Creative writing is an act of great presumption and, in a sense, an act of ventriloquism and hubris. In order to find a narrator who will help us discover the secrets and meanings we’re after, we must first struggle to find the suppleness, twist of intuition, and sober insight without which it’s impossible to presume to know how to do or become anything, let alone a writer. The transformation we’re after almost always involves our changing from someone we think or hope or fear we are and perhaps never were, to someone we want to be in our work, a change that involves risk and utter confusion, because we initially seldom understand what we’re asking of ourselves, or one another. Which is to change in ourselves the utter predictability of our self-ignorance and, in a sense, to subject ourselves to the vows and prejudices of our illusions, regardless of the risks involved. We’re asking ourselves to somehow become more clairvoyant, curious, and sympathetic, to merge our visions and ambitions into something new and oddly different, mixing the unrealized and incomplete with the witnessed and tolerated. In other words, we’re asking ourselves to completely reinvent ourselves, to become new and authentic, and therefore deserving of our own illusions.
In a sense, many people fancy themselves original and artistic. Our mailman explains why dogs bark at him: “You come, they bark, you go away. They’re control freaks.” Our plumber delineates his rich and famous clients: “To the Jews I say I’m Puerto Rican, to the Christians, Jewish, to the famous, crazy, to the filthy rich, creative because above all else everyone wants to be richer, more famous, and crazier.” My barber twirls his scissors, winks at my persona imprisoned in his mirrored infinity, and describes how the wrist, fingers, and scissors merge with the peculiar foliage of the beloved under the stress of relentless vanity and quest for perfection. How he becomes one with his client and understands their every wish.
One writer I worked with wrote stories about characters that all hated their old Westchester houses and country club privileges, the brutal expense and indomitable grief of their Irish Catholic immigrant heritage. One was molested by priests, and terrified of what in her remained unmolested. Other characters volunteered in soup kitchens and used-furniture shops, languishing among the volatile emergencies of the stricken and the discarded, which, like themselves, constantly apologized for sins of which they were not guilty. Married to a rich and dominating doctor, she found herself living in a world divorced from the one she was brought up in, an immigrant working-class world in which everyone knew and valued their heritage, having worked hard to transcend it. The wealth she married into felt to her unearned and hollow. She wanted her writing, I believed, to help her rid herself of the inept factory of her pummeled-into-oblivion self-esteem, to help her achieve some sense of tranquility and self-acceptance. Thus Gussie, a character that obeyed no laws other than spontaneity, curiosity, and freedom of will, sprang out of the cranky, bruised, autobiographical facts of her life, and blossomed first into a persona of pure fancy and desire, and then into a character who could do and say all the things she herself was afraid to, including defying a husband of whom she herself remained terrified.
Even an unreliable narrator must, within the confines of her own fictional realm, be or become, to herself at least, an authority. She was raised in a world where women were authorities only to their children, a world where self-cruelty and the tiny, unpardonable, ceaseless blasphemies and lamentations of one’s real biography had to be repressed. This was the same world I grew up in. My mother, though a brilliant student, had to leave school in the tenth grade to help support her family. Her father, an Orthodox Jew, believed educating women deprived them of their true nature: to serve first God and then men. Despite the fact that two of her teachers and an esteemed guidance counselor came to her home to argue with her father on her behalf, she left school at fifteen to help support her family. Her deprivation became my salvation; she stressed education above all else; she stressed me above all else.
Books gave this writer permission to question her complete lack of trust in her own judgment. Of the many stories she started and couldn’t finish, the one that most obsessed her dealt with her molestation by a priest when she was nine. In each version of this story the child’s fear of the priest’s authority—God’s authority presumably—stopped her. How could she protest the actions of someone she and everyone in her community admired and looked up to; who would believe her over him? When she reached the point in the story where such a confrontation was necessary, she’d stop writing and turn to another story and subject entirely different, and safer. It wasn’t until she found Gussie, or Gussie found her, that she was able to return to this subject, though now it was her husband’s authority she was confronting.
At first she wanted a character who wouldn’t be afraid to shut her study door when she wrote or give her home number to her therapist so her husband wouldn’t know she was in therapy and assume he was the very subject he’d forbidden her to talk about; a character who didn’t have to hide her diary and cell phone in a safe-deposit box and would never leave her children and flee down a nighttime highway to get away from everything that reminded her of herself. A character, in other words, who wouldn’t be ashamed of her, whom she’d want as a friend. Together, we understood that the fearless character she was seeking was actually a persona narrator who would help her overcome her fears. She looked at narrators in Alice Munro, Grace Paley, Ann Beattie, and Lydia Davis, one of Chekhov’s, and even Nabokov’s narrator (the gender of these narrators could be easily enough changed and adapted to one’s subject and needs) in Pale Fire, all of whom seemed so preoccupied with so many prolix issues it might keep her focus off what most frightened her. She could inhabit none of them. They all remained silent or disappeared completely when her husband’s character entered the story. She herself could be funny, bitterly, whimsically ironic, but none of the material she wrote about was, and none of these narrators seemed capable or willing to speak up for her. Then she met Clarissa Dalloway, and everything changed. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was a blend of Woolf’s wonderfully revelatory third-person narrator and her character, Clarissa, and almost immediately she absorbed both the character and narrator into her bloodstream, read and reread the book over weeks, and months. Woolf’s blissful joy in revealing everything going on in Clarissa’s mind during this one day of preparing for a party allowed her to confront feelings she’d until now dutifully avoided. She quoted a passage she found especially inspiring: “But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged—in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London, wherever in short the climate or the devil tempts men to fall from the true belief which is her own—is even now engaged in dashing down shrines, smashing idols, and setting up in their place her own stern countenance. Conversion is her name and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace.”
