Tennessee Williams and James Grissom “Put Women in Their Place"

I stumbled upon The Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog, by James Grissom, last summer. I saw a photo of Williams on the cover, and that was enough for me.

I got more than I bargained for.

I finished the book while sitting on a playground bench, as my husband guided our daughter across the monkey bars. All around me people were living and playing, while I sat frozen, startled, alert. The book had produced a quickening of the senses—a vitality that actors long for and thrive upon. When I searched for reviews, when I asked if others had discovered this strange book, I found little trace of public reception.

A few weeks ago, my sister shared a Facebook post by James Grissom. In it, Grissom recounted the story of discovering he had bladder cancer in 2007, and of his reaching out for the help of his senator—Hillary Clinton. Her support had saved his life. The post went viral.

James Grissom, author of The Follies of God, was suddenly a topic of conversation; his story was picked up by Clinton herself. She thanked Grissom for his post and her campaign created a video to feature his story.

Grissom next created a hashtag: #puttingwomenintheirplace. He began to publicly recount stories of other women who had been champions in his life, and he encouraged others to do the same. The connection to his book—and to the women who shine in its pages—was instantly clear. I had no doubt of Grissom’s sincerity, but I also had no doubt that the lessons he absorbed while researching his book were finding a second platform in his post.

The Follies of God stretches in breadth from the history of the American theatre to the intimate musings of dozens of actors and actresses, using as its spine the confessions of one of our greatest playwrights. It is also a thank-you letter to many of the great actresses of Tennessee William’s era.

“I have been very lucky . . . because I have offered my soul to so many women,” Williams told Grissom, “and they have filled it, repaired it, sent it back to me for use.” The political moment has merged with Tennessee Williams’ musings as transcribed by James Grissom. A book that might have been relegated—tragically—to a dusty shelf in the theatre section of the bookshop has grown suddenly pivotal.

*

In the autumn of 1982, James Grissom, an aspiring playwright, wrote a letter, put it in an envelope, stamped it, and sent it to Tennessee Williams. It’s safe to say hundreds, if not thousands of fans had done just that before him, never dreaming of any response.

Williams called Grissom on the telephone.

“Perhaps you can be of some help to me,” the playwright said.

Williams next invited Grissom to New Orleans, and Grissom—naturally—accepted.

So began Grissom’s odyssey into the heart of a lonely and deeply depressed icon who felt caught in a “knot of time,” unable to write, a victim of his own ill-use of his mind and body.

That’s a lot to lay on a twenty-year-old, but Grissom listened and took notes. Williams made no pretense of being anything but a man in desperate need of validation. Grissom was led down winding passages, traveling deeper into another person’s soul than perhaps anyone should, but Williams was so hungry for communication and so urgently needy that Grissom forged ahead.

He spent many days with Williams, who felt maligned as a “hack” and discredited by contemporary critics. He longed for a return to his heyday, a time in which he had basked in the love and appreciation of a rapt audience. He had been considered, rightly, the voice of a new generation. He wondered if he had ever been worthy of such praise. Eventually, Williams tasked Grissom with an enormous project: could he find the actresses Williams had worked with, give them personal notes he’d written for them, and speak to them in person?

Why?

To see if he had mattered to them.

Over lunches in dingy diners, “Tenn,” as Williams asked Grissom to call him, offered detailed remembrances—from notes he had kept—of the women with whom he had worked. Armed with “Tenn’s” personal notes, Grissom eventually found and gained the trust of such luminaries as Katharine Hepburn, Geraldine Page, Jessica Tandy, Kim Stanley, Lillian Gish, Marian Seldes, Frances Sternhagen, and Maureen Stapleton, to name only a few of the seventy people who appear in The Follies of God. Somehow, from the substance of many voices, one narrative emerges, that encompasses not only Williams’ insights, but those of a multitude of stars in the theatrical firmament.

A pattern emerges throughout these interviews. As we flash from Williams’s accounts to the actresses themselves, in their own words, one after another establish themselves as titanic intellectual forces.

Laurette Taylor, who ushered in a new model of acting in The Glass Menagerie—had a profound effect on Williams. “Absolutely nothing escaped her attention or merciless sense of detail”—he says.

