Often we are utterly inert before the mysteries of our lives, why we are where we are, and the precise nature of the journey that brought us to the present. This is not surprising as most lives are too uneventful to be clearly recalled or they are embellished with events that are fibs to the one who owns the life. A few weeks ago I found a quote in my bedside journal, obviously tinged with night herself, saying, “We all live on death row in cells of our own devising.” Some would object, blaming the world for their pathetic condition. “We are born free but everywhere man is in chains.” I don’t believe I ever felt like a victim and so prefer the idea that we write our own screenplays. The form or genre of the screenplay is too severely compromised for honest results. You are obligated to write scenes that people will want to see, and “Jim, head in hands, spent an entire three days thinking” won’t work. It’s on the order of the oft-repeated slogan of the stupid, “I don’t know much but I know what I think.” Many years ago when I flunked out of graduate school, it occurred to me that the cause of this outrageous pratfall was the personality I had built. It all started when I decided at age fourteen to spend my life as a poet. There weren’t any living examples in northern Michigan so I gathered what information I could, mostly fictional, and usually painters. Painters’ lives can be fascinating, poets’ less so. But both were at the top of the arts list. If I was tempestuous and living in a garret in New York or Paris I would look better with smears of paint on my rugged clothing than lint and dandruff. So I read dozens of books on poets and painters to give me hints on what kind of personality I should have. I even painted for nearly a year to add to the verisimilitude. I was a terrible painter, totally without talent, but I was arrogant, captious, and crazy so I convinced friends I was indeed an artist. This was just before the beatnik craze began, the motto being “If you can’t be an artist, you can at least look like one.” I tried to copy the paintings of old masters but on El Greco’s View of Toledo I ran out of canvas halfway across Toledo. This was poor planning not poor art. What embarrassment though no one knew but my younger sister Judy who was into my art fever and burned red candles and played Berlioz while I worked. The model of course is the romantic artist, possibly the curse of my life in the way it tripped me and made me fall flat on my face over and over. Luckily my genetic mix of generations of farmers also gave me a desire for hard work so I was rarely unemployed. My dad said, “You’ll always get by if you’re a good shovel man.”
The “everything is permitted” confusion has pretty much lasted my entire life. Of course it’s nonsense but then the ego is beleaguered without its invented fuel and ammunition. You can’t squeak out like a mouse that you’re a poet, or walk in the mincing steps of a Japanese prostitute. Part of the trouble is that you are liable to think of yourself as a poet long before you write anything worth reading and you have to keep this ego balloon up in the air with your imagination. I survived on both good and very bad advice. Doubtless the best is Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and possibly the worst, which I religiously adhered to, was that of Arthur Rimbaud who advised you to imagine your vowels had colors and for you to go through the complete disordering of all your senses, which is to say you should become crazy. I managed quite easily. This was mostly to advise young poets not to become bourgeois. Even conservative old Yeats said that the hearth is more dangerous than alcohol. I feel recalcitrant about this having had a number of friends that are dead alcoholics. We’ve always lived rurally where it is much easier to avoid being bourgeois. The natural world draws you to herself with such power that you can easily ignore the rest of the culture and social obligations. When I was eighteen I found an Italian poet I liked, Giuseppe Ungaretti. He wrote, Vorremmo una certezza (give us a certainty), which is bad advice but understandable if you just lived through World War II. He admitted, Ho popolato di nomi il silenzio (I have peopled the silence with names). Also, Ho fatto a pezzi cuore e mente per cadere in servitu di parole (I have fragmented heart and mind to fall into the servitude of words). Of course. That’s what you do. You might still be gibbering in your casket.
All over America young people are going to bad writers for good advice. There are so many MFA programs in the colleges and there are not enough good writers around to teach in them. As opposed to what you might think, teaching is brutally hard work if you insist on doing a good job. And your own work is liable to suffer.
Money is the vicious whirl, a trap you are unlikely to live through in a healthy way. If you subtract screenplays I didn’t make a living as a writer until my sixties. When I quit screenwriting to save my life my French rights moved in to save me.
In a lifetime of walking in the woods, plains, gullies, mountains I have found that the body has no more vulnerable sense than being lost. I don’t mean dangerously lost where my life was in peril but totally misdirected knowing there was a lifesaving log nine miles to the north. If you’re already tired you don’t want to walk nine miles, much of it in the dark. If you run into a tree it doesn’t move. I usually have a compass, also the sun or moon or stars. It’s happened often enough that I don’t feel panic. I feel absolutely vulnerable and recognize it’s the best state of mind for a writer whether in the woods or the studio. Your mind feels a rush of images and ideas. You have acquired humility by accident.
Feeling bright-eyed, confident, and arrogant doesn’t do this job unless you’re writing the memoir of a narcissist. You are far better off being lost in your work and writing over your head. You don’t know where you are as a point of view unless you go beyond yourself. It has been said that there is an intense similarity in people’s biographies. It’s our dreams and visions that separate us. You don’t want to be writing unless you’re giving your life to it. You should make a practice of avoiding all affiliations that might distract you. After fifty-five years of marriage it might occur to you it was the best idea of a lifetime. The sanity of a good marriage will enable you to get your work done.