How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  As the broker moves me to the front door, I don’t want to leave. I feel like I am already home.

  I go with her to see a second apartment, out of some idea that it will make it less strange when I decide on the first, but am nervous the whole time that I could lose the first to someone else. The second apartment is a little larger, a little more expensive, on the second floor, with four rooms. It feels large and lonely. “It’s too much room,” I tell her, and she raises an eyebrow.

  “Are you sure,” she asks me as I fill out the application for the garden apartment.

  “Yes,” I say. Impatient to move in and open that ground.

  PREVIOUS TO THIS, I had no talent for gardening that anyone knew about, ever, including me. As a child I helped my mother garden, but recall very little of it except for placing pine needles and Styrofoam cones around her roses at our home in Maine, insulating them for winter. One winter, I struck a buried rose with a shovel as I built a tunnel through the snow, and I tried to see into the darkness where it slept, afraid I’d killed it. I felt so terrible I was unable to tell her what I’d done, and covered the hole with snow. When the spring came, I avoided finding out if it had survived.

  The single clue that I had any future as a gardener was the long hours I spent in the woods alone, so much so that my neighborhood nickname was Nature Boy. I hunted for the wild orchids called lady’s slippers, sitting and visiting with them, in awe of their beauty and their status as rare and endangered. I picked bouquets of black-eyed Susans, lilacs, and Queen Anne’s lace to bring home for my mother—whatever I found. But I did not grow anything, which I think is why my sister said, “I would have thought you’d kill anything you planted,” when I told her what I had planned.

  In my family, I am not known for patience. I was the one who yelled, slammed doors, who had confrontations. And at the time, I was not known for living anywhere more than a year—usually six months.

  The only explanation is that it was some gift of the apartment’s, an otherwise unmystical, unmagical place. An ordinary, even miserable apartment, renovated once in the eighties and then once more before I moved in. It was a blank white box, with a small kitchen and a small bathroom, that special lowered rent, that single window that was also a back door, cross-ventilation possible only when I opened the front door as well. And if not the apartment, then it was a gift of the garden, given when I looked through that window, into the space the garden would fill. Given before it existed at all.

  IN THE FIRST DAYS after I move in, I read books on garden design. They agree that proper gardens are planned to give something to the gardener in each season, even in winter. The spring garden should have early color to revive the eye after the long, colorless winter; in the summer, a circus of full blooms; the fall, a harvest of deeper colors. The winter garden is a shape under the snow, or evergreens and the occasional mahogany red of a rose cane. Many gardeners try to match the colors and ground types and sun exposures, others compose with the scents in mind as well, in the manner of a perfumer. One book instructs on how to layer bulbs at different depths, so that the crocus is replaced by the tulip, then the lily, iris, canna, and so on, with a last set of lilies to emerge in the fall, a plot like a holster of bulbs. Some are rarefied and planted to be seen at night, with white foliage and night-blooming flowers, and fragrances that appear only in the evening. Too much of a single variety of plants, the books warn, will make the garden dull outside the season of the chosen variety’s blooming, and draw a dense number of pests—as if the pests are drawn to dullness.

  I begin to make my plan, sketching out the garden, and then my original idea, of roses everywhere, asserts itself. I discard the plan for a careful garden I do not want.

  “I am planting a rose garden,” I tell a friend at what I choose as my local bar, shortly after moving in, testing out saying it. The month is January, dark and cold.

  “Do you have a lot of sunlight?” he asks me.

  “Yes,” I lie, unsure.

  The next day I don’t have to work. I stay home all day and watch the sun move across the ground. One of the books recommends keeping a garden diary, tracking the sunlight exposures, the rains, the seasons starting and ending.

  The first sunlight hits my windows at seven-thirty and touches the ground in the back around eight. The sun leaves the last patch of dirt at four p.m. It is January, so the summer promises to have more. All roses, a guidebook says, need a good six hours of sunlight. I have more than enough.

  The next morning, I turn back to my record of the sunlight and begin another entry. And this is how this essay begins, on that day.

