2022
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Acknowledgements
Editors lurk in the shadows of the books we edit. Sometimes attention is drawn in a very public way to the work we do quietly in the background. I recenlty received two surprising and very formal “acknowledgements” to work that I had done on two newly published works. The first example is also a first for me. It takes the form of a dedication. In Charles and Emma Darwin – The Option to Believe, author Chris Dunford dedicates his book to two of his family members and also to me. What a wonderful gesture. Two days later, in the just-released Tumblehome – One Woman’s Canoeing Adventures in the Divine Near Wilderness, Brenda Missen writes, “Kevin worked with me for several years. He helped transform Tumblehome from its rambling, journally-style roots to a tightly structured, forward-moving narrative. He pulled a deeper, more honest book out of me too. I am deeply indebted to him for his guidance.” Phew! Time to get back into those shadows… On the peripheral curiosities that drive a writer deeper into research:
Not just hungry. I am starving. I long to know more of her life, both before and after the moment of composition. I want to know who she was, where she came from, and what happened next. I want to know what became of her children and grandchildren. I want to read details of her burial place so I can lay flowers on her grave. I want to know her, and to know her life, and I am lazy, so I want to find all these answers laid out easily before me, preferably in a single library book. The literature available to me, however, is mostly uninterested in answering such peripheral curiosities. Still, I search. Because I am convinced there must be a text in existence, somewhere, that shares my wonder. Once I exhaust public libraries, I set to asking favours of university friends, stealing into libraries under assumed identities to make stealth-copies of various histories, volumes on translation, and journal articles, each source adding to the portrait… From A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ni Ghriofa – a wonderful work of creative non-fiction in which she explores the history behind a late 18th century poem by Eibhlin Dbh Ni Chonaill (1743 - ca 1800) about the violent murder of her husband, Art Ó Laoghaire, in 1773. As Ni Ghriofa says several times in this book: THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT. A Ghost in the Throat is published in Canada by Biblioasis (2020) |
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"What I hope to have generated is microsuspense: the desire to keep reading, the drive to turn the page."
Jennifer Croft, translator of The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk. |
A New Year's Resolution for Writers and Editors?
Because you have seen something doesn't mean you can explain it. Differing interpretations will always abound, even when good minds come to bear. The kernal of indisputable information is a dot in space; interpretations grow out of the desire to make this point a line, to give it direction. The direction in which it can be sent, the uses to which it can be put by a culturally, professionally, and geographically diverse society, are almost without limit. The possibilities make good scientists chary. ...When asked to assess the meaning of a biological event -- What were these animals doing out there? Where do they belong? -- they hedge. They are sometimes reluctant to elaborate on what they saw, because they cannot say what it means, and they are suspicious of those who say they know. Some even distrust the motives behind the questions.
Barry H. Lopez, Arctic Dreams, Wesleyan University Press (1986), p. 127.
And why? Because you have seen something doesn't mean you can explain it.
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...insight encouragement and reassurance… Editors are counselors and can do a good deal more for writers in the first-draft stage than at the end of the publishing process. Writers come in two principal categories—those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure—and they can all use help. The help is spoken and informed and includes insight, encouragement and reassurance with regard to a current project. If you have an editor like that, you are, among other things, lucky; and, through time, the longer the two of you are talking, the more helpful the conversation will be. John McPhee, Draft No. 4, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2017), p. 83-4) |
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Writing and time:
“…fiction is a temporal art, it’s based on time that’s irreversibly passing in one direction, and I think one of the things that makes reading possible, or pleasurable, is that everybody knows what a day is, whether you’re on a farm in Ireland or at the top of a building in Shanghai. It’s what makes translation possible. And one day we won’t get to the end of that day. And that piece of time between now and then is called our lives. And I think if you’re a fiction writer, you want to say something meaningful about that.”
From Claire Armistead’s interview with the acclaimed Irish novelist Claire Keegan, The Guardian, October 20, 2021
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“What happens when a media industry that has been with us for more than 500 years and is deeply embedded in our history and culture finds itself confronted by, and threatened by, a new set of technologies that are radically different from those that have underpinned its practices and business models for centuries?”
(p. vii) In Book Wars – The Digital Revolution in Publishing (Polity Press, 2021), John B. Thompson sets out to provide a comprehensive and convincing set of answers to this troubling question. His book is essential, encouraging, and deeply challenging reading for anyone interested in the vulnerable world of “words”, their packaging, their transmission, their marketplace, their reception. And their future. (12/09/2021) |
Karl Ove Knausgaard on the Dance of the Writer and Editor:
… I know of Norwegian editors who to all intents and purposes move their author’s feet, so to speak, in the dance of their literary endeavors, who basically instruct them: left foot here, right foot there, left foot here, right foot there. And I know, too, of Norwegian writers at the exact opposite pole, who deliver print-ready manuscripts to their editors and would change publishers promptly at the suggestion of reworking anything...
… creative writing takes place are often complicated, to put it mildly—anyone even slightly familiar with the writing profession, as we so grandly refer to it, knows that it is one great big entanglement of neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncrasies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, impulsive ideas, clutter, and procrastination...
… writing and publishing a book is to lay some part of oneself bare, in such a way as to be utterly defenseless, and allow oneself to be judged by someone with nothing at risk. An editor who also works as a critic, which is to say interpreting and passing judgments on quality—and yes, they exist—serves literature poorly, since interpretation and judgment wrap up a work as if for good, whereas what they should be doing is keeping it open as long as possible. For literature is always something that is becoming, in the making…
… Writing is about breaking down what you can do and what you’ve learned, something that would be inconceivable to a craftsman, a cabinetmaker for instance, who can’t possibly start from scratch every time.. . This is how it is with musicians, too; the technique or craft is something so well mastered that the musician’s awareness of it is not a conscious awareness, and the music becomes art only in the flow...
… the author often suspects that what he or she is doing probably isn’t that good, at the same time as he or she needs to hear how good it is. The author needs that lie and must overcome the suspicion of it being just that, a lie, must deceive himself or herself into believing it.
From Karl Ove Knausgaard’s In the Land of the Cyclops, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken, and published by Archipelago Books. These excerpts are from the essay, “What Writer and Editors Do” and is online at The Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/01/05/what-writers-and-editors-do/
… I know of Norwegian editors who to all intents and purposes move their author’s feet, so to speak, in the dance of their literary endeavors, who basically instruct them: left foot here, right foot there, left foot here, right foot there. And I know, too, of Norwegian writers at the exact opposite pole, who deliver print-ready manuscripts to their editors and would change publishers promptly at the suggestion of reworking anything...
