Us / Them

We followed the twisty road up the mountain and came to the narrow one-lane bridge.  Coming down the mountain was a man on a large motorcycle.  Now, the law is that the person coming UP the mountain has the right of way of such bridges, and so Joan eased the car forward.  The curved, antique bridge hung over a gorge of considerable depth.  The man on the motorcycle also came forward and we found ourselves bumper-to-wheel in the middle.

“Bloody hell,” said Joan. “What does he think he’s doing?  I’m not backing up.”  She looked at me and shrugged.  “I don’t back up very well on straight roads, let along this goddamn thing.” Joan rolled down the window, waved and in heavily-accented French said what translated (loosely) to, “Come on, now, mate. You’ll have to back up.  Stop messing about.”

The man made a rather rude gesture and said, very clearly, what translated to, “F**k you.  You back up.”

Joan was not the sort of person to whom it was wise to respond thusly.  She blew a lock of black hair out of her face, set her jaw and gripped the wheel.  “We’ll see about that,” she said.  She inched the car forward.  The man on the motorcycle folded his arms and refused to budge.

“Maybe you should back up,” I said.  “What difference does it make?”

“To hell with that.  He’s a bully,” said Joan.

By now, several cars had appeared behind us, which meant, even if Joan chose to back up, she couldn’t.  And then two cars came down the mountain, blocking the motorcyclist.  We were in a stand-off.

Car horns bleated.  First one, and then two and then a chorus of horns.  Someone shouted and someone else shouted.  I couldn’t make out what they were saying but none of it sounded good.  Arms waved from rolled down car windows.  Gestures, some involving middle fingers punctuated the air.  My heart began beating rather erratically.

“I think we should move,” I said.

“Where do you think I should go?” Joan jutted her chin in the direction of the gorge.

A man was at the driver’s window.  He was wiry, unshaven, with a missing tooth.  The smell of cigarettes wafted in on the hot breeze.  He shouted at Joan, told her to get off the bridge.

“I’ve got the right of way,” she yelled back.

The man called her a foreign bitch, a rich bitch who had no rights of any kind.  Not in his France.  She should go back to Switzerland.

“I’m English,” said Joan.

“Then fuck off to England,” spat the man.

Photo by Robert W. Kelley (Life Magazine)

I locked my door. More men were getting out of their cars now and heading for us.  I looked behind us.  Four of them.  No, six. Maybe more.  Someone banged on the roof of the car.  Someone else pounded the hood. The car began to rock. Someone slapped the passenger-side window and I turned to see a wide, red face, contorted with anger, telling me to get out of the car.  Joan shrieked and I realized the man on her side of the car was trying to pull open her door, trying to pull her out of the car.  I grabbed her arm.

“Leave her alone,” I cried.  “Leave her!”

I looked in the man’s face and saw, in a frozen moment, that to this man—and to that one, and the one by my door, who was now pulling on the handle—we were Other.  We were The Other.   There was no appeal; we were not members of their tribe, their family; we were not their kind.  I flashed back to an article I had recently read in which a zoo keeper described being attacked by a hyena she’d fed for years.  One day, when she turned away for a moment, she felt a dreadful punch to her right thigh, and looked to find the hyena gulping down great hunks of her flesh.  She said the expression in the animal’s eyes was the same as if she’d been a cheese sandwich.  My stomach flipped.  To this mob, we had, for reasons I still cannot fathom, become prey.

I’m sure, had I been able to breathe, I would have cried.  It was just a stupid road and a stupid bridge and a stupid car and for that it seemed we would now be dragged from the car by a group of men who were quite possibly our neighbors and, at the least, beaten.

Just then, another man ran down the mountain.  Oddly, all I remember about him was that he was tanned and wore beige shorts.

“Stop!  Stop!” he cried. “What are you doing?  Stop that!”

Someone yelled that we were . . . well, a word referring to the female anatomy in unflattering terms.

“We should throw them off the fucking mountain,” someone said.

