The Art of Letter- (or Email-) Writing

     You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you—no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your whole life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.

From Letters to a Young to Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell (1986)

Despite Rilke’s hyperbole and scorn for literary criticism, the first letter of the collection, from which I excerpt the above passage, is possibly the best in the book, fit to be copied whole, handed out, and discussed on day one of an introductory writing course I’d never teach. But whether the reader agrees about its merits and moves on to the next may depend on one’s tolerance for tautological language. An article in The Guardian written using AI offers an objectively egregious example, with the abuse of the sentence beginning: “Believe me.” The phrase serves no purpose and it’s absurd to recycle. (The future is here.) Recently though, reading Christopher Hitchens’s piece on a new translation of Proust, “The Acutest Ear in Paris,” I encountered a murkier debate on the subject. Lydia Davis faults an earlier Proust translator for his redundancies. Hitchens responds with evidence of Davis committing the same error—except it doesn’t count, I think, because it’s functional, repetition for the sake of rhythm, rhetorical effect. Hitchens himself, an otherwise vigilant stylist, could be accused of the occasional redundancy, one of the banes of the journalist with a deadline to meet. We descend into ceaseless caviling. No one who’s misspelled a word or forgotten a comma knows how to write. And in this short missive of nine double-spaced pages, Rilke (or his translator) uses the word “silent” four times. There are those who would consider this disqualifying. I’m one of those who deem such readers oversensitive.

But I wouldn’t assign Letters in its entirety and, while it provides the form to one of the secondary inspirations behind this very column, I hesitate to recommend it now. The more letters Rilke sends, the more his limitations show, and the less keen I am to defend him. Aside from common blemishes, eccentric stylistic choices abound and distract:

Sex is difficult; yes.

…learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life is—: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves.

It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that—), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way—.

They’re impersonal, too. Rilke has hardly anything to say about his surroundings or what’s going on in his life, doesn’t exactly invite the reader into his confidence, doesn’t allow him to conceive much of an idea of who the writer is. Without additional layers of language and color, the book’s lone draw is advice, some of which is no draw at all. In one letter, for instance, he discourages the use of irony in favor of an examination of “serious Things” (which I took as a reminder not to neglect irony). And in every one he adopts the same tone: avuncular, humorless, preachy. Midway through the book I started squirming as if I were really sitting through a long, tedious sermon with just enough pith to keep me from dozing off.

The writer doesn’t want to dash off a letter (or most likely an email, these days) only to agonize over mistakes and paltriness. But taking your time risks causing offense, or adding the work of an apologetic preamble, or dampening the exchange. Based on their lack of polish, it would seem Rilke never intended these letters to be read by anyone but his correspondent, a stranger. Either that or sapience developed before skill in translating it to the page and judgment about what to expand upon or excise. Quality can be further reduced by the quantity of messages one is compelled to send. However, a writer planning on assembling a book out of letters or emails and crafting them toward that end would, I suspect, be trading self-consciousness for true candor and playfulness, two of the chief pleasures of writing (and reading) them. Forget the audience. Best to write to a correspondent doing nothing more than properly holding up your end of a conversation. Enduring aesthetic appeal as an accident. Perhaps even a measure of love.

Regime Change

     It was a day to celebrate when I found out that the manager of the store had finally decided to step down, right before, it so happens, his next performance evaluation. On the whiteboard in the break room, he’d written a message thanking everyone for their hard work, along with some unctuous hearts, and signed with his name. A daily annoyance for months. After he left, someone erased his name. He will be missed.

But work is a dictatorship and, based on the brief history of the store, the joyous mood at the unceremonious fall of the old regime only lasted moments, because the new regime could have been worse. Four minimum qualifications for a leadership role: Sanity. Competence. Maturity. Good sense. Not much to ask and yet no one in management has met all four. No one. People who have all these qualities, I suspect, tend to seek and acquire better jobs. Our world doesn’t have them in abundance and is poorer for it. So, from its inception, the nation of our store has been in turmoil, and I’m the average citizen who’s come to expect nothing but hardship no matter who’s in power.