… creative writing takes place are often complicated, to put it mildly—anyone even slightly familiar with the writing profession, as we so grandly refer to it, knows that it is one great big entanglement of neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncrasies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, impulsive ideas, clutter, and procrastination...
… writing and publishing a book is to lay some part of oneself bare, in such a way as to be utterly defenseless, and allow oneself to be judged by someone with nothing at risk. An editor who also works as a critic, which is to say interpreting and passing judgments on quality—and yes, they exist—serves literature poorly, since interpretation and judgment wrap up a work as if for good, whereas what they should be doing is keeping it open as long as possible. For literature is always something that is becoming, in the making…
… Writing is about breaking down what you can do and what you’ve learned, something that would be inconceivable to a craftsman, a cabinetmaker for instance, who can’t possibly start from scratch every time.. . This is how it is with musicians, too; the technique or craft is something so well mastered that the musician’s awareness of it is not a conscious awareness, and the music becomes art only in the flow...
… the author often suspects that what he or she is doing probably isn’t that good, at the same time as he or she needs to hear how good it is. The author needs that lie and must overcome the suspicion of it being just that, a lie, must deceive himself or herself into believing it.
From Karl Ove Knausgaard’s In the Land of the Cyclops, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken, and published by Archipelago Books. These excerpts are from the essay, “What Writer and Editors Do” and is online at The Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/01/05/what-writers-and-editors-do/
Gabrielle Earnshaw: Henri Nouwen & the Return of the Prodigal Son: The Making of a Spiritual Classic
Paraclete Press, May 2020
The Gift of a Book
Whenever I open a new book, I feel like a child again at Christmas. Hoping for delight, while knowing that socks can also be a thoughtful gesture and that some gifts demand a more delicate pirouette of politeness: “How interesting!” and “How did you ever think of that?!”
Then there are those enchanting moments when a new book in your hand is more like an Escher drawing, something that pulls you through layer after layer of what you thought you already knew. Although books with sock-like utility certainly have their place, it’s books like this new work by Gabrielle Earnshaw that bring lasting and memorable joy. Their value is in the way they reach higher and deeper through layers of stories that may have been told often but are presented in ways that change how you see things that you once thought were familiar.
Gabrielle Earnshaw’s Henri Nouwen & the Return of the Prodigal Son: The Making of a Spiritual Classic (Paraclete Press, May 2020) is a genuine gift of a book, a gift that is filled with surprising insights and rare material that has never been presented in print before.
Her book certainly delivers on that first principle in publishing: doing exactly what the title and sub-title say the author will do. Earnshaw digs underneath, behind, and inside the before-and-after life of Nouwen’s most famous book. She’s an archivist and they, like archaeologists, certainly know how and where to dig. This book reinforces the essential importance of well-kept and accessible archives.
With access to his early drafts and letters to and from his editors, translators, publishers, and even fan-mail, Earnshaw has produced a literary equivalent one of those “making of” documentaries that often accompany films on DVD. Unlike those fawning, celebrity schmooze-fests, this is a scholarly investigation that tells the story of the life of a book in relation to a transformational period in the life of its author, as well as the changing cultural times in which the book first appeared.
People who think they know Nouwen will certainly be surprised by what they discover here. Earnshaw has produced a book with comprehensive information about all her sources and with extensive and detailed notes. This is a highly readable work. What sets it apart is her inclusion of significant archival material that has never been seen before (early drafts and especially significant letters). This clearly written and compact book will surely inform a new generation of Nouwen scholars and readers. She serves both these communities, academic and Nouwen-fans, equally well and this is why her book is such a multi-layered gift.
As an erstwhile publisher, I was delighted to recognize how common it is for writers, even those with many books behind them, to still feel the need to “guide” their (clearly assumed to be hapless) publishers by giving them helpful hints about cover design, layout, and even printing suggestions. Nouwen was no different. And how wrong writers can be about titles! Nouwen’s most significant book might have gone down in publishing history as “A Dreadful Mercy” or “A Dreadful Love.” What a dreadful Rembrandt-denying thought!
Yet, how right is it that every writer, especially of non-fiction, will want more critics to review their work beyond the “niche” of their chosen genre or discipline. In this, Nouwen was no different, especially when, as Earnshaw points out, he felt that this book was the closest yet to what he had been trying to communicate for decades. This is also why he asked for more reviews for this book in secular newspapers and magazines. Despite his uncommonly healthy advance for the book ($65,000!), when it first appeared in 1992, it did reasonably well but was by no means an immediate bestseller. Earnshaw explains why, as she skilfully situates the book within its era: the fax-filled, photocopied, pre-internet 1990s.
Oh, the 1990s! That was a decade when, here in Canada, there were several Catholic newspapers across the country and a viable religious book publishing sector. There were many independent booksellers (remember them?) thriving across the country. People like Nouwen and his mentor Jean Vanier were authors who were being published regularly and successfully within a primarily, though not exclusively, Catholic niche. Their books were being published by smaller Catholic presses as well as larger international soon-to-be behemoth publishing houses. Each new book grew out of the lives these authors lived and the things they were also doing when they were not writing. For the most part they were not exclusive, professional writers, unlike most of their celebrity publishing counterparts in the world of fiction, those literary talking heads who would pop up regularly on radio and television, and on extensive national and international book tours. In contrast, Nouwen wrote his books “one the side” and in spare moments stolen from his teaching and pastoral duties. Earnshaw addresses his growing frustration as an artist who felt he never had adequate time to create substantive work at the level of artistry to which he aspired, all because of his other duties. And as we know, Nouwen rarely said “no” to an invitation.
By 1992 and with many books behind him, Nouwen was one of those outlier authors who, over time, had managed to pull in significant numbers of readers beyond the confines of doctrinal interests. This burgeoning self-help era was the moment when booksellers began quietly changing the label of “that” section of their stores from “Religion” to “Spirituality” – a re-labelling that was more aligned with the increasing number of people who were now buying their books from regular bookstores rather than from church suppliers or those (now mostly on life-support) specialist religious bookstores. Publishers large and small managed to keep their outlier authors in the marketplace of books because of a long-standing publishing phenomenon: the backlist.
