The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  * More still: “Or how in Moby-Dick, in chapter 85, ‘The Fountain,’ where, suddenly, the shadow of Melville, at his desk, is like an unexpected cloud cast across Ishmael’s sea. Melville, who, so near and so far, tells the reader that, as he writes those words, the precise instant, the exact and ‘blessed minute’ hanging between parentheses is ‘(fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock p.m. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850).’ Call me Herman, indeed. A humble deus ex machina that contents itself to offering the time and the date, as if taking a breath and gathering strength for the final duel and ultimate shipwreck that only one man will survive so he can tell the story of the novel.”

  * From another interview. Question: “Do you think you’ve created a school?” Answer: “Yes. But my school accepts only the best ‘special’ students, who have learning difficulties because they’re too busy understanding things not included on the syllabus or as part of the coursework, which never includes materials like Brain Exercises or Inexact Sciences. Students who during recess dedicate themselves to running in slow motion and staring at their snacks until their eyes start watering, until the snacks turn transparent; and who come to the teacher with their hand raised but always refer to him as ‘Your excellent and decapitatible majesty’ and then, subsequently, ask a question that seems punctuated by an exclamation more than a question mark.”

  * And he goes on: “It’s about continuing in that role, to have some absolute and almost divine power over others, one of my speeches, from the highest balcony of my palace (but without any need to shout or gesticulate, unlike all those politicians who seem not to have realized that it’s no longer necessary, that we have excellent amplification systems and giant screens so that you’re seen and heard in other kingdoms), would include what I’m going to say next: ‘The work is memory and the memory can only be that which the religious call soul. But it’s not something that ascends into the heavens, but rather rots on Earth; even though it can be rerecorded over the memories of those to come. In an ideal order of things, in a world so much better than our own, everyone would be obligated to write a diary or a memoir or an autobiography or, at least, a journal of random impressions. Thus, in that far better world and in that ideal order, everyone would not only know how to write. In addition, we’d all be good writers, lucid in the face of our own story and—revising it day after day, polishing the good and the bad—we’d learn how to improve it and correct it before reaching the end, before it’s too late. We’d be better people and, as such, better characters.’”

  * And next: “But, clearly, writing isn’t easy. Writing is a discipline that becomes more difficult every day. It’s like what happens with a camera lens. Or with the human eye. At first, everything appears upside down, head down, feet up. And it’s the machine and the brain that take charge of straightening it, righting it, and giving it some logical meaning. But it’s a deceptive meaning. An illusion. And so, at any moment, everything can come crashing down and expose the deception in all its clumsy obviousness. So you have to be carefuller and subtler all the time. Perfect the lie and the way you take a piece of reality and turn it into fiction. And, warning: the majority of the people whom we consider liars—the best and most professional and believable liars—never lie to us. Ever. What they do is lie to themselves over and over again until they believe their own lies. And then they relay those lies to us as unquestionable and categorical and absolute truths. Writers, of course, are the extreme and artistic versions of these specimens. Writers who serve no one but themselves. Writers who only serve themselves. And, moving along, since we’re on the subject: the thing about how, according to the aborigines, every photo taken of you steals a piece of your soul is a lie. No. It takes you a while to realize, you’ve been in a trap for a long time, a trap you only become aware of when it’s already too late. The truth is that every photo you take steals a piece of your soul. If you look carefully, without blinking, without your eyes going click, everything turns out to be the opposite of how it seems. So the writer’s task is . . . It seems like I don’t really know what I’m trying to say . . . Next question.”