It was the new leader who informed me of the old leader’s sudden departure. And with that delightful greeting out of the way, he went over the day’s agenda. The old leader, during his ignominious reign, made use of a notebook, in which he’d scrawl a list of tasks larded with such reminders as “I will not accept mediocracy!” Where a few bullet points would suffice, his entries could take up more than a page. (Admittedly, I may have been the only one who read them conscientiously, adding corrections and notes of commentary at times, which he asked me to stop doing. Not as conscientiously, I was tempted to steal it and publish it as a novel.) The new leader, on the other hand, felt no need to write junk essays for me to decipher, because our jobs are, after all, simple and unchanging. Just a few words.

Another difference: Our old leader didn’t believe in the value of basic store maintenance. One hour to clean the store (including interruptions to assist customers) turned into half an hour, which eventually turned into fifteen minutes. It was what he took to calling a “streamlined” clean. In other places I’ve worked, “streamlined” cleaning would get you fired. Unsure of what he meant exactly, I asked him to show me how to clean the entire store—office, break room, hallways, bathrooms, twenty aisles (or, to quote the notebook, “isles”), storage area, cash register area, entrance—in fifteen minutes. I had my watch on, ready to time him. But, despite that, logically, it should have taken no more than fifteen minutes to train me, freeing us from a nightly headache while providing a fully sanitary workplace thereafter, he put it off for another day, which didn’t stop him from criticizing my mediocracy later. Our new leader allotted two hours to clean an entire store. No additional training needed.

Another difference: Other authority figures would bark orders or tail you or otherwise contribute to a hostile workplace, where one is underpaid to do essential work to begin with. The new leader, after letting me know what he wanted, went to his work area. Then he worked. And not a single time did he pester me while I worked.

Near the end of the night, he engaged me in a short conversation about his fatigue at having to clean up the mess, literal (the office) and figurative (incorrect procedure), left behind by the old leader. And at the end of the shift, I didn’t escape wordlessly. We said goodnight. And I, for one, meant it.

During the next shift, I was scheduled to work with one of the old leader’s flunkeys. To take one example of how she works: I counted out a register, placed it at the end of the counter, ten feet away from her, with no one else near it. Then I left to work on my assigned aisle. It takes maybe ten seconds to put a cash register in and, once done, there’s another cashier available to help customers, which is why everyone else does it ASAP. And no one else has ever made an issue out of it. But within moments the flunkey tracked me down and, with voice raised, told me to never leave the cash register unattended. For my next shift, I was again scheduled with her. This time, after counting out a register, I stood next to it and waited. She poked around the counter for a minute, doing what looked like nothing urgent. Then a customer approached and she proceeded to check her out. Still no sign of when she’d ever put in this cash register. In the end I took it, placed it directly behind her, where non-existent thieves would hesitate to trespass, and continued with my assigned work. Within moments she tracked me down and started getting loud about how I was doing my job, a job I had before she was hired. Her instruction, an invention of her own, would have made both of my tasks, putting away products and watching the register, harder. I ignored her.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call her sanity into question. She seemed capable of doing the physical labor required. But she’s a belligerent mook, stoking conflict wherever and whenever she can and blaming anyone but herself for it. Our world has them in abundance and is poorer for it. I wouldn’t hire her to do my job, let alone a job overseeing other people. So I texted the new leader early the next morning and told him, at the risk of losing hours, to never schedule me with this person again. When we met up for a shift, I explained why, reluctantly. The old leader would have listened with bovine dullness of expression and, seemingly forgetting about it the moment the conversation ended, would do nothing about it. (According to a customer, someone eventually called the cops on the subject of those complaints.) But the new leader listened and resolved to take action right then and there. He didn’t make a judgment about who was right or wrong. He recognized that, either way, there was a problem to be addressed and both employees had an equal claim to a functional work environment. His solution: He would change the schedule so we wouldn’t have to work with each other. Problem solved.

Sanity. Competence. Maturity. Good sense. The first true leader the store had ever seen.