All publishers bank on their backlist because its depth determines the viability of future publishing activities. The backlist is the bank of books published years, sometimes decades earlier, whose solid, chug-along, reliable sales provide income for publishers to draw on for promotion and commissions as they take more risks with new authors or with certain titles. The backlist throws a lifeline to recently published books that haven’t reached their expected readership. It’s hard to believe now, but The Return of the Prodigal Son was, initially, one of those under-performing books. Until 1996 when everything changed.
The most revelatory gift in this book is the emergence of the central role of Sister Sue Mosteller, not only in Nouwen’s development of the manuscript of The Return of the Prodigal Son, but also in his development as a more fully integrated and grounded celibate religious in late middle-age. She was Nouwen’s “boss” during what was to be the last decade of his life at L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Earnshaw shows how she was much more than that.
Sue Mosteller is the guiding light for Nouwen in his struggle to get his book settled in tone and in content. All the while she pushed him to dig deeper into his own life and relationships, in a sense, to work more precisely on the interpretation of his own “living human document” – something he had studied in the work of that complex figure, Anton Boisen, early in his career. She discerned that this parable about the prodigal son was more than academic New Testament analytics. It was a direct challenge to Nouwen in his understanding of his relationships with his parents, siblings, and especially his friends, let alone all those to whom he ministered.
And she was unrelenting. Certainly, this book needed to address his life as chaplain, priest, counsellor, friend, teacher, psychologist, and wounded healer. But it could only do that if it also dealt with the way he actually lived those complex and challenging relationships, all of them. She was not going to let him separate the writer from the human being in a process of his own continuing personal development.
In her remarkable letters seen for the first time in this book, Sue Mosteller is revealed as a formidable and unwavering influence on Nouwen as a writer and as a person. This smart, tough, insightful, and deeply sensitive woman in religious life is pushing a man deeper into the unaddressed shadows in his own religious life. It’s quite the read. Fortunately, though hardly surprisingly, Nouwen listened to her and the book and his life at Daybreak were richer for it. Slowly at first, then certainly faster after Nouwen’s death, this book assumed its rightful place as a genuine classic of contemporary spirituality.
There are ambiguous shadowy figures at the edges of Rembrandt’s painting, and Mosteller could be seen as being one them. Nouwen’s chosen parable is about fathers and sons and brothers. Earnshaw draws Sue Mosteller out from of any shadows in this book. She is the open-armed, wise mother/sister figure that a certain prodigal writer returned to again and again, until he and his book could finally address an integration of a way of living and being in relation to all those around him and also to that other Father.
When it comes to gifts it’s impolite to prefer one over another. But it is Gabrielle Earnshaw’s gift of detailing the fundamental role of Sue Mosteller in the literary and human development of Henri Nouwen in that final creative decade of his life that is one of the great contributions to Nouwen scholarship. This is a gift for which I am truly and especially grateful. And I know that I will not be alone.
Kevin Burns
March 29, 2020.
I have posted the occasional articles related to writing, editing, and publishing since 2011. Here's a few more samples:
The Ten Commandments for Writing a Memoir
Blake Morrison is an acclaimed editor, writer, teacher, novelist, librettist, and novelist in the U.K. (Times Literary Supplement , The Observer and the Independent on Sunday. Goldsmiths College, London etc.) His non-fiction work includes As If , about two boys who killed a child. His first memoir, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, was followed by a second, about his mother, Things My Mother Never Told Me. His novel, The Justification of Johann Gutenberg, about the inventor of movable type, was published in 2000.
Here's his advice on how to write a memoir:
1 Grab the reader’s attention from the off
2 Put us there
3 Dramatise yourself as the narrator
4 Be strict about point of view
5 Choose your tense carefully
6 Remember God is in the detail
7 Use the same storytelling devices that novelists use – plot, character, voice, motif and structure
8 Give signposts
9 Be surprising
10 Pace the story
He expands and explains these in a longer article about recent trends and current forms of memoir in The Guardian, December 14, 2019. Here's a link to his full article:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/14/the-naked-truth-how-to-write-a-memoir
Dreyer's English - An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
One of my favourite books about editing that I read this year is by Benjamin Dreyer, the "copy chief" at Random House. It's funny, provocative, and very VERY helpful. This is from his introduction where he captures an ambiguity in editing. Sometimes you edit things to save writers from being "got at" even though you know you could let their original version pass. Smart editors, he says, still impose certain rule-bound interventions, even though they know the piece still works in its rule-breaking original. Why? This is his explanation:
"An admission: Quite a lot of what I do as a copy editor is to help writers avoid being carped at, fairly or - and this is the part that hurts - unfairly, by People Who Think They Know Better and Write Aggrieved Emails to Publishing Houses. Thus I tend to be a bit conservative about flouting rules that may be a bit dubious in their original but, observed, ain't hurting nobody." (p.8)
Dreyer's English, Random House, 2019.
“Diminishing Returns: Creative Culture at Risk”
Here is the first page from a new report on writer’s incomes from the Writers’ Union of Canada:
“Diminishing Returns: Creative Culture at Risk” Following up on the 1998 and 2014 surveys of writers’ incomes conducted by The Writers’ Union of Canada, along with recent surveys of authors’ earnings in the U.K. and U.S., the Union undertook an income survey of its members and other writers in the spring of 2018. The survey was circulated to Union members and other writers through their organizations and social media. Writers were asked to answer questions based on their income in 2017.
The conclusions are deeply discouraging and worrisome:
Taking inflation into account, writers are making 78% less than they were making in 1998. In fact, writers are making significantly less from their writing than they did just three years ago: $9,380 in 2017 vs. $12,879 in 2014. That’s a 27% drop over a short period — the same period that has seen a massive increase in uncompensated educational copying. At the same time, 30% of writers say they must do more to earn a living than they did three years ago.
The work of writers fuels an almost $2 billion book industry in Canada, and yet more than 85% of writers earn an income from their writing that is below the poverty line.
These results indicate that it is increasingly difficult for writers to earn a living wage. Writers create the content that is foundational to our culture.
Without a professional class of writers, our culture is at risk.
Overreach on educational copying (since 2012’s Copyright Act changes) has cost Canadian writers tens of millions of dollars. This survey shows how individual writers are paying for the explosion of uncompensated copying in the education sector. Legislative and regulatory changes are required immediately to ensure that writers are compensated for the use of their work by the education sector.