“But, monsieur,” said the man in shorts, “They are just driving and these women have the right of way.  They are going up the mountain.  It is the law.  And so simple.  Here, I will help you move the motorcycle.”

And with that he, and the motorcyclist, who I noticed now looked rather frightened himself, backed the motorcycle up a few feet so we could pass.

“Go on, Joan,” I urged.  “Go on.”  I waved at the man in shorts and touched my heart.  Thank you.  THANK you.

Just as we drove onto the double lanes passed the bridge a car zoomed past us, nearly making us swerve off the road and down into the gorge.  I caught sight of the man’s face.  It was he who tried to pull Joan out of the car.  We drove on the short distance to my house, looking behind us to see if anyone was following.  No one was.  We sat in my driveway for a few minutes, but neither of us wanted to talk.  We asked each other if we were all right, several times, and finally parted.

I went inside, and noticed my hands were shaking. I burst into tears. There was no word for what I felt, at least no single word.  Injustice, terror, sorrow, rage, exhaustion, some huge unspeakable longing for protection. Nothing had happened, not really.  I was safe.  I hadn’t been beaten or raped or stabbed or hurled over the cliff, but I could see the possibility; I FELT the possibility in a way I never had before.  I had certainly heard stories from friends, mostly non-white friends,  of instances of this kind, and although what happened to me paled (you’ll pardon the pun) in comparison, still, I had a glimmer of understanding now as to what it felt like to be Other.  In a situation involving Us vs Them, I had been Them, Those people, someone outside the circle of protection.

I wondered what the men in the cars were doing now that they were presumably now at their destinations.  Did they feel any shame?  Did they regret becoming part of a mob?  I wondered, too,  how many of them I’d recognize at the next village fete.

The thin veneer of civilization on which I’d relied had been torn away. I saw the cruelty and savagery that lurked so near  the surface. It frightened me and sensitized me; I became committed to battling my own worst self whenever I detected my own petty tribalism. We live in a world in which we are constantly being asked to choose sides, be name someone else as “The Other.”  I believe refusing to do so is a powerful form of political protest.

Hate injustice. Hate the misuse of power. Hate poverty. Hate hunger. Hate racism/sexism/agism. Live your life actively turning toward their opposites — justice, kindness, compassion, inclusivity and generosity. — for when all is said and done who would you rather be: the man trying to pull my friend from the car; or the man in those beige shorts, a peace-maker and truth-speaker, who calmed a violence-prone mob? 

John Ruskin at Glenfinlas, Scotland, painted by John Everett Millais.

I lead a monthly writing workshop called SHARPENING THE QUILL, details of which you can find elsewhere on this website.  I named the workshops that because a long time ago I heard an anecdote about John Ruskin (at least I think it was John Ruskin) who was out rambling and shooting pheasant or grouse or something — you know, as one does — about the hills in his native England when an idea popped into his head.  Knowing it was an important idea, and also knowing he was bound to forget it by the time he trudged back to his desk if he didn’t write it down now, he scrambled in his pockets for writing implements, but had none.  He did, however, have a gun, so he shot the first bird he saw, a crow, plucked a quill from its wing, sharpened it with his handy pocket knife, dipped it in the crow’s blood and scribbled the idea on the hem of his shirt.

Somehow, calling a writing workshop SHOOTING THE CROW, didn’t have quite the same ring to it.

This anecdote implies, to me, that you never know when you’re going to get a great idea and you should always carry a pen and paper with you. It also implies walking is good not only for the body, but for the creative soul as well.

Sometimes you have to approach inspiration obliquely.  I’ve found one of the best ways to come up with a new idea, or to work through a block in my writing, is to head out for a bracing walk. Sitting at my desk and staring at the blank page is necessary, but if that’s truly not working after say, an hour or so, it’s time for more draconian measures.  So, with my delighted dog by my side, I head out of the house and off for a walk, while keeping my mind actively receptive.  By this I mean nothing more magical than thinking about things as I walk, turning a narrative problem over in the mind, or, if I have no ideas at all, simply saying, “I’m open to a new idea,” and paying attention to my thoughts.