Initially I spoke of him with nothing but appreciation, amused at how easy he made it seem. Which it is, really. The store was cleaner than it had ever been and everything else got done too. A corporate review of our store was favorable (unlike the store that had incubated the old manager). And I never had a problem with him. But over the next month or so, I had to look past a few things. Sometimes I’d be searching for him and wouldn’t find him. Eventually I discovered he went outside periodically to smoke in the middle of a shift. I certainly wouldn’t be allowed to stop working and stand around whenever I felt like it. A minor fault. I didn’t always find him there, though, and in such cases I simply gave up. …Okay, that could turn into a real problem. Not yet though! And one night, against the instruction in one of our training videos to lock up the store in pairs as a precautionary measure, he decided to lock up by himself without explanation. It was only once? And one afternoon, I went to the storage area to look for him. He was going out the emergency door, pushing a U-boat. I called his name. He didn’t reply, so I followed him. Once outside, a man I didn’t recognize turned quickly on his heel and walked around the corner. No one other than employees should be in the area outside the emergency doors. It can’t be mistaken for the entrance. The new leader didn’t acknowledge him, just puffed on his pipe. That night, in describing the day to my brother, I added, with a laugh, that his behavior seemed a bit shady to me. My praise was now tempered.

The next morning, the new leader asked me to be especially careful about watching the register because his boss, the district manager, was in the parking lot. The DM came in and went to the back office with our new leader. I worked as usual. Before long, the DM found me and introduced me to a temp leader and informed me that the new leader, the best employee we’d ever had, was under investigation and suspended until further notice.

Corruption scandal. Forced resignation from office.

At some point during the day, the temp leader asked me how I liked the job. I explained to him that it’d been quite chaotic since the store opened, actually, that the old leader was one of the worst I’ve ever worked with, that the new leader knew what he was doing, so it came as a shock (more for the timing than the accusation, I suppose) that he was now gone. I was worried, frankly, that we’d be returning to chaos.

The temp leader replied: “Oh, that’s good.”

During my next shift, another regime change meant I found myself paired up with the mook once more. Upon seeing her, I groaned: “Oh no.”  I signed in and started trudging to the back. She called loudly after me: “Come get this cash register!” I ignored her. When I returned, she handed me a phone number and said I could go. The number belonged to the temp leader. They’d hatched a plan to deal with my insolence. Using the office phone, I called him and he picked up. I explained the situation and said the previous leader rearranged our schedules so that I wouldn’t have to work with the mook.

“Well, I am not Lance. I’m Lester. I do things a little differently,” he began.* Scandal had discredited everything the prior regime stood for. Instead he’d be looking, without proper context, at the security footage, which doesn’t have audio.

I wanted a clarification. I was facing what amounted to a punishment. The mook was not. Are you going to listen to my side of the story? When the previous leader—

“No. I’ll be looking at the security video. I am not Lance. I’m Lester. I—”

I hung up. Time to immigrate.

 

---

* Hey, footnote! Anyway, names have been changed.

DA at the Movies, February 2024

Town Bloody Hall, DA Pennebaker (Criterion Collection, 1979)

Norman Mailer presides over, rather than merely participates in, a town hall event on the theme of women’s liberation. The year is 1971 and a critic who joins him on stage, Diane Trilling, considers him the most important writer of the time. Upon hearing this, in 2024, I gaped at the screen in disbelief. Ha, what a time! This most eminent man of letters comes off as if he writes in nothing but an open bathrobe. His misogyny is half-shtick, half-sincere, and both halves are equally tiresome. His swaggering style of crudeness is cringemaking. Yet everyone, with few exceptions, actually takes him seriously. Squint and one sees that he makes a valid point or two: addressing accusations that his fictional characters represent exactly what he thinks (though what he thinks isn’t that much more enlightened), that purely accusatory rhetoric breaks down any dialogue between men and women on the subject (though perhaps that was just how he heard it). Pointing out that literary fashions change isn’t saying much. The handful of writers who define an era are, for one reason or another, bound to be relegated to the background sooner or later. It’s up to the reader to resist getting swallowed whole by the trend of the day, or to defy it, nursing and tending to some healthy doubts by sifting through the past for what merits reconsideration. But watching Mailer, I’m content to leave him there, in the past.

