I have been away from blogging because I am now deeply into rewriting, rather editing, Sojourner, my historical fiction about a Chinese who ventures to California during the Gold Rush. It is a philosophical quest that he is on. I wrote it about the age of 40, while teaching in secondary school, raising our children and feeling as if I was spent as a human being. Schools are deadly for students and teachers. There is a death pall that imbues the environment with the sense that all here is a holding action. Is it not? So, the novel reveals my discontent, a need to find purpose and intention in this world. I never did escape that Parisian sewer, but I did continue to write to express myself; I wrote for me, not you, the reader, a very telling difference. It has serendipitously helped me from selling out, kissing up, and all the rest. The previous blog declares that I am not for sale. All the while I taught, I wrote, and I went back to school to become a psychotherapist which again was a latent need to understand my self. I practiced as a therapist and felt redeemed. At last my gravestone would not say teacher.
I am getting to my point. Mayra Calvani, an author and reviewer, just reviewed Down to a Sunless Sea on 10 June, at http://blogcritics.org/. The last three paragraphs of her review are of particular interest. She offered me the opportunity to be interviewed and sent me an extended series of questions to answer; I had options and no more than 2,000 words. It too would go up on blogcritics. A day later she emailed me, saying that “I was wondering if you could add these two questions to the other bunch.”
Here they are: In your collection, you use various writing styles for the different stories. Was this a conscious decision? If yes, why did you decide to do it this way? Or is this because your style has changed with time (I read the stories were written over many years). The second question: Your collection offers readers a dark glimpse into the troubled mind of the characters. What’s in the mind of the author? (this is a kind of a fun question — you can be witty).
I’ll comment on all this here since I am preparing to respond to her questions. I believe that I wrote in order to make sense of my life and situation. Have I accomplished that end? After four decades I can say that I have made some headway, but existentially it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, Ilsa. I write to “soothe” myself and the terror of existence itself. We face two questions: life and death, and they are fierce deities. I imagine to make sense is to give order, to be rational. After the Holocaust, that is a farce. The species is brain dead. And if I make sense, it is only for me. The surprise of all my writing is that I don’t take it too seriously — the grubby writers who want to be stroked, the writers who huckster their works, the unkind editors who are eunuchs and latently jealous of their writers and so on. I have removed myself from all that years ago. I kiss no ass. When I am asked about writing, I offer this suggestion: go into the woods with a bottle of Mazola oil and anoint yourself a writer and go forth from these woods and into the cities and spread the word. I am compelled at times to write but the folly is in feeling that it does good. It is really my patrimony, given to my children. I don’t care about you or readers, other than the fun it provides when reviewed or a nice comment about the book. I am greedy about life while I have it, not greedy about my books, except as an extension of who I am and that gets awfully murky.
How do I persevere? How do I go on? How do I handle what appears to be depression, despair or moroseness? Are you kidding me? You go on. I don’t feel the former. I just see. You may see differently, of course. I see the existential uselessness of it all as soon as I interact with the next human being. Matt, you are Timon of Athens, Moliere’s Misanthrope, whatever. Not at all. Your mental snares are not for this game fish. So I will get on to the questions in another way.
Many of the short stories were written to express states of my emotions and often the style of the story was not a conscious choice. I was learning, I’m self-taught, I was experimenting. I wrote about the illness of my daughter, of the death of a cousin at an early age, about Juan Peron after reading an article in the paper about the desecration of his tomb. Argentinians are into death. I just followed my fancy. I never went for a MFA (argh); I never took a course except one which I quickly left, the lecturer needed to be adored. I tried my hand at a novel, Sojourner, and rarely did I have a story published. I tried science fiction, and Gruffworld is the product of that and is the next book after Sojourner. I was rejected so many times that I developed the arrogance which said — your loss! Obviously I have been proven right. And that feeling lasts as long as a Kathy Griffin orgasm.
The stories, of course, are me, interests, concerns, some trauma as I experienced and turned them into stories so I could digest who I was in transit. I read that Kafka would meet with some cronies, read his short stories to them, and that they’d often laugh. I got the sense that he was having bizarre fun as only a genius could. I don’t think he took himself too seriously. Amazing how much shellac we apply to his works and others.
In my collection of short stories the deviant and damaged are me in my many selves, and are not my many selves. They are my perverse imagination, my projections and fantasies and the question posed must go largely unanswered. What’s in the mind of the author, as I look back, as I reflect, is also unknown to himself. Indeed, that is a major “theme” in my efforts. Without being unduly harsh — Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin.
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