Two From The Millions

The Millions is one of my favorite websites. (Can't believe it wasn't on my blogroll, an egregious omission that I have now rectified.) Here are two recent posts of theirs that I found particularly worthwhile:

• The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia's Novel Crisis by Cathy Day. This article is about how America's MFA writing programs focus on crafting short stories and offer no guidance on crafting novels, and the problems that this causes both for aspiring writers and for the reading public. As I read it, I couldn't help thinking of the blog post I recently wrote about playwriting books, and the conversation that Tim struck up with me at Theater Pub after seeing my post. There is something similar in the deficiencies that exist in the teaching (in MFA programs) of fiction writing and the teaching (in how-to books) of playwriting. These methods do not necessarily produce the kind of writing that audiences/readers most want. They define things too narrowly (you must write a minimalist, realistic story of 8 to 16 pages! you must write a realistic play about a single protagonist struggling to achieve a single goal!) and force some writers into a box where they don't belong.
  

• Beverly Cleary's Dispatches from the Golden West, by Lydia Kiesling. Kiesling's experience of reading Beverly Cleary's two memoirs--A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet--basically mirrors my own. These are great books to give a girl who has outgrown "Ramona Quimby" and wonders what life was like for an American girl/young woman in the 1920s and 1930s (these are real-life "American Girl" books, yo). I wrote about them briefly here. Like Cleary, I am a proud Oregon girl who moved to California as a young woman, and this article has me thinking that I should reread My Own Two Feet now that I am living in the Bay Area.
  

Playwrights in Person, part 1: Brooke Berman

Over the last couple of weeks I've seen a few playwrights in person--I mean you-may-have-heard-of-these-people playwrights, East Coast-based, award-winning, establishment playwrights--so I'm going to do a little series of blog posts about these encounters.

First up: Brooke Berman. Over the summer, Terry Teachout raved about Brooke's new memoir No Place Like Home, and even though I was not familiar with any of Brooke's plays, I vowed to check it out--because there aren't a lot of firsthand accounts of what it's like to be a young, female playwright, struggling to make great art at the same time you're struggling to just figure out LIFE. So, when Brooke Berman did a promotional reading at the downtown San Francisco Borders last month, I made sure to attend and buy a copy of the memoir.

The reading was sparsely attended, which enabled me to introduce myself to Brooke and chat with her for a bit. (Also, because Brooke was 7.5 months pregnant, that gave me the opportunity to tell her that I had just had a short play produced about a pregnant woman who craves a beer!) She read the opening pages of the memoir, as well as a brief passage about a summer when she drove cross-country with her boyfriend and ended up, broke, in San Francisco--then signed copies of her book.

I began reading No Place Like Home on my East Coast trip--which was perfect, because it is a New York book. Most of the "39 apartments" described in the book's subtitle are in New York City, and Brooke writes with an evocative sense of place, reserving particular affection for downtown, bohemian Manhattan. The memoir grew out of a New York Times article about Brooke's peripatetic life; the different living situations provide the backdrop to a coming-of-age story.

It's a hard-won coming of age, brought about by much struggle--partly because being a young New York artist often means scraping by on very little money in tiny apartments, and partly because Brooke had at least two instances of really bad luck. (When she was 24, someone broke into her apartment and raped her; later, a roommate got leukemia and made her move out of a beautiful loft apartment.) I was put in the weird position of thinking that, compared to Brooke's, my life as a young female artist has been pretty stable... and wondering if I too am "cruising for a bruising." Or, alternatively, wondering if I should live my life with a little more risk and daring, even if that would mean giving up this stability.

