A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic

by Peter Turchi

  Don’t talk to me of your Archimedes’ lever. He was an absentminded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

  — Joseph Conrad

  There are many ways to create psychic and artistic distance between ourselves and our experience in order to see it more clearly, to understand it more fully, and so reproduce aspects of our experience in ways that serve the work we mean to create. They include changing the character who represents us in some significant way (gender, family or marital status, or profession); moving the events in time (from the past to the present day, or from the present to the character’s past); changing the setting (from the country to the city, from Texas to Chicago, from France to Kansas); making what was a crucial event for us a secondary event for our character, so shifting the emphasis; changing crucial plot details (if our father died, let him recover; if the story draws from our divorce, make one member of the couple ill, instead, and see if we can still gain access to the emotion prompting the story); changing point of view (not only from first person to third, but changing the point-of-view character entirely); and imposing technical constraints on the work (the story needs to have three scenes, each paragraph needs to have five sentences, authority needs to rotate among three characters, etc.) so as to elicit attention to the work as a creation apart from its motivating content.

  The goal of these strategies and others like them is to help us see the core material, the event or feeling we want not only to re-create in writing but to explore, without being beholden to the details of what actually happened. Forcing ourselves to invent can help us see what feels essential and what doesn’t. Perhaps the greatest difficulty in writing about our experience is gaining distance from our own emotional response—then and now—to the people and events involved. Ideally, we aren’t simply documenting our experience but investigating it. In some cases, that might be best achieved not by making the character less like ourselves but by staring at ourselves intently, as if we were foreign, like a scientist looking through a microscope at his own blood. Why did we act so shamefully? Why were we ashamed? Who taught us what to be ashamed of? Focusing on the aspects of the story we least understand, or are least inclined to question, is most likely to lead to new perceptions.

  WINDOWS AS MIRRORS: LOOKING OUT, LOOKING IN

  The word reflection can be defined as both mirroring and meditation; I see self-portraits as encompassing both. . . . I prefer a window’s reflections to a mirror’s. A window’s transparency provides an underlying vista and diffuses the graphic power of a reflected figure. The hard opacity of a mirror tends to substantiate the very presence I want to subvert. I aim to assimilate my presence into a continuum.

  — CHARLES RITCHIE

  Obvious uses of the self in art are autobiography and the self-portrait. Several years ago the Musée du Luxembourg, in Paris, assembled an exhibition called Moi! Self-Portraits of the Twentieth Century. The show included 150 artists, among them Picasso, Matisse, and Degas. “The self-portrait is the most intense unmasking of the artist’s identity,” the curator said, adding that the exhibition revealed 150 different responses to the question “Who am I?” But the exhibit might have included six self-portraits each by 25 artists and still gotten 150 different responses to the question “Who am I?” There is no one answer to that question for any of us; each self-portrait selects from all of the artist’s possible selves.

  The irregular blank space on the left of Erased Self-Portrait expresses Charles Ritchie’s frustration, not with being unable to draw the figure, but with not being able to find an acceptable balance between the depiction of himself and the rest of the composition. The writer who struggles to integrate a character based on herself or her experiences might feel something equivalent. Her image, emotions, and experiences haven’t yet been transformed into part of a story or poem that can communicate effectively to readers.

  Erased Self-Portrait is evidence of my difficulties with the mirrored subject. My bust was originally situated at left, in the arched mirror, but was finally scrubbed out in frustration, leaving the irregular white patch. The quality of my depiction was unacceptable, and the dominance of my visage was exasperating.

  — Charles Ritchie

  A subgenre of self-portraits illustrates one extreme approach to creating art based on the self: leaving the self out of it. While everything we touch carries our fingerprints, this approach works to create distance by eliminating any explicit depiction of the artist. This option may be most attractive if we find depiction of personal experience too “charged,” or difficult to gain separation from, or if we simply choose to focus outward. Artists as diverse as Vilhelm Hammer-shoi, Van Gogh, and Robert Rauschenberg created self-portraits using objects. Van Gogh’s is one of the most famous.

  Erased Self-Portrait, by Charles Ritchie

  Van Gogh’s Chair

  Van Gogh’s Chair was painted in 1888, after the artist’s falling-out with Paul Gauguin. The two argued over aesthetics—Gauguin saw Van Gogh as an old-fashioned romantic—and Van Gogh responded by making paintings of his chair and Gauguin’s. Gauguin’s, depicted at night, is red, baroque, holding a burning candle and books, sitting on a flowery carpet, in front of a green wall with a blazing lamp. Van Gogh’s chair is simple, even crude, a box of onions behind it and his pipe on the seat. No human figure appears. What Van Gogh presents instead is an image carefully designed to create a psychological self-portrait, a depiction of the self via his familiar, chosen surroundings.

