M.E. Breen

I finished Summertime last week and I’m still thinking about it. It doesn’t get less cruel; in fact, the dead Coetzee’s failures only become more grave, but it does get more bearable, partly because it becomes more of a novel, by which I guess I mean more fictional, more self-consciously experimental. And the people the biographer interviews at the end are more philosophical and have less at stake than those at the beginning, so the whole thing feels less tense. Here’s an excerpt from the final interview that shows what I mean. The person speaking is named Sophie. She was a colleague of dead Coetzee’s at the University of Cape Town. She is responding here to the biographer’s suggestion that she should tell him everything about her relationship with the dead man because “a great writer becomes the property of us all . . . is to some extent public property.”

On that subject my opinion is irrelevant. What is relevant is what he himself believed. And there the answer is clear. He believed our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world — as you yourself acknowledged a moment ago. That is why I asked about authorization, a question you brushed aside. It was not the authorization of his family or executors I had in mind, it was his own authorization. If you were not authorized by him to expose the private side of his life, then I certainly won’t assist you.

Their competing claims on, or rather, for, dead Coetzee interest me. On the one hand, Sophie seems to be saying the only person fit to write a biography is the biography’s subject, even though that must make it by definition an incomplete story — except, of course, if the auto-biographer stages a fictional death and writes a fictional biography. But how is this so different from the broken, distorted, opinionated stories that strangers produce about any of us? Why is the subject’s own story about himself allowed to be a fiction, while the stories of others require authorization?

I think I find this so interesting because I have never managed to think clearly about how I live my life. I mean I don’t have any sense that I make decisions that lead in a particular direction, or that my life even reflects my values. I know that it does, but it seems an accident, a happy accident, even, that it should. I don’t remember ever saying, I will live in such and such a manner. I will do such and such a kind of work. Instead I drift around in a perplexity of feeling, and somehow I must follow those feelings into decisions and those decisions accumulate into a direction, and here I am. Perhaps what I mean is that my life seems to be defined by a set of longings, some of which are distinct, some inchoate, some small and possibly sweet, some massive and possibly obnoxious. Those longings must result sometimes in my making choices, life requires all kinds of choices, but it’s never the choice that I remember. I hardly think about the past at all, though it shapes my imagination more than anything else. That sounds like a peculiar distinction, but it makes sense, because I hardly think of anything at all. I worry and fantasize and stage conversations, but I don’t weigh options. I arrive at everything crab-wise. I get this worry of Coetzee’s, then, that if you live your life that way you may fail to notice the moments when a direct glance is required, when you really must commit, when the decision is everything, and it must be acknowledged as a decision, and the right or wrong of it accepted. Those moments you can only see in memory, perhaps. Maybe you can really only see them when none of the usual things are at stake anymore. And so comes the temptation to stage your own death, to see yourself from a place where your longings have no force, to enter the heart of another.

On the subject of decision making and how it happens, the Writer’s Almanac sent me Robert Frost this morning. The familiarity of the last three lines make it easy to forget how good this poem is — sort of like if you’ve had the same really flattering haircut for years you forget it’s flattering because you’re so bored of it. But it still looks good!

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I’m reading the book Summertime by J. M. Coetzee.  In the book John Coetzee has died and a biographer is interviewing people who knew him when he was alive. So far I’ve only read two of the interviews, about half the book, but one of the traits the women keep returning to is his coldness. He isn’t unkind, but he lacks electricity and he has bad teeth. I admire this book but I wouldn’t say I’m enjoying it, which isn’t dissimilar to what the women say about the dead Coetzee. In other words, I’m intrigued by the book, and I think about it when I’m not reading it, but I find it repellent and half the time when I could be reading it I do a crossword instead. I look at it on the bedside table like I look at the pile of kleenex from last night’s allergy attack. You have the author Coetzee, and the dead character Coetzee, and the women who catalog his faults (sometimes with relish, sometimes in spite of themselves) and the whole thing comes off so naturally, so believably, so very much in their voices, and yet is so self-consciously constructed, it seems it must be driven by either the most cynical and manipulative impulses or else by a self-loathing so sincere I want nothing to do with it. The title seems like a joke at everyone’s expense, because reading Summertime makes you feel as though you are holding the hand of someone whose skin is so cold they might as well be dead.