No Place Like Home is meant for a "general" audience, for people who can relate to Brooke's story of being a young woman and finding her way. Therefore, it doesn't contain as much information as a geek like me would desire about the specifics of playwriting, or Brooke's opinions about the theater. For instance, Brooke pretty much glosses over her two years of schooling at Juilliard. Or, according to the New York Times article, Brooke once worked as playwright Maria Irene Fornes' assistant--but Fornes is never mentioned in the memoir. Indeed, because Brooke has to cover so many years and so many apartments in 250 pages, it sometimes feels like a lot of stuff has been left out. The entire book is written at a dogged "and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened" pace, so that sometimes it is hard to keep track of just which of these years, and these apartments, are most important to Brooke's story.

Still, there are some good insights into the playwright's or artist's life. I loved Brooke's comment "My job is to create a world that other people can live inside of--without me. It feels like my housing: entering a space, making it my own, and then leaving it to someone else's care. Leaving an imprint, then moving on." Or, when she says of a friend, "He understands how my plays are put together and why, which is like understanding how I'm put together and why," I just thought yes, exactly.

One other thing that No Place Like Home made me realize is how my life has been lacking in a spiritual dimension lately. Throughout the memoir, Brooke talks about how she has been helped by yoga, meditation, New Age philosophy, and other spiritual practices. I realized that I spend a lot of time alone, and yet, I don't spend enough time taking care of myself, being good to myself. I am privileged to have a peaceful and stable home, and yet my room is always a mess! Wouldn't I be happier if I lived in a tidy room, if I finally hung pictures on my walls, if I tried to cultivate my spiritual side and not just my intellectual/artistic side? It is something to think about... and San Francisco will clearly welcome me with open arms if I want to look further into spirituality.

"Timebends," Crooked Lives, Warped Humor

I've finally finished reading Timebends, Arthur Miller's dense and twisty memoir. Despite its length, Miller still leaves some things out (he hardly discusses his first marriage, and, of course, never mentions his Down's-syndrome son — more on that in a later post). Nonetheless, it is very revealing, sometimes overly so. At one point Miller casually admits to having an Oedipus complex, as if it were no different than having a stomachache. Does he not know how weird this makes him sound? Or does he just not care? On the one hand, it's valuable that Miller reveals stuff like this; on the other hand, it's not fun to read a memoir if you're constantly raising your eyebrows at the author.

Miller spends a lot of the book trying to justify his actions, but sometimes this has the opposite effect--he makes some feeble excuses. You know, if he'd written, "It was the 1950s, I was going through a lot of angst, McCarthyism frightened me, my marriage wasn't working out, women found me attractive now that I was famous, so I'm not saying it was a nice thing to do, but I cheated on my wife," that would be honest and humble, and you could forgive him. But instead he makes it sound like the hardships of McCarthyism not only caused him to cheat on his wife, but justified it--because he deserved the succor that only contact with the "eternal feminine" could provide. (Can female artists ever think that "the eternal feminine" is anything but hogwash? You never hear us extol "the eternal masculine.") The New Yorker titled its review of Timebends "Apologia Pro Vita Sua," and I can't think of a better description.

I have never read this much non-fiction writing from one dramatist before, and it is good that Miller discusses his major plays in depth. And undoubtedly, he has a very clear vision of what theater ought to do. For him, plays must specifically engage with and respond to major social and political trends; otherwise they are worthless. He is right, up to a point--of course theater should be relevant! But his vision can get way too didactic and dreary; it leaves out everything that has to do with amusement and style and the thrill of live performance. In the last part of the book, he veers close to sounding like a grouchy old man who says "Entertainment? Bah, humbug!"

Yes, it makes sense to decry the mind-numbing, commercialized entertainment of the late twentieth century. But when I think about the playwrights who have brought me the most joy and whom I admire most--I don't believe any of them would ever have said "Bah, humbug!" to entertainment.

Then there is the related matter of Miller's humorlessness. Or perhaps I should say, his bizarre sense of humor: in Timebends he says he considers Death of a Salesman a funny title. ("Out of the laughter the title came one afternoon. Death Comes for the Archbishop, the Death and the Maiden Quartet--always austere and elevated was death in titles. Now it would be claimed by a joker, a bleeding mass of contradictions, and there was something funny about that, something like a thumb in the eye, too." A strange thing to say about a play that Americans have always considered "austere and elevated.")