  Van Gogh, who collected illustrations from magazines and newspapers, was inspired by a “portrait” of one of the world’s most famous novelists. According to the Guardian, “In 1870 the Victorian magazine the Graphic published a valediction for an absent fixture of Christmas past: Charles Dickens had died that year, and Luke Fildes’ illustration ‘The Empty Chair, Gad’s Hill—Ninth of June 1870’ depicts Dickens’s chair at his desk, pulled back, but empty, no one there to write that year’s Christmas story.”

  Empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be.

  — Charles Dickens, Bleak House

  In The Empty Chair, Dickens’s absence signifies death. A month after painting his chair and Gauguin’s, Van Gogh threatened Gauguin with a razor, then cut off his own ear. A year and a half after that, he killed himself. If you’ve looked at Van Gogh’s Chair before and seen it as warm or comforting, it may change your sense of it to know that Van Gogh smoked a pipe because Dickens advised it as a cure for melancholy. In the painting, his pipe lies abandoned.

  In these portraits, omitting the figures required the artist to express character in other ways: through the choice of what is depicted, and how; through color; and through composition.

  I think it is impossible for [Hemingway] to write of any event at which he has not been present; his is, then, a reportorial talent, just as Sinclair Lewis’s is. But, or so I think, Lewis remains a reporter and Hemingway stands a genius because Hemingway has an unerring sense of selection. . . .The simple thing he does looks so easy to do. But look at the boys who try to do it.

  — DOROTHY PARKER

  In stories like “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Hemingway’s narrators can seem distant, removed; the stories themselves seem far from mere documents of personal experience or observation. Even in the stories about Nick Adams, who is generally considered a stand-in for the author, the narrator is capable of expressing things beyond Nick’s understanding. Hemingway often focuses intently on objects and setting to reveal what is felt but never explicitly expressed. One of the most dramatic examples is his early story “Big Two-Hearted River,” which evokes Nick’s devastation after the war almost entirely through description of the landscape. While working on the story, Hemingway wrote to Gertrude Stein, “I am doing the country like Cézanne.” That “unerring sense of
selection” is the prose equivalent to the arrangement of objects and the choices of color and composition in visual art. Even though his stories and novels were based on his experience, Hemingway created the equivalent of mirrors carefully arranged to give readers a precisely controlled view, a unique angle of perception.

  From behind the screen where I hid I advance personally, solely to you.

  Camerado! This is no book; Who touches this, touches a man. . . . I spring from the pages into your arms.

  — Walt Whitman

  Charles Ritchie’s choice of subject—what he can see from inside his house, looking out, in near darkness—led to a conflict. He works with one or more lights illuminating his work space. Those lights are reflected in the windows he looks through, and among the things they illuminate is him: the artist at work. While he embraced the complex play of reflected light on glass, for years he had eliminated various visual distractions—including his own image. Eventually, in order to be more true to what he saw, he decided to stop eliminating himself from the world he observed. What he saw reflected was not a neat image, as we might see in a typical portrait, but a dim, partially obscured, ghostly image, sometimes all but imperceptible behind other objects or reflections. In Self-Portrait with Paper Whites (left), his figure is fragmented by the window mullions and white blossoms. In Kitchen Windows with Reflections (facing), only half of his upper body and head are visible, in deep shadow.

  Every creation is a reflection, however indirect, of its creator. In revealing our obsessions we reveal what concerns us. By choosing to work in a particular way, by choosing particular materials and subjects, we enter into conversation with art and artists of the past as well as with our contemporaries.

  We are not in complete control of the way our work reflects us, any more than we are in complete control of the way the pitch of our voice reflects our timidity or assertiveness, or the way our perspiration reflects our nervousness. Some of us just perspire a lot. But our interest here is in the struggle to gain control, to be aware, to assert an artistic point of view—to make conscious and determined choices. Just as we can improve our posture, or teach ourselves to make eye contact with strangers, by being more conscious of how we present ourselves in prose we can achieve greater control over the effects we create.

  A magician is a particular type of actor, his every movement and act of speech intended to create a tone or to (mis)direct our attention. An actor shaves himself one way at home, in his bathroom, with no one else around—and entirely differently on stage, in a role, with an audience watching. At home, his goal is to remove the stubble from his face; on stage, where the razor may not have a blade, his goal is to project a character at a particular moment in a larger narrative and to create one or more particular effects. His movements are designed to communicate with the audience.

  Like a magician practicing for hours in front of a mirror, we need to learn to see our work and the effects we mean to create from the audience’s point of view.

