built thing, a city
in which I encounter my own bacterial hordes as strangers
passing silently through a maze of narrow alleys.
I watch my heart pulsing and I do not think,
That is me, there beats my engine,
I think, Ah, skillful machine, as if it were an iPhone.
I feel the body’s otherness all around me.
I compose the urgent letter in its envelope,
I carry the scepter in its keep.
It is a prison and a vehicle of emancipation, a strong horse.
My legs trot and canter, my hair grows unlicensed,
my lungs expand and contract automatically.
I am me, alone, but how do I happen
to be here? What am I
if not my body?
Who am I if not that it?
The doctors tell me the many ways I might die
but not how I come to be alive,
existence is a fever of unknown origin,
a pandemonium of desires—
I want to live, I want to breathe, I want
to see as vividly as Vermeer and as broadly as a common fly
and as encyclopedically as the mantis shrimp
though I cannot understand why
it would need to differentiate ten million colors
or how anyone could measure its ability to do so—
the Ishihara test?—simple questionnaires?
I want my heart to shake its defiant fist at the sky forever.
I want my soul to swell with sorrow as with joy.
Most of all, with a desperation that embarrasses me,
as if I had been jailed a decade, I want to go home.
<3
APPIAH
People didn’t argue with the main claims because those were footnoted to articles in biology journals, which they didn’t feel equipped to disagree with. But I think what they felt was, in saying that there were no races, you were denying what the social constructionists were asserting, which was that, of course, in everyday life, in a country like ours, people have experiences as if there were races. People are treated as if races existed, and if you take that away, it sounds as though you are denying that you yourself are a Black person. Now, of course, I was saying that, as a claim about biology, there aren’t any White people either.
INTERVIEWER
But that means what?
APPIAH
What I was denying was the thought that these social cleavages mapped onto interesting biological ones. I was denying that once you’d classified people in those ways you could then say powerful and interesting things about their other properties, how smart they would be, or how honest, or whatever. And that’s part of a package of ideas that was put together in the nineteenth century. I was not denying that people thought there were races—that’s obviously true—nor was I denying there was racism. Racism doesn’t require races, it just requires people to believe in races.
My students are debating the nature of the woman in Klimt’s The Kiss. Why, you ask, are students learning about The Kiss in Landscape Design and Management at the local community college? Because, according to my extremely rough quant research, their future clients will probably be the type of people who fucking love Klimt. Or, at least, the aesthetic of Klimt. We can infer that their clients will want to exude an aura of knowing and appreciating Klimt.
There are about ten minutes left in class, so most of the students have tuned out and are waiting for the conversation to find a natural conclusion. I’m waiting, too, my mind having drifted to climbing palm trees with a saw, the breeze in my hair, and then tonight, maybe some cheap wine or a couple beers with Liz before bed—such a good life.
Max, my favorite worst student, signals that it’s time to pack up by playing, aloud from his phone, a Sonic Youth song, the one that inspired K to record her first demo. Now it feels heavier on pick scrapes than I remember. And as it turns out, this song is also on the playlist K sent me.
“Max,” I say. “Not now. I hate that band.”
“But you’re wearing their shirt,” Max says, shaking his head.
I point to the Klimt again. “Now listen, one last question before we wrap. You walk into the prospective client’s house and you see this hanging above a white marble table in the foyer. Klimt’s aesthetic. How might it inform the imaginary lines your client desires outside their home? Like, for example, azaleas or no azaleas?”
this is so funny
It’s as if they’ve all figured out exactly what they want in life. It’s fucking great. I bang on the window. They stop and look. I give them the thumbs-up. “Bravo! I’m very happy for y’all!” I yell.
Rob shakes his head and points at his ear. I don’t think they can hear me. They go right back at it.
Then, just like that, my indulgence in this, all this that is apparently life now, is interrupted by thoughts of my sister, and how she wasn’t scared of anything. Or was it that she didn’t care about anything? Why didn’t she call me when Heather died? Or even years later when I met Liz and we got married?
I try to sink these thoughts. My life has somehow turned out too good, and I worry that it might get even better, and then, after it gets as good as it can get, somehow it will all be taken from me. This is a reminder that some grief and some fears that I pretend are no longer alive are very much alive in me, alive as much as my sister might not be alive very soon. Wrap your head around that and walk straight through the fucking day.
But here are all of my students, kissing each other in the quad. I know they can’t hear me, but I bang on the glass and yell anyway, “Does this mean I’m doing a good job?”
By the time the window defogs, they have disappeared.