A Reader on Reading

Experience of life everyone has; the knack for transforming it into literary experience is what most of us lack. And even if one were granted that alchemical talent, what experience is a writer allowed to use in trying to tell a story? The death of her mother, like the narrator in Alice Munro’s “Material”? His guilty desire, as in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice? The blood of a loved one, like the master who sees his disciple beheaded and thinks how beautiful the scarlet color is on the green floor, in Marguerite Yourcenar’s “How Wang Fo Was Saved”? Is he entitled to use even the intimate secrets of his family, his friends, of those who trusted in him and might be horrified to find themselves speaking private words in front of a reading public? When the novelist Marian Engel, in the company of other authors, heard of something that appealed to her, however confidential, she would shout out, “Called it!” claiming for her writing the juicy tidbit. Apparently in the realm of writing there are no moral restrictions on hunting and gathering.

I, too, tried to work from experience, seeking moments and events to furnish the thing I was calling up from the shadows. I chose for my main character the face of a man I had once seen in the paper, a gentle, knowledgeable, kindly face which I later discovered belonged to Klaus Barbie. That misleading face suited my character perfectly, as did the name, Berence, a name I borrowed from a strange gentleman I met on the ship from Buenos Aires to Europe, a writer who was in the habit of traveling back and forth across the Atlantic, never spending time in the port of destination, and who one night, when I was suffering from a bad cold and a high fever, told me the story of Lafcadio, who commits the gratuitous act of pushing the unworldly Amédée off a moving train in Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican. I depicted Algiers according to my memories of Buenos Aires (another pseudo-French city on the sea), and northern Quebec according to my memories of a visit to Percé. In order to bring the story to its close, I needed to describe the workings of a torturer, but not the torture itself. I imagined someone applying the brutal methods not to a person but to something inert, lifeless. My unattended fridge contained an old celery stalk. I imagined what it would be like to torture it. The scene, mysteriously, turned out to be exactly right. But I still had to give words to the torturer’s self-justification. I didn’t know how to do it. “You have to bring yourself to think like him,” my friend, the novelist Susan Swan, advised. I didn’t think I was capable. Humiliatingly, I realized that I could think the torturer’s thoughts.

But in spite of a few successful moments, the writing hesitated, stumbled, fell flat. Attempting to say that a man enters a room, or that the light in the garden has changed, or that the child felt that she was being threatened, or any simple, precise thing that we communicate (or believe we communicate) every moment of every day, is, I discovered, one of the most difficult of literary endeavors. We believe the task is easy because our listener, our reader, carries the epistemological weight and is supposed to intuit our message, to “know what we mean.” But in fact, the signs that stand for the sounds that spark the thoughts that conjure up the memory that dredges up the experience that calls upon the emotion crumble under the weight of all they must carry and barely, hardly ever, serve the purpose for which they were designed. When they do, the reader knows the writer has succeeded and is grateful for the miracle.

G. K. Chesterton observes in one of his essays that “somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.” I think every reader can find them in the books he or she truly loves; I am not certain that every writer can. As to my novel, I have a vague notion of what those words might be, and now (so many years after the fact) I feel that they would have sufficed if they had come to me then, at the beginning of the process.