I don’t suppose it will surprise you—having finally read the tale of our narrator’s writerly genesis—to hear that I’m thinking about origin stories this week, and the compulsion in artists and writers to offer them to our audiences like humble housewarming gifts, as though saying, oh, yes, thanks very much for inviting my work into the precious real estate of your mind, here’s why I do this. At the end of the “Combray” section of Swann, Little Marcel’s first fragment seems to him an urgent translation of an encounter with transportive beauty. In regarding the church of Martinville, he senses that “what lay hidden behind the steeples […] must be something analogous to a pretty phrase.” Though he does this “without admitting” the process to himself, it is, nevertheless, the moment of inception, an axis-shift in which he first begins to work through how he might reproduce his experience of the world through art.
How did I come to writing? There was no moment of revelation—it was for many years my private pleasure, just a place I visited. When I was a child I wrote because I liked abandoning my self in books, and thought—why not see if I can do it like this. I dipped in and out of practice—I’d keep a diary or a poetry notebook every day for two years and then write nothing for six months. After one of my assaults, I stopped writing all together for nearly 5 years, which is the sort of post-traumatic silence I’d once thought only happened in Lifetime movies. It’s the book I’m working on now that brought me back into the fold, some seven-odd years ago—a book I’ve long felt needed to be born. Does this book reveal where I come from? Do I require a narrative cleaving from a kind of pre-written or pre-verbal Before in order to justify the text? I don’t know yet; it hasn’t been written.
Funny enough, at one time the thing I thought I’d be was (cue Jenna Maroney voice) an Ac-Tress, god knows why. I was lousy, but in high school I’d made the theater my entire life—a slipshod method of shucking off my paralyzing, painful shyness. Writing, by contrast, was where I stored my secrets, my desires, my shames. It was a distinctly insular world, and in any case, already I knew how impossible a profession it would prove, even if it were to become the thing I wanted to do with my life.
When I am obliged to talk now about my “path” or “process,” most of what I do is emphasize how writing is work, and how this makes it a deeply different beast for those of us from working class backgrounds, as well as those of us who remain working class now. I spoke in my first long dispatch here about the ways the pandemic forced me to professionalize my writing in ways I hadn’t before imagined doing, even though I knew one day I’d probably like to put out a book, maybe two. In the last three years I turned anew to writing as a thing that could pay my bills, and this has irrevocably altered my relationship to it, made it more a responsibility than a whim, more a task than a happening.
Talking about myself as a “working writer” feels profoundly alien, but this labor is, I suppose, part of my dailiness now, more even than bartending is (even though I still make more money being condescended to by drunks than in Servicing My Art). There are brief moments I wish I was one of those writers who talk perpetually about The Muse and otherworldly inspiration, whose whole public persona functions as a kind of diversionary shroud, but the fact is, I am uninterested in iconographies of the poet-as-mystic, for I think that, while sexy, mainly what these myths do is conceal the ways the writing life is almost wholly inaccessible to people beyond the bounds of significant class privilege, nearly impossible to make truly survivable without inherited wealth.
An article floated around twitter recently that concerned the ways the working class is being exiled from the arts—the number of people with “working class origins” has shrunk BY HALF since the ‘70s. (Most people, myself included, initially failed to notice the study was based in England, but the larger critical framework remains true, I think.) It’s a devastating thing, while rents skyrocket and inflation rises and wages stagnate, to wonder if only the often incurious intellects of the upper crust will get to determine the shape of our witnessing, the words and images that formulate our desire.1
But still. I’m only offering one more mythology here, a (now) less commonplace origin story: that of the poor southern girl who fled to the city with a light in her eye and a dream in her heart. It’s classic Americana, even if, in a practical sense, it’s been largely outmoded as a reality.2
Stories of origin operate chiefly in the explanatory mode, wrestling character from chaos into order. These plots are not peculiar to but have particular traction and power in one of contemporary culture’s most pervasive—and, increasingly, infiltrative and asphyxiating—narratives: the superhero (or supervillain) story. The question: how does one become assimilated into a moral universe?—how do we cultivate generosity, courage, and altruism, particularly in a world where precarity has become the rule, and not the anomaly, where genuine solidarity is under perpetual threat, where we are more and more atomized and pitted against one another?
Oppositely: if I have been made to regard this moral universe and repudiated it, what faultline preceded or resulted in my ethical spoilage? In what strange soil was my evil sown?
As inheritors and inhabitants of the long 20th century, it would be easy to blame such narrative imperatives on the aftershocks of psychoanalysis, but of course these frames come long before Freud—my god, just look at the Victorians, the German bildung, the mythologies of the Greeks. Explanation is one word for this posture of accounting, but a better one might be apologia, our strickenness as artists before this obligation to defend what it is we do against real or imagined accusations of social uselessness.