Jack London once said, you have to “light out after inspiration with a club.”

Well, I’ll leave shooting and clubbing to the boys, but I do understand what London meant.  As creative people, courting inspiration is our JOB, and we have to actively work for it. Ideas arrive when we’re both open to them and ready for them, but alas, there is no little shop in Poughkeepsie  from which you can order them by mail.  Thus, ready, in this instance, means turning our intention toward our writing, and always having pen and paper ready.

I jot things down as they come to me, without judgment (editing comes later).  When I come back from my walk, the first thing I do is transcribe the new ideas into either a notebook, or directly onto my computer.  I fiddle with them, expand, brainstorm. . . play.  Then I leave them alone for a while, perhaps a day or so, letting them compost into something rich and fecund.

When I go back to them I always — I repeat — ALWAYS find something I can use, some new direction, some solution.

So, next time you’re stuck, or in search of inspiration, apply shoe leather to walking path and you might just be surprised what pops out of the gorse.

However, I did want to tell my Canadian fans that if they haven’t already bought a copy of OUR DAILY BREAD, they may have to wait a few weeks.  Harper Collins Perennial has bought the Canadian rights, which means they’ll be repackaging the book (I’m quite excited to see what they’ll come up with and will keep you posted), and republishing in early March.  Until then, the book won’t be available at Canadian outlets such as Amazon.ca.

For my friends in the US, nothing changes — the book is still available in all the usual ways.

Thanks so much!

Lauren

Ernest Hemingway practising Sitzfleisch.

Larry, bless him, has been a wonderful support through difficult times, when the book was rejected by one publisher after another.  In his email to me he wrote I had “pluck and drive in the face of disappointments.”  He said that marked me as a real writer.

I couldn’t help but recall that very first episode of The Mary Tyler Moor Show, when when Mr. Grant looks at Mary and says, “You know what you’ve got? You’ve got spunk.”  When she thanks him, most bashfully, he says, “I hate spunk.” Snort.

What I think I might have is called, in Yiddish, Sitzfleisch.  According to Anu Garg at the A.Word.A.Day website, this refers to “what’s commonly called chair glue: the ability to sit still and get through the task at hand. It’s often the difference between, for example, an aspiring writer and a writer. Sometimes the word is used in the sense of the ability to sit out a problem — ignore it long enough in the hope it will go away.”

Eudora Welty practicing Sitzfleisch

I tell my students this all the time: if you want to be a writer, you have to write.  By this I don’t mean you should write only when you feel like it, or when you’ve finally found the perfect writing spot, or when you’ve nothing better to do.  No, I mean you have to write every day.  You have to write whether you want to or not. You have to write when you’re sure what you’re saying is garbage — it probably is, that’s what editing is for. You have to write even if you think you’ll never publish — you might not, write anyway.  You have to write when you’ve been rejected — we all have.  You have to write when your heart has been broken by bad reviews — Herman Melville did, or yet another pithy rejection letter from that agent who promised you a six figure deal when you had lunch last week or one more rejection letter (not so pithy) from the editor who you were so sure would love you book.  Write anyway.  Write, write, write.

Mark Twain practising his own special kind of Sitzfleisch.

Our Daily Bread sat in my drawer for years before anyone was agreed to publish it.  In the meantime, I’ve written a great deal of stuff — another whole book in fact — and that’s been rejected, too.  So yes, even after great reviews and “Best of” lists and so forth, writers still deal with rejection.  And yet, what am I doing this very moment?  I’m writing.  And what will I do when I finish this blog?  I will write.  I have yet another book I’m working on and just like every book I’ve ever written, the damn thing refuses to write itself.

Why do I bother, you might ask, in the face of so much rejection and such little return?  Because I’m a writer.  I can’t sing or dance.  And writers write.  Even when no one wants to publish us.  Perhaps especially then.

