Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story

Posted on May 30, 2012 by K

For the past three years, I’ve been working on a story that won’t let me finish it. Through its first few drafts, the syntax dragged, the language waddled around the page with the grace of my 30-pound coon cat (bless his heart), and even once I got the sentences and rhythm under control, new problems emerged–not with plot or character, but with structure and point of view. It made sense for the story to be in present tense, but perhaps made more sense for the story to be retrospective. At the same time, there were parts of the story that demanded the distance of third person, others that would not work without the unwavering earnestness (and sporadic unreliability) of first.

When working on the story, I kept returning to one of my favorite published greats–”Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story” by Russell Banks. Anecdote Alert: I remember pretty vividly being locked outside a small sort of “arts” building at Indiana while waiting for a Russell Banks reading to begin. I was the first person there–I’m chronically early–and after standing outside in the cold for a few minutes, a lumbering man with white hair a sort of Teddy Roosevelt physique arrived and stood a few feet away from me.

Russell Banks! My immediate impulse whenever I meet a man named Russell is to make a joke about my last name and his first name and maybe we should get married and he can take my name so then he would be like Humbert Humbert but that is obviously completely inappropriate and not even funny and also utterly nonsensical. So I kept quiet while trying to make eye contact with the man, but he very deliberately avoided me altogether and went on to give a very nice reading and Q & A.

“Sarah Cole” is, I think, in a lot of way a good representation of what Russell Banks’ writing can do. Though it’s not a historical story, it does deal rather deftly with class–an issue all too often ignored by Banks’ American contemporaries (and non-contemporaries, let’s be honest). And though it’s a short story, it carries the emotional weight of a novel and offers a complete world into which the reader can peer and wonder and kick at a few unturned stones. I think much of the story’s texture and depth comes from its point of view, or points of view–it is “ultimately” a first-person, past tense story, though in its most difficult scenes, the p.o.v. switches over to third, as though to suggest that the narrator is still too ashamed of his past behavior to look at it head on and take ownership of it. It’s all still too fresh for him, and in turn it becomes a bit raw for us, too.

I’m still plugging away at my story. It’s on deck to be revised one more time (it’s always just “one more time” with revisions), and I’m planning to follow through with what I’ve deemed the Sarah Cole Technique of mercurial narrative. My own narrator is guilt-ridden as hell, and wistful and ashamed of what he’s done but somehow proud, too, of the pain he caused virtually everyone around him, and I think it’s safe to say that only one narrative technique is not going to shoulder the burden of this guy’s emotional muck. So, wish me good luck and have a read of the opening passage of Russell Banks’ “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story.” A link to the full text of the story is below as well.
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TO BEGIN, then, here is a scene in which I am the man and my friend Sarah Cole is the woman. I don’t mind describing it now, because I’m a decade older and don’t look the same now as I did then, and Sarah is dead. That is to say, on hearing this story you might think me vain if I looked the same now as I did then, because I must tell you that I was extremely handsome then. And if Sarah were not dead, you’d think I were cruel, for I must tell you that Sarah was very homely. In fact, she was the homeliest woman I have ever known. Personally, I mean. I’veseen a few women who were more unattractive than Sarah, but they were clearly freaks of nature or had been badly injured or had been victimized by some grotesque, disfiguring disease. Sarah, however, was quite normal, and I knew her well, because for three and a half months we were lovers.

Here is the scene. You can put it in the present, even though it took place ten years ago, because nothing that matters to the story depends on when it took place, and you can put it in Concord, New Hampshire, even though that is indeed where it took place, because it doesn’t matter where it took place, so it might as well be Concord, New Hampshire, a place I happen to know well and can therefore describe with sufficient detail to make the story believable. Around six o’ clock on a Wednesday evening in late May a man enters a bar. The place, a cocktail lounge at street level with a restaurant upstairs, is decorated with hanging plants and unfinished wood paneling, butcherblock tables and captain’s chairs, with a half dozen darkened, thickly upholstered booths along one wall. Three or four men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five are drinking at the bar, and they, like the man who has just entered, wear three piece suits and loosened neckties. They are probably lawyers, young, unmarried lawyers gossiping with their brethren over martinis so as to postpone arriving home alone at their whitewashed townhouse apartments, where they will fix their evening meals in radar ranges and, afterwards, while their tv’s chuckle quietly in front of them, sit on their couches and do a little extra work for tomorrow. They are, for the most part, honorable, educated, hard-working, shallow, and moderately unhappy young men. Our man, call him Ronald, Ron, in most ways is like these men, except that he is unusually good-looking, and that makes him a little less unhappy than they. Ron is effortlessly attractive, a genetic wonder, tall, slender, symmetrical, and clean. His flaws, a small mole on the left corner of his square but not-too-prominent chin, a slight excess of blond hair on the tops of his tanned hands, and somewhat underdeveloped buttocks, insofar as they keep him from resembling too closely a men’s store mannequin, only contribute to his beauty, for he is beautiful, the way we usually think of a woman as being beautiful. And he is nice, too, the consequence, perhaps, of his seeming not to know how beautiful he is, to men as well as women, to young people, even children, as well as old, to attractive people, who realize immediately that he is so much more attractive than they as not to be competitive with them, as well as unattractive people, who see him and gain thereby a comforting perspective on those they have heretofore envied for their good looks.

