June 17, 2002
WRITERS ON WRITING; Recognizing The Book That Needs To Be Written
By DOROTHY GALLAGHER
Years ago, I picked up a copy of Sarah Orne Jewett's collection of stories ''The Country of the Pointed Firs.'' These are wonderful stories. But what struck me at the time, and what has stayed with me, is a letter from Jewett to Willa Cather that Cather quotes in her preface to the book:
''The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper -- whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.''
The thing that teases the mind. . . . A writer is always preoccupied with identifying the material that is essential to her work, the book that needs to be written. If there is such a core of material, bits and pieces of it will find their way into everything she writes, even into an editor's assignment. And she waits for that moment of synthesis when the subject finds the vehicle for its expression.
For me, that moment first came in the late 1970's. I learned then about an obscure Italian-American anarchist named Carlo Tresca. By that time Tresca had been dead for more than 30 years, murdered in 1943. I had never heard of him, but I recognized him at once. He was the embodiment of my subject. In writing his life, I would at last be dealing with the material that was necessary to me.
And to say what that is, I will turn to another writer, Robert Warshow, who died young, in the 1950's, still in his 30's, but who produced in his short life a number of brilliant essays on American cultural life that are collected as ''The Immediate Experience.'' In one essay Warshow wrote about the crucial effect of the American Communist movement on the intellectual life of the country in the 1930's.
There was a time, Warshow wrote, when virtually all intellectual vitality was derived in one way or another from the Communist Party. ''If you were not somewhere within the party's wide orbit'' -- and he was referring to the days of the Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Fascism: the time of the party's greatest influence in America and in Europe -- ''then you were likely to be in the opposition, which meant that much of your thought and energy had to be devoted to maintaining yourself in opposition. In either case, it was the Communist Party that determined what you were to think about and in what terms.''
The world has moved on, and very quickly, too. Fanatical ideologies have taken different forms, and even as we watch at this moment, we see the categories of political and social thought that defined the world through the 1980's dissolve and re-form in strange and terrifying ways. But it was the idiom of the Communist Party that I took in with my mother's milk: it was my introduction to intellectual experience and to the dense web of loyalties and enmities that ideology so dangerously generates; and it continues to engage me as nothing else does.
And, really, why wouldn't it? Unquestioning belief in an abstract idea is a peculiar feature of our species that transcends the ages. The historian Martin Malia called Communism ''the great political religion of the modern age . . . promising egalitarian redemption at the end of history.'' Worse, almost, than the horrific acts committed in its name, Communist ideology appropriated the language of the best hopes and ideals of humanity. And every horror was called by the name of its opposite, as George Orwell noticed.
Many immigrant Jews, as my own family did, lived in fairly isolated enclaves, among people who had come from the same part of the world -- Eastern Europe, Russia -- and who largely shared their views. It was possible for that immigrant generation to live an entire life in America with little connection to the people and country of their emigration.
If my grandfather kept the God of the shtetl, my mother's generation found life's meaning in the Bolshevik revolution. It was left to their children, who were the first generation born in America, to connect with the new world. And for many years that was my business: finding a foothold on this ground. When I felt firmly grounded, the past asserted itself, and I eventually found Carlo Tresca, an anarchist, whose political viewpoint had led him very early to see the dangers of Bolshevism. He became my vehicle and guide to what had always been waiting at the back of my mind.
Writing is problem solving; whether in fiction, biography or memoir, certain basic questions have to be resolved. In biography, at least, a writer leans heavily on materials gathered in research. Working with a trove of documents is constraining, but also in some ways liberating, as working a puzzle is liberating. The clues are in your files, and if you've done your job as a researcher, you have the tools to solve the puzzle. But when I turned to memoir -- the shamelessly naked core of a writer's necessary material -- I found myself traveling as light as any writer of fiction.
I have never written fiction, and this memoir may be as close as I ever get to it. No more than a biography or a novel is memoir true to life. Because, truly, life is just one damn thing after another. The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story. There really is no choice. A reporter of fact is in service to the facts, a eulogist to the family of the dead, but a writer serves the story without apology to competing claims.
This is an attitude that some have characterized as ruthless: that cold detachment, that remove, that allows writers to make a commodity of the lives of others. But a writer who cannot separate herself from her characters and see them within the full spectrum of their human qualities loses everything in a haze of nostalgia and sentimentality. Bathos would do no honor to my subjects nor, most important, bring them to literary life, which is the only way they could live in the world again.
At first I intended to write only one piece, the story of the agonizing last years of my parents' lives, a five-year period during which I had made some notes. The original version of the story I wrote was about 150 pages long. Everything was in it, but it didn't work. I hadn't solved any of the problems that the story demanded. But I was lucky, and eventually a solution came to me.
The right voice in which to tell the story came to me, and when it did, many other things fell into place. And I wound up with a story that is 10 or 12 pages long and yet contains everything I wanted to say. After that first piece, I went on to make a book of stories about my family that I called ''How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories,'' without notes this time, with only treacherous memory and a few letters to guide me.
Now you may ask: Just what is the relation of your memoir to the truth?
It is as close as it can be.
The moment you put pen to paper and begin to shape a story, the essential nature of life -- that one damn thing after another -- is lost. No matter how ambiguous you try to make a story, no matter how many ends you leave hanging, it's a package made to travel.
Everything that happened is not in my stories; how could it be? Memory is selective, storytelling insists on itself. But there is nothing in my stories that did not happen. In their essence they are true.
Or a shade of true. There is a piece in my memoir that I call ''Cousin Meyer's Autobiography.'' I did not really write this story. My cousin, whose real name was Oscar, left a self-printed memoir of some hundred pages. The first liberty I took with it was to change his name to Meyer in order to avoid confusion with my uncle whose name was Oscar.
Cousin Meyer's memoir was a treasure; it told of some extraordinary events in his life that dovetailed with the central material of my book. I took his hundred pages, reduced them in the way you would reduce a sauce, I turned them a little, say fron north to northeast. The result may not be the story he wanted people to read. I took his story over, I insisted on my interpretation, I even added some lines that he did not write.
Did I have a right to do that? Some would say not, and really I would have no defense. Nevertheless, if cousin Meyer, so incensed by my interference, returned from the dead to object, I would answer him: But, cousin, for more than 20 years your story languished in a drawer; you were dead in fact, your life lingered in hardly anyone's memory. And now, because I have used you, more people have read your story than you ever could have dreamed. Cousin, you live, even if you dance to my tune.
Writers on Writing
Articles in this series are presenting writers' exploration of literary themes. Previous contributions: nytimes.com/books/columns