Of Elizabeth Wilson, Williams said, “Imagine yourself committed but distant; passionate but professional.”

“I reflect on Marian,” Williams told Grissom, of Marian Seldes. She says, ‘Life goes by. Your use of time defines the kind of person you are off the stage—and on. When you are in charge of that time—the time of your life—you are happy.”

And of Frances Sternhagen, Grissom writes: “Tenn felt he could see her brain at work, that her intelligence—one he described as ‘astringent’—fueled her every action.”

“Look,” Katharine Hepburn told Grissom, “. . . most of those women on your list—on Tennessee’s list—made very conscious decisions about their lives and about their actions in their careers to become good and to become some sort of inspiration to people. It is a struggle—a perpetual struggle—to do anything worthwhile.”

Geraldine Page is, of all those Grissom spoke to, the most astonishing: every word she utters makes up a kind of gospel on how to conduct a life of dignity and significance. “Page,” Grissom writes, “hated inactivity, idle minds or chatter, conversations for which there was no point or theme or purpose. She had no patience or sympathy for unintelligent, unexamined people or situations.”

“Geraldine,” Williams told Grissom, “has an intellect that I would match against that of anyone else in the world.”

And yet this fearsome intellect—who, in Grissom’s words, had “impossibly high standards of conduct and creativity that have led her to be compared to any number of ferocious and wild animals”—read the note provided for her from Williams, clutched James Grissom’s hand, and cried. She had much to say on the subject of Tennessee Williams: she hadn’t known how fragile he was, how much he had longed for friendship. Williams aspired to behave like the women he admired, but he hadn’t known how to ask for help.

When Williams muses about these women, he is telling us what to pay attention to—what he wished he had paid attention to. It is perhaps upon Page whom Williams most wishes he had modeled his conduct: “She believed that every single thing, every moment, should serve some bigger purpose. . . . She had no fear of beginning, of jumping off where she should, over and over, to get to where she needed to be. I would like to emulate her in her impatience with delusion. I delude myself all the time, still, and it offers me no reward.”

Page replied to this, through Grissom, saying, “Dreaming is a negative thing, in a way, and I think Tennessee’s dreaming—that lifelong plunge into darkness—was a negative thing. . . . It’s very poetic, but it’s not a state in which I care to work. I need all of my senses when I’m working. The dreams are the first act, I guess. The overture. And the work begins. One should always be beginning to work.”

In 2015, a great distance from that 1982 phone call, Grissom at last produced a volume overflowing with insight, both poetic and direct—from the many actresses Williams had worked with. In his effort to convey the rich life of the mind in which fine artists dwell, Grissom quotes Robert Edmond Jones: “They seem so much more aware than we are, and so much more awake, and so much more alive that they make us feel that what we call living is not living at all, but a kind of sleep.”

Uta Hagen wrote in her own seminal book on acting, that “an alert mind is an actor’s prerequisite.” In The Follies of God, Grissom conveys the quickening of the senses that is embodied by the art form. Grissom has succeeded in simultaneously introducing his reader to the almost supernatural awareness of the actor’s mind on the one hand, and on the other, the pragmatic quotidian work ethic she must apply in order to succeed at her craft.

Uta Hagen also wrote: “Art is mysterious enough without our making it more so.” Hagen was a firm believer in being grounded: “Theoretically, the actor ought to be more sound in mind and body than other people,” she wrote in her own book, “since he learns to understand the psychological problems of human beings when putting his own passions, his loves, fears, and rages to work in the service of the characters he plays.”

Grissom pays homage to the mystique of famous actresses but reveals, often through their own words, their sweaty struggle to make their work—their life on stage—real. Grissom also got an answer to Williams’ question: Had he mattered to the artists who breathed life into his work?

Yes, he had mattered.

*

Why women? Why were women so important to Williams? Why was he able to recognize their power, why was he so hungry to learn from them and seek shelter in their lessons? The answer may lie in his childhood. He had looked to his mother for shelter from a brutal and abusive father—and he had felt betrayed when she was unable to provide it. He had expected more from her than from his father, a man locked inside ignorance and bigotry. Williams spoke to Grissom about this wound: “I hated my mother for blandly accepting the mediocrity that was our life, and until I jumped on her train of outward-bound dreams, I hated her for moving out of the real world, where I felt she might have offered me some aid.”

