Unless It Moves the Human Heart

by Roger Rosenblatt

  “It’s certainly true that memory is no protection against pain,” Donna says. “It usually causes pain. But I’ve often wondered if this wasn’t a good thing, after all. Even if you dream up a painful memory, it’s only the facts you’re distorting, never the feeling. In some ways, I think we punish ourselves with memory, to feel as deeply as we can, to feel pain.”

  “Like The Pawnbroker,” says Veronique, referring to the story of the former concentration camp prisoner who pushes his hand down into the long metal pike that holds store receipts, in order to feel anything again.

  “But if memories are fiction and personal essays are made of memories,” says Inur, “then we’re back to no difference between short stories and essays.”

  “Except,” says Nina, “that we believe our memories to be true. We don’t consciously invent them.”

  “I think we may use memory in essays to appear better than we are,” says Sven, “even when we paint ourselves as fools or cowards. The recognition of foolishness or cowardice becomes an exhibition of bravery. We fess up. We look good.”

  “So we create a sympathetic character in ourselves,” says Robert, “remembering ourselves as worse than we actually were.”

  “I think memory is like the imagination,” says Diana. Veronique, George, and Jasmine murmur assent. “We remember some things the way we wish they had been, facts suiting our feelings.”

  “We may be better off not remembering when writing a personal essay—at least not making the whole essay out of memory.” They ask me what a personal essay should be made of, if not memory. “Something new, something not seen by the writer before. If you try to write an essay about the house you grew up in, you’ll only get so far before you start to repeat yourself and run out of steam. But if you begin your essay in a new house, something you’re seeing for the first time, your writing will be full of surprises. It will be alive. After you’ve written about the new house, you then can go back to the old one.”

  “That’s what happens in real life—whatever that may be,” says Suzanne. “You see something new and it triggers the memory of something in the past. But that’s mysterious, too. It’s as if you deliberately came upon the new site in order to bring something back.”

  “ ‘The muffled mystery of lost paradises.’ ” They look curious. “It’s a phrase in Dan Halpern’s book about writers talking about painters. Camus is writing of Balthus. He says that the most ordinary daily things are heaving with past mysteries.”

  “Not always,” says Diana. “Whenever I’m looking for a subject, I usually screw it up. I think: There must be something in that flower, in that bridge, to carry me into a thought. And as soon as I do that, I fail. The muffled mystery to me is what we were talking about with our short stories—how subjects come to you out of nowhere.”

  “Because we trust invisible things,” says Veronique.

  “You know,” says Robert, “in reading my classmates’ essays, I found that I liked them as people. And I wondered if that was important in the writing of personal essays—to establish yourself as likable.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t want to confuse the charming, delightful, brilliant first persons in your essays with the despicable idiots who wrote them . . .” A round of boos and hisses. “But yes, definitely. If you create a likable ‘I’ in your essays, the readers will trust you. After that you can take them anywhere.”

  “There are several ways to be likable,” says Inur. “You can be strong-likable, intelligent-likable—”

  “Weak-likable,” says Jasmine.

  “You mean human, frail, vulnerable? You’re so right. There’s nothing like the confession of human frailty to draw the reader straight to you. Any of you ever read Edwin Muir’s Autobiography?” They have not. I urge them to get it, not only because Muir writes about himself so gracefully, but also for its appeal to common human frailty. Reluctantly, Muir undergoes psychoanalysis. But through it he finds out something indispensable and right: “I saw that my lot was the human lot, that when I faced my own unvarnished likeness I was one with all men and women, all of whom had the same desires and thoughts, the same failures and frustrations, the same unacknowledged hatred of themselves and others, the same hidden shames and griefs.”

  “You may make yourself likable simply by creating a situation in which we wish you safety, or happiness,” says Diana.

  I ask them to look at the Gayle Pemberton essay. I came upon this essay many years ago. I got in touch with Gayle to tell her how I loved it. At the time she was teaching at Princeton. She then went on to chair the African American Studies Department at Wesleyan. We chatted, and became friends. “One of the myths about the social life of writers is that we all hate each other. Not true.”

