These words are written under duress. The deadline is breathing down my neck, my personal computer is broken, and as I type on my badly gasping backup laptop, the two-year-old is wandering around my city office with a destructive glint in her eye.
Raymond Carver is the patron saint—well, the patron, anyway—of those with bad writing situations. Before he made it (and consequently ruined his marriage with endless drink), he was a garbage man. He would scribble out a page here or there while waiting to pick his kids up from school. He said he loved when his kids were fighting, because they were entertaining themselves without asking anything out of him.
The two-year-old has asked to go home. It is 9:49 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. We have been here for thirty-two minutes, and the Bottom Line will not open for another hour and a half. She has been temporarily pacified with one of the kids’ books I keep stashed in the desk, but I fear it is a matter of time.
Carver is someone whose work I respect without really enjoying. This class of writers is, I am afraid, fairly sprawling—Carver, Roth, Hemingway, Jhumpa Lahiri. This was something of a handicap in grad school, when the fad was for small, finely wrought, exquisitely felt little nugations, rather than the big, bloody, regrettably often male and white fictionists I prefer, the school of Melville through Wallace. If I had to pick the life and work of a novelist to take on as my own, it would obviously be Sir Salman Rushdie’s (although I’ll admit the calculus has shifted some since he lost an eye and Padma Lakshmi).
Allah is merciful—the two-year-old has found the stickers. But he is just—she’s putting them on the wall. I count three large sheets, each with about eighty stickers. I can probably finish before she’s done, and then we’ll take a long walk before opening time.
I think it is terribly unfair that Rushdie still hasn’t gotten the Nobel, even after the face-stabbing. I mean, what do you have to do around here? Sure, he has mostly been famous as a fugitive since The Satanic Verses; nobody’s life was changed by Shalimar the Clown. I rather liked Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, although some amount of that is pure sentimentalism—I interviewed Sir Salman on behalf of my college rag during that book’s publicity tour. But Peter Handke hasn’t done anything besides make problematic comments about the Balkan Wars since the Eighties, and they just gave him the shiny prize. Where’s the justice, I ask.
Possible trouble: The stickers are now going on coloring books (fine) that the four-year-old has already filled out and so developed a proprietary feeling for (oh no). I will have to remember to disappear them before the four-year-old comes in with me next, and get some other coloring books so there isn’t an Entertainment Gap.
I will grant that being a fugitive, in truth, sounds like an ideal way to go about writing: “Oh, no, I can’t take visitors and my agent will have to settle my hotel bills.” And I imagine there’s a fair amount of professional generosity for the fugitive. Nobody cares if your kid is putting stickers on the office wall when the powers of Muslim clerisy are after you. Not, however, enough generosity to get shooed in at Stockholm.
She has moved on from stickers to pencils, and, worse, has mumbled the word “hungry.” My time here is short.
Isn’t it curious that the Swedes and Norwegians have ended up as the arbiters of world culture? It’s a good trick. In the fifth book of the Aeneid, the titular hero does not participate in the funeral games for Anchises; he merely presides. In this way also the Roman emperors did not participate in the cursus honorum, but oversaw it. Americans, Chinese, Germans, Indians all sweating away in the bowels of the machine of history while the people behind ABBA and modular furniture dole out approbations. I don’t know what lessons are to be learned from this, other than that the Nordics are surprisingly slippery operators.
She’s been back to the book stash; my desk’s outlying regions are a chaos of stickers, twice-used coloring books, and miniature Winnie the Pooh volumes. The assistant editor finally made his way in; he made a brief and clinical survey of my half of the office, but is keeping his thoughts to himself. An impossible gulf of personality: he is a teetotaller and a bachelor. There are also about ten unsolicited review copies of books from Christian vanity presses and some packing materials in a heap; when we moved offices, our admin boy inscrutably got rid of our recycling bin, along with my desktop’s keyboard and the printer. I don’t know what to do with all this dross from the mail bag, so it hunches by the desk. Mine is not an orderly domain.
Sometimes life surprises you. India and Pakistan together have more English-speakers than the United States. Bruce Springsteen is Italian. Glenn Gould was a gentile. The Swedes choose civilization’s winners. Bob Dylan got a Nobel, but Philip Roth didn’t. Raymond Carver died of lung cancer, not liver failure. And, between ministrations to the toddler’s endless appetite for entertainment, I’ve managed to turn this pile of scraps from my desk into something for Nic to run in this afternoon’s newsletter—and it’s not even opening time yet. This is what we talk about when we talk about writing.