  EACH DAY I WAKE to the new apartment, still full of sealed packed boxes and a scattering of furniture: a small table that I use as a desk, a chair, and a futon. I take a few of my books out and pile them against the wall, reading some, browsing others. I enjoy the silence. I worked extra jobs like a demon in the previous months to get the money together to move, and it’s as if the effort has burned off all conversation. I do not get a phone installed immediately, as I do not know what I would say if it rang and I answered. I make calls only when I need to, from a pay phone. When I am questioned by police, who suspect I’m a drug dealer because of this behavior, I get a line installed, but it feels like a concession.

  The center of this block is an H of adjoining yards, variously planted and tended or, as in the yard on my right, abandoned. By spring, it will be clear the bare wintry trees in the back will remain like this all year. The black branches pinch the sky like the trees in an Edward Gorey cartoon.

  “They were root-poisoned by the landlord,” my neighbor tells me when she emerges one day and introduces herself. Their taproots had endangered the pipes and foundations of the buildings as they made their slow push through the ground below us. The trees will stay like this the entire time I live here, branches occasionally falling into one or another garden. My yard is full of the fallen limbs of the poisoned trees.

  My neighbor is a young woman, roughly my age, living off of SSDI due to AIDS, she tells me. I like her right away. She is new also, and almost always at home. She has plans for a lawn and vegetable garden, and keeps a compost pile in the back corner of her yard, but she worries about the poison in the ground used to kill the trees. “I’m testing the soil,” she says. “You should too.”

  A beehive is back there also, wild but, as she points out, useful: the bees will pollinate our gardens. She will not remove it. This strikes me as both wise and foolish.

  The only living tree remaining is a silvery magnolia, still dormant and inexplicably alive amid its dead cousins.

  The yard to my right is all trash bags of dead plants, an old bicycle, and a smashed fence, and home to those feral yard cats, the mother cat and her new brood. The three yards, when viewed together, my young neighbor’s, mine, and the abandoned one, are like a declension, variations on the theme of habitation: my neighbor’s yard is the neat one; mine, half spoiled; the last, a ruin.

  What appear to be metal ladders ascend from the yards, several stories high, notched with pulleys to hold laundry lines, strung over the yards with panties and sheets and towels hung to dry. Occasionally a sock or a panty falls into my garden. No one ever comes to ask for them, and I do not ever know whose these are, and inevitably I throw whatever the stray item is away. The only other neighbor I see for the first few months is an older woman opposite me, her hair a combed and brassy hat. She occasionally appears and leaves large metal bowls of cat food for the yard cats, who tumble nightly through my garden in yowling fights.

  I have a dream of a garden, my first ever, and in the dream there are grass leaves as thick as sword blades, and flowers, indistinguishable by type, of the deepest red and blue and pink. I walk through the garden and that is the entire dream.

  2

  IN THE INTRODUCTION TO the British horticulturist Ellen Willmott’s The Genus Rosa, a brief story:

  The Persian poet Omar Khayyám, who flourished in the eleventh century, has muc
h to say about Roses. A hip from a Rose planted on his grave at Nashipur was brought home by Mr. Simpson, the artist of The Illustrated London News. It was given to me by the late Mr. Bernard Quaritch, and reared at Kew. It proved to be Rosa damascena, and a shoot from the Kew plant has now been planted on the tomb of his first English translator, Edward FitzGerald.

  A rose travels from Omar Khayyám’s grave to Willmott to the tomb of his late translator. Willmott declines to say if she is the source of this planting, but her knowledge of it is such that I can only imagine her digging the hole herself, smiling to think of the same bloom watching over both men’s graves.