No matter how fast he ran, he could never outpace his guilt. Williams might have loathed his mother, but he also felt great love for her, eventually recognizing that it was from her that he had inherited his talent.

“I would suddenly realize,” Williams reflected, “that the person I thought I hated had made me someone who could appreciate images, illusions, and who had probably made me a writer.”

His life’s work—his plays—gazed back at the woman who haunted him. By 1982, he was able to see his mother’s influence as a gift. Even this fragile, delusional woman had given him a kind of wisdom: a penetrating ability to feel pain and recognize the raw material upon which an artist seizes.

Williams fancifully believed that women were a magical force that had lifted him repeatedly out of despair. He spent, as he recounts to Grissom, decades seeking shelter in and friendship from many of the actresses who appeared in his plays. It wasn’t until later—1982 to be exact—that he began to understand how much more than merely shelter these women had to offer. It is in this latter day recognition that the power of The Follies of God lies.

My own mother, an actress herself, was fond of the expression “Too late we learn.” This sentiment is the clarion call, the urgent warning that drives Grissom’s narrative.

The Follies of God affirms that theater is only as great as the people who understand not only how to act, but how to think precisely, how to love completely, and how to work very, very hard. It also suggests to those outside this world that they might awake from the kind of sleep that Jones had written of, and to live more fully, more sensually, and with more purpose.

In 1982, Grissom traveled to New Orleans and met with a bereft soul, broken from childhood, who had risen above the cruelty of his upbringing, but had lived on borrowed time. By the time Williams reached out to the young Grissom, his demons had outpaced him. Williams had an appointment with self-destruction and he kept it. Still, although unable to write another play, he had much that he longed to express. It came out in the form of advice and remembrance, and it was left to Grissom to weave the words with those of the women Williams achingly described.

*

When the twenty-year-old Grissom left “Tenn,” having filled several notebooks, he did not rush to begin the project with which Williams had tasked him. Just as Williams had left a broken mother behind in New Orleans, so had Grissom needed to leave Williams to get on with his own life. Ultimately though, he honored his promise. What made him cast a backward glance at the haunted playwright? The answer lies in Williams’ description of his mother: “I knew that my mother saved things—odd things—that helped her to remember what she was and what she could have been. . . . Each had a story and each had a place in her home,” Williams told Grissom.

“Totems—I wanted to give my mother something she could place on a shelf and love, something as fragile and transparent as those perfume bottles. Something as beloved and fraught with meaning as those rose petals and those napkins.”

Grissom crafted a totem for the playwright, something to honor his insights and recollections. From pages of scribbled notes—Williams’s “odd things”—he constructed a masterful narrative. Williams offered Grissom advice and philosophy tinged with depressive regret, and Grissom poured every poetic bit into the final product.

Williams surely would have loved this totem—loved it for his mother, who was halted in her ambitions for a better life, and loved it for all the women he later reflected upon and deemed underappreciated. It is a coming full-circle. Grissom received Williams’ keening confessions and crafted a totem from them, as Williams had wanted to do for his mother.

*

Serendipitously, Hillary Clinton saved James Grissom’s life, and he crafted a Facebook post, an ode to her, another “totem.” That totem went viral.

Hillary Clinton has said that she is more comfortable with the “servant” part than the “public,” part of her work. Her legendary reserve has been used as a cudgel against her reputation. It has been easy for her detractors to characterize her as “suspect” in a culture hungry for confession. She is a private person in a chatty world. In this way, as in the driving, focused nature of her work ethic, Clinton is reminiscent of the actresses who haunt the pages of The Follies of God. Grissom unearthed the ruminations of artists who were as reserved as Clinton about their personal lives and their methodologies. They did not publicize their intellects; it would have been contrary to the very private nature of artists. This privacy serves to protect their resource, their “inner theatre,” as Tennessee Williams called the artist’s brain.