Now, I am a person who has cold hands all the time, and cold feet, and who is always drinking tea and wearing two undershirts. I take all this as evidence of nothing more significant than poor circulation, but then looking through the Anatomy of Melancholy I came across this:

Fracastorius will have cold to be cause of fear & sorrow; for such as are cold are indisposed to mirth, dull and heavy, by nature solitary, silent; & not for any inward darkness (as Physicians think), for many melancholy men dare boldly be, continue, and walk in the dark, and delight in it: only the cold are timid; if they be hot, they are merry, and the more hot, the more furious, and void of fear, as we see in madmen.

The timid part is what I find interesting. Pretty often when I fail in the get-up-and-go department at least some of the failure can be attributed to cold: feeling cold already and fearing getting colder, or feeling warm for once and being afraid of losing that comfort. We aren’t talking about the kind of cold that’s actually dangerous (I live in San Francisco, after all), but I spend more than half my life colder than I want to be and negotiating with myself about whether to accept or try to change that situation. It’s the kind of self-preoccupation that could certainly register to others as . . . coldness, or at least as an unwillingness to get involved, a preference for self-study and self-calibration. But it also means that when I’m not out doing things in public with other people, I’m doing secret and possibly brilliant things alone at home. Anyone’s secrets can be supposed to be remarkable, and what is more embarrassing than finding out someone you didn’t think much of has accomplished something impressive on their own time? Cold is essential to so many acts of invention.

And this returns us to dead Coetzee, whose preoccupation with vegetarianism and the political importance of manual labor and his own intellectual progress makes him disagreeable to others. There is some idea here that we owe it to one another to be hot and furious and void of fear. When we feel those things, we tend to act, and when we act, people know what we are about. They have the comfort of knowing who we are as we are, meaning they see our lives unfolding and can make reasonable judgments about them.  The women discussing dead Coetzee claim to be disappointed in him and a little sorry for him, but actually they are outraged. How could he keep so many secrets? How could he be so much more than he seemed? What does that mean about me? Is being merry a waste? Do we only have so much heat, and once it is all given away we are used up and can’t make anything? Do the cold know something the warm don’t? Do the dead know more than the living?

I signed the lease on an office today.  I’m the only one who calls it an office. Everyone else I met today calls it “space.” I share it with a woman who makes mosaics and a man I haven’t met yet who does something with photographs and paints behind a partition. It has a paint-spattered carpet and heat and a skylight and a desk-type object but no chair. I have three keys: one for the building and one for the giant warehouse floor and one for the floating square that is my office.

I was nervous about going to the studios. I only figured out two days ago that you can wear boots over your pants if you buy skinny-leg jeans. It occurred to me driving over there that the people who rent studio space probably mastered this trend in 2006. Usually I don’t mind being square but this seemed like the kind of place where I might wish I was more wavy. As usual I was worrying about the wrong thing.  The people wore pants in a variety of leg-widths and didn’t seem that interested in clothes. They were interested in art!

What I should have been worrying about was cost per square foot. Also, somehow I imagined the whole floor would be set up with cubed partitions and desks and chairs. Like, you know, an office. But after recovering from that always-fresh shock of discovering that everyone else is not the same as me, I started to really like it. I had been in galleries, and I had seen what artist’s lofts look like on TV, but I had never seen a real working space with people doing video art and handmade t-shirts for sale and used tea bags in the kitchen and notes about the tricky toilet taped to the bathroom door and walls of windows and paint smells.

So now the problem was that I liked it, but it didn’t like me. The cheap studios were essentially standing room in a hallway. The private studios with windows were essentially a gazillion dollars. Enter Kate. Kate has been making mosaics for twelve years. She showed up at the open house the same minute I did.  We toured the standing-room only spaces together. We were shopping in the same price range.

The floating square was the last space they showed us. It had no windows but it did have a big skylight. The carpet was old but not gross. It was weirdly calm.  It was like a lake of a room in the middle of a bustling town. It cost almost twice what either of us had budgeted. We decided to share. We co-signed.