  “Who else would put up with a writer but another one of the tribe?” says George.

  “You said it. And we all go through the same experiences. I wanted to be Gayle’s friend because of the woman she showed herself to be in this essay.”

  She wrote “Do He Have Your Number, Mr. Jeffrey?” when she was working for a caterer in Los Angeles. It takes its title from a throwaway line in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The line is spoken over the phone by an unseen, yet clearly black babysitter, telling Jimmy Stewart that his cop friend is out for the evening. The line could have been spoken by anyone, but Hitchcock chose to give it to a black girl, to indicate servitude and ignorance of the language. Gayle’s point was to show how casually, how carelessly, such insults are delivered. I ask Veronique to read the first page and a half of the essay aloud. When she finishes, I ask the class what the writer tells us about herself in describing her catering experience. They say she shows herself as responsible, sensible, loyal, well-mannered, highly educated, sensitive, and alert to her surroundings. “Anything else we know about her?” I ask. They stare. “What does she not tell us in the first page and a half?”

  “Oh,” says Robert. “I get it. She doesn’t tell us she’s black.”

  “Why does she wait this long to let us in on this essential piece of information?”

  “So that she won’t raise hackles,” says Ana. “Or prejudices.”

  “Because she does not trust us,” says Jasmine.

  “Because she’s good,” says Sven.

  “Suzanne seems to be writing a little memoir,” says Kristie. “What’s the difference between a memoir and a personal essay?”

  “Not much. Both are written on two levels at once—the events and actions of a life and the emotions they evoke. Both take chaotic material and give it coherence. A memoir is always a memoir. A personal essay can be that, but also something else. It can use memory to make a point, and it is usually more rational. A memoir takes advantage of the irrational. Diana’s essay contains something of each.” I ask Diana to read from her piece that centers on the Mexican workers on the East End. It is not about the poor Mexicans per se, but rather about her pursuit of an MFA in a world where real people have real problems.

  “Were you happy with your essay, Diana?” I usually ask this question of the students after we discuss their work, in part to let them have the last word. A certain amount of self-satisfaction is good for them at this stage, and most of them don’t misuse or confuse it with total success. Often they say “no” or “mostly.”

  “I was surprised how alive it felt writing it,” says Diana. “I haven’t written many essays, and I guess I always thought of them as spiritless and dry, even plodding. You hear this bass voice in the room—‘You’ve got to sound smart.’ But when I got into the piece, it felt no different from writing a short story. I had the same thrill of riding a runaway horse.”

  “Diana uses her own life to make an argument or support a cause,” says Sven. “So I guess it’s part memoir, part essay.”

  I agree. “But a pure memoir meanders without achieving meaning. It avoids meaning—more like fiction that is real.”

  “Frank McCourt’s books,” says Robert. “Rest his soul.” Frank was the beloved centerpiece of our w
riting program for six years.

  “Yes. And Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, too, which is called fiction but is really his life. At the end of the book, Brown steps back and recalls being a child and never wanting to leave the front stoop from which he could see all the real and unbelievable things that went on in the streets. ‘You might see somebody get cut or killed,’ he wrote. ‘I could go out in the street for an afternoon, and I would see so much that, when I came in the house, I’d be talking and talking for what seemed like hours. Dad would say Boy, why don’t you stop that lyin’? You know you didn’t see all that. You know you didn’t see nobody do that. But I knew I had.’ ”

  “When one is writing of a tragedy, is it best to simply stay with the facts?” says Kristie.

  “Yes. It goes back to my preference for restrained writing in general. If you have the goods, there’s no need to dress them up. Your reader will do that for you.”

  “What do you mean?” asks Suzanne.