The full, 8-page report is available here:
https://www.writersunion.ca/news/author-incomes-steep-decline
From a letter to young writers
The author, Colum McCann offers this advice to young aspiring authors:
The quiet lines matter as much as those which make noise. Trust your blue pen, but don’t forget the red one. Allow your fear. Don’t be didactic. Make an argument for the imagined. Begin with doubt. Be an explorer, not a tourist. Go somewhere nobody else has gone, preferably towards beauty, hard beauty. Fight for repair. Believe in detail. Unique your language. A story begins long before its first word. It ends long after its last.
Degrees of Preparation
In a letter written in 1888, the 28-year-old Russian playwright and writer of short stories, Anton Chekhov, sets out 6 writing principles for writers seeking to create a good story:
1: Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political, social-economic nature;
2: Total objectivity;
3: Truthful descriptions of persons and objects;
4: Extreme brevity;
5: Audacity and originality: flee the stereotype;
6: Compassion.
Although Chekhov does not make the connection, these simple principles also apply to writers of non-fiction.
From the Introduction to Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, Trans: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Modern Library/HarperCollins, 2005.
A writer advises a fellow writer
In an exchange of letters the author of Brideshead Revisited offers some writing advice to the author of The Seven Storey Mountain:
“With regard to style it is much more laborious to write briefly. Americans, I am sure you will agree, tend to be very long-winded in conversation and you method is conversational. I relish the laconic. This is a personal preference… I fiddle away rewriting any sentence six times mostly out of vanity…You have clearly adopted the opposite opinion … banging away at your typewriter on whatever turns up.
Never send off any piece of writing the moment it is finished. Put it aside. Take on something else. Go back to it a month later and re-read it. Examine each sentence and ask ‘Does this say precisely what I mean? Is it capable of misunderstanding? Have I used a cliché where I could have invented a new and therefore asserting and memorable form? Have I repeated myself and wobbled round the point when I could have fixed the while thing in six rightly chosen words? Am I using words in their basic meaning or in a loose plebeian way?’
That was Evelyn Waugh writing in 1948 in response to a request for writerly advice from Frater Louis OCSO, better known as Thomas Merton. Three years later, Waugh tackled the issue of how a writer considers the audience/readership of a given work: “… [Y]ou do not seem to have decided whom precisely you are addressing. You must, I am sure, in the writing have a specific reader in mind. …You seem to wander from page to page…now taking the ignorant (like myself) out of his depths, now offering rudimentary information which is quite superfluous…
I do think the power of your writing would be greatly increased if you decided on a single level for each book – or write four books instead of one…”
The full and deeply engaging exchange of letters between these two major figures is the subject of a wonderful new book by Mary Frances Coady: Merton & Waugh – A Monk, A Crusty Old Man & The Seven Storey Mountain, published by Paraclete Press (2015). Reading this will give new insights into the works of both authors and will also send you in search of The Reader Over Your Shoulder - A Handbook for Writers of English Prose by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge. Waugh recommends this 1943 style guide and Merton thoroughly enjoys it. Some libraries still have a copy.
Ask the beasts
The starting point for Elizabeth A. Johnson’s latest work is the Book of Job.
Ask the beasts and they will teach you;
The birds of the air, and they will teach you;
Ask the plants of the earth and they will teach you;
And the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among these does not know
That the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing,
And the breath of every human being.
(Job 12: 7-10)
Using those three Biblical verses she proposes that for humans to understand their relation to the non-human world, they should consult with it. She has titled her latest book: Ask the Beasts – Darwin and the God of Love. And in its 323 pages she addresses many different ways to “ask” that question, offering a wide and deep range of how scientists and theologians have and continue to answer such questions.
As with all the best books, reading hers will send you in search of a lot of follow-up titles, starting with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Literary analysis has shown how Darwin’s voice as a writer, by turns persuasive, friendly, dazzling, humble, dark, and warmly human, invites readers to sue their own image-making powers to see the grandeur in this view of life that the author himself envisions. His writing has been compared to the novels of Victorian contemporaries Charles Dickens in Great Expectations and George Eliot in Middlemarch, authors who wove stories with complex, interlacing lines into a single overarching narrative. By involving the reader in the narrative experience at once tragic, awesome, and mundane, the book functions as literature. It is as a work of science, though, that Origin has had its most significant impact. (p. 99)
Elizabeth Johnson makes you want to read so much more than the citations and quotations she weaves into her own wonderful exploration of theological perspectives on evolutionary theory. Her 11-page bibliography will send you to your local library for a year or two.
In addition to showing enormous respect for her sources she singles out her editor, Robin Baird-Smith. He is one of the most influential editors in British non-fiction publishing. Working with him “has been a delight,” she writes in her Acknowledgments. “He is a lovely person to work with and I salute him with sincerest thanks.” Their editorial partnership has resulted in a remarkable and intellectually provocative book.
Elizabeth A. Johnson’s Ask the Beasts – Darwin and the God of Love is a Continuum book published by Bloomsbury (2014).
Teach us to sit still
In Teach Us To Sit Still, the novelist Tim Parks details his urological and pain-filled journey from the conventional world of medicine and toward meditation and mindfulness. While not fully cured by the book’s final chapter, he avoids surgery and dives deeper into the creative links between writing, illness, and simply getting on with life. In this section he is attending a silent meditation retreat and is struggling to clear his (writerly) mind:
Uncalled for, unwanted, the thoughts flew across my mental space, back and forth, hither and thither, like birds in the evening sky, chasing and losing and finding each other, racing, wheeling, dispersing, gathering, gliding a while then flapping in hard flight, always moving, through each other and across each other, at different altitudes, different speeds, as the light fails and the breeze comes up and the rain spatters on rustling leaves. Then one by one, at last, they begin to settle, they drop from view. With a last flutter, a thought settles on its perch and is quiet. On a rooftop perhaps, or on your wrist, in your throat. Another joins the first, and another. Thoughts fluffing their feathers before falling still. Perhaps one last squawk … then silence. Until, huddled together on their wire, between your ears, they lose definition, merge into each other, become a single pool of feathery shadow, deep shadow in the darkness, one layer beneath another, beneath others, as eyes close behind closed eyelids, watched by still deeper eyes, and the mind at last discovers itself transparent; the mind is finally still and clear as clear water, and from top to toe the body brims with transparent wordless mind…
(p. 267)
Tim Parks, Teach Us To Sit Still – A Skeptic’s Search for Health and Healing
Rodale Books, 2010
Ink-Stained Fingers
In The Missing Ink – The Lost Art of Handwriting, Philip Hensher may have written this by hand, but keyboards and digital typesetting took over where he left off:
This is a book about the disappearance of handwriting. We don’t quite know what will take its place – the transmission of thought via a keyboard into words; the rendering of voice commands into action; the understanding by a piece of technology of a gesture or, conceivably, a thought. The shaping of thought and written language by a pen, moved by a hand to register marks of ink on paper has for centuries, millennia, been regarded as almost the most powerful sign of our individuality. …Handwriting is what registers our individuality, and the mark which our culture has made on us. It has been regarded as the path to riches, merit, honour; it has been seen as the unknowing key to our souls and our innermost nature. It has been regarded as a sign of our health as a society, of our intelligence, and as an object of simplicity, grace, fantasy, and beauty in its own right. (p. 17)
This is a wonderful exploration of handwriting’s history – how it was taught, the tools of the trade (quill, dip pen, fountain pen, “biro”, and rollerball) the pseudo-science that grew up around, and its imminent demise.
