Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the Context of Other People

I think it’s pretty funny that over the last week I’ve read four quality Paris Review interviews — Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter Thompson, and more recently Gabriel Garcia Marquez — and of the four the writer whose prose stays closest to reality is Hunter Thompson.

The Garcia Marquez interview was interesting to me in two ways; first because it had cool tidbits about the man and his manner of writing and second when viewed in juxtaposition with the other interviews. For instance, one of my favorite throwaway quote from the Bradbury interview was a wonderful sex joke about short stories versus novels:  ”The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days.” So naturally I thought it was really funny when today I read: “One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph… At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be. That’s why writing a book of short stories is much more difficult than writing a novel. Every time you write a short story, you have to begin all over again.” Both are pretty good points — although Bradbury’s was much funnier — and they stand there diametric opposites. I’m not trying to say it’s weird that two great writers have completely different styles or approaches to writing, just that the proximity of my finding the two quotes is entertaining.

And yet, I think there are arguments that can be made to say Bradbury and Garcia Marquez are surprisingly similar writers despite the massive differences in cultural context. In the interview, the interviewer asks Garcia Marquez about the style he used in One Hundred Years of Solitude to convey the fantastic and natural. Apparently he got it from the stories that his grandmother used to tell him. “What was most important was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.” And when I paused to think about it, maybe five minutes ago, I can say that Bradbury uses a similar brick-faced prose to describe the fantastic in his stories. Again I’m thinking of “The Veldt,” and oh, “The Happiness Machine” from Dandelion Wine. I just remembered a conversation with my mom from years ago, trying to decide if magical realism was a uniquely Latin American phenomenon; my first and best guess at a non-Latin novel in that style was Dandelion Wine. It’s time to reread that.

One last thing, one more quote. I like it because it does two things. Garcia Marquez is talking about his transition from journalism to fiction — though it wasn’t a full or permanent transition:

“One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.”

First, the statement that Kafka showed Garcia Marquez that he was “allowed” to write things like that warms the cockles of my fucking heart. Writers like Garcia Marquez did the exact same thing for me, and it feels wonderful when titans are shown to only be so big when viewed at the right angles.

Second, In One Hundred Years and even more so in Autumn of the Patriarch Garcia Marquez plays around with time, turning around to tell stories concurrent with ones we just read, jumping forward to name a future that he has yet to build to, and so on and so forth. The quote does this too. It starts as a man in 1981 remembering his first experience with Kafka, when he was twenty years younger. But the way that he phrases the last sentence of the quote sounds like it comes directly from the man in his twenties — the man in 1981 did start writing a long time ago, the phrase would be “a much longer time ago” or something similar. Of course it could just be a translation mistake, which would be much less entertaining.

Honeymooners: The Drunks

On Friday I bought Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale from the Pitt Book Center. I didn’t have a piece of mail to verify my address to the Carnegie Library, and I don’t think I’m allowed to rent from Hillman anymore, and I had been lamentably without a book for almost a week.

Honeymooners was written by Chuck Kinder, former director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Creative Writing department, until he had a triple by-pass a few years ago and stepped aside, or took a medical leave, or something. Published in 2001, he’d worked on it for something like 20 years. The book, and Kinder, were the basis for Grady Tripp and his novel in Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. The main characters, apparently, are based on Kinder and his Stanford-era buddy Raymond Carver.

I’m about a hundred pages in, and as it is now it seems to be a novel about a couple of dirtbag writers going about getting drunk and tearing their lives apart. In honor of this topic and the author, I read a good forty pages yesterday ripped out of my gourd. This morning, when I first cracked the book, I remembered that where I’d left off, Ralph Crawford/Raymond Carver was drying out at an upscale clinic. Which I thought was kind of funny.

While the plot itself hasn’t really gotten me by the balls, there’s definitely some stuff that piques my interest. First off, Kinder cares very little about making his dialogue stand out for easy reading. The occasional em dash and consistent changes of narrative perspective are his biggest clues, and he expects the reader to be able to follow conversations with minimal direction from him.

I’ve gotten complaints about my dialogue before, and I’ve even more structured than he is, so it was nice to see. But I do like to put dialogue in the middle of sentences and I hate “he said” “she said” and the like — they make me uncomfortable.

He also includes in the dialogue these incredibly irritating and repetitious verbal tics, like constant references by characters to the other as “Jim old dog” or “Ralph old dog.” This isn’t beautiful writing in the least but it could very well be accurate. There’s a section I recently wrote — I’ve been writing entirely in monologue and dialogue this summer, for some reason — in which my character obsessively begins sentences with the word “but.” I happen to find it somewhat ugly to read, but it’s “accurate” to this character.