  * A recommendation of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and Bach’s Goldberg Variations by Glen Gould (his second version, almost a farewell) as “an ideal soundtrack for sitting down and remaining seated and writing. [. . .] Perfect music for trying to attain that thing Fitzgerald said, that thing about how ‘all good writing is like swimming under water and holding your breath.’” And “Big Sky” by The Kinks as “the best way to kick-start every workday. [. . .] A kind of supplication. An Our Father who is, indeed, in heaven because he is the heavens. And also a way to remember that, while a good part of the writers of my generation wanted to be U2, it’s not bad at all, better in fact, to want to be The Kinks. True, the tours would be more uncomfortable and less spectacular. And the loneliness of the backstage hallway before the instant glory of those hundred meters. But better to be like Harry Nilsson than like Bono. Do any of you have even the slightest idea who Harry Nilsson was or is? Or Warren Zevon? And, just to be clear, I’m not talking about their dissonant and clever self-destructive epics but about their constructive intimacy in the moment of composing subtle and perfect songs. The exquisite way they assemble and disassemble verses and choruses and bridges so their poetry can cross over to the other side where you’re waiting for it. So, that’s how I think about the writing of stories and novels. A particular balance of feelings and sound and phrasings and word games. And the Greek Choir holding hands and singing ‘He goes around saying he’d rather be a rocker than writer, doo do doo, doo do doo, doo do, do doo do doo, doo do, doo do . . .’ In the end . . . Where was I? Ah, yes, I’ll find an easy example: better to be like Ray Davies than like Bono, I think. And I’m repeating myself. I insist. The Kinks. The ones of ‘You Really Got Me,’ Right? But I think more about a song like ‘Big Sky.’ In ‘Big Sky’—like Harry Nilsson in ‘Good Old Desk’ singing to his divine desk; or Warren Zevon in ‘Desperados Under the Eaves,’ feeling down and listening to the sound of the air conditioner, which suddenly inspires a final and majestic crescendo—Ray Davies invokes, without getting too anxious, a sort of unknown deity who doesn’t care much about us. Bono, on the other hand, time and again desperately kneels down in intense prayer to someone he knows well—to himself [. . .]. Staying on topic—and band—I can’t think of a better song than ‘Days,’ also by The Kinks, as background music for lowering the blinds at the end of a workday. But it might be better to listen to Elvis Costello’s crepuscular version and not The Kinks’ original . . . Ray Davies. Thank you . . . All of a sudden I remember that once, a long time ago, Ray Davies rescued me from a University lost among the Iowa cornfields and made it possible for me to go to New York, to hear him sing ‘Days.’ I was there, as a sort of guest writer in an academic B-movie. And I couldn’t leave that place. I was held captive by the bureaucratic spell of a special visa that didn’t allow you to travel around the United States unless someone took responsibility for you. So I found out that Ray Davies was going to play in Manhattan. And I’d never heard or seen him live and in person. And I needed to see him and to hear him. So I tracked down the number of the hotel where he was staying, I was able to get them to put me through to his room and he answered and I explained the situation. He had to talk to the Dean so they would let me leave, so I could go to his concert. Of course at first Ray Davies thought it was a prank being played by some malicious friend, and then, to verify that I was an authentic fan, he made me sing several of his songs over the telephone. Not the easiest ones. No hits. Songs like ‘Polly’ or ‘Too Much on My Mind’ (one of my all-time favorites) or ‘People Take Pictures of Each Other’ or ‘Art Lover’ or ‘Scattered.’ And I knew all of them. But pretty soon he got tired and hung up. A few days later, thanks to a message he sent to the Dean, I left heading east. Ray Davies invited me to have tea with him; he gave me a ticket, and said, ‘This is as far as we go and we’re never going to see each other again, right?
’ A true gentleman, yes. An artist who merely raised an eyebrow above the Darjeeling-perfumed steam that rose from his cup and smiled somewhere between amused and sad when I mentioned, indignant, the gall with which, at that time, Blur and Oasis and Pulp stole and falsified his style and songs, reveling in money and fame and barely acknowledging his genius and tutelage and mastery. There are no writers, no writers of books like that. And if there are, I’m not aware of them. There are no fans of writers like that either. Fans of musicians are happy to know their songs and to howl them at concerts or inside rooms with doors shut tight. Fans of writers, on the other hand, are more dangerous: fans of writers want to write, to write something of their own and, with their own writing, to rewrite the other and what the other has written.”

