Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life

  Here is a dream-vision of singular vividness and strangeness. It would seem almost, by the young writer’s account, that the allegorical horror story/moral parable had not been imagined into being by the author herself. Rather, Mary Shelley is the passive observer; the vision seems to come from a source not herself. Yet, we are led to think, knowing something of the biographical context of the creation of Frankenstein, that it can hardly have been an accident that a tale of a monstrous birth was written by a very young woman who’d had two babies with her mercurial and unpredictable poet-lover Percy Shelley, one of whom had died, and was very much pregnant again. And, they were not (yet) married.

  Following this dream, Mary Shelley spoke of being “possessed” by her subject. (Though neither Byron nor Shelley responded fruitfully to Byron’s challenge, their companion and friend John Polidori wrote one of the first vampire novels, The Vampyre [1819].) At first Mary Shelley had thought that her lurid gothic tale would be just a short story but, in time, as the manuscript evolved, the work became a curious, heavily Miltonic allegorical romance, rejected by both Shelley’s and Byron’s publishers, who knew that the author was a young woman; and finally published, anonymously, in 1818, when the author was twenty-one. Since then, Frankenstein has never been out of print and is surely the most extraordinary novel ever written by an eighteen-year-old girl in thrall to a brilliant but doomed Romantic poet.

  Today, “Frankenstein” isn’t identified as the doctor-creator of the monster, but the monster himself: the “hideous phantasm.” And Mary Shelley’s brilliantly deformed creation has been detached from the author, an iconic figure seemingly self-generated; one of the great, potent symbols of humankind’s predilection for self-destruction, as significant in our time as in 1818.

  Another horrific dream-inspiration some sixty years later is the great mythic parable of the Victorian era, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1885), the quintessential expression of humankind’s tragic doubleness; or, at least, the criminal hypocrisy of Victorian gentlemen. Like numerous poets and writers of the Romantic and Victorian era, Robert Louis Stevenson, suffering from tuberculosis, “self-medicated” (as we would say today) with laudanum, an alcoholic tincture of opium with a trace of morphine. It is known that opium provokes astonishing dreams and nightmares, and so Stevenson experienced a “fine bogey tale” one night in 1885, from which his wife, Fanny, had to wake him; inspired by the dream, Stevenson wrote a story within three days, which his wife so disliked as “overly sensational,” he destroyed it. But the story haunted him, and Stevenson composed another version, also feverishly, and also within three days; narrated by the “lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable” lawyer Utterson, the very emblem of Victorian propriety and dullness, the lurid tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde bursts free of its restraints in its final chapter, “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case”—the Victorian gentleman’s acknowledgment of his animal-self, and the “condescension to evil that . . . destroyed the balance of my soul.”

  It seems significant that Stevenson’s dream-inspired novel was written while the author was confined to his bed in an entranced state; that Jekyll speaks of Hyde as a being “within” him, as “intimate” as a wife, or an eye in its socket. It is a kind of miracle, though a hellish miracle—Jekyll gives birth to Hyde, as Stevenson the writer gives birth to both. We wonder who it is who speaks so passionately: “My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.”

  Social injustice as inspiration. The wish to “bear witness” to those unable to speak for themselves, as a consequence of poverty, or illness, or political circumstances, which includes gender and ethnic identity. The wish to conjoin narrative fiction with the didactic and the preacherly. Above all, the wish to move others to a course of action—the basis of political, propaganda-art. Here we have such works as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. (Sinclair, an avid lifelong Socialist, wrote nearly one hundred books of which the majority are novels involving politics and social conditions in the United States; among these are Oil! [from which the much-acclaimed 2007 film There Will Be Blood was adapted] and the Lanny Budd series of eleven novels, each a best seller when it was published. Dragon’s Teeth was awarded the 1943 Pulitzer Prize.) Frank Norris’s McTeague and The Octopus are savage critiques of rapacious American capitalism; “class war” might be identified as the groundwork of such novels of Theodore Dreiser as Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy and of John Dos Passos’s hugely influential USA. In the era of Dreiser there were few women writing of life in urban ghettos with the intelligence and emotional power of Anzia Yesierska whose Bread Givers, Hungry Hearts, and How I Found America: Collected Stories chronicle the lives of Jewish immigrants of New York City’s Lower East Side with unflinching candor.

  This is the sort of socially conscious “realistic” fiction that Nabokov scorned as vulgar (“Mediocrity thrives on ‘ideas’”) and of which Oscar Wilde would have said with a sneer (“No artist has ethical sympathies. . . . All art is quite useless”) (Oscar Wilde, Preface, The Picture of Dorian Gray). Still, mainstream American literature with its predilection for liberal sympathies with the disenfranchised and impoverished, the great effort of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel to draw attention to social injustice and inequality, remains the most attractive of literary traditions even in our self-consciously postmodernist era. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for instance, slave narrative sources have been appropriated and refashioned into an exquisitely wrought art that is both morally focused and aesthetically ambitious.

