Last week I wrote about lifting Karen Blixen’s line “I had a farm in Africa” for the opening of my novel, Ahmed’s Revenge (Random House, 1998), so I thought this week might be a good time to discuss finding the seeds of fictive worlds in what we somewhat blithely call “real life,” and also springboards.
And for that I need to talk about two of my uncles and my maternal grandmother, whom I loved as deeply as she loved me.
The two uncles were the youngest children of that grandmother, Cassie Morgan, and their names were Frank and Jack. Jack was killed at the age of nineteen, on Guam during World War II, and Frank came home from the same war a broken man, with what modern parlance would call PTSD. He was in and out of jail, spent time at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary - only a four or so miles down Puget Sound from my boat ramp - and drowned at the age of fifty-something in a Minnesota lake.
But man, what nine-year-old kid wouldn’t want to take the stories of both those uncles to school for “Show and Tell”? I know I did! I had my Uncle Jack’s Silver Star and Purple Heart to show, and Uncle Frank… Well, Uncle Frank was in prison!
The love between Grandma and me, by the way, even got a sly recognition on her gravestone.
Now I’d like to share a short excerpt from a novel I finished recently and then talk about its “truths” and its fictional springboards.
Here’s the excerpt:
I was nine years old and in bed with my grandmother, in the rundown old house where my parents often parked me, when I first got the feeling that I had been there before, also at nine years old, but some decades earlier.
Grandma’s dentures were in a jar on the edge of her sink in the bathroom. I could see them through a partially open door and through the moonlight. We were together in her twin bed. The other bed was empty because Grandpa was in the hospital. When he was home I slept in the living room, but I’d begged Grandma to let me sleep with her that night, not only because I was afraid in the living room, but because I loved her as much as it was possible to love another person, and she, though she had lots of other grandchildren, loved me in that same way. My mother’s theory on it was that Grandma lost her youngest son, Cornelius, four months before my birth, and therefore transferred her love for him to me. I heard a ton of stories about him, he was my mother’s youngest brother, after all, but I didn’t begin to get the idea that I might actually be my dead uncle, until that night.
“All I ask of God is that He let me live until Grandpa passes,” said Grandma. “Then I think my work on earth, this time around, anyhow, will be done.”
When she said “this time around,” I looked at her teeth again, grinning at me through the side of that jar. According to Grandma, the life she was living wasn’t her first by a long shot. She’d been a Union soldier during the Civil War, a cook at Buckingham Palace, and a concubine in Kyoto, Japan - a life she said exhausted her. There were other lives, too, but they had mostly been marked by disease and early death, so she didn’t talk about them very much.
The “truths” in the excerpt are: Grandma’s twin bed with both of us in it; her incredible, indelible, dentures in that jar; my fear of sleeping in the living room and that Grandpa was in the hospital; that Grandma asked God to let her live until after Grandpa died (she died first); plus our love for each other and my mother’s theory as to why.
And its fictive elements, which allow the boy telling the story to no longer be me: his inkling that he had been there before, some decades earlier; his uncle’s name turning from Jack to Cornelius; the sense that he might be his dead uncle; and his grandmother’s belief that she’d had many past lives, most particularly (sorry Grandma!) as a concubine in Kyoto.
Those 329 words start the novel.
All I knew, before I wrote them, was that the book would be set in Kyoto in 1972, where a twenty-five year old Cornelius goes in search of a love akin to that which he had with his grandmother - an impossible thing! - that he would have a sense of lives lived previously, and - in order for that to carry the necessary verisimilitude - that the seeds of it had to be planted in his (my?) grandmother’s story.
Why Kyoto and why1972?
Simply because I had already published two “Japan” novels and wanted a triumvirate. Plus, I lived in Japan in the 1970s, so wasn’t likely to mess up my representation of it… with a little research I could ‘stick my landing,’ if you will, on several seminal events.
Interestingly, to me at least, the ‘Cornelius’ of that as-yet unpublished novel - Cornelius on Love - kept on pestering me once the novel was done, until I made him a central protagonist in my soon-to-be-published The Grievers’ Group, where, fifty years later, he loses the woman he met and married in the earlier novel, in Kyoto.
That’s a good springboard whether the initial novel sees the light of day or not, right?
The upshot, then, of last week’s and this week’s posting, is that fiction writers steal what they can steal, borrow what they can borrow, and then invent narrators who make up the rest of the story.
Ian McEwan listened to his father’s war stories and wrote Atonement.
Tobias Wolff took notes about his childhood for This Boy’s Life.
Ray Carver used to say that writing is a little autobiography and a lot of imagination.
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?
Why did I mention my Uncle Frank, you might ask, if he had no part in this essay?
Because there is a nine-year-old boy inside of me, who still thinks it’s cool that he was in prison.
I was also a Union solider in the Civil War and was killed in my very first battle before I had fired a single shot at the enemy.
As an author one or two generations after yours (I'm still a little fuzzy on what constitutes a generation--people are born every day, or so they tell me), this post was such a refreshing chance to remember that fiction--indeed all literary prose, especially when it's narrative--is art. Culture and technology keep trying to convince us that if we're not trying to make a point or win an argument, we're essentially wasting our time. Which is a difficult perspective to turn into a story that has room for a real metaphor, even one as vivid, simple and real as Grandma's dentures.