Books and Quotes

In the article I quoted in Monday’s post, Elissa Altman shared this earthy bon mot from writer Dorothy Allison, which is now officially one of my all-time favorite quotes about writing:

If you’re going to write a character as an asshole, you’d better be ready to write yourself the same way.

Memoirists and others who may be tempted to include real-life assholes as villains or corpses in their writing, take note.

You might recall Allison as one of the examples of messy writers in my posts on authenticity. While Bastard Out of Carolina wasn’t strictly a memoir, it’s well-noted as a fictionalized version of Allison’s childhood. Her fictional stand-in, protagonist Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright, wasn’t exactly an asshole, but she was confused, complicated, rebellious, reckless, and vengeful. Allison didn’t hold back on revealing her contradictions, even if she risked losing her readers.

It doesn’t get more authentic than that.

The fact that it reminds me of one of my favorite John Waters quotes is a bonus.

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If you’ve ever worried that what you have to say isn’t important enough or that you have nothing new to add, I present to you this quote from one of my favorite writers.

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” – Andre Gide

Set in the earliest days of the French occupation by the Nazis in the summer of 1941, Suite Française is an unfinished set of short novels by the French-Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky.

The first short novel – Tempête en Juin (Storm in June) – follows the lives of multiple Parisians in the days immediately prior to the occupation of the capital city, as the French army is failing at the eastern front. The citizens veer from faith in their military to disbelief in the possibility of defeat to panicked flight before the oncoming Germans. Major characters include the Michauds, a middle-aged couple who work for a large bank; their boss, an adulterous boob who gives away their seats in an evacuation car to his mistress and her luggage; the Michaud’s son, an injured soldier; a pompous writer and his mistress; and a wealthy family fleeing the bombardment of Paris for their additional home in the south. As chaos erupts, Némirovsky’s characters make difficult choices, rise to higher moral standards, abandon their principles, and bully and steal their way to survival. By the end of this short novel, an armistice is reached and a bit of normality returns.

In the second short novel – Dolce (Sweet) – characters in Bussy, a country town in the suburbs of Paris, adapt to life under occupation. The mother of a prisoner of war chafes at the burden of putting up a German officer in her home, while an escaped POW believes another officer has designs on his wife. Brief affairs spring up among the German soldiers and young women from the town, and even some of their elders find themselves less resentful of their occupiers, who spend freely at their shops. While mostly disconnected from Storm in June, the novel features a few minor characters in expanded roles, including the family who took in the injured Jean-Marie Michaud. The Michauds and the wealthy Pericands are mentioned in passing. The novel concludes with the occupying soldiers departing for Germany’s eastern front, after the invasion of the Soviet Union begins.

A third novel – Captivité (Captivity) – was outlined but never written, and would have featured some of the characters from the first two sections connecting with the resistance. Fourth and fifth novels – potentially called Batailles (Battles) and La Paix (Peace) – exist as nothing more than titles in Némirovsky’s notebooks, as the war had not yet played out. “It’s really in the lap of the gods since it depends on what happens,” she wrote.

Sadly, Némirovsky would never truly complete any of this work. She was arrested in the summer of 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus.

Written while Némirovsky was living under occupation after abandoning Paris with her family, the two completed novels chillingly capture the chaos and urgency of people facing an imminent invasion of their homeland. Morally smug characters who believe their wealth renders them immune to disruption find themselves grubbing for food and transportation, fleeing burning buildings, and placing survival above their principles. Others surround themselves with material goods and comforts, valuing them more than the lives of refugees or even their co-workers. In Dolce, one of the main characters falls in love with an occupier and another cajoles her neighbors for donations for refugees while hoarding her own goods and dining with German officers.

Deftly written and morally complex, Suite Française places the reader in the heart of Paris and its people. I can’t remember a novel where I felt so literally within the story world, which isn’t surprising, sadly, given that’s exactly where Némirovsky herself lived and died.