If Alice reads this, she will be familiar with my Gabriel Garcia Marquez paradox, which is applicable here I believe. In Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Garcia Marquez writes about some incredibly depraved things, most notably that the narrator is purchasing himself a virgin prostitute for himself on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. And yet it is still an incredibly beautiful novella. The ability to write about horrendous things and make the reader feel ok with those things simply by the beauty with which they’re described, that’s a feat. And I think I want to be there, as a writer, I think that’s a very fruitful area if it can be done right.

Finally Finished With TR

I finally finished The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris. It is, among other things, an incredibly well written narrative history of Teddy up to age 42, when McKinley got shot and he became the youngest president in history. Side note: as McKinley Lapsed into shock, and they were arresting his assassin, he says “Don’t let them hurt him.” That’s a pretty solid guy.

I already read Theodore Rex, which is Morris’ second volume on Teddy, accounting his presidency. Although there’s no chance in hell I’ll reread that for years to come, I do kind of wonder what it would have been like if I had read the books in order. Teddy comes across as super human in the vast majority of each book, but more so in Rex, after he’s matured a bit.

In Rise, there is a long accounting of his actions as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a position he used to, among other things, start the Spanish-American War in order to get his rocks off on a battlefield. As soon as they declared war he resigned and created the Rough Riders.

So, with my current self-defeating jones for Big People and Big Happenings, it was great to make sure that Morris, a TR apologist of the first order, did not shy around the intensely imperialist nature of Teddy in the late 19th century.

I’m definitely ready to be done with Theodore Roosevelt for a little. There’s still Colonel Roosevelt to read in the trilogy, but it’s still in hardback, and fuck paying for that. It’s time for more Latin America: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Roberto Bolano (whose poetry gives me a sense of a Chilean Bukowski,) maybe a little Isabel Allende…

Suggestions are of course welcome.

Big.

Today I am not in a mood to mocked by the beautiful weather and sun. I’m not sure why, exactly, but I’m pleased to be in the fluorescence of the computer lab for a little. I’ve acquired the bad habit of reading about incredible human beings. Right now it’s the young Theodore Roosevelt, who at 24 became the Republican Minority Leader in the New York Assembly, and introduced and passed the Civil Service reform bill, with the help and aid of Gov. Grover Cleveland. The winter before, he finished his massive book The Naval War of 1812, which was the definitive work on the subject for a fucking century. I feel like every six pages he does something thoroughly impressive and I get simultaneously excited by what I’m reading and seriously disheartened by my lack of anything impressive in my short life. The only consolation is that Teddy seems not to be planning much of it out in advance, just being totally admirable in any given situation.

Then there’s Giaconda Belli, the rich and aristocratic housewife in Leon, Nicaragua, who starts writing poetry and drifts into the artistic circles, and becomes first a Sandinista supporter, then agent, then major player, and she’s having meetings with Ortega and Castro in the 70s. In 79, when they finally did overthrow Somoza, she was 31.

Oh, and Raphael Nadal just won his record-tying sixth French Open Championship. He’s only ever lost one match at the tournament. He’s 25. He won his first at 19.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez published the Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor at 27, the same year a publisher accepted Leaf Storm.

When Hunter Thompson was 21, he got himself (somehow) honorably discharged from the Air Force, drove from Eglin AFB in Florida to Jersey Shore, PA, got a job with a paper there, and had to skip town a week or two later when he broke the office vending machine, crashed his boss’s car, and make some unwelcome advances at the daughter of a prominent citizen in town.

Obviously I’m not doing myself any favors, when it comes to trying to make decisions for my upcoming blank page of a life, by surrounding myself with the stories of these people. I’m sure many people find this kind of stuff inspiring, and I do sometimes, today just might be a kvetching day for me. (Are the any appreciable differences between “kvetching” and “bitching?”)

I think over the past year and a half (although thoroughly declining through 2011 so far) I had a desire to be great, or famous, or as Teddy would put it “big.” I feel genuinely embarrassed at even mentioning that; I’ve never been comfortable with that kind of egotism.  But I did want to be famous, preferably as a writer, at a young age, which would then provide me the opportunity of growing old and becoming some sort of elder statesman figure for a group or organization. I just blushed typing that, I think.

To say that my paradigm has shifted is a bit of an understatement. Right now I’m focusing on deciding if I’m staying it Pittsburgh after my lease is up or running to the West in a desperate attempt to feel like I’m doing something. I need a job. I need an apartment. Hopefully even a little sense of fulfillment. There’s no room or desire for fame or prestige in this.

Like I said earlier, the consolation of Teddy’s story is that he doesn’t seem to have planned anything too far in advance. He rolled with it, and god damn it I’m gonna roll with it too.