  * Something that John Banville said to him once, as they walked around the outside of Martello Tower in Sandycove, about how “style goes on ahead giving triumphal leaps while the plot follows along behind dragging its feet.” Later he wondered whether it might not be possible for the style to go back a few steps and lovingly lift the plot up in its arms, as if it were a brilliant and complicated child, and turn it into something new, different: into a stylized plot, into the most well-plotted of styles. It was Nabokov, and he almost always agreed with Nabokov, who postulated that the best part of a writer’s biography didn’t pass through the record of his adventures, but through the history of his style. Style as an adventure and adventure as style, yes.

  * Something he once told someone, while they walked around the outside of who knows where: “The gods of one religion frequently become the devils of the religion that follows it. Something similar happens with writers, with the writers of a prior generation when they are evaluated by the writers of the generation that follows them.”

  * Answer: “What would I like as an epitaph on my gravestone? Easy: my name, the word ‘Reader,’ and the years 1963-1,000,000,000 and increasing. And it’s not that I want to live that long; but, warning, the code for the impossible second number passes through the word ‘Reader.’ Which is to say: more time, all time, to be able not to continue writing but to continue reading . . . When I was very young and still concerned with things like my photo on the jacket flap of my books, I once posed wearing a black T-shirt where, written in white letters, it read ‘So many books . . . so little time!’ . . . I bought it in a New York bookstore that no longer exists. The T-shirt no longer exists in my closet either. It disappeared along with those other T-shirts: one with the legend ‘Likes Like/Like Likes’ and another with a reproduction of the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, where a friend who designed album covers had inserted my face next to that of William S. Burroughs. But the thing from the first T-shirt—I still think that. It’s extremely unfair that, clearly, neither I, nor anyone else, has the time, all-the-time-in-the-world, to read everything you need to read first in order to write later. To write the best that anyone can write . . . Faulkner, without going any further. I have him here, all the Library of America tomes, waiting. I read him a little and poorly in my adolescence, in deficient translations (which, also, might bring me to all the time I lack to reread, which is like a glorified version of reading) and there he remains, waiting for me. To read? Or not to read? Now? In summer or winter? Is it better that the climate and temperature of the external landscape correspond to Faulkner’s South? Or just the opposite? Next year? Is my writer DNA ready to receive such an explosion and, maybe, find itself changed forever? Who knows? Faulkner is there and there Faulkner stays, howling, like one of those dangerous wolves with one foot tied to a chain whose exact length is unknown. So how close can you safely get without him jumping on you and eating your face? Or, unbeknownst to you, chewing through his own foot and lying there, waiting for you? A lone wolf. Never forget how Faulkner responded to Hemingway suggesting that writers unite and make themselves strong, like doctors and lawyers and wolves. Faulkner mistrusted writers who came together and formed groups and generations, saying they were doomed to disappear, like wolves who are only wolves in packs, but are nothing but docile and harmless dogs on their own, dogs that are all bark and no bite.”

  * His propensity for citing books’ original titles, provided that those books are in English (because he doesn’t speak any other language and because French “makes me panic”), and the idea that “The Great Gatsby has nothing to teach you. The only thing The Great Gatsby has to teach you is that neither in your lifetime nor in all your remaining reincarnations are you going to write a novel as perfect as The Great Gatsby. But you can learn a great deal from the imperfection, the victorious fall, from the crack-ups and roughness of Tender Is the Night, Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s Wuthering Heights” (on the tape where The Writer says this, you can clearly hear the screams of The Writer’s Mad Sister howling “Wuthering Heights is mine! And that novel you wrote about that foreign family was mine too and about me!”).

  * Something about how he’s somewhat tired of “being considered a pop-writer; but better that than a poop-writer, right?” and that “I’m as pop as Jane Austin was in her day, irrefutable proof of the power of fiction. Don’t forget that she, considered today the high oracular priestess of the matrimonial, died at forty-two, a virgin and still living with daddy.”

