Month: March 2014

Hermione Hoby, considering why Karl Ove Knausgaard’s sprawling six-volume autobiography has captivated so many Anglophone writers, concludes that the maximalist approach “gives a reader the irresistible sensation of reading a life as it’s lived – reality, in real time”:

Real life, of course, is mostly boring, and in book one, the longueurs are almost comic in their banality. A teenage mission to procure beer for a New Year’s Eve party, for example, occupies about 70 pages. Throughout, innumerable quotidian tasks are rendered as meticulously and exhaustively as autopsies. Here, for example, is the making of a cup of tea: “After a while I picked up the teapot and poured. Dark brown, almost like wood, the tea rose inside the white cup. A few leaves swirled and floated up, the others lay like a black mat at the bottom. I added milk, three teaspoons of sugar, stirred, waited until the leaves had settled on the bottom, and drank. Mmm.”

Yet, as the New Yorker‘s book critic James Wood put it, “even when I was bored, I was interested.” There is something so compelling and addictive about being immersed in a life like this that it is, as one novelist put it recently, “like reading a vampire novel.” Zadie Smith is among the many writers to declare their fandom, writing at the end of last year: “A life filled with practically nothing, if you are fully present in and mindful of it, can be a beautiful struggle.”

Hoby detects a touch of envy amid the accolades – not because Knausgaard is such a talented writer, “but because he has a knack for defying every piece of received wisdom about how to write well”:

As he declared in one interview: “The critical reading of the texts always resulted in parts being deleted. So that was what I did. My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn’t write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad, I expanded it, and poured in more and more? After I started to do that, I became free in my writing. Fuck quality, fuck perfection, fuck minimalism. My world isn’t minimalist; my world isn’t perfect, so why on earth should my writing be?”

Previous Dish on Knausgaard here, here, and here.

Do authors betray their loved ones with fictionalized accounts of their lives – and does the answer matter for the reader? Tim Parks explores the morally murky territory between fiction and memoir:

The question is: Can a novel that will affect the author’s closest relationships be written without any concern for the consequences? Will the story perhaps be “edited” to avoid the worst? Or is awareness of the possible reaction part of the energy feeding the book?

Italo Svevo’s Coscienza di Zeno begins with a hilarious account of Zeno’s attempts to stop smoking, always stymied by his decision to treat himself to l’ultima sigaretta, the last cigarette, usually one of the highest quality. Friends were aware this was largely autobiographical.

The novel continues with Zeno’s courting of three sisters; eventually rejected by the two prettiest, he marries the plain one. Again his wife would have been aware of elements from his own life. And now we have the story of a love affair, its various stages recounted in the most meticulous and again hilarious, all-too-convincing psychological detail. Finally, we proceed to chapters on Zeno’s business life, which much resembles Svevo’s own running of a paint company. Nevertheless the author’s wife always stated with great serenity that she was sure her husband had never betrayed her, nor was she shaken in this belief by the fact that his last words, when pulled out of a car accident were, reputedly, “Give me l’ultima sigaretta.”

So, was the introduction of the affair into the novel a kind of trial for her? She had to believe it was just made up. Or was there an agreement between them, explicit or otherwise, that whatever they knew would be kept to themselves, any truth in the matter forever denied? Did Svevo have to introduce the mistress because the shape of the novel required it? If so, wouldn’t there be a certain anxiety that his wife wouldn’t see it that way, and wouldn’t that affect the way he wrote these chapters? What I am suggesting is that in the genesis of a novel, or any work of literature, there will often be private tensions that the general reader will not be aware of playing a part in the creative decisions made. If, then, a reader becomes aware of these tensions, that awareness will inevitably alter the way the book is read.

You know him for his classic novels and searching essays, but Nikky Finney argues that poetry – which Baldwin wrote “throughout his life” – was at the heart of his self-understanding:

Baldwin wrote poetry because he felt close to this particular form and this particular way of saying. Poetry helped thread his ideas from the essays, to the novels, to the love letters, to the book reviews, stitching images and feeling into music, back to his imagination. From the beginning of his life to the very end, I believe Baldwin saw himself more poet than anything else: The way he cared about language. The way he believed language should work. The way he understood what his friend and mentor, the great American painter Beauford Delaney, had taught him — to look close, not just at the water but at the oil sitting there on top of the water. This reliable witnessing eye was the true value of seeing the world for what it really was and not for what someone reported, from afar, that it was.

When Baldwin took off for Switzerland in 1951, he carried recordings by Bessie Smith, and he would often fall asleep listening to them, taking her in like the sweet black poetry she sang. It must have been her Baby don’t worry, I got you voice and their shared blues that pushed him through to finish Go Tell It on the Mountain in three months, after struggling with the story for ten years. Whenever Baldwin abandoned the music of who he was and how that sound was made, he momentarily lost his way. When he lost his way, I believe it was poetry that often brought him back. I believe he wrote poetry throughout his life because poetry brought him back to the music, back to the rain. The looking close. The understanding and presence of the oil on top of the water. Compression. Precision. The metaphor. The riff and shout. The figurative. The high notes. The blues. The reds. The whites. This soaking up. That treble clef. Bass. Baldwin could access it all — and did — with poetry.

Check out Baldwin’s poetry in the volume Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems. Recent Dish on Baldwin here, here, and here.

(Photo of Baldwin in 1971 via Wikimedia Commons)