Author: Andrew Sullivan

In an interview, Christopher Bram, a novelist and author of Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, describes the tension that animates much of his work:

One theme that appears again and again is the conflict between big love and little love. The phrase was coined by my friend Mary Gentile, who went to college with me and has been one of my best readers and toughest critics. Mary recognized early that my characters are often torn between their love for something personal and immediate and love for something larger and more difficult. In Surprising Myself, Joel finds himself divided between love of sex and self and his love of his partner, Corey. In Gossip, Ralph is torn between political loyalties and his affection for a closeted Republican. And so on. Sometimes the larger love is just plain wrong, as in Hold Tight, where Hank Fayette, a white sailor from Texas, has no trouble accepting his homosexuality but is angrily confused when he falls in love with a black man, the smart-mouthed Juke. He feels his very identity as a white man is being thrown into doubt.

I’m not sure where this pattern originated in my work. It might come from my experience as a gay person: all of us must learn to choose between what we were taught to feel and what we really feel. Or maybe I just read too much George Eliot in college.

How he writes about sex:

Sex is as important as laughter for me in storytelling. Well, it’s another part of my realism. Sex is not just a sensuous act, but an expressive act, a dramatic act. People reveal a lot about themselves in bed. Or they can anyway. When it’s just sex, I usually skip over the act and say something like, “Afterwards they smoked cigarettes.” But when something in addition to lust is being expressed or worked out, I write a scene. For example, the first real sex scene in Surprising Myself isn’t until fifty or so pages in, when Joel and Corey have been together for three years. They have all these other bonds and memories and emotions, which crowd into bed with them. And Joel finds himself fantasizing about all the guys he didn’t sleep with. He is both confused and excited.

You’re right; people rarely talk about the sex in my novels, but I suspect that’s because so much else is going on. The sex is blended with the rest of life. In novels by, say, Edmund White or Alan Hollinghurst, there’s often not much else going on except sex, so readers really notice it.

“[I]n most parts of literary culture, revision has become as important as inspiration,” writes Craig Fehrman, who traces the current role of revision back to two influences – Modernism and the typewriter:

Most Modernist writers, like Hemingway with The Sun Also Rises, wrote by hand and then painstakingly typed up the results. That took time, but seeing their writing in such dramatically different forms—handwritten in a notebook, typed on a page, printed as a proof—encouraged them to revise it aggressively. “Much as I loathe the typewriter,” W.H. Auden wrote, “I must admit that it is a help in self-criticism. Typescript is so impersonal and hideous to look at that, if I type out a poem, I immediately see defects which I missed when I looked through it in manuscript.”

Twenty-first century technology has made revising easier than ever – maybe even too easy:

Today, most of us compose directly on our computers. Instead of generating physical page after physical page, which we can then reread and reorder, we now create a living document that, increasingly, is not printed at all until it becomes a final, published product. While this makes self-editing easier, [scholar and The Work of Revision author Hannah] Sullivan thinks it may paradoxically make wholesale revision, the kind that leads to radically rethinking our work, more difficult.

“The ideal environment for revision is one where you can preserve several different versions of a text,” Sullivan says. With only one in-progress draft on a computer, we lose the cues that led the Modernists to step back from their work and to revise it. “It’s that moment of typing things up that led to the really surprising and inventive changes,” Sullivan says. “The authors came back to their text, but it seemed estranged.”

In a classic New Republic essay from 1941, Vladimir Nabokov expounds on the necessary qualities of the good translator:

We can deduce now the requirements that a translator must possess in order to be able to give an ideal version of a foreign masterpiece. First of all he must have as much talent, or at least the same kind of talent, as the author he chooses. In this, though only in this, respect Baudelaire and Poe or Joukovsky and Schiller made ideal playmates. Second, he must know thoroughly the two nations and the two languages involved and be perfectly acquainted with all details relating to his author’s manner and methods; also, with the social background of words, their fashions, history and period associations. This leads to the third point: while having genius and knowledge he must possess the gift of mimicry and be able to act, as it were, the real author’s part by impersonating his tricks of demeanor and speech, his ways and his mind, with the utmost degree of verisimilitude.

What not to do:

The … sin of leaving out tricky passages is still excusable when the translator is baffled by them himself; but how contemptible is the smug person who, although quite understanding the sense, fears it might stump a dunce or debauch a dauphin! Instead of blissfully nestling in the arms of the great writer, he keeps worrying about the little reader playing in a corner with something dangerous or unclean. Perhaps the most charming example of Victorian modesty that has ever come my way was in an early English translation of “Anna Karenina.” Vronsky had asked Anna what was the matter with her. “I am beremenna” (the translator’s italics), replied Anna, making the foreign reader wonder what strange and awful Oriental disease that was; all because the translator thought that “I am pregnant” might shock some pure soul, and that a good idea would be to leave the Russian just as it stood.

(Hat tip: buzzwords)

Laurie Penny describes her former life as a MPDG:

I had the raw materials: I’m five feet nothing, petite and small-featured with skin the color of something left on the bottom of a pond for too long and messy hair that’s sometimes dyed a shocking shade of red or pink. At least, it was before I washed all the dye out last year, partly to stop soulful Zach-Braff-a-likes following me to the shops, and partly to stop myself getting smeary technicolor splotches all over the bathroom, as if a muppet had been horribly murdered.

And yes, I’m a bit strange and sensitive and daydreamy, and retain a somewhat embarrassing belief in the ultimate decency of humanity and the transformative brilliance of music, although I’m ambivalent on the Shins. I love to dance, I play the guitar badly, and I also–since we’re in confession mode, dear reader, please hear and forgive – I also play the fucking ukelele. Truly.

Penny dropped the identity “about the time I got rid of the last vestiges of my eating disorder and knuckled down to a career”:

I became successful, or at least modestly so–and that changed how I was perceived, entirely and all at once. I was no longer That Girl. I didn’t have time to save boys anymore. I manifestly had other priorities, and those priorities included writing. You cannot be a writer and have writing be anything other than the central romance of your life, which is one thing they don’t tell you about being a woman writer: it’s its own flavor of lonely. Men can get away with loving writing a little bit more than anything else. Women can’t: our partners and, eventually, our children are expected to take priority. Even worse, I wasn’t writing poems or children’s stories; I was writing reports, political columns. …

[I]n the real world, the very worst thing about being a real-life MPDG is the look of disappointment on the face of someone you really care about when they find out you’re not their fantasy at all–you’re a real human who breaks wind and has a job.

(Photo: Manic Pixie Dream Girl LARP character sheet by Colin Fahrion)