To read this book makes you want to seek out that Christmas present from log ago, the green Waterman fountain pen in its silk-lined box, and the dust-covered bottle of Parker “Quink” ink.
A great read, filled with rich historical anecdotes. Hensher intersperses this historical survey with chapters marked “Witness” which are edited transcripts of his interviews with a wide range people about their handwriting.
When I was younger, I used to admire my mother’s handwriting. But now it’s more like my father’s. I can’t read my own handwriting, and my father can’t read his handwriting, either. (p. 230)
What does my handwriting say about me? It says – I’m feeling self-conscious about this now. This is so difficult. (p. 143)
The Missing Ink – The Lost Art of Handwriting by Philip Hensher is published by Faber and Faber Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2012)
The Possible in the Fictional
Every few years, long-dead authors are resurrected by other writers who identify their work not as something frozen in historical time but as an essential contribution to understanding the present moment. A few years ago it was Proust (How Proust Can Change Your Life, and Proust and the Squid.), and then it was Chekhov (Reading Chekhov – A Critical Journey, and Scenes from a Life ). Now it seems to be George Eliot’s turn. (Nancy Henry’s 2012 biography and the just-published: My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead).
But why George Eliot in 2014?
Writing 20 years ago, Rosemary Ashton, the editor of the Penguin edition of George Eliot’s Middlemarch was surely on to something: "George Eliot places her novel forty years back from the time of writing (1871). She adopts the role of imaginative historian, even scientific investigator, one who is intent on ‘watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots’, as she describes her task (Chapter 11), and who seeks to analyse recent political and social changes by means of the particular human stories she tells. Her method is to weave together several strands in such a way that an individual’s lot is seen to be affected by those historical changes as they happen." (p. viii)
Then Ashton adds, “Middemarch is above all about change and the way individuals and groups adapt to, or resist, change.”
What does the novelist herself say?
Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years? For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (p. 832 Penguin edition)
And then, a few lines from the end of the work she adds, “for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”
A commitment to the fragile possibility of things, perhaps that’s why.
Writing advice from Hillary Mantel
Trust your reader, stop spoon-feeding your reader, stop patronizing your reader, give your reader credit for being as smart as you at least, and stop being so bloody beguiling: you in the back row, will you turn off that charm! Plain words on plain paper. Remember what Orwell says, that good prose is like a windowpane. Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can.
Giving up the Ghost – Hillary Mantel
John Macrae/ Henry Holt,
2003
The gyration and discord
Phillip Lopate’s new book To Show and to Tell – The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2013) is a must-read for any aspiring writer.
One third of the way through the book he includes this brief excerpt about the contrariness of a writer from an essay by Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592):
All contradictions maybe found in me by some twist and in some fashion, Bashful, insolent, chaste, lascivious, talkative, taciturn, tough, delicate, clever, stupid, surly, affable, lying, truthful, learned, ignorant, liberal, miserly, and prodigal: all this I see in myself to some extent depending on how I turn; and whoever studies himself really attentively, finds in himself, yes, even in his judgment, this gyration and this discord. I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply, and solidly, without confusion and without mixture, or in one word.
A laugh, a sob and a cough all at once
That’s how the New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley describes the essence of Chekhov. “[I]t’s a muddle of joy and sorrow and stumbling self-awareness shadowed by the premonition of the death that is always waiting.” (New York Times, December 2, 2012) He says that this is the “music of Chekhov” – neither “cheering nor mellifluous in its depiction of shrinking aspirations and missed connections” among his favourite characters: Russian provincials.
Brantley suggests that Chekhov’s incisive writing makes a direct connection to today. “There’s something about the clarity in Chekhov’s ambiguity – his quiet insistence that life is comic and tragic at once in a world without heroes and villains.”
Perhaps it’s their Russian setting but I always think of Chekhov at this time of year, despite the number of his characters who seem to wilt in the oppressive heat of a languorous summer. Perhaps that’s it: always layer upon layer of contradiction.
In 1897, while recuperating in the south of France from the tuberculosis that would eventually claim his life, Chekhov wrote to his friend, the theatre critic Aleksey Suvorin:
NICE, October 6, 1897.
... You complain that my heroes are gloomy--alas! that's not my fault. This happens apart from my will, and when I write it does not seem to me that I am writing gloomily; in any case, as I work I am always in excellent spirits. It has been observed that gloomy, melancholy people always write cheerfully, while those who enjoy life put their depression into their writings. And I am a man who enjoys life; the first thirty years of my life I have lived as they say in pleasure and contentment ....
Chekhov would not experience a “second” thirty years of life. This medical doctor, writer of fiction and of extraordinary plays, died at the age of 44. He continues to influence the craft of restrained but powerful writing - in all forms.
So, with a Chekovian laugh, a sob and a cough all at once: Happy Holidays and all the best for the New Year ahead.
Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? (King James Version)
How truth-filled should an autobiography or a memoir be? Truthfulness is an ethical challenge to every writer with a conscience or with hopes of maintaining peace within the family and the extended circles of friends who may or may not be disguised in a work.
“Some names, circumstances and time sequences have been changed to preserve privacy and give the narrative dramatic shape. This is a memoir, not an autobiography, a snapshot of one period of my life as I remember it. There is no authorized version of the past.” That’s James Clarke explaining his approach to his book about his difficult childhood in the 1940s and his clearly dysfunctional family. (The Kid from Simcoe Street, Exile Editions, 2012)
It’s equally a challenge for writers of fiction who choose to include real characters in their work. As the novelist Sebastian Faulks says on his website, when asked if one of his characters was based on a real person: “I don’t do ‘based on’. I am a novelist. I make things.” That didn’t stop him from building a sequence in another novel involving the real French neurologist Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) in Human Traces(Hutchinson, 2005).