Yet there is also a suggestion that Miller finds humor vulgar and embarrassing. On the last page, he writes, "If only we could stop murdering one another we could be a wonderfully humorous species." As if humor were a frivolity that has no right to exist until all the world's problems have been solved. As if we were not already a wonderfully humorous species, despite all the tragedies that remain with us. As if humor were not a way of dealing with those tragedies. If we lived in a perfectly harmonious world, I daresay we would not need humor--it would not even tempt us. Doesn't some of the best humor result from righteous anger in the face of adversity? The world is imperfect, and therefore the world is humorous.

Very few of my favorite artists lack a sense of humor--especially when it comes to playwrights. (For some reason I seem to find humorlessness easier to take in novels, e.g. Atonement, a great book but entirely solemn.) This is why something like Synecdoche New York leaves me feeling almost betrayed--because Charlie Kaufman's other screenplays show that he has a profound and original sense of humor, but it was hardly evident in Synecdoche.

Oddly enough, in the first part of that movie, Caden, the protagonist, directs Death of a Salesman using a "concept" that he hopes will make it even more depressing: Willy and Linda are played by young actors, and Caden wants the audience to realize that the young people will inevitably grow up to become like Willy and Linda, though they seem so full of promise. And the rest of the movie proves Caden's thesis--a perfect storm of humorlessness, really.

Now, before I go to Japan, I am trying to finish up the Anthony Lane compilation as well as read The Complete Short Fiction of Oscar Wilde. In other words, I require not one, but two, preternaturally witty Brits to serve as palate-cleanser after the humorless American. Wilde, the man who said "Style, not sincerity, is the important thing," is a very good antidote to 600 pages of Miller.

Degrees of Separation, Memoirists Edition

As the perspicacious Mead pointed out in a comment to my Oh the Glory of It All review, it's entirely appropriate that I have moved on to read Tales of the City, which contains lightly fictionalized versions of some of the people in Wilsey's memoir. (Wilsey's mom, Pat Montandon, becomes Armistead Maupin's character "Prue Giroux," a dilettantish woman who holds "salons" in her Russian Hill penthouse.)

I'd noticed this, and also another connection, which I think is even stranger--linking the three memoirs I have read so far this year: Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, and Oh the Glory of It All by Sean Wilsey.

I knew the latter two authors were connected--they are friends and colleagues at McSweeney's--but you can imagine my surprise when I got four pages into Wilsey's book and came across Jessica Mitford's name. Turns out that she was a frequent guest at Pat Montandon's salons! Wilsey, who was just a boy at the time, describes Mitford as "an old British woman with huge round glasses who proclaimed 'When I die I've given instructions that I want to be buried like this,' and then pulled one corner of her mouth up and dragged the other one down and eyed the other guests (the mayor, a plastic surgeon, Agnes Moorehead, Shirley Temple). 'I want to make sure you all check on it. That's the way I want to look.'"

The "six degrees of separation" theory has been largely discredited but this is enough to make you believe in it again, huh? And since I met Dave Eggers at a book signing once, that puts me somewhere in this web too. Is this the "lattice" that he writes about in his memoir? Now when I walk through San Francisco I feel myself in the footsteps of all these real and even fictional characters who have convened here in combinations that might happen nowhere else...

Glorious San Francisco!

Ding ding ding, I think I may have found a winner in my quest for the Ultimate San Francisco Book (though take this with a grain of salt, because I am halfway through Tales of the City right now and of course that is a very strong contender). It's Sean Wilsey's Oh the Glory of It All, his leave-no-stone-unturned memoir of growing up as the son of some of San Francisco's most famous figures in the 1970s and 1980s. When he was nine, his father, dairy-products millionaire Al Wilsey, divorced his mother, socialite Pat Montandon--then immediately married her best friend, Dede Traina. Sean, a rather shy and sensitive boy, grew up in the shadow of these three outsize personalities, turned delinquent as a teenager--but got himself straightened out, and matured into an impressive, engaging writer.

