I Couldn't Say
I’m subscribing to The Paris Review as a further means of keeping current with what’s being published. George Plimpton’s old rag. Reading the spring issue’s interview with Rachel Cusk, the Canadian English transplant, several things puzzled me, but what stopped me was her comment that:
“One of the things about being female is the numerous transformations you go through, physically, and the numerous things you have happen to you. I think men are much more continuous than women are. A man tends to be the same thing all the way through.”
From an interview with Rachel Cusk in The Paris Review.
It was that last line–men tending to be the same thing all the way through? It’s interesting how she phrases it, though it’s off the wall. Nary a person I know has stayed ‘continuous’ except between bouts of discontinuity. We all of us live lives of transformations, a few we may even get to choose though most we’re handed and expected to handle. As Stephen Jay Gould might say, “it’s all contingency, bubba.”
Gould would never throw in the ‘bubba’ but his southern cousin might could.
Rachel Cusk began her writing career as a novelist at the ripe age of 26. Then in her child-raising years took to memoir. I gather she made a reputation for herself with A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. Reputation as in she took a lot of grief for not pretending. The ‘form’ as she likes to call it, of the novel got in the way of what she needed to express about motherhood, so she went for the memoir – helping to popularize it. Helped to popularize the ‘bad mother’ bit in the process. Scandalous for a proper English woman.
Form. The closest I can relate is employing poems for delving more directly than fiction; for me it became a means to write non-fiction up until the blogging began. With fiction, you have all this messy buildup and backstory required to make sense of the story. With poetry one’s allowed to leap from non sequitur to the next in the name of the Muse, and if the reader’s confused the reason’s because it’s hard to read poetry. Right.
I assumed for the longest time that memoir required a famous life. If one were William Butler Yeats, maybe go for it. But it also struck me as both too broad an effort, like weeding acres for a few scrawny flowers, and too self-absorbed to be sufficiently inspiring to write, let alone read. Had I been advised to work on developing a thoroughly interesting life story so to have a good store of material, things might have proved different. Ironically, stories from my life keep occurring in this blog, and I’ll admit that a number of the poems I’ve tried are self-referential. But memoir? Nah.
Though when still a skinny bud, I also knew that one needs to live a bit before you have anything of value to say. As a kid, I had these great yearnings to write something, anything, so I mostly produced yearnings. It’s still a failing, but I’m working on it.
To distinguish Cusk’s world from anything like my own American upbringing, she was an English daughter cloistered by private school and all that implies, most of which she says was heartless. Even the language of the upper class English, in her words, was crushingly paternalistic, something she struggled to escape from in her writing. She claims D.H Lawrence showed her how to write like in a lesser class, i.e. feminine voice.
I suppose Englishmen are trained to be didactic in a superior-sounding sonority. I’ll be fucked if I learnt it.
Cusk doesn’t mention much about her parents that implies more than practicing procreation, and she and her siblings were their products. Again, this is that ‘English way’? The thin upper lip? It’s not stiff; it’s just thin, as in miserly.
“The defining feature of our parental culture was a kind of domestic totalitarianism, and absolute breaking and repurposing of truth. So there’s no going back to look at the history, because it’s been incinerated.”
From an interview with Rachel Cusk in The Paris Review.
If there is a way to level charges against your parents, Cusk has surely found it. Like tossing hand grenades.
“I suppose it must have started with my unacceptability to my parents… It always seemed to me that the oedipal situation–that you are defined and driven by things you will never know the name of, because the people who do know won’t tell you–reflects a lot of how I felt about being in the world.”
From an interview with Rachel Cusk in The Paris Review.
What I discovered was after my child-rearing dive was complete, wholly different relationships with my young sons emerged. Unexpectedly, but they did lodge in the brain pan. In Ryan’s case, losing him at eighteen, I only caught glimpse of his potential, no more–which became an enormous part of the loss. Nevertheless, the gift of his life, short as it was, was still given me. And his brother’s gift continues. My son is not like me, yet he is, and he chooses the connection in spite of the failings he sees in his father.
For Cusk, she doesn’t say whether her parents’ indifference contaminated her own nuclear family. One hopes the repugnancy she bore through her own childhood led her in the opposite direction.
Robert Bly, in Iron John, states we don’t get to choose how we children are parented; regardless of our needs, our parents are who they are which is kinder than what’s described in Mommy Dearest. Probably the most important thing Bly says in the book–because he had to learn if from his own distant father.