David Lodge went further in creating a hybrid work: a full biography in the form of a novel. In the preliminary pages of A Man of Parts(Harvill Secker 2011), he writes: “Nearly everything in this narrative is based on factual sources – ‘based on’ in the elastic sense that includes ‘inferable from’ and ‘consistent with.’ All the characters are portrayals of real people, and the relationships between them were as described in these pages.” His subject was the complicated personal life and professional career of the British writer H.G. Wells and Lodge details the extra-marital affairs and offspring from various unions. Lodge includes an extensive set of sources at the back of the book to explain where he found lines of dialogue or details for certain events in the book.
Penelope Fitzgerald is somewhat more oblique about what she did in her novel, The Blue Flower, (Flamingo, 1995) in which she explores the life of the real-life German poet Friedrich von Hardenberg.
“This novel is based on the life of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772-1801) before he became famous under the name Novalis. All of his surviving work, letter from and to him, the diaries and official and private documents were published … between 1960 and 1988. The original editors were Richard Samuel and Paul Kluckhohn, and I should like to acknowledge the debt I owe to them.” Novel or biography? Julian Barnes doesn’t tackle that in his 2008 tribute to Fitzgerald in The Guardian. He celebrates her “[m]astery of sources and a taste for concision.”
Hilary Mantel explains her strategy as a novelist who deals with “real” people and events in a note at the conclusion of her Digging up the Bones (HarperCollins, 2012), her second novel about Thomas Cromwell. This work focuses on the demise of Anne Bolyn. “I am not claiming authority for my version; I am making the reader a proposal, an offer.”
It may be true that the further back in history an author ventures, the ethical difficulties seem to become more diluted. However, the closer writers are to the present moment the more difficult these decisions become. In 2010 Sharon Dogar wrote a fictionalised version of the life of Anne Frank (Annexed, Andersen Press) intended for teen readers. Needless to say the Anne Frank Foundation was not pleased at the appearance of an unauthorized portrait. In the back and forth in the literary press that followed the book’s release, Meg Rosoff who blogs regularly on the Guardian’s online books page, offered this helpful perspective:
The question of whether authors have the "right" to write about living or real people is not one that should be answered by the caretakers of historical reputation. Fiction is a free-for-all, and as long as an author can find someone who'll publish what they write (or these days, publish it themselves), there are no actual rules about who or what can be tackled, give or take a few libel laws.
What is literary or autobiographical truth, then?
What art requires and the law permits.
Attention ought to be paid?
Three fragments about writing and remembering from this week’s reading: “May no one blame me that I write so much about insignificant people, sisters, brothers, relatives, neighbours, burghers, peasants, youths, bout domestic, simple, and childish things, and about myself. For who will do it if we don’t? In the Bible, in the Roman histories and chronicles, in the Holy Scriptures, in the seven liberal arts, and in other arts and philosophers and poets one cannot really find us. Therefore, if my book and records are preserved and continued, our descendants will also know something to say about us; otherwise, it will be as if we had never been.”
Herman Weinsberg’s “Gedenkbuch” written in 1582, Köln and the subject of Paper Memory: A Sixteenth-Century Townsman Writes His World, Matthew Lundin, Harvard University Press, 2012.
“Merciful God! The years will pass, and we shall all be gone for good and quite forgotten … Our faces and our voices will be forgotten and people won’t even know that there were once three of us here … But our sufferings may mean happiness for the people who come after us … There’ll be a time when peace and happiness reign in the world, and then we shall be remembered kindly and blessed. No my dear sisters, life isn’t finished for us yet! We’re going to live! We’re going to live! The band is playing so cheerfully and joyfully – maybe, if we wait a little longer, we shall find out why we live, why we suffer … Oh, if only we knew, if only we knew!” - Anton Chekhov’s character Olga in The Three Sisters (first performed in 1901), Trans: Elisaveta Fen, Penguin Classics, 1951.
“André Malraux remarks in his Anti-Memory that one day we will realize that we are distinguished as much from each other by the forms our memories takes as by our characters. I am wondering what form my memory is taking. It seems that this depends a great deal on myself. I have little to say about events, good or bad, creative or destructive, but much about the way I remember them – that is, the way I start giving them form in the story of my life. I am starting to see how important this is in my day-to-day living. I often say to myself: ‘How will I remember this day, this disappointment, this conflict, this misunderstanding, this sense of accomplishment, joy, and satisfaction? How will they function in my ongoing task of self-interpretation?’”
Henri Nouwen: The Genesee Diary, Image/Doubleday, 1976.
Dr. Jane's indelible mark on all whose lives she touched
Dr. Phil Gold remembers Dr. Jane Poulson in his Canadian Medical Association Journal tribute. He describes her as “athlete and author, musician and researcher, student, teacher and role model, doctor and patient, colleague and friend.” And adds, she “died a hero Aug. 28, 2001, aged 49.”
For twelve years now, every August, I remember Jane Paulson in a particular way. In the final months of her life I had the privilege of working briefly with her on the completion of her memoir: The Doctor Will Not See You Now: The Autobiography of a Blind Physician. Our final working sessions on that book were in in the summer of 2001, the last one at her bedside in Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital. Outside people were wilting in a summer heat wave and in the slight chill of her air-conditioned hospital room we spent most of the afternoon working to sequence the final order of the chapters. That was no more than three weeks before she died in the palliative care centre at Toronto’s Grace Hospital.
Earlier in the year a friend of Jane’s had sent me a chaotic bundle of autobiographical pieces that he thought could form a book. It took hardly any time for me to see that this collection of rough-and-ready pieces indeed could well become a deeply moving book. She had written a bunch of autobiographical and reflective pieces with no overall plan at the recommendation of the late Most Reverend Edward Scott at the time he was primate of the Anglican Church in Canada. Jane was also greatly influenced by a Catholic hospital chaplain in Montreal, Father Paul Geraghty and also the Very Reverend Douglas Stoute of Toronto. This trio of mentors encouraged her to share her remarkable story beyond Canada’s medical establishment, to go beyond the privacy of a personal journal, and to address something of the profound spirituality that was so clearly integrated into her remarkable work as a doctor. In response to their suggestion Jane had evidently taken on the writing challenge in much the same way as she approached everything else in her life: with great conviction, unrelenting determination, a wild sense of humour, great energy, occasionally wonderfully raw language, and great precision. And all of that with an amazing sense of warmth and a superb recall of detail.