  Willmott’s two-volume Genus Rosa is one of the grander dames of rose culture, published in between 1910 and 1914. Willmott walks the reader through the various mentions of roses in classical literature and the Bible, always calling it the Rose, with a capital R. She mentions rose garlands found in ancient Egyptian tombs dating to AD 300, takes us to the aforementioned Khayyám anecdote, and duns Linnaeus for his “scant attention” to the genus and the confusion that resulted from it for those who came after, even somehow knowing, like a spy, that there were roses in his herbarium that he neglected to mention: “Rosa mochadi, Rosa agrestis (sepias) and Rosa multiflora.” She then reels off the attempts to gather the roses that have appeared between her and Linnaeus, concluding before she fully begins, without fanfare, that “the Index Kewensis gives specific rank to 493 Roses, with additions in the first, second and third Supplements amounting to about 50.” Around 543 roses, then, or Roses, as she would put it.

  David Parsons, in the revised edition of his Parsons on the Rose, published about the same time as Willmott’s book, in America, notes more than 2,000 varieties. At present there are around 3,000, though there remain approximately 150 species commonly grown.

  Every book on roses I have ever read begins in some way like Willmott’s. For example, the Rosarum Monographia, a lovely and rare volume of roses, praised by Parsons as among the finest and published in 1820 by a young Dr. John Lindley, who dedicates it to one Charles Lyell, Esq.: “Although the number of publications on the present subject is already too considerable, and their authors, in many instances, men of established reputation; yet nothing is more notorious than the almost inextricable confusion in which Roses are to this day involved.”

  Lindley accuses some of the authors of the aforementioned confusing works of having used dead and dried flowers as specimens, and reveals his book to be inspired by the “considerable private collection of living plants” that has occupied him for years. His new book is meant as a corrective to those who haven’t had the advantage he has, which is to say, the advantage of his own garden. And this is because all rosarians, I think, find their own garden to be not just a wonder, but a messenger, from a place of secrets that other rosarians cannot know.

  From Lindley we learn the rose was a bribe given to Harpocrates, the god of silence; that there is a custom in northern Europe of hanging a rose from the ceiling above a table if what passed beneath it was meant to be secret; that the red of roses comes from the blood of Venus, whose feet were cut by roses as she attempted to protect Adonis from the rage of her husband, Mars. Or, per Theocritus, the red is the blood of Adonis himself. Or it is Cupid, who spilled a bowl of nectar while dancing, staining the rose red. Or, per Ausonius, it is Cupid’s own blood. Or it is the sweat of Muhammad, according to the Turks.

  Perhaps all of it is true. The rose as love gift, stained by the gods, no matter the god or the giver, the first secret of them all.

  In any case, the lesson we can take, I think, is: Plant a rose, wait for a message. Be it earthly or divine.

  3

  A GOOD PLACE TO begin a garden is to undo whatever appear to be the clear mistakes of previous owners.

  I tear up the stone walk. It occupies patches of ground feasting on sunlight, a feast of no use to a rock. The mother cat looks at me skeptically as she nurses her kittens, as if she has seen this happen before. I make a figure-eight path, irregular in the manner of handwriting, hollowing out the spaces for the stones before I water them into place and hop on them as they set, in a method I invent as I go.

  I wander out to the chain link fence and back again. Shattered glass and ceramic shards cover the ground in my yard, and I consider using the larger pieces to make a mosaic of some kind, but discard that idea quickly. Most gardens are palimpsests of previous gardens, and the first spring usually has surprises, but it is already clear someone before me planted mint—a newbie mistake, my neighbor points out, as mint spreads rapidly, choking out everything else with long, fragrant rhizome ropes just under the surface of the dirt.

  The woman who lived here before me, according to the neighbor, had vegetables, some herbs, some flowers. My neighbor and I have conversations over our fence, each of us standing on benches; mostly we talk about getting the yard cats adopted. The tomcat suitors of the mother cat pass through the missing teeth of the fence at a high run, and we discuss whether repairing the fence will slow them down. One tom seems to be the neighborhood king: he has a giant head and is so heavy that when he climbs down the fire escape and drops to my deck, he sounds like the full sack of a burglar.

  My neighbor is concerned about what pesticides and fertilizers I will use. I assure her I will not use chemicals without consulting her. She tells me she has planted dandelions, and I studiously do not laugh at her, instead quietly remembering summers spent pulling them out of my mother’s yard.