Tennessee Williams didn’t live to see a woman save his young friend’s life, but no one would have been less surprised by Clinton’s efficiency and warmth. Had he lived to see hashtags, he couldn’t have crafted a more fitting one than Grissom’s. He loved women because he had witnessed so many fine actresses at work both on stage and in life. He craved their partnership and guidance. Tennessee Williams knew as well as anyone the importance of #puttingwomenintheirplace.

Father & Son: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is post-apocalyptic, but, as has been exhaustively noted, it’s largely unconcerned with the cause of the world’s end. In this sense it breaks from the tradition of dystopia as political and cautionary. Though it earned McCarthy a spot on The Guardian’s 2008 “50 people who could save the planet” list, with environmentalist George Manbiot heralding it as maybe “the most important environmental book ever” (sorry, Rachel Carson), The Road is not actually a political novel so much as it is interpersonal, familial.

The novel’s stark prose and barren landscape are an ideal milieu for meditation on human relationships. (There really might be something to McCarthy’s bold dismissal of all but the barest punctuation as “weird little marks” that “blot the page.” In his interview with Oprah, he went on to say that “if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.” Is it disrespectful to note this in a parenthetical?) The Road keeps closest to its heart the relationship of parent and child — specifically, father and son. In the first pages the unnamed or nameless father looks out across the wasteland that is the present and says of his son, “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” His words are amplified by the setting but are hardly bound to it: blasphemy and all, such a sentence might be said by a parent even before the apocalypse.

If the book were just about this aspect of the parent-child bond — if it were merely an invocation of the bond’s ineffable depth and the parent’s singular desire for or obligation to sacrifice for the child — the work might be overly precious. But McCarthy is masterful, and so the portrait of this father and son is rich and nuanced. It’s a dark book about desperate circumstances, but the mundane persists, and exchanges like this are among The Road’s finest:

What is it, Papa?
Morels. It’s morels.
What’s morels?
They’re a kind of mushroom.
Can you eat them?
Yes. Take a bite.
Are they good?
Take a bite.
The boy smelled the mushroom and bit into it and stood chewing. He looked at his father. These are pretty good, he said.

And then there is the far darker side. It’s not just survival at stake: it’s also integrity and human dignity. The father advises his son on how to use their revolver to kill himself if need be, rather than be taken by one of the roving bands of cannibals. In an act of love distinct from and perhaps beyond self-sacrifice, the father asks himself whether he could, if the situation required it — if the gun didn’t fire — kill his son to save his son. “Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock?” he asks himself. “Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be?”

Maybe the most significant aspect of parenthood here is the parent as moral educator. The novel’s arc follows the father’s slow death, foreshadowed early on by his persistent cough. His illness, the dangerous terrain, and the real threat posed by other human beings all make most urgent the issue of what the father will impart to his son before he passes. The imperative is stronger, too, in a world devoid of society, a world in which even the family is reduced to its barest form (the boy has no siblings and his mother has long since killed herself). But ultimately this is an issue centrally important to any parent: What can and will you do to make your child a good person?

But the education — as educations tend to — goes both ways. The son is deeply uncomfortable that they must sometimes leave other good guys behind, and he eventually coerces his father into giving some food to an old, nearly blind man. Though the father appears to do so only begrudgingly, it clearly affects him. When he and the old man discuss why the boy wanted to stop when the father did not, the old man suggests that he might believe in God. “He’ll get over it,” the old man assures him. “No he wont,” says the father, seeing something beautiful.

Because it is so brutal, The Road has been called unsentimental. Certainly it’s not maudlin, pat, cheaply tear-jerky, or trite, but it is sentimental — and tender and hopeful — and that’s largely because of its brutality: the honesty, the way the gray nothingness of this future illumines the sacredness of this bond. I don’t mean to diminish the weight of the tragedy in this novel by claiming it is as much about parents and children as it is about disaster, beauty, and grace. I mean to do the opposite: to say that human relationships — here, parent and child — are loaded with this gravity, sanctity, and light. The Road brings this forth: it does not construct, but reveals.

