by
Cathy Curtis
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Elizabeth was the last survivor of her circle of women who were notable twentieth-century cultural critics, including Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag (who had died in 2004), and Hannah Arendt (1975). At her memorial service, Derek Walcott’s remarks—read by Hilton Als—described Elizabeth’s merry side. She was, he said, “more fun than any American writer I have known. She preferred gaiety to malice and had the laugh to go with it.”164 Joan Didion said, “every line she wrote suggested that moral courage required trusting one’s own experience in the world, one’s own intuitions about how it worked.” She had “a way of putting words together that could make the most subtle connection seem at once thrilling and matter-of-fact. . . . She never took for granted what is often presented as a given.” Elizabeth’s former student Darryl Pinckney recalled how she told the class that “there are really only two reasons to write: desperation or revenge” and that “the only way to learn to write is to read.”165 The December 16 memorial, held at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, was an intimate affair befitting Elizabeth’s under-the-radar existence at the time of her death. After the service, a group of her friends gathered for dinner at Café des Artistes in her building to celebrate her long and extraordinary life.166
Elizabeth wrote to Robert Silvers that she was working every day on her novel, making fixes “that gleam out like flares.”97 Revision was what she liked best about writing: “You’re up against your mind, you’re up against your experience, you’re up against the quality of your insights, you’re up against your command of language, up against your knowledge, you’re up against your moral vision.” [...]
[...] This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me is both "good" and "bad," and yet also neither: she's complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. [...] But I submit that that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from. A movie that requires that these features of ourselves and the world not be dreamed away or judged away or massaged away but acknowledged, and not just acknowledged but drawn upon in our emotional relationship to the heroine herself--this movie is going to make us feel uncomfortable, pissed off; we're going to feel, in Premiere magazine's own head editor's word, "Betrayed."
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’l lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.
For the last twenty years, at Syracuse University, I’ve been teaching a class in the nineteenth-century Russian short story in translation. My students are some of the best young writers in America. (We pick six new students a year from an applicant pool of between six and seven hundred.) They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space”—the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves—their strengths, weaknesses, obsessions, peculiarities, the whole deal. At this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.
I was an engineering student in college, at the Colorado School of Mines, and came to fiction late, with a particular understanding of fiction’s purpose. I’d had a powerful experience one summer, reading The Grapes of Wrath at night, in an old RV in my parents’ driveway in Amarillo, after long days working in the oil fields as what was called a “jug hustler.” My fellow workers included a Vietnam vet who, there in the middle of the prairie, periodically burst into the voice of an amped-up radio host (“THIS IS WVOR, AMARILLO!”) and an ex-con, just out of jail, who, every morning, in the van on the way to the ranch where we were working, would update me on the new and perverse things he and his “lady” had tried sexually the night before, images that have stayed with me ever since, sadly.
As I read Steinbeck after such a day, the novel came alive. I was working in a continuation of the fictive world, I saw. It was the same America, decades later. I was tired, Tom Joad was tired. I felt misused by some large and wealthy force, and so did Reverend Casy. The capitalist behemoth was crushing me and my new pals beneath it, just as it had crushed the Okies who’d driven through this same Panhandle in the 1930s on their way to California. We too were the malformed detritus of capitalism, the necessary cost of doing business. In short, Steinbeck was writing about life as I was finding it. He’d arrived at the same questions I was arriving at, and he felt they were urgent, as they were coming to feel urgent to me.
The Russians, when I found them a few years later, worked on me in the same way. They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.
-
Look away from the page and summarize for me what you know so far. Try to do it in one or two sentences.
-
What are you curious about?
-
Where do you think the story is headed?
Whatever you answered, that’s what Chekhov now has to work with. He has, already, with this first page, caused certain expectations and questions to arise. You’ll feel the rest of the story to be meaningful and coherent to the extent that it responds to these (or “takes them into account” or “exploits them”).
In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We’d better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning.
We might say that what’s happened over the course of this page is that the path the story is on has narrowed. The possibilities were infinite before you read it (it could have been about anything) but now it has become, slightly, “about” something.
Here, Chekhov gives us an opportunity to reconsider the scary term “structure.”
We might think of structure as simply: an organizational scheme that allows the story to answer a question it has caused its reader to ask.
Me, at the end of the first page: “Poor Marya. I already sort of care about her. How did she get here?”
Story, in the first paragraph of its second page: “Well, she had some bad luck.”
We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.
There should be a name for this moment in a story when, a situation having been established, a new character arrives. We automatically expect that new element to alter or complicate or deepen the situation. A man stands in an elevator, muttering under his breath about how much he hates his job. The door opens, someone gets in. Don’t we automatically understand that this new person has appeared to alter or complicate or deepen the first man’s hatred of his job? (Otherwise, what’s he doing here? Get rid of him and find us someone who will alter, complicate, or deepen things. It’s a story, after all, not a webcam.)
Having understood Marya as “she who is unhappy with the monotony of her life,” we’re already waiting for some altering presence to arrive.
And here comes Hanov.
This is the big event of the page, and notice this: having made Marya on its first page, the story didn’t stay static for long at all. (We didn’t get a second page merely explicating her boredom.) This should tell us something about the pace of a story versus the pace of real life: the story is way faster, compressed, and exaggerated—a place where something new always has to be happening, something relevant to that which has already happened.
So, this is both a realistic description (it’s spring, snow melts, roads get muddy) and a little poem that adjusts our understanding of the story.
Roughly speaking, we understand this description to indicate: “a steadily degrading situation.” The road is “growing worse and worse.” They are driving “into the woods.” There’s “no turning off.” There’s a cost to this trip (those twigs in the face).
This falls on us differently (with more foreboding, say) than a description in which they drove “out of the woods and into the bright sunshine” to find that “the road widened welcomingly” and “low-hanging flowers brushed against her cheeks softly as the cart gently rolled past a joyful peasant wedding.”