  THROW IN A LITTLE FANCY

  Herman Melville’s first novel, and his most popular book during his lifetime, was an exotic, romantic travelogue. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life tells the story of a sailor who finds himself captive on an island inhabited by cannibals, and who soon falls in love with a cannibal maiden. Unlikely as it may seem, the novel is based on actual events. In 1842 Melville deserted the Acushnet and spent three weeks on Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, where he saw the Tai Pi Valley and quite likely met the model for his novel’s feast for the eyes, Fayaway. Over the course of Omoo, Mardi, and then Moby-Dick; or, The Whale—the book now most commonly considered his masterpiece, but a financial and critical failure when it was published—Melville moved further from his own experience, unless we include his reading among his experiences. Moby-Dick was inspired by the story “Mocha Dick; or, The White Whale of the Pacific,” about an actual notorious sperm whale, published in The Knickerbocker magazine in 1839. Melville was fully aware of the challenge of transforming his time at sea and the first-hand accounts of others into fiction. In 1850, as he was composing Moby-Dick, he wrote Richard Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast, “It will be a strange sort of a book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; —& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy. . . . Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.”

  “One must needs throw in a little fancy. . . . Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing.” We understand the sort of truth he’s talking about. We also understand the confounding banality of experience: blubber is blubber.

  In a long letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville wrote, “In reading some of Goethe’s sayings . . . I came across this, ‘Live in the all.’ That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one,—good; but get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself. . . . What nonsense! . . . [but] there is some truth in it. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth.” This was in 1851, just four years before Whitman published Leaves of Grass. The notion of reaching toward universal experience, so universal truth, through individual experience and awareness, was in the air. And, like Whitman, Melville wanted to include everything: what he had seen, what he had done, what he had read, and what he had imagined. This ambition led to an unusual book—a combination of fact and fiction, varying in mode from traditional scenes to short essays to lists to digressive expository excursions—not far removed from supposedly innovative books of our own time. In a contemporary review of the novel, Evert A. Duyckinck simultaneously recognized Melville’s ambition and found the execution wanting:

  There are evidently two if not three books in Moby-Dick rolled into one. Book No. 1 we could describe as a thorough exhaustive account admirably given of the great Sperm Whale. . . . Book No. 2 is the romance of Captain Ahab & Co . . . very serious people . . . concerned a great deal about the problem of the universe. . . . After pursuing [Moby-Dick] in this melancholic company over a few hundred squares of latitude and longitude, we begin to have some faint idea of the association of whaling and lamentation, and why blubber is popularly synonymous with tears. . . . Book III . . . is half essay, half rhapsody. . . . These are strong powers with which Mr. Melville wrestles in this book. It would be a great glory to subdue them to the highest uses of fiction.

  Duyckinck thought he was describing the shortcomings of the novel; later readers decided that these are its virtues. Whatever you think of Moby-Dick, it’s hard to imagine a book more tightly bound with its creator. It amply demonstrates not only his experience but also his interests, his passions, and his habit of mind—which was sprawling, philosophical, and less interested in certain kinds of detail (Melville was notoriously careless about proofreading) than in the grand vision that drew together apparently disparate parts. In the progression from Typee to Moby-Dick we see Melville standing back from his exploits, doing more than polishing them into adventure tales, and relying less on recording things that he actually did, or nearly did; at the same time, we see him investing himself more fully, actually incorporating more of his total experience in the work—if, again, we include his reading and thinking as his life experience. That is the development we see in any number of writers who, as they mature, rely less on recounting and being faithful to specific events and grow to see experience as raw material, the way a visual artist sees paint, a sculptor sees marble, or a magician sees a deck of cards.

  TRANSFORM THE USABLE PAST

  A quarter-century after the publication of Typee, another American writer chronicled a different voyage—this one across the western half of the country—in the comic travelogue Roughing It. “Mark Twain” was, everyone knows, the pseudonym of a man named Samuel Clemens—a pseudonym taken from riverboat navigation. While Erik Weisz (born just two years after Roughing It was published) wanted to be a magician, Sam Clemens wanted to be a riverboat pilot. H
appily for us, while working on the Mississippi he fell into company where the ability to tell an engaging story was hard currency: the more outrageous the story, the better. His early work is highly autobiographical, often detailing trips he made, but with the actual events seen through a distorting lens, a funhouse mirror designed to exaggerate and poke fun at everyone, including himself. Assuming the role of a comic journalist, he had found a place to stand.

  But as is true of most comedians, a demon drove his humor, in his case a sadness turning to cynicism that threatened to ostracize audiences, editors, and advertisers. In 1866, at the age of thirty-one, just a few months after publishing what is now his most famous short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”—before he had written Roughing It, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—Samuel Clemens put a gun to his head.