This defensiveness is perhaps especially suited to American labor culture, which is so calibrated around a kind of bootstraps ethos, around our ridiculous fictions of meritorious class mobilities. From another angle, I suspect the artist’s reckoning with the story of why they do it emerges from or coincident with utilitarian framing narratives. In other words, can the maker of art make a functional (and therefore ‘good’) citizen-subject? (Then again, Americans are perfectly willing to view fame as an acceptable grindset—if you can make it, really make it, as an artist, your value can be proved in the pudding. But I think this has an otherwise to it, that it’s instead to do with the idea that passive reproduction of wealth is a self-explanatory value.)
This tension has never been more pressurized and perilous: space and funding for the arts are escalatingly chipped away at in service of—what? defense spending, police budgets, developments in tech (which, in turn, are developments in weapons and surveillance technologies, or else A.I., which, yeah)? Eric Adams is slashing NYC public library budgets by $42 million while paying out $121 million for police misconduct. Meanwhile, do we need writers, if an algorithm can pen a TV script functionally indistinguishable from Netflix original programming? Do we need rigorous books coverage on culture websites, when a listicle that condenses the “10 best books about cuckolding” into one-thousand words can pull in a technically efficient number of views? Do we need Kate Bush making new music when we can hear the same 13 seconds of “Running Up That Hill” compressed, refabricated, and regurgitated atop five-thousand recursive tiktok memes?3
Probably I sound like some bitter bitch, slowly boiling down to my boomer era, but as I consider why we tell stories about how we come to writing, come to artistry, come to ‘deserve’ the time and energy we devote to our work, ‘deserve’ the space we take up in a global imaginary, I guess I feel a touch testy. The other day I was thinking of the kinds of hack origins writers recount in interviews about When They Knew—the familiar ones, where they wrote their “first” “novel” at three years old, and all the adults around them were astounded by this toddler’s originary stroke of genius, and sang and clapped and began preparing them for their ‘life’s work.’
And maybe these are true stories, but mainly I see them as directed towards rationalization: see, it’s not that I wanted this, it’s that I had to do it. I was called, I was ordained from the jump. And I thought how even in this letter I’ve already slouched against such a door frame—remarking earlier that the book I’m working on now is one I feel I MUST write. And then I was talking to T. about something else and she said to me “you know, we say all sorts of made-up shit on the press circuit, on book tours, in interviews, because we’re exhausted, and we’re jet-lagged, and we’ve been asked the same fucking question every day for weeks,” and my resentment just vanished.
Because I suddenly remembered how canned I am when I’m bartending, and I’ve had to tell the 50th person in a single hour that, no, we don’t have Coors, and yes, that’s the full menu in your hands, and our card minimum is this, just like it says on the big poster behind my head, and how canned I am when I’ve had to describe for the 70th time what the book I’m reading behind the bar is about to someone who seems surprised I can read at all, and how prepackaged I likely seem when talking through why I feel an urgency writing about trauma and cultural backlashes and deflecting the notion that I’m unstudied or inartful in my memoirism, and all of this associational thinking reminded me how ambivalent even the most obvious stories can be, because for them to become stories in the first instance means they’ve been tightened and smoothed and renovated to be more palatable, or more titillating, or more disorienting, or more easily done away with all together.
When the narrator transposes his vision of the steeples into a “fragment” of writing, it is, fascinatingly, impressed in the text as a kind of substitution—it emerges in the gap where a desired conversation would have been, the narrator’s longed-for dialogue with the carriage coachman. The coachman, however, “seemed little inclined for conversation” and “barely acknowledged [his] remarks.”4 Writing, the narrator laments, is a folding back into oneself, an orientation toward the interior, and a thing done by necessity “in default of other company.” Why do we write? In the place where chatter—where sociality—would have lived, the narrator’s path toward the writing life is forged.
(As we shift our regard toward “Swann in Love,” and the pointed social satire inside Proust's salons, it might be interesting to remember this see-sawing motion between society, with its alleged ‘aesthetes,’ and Proust's / the narrator's work/ing “from life.”)
Lydia Davis reminds us that the child-writer (rather, the child-aspirant) is a not unusual fixture in the novel, but that La Recherche is “among the few novels in which the child in question will have his wish granted and will in fact grow up to be a famous writer.” We the readers know, too, that Proust himself—writing of a child-writer dreaming of the writing life—would go on to become one of the most esteemed novelists of the 20th century, even if Proust couldn’t have known it at the time (trapped, as Davis notes, initially in his reputation as an unserious dilettante).
Fascinatingly for the narrator, writing is also purgative: after he’s finished calcifying his vision in pretty phrases, “I felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of its obsession with the steeples and the mystery which lay behind them, that, as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice.” If memory is an olfactory involuntarism, writing is the hand that grasps and disciplines our fixations, not to mention this ineluctably disorienting passage of time. Narrative may function as a method through which we reclaim authority over our experience, recenter the observing self in the wake of a moment of beauty or pleasure5 that has unmoored that self.