How to Breathe Underwater reminds us that the crises, tragedies, and dramas, no matter how dark and confusing, can be survived

Serendipity ­— as it happens randomly, appears as if it were planted for you before you arrived. A waiter carries a tray of ice water, bumps against a woman. The water tumbles. A relationship is born. A lawyer browses the book store stacks for George Bush’s memoir, and next to it, a misplaced volume of poetry calls out to him, “Pick me, instead.” It changes his life. Increasingly, it is our machines planning the “aha” moments for us. Case in point, Amazon.com’s recommendation system: “you might also like . . . THIS” is how I discovered Julie Orringer. Amazon’s robot overlords saw fit to point me in the direction of her 2003 short story collection, How to Breathe Underwater. I was looking to find a book of contemporary literature that might connect better with my undergraduates, a book without Pink Monkeys or Spark Notes, one that would make my students think about their own connection to memory, imagination, and literature. Then Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater appeared on screen, as if waiting for its cue.

Orringer, whose first novel The Invisible Bridge was published last year, makes you believe that the project of realistic fiction can still make a difference, if only left in the right hands. How to Breathe Underwater takes the all too often shopworn theme of “coming of age” and invests it with new life and deep relevance. Having taught it for three consecutive semesters, I can attest to the book’s arresting impact on students. They really connect with it. It is the kind of fiction that speaks especially well to young people who don’t have well tuned ears for challenging fiction; they don’t need special hermeneutic qualifications to read this stuff. They “get it” viscerally and see aspects of themselves in Orringer’s finely drawn characters:  kids coping with diseased parents, guilt, shame, jealousy, addiction, immaturity, religious questing, and personal tragedy. “The Isabel Fish,” one of the best in the set, explores guilt, revenge, and reconciliation among siblings in the aftermath of a fatal car accident.  “The Smoothest Way is Full of Stones” plucks a teenage girl from her comfort zone and drops her into an orthodox religious community, where her religious questions run parallel with forbidden sexual initiation. In Orringer’s short story universe, a change in setting is often the engine for a transformative experience.

There is a consistency of quality throughout the set. Orringer keeps her narrative pacing tight; stories move with inexorable momentum. She is reluctant to stretch plots beyond their realistic snapping point, and knows how to leave a story open ended, allowing it to breathe. This makes them quite friendly to classroom or book-group discussion. The stories virtually teach themselves. Her characters evoke our compassion, and in the case of the antagonists, our understanding. Even the ones we disapprove of and can’t forgive are acting for discoverable reasons.

Sometimes such well-honed storytelling is too much of a good thing, like hearing a soprano hit all the right notes, yet something essential is missing. Not the case here. I think Orringer is able to transcend the trap of mere expert craftwork by holding doggedly to her artistic ethic, in this case, a mode of traditional literary realism. Her eye never loses focus, and the imaginative truth springs into view. In each of the “realistic” lives being depicted, easy answers, short cuts or deus ex machina solutions to growing up are not to be found. Children and teenagers must plow through to the other side, somehow. The “somehow” is the stuff of the stories; they offer situations as occasions for growth and maturing. There are no smooth ways across. How to Breathe Underwater reminds us that the crises, tragedies, and dramas, no matter how dark and confusing, can be survived.

Water and History Everywhere!

There have been exactly two books I’ve read in my life that have made me decide to stop writing for good, knowing full well I could never achieve the mastery of their respective novelists. Before you go and ostracize me for indolence or lack of perseverance, know that the feeling of discomfiture is always temporary. In fact, on both occasions after a few hours wallowing in my self-pity and doubt, I was determined to get back on the warhorse and ride that Equus ferus into the combat that is writing.

The first novel that elicited defeat within me was Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. I was eighteen when I first came across the little book, so you could possibly blame youth on my resolve to give up. But the second time I felt the sense of vanquishment was no longer than a few months ago, when I finished Graham Swift’s brilliant novel, Waterland.

Set in the bleak, drab, musty, and aqueous Fen land of East Anglia, Waterland is the profound story of a family marked by tragedy, incest, madness, torment, 240 years of ale-making, and generations of excruciating, pumping manual labor of land reclamation. It’s a big, beautiful endeavor and Swift delivers brilliantly.

This novel screams with energy, fertility, violence, madness, and a profound knowledge of history and drama. Graham Swift slowly unravels the plot of this masterful work much in the vein of Thomas Hardy, but with a wonderful, contemporary verbal felicity and ardor.