In brief: Jane Poulson was born in Toronto in 1952, attended St Clement’s School and Havergal College in Toronto, and then Queen’s University in Kingston before moving to Montreal to study medicine at McGill. While still in grade school she had been diagnosed with a severe case of insulin-dependent diabetes and just before completing her medical studies she lost what remained on her vision. Now at that time, higher education and (especially) professional gatekeeping organizations offered relatively little accommodation for anyone with a serious disability. Fortunately, Jane Poulson did not regard blindness that way. “It was time for me to start learning how to be blind,” she wrote in her book, “and at the same time to find my place in the profession I so loved and was determined to pursue, my handicap notwithstanding. This is a never-ending journey for me and, like any important venture, it started with practical and immediate little steps.”
The Doctor Will Not See You Now is filled with the frustration and the elation of being floored by and then eventually succeeding with those messy “immediate little steps” and the many “smashing crack-ups” in between. Along the way, she challenged Canada’s medical establishment to come up with a way of examining blind, accomplished, and determined medical students like her. And they did. Once qualified, Dr. Poulson then had to instill confidence in her initially somewhat tentative patients. And she did. She refused to settle for anything like an easier, limited form of accommodated medical practice. So she didn’t. As a doctor, a researcher, and a gifted teacher she knew the depths of what she had to offer. She insisted on setting out on a pioneering path of serious medical research and innovative practice in internal medicine which eventually led her toward palliative care. And that’s what she did, successfully, and on all fronts, first in Montreal and later in Toronto, where she was eventually named a Fellow of Massey College. Oh yes, and in 1987 at the tender age of 35 she was also awarded the Order of Canada. This is the citation:
Martha Jane Poulson, C.M., M.D.C.M., F.R.C.P.
Toronto, Ontario
Member of the Order of Canada
Awarded on June 29, 1987; Invested on October 28, 1987
Having fought a losing battle with blindness, she convinced authorities at McGill University to let her finish her medical degree and pursue her residency training in Internal Medicine. The first blind Canadian physician to qualify as a specialist in internal medicine and become a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, she is now a staff member of the Montreal General Hospital and an Associate Professor at McGill University. She also addresses audiences in Canada and the U.S.A. inspiring other blind people to pursue their chosen professions.
Diabetes and blindness were not the only serious health challenges she faced. Eventually cancer took up residence in her already ravaged body. Her own health issues, she made it abundantly clear, helped to make her an even better doctor. In the Introduction to Jane’s book, her dear friend Elizabeth MacCallum writes:
A few years into her battle with cancer, she began writing what Dr. Neil Macdonald refers to as seminal articles on patient care and cancer. She wrote to Macdonald, "I am no longer a private person" once she had written professionally about how it felt to be a patient. After giving a lecture on patient care using her now double-sided experience, the first talk she’d given in over a year of her illness, she was subdued. "There wasn’t much audience reaction," Jane reported. After considerable silence she went on: "I was surprised how many women who have breast cancer came to speak to me afterwards." After more discussion she said, "The guy who invited me to talk came to me later and asked if everybody always cried during my lectures."
If you’re blind, others’ tears are secret.
Elizabeth’s husband, John Fraser, and Master of Massey College, co-authored the Introduction with her and he captures Jane’s magnetising impact on everyone she met:
Whenever she felt she had a triumph – beating back cancer, getting a new job, greeting the return of spring, et cetera – she would dial up the College catering office and book the Common Room or the small dining room or the Upper Library and throw a party. Usually with a band, always with an open bar and the very best food. These parties, I am convinced, were an extension of her duties as the Chapel Mistress. She not only ennobled all the people who came into her life, she wined and dined them so well that they actually came to believe her when she said her friends meant everything to her. How could it have been otherwise, as she showered on us all her talent of loving and healing?
John and Elizabeth experienced these things first hand. I learned about them from a set of messy manuscript pages. I once complained to Jane that reading her manuscript was like looking at an old telephone directory from a distance. The margins were extra wide and the font was tiny – somehow she had set her computer to what looked to be 6- or 8-point type on many of the pages. She dead-panned, “Then try reading type when you are blind!”
In those few treasured months, through a series of long telephone calls and unforgettable working sessions together in Toronto, we found a way to organize all the printouts and files on her computer. Her life story in print would unfold chronologically in the ordered pages of a big blue ring binder which still sits on my bookshelf. Those printouts eventually became the 252 pages of the final published book.
And so it was that summer of 2001, before I left her hospital room for what we both knew would be the last time, knowing that she would never get to open the published book, I said, “Jane, hold out both your hands.” And she did. I carefully placed the heavy binder in them and said, “Jane, this is your book. Careful! It’s a quite a heavy piece of work!” and she laughed.
I am honoured to have met Jane and to have learned about her life in that strangely intimate way that an editor can when working with a trusting and fearless author. Even the publication of her book, several months after her death, was another Poulson accomplishment. Given the role of vision health in the book, I had put the publisher, Novalis, in touch with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. In 2002, The Doctor Will Not See You Now was released in multiple formats on the same day: print, audio, DAISY, and Braille – this was just before e-books arrived on the scene – making it the first book in Canadian commercial publishing history to be released in key accessible formats simultaneously.
Working, even if briefly, with Jane Paulson remains one of the treasured experiences of my professional life. But of course, Jane must have the last insight-filled word:
I see all that I do now through a different lens….When you presume to have infinity before you the value of each person, each relationship, all knowledge you possess is diluted. My life now is concentrating before me. This is the most painful yet enriching experience of my life. I have found my Holy Grail: it is surrounding myself with my dear friends and family and enjoying sharing my fragile and precious time with them as I have never done before. I wonder wistfully why it took a disaster of such proportions before I could see so clearly what was truly important and uniquely mine.
In addition to her memoir the book also contains two moving pieces that Jane Poulson initially wrote for the Canadian Medical Association Journal to explain how her own medical challenges informed her work as a doctor, “Dead Tired” and “The Days That Will Still Be Mine.” Both articles can be read at the CMAJ website. For "Dead Tired" click:
www.cmaj.ca/content/158/13/1748.full.pdf+html?sid=94f508c7-8ffe-48bd-a946-e04585b9f83d
For "The Days That Will Still Be Mine" click:
www.cmaj.ca/content/158/12/1633.full.pdf+html?sid=94f508c7-8ffe-48bd-a946-e04585b9f83d
The Doctor Will Not See You Now – The Autobiography of a Blind Physician, Jane Poulson, Novalis, 2002
All in all it is a story of loss
What do you do the day after your discover your children have been taken to the other side of the world, the first day of that new and violently changed life in which you are likely never to see them again? What’s the procedure, who do you call? One is the citizen of an advanced liberal democracy and has paid one’s taxes – now that catastrophe has struck it goes without saying that a well-oiled and effective and highly professional procedure will swing into action. After all, people don’t just disappear without any questions being asked. At the very least, someone will insist on digging over the garden, just to be on the safe side.