Full text of “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story”

The End of the Affair

Posted on May 28, 2012 by K

I remember I dreamed a lot of Sarah in those obscure days or weeks. Sometimes I would wake with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one’s thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night. I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. But this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book–the unconscious worked on it instead, until one morning I woke up and knew, as though I had planned it overnight, that this day I was going to visit Mr. Savage.

- Graham Greene, from The End of the Affair

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I’ve been reading The End of the Affair for the first time, and it’s also the first Graham Greene I’ve read, which seems strange and maybe even inexcusable. I’m only a little ways in–forty pages or so–but already I find the passages describing Bendrix’s writing process about a hundred times more engaging than any descriptions of that pill Sarah Miles. That it was Bendrix’s writing and desire for authenticity that led him to the affair with Sarah in the first place and that the novel was, in the end, abandoned is saying something to me and my own sluggish writing and my own long, drawn-out affairs. Not sure what it’s saying, but it’s saying something.

The idea of flow that’s presented in the above passage is interesting as well. Though it’s somewhat at odds with the Csikszentmihalyi definition of flow as Bendrix’s entire self isn’t wholly absorbed in writing–merely his subconscious is doing the uninterrupted work–I like the idea of a part of a writer plugging away continuously, the words and thoughts unbroken, and that act of sitting down and putting words on paper is only part of the process. I suppose, too, that it suggests that “inspiration”–something I’ve never been to keen on–is just a bunch of bullshit since those words “coming as though from air” isn’t a random, serendipitous event but rather the product of the subconscious doing a whole shitload of work.

Is Graham Greene even remotely cool these days, though?

Edit: I just came across this article that describes Graham Greene as David Cameron’s favorite author, so that can’t be a good sign for G.G.’s coolness factor. The real question might be why I’m going through this misanthropic old white man kick lately, which is showing no signs of slowing down.

Light Years

Posted on May 21, 2012 by K

I first read James Salter’s novel Light Years the summer after I graduated college. I was living at my parents’ house, doing absolutely nothing for two and a half glorious months while I prepared to move to Indiana for graduate school. I remember that summer as a time when I felt a little sad but mostly elated–as though I had somehow wriggled myself into the seat of a rubber band being pulled back by some invisible hand, back further and further, threatening every day to snap and send me careening into the world with no idea where the hell I was going. That entire summer, I was so excited I could barely sit still and looking back on it now, nearly six years later, I’m almost as equally thrilled for that past self who had what seems now like the entire world lain out before her–and I say this knowing that there is some far-off future self looking down on me right now, excited for all that lies in store for me, but regardless.

It’s a bit ironic, then, that the writing I was so drawn to at that time of elation was James Salter’s. His languid, meandering novels–Light Years in particular–are slow-moving at best. A friend of mine, and one of the only people I’ve met who is familiar with Salter (why is that so?), described Salter as “Cheever without conflict” which is probably fair, but for all the criticisms of Salter’s temperate plotlines and his writing’s inherent misogyny (the latter completely valid, for the record), the way Salter constructs sentences is nothing short of sublime. I mean, it’s remarkable. The way, too, that he strings those sentences together and creates a sense of movement, a breathless pace that makes you, the reader, literally hold your breath as you take in each page. Those dreams I’ve always had–the dreams that everyone always has–of flying? Of running so fast, you keep gaining speed until suddenly your feet are off the ground? Reading Salter makes me feel the same way as those dreams.

As obscure as I might find him to be, Salter is without a doubt a prized writer–one of the Living Greats–and he’s often described as a “writer’s writer,” so it probably comes as no surprise that the Paris Review celebrated Salter in April 2011 with James Salter Month which offered gems like Jhumpa Lahiri remembering when she first found Salter and Light Years and glimpses into the novel’s earliest beginnings on scraps of notebook paper and napkins like this early outline.

The opening to Light Years is probably one of my favorite pieces of writing. It not only employs that method of creating movement, but also uses the plural first-person narrator in a trick that both distances us from the novel’s characters–and rightfully so, because they don’t want us getting too close, anyway–and also draws us into what is the beating heart of the novel: its narration, its sentences, its language and structure. A gorgeous opening to a fantastic, fantastic novel. Please read below–

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WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.