Kate gets the spot directly under the skylight and I get the desk-shaped thingy. Tomorrow I am going to bring a chair and an amaryllis and my laptop. I can’t wait. And here’s the thing: I committed to something. Quite specifically, I committed to my life as a writer, right now. I’m not a commitment-phobe in any generic sense. I don’t fly around the world like George Clooney and leave houseplants to die. I have a dog and two cats, for Pete’s sake. But I do spend a fair amount of my time thinking about my life as it will be rather than my life as it is. The future life isn’t so different from my present life — basically it is my present life, only with all the sources of anxiety and uncertainty removed. In that life, I know the things I only wonder about now. The good things have come to pass. The worries have resolved themselves. The pets all die quietly in their sleep at age 22.

So signing this lease with a woman I’d only just met felt like a big deal. It meant trusting my instincts, which is nerve-wracking despite the fact they’ve never given me any reason to doubt them (good fellows!). More significantly, it meant taking action in the face of uncertainty. I put things off because I think I can make a better decision when I know everything, in that certain future. But, duh, you never know everything. You can’t wait to know everything. You make a decision and then you know something, and then you get your plant and your computer and you get cracking. Tomorrow I’m going in even if I can’t find a chair. I’ll sit on the carpet. It’s my space.

It will come as a surprise to no one who knows me that I become very lame very fast without structure. Just now, for example, when I was supposed to be working on, oh, I don’t know, a novel? I decided to eat a pomegranate. First, how come I never noticed before how much the seeds look like roe? Second, is there any fruit that takes longer to eat? In a sort of reverse-Persephone I decided to eat the whole thing, every seed, standing over the sink, as though determined to remain stuck for good in this underworld of none-to-low-literary-output.

So why should freedom feel like such a trap? Why should the feeling, I can eat that fruit! mean I must eat that fruit? There’s the problem: when no one is watching you, there is no reason for self-restraint, and without self-restraint there can be no priorities, and without priorities, who are you? If one thing is just as possible to do as another it becomes just as worth doing. And that, I believe, is a disaster.

Let me start at the beginning. I was laid off from my dreamy part time job on November 30. The sensible part of me knew this was bad. I was facing not insignificant losses, among them income and health insurance and colleagues and a place to go that was not my apartment. (I live in the sort of apartment where you can see the bed from wherever you’re standing. You try to write a novel someplace where you can always see your bed.) Anyway, this was a good job. We’d been going steady for about four years. But I couldn’t help thinking it would be fun to hang out more with No Job. The wild times we’d have! The pages we’d write! As the end of November approached, I started to persuade myself that I was breaking up with Good Job instead of the other way around.

“It’s time,” I said kindly to my office desk with its smooth-tracking and capacious file drawers.

“We had a good run,” I said to my office printer of endless cartridges.

“Where’s the magic?” I asked my ergonomically-self-specific office chair.

“I need a challenge,”  I said to the prepaid office postage meter.

So I felt pretty good on December 1st, and I felt pretty good on December 2nd. I was even feeling good on December 10 when I went to Walgreen’s to refill a prescription. I told the pharmacist what I wanted and wandered off to get cotton balls and read US Weekly. Ten seconds later my name sounded over the intercom.

“That was fast,” I said to the pharmacist.

“Your insurance has expired. You still want this?”

The “this” in question is not a life or death prescription. It’s what you might call a vanity prescription. It’s a cream. For the face.

“I’m getting COBRA,” I said. “Obama is paying for part of it.”

“Um,” she said. “You want this now?”

“How much is it?”

“Seventy-three ninety-nine.”

All of a sudden the skinny tube of skin stuff seemed not vain but insane. And I felt embarrassed, like I’d been spotted in the couture section of Saks by a saleswoman who knew I couldn’t afford one of the t-shirts two flights down in Juniors. What I mean is I felt pretentious and guilty for wanting to buy something that cost more than it should have in the first place, and, even weirder, I felt ashamed that I didn’t have insurance. Health insurance allows you access to medications you need, of course, but it also means you don’t have to differentiate between kinds of need. It makes things feel tidy, as though all your wants are normal and important, and everything is ok.