There are unbearable scenes in this book — unendurable both for their honest, horrific imagery, but also for the complete mastery with which they’re unfurled for us readers by Swift — little bits at a time, not too slowly, not too quickly. But oh so goddamn eloquently! In particular, there is a long scene dealing with an illegal home abortion performed on one of the characters, which will leave you breathless for the consummate language with which it’s written. The intensity and dynamic of this particular scene is reminiscent of the tableau Hemingway gives us in For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which Fascists and fascist sympathizers are being run through a gauntlet of armed Republicans, and thrown over a cliff. To say it’s acute and agonizing would be watering down the tension. I found myself reading Swift’s passage with jaw fully clenched, at times grinding my teeth. Yeah, this book will make you get that much into it.

If you’re a writer, you’ll think about giving up your craft after reading Swift’s Waterland. But only briefly. This kind of book will ultimately energize you, and fill you with the hunger to continue weaving your own stories. If you’re a reader, a lover of history, humanity, and getting lost in earthy, realistic narratives, you’ll not want to finish this book. You’ll want to dole it out to yourself in increments, maybe daily . . . maybe weekly.

Graham Swift went on to win the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1996 for his novel Last Orders. It is a wonderful book, worthy of the prize indeed, and a great little film as well with Michael Caine, Helen Mirren, and Bob Hoskins among others. It’s recommended at the bottom of this page. But Swift’s career-defining work (at least so far) is his stellar Waterland. Please read this amazing novel and rejoice at the beauty of storytelling; and at the beauty of our language.

On the Surface, Written On the Body Is a Love Story for the Repentant Commitmentphobe; For Me, It Is a Shelter from Adolescent Heartache

I first read Jeanette Winterson in college, for a course on the philosophy of art. We were assigned to read several essays from Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. The title essay has stuck with me in the years since that course mostly because it offered the most understandable foundation for a class I typically felt lost in, but also because reading Jeanette Winterson felt like slipping into something eccentric and luxurious. Her storytelling style in this essay is straightforward, nearly confrontational for those who do not care about engaging in art. Simply put, art is a full-contact sport.

It turns out, love is too. I was 19 — hurt and confused by a spectacularly failed romance — when I bought Written on the Body. On the surface, it is a love story for the repentant commitmentphobe; for me, it is a shelter from adolescent heartache. An initially unsympathetic narrator gives us someone to hate, someone who is not the person we loved until we couldn’t. Watching the narrator reform gives us hope that people have the capacity to change.

It is by no means a perfect book. While it may be cathartic to project all of our hatred onto the narrator, having an unlikeable narrator makes for a frustrating reading experience. To Winterson’s credit, the narrator’s ambiguous identity allows us to hold a mirror up to not only the person we want to hate, but to ourselves, our flaws. Our discomfort with this narrator is part dredged-up memory and part recognition of something we don’t like about who we are or how we act.

A brief summary: Our nameless and genderless narrator has a history of abandoning relationships once the novelty wears off. Along comes Louise, vivacious and sexy and . . . married. To a man. Who works long hours, leaving his wife home alone most of the week. With the house to themselves, Louise and the narrator have their fair share of romps, narrowly avoiding being caught by Louise’s husband. Shortly after leaving him, Louise finds out she has cancer and she leaves the narrator as well.

To cope with Louise’s departure, the narrator moves into a tiny cottage and devotes every waking hour to the medical reference section of the local library:

“If I could not put Louise out of my mind I would drown myself in her. Within the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem to Louise. I would go on knowing her, more intimately than the skin, hair and voice that I craved. I would recognise her plasma, her spleen, her synovial fluid. I would recognise her even when her body had long since fallen away.”

Thus concludes the first part of the book. The second part, the reward for making it through the sometimes uncomfortable, unenjoyable first, is the catalog of the narrator’s newly acquired knowledge of human anatomy married with memories of Louise’s now failing body. Winterson plays with the concept of what it means to know a person inside and out, something we typically consider synonymous with intimacy. The second half of the book is divided into five sections, the first four of which relate to the hours dedicated to anatomical study; the last section is a return to the more straightforward narrative of the first half. Each of the four anatomical sections — one each for the cells, the skin, the skeleton, and the special senses — is written in a stream of consciousness that is at once tender and epic, occasionally dipping into the Bible and other mythologies. From any other writer, this approach might seem hyperbolic, but Winterson is able to make it urgently loving (and maybe a little bit sexy).