Amy Tan practicing Sitzfleisch.

I wrote for decades before I published my first book, back in 1999.  Today it hardly ever happens that someone will write and write and write for years before publishing — not with all the self-publishing out there and the weird desire so many people have for instant fame.  But I’m glad I did, because with each lousy piece of unpublishable prose I learned a few things.  First, I learned how to be a better writer, but I also learned how to keep going and how to sink down into the work so that the act of writing itself fed me.  I needed that later, when for a time I erroneously thought publishing would fill up all the hollows in my soul.  It won’t.  Publishing is lovely, don’t get me wrong, and so are good reviews and all that — it helps, no doubt about it — but you can’t NEED it.  The only thing a writer needs is to write.  Every day.  Even today when you don’t want to.

And now — join me — get writing!

Take a gander at these beauties:

The Major Works of Dickens in the new Penguin Classics boxed set

Penguin has come out with special edition classics, with stunning covers created by acclaimed designer Coralie Bickford-Smith.  Their web page says, “Penguin Classics presents beautiful hardcover editions of the world’s favorite books. Featuring gorgeous patterns stamped on linen cases, colored endpapers, and ribbon markers, these are rich and sumptuous volumes that continue what will be one of the most coveted sets of books ever produced.”

“Great Expectations” has white chandeliers on a black background. “Cranford’s” cover is adorned with climbing sweet peas, “Little Women” pink scissors against taupe, ” creamy moths flutter across the cover of “The Hound of the Baskerville’s”.  Wonderful stuff.

I admit it — I’m reading a lot of books on my Kindle these days.  I picked this e-reader over others not because I am in love with Amazon, but because it’s an ink reader and much easier on the eyes than other computer-screen type readers.  When you do as much reading as I do, this matters.  At first I thought I’d only read non-fiction on my Kindle, but before long I was reading just about everything on the darn thing.  I don’t know why, but I seem to read faster, and then, too, I don’t have to lug an extra suitcase of books with me when I travel. Not to mention the fact my house is less buried under stacks than it once was.

But if I read a book on my Kindle and love it, I end up buying the actual book.  This means I am a publishers dream, I do get that, and I don’t mind, since publishers publish ME and I want them to stay in business.  The books slowly making their way to my shelves , therefore, are the ones I really love, and that truly reflect, I think, my interior world, which is one thing a house full of books does, don’t you think — it acts as a sort of map to the reader’s mind and heart and soul.

And then there are the classics, like these Penguin books, which I will always want to read in the actual book form, simply because it is part of the ritual of reading them, in a way that reading say, a murder mystery or the latest ‘must read’ contemporary fiction.  Books are objects of beauty even when they’re not packaged so enticingly as these Penguin editions — but man, I simply can’t resist these.  I’ve decided to buy one a month until I have the entire collection, and I only hope they come out with more and more.  Bravo to Penguin, who understands the value of a lovely cover and a well-made object.

At the moment, I have negotiated with the mossy-toothed skull of doubt, whom I shall call Morton. I have agreed to allow Morton is perhaps right, and that this idea I had  a while back for a perfectly BRILLIANT novel (sure to land on every prize list in the world, not to mention enormous commercial success)  will be, well, at best, a GOOD novel.  And perhaps not even that, let’s just admit it.

In short, now I realize (as I do with every book I’ve ever written), that the enchanting opalescent vision the muse first plonked in my noggin in never going to re realized.  Oh, sure, I’ll write a book, but it won’t be the book of my dreams.  The characters won’t be quite as irresistible, the plot won’t be quite as mesmerizing, and the theme won’t be quite realized.

I have told this to My Best Beloved, and he has said, as he always does, “Oh, there already are you?  What a good sign.  You’ll be finished the first draft in no time.”  I have learned not to stomp around muttering when he says things like that.  And there’s no point in telling him I’ve thought of just chucking it since he knows from experience, as do I, that I will see this book through to the end, that this is only a phase, and part of the process and the biggest truth of all which is:  ALL WRITERS FEEL THIS WAY.  We are all filled with self-doubt and we write anyway?  Why, because we are writers first and foremost, even if we are accountants, lion tamers, firemen or priests in our spare time.