  From his early novel imaginatively reconstructing the lives of the “atom bomb spies” Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, The Book of Daniel, through the much-acclaimed Ragtime, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, and The March E. L. Doctorow has taken for his subject the volatile issues of class and race in America; his more recent novels have been shaped by oral histories. “Every writer speaks for a community.” (Doctorow, Paris Review interview.)

  No one has spoken more explicitly of his political/moral intention in writing a work of fiction than Russell Banks in his “Envoie” to the novel Continental Drift, which concerns itself, like most of Bank’s fiction, with working-class and disenfranchised Americans caught up in the malaise of a rapacious capitalist economy:

  And so ends the story of Robert Raymond Dubus, a decent man, but in all the important ways an ordinary man. One could say a common man. Even so, his bright particularity, having been delivered over to the obscurity of death, meant something larger than itself. . . .

  Knowledge of the facts of Bob’s life and death changes nothing in the world. Our celebrating his life and grieving over his death, however, will. . . . Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book’s intentions. Go, my book, and destroy the world as it is.

  James Joyce once remarked that Ulysses was for him essentially a way of “capturing the speech of my father and my father’s friends”—an astonishing statement when you consider the complexity of Ulysses, but one which any writer can understand. So much of literature springs from a wish to assuage homesickness, a desire to commemorate places, people, childhoods, family and tribal rituals, ways of life—surely the primary inspiration of all: the wish, in some artists clearly the necessity, to capture in the quasi-permanence of art that which is perishable in life. Though the great Modernists—(Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Lawrence, Woolf, Faulkner)—were revolutionaries in technique, their subjects were intimately bound up with their own lives and their own regions; the Modernist is one who is likely to use his intimate life as material for his art, shaping the ordinary into the extraordinary. The Confessional poets—Robert Lowell, John Berryman, W. D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath—to a degree, Elizabeth Bishop—rendered their lives as art, as if self-hypnotized. Of our contemporaries, writers as seemingly diverse as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike created distinguished careers out of their lives, often ret
urning to familiar subjects, lovingly and tirelessly reimagining their own pasts as if mesmerized by the wonder of “self.” In his last, most obsessively self-reflective work, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Vladimir Nabokov evokes the intense claustrophobia of a “super-imperial couple” who not only inhabit the same psychic realm but, boldly and audaciously, are also intimately related: sister and brother. Set in a whimsical counterworld, “Antiterra,” Nabokov’s commemoration of self is finally, and literally, incestuous.

  No writer has been more mesmerized by the circumstances of his own, exceptional life than our greatest Transcendentalist poet Henry David Thoreau who wrote exclusively, obsessively of his “self” as an adventurer in a circumscribed world—“I have traveled much in Concord,” as Thoreau famously said. Walden is the publicly revered text but it is Thoreau’s Journal, in which he wrote daily from 1837 to 1861, eventually accumulating some seven thousand pages, that is the more remarkable document, as Thoreau is the most acute of observers of nature and of human nature; an analyst of his “self” in the Whitmanesque sense, the “self” that is all selves, the transcendent universal. Here is the essential Thoreau, in the essay “Ktaadn and the Maine Woods”:

  I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one . . . but I fear bodies. . . . Talk of mysteries!—Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The Common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we? “”

  The early Surrealists considered the world a vast “forest of signs” to be interpreted by the individual artist. Beneath its apparent disorder the visual world contains messages and symbols—like a dream? Is the world a collective dream? Not the hypnotic spell of the individual artist’s childhood, family, regional life—(as in the inspiration of commemoration)—but rather its antithesis, the impersonal, the chance, the “found.” The Surrealist photographer Man Ray wandered Parisian streets with his camera, anticipating nothing and leaving himself open to disponibilité, or availability/chance. The most striking Surrealist images were ordinary images made strange by being decontextualized—“Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table.” (André Breton appropriating metaphor of Lautréamont.) When photography began to be an art that didn’t depend upon careful staging in a studio, or even outdoors, it was discovered to be ideally suited to the caprices of opportunity; the artist wanders into the world, armed with just his camera, freed from the confines of the predictable and the controlled as in the work of Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, Bruce Davidson, Garry Winogrand, the newly discovered Vivian Maier, Diane Arbus (whose strategy was “to go where I’ve never been”), (quote from “Diane Arbus’s ‘Dark Secrets,’” Daily Beast, online), and numerous others.