As historical document, Town Bloody Hall may have some value, with a number of recognizable names making cameos. As conversation, however, it hardly entertains or illuminates, though the audience plays along, clapping, hissing, laughing—mechanically, so they look like they’re having a good time, as Hitchens observed of certain audiences. During the ending Q & A, Anatole Broyard gets up and asks a dumb question, stepping into the role of that audience member who has the sudden urge to offer himself up as a punching bag, on camera, no less. Germaine Greer responds to the question waspishly, which is understandable, but then her haymaker, the cheap gag, barely grazes. This exchange about sums up the night. I’m not sure I’d have stuck around that long to hear it. The original event was approximately 3.5 hours. The movie is half that length and still I only felt relieved to get to the end.

 

The Third Shadow Warrior, Umetsugu Inoue (1962)

Originally I was toying with writing a standalone piece on this called “On Power” because it could be the best film statement I’ve ever seen on the subject, nested within a magnificent plot. It takes place in 16th-century Japan. Samurai ride through a village. One drops something on the ground and tells a peasant standing nearby to pick it up. It’s a severed head. Other peasants leap back, aghast, but one looks after the samurai in awe. This peasant eventually receives a strange but alluring offer: given his resemblance to a local warlord, he’ll be paid handsomely to leave his humble village and live in luxury as one of his body doubles. Hidden in the warlord’s home with the other doubles or “shadows,” they spend their days learning to mimic the warlord to perfection—his limp, his voice, his mannerisms. They hang out. They eat well. But they only realize what’s really demanded of them when the warlord loses his eye in battle…. The peasant goes on to experience everything degrading and humiliating that comes with the pursuit of power, all without ever wielding it. Then his sorry carcass returns namelessly to the soil. A work of art that can serve as an inoculation.

 

Kill Me Again, John Dahl (Tubi, 1989)

I scrolled past this one for a long time before I finally chose it. I like Val Kilmer. I like the idea of Val Kilmer as the lead in an 80s noir movie. And I liked the movie even though it seems, at first, to follow convention closely. The money. The crime. The double-cross. The femme fatale. The detective who takes on the case against his better judgment and gets in deeper than is safe. Then, with a couple of surprises, not all that surprising in themselves but perfectly executed, it's lifted above convention and, coupled with visual kick and not a wasted scene, takes its place near the best of the genre. A debut and an underrated gem. Reading about the director, I discovered that the movie he made after this is one I watched years and years ago and have been eager to watch again, another one that doesn’t get mentioned enough, Red Rock West. I’ll be making it a double feature.

 

Royal Warriors, David Chung (Criterion Collection, 1986)

A pair of criminals on a plane attempt to break loose from police custody. As mayhem erupts, three law enforcement officials onboard, unknown to each other, intervene. The criminals wind up dead, the plane lands safely, and the three are hailed by the media as heroes. Soon a bond between them is forged. But the criminals have brothers in arms who track down the heroes to pay them back. On the whole, I found this to be one of the less satisfying Hong Kong action movies I’ve seen, with no particularly memorable fights or chases (to say nothing about the drama). This subtitle, though, will forever bring me joy: “Michael, I will revenge for you!”

 

Amanda, Carolina Cavalli (2022)

My knowledge of Italian cinema amounts to some Westerns and dramas, nothing from within the last 50 or so years. I took a chance on this movie to hear Italian, to see the actress starring in it, glimpsed in the button reclining in an inflatable pool mattress, in action, and to learn what a modern Italian comedy is like. This one is a debut. It can be grating and twee. Some scenes are incongruously serious in tone. But it’s promisingly weird. And more often than not, it has the intended effect. Benedetta Porcaroli plays Amanda, a woman in her midtwenties who lives at home with her wealthy mother. She has no: friends lover job ambitions prospects reliable source of pleasure. And her behavior is primarily what suffuses the movie with weirdness: she’s a tornado. In one scene, she’s in the passenger seat of a parked car with her sister, who says she hopes her daughter doesn’t grow up to be like Amanda. After a pause, Amanda replies with what turns out to be the closest thing she has to a catchphrase: “Go fuck yourself.” She gets out of the car and starts running to who knows where. The camera remains fixed, watching until she’s nearly out of sight. Her sister calls out: “We’re in the middle of nowhere!” Still running, Amanda shouts back: “You’re in the middle of nowhere!” One day Amanda seizes a chance to revive an old friendship with a woman who’s become a shut-in. At first it seems to work. Then the conflict Amanda customarily stirs threatens it.