Here, the narrator literally learns about Louise, and every other previous lover, from the inside out. It’s the only possible way to compensate and / or atone for being, frankly, a shitty partner. Only through these self-imposed anatomy lessons does the narrator learn how to properly love Louise for everything she is.

Winterson’s style in the second half of Written on the Body is such a departure from the take-no-crap criticism that knocked my socks off in philosophy class. Instead, I was greeted with unanticipated tenderness, particularly in the latter half of the book. I was prepared to hate the narrator as much as I hated the boy who wronged me during winter break; but as the narrator’s steeliness was worn down during the exploration of Louise — her body, her disease, her mythology — I found myself coming around to the boy. I saw him as a human, deeply flawed and hurting from problems of his own.

I still have mixed feelings about this experience — was I in fact the frosty unlikable narrator who needed to learn how to love without putting up insurmountable walls? — but I am thankful for having lived through it. I am reminded of a concept introduced in Art Objects, Winterson’s theory that our negative responses to art have more to do with us and our lack of understanding than with the art itself. My recoiling from the narrator of Written on the Body is a mirror showing me something I didn’t like about myself. The narrator’s capacity to learn, appreciate, forgive, showed that I have the capacity to do the same and that the boy has the capacity to heal.

The narrator may not have been able to fully love Louise. I may not have been able to fully love this boy, nor he could he fully love me. But I can say that I am able to fully love myself, flaws and all.

On Writing and Jazz

Quite often I re-visit books I’ve enjoyed as a younger man to make sure they “hold up,” and almost every time, on each subsequent pass, I discover new levels of emotion elicited by the works. They hold up, all right. Re-reading Charles Mingus’s mercurial, non-linear autobiography Beneath the Underdog has once again left me melancholic for what once could have been. Beware brothers and sistahs: I’m about ready to get soft on you: I love writing — I make a decent living working at it . . . but more than anything I adore playing Jazz.

I mean Jazz Jazz. . . . “Jass,” as some, more naughty New Orleans bateristas used to sheepishly write on their gargantuan bass drums at the turn of the 20th century, while they swung hard both rhythm and bottle. Jazz, brothers and sistahs, amen! Not the “smooth” bullshit that now passes for this once pure, most original American jambalaya of blues, race, sex, whisky, and pimp life. Not Najee jazz. Not Kenny G jazz. Jazz! Specifically Modal Jazz. And Hard Bop.  And Bebop. You know the kind: Dizzy and Miles and Coltrane and Dolphy and Mingus and Monk and Bird played it. Invented it. Perfected it. The Jazz that evolved in the mid ’50s from the original Fathers (Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Oliver, Bechet, Armstrong) but that, for unfortunate reasons, stopped resonating with American audiences somewhere around 1965.

Before I came to realize I would write for a living, I was convinced I would work as a musician; a drummer, to be more specific. And I was on the right path, too: early lessons in percussion and the kit, sight reading, music theory / history. But back then (age 11) it was rock music that muscled its way in and brainwashed the grey matter. I came to understand Modal Jazz and Hard Bop much, much later than a trained, wannabe-working musician ought to have. And so rock music diverted my attention and, I feel, made me miss my Jazz train (‘Trane?). Sure, I played rock / pop music in some cool, local (Washington D.C. / Baltimore) venues (even toured the east coast for a short time) and had a bit of fun for a handful of years, but my regret of not having come to study Jazz sooner persists and haunts me to this day. I coulda been a contender. I coulda swung with the best of ’em: Rich, Krupa, Morello, Webb, Blakey.

It’s all right, don’t feel sorry for my shattered dreams (I’m quite adept at self pity as you can see); in a way it’s a very good thing. The realization that I’d never be Max Roach provided for a seamless transition to a life built upon writing. After all, I had been an avid reader since age 5 or 6 — a positive byproduct of being an only child growing up in Communist-era Romania throughout the ’70s.