  * A clarification about how “more and more, as a reader, I enjoy the books that interest me least as a writer. It’s a true pleasure to read something you’d never write and that others write so much better than you. I guess, I hope, it has something to do with maturity. Something like, remember, being young and dreaming of having a girlfriend identical to you, a mirror that understands and comprehends everything. The primal effects of beaches in movies of and about writers like Julia or Betty Blue and reading epistolary exchanges, the kind of letters no one writes anymore. Letters like those elaborate set designs, now obsolete, replaced by a blue—infinite and celestial and divine and digital blue—screen, where you can project everything that happens inside your head into the air. Letters to be read and reread, folded and unfolded, letters of so many writing couples. But, as time passes, you discover that this mirror does nothing but reflect, with clinical and merciless fidelity, your own defects, your insurmountable flaws, your tics and cracks. So, it’s no surprise that, later in our lives and work, we fall in love with our opposites, with virgin territories where everything is yet to be discovered and where the most foreign of languages is spoken. So, as writers, we start off learning from what we’d like to be and end up learning from what we’ll never be, because there’s neither time nor space to start over and strike out in a new direction. We begin by telling the stories we were told and end up telling the stories that are worth telling. But maybe this is all nonsense, maybe I’m lying to myself in order to fool all of you.”

  * One of those quotes longing for bronze or marble, but without sacrificing a certain humor or something like that: “Literature is a long-distance race and, at the same time, a race without an end.”

  * Another tape, another TV program, a table, a few chairs, three guests and the woman hosting the thing, a sad backdrop composed of cubes with writer’s faces on their faces, all the faces of writers who, whether you like it or not, have to be there, no surprises. The Writer says: “A writer is a kind of Frankenstein’s monster. A model to assemble. A life made of multiple lives. A minimum of four: the life comprised of what is written, the life comprised of what is read, the private life, the public life . . .” Then one of the other guest writers interrupts with “Once again the same crap as always” and the hostess smiles nervously and the tape stops there, cuts off, and . . .

  * A theory of the reader/writer: “As far as the formation and/or deformation of a writer, I believe the process is a lot like the formation of the reader. When we start writing, as children, the most important thing is the hero, identification with the hero. We fall in love with the boy or girl in the story, and then take it upon ourselves to find out if they’ve starred in other adventures. So, stacks and stacks of comics and Sando
kan, the Musketeers, Nemo, Jo, etcetera. And there/here is as far as most readers go (and they can stop here, no problem). To continue the adventure, into the jungle, a new reader appears. A slightly more sophisticated reader, with a particular interest in the structure of the adventures and, later, a particular fascination with who created them and under what circumstances—with that living ghost called author and with the distinct possibility of other similar authors. The final and most evolved stage of reader—and writer—is one who, in addition to all the foregoing, is also concerned with and enjoys a particular style. That’s the only way you can fight back and make peace in our digital and pluralized times, electrified by writers who narrate but don’t write, by writers who simply recount but on whom you can never count when you need them the most. And there are few writers—the truly great ones—who make their style come through in their prose and, also, in what their prose tells. And thus, the miracle of a plot and a style all their own—unique, nontransferable. If there is a goal, it is certainly that—to have plot and style make space and time for a new and personal language. That the invented part of what’s told also be the way that fiction speaks and expresses itself. But—warning—never forget that the style you achieve is always—though a posteriori you try to convince yourself of the opposite, that everything was coldly calculated—just a detour along the way. Style ends up being nothing more than the hangover that follows a bender. What’s left behind and provokes a headache and so let’s see what we can do with this. Style is the successful distillation of a failure, the glorious, unforgettable accident. A laboratory problem, like in The Fly, like in The Hulk. That’s the only way to understand the expansive yet Prussian digression of Saul Bellow or the novelistic mutation of Shakespeare in Iris Murdoch. A thing you find when you’re looking for something else entirely.” And yes—The Young Man and The Young Woman realized this while reviewing the tapes—The Writer sometimes confuses the order and skips a few steps in his evolutionary cycle.