At some point a few years back—around 2017 or so—a friend pointed me to a publisher seeking manuscript submissions for young adult novels. I was intrigued by the challenge and so thought I might try my hand at writing a potboiler. I read the website closely to better understand what they were looking for. It appeared—at that point at least—that stories involving teenage vampires were still very much in demand. "Sounds simple enough," I said to myself.
Okay, so—teen vampire romance. How to write that... I thought. I knew that there needed to be a protagonist. So I gave her a name and put her in a high school classroom. But then what should happen? I knew that there was supposed to be a vampire, but that his vampiric identity shouldn't be immediately obvious. He should pass incognito among us, carefully seeking out plausible excuses to avoid mirrors, garlic, and sunlight. So I made up a character and put him in the same classroom.
But what should these characters say? What should they be like? What should they care about? I decided to just write and see what came out. Lo and behold, the protagonist turned out to be a person more or less just like my teenage self, beneath a few thin disguises (gender was swapped; instead of forever fretting about orthodontia, she was worried about psoriasis, and so on). And the people she interacted with were all composites of people I knew in high school.
Pretty soon, I'd forgotten about the vampires. I had nothing to say about vampires. But I did have loads to say—far more than I'd ever realized—about my then un-processed high school experiences. It all poured out, my entire adolescence, and because it was "fiction" I could tell the truth for a change.
And because I was telling everything almost exactly the way it really happened, and transcribing the thoughts of my younger self almost exactly as they had formed, it was all for some reason terribly funny. (As the great Quentin Crisp once observed, of his own attempt at a first novel, "if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.")
By the end of writing it, I knew that whatever I had created was not a novel about teenage vampires. I knew that it was also totally unmarketable as YA fiction. But it struck me nonetheless as great stuff. Which is not to say that it was beautifully written, or well-structured, or artfully conceived—it was none of these things. But it recorded something that only I could have ever put on paper, because it was my own life. ("I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart," as the creature says in a poem by Stephen Crane.)
Admittedly, it was somewhat disappointing to discover that I was not a titan of invention. I had discovered from my attempt that I did not have whatever unique muse it is that allows people to invent fantastical scenarios that never took place. I could not string together a sentence about vampires, much less a novel, because I have never had any experience of vampires and would therefore be unable to come up on my own with anything that they might do.
But I also realized that it was not in any way a shameful thing to describe one's own life. It's the only life I have to offer to posterity, I reflected, so I might as well write it up. My experience is the only thing about me that cannot in any way be second-hand; and so I should describe it as best I can: it's my way of contributing at least one unique growth—one strange and sui generis flowering plant—, if nothing else, to the hothouse of human history.
There are also far more famous novelists who have done little more than this, it turns out, than they would like to pretend. I recently finished reading Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, for instance, which is prefaced by a short apologia for autobiographical fiction. Is not all the best fiction in some sense autobiographical?, asks Wolfe. Is not even a story as imaginative and fantastical as Gulliver's Travels̛ still, in some way, a record of its author's most intimate thoughts and experiences?
And one is willing to go that distance with him. One thinks that he is saying that his novel is autobiographical, and his protagonist Eugene Gant an alter ego, in the same loose, non-literal sense in which, say, Flaubert described Emma Bovary as an extension of himself (Madame Bovary, c'est moi!).
But then one discovers that Thomas Wolfe had a brother named Grover who died at age 12 of typhoid fever after visiting the World's Fair in St. Louis. And that his fictional alter ego Eugene Gant has a brother named Grover who dies at age 12 of typhoid fever after visiting the World's Fair in St. Louis. Both have an older brother named Ben who perishes in adulthood under similarly tragic circumstances. And so on. He didn't even change the names!
Indeed, the whole novel turns out to be a kind of meta-reflection on the inescapability of autobiographical prose. The young Eugene Gant wishes for nothing so fervently as to escape his home town; to go on voyages. Ultimately, he succeeds in doing so in a literal sense, just as Thomas Wolfe did. But no matter how much geographic distance he placed between himself and his home town, when it came to write his novel he had only one story to tell—his own—and only one place to describe—the place he was born.
The predicament—like the novel, in places—is thoroughly Joycean. Just as Joyce sought exile from Ireland yet kept returning to Dublin in his fiction, Wolfe finds that he cannot truly leave North Carolina. Why not? Because he cannot leave himself. And rather than resenting this, he should embrace it as his artistic task and calling. Instead of voyaging abroad—Gant realizes in the dreamlike closing section of this deeply moving novel—he should explore "the city of myself, the continent of my soul."
Is anyone who writes able at last to do more than this? I suppose someone out there is writing the manuscripts about vampires that ultimately get picked up by YA publishers, so it must be humanly-possible to write works that are composed of the elements of the imagination, rather than of direct experience. But I was surprised recently to find even as staunch an anti-realist as Italo Calvino complaining about the inability to transcend one's own story.
In a preface to his first novel, The Path to the Spiders' Nests, written decades after its original publication, Calvino suggests that every writer has only one novel in them—the book of their own life. And they must be careful to steward this resource, and not squander it casually at the first opportunity. Calvino notes that he regrets writing a book about his wartime experiences so early for just this reason—he did not know in writing it that it would be his sole chance to do so.
This seems very odd coming from Calvino, as I say—since, after all, he wrote many novels after that, all non-realist in nature—drawing from the store of invention rather than of life in any literal sense. Yet, one catches a glimpse of the writer's concern with wasting personal experience even in his most fabulous fictions. In Invisible Cities, for instance, Kublai Khan observes to Marco Polo that there is only one city he has not yet described to the great ruler—his native Venice.
Marco Polo replies to this that he will not put Venice into words, because then it will be lost to him. The rich tapestry of his memories will have been concretized and thereby bound and domesticated by the poor medium of language. (The impossibility of fully conveying the rich nuances and open possibilities of gestures, images, and lived realities through mere words—impoverished linguistic signs—is a theme throughout the book, and in The Castle of Crossed Destinies as well.)
Plainly Calvino felt that he had lost his own Venice—that he had squandered his own home life and home experiences—by channeling them too early into prose. He didn't know at the time he was writing The Path to the Spiders' Nests, he tells us, that it was in truth the only book he had to write, the only story he had to tell, and—worse still—that it would be his sole opportunity to tell it.
There's a literary anecdote about Somerset Maugham that conveys a similar truth. Here was another writer who, like Calvino, had written many books. But in another sense, only one of them was real. He was asked by someone or other why he had never written a book as good, as human, as emotionally-resonant and richly meaningful as Of Human Bondage. He replied, "because I have only lived one life."
For what it's worth, I haven't written another novel or any prose fiction since my vampire-story-without-the-vampires. It may have been my only story to tell: the chronicle of my unique life. And had I known that it would be the only chance I'd ever have to tell it, to relive my adolescence and concretize it in words, perhaps I might have fretted and labored over it longer, or held onto the material for a future occasion—just as Calvino recommends.
But on the other hand, it was precisely the fact that I thought it didn't matter—that I was writing trash, a potboiler, something on a dare—that allowed me to begin the thing in the first place. Most likely, at last, the story could have been told in no other way, at no other time, and in no other form. That story, for better or worse—c'est moi.
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