I’ve been chewing the cud of this query in the beginning weeks of writing my second book, wondering whether my decision to undergo this process—to write this rape book—is exorcismic in origin. Do I seek control or healing through expulsion? I believe our desire in language exceeds us, that our writing knows more than we do. By transcribing these traumatic happenings and situating them in a cultural context, do I, in turn, fantasize about becoming the happy hen who has just laid its abject egg—will I sing, full-throated and joyous? (I should say I am skeptical of the out of darkness proclivities of the conventional trauma memoir.) Can our work signal a sort of advantageous exile from the past? The narrator reproduces his fragment for the reader and remarks that “I never thought again of this page.”
There is something to be said, too, about the gendering of the writer in these narratives of origin. There’s no space to be exhaustive on the subject of the künstlerroman here, so I will only say I was briefly thinking of Marcel’s genesis in comparison to two contemporary texts in which the child-writer acts as a calibrating field: Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and Yiyun Li’s recent, gorgeous Book of Goose. Where the more commonplace boy-subject of this novel form—Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister might be said to be the ür-text here—learns to reject ordinary (and, as here in the Proust, the intersubjective) experience in favor of the artist’s calling, for Ferrante’s and Li’s young women, the production of writing is initially a socially collaborative endeavor. But to “write from life”—as Lenù and Lila, and as Agnès and Fabienne—do, is, finally, a cleaving one: it dissolves the bonds between them. Which is to say—for the woman who writes, is this severance from the social necessarily one from the expanse of female friendship? We see, also, the ways these narratives resituate writing women within the marriage plot (I’m thinking here of the epistolary novel, also, as ever, of the Brontës). Does the birth of the woman writer become figured, not as a liberatory spurning of ordinary life, but as an originary trauma of separation?
À bientôt xo
What’s happening in Swann?
Per Proust’s synopsis: Scene of sadism at Montjouvain (224); The Guermantes Way: River landscape: the Vivonne (235); the water lilies (238); The Guermantes; Geneviève de Brabant ‘the ancestress of the Guermantes family’ (242); Daydreams and discouragement of a future writer (243); The Duchesse de Guermantes in the chapel of Gilbert the Bad (246); The secrets hidden behind shapes, scents and colours (252); The steeples of Martinville; first joyful experience of literary creation (254); Transition from joy to sadness (257); Does reality take shape in the memory alone? (260); Awakenings (252; cf. 1) | SWANN IN LOVE | The Verdurins and their ‘little clan.’ The ‘faithful’ (265); Odette mentions Swann to the Verdurins (269); Swann and women (269); Swann’s first meeting with Odette: she is ‘not his type’ (276); How he comes to fall in love with her (277); Dr Cottard (281); The sonata in F sharp (290); The Beauvais settee (292); The little phrase (294)
What else is on the docket?
Reading: Brian Dillon’s Affinities and Swann; also: Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, as well as galleys of Gillian Conoley’s fabulous forthcoming poetry collection Notes from the Passenger and the first translation in English of Turkish writer Tezer Özlü—her dreamy slip of a novel, Cold Nights of Childhood.
Listening: Fever Ray’s excellent new record, Radical Romantics. (I really enjoyed this review of it by Anna Gaca.) Also—OF COURSE—Lana.
Working: back at bar :(
Publishing: Nothing these weeks, but filed two pieces that should be up next month. Also—in 2-3 more weeks we’ll have our first guest dispatch here :)
Which isn’t to say rich people don’t make or have never made good art—a ludicrousness on its face—but that violently exacerbated inequity and insecurity have homogenized things, made everyone rather duller. The world is bland decadence or it is bare life; you are cushioned wholly from reality or you are debased irrevocably by it.
Speaking of rich people fictions, this is precisely what compels in Edith Wharton’s ruined women, in Henry James’ Portrait (which is, of course, also an inversion of the American fantasy—Isabel Archer is given the world, and is ruthlessly unmade by it), in—because I can’t not honor her on this, the week of her album drop—Lana’s early aspirant baddie personae.
Kate Bush, if you’re reading this: PLEASE.
This reaching out to the coachman for connection is emblematic: Proust was evidently known for his curiosity about and kindness & generosity toward those in the servant classes. As Edmund White recounts, the princesse de Caraman-Chimay told him that her great-uncle Comte Henri Greffulhe found his butler sobbing at news of Proust’s death: the butler, on being asked if he’d known “Monsieur Proust,” replied that “‘Oh yes…every time there would be a ball here, Monsieur Proust would come by the next day and quiz me about who had come, what they said, how they were related to one another and so on. Such a nice man—and he always left such a generous tip!’”
Or, to borrow Woolf, a “moment of being.”