Don’t Explain by Lisa Zeiger
“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.”
—Truman Capote
This is a reflection on a memoir I spent four years writing and rewriting. By the time it was done, I had changed almost every word. My book became what cooks call a reduction; a broth simmered, sieved, and steaming. It fills only a saucepan; in book-speak it is a “slender volume.”
The ineluctable bromide of editors and their marketing departments is the mantra “narrative arc”. My memoir had none, but I made up for it with unassailable sentences transmitting hard-won sense. For I am unshakably an essayist, a genre I own like the nose on my face. From fifteen to forty I read at least a thousand novels, but from them I learned only how to structure a sentence; never a plot. The latter is a gift I simply don’t possess, nor do I care to. If reading is urged onward by plot, writing is impelled by language, pure and impure.
My agent, dispirited by the rejections of editors who all cited my absentee “arc”, pleaded with me to insert between episodes something cute she called “connectors”. I would sooner have had my aristocratic nose bobbed.
Have we forgotten that the very first English novels were “picaresque”— Moll Flanders and Tom Jones— first-person yarns of drifting rogues who ricochet from one predicament to the next thinking only of the moment; never the morrow? Defoe and Fielding got it right: life is not a line on a graph, rising and sinking like the Dow, but a mosaic that nobody—narrator included—is privy to behold all at once as a monolith of meaning. Life’s million little pieces do not interlock like a jigsaw puzzle. They merely jostle each other during whatever mortal span the Fates measure out for us. Cause and effect are wishful thinking; a consoling unguent to smooth the crazy pavement of our experiences.
Perhaps one reason I can’t write fiction, or indeed any book except as an arrangement of distinctly self-contained portions, is that nothing fascinates, shocks, and amuses me more than facts. Not the dirt dug up by pious “investigative journalists”, but the man bites dog variety reported in The New York Post. To describe reality suffices; I don’t need to posture as its hangman.
An essay has four corners, as lawyers say of contracts. No extraneous explanations of cause and effect are needed. An essay is mobilized by argument rather than novelistic action, although both writing strategies require the evidence and atmosphere supplied by description. For decades, therefore, I wrote not about characters, but about things: publishing magazine articles on art, architecture, and interior design. In those years the single book about humans I might have written would have been an interior decorator’s rendition of The Devil Wears Prada, for I could dig no deeper than design (though only the shallow regard design as so much loose, scan topsoil).
As I wrote my memoir, outrageous fortune propelled my pen. I discovered that to write about life, especially mine, I needed the backdrop of a bloodbath. It was lived catastrophe, serial and shattering, that unleashed in me the fiercest of commitments to the English language; as wildly irregular as it is sublimely ordered. Unfair passions, lawless rage—the lyric extremes reached by Shakespeare—are as native to English as prayer—and I mean the Jacobean splendor of Thomas Cranmer, not the grasping gospel of Joel Osteen.
The totems and taboos of my past traipse through my texts: works of art I learned from; houses and rooms I lived in, or longed to; books that stocked my mind with sentences; and men and women who provoked desire, love, friendship, and rage. Over and over, memory turns up old talismans in reopened tracts of time, like shiny bad pennies.
Pleasures lost--provided you once lost yourself in them completely--are an archaic tongue renewed by translation. But language cannot bring ecstatic moments back to life, no matter how luxuriant the words you have for them inside your head.
To be a writer entails losing all that is not writing. Yet, at its pitch, language can come close to raising the dead. Closer still, to restoring all you lost.
Close, but no cigar.