So, if you’ve ever felt like I do — take heart.  Just like your characters, it will transform.  Keep writing.

Thanks to everyone who believed in this book when others said it would fail.  You know who you are! I’m immensely grateful.

There’s an awful lot of rejection and criticism in the writer’s life, so I try and savor the good bits.  Thus, embarrassingly, I admit this is pretty much how I feel right now:

Too many.

I’ll be honest — I’m a magpie, by which I mean I’m someone who’s easily distracted when  previously unnoticed bright shiny objects catch my eye.  I believe this is a wonderful quality for a writer.  Sure, we need discipline, stick-to-it-ness, focus and all that.  We need to be able to get our butt in the chair, the pen in our fingers and slip down to the dreaming state where we can follow one word after another.

That’s a given.

But what about inspiration? Could it be that if we pay attention to what catches our attention, what sparkles in the corner of our eye, might be inspiration calling?

Hmm. . . I wonder what those strange lights are?

I’m reading (one of the five or six books I have on the go. See magpie, above) In the Sanctuary of Women by Jan L. Richardson.  In the first part of the book, Richardson talks about the Garden of Eden, about Eve and hunger and that apple.  She discusses the possibility that God (The Ineffable, your Higher Power, your Soul, whatever. . . )  works to guide us through our desires and hungers, pointing us to a deeper desire, for which the overt desire may just be a metaphor.  She quotes M.F.K Fisher, the famed food writer, from the forward to Fisher’s book The Gastronomical Me, which offers insights into the “mysterious ways our hungers and histories intertwine.”:

When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied. . . and it is all one.

I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.

I think that’s lovely, and true.

If I wrote about only those things I now know, I suspect I’d end up writing about the same things over and over, and not very many of them at that.  Eventually I’d grow bored with my work and so, therefore, would my readers.

Some writers, like Charles Bukowski and Richard Yates, wrote almost purely autobiographical work, of course, and good for them, but I feel blessed by my magpie nature.  How else would I have burrowed into the 1930s and the particular form of mental illness that was such a strong metaphor for The Great Depression in my first novel, The Stubborn Season?  Or what about the war correspondents and the events in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia (countries I have yet to visit) in my second novel, The Radiant City?  I am hardly old enough to have lived through the 30s, nor have I ever been a conflict-zone journalist, never mind a male one.  I am certainly not a young man growing pot and trying to survive the horrors of an abusive childhood, as Albert does in Our Daily Bread.  Then again, Flaubert wasn’t a bored, love-starved housewife, Jeffrey Eugenides isn’t a hermaphrodite and I don’t think Vladimir Nabokov was a child molester.

A writer’s job, in my opinion, isn’t only to write about what we know, it’s to write about what fascinates us, what we’re obsessed with, curious about, intrigued by.  Paying attention to those cravings leads us to write about subjects that matter to us.

What if you’re fascinated by, say, physicists or astronomers or cops, but you are none of those things.  Fine. In fact, wonderful!  Time for research.  One of the great pleasure of writing is research — an excuse to spend hour after hour, day after day, diving headfirst into books on any number of subjects, following a trail of sparkly bits through the library stacks, making notes, feeling that flicker of excitement when I find something new . . .

The San Fanciso Monastery Library in Lima, Peru. Think about spending a few months there doing research!

I have learned more from the long hours of research I’ve done for various books than from any other kind of education. Even if I start researching a book and then find it isn’t going to pan out, who cares?  What wonderful things I’ve learned in the process!

So, the next time you find yourself hungry to know about how the railway was built or what happens in the tunnels beneath New York City or what’s it would be like to be a sapper in World War II, go ahead a spend some time investigating.  Who knows where you might be led by what you don’t yet know?