The trouble with literature is that writers have to be the ones who write it. It’s always partial, it’s always partisan, and it’s always incomplete. When I say that writers have to be the one to write it, I mean that in order to generate the energy to create a big novel, a big play, an involved poem, one has to be a species of fanatic. You have to to think that this is really the only thing worth doing. Otherwise, you can’t generate the intensity to do it well. And to that degree, by generating that intensity, you are blinding yourself to what does not fit into some preconceived pattern in your own mind. There’s no doubt about that to me, and I think that probably lay behind Plato’s prohibition of the artist in society. He was right in the sense that the artist doesn’t know what he’s doing, to some extent. That is, we pretend, or like to believe, that we are depicting the whole truth of some situation, when as a matter of fact, the whole truth is, by definition, made impossible by the fact that we are obsessed people.

– Arthur Miller, from an interview with Phillip Gelb for Educational Theatre Journal, October 1958

The artist is the outcast; he always will be. He is an outcast in the sense that he is to one side of the stream of life and absorbs it and is, in some part of himself, reserved from its implications…I think you can’t see a thing when you’re in the middle of it. To some extent, an artist has to step to one side of what’s happening, divorce himself from his role as a citizen, and in that sense he becomes the enemy because he does not carry forth in himself and believe what is being believed around him. He is the enemy, usually, I suppose, of the way things are, whatever way they are.

– Arthur Miller, from an interview with Phillip Gelb for Educational Theatre Journal, October 1958

It matters not at all whether a modern play concerns itself with a grocer or a president if the intensity of the hero’s commitment to his course is less than the maximum possible. it matters not at all whether the hero falls from a great height or a small one, whether he is highly conscious or only dimly aware of what’s happening, whether his pride brings the fall or an unseen pattern written behind the clouds; if the intensity, the human passion to surpass his given bounds, the fanatic insistence upon his self-conceived role–if these are not present there can only be an outline of tragedy, but no living thing.

– Arthur Miller, from the introduction to his Collected Plays

Art and Fear
by David Bayles & Ted Orland

Started the year off finishing a short story collection, The Worst Years of Your Life: Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst-Ridden, Lust-Addled, and Deeply Misunderstood Adolescent in All of Us, edited by Mark Jude Poirier.

This one has been on my TBR shelf for a while. The copyright date is 2007, which sounds about right. The price sticker on the back is from Borders, so that tells you something. It’s not the longest-waiting book on the TBR shelf.

The stories all feature protagonists in middle or high school, or a mix of both. It’s a solid collection that doesn’t get repetitive, given the mix of eras, nationalities, sexes, and sexualities of the main characters.

Surprisingly – my bias is showing – editor Mark Poirier’s story “Thunderbird” was one of my favorites. I find that an editor including their own work in an anthology is usually more a testament to their ego than their ability to hold their own, but I was nicely surprised by this story of a closeted gay middle schooler dealing with bad friends and bullies while coming to terms with his burgeoning sexuality.

Other standouts are stories from George Saunders and Nathan Englander, both of whom write about the people in your neighborhood from a child’s perspective. Jim Shepard’s “Spending the Night with the Poor” is a painfully real examination of the relationship of two girls from different social classes, neither of whom understand how their different lifestyles will affect their friendship or how to navigate those differences.

The collection also includes some delightfully creepy fiction from A.M. Homes, whose “A Real Doll” documents a boy’s relationship with his older sister’s Barbie; and Stanley Elkins, whose “A Poetics for Bullies” gets into the head of a neighborhood little asshole who terrorizes weaker kids until his comeuppance arrives.

The charms of a few entries were lost on me, particularly those whose youthful protagonists involved with drugs, sex, and crime. I was a sheltered kid and a very late bloomer, so I have no entry point for these kinds of stories. In my head, I know that thirteen and fourteen year olds – and younger – get into all kinds of things, but the experience is so foreign to me the stories felt more like science fiction than slice of life. But that’s a personal reaction, not a criticism of the talent.

A good collection that worth seeking out.