So now I find myself in a position of having to decide, at every moment of the day, what is necessary and what isn’t, what is more important than what, what is worth doing at all. It’s exhausting. I make mistakes all the time, and mostly they’re the kind of mistake that involves outlay and regret. I bought the cream. I ate the fruit. I lay on the bed.

I hope I get the hang of it. I hope one of these mornings it will feel more worth it to get up early than to sleep late. I wonder whether Persephone really ate those three seeds because she was hungry or thirsty. Maybe she just wanted to know where she had to be for three months of every year. Maybe she wanted to know what were the rules and what the limits, so she could plan her damn life.

I spent part of Thanksgiving weekend reading the first two books in a series of comics called Fables. The premise is that all the characters from the world of fairy tales and fantasy have been driven from their homelands by an evil being called the Adversary and forced into exile in the human world. Humans are called “mundys,” short for mundane. The fables who look human (Snow White, Blue Beard, Jack of beanstalk fame, etc.) live in Manhattan, holding various jobs in the fable government. The mice, pigs, foxes, giants, pusses-in-boots, animated playing cards, bespectacled Mr. Moles, etc., live on a farm upstate screened by enchantments.

As the series unfolds you meet different characters from different stories. The Wizard of Oz characters are there, and so is everyone from Lewis Carroll, the Just So Stories, Aesop, the Jungle Book, Grimm’s, Mother Goose, etc. Those last two get the most page time, since the stars of the series are Snow White, who runs the fable government (though merry King Cole is the figurehead), and Bigby Wolf, the chain-smoking big bad wolf who goes around in hairy and disheveled human form. He works as the sheriff for the fables in Manhattan and isn’t allowed on the farm because he’s tried at some point to eat almost everyone who lives there. (All the fables received amnesty for past crimes upon moving to the mundy world, but no one has forgotten or forgiven.)

The comics have their bawdy and violent scenes (they have a Mature rating, I think, or the equivalent of an R for movies), but mostly they’re concerned with the fables’ uneasy relationship to each other in a world much more morally nuanced than their own. They are used to solving their differences by eating each other or tricking each other or getting married and living happily ever after, so it’s fun to see them bumbling through modern life with their basic personalities intact. Prince Charming is a smarmy serial philanderer; Snow White is frosty and rule-bound; Rose Red is a rebel with a permanent chip on her shoulder because people have only ever heard of her sister. Blue Beard is a terrifying millionaire. None of them age, and they all have to support themselves and somehow get along for eternity.

I guess I find this series interesting for the same reason I find the comic Unwritten interesting: they both turn fictional worlds inside out, shaking the characters loose into the real world. I understand the impulse, because maybe it’s a way to see, and test, the strength of a fictional creation. Can your character adapt? Does she have legs of her own, or can she only survive buoyed by magic? Can you shore up someone else’s unsteady creation and make him or her do some different kind of work?

On the other hand, part of me resists this porousness between fantasy and real worlds. I want the world of a fantasy novel or story, perhaps of any novel and story,  to feel complete and intact and, frankly, safe: safe from me as I am safe from it. I don’t want to be bringing my mundanity in with me like some kind of pox, and I also like to take breaks from these worlds which tend to be scarier and nuttier and more intense than daily life. When I set down a book to feed the dog or brush my teeth, I like that feeling of closing a door that I can open again when I want, or leave shut. (I shut the door on Lolita for eight months the first time I read it — I think the longest time I ever did that and eventually opened it again.)

I’m not in any fear of the three little pigs (turned bloody revolutionaries in Fables) showing up in my living room, so I’m not sure what I’m after here, except I think my attachment to reading is essentially that of a child: to run toward danger and yet be safe, to be lost but always feel it in my power to be found. In one scene in Fables Snow White races to Bigby’s assistance armed with the vorpal blade, and you laugh and also feel nervous seeing her carrying it around, because it seems it should never be used against any less (or less ridiculous, or less murkily defined) foe than the Jabberwock. It seems it can only be misused in the mundy world, which is probably one of the points of the comic: look how we misuse our fantasies, or look how they misuse us.

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.