C'est Moi, Encore

I was chatting with a friend the other week: giving him—as I often do—a verbal digest of the Six Foot Turkey posts that have appeared since the last time we spoke. Encapsulating the insights of my May 9 entry, "C'est Moi," I went through the same progression of thought all over again as I had in writing the original piece: I'm worried that the one short and sloppy novel that I wrote at age 27 and that will never be published by a real publisher or find an audience may in fact have been the only novel I have in me and the only one I will ever write because I think I'm discovering I don't have the ability to make up things that haven't actually happened to me, or to write about anyone other than myself, and so all I can really do is transcribe the actual events of my life, but maybe that's not so bad because how many great authors are really doing anything more than that?; weren't all the greatest authors really just writing thinly-disguised autobiography? Like Proust and Joyce and—

My friend cut me off here with a snort. "Wait," he said. "Are those actually the greatest authors? Or did you just hand-select a couple examples that fit your point?" Confirmation bias, in short. 

I of course thought he was being uncharitable. Joyce and Proust are not exotic picks for anyone's shortlist of esteemed writers. But they are, to his point, perhaps not exhaustive either. We do still have, somewhere in our collective psyche—based perhaps on hearsay evidence about unread 19th century novels—a notion of the great writer as an inventor of people who haven't actually existed, a spinner of tales that haven't already taken place, an empath with the creative capacity to summon times, places, people, and events into existence through the power of the imagination. Something like what we imagine Balzac or Tolstoy's oeuvre to be—though I haven't read enough yet of the longer works of either to say whether our mental conception of them is accurate. (Not, for that matter, if we're telling the truth, that I've read Proust yet either). 

I decided to try believing my friend and testing out his theory (despite the countervailing evidence and testimonies I had already compiled in the May 9 post—Wolfe, for instance, and even the implausible witness statement of Italo Calvino, whom no one would ordinarily mistake for an autobiographical writer); after all, my friend's thesis was the more hopeful one. It meant, ideally, that I was still capable of containing multitudes. That I was not to be forever condemned to write only about myself—to be a prisoner, in other words, of what Byron called "the gloomy vanity of 'drawing from self'"—and therefore I might have future novels in me that were not simply retellings of the same mortifying tales from my adolescence and young adulthood until I had utterly exhausted that vein and was boring to tears the imagined readers I would never find. 

And of course, one can find novels that don't seem in any obvious ways to be the story of their author's life. I read Effi Briest the other week, for instance, and no one can say that the elderly Prussian conservative's tale of a nineteen-year-old woman destroyed by a bad marriage was an example of straight autobiography. (It appears Fontane heard a similar story that actually happened, and which inspired him to pen the tale, so the book was drawn from life, but at least it doesn't appear to have been "drawn from self.")

But then I picked up Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. The novel had been sitting on my shelf for years, having come highly recommended in all the lists of modern-to-contemporary classics, and it seemed like exactly the right sort of book to read while spending a summer day on a suburban street during the July 4 holiday weekend (well really, an even more fitting pick for the occasion would be the book's sequel, Independence Day, which is probably why I was reminded of Ford this weekend, but I couldn't very well start with the second work in the series, could I?). And here is another book that appears to be full of convincing characters, realistic dialogue, persuasive attitudes to life that seem wrought out of genuine experience. Is it possible that Ford just made all of this up without having lived it himself, in Fontane style? 

One mouses over to Wikipedia to look and see. What do we learn there about Ford's life? 

Well, for one thing, he was a sportswriter. Much like the protagonist of his novel, The Sportswriter. Also like his protagonist, Frank Bascombe, he was born in the south. He contemplated but abandoned a legal career. He wrote some early fiction but gave it up in order to turn to sports journalism. The outlines of their lives, therefore, are roughly parallel. But did Ford at least alter a few key details in order to make the disguise on his narrator a little more convincing? No. The few changes that were made are so minor as to only call more attention to the resemblance. Ford attended law school and dropped out; Bascombe applied but never went. Ford attended Michigan State University; Bascombe the University of Michigan. 

(Indeed, a subtle recurring joke in the book is characters' tendency to assume Frank went to school in East Lansing, forcing him to correct them: "No, Ann Arbor." A reversal of the usual situation that befalls Michigan State grads in the larger world, where U of M is often the better-known institution.)

Richard Ford, if in this regard too he is anything like his fictional protagonist Bascombe, became a sportswriter because he felt he no longer possessed the knack for making things up (Bascombe's novel Tangier is abandoned because he finds that he has no curiosity about what his invented characters will do next). And when he did come around to writing fiction again—including The Sportswriter, which would finally bring him success—Ford ended up writing a story about a character very much like himself. Nor was he unaware of doing so (he even teases himself in this regard, having one sad-sack character undertake to write a novel and get as far as only the first sentence, which features a protagonist named Eddie Grimes. As if it weren't already obvious, the sad-sack author tells us: "Eddie Grimes is me. It's a novel about me, with my own ideas and personal concepts and beliefs built into it.")

So I swing back around to my original claim in the "C'est moi" post—namely, that many of us are only capable of writing autobiography, but that this is by no means a bad thing. If writing about oneself can yield something as great as The Sportswriter, it is by no means an objectionable practice. It does mean, however, that I should perhaps not bank on having a steady stream of unique novel ideas coming to me for the rest of my life ("Some people only have one book in them" says Frank Bascombe. "There are worse things.") Perhaps it is also a sign I should not leave my day job—my equivalent of the titular sportswriting. And furthermore that it is also a valid reason not to follow Ford's and Frank's path in at least one regard: I should probably finish law school.