This is dishy stuff, so I felt mildly scandalous toting my paperback around town, reading it on a bench in Alta Plaza Park or while waiting for the curtain to rise at the opera house. See, Dede Wilsey lives across from Alta Plaza Park and is one of the San Francisco Opera's most generous patrons, so there was the subversive thrill of thinking I could possibly run into her, and she'd see what I was reading, and, I don't know, snatch the book out of my hands and tell me that it was all lies from cover to cover, or just stare daggers at me and then mutter "Plebeians" under her breath.

Because Oh the Glory of It All leaves you in no doubt that Dede Wilsey would do that kind of thing. "How can I explain Dede? She's my evil stepmother," writes Sean. In a book full of manipulative and self-absorbed people, Dede beats them all. You know how in an old-fashioned melodrama, the villain comes onstage and kicks a dog in order to prove that he is a Bad Man? Well, Wilsey implies that Dede poisoned her pet dog in order to divert attention from her ex-husband's wedding to Danielle Steel! And that's just the beginning.

The book is filled with these kind of audacious stories--and Wilsey describes them in such unsparing detail that they are funny as well as shocking. He doesn't hesitate to show himself in an unflattering light and milk that for humor, either; I nearly went into hysterics on the bus when I got to the part where Wilsey reveals that his favorite song when he was 12 years old was a schlocky pseudo-Broadway advertising jingle.

Like Dave Eggers, Wilsey is a McSweeney's-an, and they both write in a similar style (hip, loquacious memoirs) but the appeal of Oh the Glory of It All is fundamentally different than that of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Before his parents' sudden deaths, Eggers did not lead a particularly remarkable life; thus the reader easily thinks Hey, that could be me! Indeed, Eggers openly adopts an Everyman persona, wishing to be the conduit for the hopes and fears and struggles of his generation. Wilsey, however, was born into incredible circumstances, wishing he could live the simple Everyman life, but finding that hard to achieve. He frames the book as a story of how he carved out his own identity and made peace with the past, rather than a story of his generation's angst. The gossipy, Schadenfreude aspects of his memoir also appeal to we who wonder what it would be like to live among millionaires or attend a ritzy boarding school (oh come on, don't we all?). I also found Wilsey less guilt-ridden and self-conscious than Eggers, more attuned to the quirks of the people around him and not only to his own emotions.

One of the highlights of the book is a trip 12-year-old Sean takes to the USSR with "Children as Teachers of Peace," his mother's charity, and later he attends far-flung boarding schools in New England and Italy, but that doesn't stop this from being a left-my-heart-in-San-Francisco story. Wilsey is in love with the topography of this town, fascinated by historical events such as the 1906 quake, and takes the reader into little-known corners of the city, both high and low. He's equally adept writing about the opening of the opera as he is describing how it feels to skateboard down Market Street. If Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City is about San Francisco as a haven for people who never fit in in other parts of America ("Nobody is from San Francisco," Maupin writes), Oh the Glory of It All refutes that--San Francisco does have native citizens and a culture distinct from the waves of hippies and beatniks and gay people and computer nerds that have settled here. And Wilsey is the perfect introduction to it. If any of my friends ever move out here, I know what I'll be buying them a copy of...

Photo of Sean Wilsey by Ting-li Wang, The New York Times.

Heartbreaking as well as staggering

When I came to San Francisco, I brought two books to reread: The Maltese Falcon and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I remembered that AHWOSG (so called for convenience's sake) deals with being a 20-something in the Bay Area: in the early 1990s, after Dave Eggers' parents had both died of cancer within weeks of each other, he and his little brother Toph moved to California to start afresh. I will probably post some Eggers quotes about San Francisco in the coming weeks, but now I want to discuss other aspects of his memoir, which, I now realize, is one of my Formative Books.