  Literature is not a medium that lends itself well to the Surrealist adventure of disponibilité. Even radically experimental fiction requires some strategy of causation, otherwise readers won’t trouble to turn pages—unlike most visual art, which can be experienced in a single gaze, fiction is a matter of subsequent and successive gazes, mimicking chronological time, as it is locked into chronological time. (A rare exception is William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch with its “cut-up” method of a discontinuous and disjointed narrative appropriate to a drug-addled consciousness for whom hallucination is more natural than coherence.) There is a very minor tradition of “found poems” discovered in unpoetic places like newspapers, magazines, advertisements and graffiti, instruction manuals, and brochures. Virtually all poets have experimented with “found poems” at some point in their careers, sometimes appropriating entire passages of prose into a poem, more often appropriating a few lines and constructing a poem around these lines, as in work by Howard Nemerov, Charles Olson, Blaise Cendrars, and Charles Reznikoff among others. A “found poem” gem is Annie Dillard’s appropriation of a manual titled Prehospital Emergency Care and Crisis Intervention (1989) which the poet has fashioned into a suite of short poems titled “Emergencies.”

  “Answer”

  If death is imminent either

  On the scene or in the ambulance,

  Be supportive and reassuring

  To the patient, but do not lie.

  If a patient asks, “I’m dying,

  Aren’t I?” respond

  With something like, “You

  Have some very serious injuries,

  But I’m not giving up on you.”

  More often found poetry is meant to be satirical or witty, or mordantly ironic, as in Hart Seely’s appropriated material titled Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld (2003). Here is a complete poem by Rumsfeld/Seely:

  “The Unknown”

  As we know,

  There are known knowns.

  There are things we know we know.

  We also know

  There are known unknowns.

  That is to say

  We know there are some things

  We do not know.

  But there are also unknown unknowns.

  The ones we don’t know

  We don’t know.

  If inspiration is many-faceted, out of what human need—or hunger—does inspiration spring?

  That’s to say, what is the motive for metaphor?

  It seems clear that Homo sapiens is the only species to have anything like language, and certainly the only species to have written languages, “histories.” Our sense of ourselves is based upon linguistic constructs, inherited, or remembered, and regarded as precious or at least valuable; our sacred texts are presumed to have been dictated by gods, and sometimes we are fired with murderous rage if these texts are challenged or mocked, or if our creator’s name is uttered in the wrong way, or by the wrong lips. Perhaps literature in its broader sense, incorporating centuries, millennia, as a consequence of myriad individual inspirations across myriad cultures, relates to us as that part of the human brain called the hippocampus relates to memory.

  The hippocampus is a small, sea horse-shaped part of the brain necessary for long-term storage of factual and experiential memory, though it is not the site of such storage. Short-term memory is transient—long-term memory can prevail for many decades: the last thing you will be able to retrieve in your memory may well be the first thing that came to reside there—a glimpse of your young mother’s face, a confused blur of a childhood room, a lullaby, a caressing voice. If the hippocampus is injured or atrophied, there will be no further storage of memory in the brain—there will be no new memory. I have come to think that art is the formal commemoration of life in its variety—the novel, for instance, is “historic” in its embodiment in a specific place and time, and its suggestion that there is meaning to our actions; it is virtually impossible to create art without an inherent meaning, even if that meaning is presented as mysterious and unknowable.

  Without the stillness, thoughtfulness, and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture—no collective memory; as, if memory is destroyed in the human brain, our identities corrode, and we “are” no one—we become merely a shifting succession of impressions attached to no fixed source. As it is, in contemporary societies, where so much concentration is focused upon social media, insatiable in its fleeting interests, the “stillness and thoughtfulness” of a more permanent art feels threatened. As human beings we crave “meaning”—which only art can provide; but the social media provide no meaning, only this succession of fleeting impressions whose underlying principle may simply be to urge us to consume products.

  The motive for metaphor, then, is a motive for survival as a species, as a culture, and as individuals.

  THIS I BELIEVE:

  Five Motives for Writing

  It is a very self-conscious thing, to speak of one’s “credo.”

  I think that most writers and artists love their work, which of cour
se we don’t consider “work”—exactly. As artists love the basic materials of their art—(paints, charcoal, clay, marble)—so writers love the basic materials of their art—(language).

  Many visual artists have no “credo” at all. They offer no “artist’s statement.” And they consider those who do to be somewhat suspicious, if not frankly duplicitous.

  The oracular, pontificating, self-aggrandizing vatic voice—how hollow it sounds, to others! There are great poets, including even Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, who might have known better, who have fallen into such hollowness, as one might fall into a bog.

  Recall D. H. Lawrence’s admonition—Never trust the teller, trust the tale.

  Criticism, as distinct from literature, or “creative” writing, has often been aligned with a particular moral, political, religious sensibility. The 1950s were perceived, proudly and without irony, as an Age of Criticism—at least, by critics. (It does seem rather narrow to define the 1950s as an age of criticism when writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor among numerous others were publishing frequently.) Criticism is more naturally a kind of preaching, or propaganda; there are systems of belief underlying most criticism, intent upon rewarding those who confirm the critic’s core beliefs and punishing those who don’t. But “creative” artists resist defining their beliefs so overtly, as one might wish not to wear one’s clothing inside-out revealing seams and stitches.