She has at least one thing going for her: even when everything and everyone discourages her from being who she is, which isn’t evil, just abrasive and bewildering and exhausting, she never stops unsettling the world, to shake something out that’ll moor her and give her life meaning.

 …Arguably, that’s a thing.

 

Panic in Year Zero, Ray Milland (1962)

What happens immediately after major US cities are struck simultaneously by nuclear weapons? An anonymous all-American (white) family is driving to a vacation spot when a bomb goes off in the Los Angeles area, where they just left. Panic sets in and order soon crumbles. Freeways clog. Desperate people begin sacking towns for supplies and townspeople, in turn, take up arms and set up roadblocks to keep non-residents out. Degenerates see an opportunity to go on a crime spree. The father swiftly does what he must, even if it’s morally dubious, to ensure that they all survive. He steals guns at gunpoint and escapes to a cave in the mountains to wait out the chaos. The plot proceeds smoothly. The acting may be unremarkable but the drama of the situation is convincing. And it’s ultimately thwarted by the badly misjudged choice of musical accompaniment: unironically sprightly jazz, as if they were hurrying to get to a wedding on time. That’s mainly what I took away. Conclusion: Nuclear war, the collapse of society, and weddings are best set to grim soundtracks. 

 

Tampopo, Juzo Itami (1987)

I first encountered this director years ago in a novel by Kenzaburo Oe called The Changeling. Since then I’ve always kept his work in mind to view one day. Tampopo is his most acclaimed film. It’s a cartoonishly festive sendup/celebration of the gastronome lifestyle and, in particular, the art of making ramen. It’s somewhat baggy, wandering from the core story to include self-contained side stories that are all quite unlike each other, though each has its own charms. But the crackling energy of joie de vivre links everything together and never flags. And it similarly presents a lesson about mastery from another (albeit fairly different) Japanese food classic, Jiro Dreams of Sushi: What are all the steps involved in whatever you’ve chosen to devote yourself to and how can each be improved upon? This is one way of separating the dabblers and mediocrities from those determined to get better (or to be counted among the best). Breaking something down in this manner makes all the work involved—and all the issues that must be addressed—highly visible and daunting. It also allows one to appreciate everything that goes into creating the object of admiration.

After Tampopo, Itami would go on to make a movie lampooning the yakuza. It got him slashed in the face. He wore the scar proudly.

 

The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris (1988)

Thanksgiving weekend, 1975. Dallas, Texas. A policeman, Robert Wood, stops a car on the road. As he approaches the vehicle, the driver shoots him multiple times and flees. The policeman dies. His partner shoots after the car as it disappears into the night. Eventually law enforcement tracks down a suspect, Randall Adams, 28. Appearing in interviews with the filmmaker, I see a man with a detailed explanation of his activities on the night in question, conveyed with anguish and astonishment at his fate. He has no criminal record. And there’s no discernible motive for why he’d murder a policeman out of nowhere. The other suspect is David Harris. He was sixteen at the time. He’d picked up Adams earlier that day, who’d been walking around, looking for an open gas station. The teen was driving in a stolen car. He’d also stolen the gun used in the crime. He already had a criminal record. Later, he bragged to friends that he’d killed a cop. And still later he committed armed robberies (and murder). A likely motive for the shooting: evading capture. Meanwhile, his side of the story makes little sense: Adams, a stranger, was driving his car for some reason that isn’t explained and shot the police officer. Then Harris leaves Adams at a hotel and decides not to call the cops. And the whole time he relays this questionable account of a murder, it’s with all the emotion of recollecting an errand he once ran, occasionally smiling.

The Thin Blue Line is heartening and instructive in how effectively it makes a case, using techniques such as repetition and reenactment that were then innovative and that today are standard (though often misunderstood). But it’s more chilling as proof of how easily justice can be denied to an innocent person, even when the real culprit would seem rather obvious. (This mood is enhanced by Philip Glass’s score.) According to Adams, a policeman pulled a gun on him, trying to force him to sign a confession. An infamous psychiatrist, Dr. Grigson, talks to Adams for 15, 20 minutes and comes to the exact wrong conclusion, accusing Adams of being a psychopath deserving of nothing less than the death penalty and Harris as the innocent. A key witness can’t get his facts straight and admits to deliberately omitting at least one, with a laugh. Morris, in an interview with Slate decades later, mentions Rashomon and its multiple perspectives on the same crime as an influence. But where Akutagawa ends with jejune despair (and Kurosawa forces hope), Morris answers by getting to work, probing into the available evidence and achieving true clarity. And, after Adams spends eleven years in prison, justice. A judge nearly sheds a sentimental tear as the prosecution refers to the thin blue line of law enforcement that saves society from chaos. To be more precise, it’s the sort of rigorous investigative effort people such as Morris display that has any chance of saving us.

