Category: The Dish

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)

Maria Konnikova searches for a fix:

The ubiquity of modern music and the resulting proliferation of earworms raise [a] question…: How do you dislodge one? In a study that [researcher Lauren] Stewart and the psychologist Victoria Williamson just published in the journal PLoS ONE, they examined thousands of survey responses to see what, if anything, was an especially effective method.

While people’s strategies for ridding themselves of unwanted aural guests fell into one of two broad categories—distraction or coping—the most successful way to remove an earworm, they found, was to deal with it head on, by intentionally listening to the song or singing it out loud, no matter how embarrassing the song.

But it may be futile to try to resist completely, if Stewart is correct about why we get earworms in the first place. In ongoing research with a team of neuroscientists at the University of Western Ontario, she says, “we’re working with the hypothesis that people are getting earworms to either match or change their current state of arousal—or a combination of the two.” She adds, “Maybe you’re feeling sluggish but need to take your child to a dance class, so it could be that an earworm pops into your hear that’s very upbeat, to help you along. Or working in reverse, can earworms act to calm you down?” It would explain why we sometimes get earworms even when we haven’t been listening to music at all, or why people who spend a great deal of time in nature often report beginning to hear every sound—wind blowing, leaves rustling, water rippling—as music, which their brain spontaneously plays over and over. Just as important, it would help explain why our brains often seem to linger on music that we don’t particularly care for.

Previous Dish on earworms here and here. Update from a reader:

For some reason I am highly susceptible to earworms. Once a melody is in my head, it will play on repeat forever. I have been known to lose sleep when an especially pernicious little melody gets its hooks into my gray matter. My wife and kids know this and have to be careful what they sing around the house and how often.

I’m not sure what it is about my brain. I am easily distracted by music and can only play certain kinds of music when I work or read. It is usually extremely minimal ambient music with little melodic or dynamic variation to grab the brain’s attention (I actually run an online label for such music). Of course the brain just loves to find patterns and a simple melody (quite appropriately called a “hook”) is something that the brain just seems to love. The good news is that I have the cure.

Jazz.

Not necessarily any jazz. It should be at least somewhat melodic and instrumental. Standards are great because they have the right combination of familiarity and novelty due to the interplay between melody and improvisation. If an earworm is crawling around in the brain, its little barbs have attached themselves to the part of the brain that wants patterns. The new melody of the jazz tune will sneak it’s way in and replace the earworm melody in the brain. Then as the song develops and improvisation takes over, the melody is basically broken apart and dissipates. Several jazz tunes in a row should work well enough to dissolve even the most pernicious melody (think Pharrell’s blissfully obnoxious “Happy”).

Try it, you’ll thank me.