I first read AHWOSG the summer I was fifteen, at the time I was learning what "po-mo" means and why it's cool to be "meta." So I loved the book because I was basically amazed that you could do this kind of stuff in a memoir and get away with it. A jokey and rambling acknowledgments section; characters who break out of character to point out the writing techniques that Eggers is using; Eggers interviewing himself while pretending it is his audition for The Real World; an upside-down section of errata and corrections at the back of my softcover edition. All of this appealed to me because this was the point in my life when I became increasingly self-analytical (I started keeping a diary at age fourteen and a half; haven't stopped) and learned to think about thinking. You know, I read Gödel Escher Bach that same summer (what was I doing, reading these books at such a tender age?) and reading two such playful, digressive, self-conscious, uncategorizable books in quick succession must've expanded my mind...

So rereading AHWOSG, I can see how it influenced the way I view literature. But I also have a newfound appreciation for its emotional and thematic content. I am now the same age that Eggers was when his parents died, which makes his story seem that much more real and frightening to me. There's a section of the book where Eggers attempts to scatter his mother's ashes on Lake Michigan. I used to read this scene as a kind of comedy of errors; now the full horror and pain of the incident hits me viscerally.

Or, take Eggers' descriptions of his paranoid thoughts, e.g:

I messed up the words to the song I was singing, and though it was two fifty-one in the morning, I became quickly, deeply embarrassed about my singing gaffe, convinced that there was a very good chance that someone could see me--through the window, across the dark, across the street. I was sure, saw vividly that someone--or more likely a someone and his friends--over there was having a hearty laugh at my expense.

That must drive you insa--
Oh please. What would a brain do if not these sorts of exercises? I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I'd lose my mind.

Six years ago, I might have mildly chuckled and thought "Boy, that guy has problems!" But now, rereading it, I guffawed out loud because I recognized it. I feel the same way: what was my brain designed to do, if not to brood and obsess and spiral off into hypothetical or counterfactual tangents? Ah, and now I am a little scared of what will happen if I ever have kids: many of Eggers' paranoid thoughts involve awful things happening to Toph, and I suspect that I will have similar thoughts if I'm ever a parent. My mom, who is also an AHWOSG fan, says that one of her favorite aspects of the book is how it evokes the challenges of parenting; and I used to discount that, thinking it was really a story about the power and promise and terror of youth. But those two themes are related, aren't they, after all?

Eggers' thoughts on fame, self-disclosure, and the act of memoir-writing feel newly relevant to me as well. In 2000, when AHWOSG was published, hardly anyone had a blog; I couldn't have predicted that I'd eventually spend so much time blogging and reading Web-based New Media. But Eggers' writing about the rise of the self-disclosure culture--"We've grown up thinking of ourselves in relation to the political-media-entertainment ephemera, in our safe and comfortable homes [... We] are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational, impossible"--now seems downright prescient in this age of Facebook et cetera. I also relate to his tortured, self-conscious thoughts about wanting fame, wanting to do something world-changing and triumphant, but being disgusted by the thought of coming across as a vapid fame-whore. I know some people say that Eggers comes across as exactly that...but to me, AHWOSG is the furthest thing from vapid.

Image of Dave Eggers from phillymag.com

Jessica Mitford, Red Sheep

Like many people who are intrigued by the 1930s, by British aristocrats, by women who defied expectations, I have a healthy interest in the six Mitford sisters. A few years ago I read eldest sister Nancy's comic novels The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, inspired by her family's history but with names changed and roles reassigned. And yesterday, I finished next-to-youngest sister Jessica's memoir Hons and Rebels.

Jessica Mitford, known as "Decca," called herself the "red sheep" of the family--an ardent Communist among conservative English aristocrats. Her older sisters Diana and Unity were famously attracted to Nazism, making Decca's position even more remarkable. At the age of 19, she used the money that she had saved for years in a "running-away fund" to flee to Civil War-riddled Spain with her second cousin Esmond Romilly. The young anti-fascists got married soon after, though their time together was cut short by Esmond's death in World War Two (Hons and Rebels stops a little before this point).