In the interview, Cusk freely admits she struggles now with life after children. Like somehow the rug of her life was pulled out from under her by the process. It seems a not unusual theme for women, like what they pour into the lives of their children exhausts them after. Ain’t no easy ride for fathers raising children, but either it doesn’t exhaust us, or we’re too dense to recognize how it does.
The Outsider is the title of a lighter piece by Cusk that I came across doing research for this blog–article in The Guardian. You get a clear idea of Cusk’s humor, as she reluctantly gives up on the notion of taking part in a book club. The article’s lede is as follows:
“Novelist Rachel Cusk joined a book group to discuss beauty and truth. Instead she found herself defending Chekhov, and perplexed as to why the English resist stories of everyday life.”
from article in The Guardian by Rachel Cusk.
She is, indeed, the outsider to the book club, and I felt sympathy for her failed aspirations. It’s curious that a group of avowed readers wouldn’t welcome the presence of a respected author. Cusp puts it down to their being English–one has to wonder, after that comment does she ever gets invited for tea again?
So I come back to that opening quote about men being more continuous than women in their lives. Continuously fractured, I’d say. Possibly men are better able to accept the contingencies, recognizing them for part of life, though it was Dylan Thomas, the heavy-drinking Irishman who raged against the night. Like any competent Irishman, he raged about a lot of life.
“And where the pretense is, [in fiction] the self-exposure is also. By building a pretense you’re revealing so much of who you are, you’re showing your fantasy, your unconscious self.”
From an interview with Rachel Cusk in The Paris Review.
Is she showing the wizard’s secret panel, or simply acknowledging her own? In writing fiction, an author can’t avoid telegraphing something of her own personality–or leaving an empty place where a truth might otherwise lie. It is that idiosyncratic shading by a writer’s hand that brings meaning to a piece of fiction–that one hopes makes a reader nod her head and smile occasionally.
Finally, coming back to form, and what Cusk considers as she composes:
“With Outline [the first novel in a trilogy] what I took away [from the story] was the known ‘unknown’–what the novel has to pretend it doesn’t know in order to stage its drama. It was interesting to see how that concealed prior knowledge occurs at a sentence level, and if you take it out of the sentences something very different happens. A new kind of narrative comes out of eliminating the author, eliminating prior knowledge.”
From an interview with Rachel Cusk in The Paris Review.
Judging from the interview, Cusk is an intently focused person. Intently observant in constructing her writing. So I’ll probably signal for the Amazon angel to fly me a book of hers to read, maybe two. Though I’ll pass on her rant about motherhood–I did my share of changing smelly diapers.
Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash
“You Think It’s Easy?”
I could always get a rise out of Mel by telling him I hated Mozart.
“How could you possibly say that!” he’d exclaim in mock astonishment.
So I’d tell him I found Mozart boring–at least what WETA would play of his. They were always the same tinkling pieces, repetitive and frilly, and I couldn’t help but picture the toothless wonders sipping tea by the radio while the disc jockeys begged them to keep the station in their wills. “No wonder Salieri hated him.”
It became a running gag between us which he tolerated, being a good natured man.
Mel was a man of the arts. He was a mechanical engineer by profession, even if his larger heart lay in the arts, music and architecture. He generously acknowledged my own passion for architecture. Project working sessions were, for Mel, as much about design concepts as to do with the practical matters of putting well engineered buildings together. He’d declare he should have stayed in architecture school instead of changing majors, though I never got the impression he let it really bother him. What I liked about the man–he found joy in living in the moment–in whatever moment he found himself living.
Mel loved all music, but his deep passion was jazz. Probably one of the most frequent attendees at the New Orleans Jazz Fest. This year’s will be 50 years. Have to wonder if it will go off–what with the virus going ‘round.
What brought him to mind: this morning I was listening to Mozart’s Requiem on SiriusXM. It is, of course, one of his master works. It’s magnificent choral music, even if it took Mozart’s life to create it. He was writing the score as he was dying, apropos it would seem. Sadly, he never completed it. Yeats wrote an epitaph for his grave; Mozart wrote the music.
Though Mel’s no longer around. And I miss the times when he’d stroll past my office, calling out, “You think it’s easy?”
Maybe he’s sitting in on a jam session, guitar in hand with Mozart on the ivories–somewhere in the great beyond.
You think it’s easy? Photo by Robson Hatsukami Morgan on Unsplash