Yes, Proportion now had a sister. In Woolf’s novel the great flood of images and thoughts and colors pours forth on a river of sheer feminine confidence and authority—Woolf is in love with her prowess, is fully aware of the masterpiece of style and vision she’s composing word by word, instinct by intuition, sinew by sinew, and all this was being absorbed into every facet of my student’s consciousness and being. She would dream, she told me, of Woolf’s use of interior monologue and then imitate her voice while driving to class. “Imagine Woolf saying, actually saying this out loud: ‘How can one weigh and shape dialogue till each sentence tears the shingles in the bottom of the reader’s soul?’—imagine that, please!”
Gussie was born out of her mastering and celebration of what she saw as heroic feeling, a shrine to the creative powers of persuasion and influence. She especially found enthralling Woolf’s subtle use of uncertainty and incongruity—especially as it applied to Woolf’s frank admission of aloneness, the solitude necessary to creative and spiritual realization—which provided her with the strength to embrace the thing she feared most, the very centerpiece of her victimhood: her helplessness.
It didn’t seem all that long before Gussie wasn’t satisfied in taking over her every scene of every story she wrote, but also began disrupting much of her life. Things she might not have even imagined thinking, let alone saying, she now said with confidence, such as the note she sent me after she met my soon-to-be wife at a school reading: “Marry her, immediately!” And when I found the courage and money to make a down payment on a wreck of a house in East Hampton during a recession, she sent me a boom box to entertain myself with while I and a legion of friends and hired help made my new house livable. At my fiftieth birthday party, she read a note toasting my chewed fingernails, misbuttoned shirts, and manner of stuttering in class when excited about any idea, good or bad, all now, as far as she was concerned, represented as precursors to my meeting my wife, Monica. And once, when she worried that a character as strong as Gussie required a much stronger and more self-assured writer, her certainty of absolute failure was so convincing that after our conversation ended, I found myself regretting everything I’d ever said to her, said to anyone, regretting not knowing how to answer, assuage, remove her pain. Should I have admitted that no one ever saves anyone, that teaching at best points a way in the dark, but nothing more; confessed that I sometimes didn’t sleep the night before one of our sessions, described in my own therapy sessions her situation, fearing I’d say the wrong thing and somehow harm her further? What was I doing taking on such responsibility, I wasn’t trained or qualified, I prided myself on never promising anyone anything, especially something as ethereal and complex as the rescue creative writing represented—had I learned nothing from my friendship with Ralph Dickey?
But then Gussie, the very sibilance of her name, seemed to change everything. “Guess what Gussie said to his face, yet!” she’d proclaim about this smart, fast-talking narrator that gave no quarter, who would, she believed, show her the way out of her unhappiness, and set her free. Wasn’t this how I too had survived? she once asked me. She, who lived in a fancy suburban house and took golf trips around the world, was asking me, who made just enough to get by, to do for her what I’d done for myself, to, in some fashion, save her. Yes, she laughed after I asked if that was what she wanted, to in any way be like me, bitten nails and stuttering improbability and all? Yes, she said, because I lived according to my beliefs, while she denied hers.
When she heard about the birth of my first son, Eli, she called to say that now I had a subject worthy of my talents. “Do you know what I mean? It’s important that you know.”
I confessed that I wasn’t sure.
“I mean now you have a family and can be the father you never had. Do you understand how important that is?”
I said I did but was too emotional to say anything more.
Sometimes I didn’t know who was teaching whom, or what. Her goodness and generosity came from somewhere unique and private, I would tell her; her love of literature and determination were qualities that derived only from her. Sometimes I didn’t know who I was talking to, her or me. Had I said this or had she, or maybe Gussie herself? I say so many things, attempting with technique and encouragement to move a writer one step closer to recognizing that there were at least two of them, one who admitted and understood nothing, who refused under any circumstance to acknowledge or use the knowledge we knew they possessed, and the one who admitted it freely, proudly, who recognized when her black bird was speaking and why. The open writer and the hidden one, both listening and nodding their heads and smiling at what was being said, explained, emphasized, and reiterated countless times, the one famished for instruction, movement, and success, and the one that rejected everything that held any scent of revelation. The one who connected to what was learned and the one who buried it immediately, decisively.
She was going further and faster than ever before, right up to the most difficult part of her story, when Gussie’s husband screamed at her, breaking a chair against the wall behind her, threatening to destroy her reputation and take her children away if she left him. This is when she, holding her baby, smelled in the delectable texture of her hair her own innocence and strength, and found there the dignity of autonomy and rage, there, in the wellspring of her character’s imagination, the strength and largess of her precious well-being:
Gussie dropped her head onto the baby’s and brushed her lips against the soft hair.
She allowed herself the luxury of a few caved-in moments, trying to find the strength to enter the house.
She, who spent her life regretting just about everything, except for her children, was doing what she’d always wanted to do, what she’d always hoped her writing would permit her to do: to finally speak up on her own behalf, to represent herself as someone worthy of attention and sympathy.
Her illness came quickly, and irreversibly. We didn’t speak for weeks, maybe a month. I knew only that she had to cancel several sessions. Then, sick with cancer, she called me from a hospital bed, her voice buoyant, telling me the not-yet-written end of her story: Gussie calls her mother from a highway to say she was headed north with her children, toward Canada, beginning all over again. She was only a few pages away from finishing it, she said, her children were all healthy and settled, everything was okay, finally, she just wished she had a little more time to finish her story and say goodbye to Gussie. Gussie was alive even if her story wasn’t finished, even if no one besides her and me ever read it. She was alive and independent, she laughed, a character born of her imagination living the life she was afraid to, out there somewhere, heading north.