I knew the outlines of Decca's story but very much enjoyed reading it in her own words. For instance, most sources simplify things by saying that Decca and Esmond "eloped to Spain," but she tells it a little differently. She'd had a crush on the intriguingly rebellious Esmond from afar, but had never met him due to family disapproval. In 1937, Esmond was in England recuperating from an illness contracted in Spain, and by chance a mutual relative invited Decca to spend a weekend at the country house where Esmond was staying. Esmond said he planned to return to Spain in about a week and Decca begged to go with him--not as a lover, but as a fellow anti-fascist. Esmond and Decca concocted a plan and ran away together just a week later; only when they got to France did they admit they loved each other. The chapters of Hons and Rebels surrounding Decca's escape are absolutely thrilling even if you know the outcome--because of the many ways her plan could have failed, and the very romantic idea of young lovers on the run.

Hons and Rebels can be divided roughly into three sections. First, Decca discusses her isolated childhood, her eccentric family, her growing frustration, and the birth of her Communist beliefs. The Mitford parents had strange ideas about raising children, to say the least; e.g. they prohibited all doctors and medicine, except surgical operations, because of the "biblical sanction in the passage 'If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out'" (40). Decca describes the Mitford children's made-up language, their brutal teasing games, and her relationships with each of them. For a long time she is closest to her two Fascist sisters--Diana, beautiful and charming when she's not supporting Hitler, and Unity, as eccentric and frustrated as Decca, but channeling that frustration into the opposite political philosophy. This section of the book also looks humorously at upper-class traditions, a few months spent in France, and a Mediterranean cruise; Mitford has an eye for the telling detail in all these situations.

The second section of the book is the aforementioned running-away and its aftermath, which thrusts Decca into a totally different milieu. She doesn't actually spend a lot of time in Spain, but she and Esmond learn to live on not much money, first in France then in England (though Esmond has an awful weakness for get-rich-quick schemes). They have a hard time reconciling their lingering aristocratic upbringing with their downtrodden, working-class surroundings, though, and they become frustrated that they cannot do more to stop fascism.

Eventually, English snobbery and pessimism overwhelm them, so they move to America. This means no more funny Mitford anecdotes, and Decca spends a bit too much time praising the warmth and generosity of Americans as compared to Britons, but there are some great scenes in this section too. Her stories of how she and Esmond supported themselves (selling Scottish tweeds at the World's Fair, selling stockings door-to-door, bartending) are hilarious.

Decca ends the book by summing up some of the people in her life, especially Esmond and Unity. She shows an admirably nuanced attitude to her beloved older sister, wondering how "a person of enormous natural taste, an artist and poet from childhood, [could] have embraced [the Nazis'] cruel philistinism" (273). And Decca admits her own faults, as well: "[Unity] was always a terrific hater--so were all of us" (273) and "The qualities of patience, modesty, forbearance and natural self-discipline that the worker brings to his struggle for a better life, the instinctive respect for the fundamental dignity of every other human being [...] were on the whole conspicuously lacking in [Esmond and me]" (280).

Still, after reading Hons and Rebels, I admire Decca's courage, resilience, humor, and sheer nerve. I must say, though, that I identify more with Nancy: as I noted yesterday, I'm an aesthete, not a revolutionary. Nancy doesn't always come off well in Hons and Rebels--Decca has no patience for aesthetes, and describes Nancy's personality as "astringent," "cutting" etc.--though she admits that Nancy had enormous strength of character to stand up to their parents: "She had broken ground for all of us, but only at terrific cost in violent scenes followed by silence and tears" (29). I suppose it's rare that the eldest daughter is the greatest maverick in a family; so in a way, Nancy cleared a path for Decca to become the Communist rebel she always knew she'd be.