  I HAVE TWO MORE dreams about gardening during my first year of living in this place, and then never again to this day. In the first, I take a train ride, much like the one I once took from London to Edinburgh, and meet, at the station, my grandfather Goodwin, my mother’s father, a man who farmed every day of his long life in Maine. He takes me in his pickup, quietly, and shows me a beautiful forest of parti-colored leaves, each of them as big as the shield of a Templar. Behind the leaves are flowers as big as faces.

  It is the same garden, I understand after waking, that I dreamed of when I moved in, though in the way of dreams, there is no resemblance, just an inner knowing.

  In the second dream, I am walking through Brooklyn and flowers fill the streets like a river, roses that climb several stories high, foxglove and lupine like missiles. So many flowers that we Brooklynites must walk on catwalks set along the top stories of buildings, built especially to accommodate those garden streets.

  ROSES, I DISCOVER IN my research, appear delicate but have adapted to most climates. They can be made to bloom all through the year until winter. The more they are cut back, the faster they grow and the stronger they are. My role models at last, I think, when I read this.

  I will have the dull garden with just one type of plant, I decide, but the variations on the theme seem enough.

  I begin with just ten roses. Shrubs and climbers, a few floribundas and everbloomers. All are chosen for being described with words like “hardy” and “disease-resistant.”

  As I wait for the order to arrive, I go into the yard and gather all the dead wood and giant dead stalks left from the sunflowers of the previous inhabitants. I bundle the wood branches with the idea I’ll use them to stake the roses, until I remember they’re poisoned and take them out.

  The roses arrive, bare roots wrapped in a brown paper bag, looking like the sticks I cleared from the yard, except, touching the bag, I can feel they are alive, a fierce halo of living force against my fingertips. I understand immediately why people speak to plants, as I draw a bath of cool water for them per the instructions that accompany them. I set the roots in the tub and step back, feeling crowded out of the bathroom.

  People talk to plants because they’re alive.

  I get into bed and can feel them still, in there, drinking the water. In the morning, I rush to put them in the ground.

  BEFORE THE PLANTING, I walk around the garden with the tags of the various roses and set them in different spots as I try to decide on the final design. I use the pictures and t
he projected measurements to imagine a sort of ghost garden amid the straw-colored dead plants.

  I then dig three of the holes in quick succession. With the fourth, my spade hits cloth, and I put it down.

  Briefly, I imagine the possibility that I am in a very different story from the one I believed myself to be in. A murder mystery, for example. This is perhaps the moment when I discover the murders that made the rent cheap.

  I go back and dig until I pull from the ground what turns out to be a pale blue cotton housedress, flecked with a flower-bud print and stained from the pale mud tea soaking the wet ground. It is light, the size of a small pillow. I set it down gently and with the spade’s blade push the folds of the dress back. At the center is a small crucifix and rosary, wrapped around a pile of small, thin bones. Among them are sharp fang teeth, one still attached to a piece of jawbone, reassuring me this was once a cat or small dog. I place it all carefully into a trash bag, go to the corner bodega, and look for a saint’s candle, settling on Our Lady of Guadalupe, the avatar of the Virgin Mary, always painted surrounded by roses. I’ve always liked this story: A campesino asked to prove he saw the Virgin Mary returns to where he saw her, and she tells him to go to the top of a hill in winter to collect flowers he can take back as proof. He arrives to find a rose garden blooming in winter.

  I light the candle, set it by the hole, and finish digging it. As I go through the rest of the garden, I find more bones—it is like a boneyard—ox tails thrown here after making soup? Some look to be birds, others, the remains of a hundred feral cat feasts. A dead rat is under the deck—I use the spade to remove it. I uncover piles of magazines that seem to have been put in the ground as landfill and carry these to the curb. I let the candle burn for hours, in the manner you’re supposed to, and when I put it out, I consider the possibility I’ve disturbed some kind of spell. I’ve never heard of a cat being given a Catholic burial—I imagine a small girl or boy doing such a thing. A private religion, a child’s insistence on the animal’s soul. Much like me, the nonbeliever who goes to the corner to buy a saint’s candle, just in case.