(p. 81)
That’s not the plotline for a novel but a paragraph in a moving work of non-fiction by the Scottish novelist, Douglas Galbraith. The year is 2003, and Galbraith has returned home in Scotland after a short business trip to London. His wife and children are not at the station to meet him, as planned. Perhaps there has been a misunderstanding about the time, or even the day. He makes his own way to their isolated home and two buses and one taxi-ride later, he discovers the car is still on the drive and the house is locked, apparently empty. He has to break into the house through a rear window because he has forgotten his key. He slowly discovers an eerie crime scene. There are no signs of violence, furniture is not unturned, no blood, and bodies. The house is more or less as he left it, except that his Japanese wife, Tomoko, and their two sons Makoto – 6 years old at the time – and Satomi – then 4 years old – are not there. He eventually learns that she has returned to Japan with the two boys. She has taken away all their documents and has left no note, explanation, or forwarding address.
My Son, My Son is Galbraith’s reflection on his search for an explanation for this decision and his determined efforts to regain contact with his sons. He describes the challenges of working with and through the various layers of a complicated situation that begins with a seemingly benign encounter with a hapless police officer. This is a marital dispute with implications for domestic and international law as well as parental and children’s rights. His efforts are frustrated at almost every level. “I have been shut into a parallel, soundproofed world from which it is impossible to send a message back to the one I have just left.” The outcome? No spoilers here.
As with every well-written book, My Son, My Son identifies its principle turf: gender politics, the way different cultures view children, the challenges of inter-cultural relationships, the complexity of international legal cases, and the way good intentions can become so easily diverted and diluted at practically every turn. And as with every well-written book, My Son, My Son also contains peripheral material – those almost-parenthetical bits of content that point towards territory that the writer chooses not to enter but still identifies in passing. In Galbraith’s case: the differences in the ways novelists and historians use facts.
At the time his children were taken to Japan, Galbraith was working on a novel set in China in the 1930s: A Winter in China. He describes the time he spent in the British newspaper archives, digging through the microfilmed pages of the China Press for 1937, “I begin to pick out the novelist’s raw material; all the most highly coloured and poignant and pregnant ephemera the historians so reliably leave out.” (He maybe hasn’t read the reliably “left in” works of such historians as Keith Wrightson, Amanda Vickery, Michael Grant, Lucy Moore, Franny Moyle, Glyn Williams, Simon Schama, Charlotte Gray et al. – but I’ll move on.) Then he offers this helpful insight for writers if fiction about the manner in which factual research-in-the-raw can become vibrant writing in the hands of an accomplished writer:
The trick of the novelist is not be learned about his material, but to cultivate in himself the illusion that what he knows is truly a memory; that he did not read it, but recalls if from having been there, just there where I can recognize myself in the crowd – that man in the trilby and the white shirt with the wide collar. I was a better dresser in the thirties. I became the one who looks up and then runs for the shelter as he hears an air-raid siren, the one who bought a Shanghai corporation lottery ticket from the kiosk that morning and sat through the matinee at the Grand, staying for the Paramount newsreel and even for the Popeye cartoon at the end, though he never found it funny. (p.8)
What Galbraith the may have “reliably left out” of his own story in My Son, My Son will no doubt be a point of debate for some readers. But this is the work of a gifted though deeply hurt writer who in his 2001 novel, The Rising Sun, set in 1698 in the failed Scottish colony of Darien in South America, opens a chapter toward the end of that book with: “How strange is Fortune. The impossible becomes the everyday, the inevitable never happens.”
My Son, My Son, Douglas Galbraith, Harvill Secker – Random House 2012
Ears, eyes, solo, trio, box, and a 35th anniversary
In 1990, I was in Toronto to interview a novelist and as I was driving back to my hotel I heard an announcement on the radio that Keith Jarrett was giving a concert that night, playing the Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord. I raced to the concert hall and managed to get one of the last tickets.
A few years later, when I lived in Toronto and working for CBC Radio, one blisteringly hot Canada Day he was in town with his trio giving a concert at Roy Thomson Hall. I got a ticket and managed to meet with him backstage after the concert because the CBC was planning to record a radio porgramme about him.
Then, on September 26, 2005, I was in New York on another radio project and he was playing a rare solo concert at Carnegie Hall, the one that became The Carnegie Hall Concert (ECM 1989/90) and was released to uniformly rapturous reviews in 2006.
This week I opened the big box of Keith Jarrett’s solo piano Sun Bear Concerts, recorded in Japan an astonishing thirty five years ago this month. I hadn’t played it for a long time. The original LP version contained 10 vinyl albums (later transferred to 6 CDs in 1989) of 5 different concerts and encores, recorded in Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya, Tokyo, and Sapporo between November 5 - 18, 1976. It's fresh, ageless, inexplicable, inspiring music.
More than any other musician I have ever heard, or indeed met, Keith Jarrett is an enigmatic and awe-inspiring artist who has caused me to rethink what I am hearing, what the music is doing, and what the performer’s role is in that mysterious process of music making.
In a 1997 profile The New York Times writer Andrew Solomon characterised Jarrett as a jazz martyr: "Despite all of its affectation, Jarrett's music is always heartfelt. ‘You know, nobody else does this,’ he says. ‘This format ganged up on me in my early years. It's like I'm asking for trouble. People say that it must be easier to do the solo concerts than it used to be, because I've done so many, but it's exactly the opposite. You know -- why would I ask for this trouble again? The music's in the way and I have to get rid of it. And the audience hears me doing that. Let's say you know something and you're sitting in your room knowing it, and you feel that your friends would benefit by knowing this if you explained it to them. But you're going to lose all the calm you have if you try to express it. But you express it anyhow.’
Nine years later in an interview with The Guardian, Jarrett said this about the vulnerability of improvisation: “One thing you learn: if you want to reveal yourself, you also have to know where to stop.”
The accompanying CD booklet in the Sun Bear Concerts box contains only one quintessential Jarrett-authored koan-like sentence: “Think of your ears as eyes.”