The day is white as paper. The windows are chilled. The quarries lie empty, the silver mine drowned. The Hudson is vast here, vast and unmoving. A dark country, a country of sturgeon and carp. In the fall it was silver with shad. The geese flew overhead in their long, shifting V’s. The tide flows in from the sea.

The Indians sought, they say, a river that “ran both ways.” Here they found it. The salt wedge penetrates as far in as fifty miles; sometimes it reaches Poughkeepsie. There were huge beds of oysters here, seals in the harbor, in the woods inexhaustible game. This great glacial cut with its nuptial bays, the coves of wild celery and rice, this majestic river. The birds, like punctuation, are crossing in level flight. They seem to approach slowly, accelerate, pass overhead like arrows. The sky has no color. A feeling of rain.

All this was Dutch. Then, like so much else, it was English. The river is a reflection. It bears only silence, a glittering cold. The trees are naked. The eels sleep. The channel is deep enough for ocean liners; they could, if they wished, astonish the inner towns. There are turtles and crabsin the marshes, herons, Bonaparte gulls. The sewage pours from the cities further up. The river is filthy, but cleanses itself. The fish are numbed; they drift with the tide.

Along the banks there are houses of stone, no longer fashionable, and wooden houses, drafty and bare. There are still estates that exist, remnants of the great land parcels of the past. Near the water, a large Victorian, the brick painted white, trees high above it, a walled garden, a decaying greenhouse with ironwork along the roof. A house by the river, too low for the afternoon sun. It was flooded instead with the light of morning, with the eastern light. It was in glory at noon. There are spots where the paint has turned dark, bare spots. The gravel paths are dissolving; birds nest in the sheds.

We strolled in the garden, eating the small, bitter apples. The trees were dry and gnarled. The lights in the kitchen were on.

A car comes up the driveway, back from the city. The driver goes inside, only for a moment until he’s heard the news: the pony has gotten loose.

cats & creative types

Posted on November 18, 2011 by K

I’ve never been much of a cat person. Indeed, as a kid my love for dogs bordered on an unhealthy obsession, beginning with an imaginary friend of a wolf named, appropriately Best Friend Wolf, and culminating in a phase during which I demanded on going to daycare wearing a dog collar and communicating only in barks. I left the weird behavior behind (sort of), but growing up in a very small, very rural town with a population of about 700 made my childhood dogs basically my best friends.

I mean, dogs are easy, right? They look at you with eyes full of adoration, get so happy that they wag not only their tails but their entire rear ends, and they live to please. Just like boys.

Cats, on the other hand, are weird. Really weird. They want you when you don’t want them and they do that weird “making biscuits” thing with their claws into your legs and they poop in boxes and expect you to clean it up. Like, excuse me but who the hell are you?

But the good thing about cats is that they don’t really need you. They can survive on their own for a few days at a time as long as there’s food, water, a clean litter box, and lots of places to sleep. As a person who often has trouble doing…everything, this weird cat quality is the one that eventually made me decide to do the unthinkable and opt for adopting a cat rather than a dog. Dogs would be there when I grew up a bit and became a responsible adult, but cats were now, cats were self-sufficient and independent, cats were undemanding and aloof and exactly what I needed. I dreamed of finding my very own Maru, a quirky little friend who would run full-tilt across my little apartment and dive into empty six-pack holders. I imagined a cat delicately making its way across my mantle, knocking over a picture frame or two, and jumping from surface to surface, agile and strange and beautiful.

Instead, I went to the shelter and I came home with this.

Honestly, I don’t think that photo really gives justice to my cat. He’s huge, tipping the scales at about 30 pounds. Almost everyone who has met him has said the same thing, that he’s the biggest cat they’ve ever seen. He’s fat and tall and long and ten years old with a tendency towards kidney stones and he’s basically the coolest guy ever.

I’m not going to sit here and convince you how rad my cat is because that’s embarrassing and I am very keen for this blog not to be embarrassing, but I will say that–obviously–my cat is not that cat I dreamt up. He does not run across my apartment. He does not run, ever. He wouldn’t fit on my mantle even if it were bare and the highest surface he can pull himself up onto is the couch. But he’s a dear and he’s hilarious and he’s a great friend.

A friend of mine said that he thinks of me and the cat as roommates, and I think that’s pretty accurate. We have our own rituals that sometimes intersect with each other’s but in the end, we’re living our own lives. And, you know, it occurs to me that this cat-person relationship is something that might suit creative types. I know Byron had his Newfoundland and photographer William Wegman’s weimaraners have their place in American pop culture, but this Tumblr makes me suspect that, at least with writers, cats are king and I’m not alone in my appreciation for the less-devoted but less-demanding pet of choice.

Hemingway, the penultimate writer cat lover