  I tell them something I have only recently realized: “One thing you learn the more you write is to leave much of the work up to the reader, the way great movie actors leave the work to the audience. Minimalists like James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, or today’s actors like Anthony Hopkins and Tom Wilkinson—they just say their pieces and the moviegoers fill in the emotions. A good writer does the same thing. If you have something worthwhile to say, and you just say it, plainly and clearly, your reader will add in his or her life, and feel it personally. Your reader will think that it was you who gave him the depth of feeling that’s unearthed. But all you did was hint at it. It was he who dredged up the great heartbreak, or delirium, or outrage at injustice. You merely created the sparking words.”

  “So does the personal essay involve two people at once? Is it personal two ways?” asks Jasmine.

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way. But I think you’re right. Every life contains every other life, just as Edwin Muir discovered. The fact is complicated enough, without overloading it with excess language.”

  “I wonder if we write to learn that, over and over, about lives containing other lives,” says Sven.

  “To learn it and to make the best of it. All good stories, fact and fiction, end badly. We write to find out how to live before the bad ending happens.”

  “How cheerful,” says Kristie.

  “Which do you think is more true, closer to the truth—an essay or a story?” asks Ana.

  “That’s an interesting thought,” says Nina, “since the essay is supposed to be true.”

  “In the end, both are true and untrue. You live your life, like Claude Brown. You don’t believe a word of it. And you believe nothing else.”

  Chapter 5

  Writing Like a Reader

  Before we go on to poems—I had asked the students to write their poems for the class after this one—I want to take up a question Robert asked me as we were finishing the last class on essays. At our ninth meeting, I ask Robert to tell the others what he’d said to me.

  “It was about the connection between reading and becoming a writer,” he says. “Our cranky professor is forever belittling us for how little we read or have read. . . .” Professor Cranky smiles with satisfaction. “But I wonder, does it really matter how well-read a writer is?”

  “How well-read was Shakespeare?” says Nina. “Didn’t they say he had little Latin and less Greek?”

  “Did Donne learn to write by reading someone else?” asks Donna.

  “Would that he had,” says Jasmine.

  “So you think there’s no connection between reading and writing? I can prove that’s not true. But you may be right in questioning the direct relationship. And then there’s the special selective way that writers use the reading they do. I don’t want you to be overeducated—”

  “No danger in that,” says Robert.

  “I want you to read just enough to do your job better.”

  “You think the influence of what we read is indirect?” says Ana.

  “It is for me. When I was writing my satirical novels, I was rereading Nabokov at the same time. I wasn’t reading him for purposes of imitation. I never could be directly influenced by Nabokov since he outstrides me at every turn. He is simply too great a writer. But I did like having him at my side as I wrote. He was good company, the best. It was like hanging around a superior mind. You can never equal that mind, but you strive to do your best, and not to embarrass yourself in his presence. I just wanted him in the same room.”

  John Updike’s idea of influence was more general still. In a pamphlet about The Writing Life, he wrote: “Of course, everything you read of any merit at all in some way contributes to your knowledge of how to write. But my first literary passion was James Thurber. He showed me an American voice and a willingness to be funny. I wrote him a fan letter at the age of twelve, and he sent me a drawing which I’ve carried with me, framed, everywhere I’ve gone since.” Thurber’s “American voice” was probably not the first such voice Updike read, but the “willingness to be funny” is a wonderful phrase to attribute to Thurber, or to anyone, because writing humor is risky business. It takes courage to assume that readers will laugh, especially at intelligent humor. Still, Thurber showed Updike what could be done, not how to do it.

  “You’re basically talking about inspiration, not direct influence,” says Robert.

  “That’s right. I don’t believe that the influence is direct. Some do.”

  In Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose, clearly a superb teacher of writing, describes how reading certain authors with her students helped things she was writing herself at the time. Going over Joyce’s “The Dead” showed her how to write a party scene in which each of the partygoers has something important to say. The stories of Isaac Babel showed her how to set up a story that was to end in catastrophic violence. Babel preceded his violent scenes with “a passage of intense lyricism,” to increase the effect of the violence to follow by contrast. Francine followed suit, she writes, and it worked for her. I can see that happening, but it has never happened to me. I can recall nothing in the authors I have read with my students that I put to use in my own work, either in fiction or in essays.

