[stylist] the writer in the family

Fri May 23 18:45:19 UTC 2014

Chris,
I had saved this, meaning to comment. Now, I think I have heard it in the
magazine, Choice. I could not have saved it since I get the cartridge. How
did you manage to do this. There are so many good articles in that magazine.
Magnify that article by ten when referring to a poet, and it is right on.
It is humorous, and such a good picture of real life.
Thanks so much for your perception of what is truly illuminating to your
fellow writers.  

Jackie Lee

Time is the school in which we learn.
Time is the fire in which we burn.
Delmore Schwartz	 

-----Original Message-----
From: stylist [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Chris Kuell
Sent: Saturday, April 19, 2014 7:39 AM
To: stylist at nfbnet.org
Subject: [stylist] the writer in the family

An essay I think most of us can relate to.
Enjoy.

Chris

The Writer in the Family

by Roger Rosenblatt (NY Times, May 2012)

So there I stood at the front of my granddaughter Jessica's fourth-grade
classroom, still as a glazed dog, while Jessie introduced me to her
classmates, to whom I was about to speak. "This is my grandfather, Boppo,"
she said, invoking my grandpaternal nickname. "He lives in the basement and
does nothing." 

Her description, if terse, was not inaccurate. My wife and I do live on the
lower level of our son-in-law's house with him and our three grandchildren.
And, as far as anyone in the family can see, I do nothing, or next to it.
This is the lot of the writer. You will hear someone referred to as "the
writer in the family" - usually a quiet child who dresses strangely and
shows inclinations to do nothing in the future. But when a supposedly
grown-up writer is a member of the family, who knows what to make of him? A
friend of my son-in-law's asked me the other day, "You still writing?" - as
if the profession were a new sport I'd picked up, like curling, or a disease
I was trying to get rid of. Alexander Pope: "This long disease, my life." 

Writers cannot fairly object to being seen in this way. Since, in the
nothing we do - the "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is"
(Wallace Stevens) - we do not live in the real world, or wish to, it is
fruitless and dishonest to protest that we do. When family members introduce
us to one of their friends, it is always with bewilderment camouflaged by
hyperbole. "This is so-and-so," they will say, too heartily. "He's a great
and esteemed writer." To which their friend will reply, "Would I have read
anything you've written?" To which I reply, "How should I know?" 

At home, they will treat us like domesticated, dangerous animals, pet pandas
or snow leopards, patting and feeding us, while eyeing our teeth. Or they
will make touching attempts to associate us with comprehensible pursuits,
such as commerce. When he was 3, my 5-year-old grandson, James, proposed
that the two of us go into business together. "We will write things and we
will sell things," he said, thereby yoking two enterprises that are rarely
yoked. 

Much of our familial treatment as weirdos is not only merited, it is also
sought. We deliberately cultivate a distance from normal experience,
whatever that may be. We seek and relish anarchy. One day, another writer
and I were standing on a hill overlooking the irritatingly civilized village
of Williamstown, Mass. The sun was shining, the flowers flowering, the air
had just been sterilized. I remarked, "What I would like to see now is a
gang of thugs stripping that car over there." My companion added, "With the
church bells tolling." 

The world of orderly decency, harmless ceremonies and modest expectations,
i.e., family life, is not the writer's. One morning at breakfast, when she
was in the first or second grade, E. L. Doctorow's daughter, Caroline, asked
her father to write a note explaining her absence from school, due to a
cold, the previous day. Doctorow began, "My daughter, Caroline. . . . " He
stopped. "Of course she's my daughter," he said to himself. "Who else would
be writing a note for her?" He began again. "Please excuse Caroline
Doctorow. . . . " He stopped again. "Why do I have to beg and plead for
her?" he said. "She had a virus. She didn't commit a crime!" On he went,
note after failed note, until a pile of crumpled pages lay at his feet.
Finally, his wife, Helen, said, "I can't take this anymore," penned a
perfect note and sent Caroline off to school. Doctorow concluded: "Writing
is very difficult, especially in the short form." 

If the sad truth be known, writers, being the misfits we are, probably ought
not to belong to families in the first place. We simply are too
self-interested, though we may excuse the flaw by calling it "focused." As
artists, writers hardly are alone in this failing. In Stephen Sondheim's
masterwork, "Sunday in the Park With George" (at least the first act was a
masterwork), we are shown the gloriously self-involved Seurat dotting away
at isolated trees and people in his all-consuming pursuit of the famous park
painting. Among those consumed by his zeal is his mistress - not technically
family, but in the family way. He ignores her, leaves her high and dry. He's
an artiste, after all. If one took a straw vote of the audience a few
minutes before the first act ended, they gladly would have stoned the
miserable son-of-a-bitch artiste to death. But then, in the very last scene,
the separate parts of Seurat's painting coalesce before our eyes. Everything
magically comes together. And the audience gasps, weeps in wonder. So who is
the superior character - the man who attends to the feelings of his loved
ones, or the artist who affects eternity?

Even when writers move to embrace the family, appearing to be one of the
group, it is often in the interest of putting the group to use in their
work. Alex Haley defined the family as a "link to our past," another way of
saying Roots. For the wolf of a writer, the family is a crowd of sitting
ducks. There they assemble at the Thanksgiving table, poor dears -
blithering uncles, drugged-out siblings, warring couples - posing for a
painting, though they do not know it. The objects of the writer's scrutiny
may be as blameless as a day in Williamstown, but in the story he has in
mind, the writer, being the freak he is, will infuse his family with warts
and all, because defects make for better reading than virtues. 

A few writers have expressed themselves on the matter of families, not
always encouragingly. Reluctant high school students learn from Bacon that
wife and children are "hostages to fortune." John Cheever, recalling life in
the family he grew up in, remembered their backs. "They were always
indignantly leaving places," he said. Margaret Drabble saw families as
"dangerous." On the sunnier side, André Maurois, George Bernard Shaw and
Mark Twain lustily sang the praises of family life. George Santayana called
the family "one of nature's masterpieces." Once you learn that line, you are
not bound to repeat it. 

See what I just did? I made a lame quip that only someone who knew
Santayana's adage about the mistakes of history being repeated would get,
and even then, at best, the quip would produce an embittered smirk. And from
whom? Another writer. Need I also mention the quotations from Pope and
Stevens dropped into this essay earlier, just to show off? This is how
precious, not to say annoying, we writers can be. By the way, as soon as
Jessie introduced me as jobless and subterranean, I immediately thought of
Ellison's Invisible Man, thus displaying yet another of the writer's
antisocial features - Romantic self-aggrandizement. In fact, the writer in
the family is so out of things, so socially inept, that it may require an
institution as basically benign as the family to take him in. We writers may
be unfit for human consumption, but something about the malleable, permeable
family structure says to us, That's O.K. Of course, to further indicate how
unfit we can be, we are perfectly capable of abusing that tolerance and
calling it boring. 

Whatever. The writer may not be good for the family, but the family may do
wonders for the writer simply by teaching him that "it takes all kinds,"
including him. A generous view of the world may not be as artistically
riveting as crazy acrimony, but it is a lot more pleasant to live with. (Who
among us would choose Scott and Zelda as our folks?) Besides, "It takes all
kinds" is what the best of art says anyway, albeit with finer brush strokes.
When Jessie introduced me, I watched her classmates for a reaction, either
laughter or horror. There was no reaction whatever, not one bat of one eye.
A man who lives in the basement and doe
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