But (fiction) writing and Jazz are such diametrically-opposed ways to make art . . . at least for me. Whereas one requires relative silence, isolation, a solitary chunk of time during which the (this?) writer flirts with addiction, madness, and descent into one of Dante’s various circles (or temporary residence in any Hieronymus Bosch painting), the other is an uplifting, instantaneous experience of an improvised, running dialogue with your fellow artists: intuitive phrasing, call and response, blue notes, prosody . . . an immediate validation or rejection of that which you have just created. Listen, you gotta have giant balls to get up on that stage night after night, play something different every time, while being instantly judged by your peers and audience. Yessir, you can’t hide your shortcomings or mediocrity behind pseudonyms or the relative anonymity of the Internet. You’re out there hanging yourself out to dry. And you better deliver. Every night. Now that’s bollocks and tough-as-titanium skin, mates. That being said, both processes necessary for writing and music improv are extremely attractive to me.  They’re the yin yang in my life. I crave to experience both. I am selfish, I know.

Writing well, and sustaining that brilliant level for the duration of a novel is ambitious and challenging for me. A full time job, marriage, fatherhood, mixed in with the daily, soul-grinding details of life that infringe upon that elusive chunk of quality time, make the craft of writing sacred, but at the same time quite fractious. I envy those lucky scribes who have somehow stumbled upon those oases of temporal nirvana, and who can afford to, as Gertrude Stein once said, fuck about for 23 hours a day, in order that they may write for that particular one. OK, I paraphrased that. But you get the point of my coveting.

Truth is, for me, writing has always come in sudden and sometimes unexpected spurts. I’ve never truly had the luxury to cogitate and compose for too long, and so, like an infantry grunt, I’ve remained vigilant and prepared myself with Moleskine (given my financial state) and pen for those magical times “it” hits me. Consequently, I’ve written just about anywhere you can imagine — including more than a few men’s room stalls in federal and state buildings’ washrooms. I am proud of those venues, all of them. They’re like constant boot camp. They are Sergeant Hartman on your ass, relentlessly.

Lately I write strictly on a computer, as it seems there is a machine available no matter where I am. Between laptops, desktops, iPads, and even their smaller cousin iPods (which I mainly use to take notes or jot down ideas), I have nearly full time access to writing. I know, I am lucky. I don’t take that for granted. But I cannot say that during those dog days of emergent technology when I wrote with stubs of broken #2 pencils in ruffled notebooks on packed subway trains, writing was necessarily more dynamic or more “legit.” That would just be me romanticizing things. And if you know me, you’re laughing uncontrollably now. What I am trying to say: the computer hasn’t mechanized or destroyed my creativity; it hasn’t taken away the humanity or emotional dynamics of my writing.  Nor have the inconsistent settings or the venues, although lately I’ve settled in a comfy enclave tucked into a corner of my bedroom, by a window overlooking some really nice oak trees.

I like the idea of incorporating Modal Jazz techniques into the process of writing prose. That is to say, I enjoy improvisation, particularly of dialogue, within a larger framework or mode, rather than plot twists and turns, or devices as the framework itself. Nowadays, most of the dialogue I write, particularly in my short stories, I don’t edit. Dig what Jackson Pollock said to interviewer William Wright in 1950: “I don’t use the accident. I deny the accident. I do have a general notion of what I’m about and what the results will be. I approach painting in the same sense as one approaches drawing, that is, it’s direct.”

I wrote my book Short Lean Cuts in the same manner, and the prose is experimental; short sentences and fragments, meant to be very much like improvised solos — crescendos and diminuendos — exploring  a particular mode in rhythmically and melodically varied ways. The mode is the chapter. And in a greater sense, the chapters themselves further act like solos within the mode (the theme) of the entire book. I know it may sound pretentious, but it’s not meant to be. The book is an experiment; a fusion of my love for Jazz and literature.

In Beneath the Underdog, Charles Mingus is often all over the place, but not without losing that most important thread: his humanity. His account is not linear, it’s at times ugly, utterly personal, and by no means a simple factual narrative like you would expect. It’s a work of art. It’s deranged. And it’s so beautiful.

They both are — writing . . . and Jazz.