This Year's Balzac Novel

     With canonical French writer Honoré de Balzac, I’d suggest starting either where I did, with Old Goriot, or the latest novel of his I’ve read in my annual return to his work, Eugénie Grandet (1834). (Attempting to pronounce that last name the French way has unexpectedly defeated me. Sounds like I’m hacking. So I settle for the anglicized Grandet [Gran-DAY.]) The theme I associate most closely with him—the corrupting power of money—is presented here with typical acidity, in a masterfully plotted novel of beginner-friendly length. It takes place in the French countryside and concerns the Grandet family, whose patriarch is Monsieur Grandet, a wine salesman and miser. Or, as I took to referring to him, a “cheap bastard.” Though he’s accumulated the sort of wealth that’s made him and his family the talk of the region, he jealously guards every last coin, every crumb of food, and every candle in the rundown, cheerless home he shares with wife, daughter, and servant. The novel isn’t satire but, nevertheless, Monsieur Grandet’s ruthless pennypinching, sharp business practices, love of caressing his riches, and generally detestable personality (he refers to himself as a cat and his wife and daughter as the mice) can make the reader wonder. A nephew temporarily staying with the family learns that his father has gone bankrupt and committed suicide. Inconsolable, he shuts himself in his room and refuses dinner. Monsieur Grandet’s first thought: Hey, at least we’ll be saving on dinner. One day Madame Grandet, who’s spent her marriage suffering her husband’s tyranny in silence, takes ill, her skin turning yellow. Monsieur Grandet says he likes the color yellow. However, it isn’t simply an exaggerated portrait. Balzac’s consciously constructed monster of the age contains traces of humanity, meted out at no suspiciously apt moments: watching his daughter brush her hair, making luggage for his nephew, an evanescent doubt or two. And as in other Balzac novels, the monster eventually clashes with someone who isn’t so calculating, doesn’t worship money, an innocent. That innocent is the titular character, the monster’s daughter, Eugénie. She’s been kept ignorant of basic comforts and her mother has been largely cowed into submission, leaving her to appear simple and pure of heart, initially. Yet Balzac is sensitive to each stage of growth that leads to conflict with her father, and more, to maturity in the form of an awareness of how many others in society at large share his attitude toward life. Contradiction that makes for a flesh-and-blood person on the page: fragility revealed by disappointment and sorrow blended with the quiet strength to endure, soul intact.

I must applaud this plot once more. The very word might bring on a foretaste of bored predictions and squandered time: of hokey or overwrought incidents provided at regular intervals because something has to happen, wrapped up neatly (and without reverberation) in the end. The answer, this novel shows, isn’t necessarily indifference or chaos or whatever the day happens to give. Balzac establishes a world and a situation with his representative figure. He all but announces his intent to create a work that’s part social criticism. And at every point I think artificiality is about to peek through, what happens instead follows the logic of the ordinary, events shaped by human weakness and unremarkable developments. Nothing is given short shrift: Balzac retains precision of form as the book moves and pulses.

All this has been to say that I don’t think I can wait another year to read Balzac. This edition of Eugénie Grandet was translated by Marion Ayton Crawford and is part of the Penguin Classics series, the label of which (usually) sets my mind at ease. 