  “To me the writing of others has no greater influence than kisses I’ve kissed or fights I’ve fought, or any event that makes an impression.”

  “But you’re always saying good readers make good writers,” says Robert. “So where does the making come in?”

  “Where was it for you? Every one of you has read something at an early age that made you want to become a writer. Who was it, and why?”

  George volunteers. “The first book that made me want to become a writer was a book I was barely able to read. I was five or six when my parents first took me to Glendale’s Queens Public Library. I don’t even remember the title of the book. It was the subject matter that captured my imagination. I can almost see that book about dinosaurs again, recalling how giddily hard I fell. For me dinosaurs still roamed somewhere in the dark recesses of undiscovered countries, so it was official, adult confirmation of my faith. Books were verifications of imagination. The librarian said the book was too old for me, but my grip on the cover was unbreakable. Dad grinned and said, ‘He’ll look at the pictures then.’ ”

  “A good dad,” says Kristie.

  “The moment the book and I arrived home,” says George, “I snitched a blank black-and-white marble-covered composition book from my sister’s schoolbag. Leaning on the tin radiator cover, I began copying it line for line, word for word. I was unable to read most of the text. It was the idea of the book more than the book itself that got me. The intoxicating act of writing unknown symbols on paper, leaving a trail for unknown others to follow. When Dad asked what I was up to, I proudly announced to my assembled family, ‘I’m writing a book!’ ” The class cheers. “ ‘And,’ I said, ‘I’m going to write books from now on.’ My father looked at me a way I’d never seen before, smiling as he patted my head. ‘Of cours
e you will, son,’ he said.”

  “What about you, Jasmine?”

  “For me there was no specific book that made me want to be a writer. I was drawn to writing because I thought most books were extremely one-sided and told the stories of heroes. But for me, the antiheroes were the more interesting characters, and after reading books I always wanted to know more about them. The first book I can remember inspiring me is Mary Renault’s The Bull from the Sea, which follows Theseus but not Hippolyta. After reading the book I remember thinking, What would her story be? And what was the history of her people, the Amazons? This book and others like it didn’t inspire me to write because they were well written or thought-provoking, but because I’ve always wanted to write about characters or groups of people that had no story or written history, and to write for them.”

  “Are those the people you read today?” asks George.

  “Books that inspire me today come from different avenues,” she says. “Edgar Allan Poe’s stories always dig into the minds of unpleasant people, who make his work interesting—”

  “That’s what you did with your short story,” says Kristie.

  “—and sometimes I read the fiction in the New Yorker just to see what and how contemporary writers are writing. But the authors I most emulate and look to are somewhat opposites, Emily Brontë and James Joyce. I’ve always preferred the style of Brontë and other Romantics who use pathetic fallacy in their work, while Joyce explores the minds of his characters, making them tangible.”

  “As in ‘Clay,’ ” says Inur.

  “As in ‘Clay,’ ” says Jasmine. “For my writing I want to include nature as a character but also flesh out seemingly ordinary people or antiheroes. I look for authors who would do that. But I have found that while reading shows me what I want my style to include and inspires me to write, it doesn’t exactly help my writing.”

  Donna follows. “Few books littered my home as a kid,” she says. “In fact, the strongest memories I have of leafing through bound pages centered around the Sears, Roebuck catalog.” Everyone smiles. “Me and my mother, who liked to sew, used to sit side by side at the kitchen table and thumb through its flimsy pages and assess dress designs. It’s less than surprising, with this kind of childhood experience, that my first career was in the apparel industry, peddling garments. My interest in writing came later in life. Shortly after my husband and I were married, his great-aunt died, and along with a mahogany bed, we inherited a fifty-one-volume set of the Harvard Classics, an anthology of notable works in world literature. Some people say reading the collection constitutes the equivalent of a college education, something I had lacked.”