To Be Honest

     I was in an office park on another afternoon exploration of Union City, CA, rollerblading around a company’s loading area, when I noticed a truck had its back doors open. I didn’t see anyone nearby, so, as I was increasingly apt to do at that age, I transgressed, climbing into the truck. There wasn’t much to see, just a lot of nondescript packages ready to be sent out. As I poked around, feeling the rush of being a bad boy, I thought I heard someone. I crouched down and froze, listening, waiting. The doors of the truck slammed shut. Then, moments later, the engine rumbled to a start. Not wanting to give myself away, I made no attempt to alert the driver to my presence, thinking some sort of opening to escape would present itself. The truck picked up speed. I imagined that as soon as it came to a stoplight, I could open the doors. But I didn’t move, too afraid that something could go wrong and I’d hurt myself or that, I don’t know, I’d be held responsible for any lost or damaged packages that tumbled out after me or that I’d cause a traffic accident. The only other choice was to sit there until the ride was finished. Ten, twenty minutes went by. Ended up in Oakland.

This has been a version of a lie I used to tell. It wasn’t a terrible lie: there was a grain of truth. I really would ride around in my rollerblades, exploring the hidden corners of Union City, including an office park. Sometimes I even courted trouble. The skeptical, though, might have (correctly, in this instance) winced at the outlandishness of my adventure. I was never pressed for more details but with every repetition, my discomfort grew: sooner or later I’d be found out and summarily pantsed, metaphorically and literally, maybe—not unheard of in the realm of kid justice—for a story I eventually tired of. In later teen years, I remember at least once someone uttering those fearsome words to me after hearing one of my made-up stories, something along the lines of: I don’t believe you. And occasionally I would speak to or be in earshot of a kid who was clearly lying in the same way and feel embarrassed for him or her. The kid who could always conveniently top everyone else’s story. The new kid who sought to establish her reputation by alleging that her mom dated famous musicians. The classic: the kid who got laid in a distant land one summer, where none of his listeners had ever been or would ever go. Finally, in my senior year of high school, I was asked to repeat the delivery truck story for someone who hadn’t heard it and I immediately fessed up: “That was a lie.” I was high at the time. Getting high, for me, intensified whatever I was feeling, so what this request likely turned up the dial on was a sense of fraudulence and self-loathing, catalyzing honesty. Disappointing my listeners and doing harm to my own legend hardly stung. And what a relief! How much less stressful life is when you don’t spend it lying and then worrying about your lies and running from scrutiny and sputtering to prop up lies! From that day forward my legend has been built on the unmatched honesty and purity of a secular saint.

I’d been playing a game to see if I could get someone to buy the lie. But, closer to the point, I wanted to seem interesting. Then I grew up and stopped sweating it. In the years to come I would make the connection to literature. In writing but especially in reading, one of the greatest pleasures is what really happened: that perfect detail or situation or character that’s powerfully, excruciatingly, hilariously real. And, over and over, it’s proven that these can be found in the most seemingly unremarkable lives. (Meanwhile, anyone who’s ever watched a late-night talk show has probably been sent to bed early by the anecdotes of a world-famous guest.) It’s a skill to forage from your life. And it’s another skill to make something of what’s foraged for someone else’s consumption. In the sense of bypassing the work involved, I think of the fabulist as lazy. There are no boring lives, just boring people living them. Sometimes they take the easy way out at the risk of ignominy.

I don’t wish to devalue another great pleasure of literature, what didn’t happen: imagination, invention, comic exaggeration, manipulation of autobiography that isn’t underhanded. And I suppose it’s a shame, with the advancement of research tools and surveillance technology, that the tall tale is largely extinct. But imperfect memory is no infallible defense. And to those who are in the habit of lying merely to convince others that you’ve led a life you didn’t actually lead, that is essentially underhanded: if pangs of conscience don’t torment and madden you first, assume, no matter who you are, that one day you’ll have the eyes of the world on you and that a scrupulous journalist or investigator or amateur sleuth will come knocking. From there, only the most shameless self-deluded career bullshitters try to keep up the act, through widespread mockery and scorn, through court proceedings and prison.

…Okay, something that really did happen: A girl invited me to hang out. I put on my new sweater, strapped on my super cool super sexy rollerblades, and rocketed out the front door. Midway there, I suspect it was excitement that blinded me to the signs warning that the road ahead had just been paved. Speeding along, I suddenly came to a dead stop and tipped forward in what felt like the blink of an eye. I had just enough time to use my hands and forearms to break my fall. And I was stuck to the ground. And my hands were burning, half tarred, in full view of a busy street. That’s about how it feels to get caught in a dumb lie.

When I got there, she and another girl kindly laundered my sweater. To no avail.