“[H]e was a writer, an imaginer. He had never met one—including himself—who had more than the vaguest idea of why he or she did anything.”
—Stephen King, The Dark Half
Welcome, creatures! It’s been a little while. Partly I’ve been frantically trying to find an apartment. Partly I just don’t always have that many thoughts! I try to make this newsletter adhere to Mr. Ed’s great principle: “Mister Ed will never speak/Unless he has something to say.”
And partly I’ve been gnawing my way through Mariam Petrosyan’s fantastic novel The Gray House, in Yuri Machkasov’s translation. It’s an immersive novel set in an institution for disabled children, but also set in that institution’s dreamlike Underside. It’s a big book and although it’s full of incident and adventure, it doesn’t read quickly, because it’s studded all over with clues to its many puzzles. And beneath the puzzles there are layers upon layers of mystery. Beneath the questions about what happened to the kindhearted administrator Elk, or whether the eager newcomer Grasshopper still lives in the House, or what Striders and Jumpers are, there are questions like: How do we make sense of the Wonderland world into which each of us is shoved at birth, in which every word and action seems to cast a shadow of some hidden second meaning? Why does time only go one way—or does it? Do we invent our traditions to help us cope with grief, or are they unwanted, necessary gifts from a capricious universe?
It’s an institutional novel, and therefore always penetrated by the inexplicable, the absurd, the degraded, and the mystical. In this case it’s also about a culture run by mostly-feral children. I’ll be reviewing it shortly but I hope this is enough to convince you that you want to read it now.
I cut in two/a long November night/with the help of a bunch of maids who won’t be appearing in this poem.
A while ago I went to (part of) the Hokusai exhibit at the Freer. They’re opening it in parts until its full opening August 28. You should hit it, he’s magnificent and funny. And in one room they’ve got selections from his illustrations for One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each—but the Hokusai series adds the impeccable appendix that these poems are Explained by the Wet Nurse.
I don’t actually know if Hokusai was even supposed to “illustrate” the poetry in the sense of showing you what happens in it. But what struck me about this selection was that the poems described actions that seemed to occur spontaneously, often in an atmosphere of loneliness or solitude… and then the pictures, or explanations by the wet nurse!, are just crammed with servants. Like, the poem will be all (this is from my notes, so I apologize for mistranscriptions):
No one visits me
except the autumn leaves,
which a) that’s so haunting, and on the other hand here’s Hokusai showing the unvisited autumnal fellow watching his servants wash his horse and feed his chickens.
Just like the moon
you had come and gone
before I knew it,
and the picture has people hauling big boxes on poles, hefting bags, shouldering bundles, all the necessities of poignant arrival and ethereal leavetaking.
...I will surely die alone
of a broken heart,
but like, my good lady, what does it mean to say that you’re alone when just below the windows of the bedchamber in which you languish there’s four women working a huge spindle?
The spindle women are the foreground, which you can make into an argument for the primacy of comedy over tragedy if you’d like to. Plautus says that the introduction of a slave turns the same play from tragedy to tragicomedy. Do we like this argument? It looks like it’s degrading, but I’m not sure it has to be. Comedy and tragedy are both ways of living through reversals, mistaken identity, just or unjust punishment. Would you be ok with living in a comedy and not a tragedy, even if it meant you had to be a servant or a clown?
Where do you get your ideas, and why can’t you leave them there?
Last night I finished Stephen King’s The Dark Half, about a writer whose pseudonym comes to life and tries to kill him and everybody he loves. I like King generally, but I picked this one up because it’s the one he wrote while he was really in the throes of quitting drugs and alcohol. And yeah, there’s a certain slight rise in temperature whenever some addictive substance comes onstage in the book, though not that much, honestly.
And the novel is clumsy in certain very un-Kinglike ways, which perhaps reflects personal upheaval. It feels padded, especially in the long midsection, whereas King’s great gift is that he can knock out these vast wunderkammers of horror where every single scene feels necessary. The main woman character is a flimsy plot device who exists to support her man and be threatened by his Other Side. The novel feels weird toward women in general, with a lot of heavily gendered judgmental language getting thrown around in a way which is probably period-typical but no fun, and usually handled by King with more self-awareness.
On the one hand I don’t want to think of myself as somebody who psychologizes everything or makes novels into cartoon autobiographies of the author. On the other hand I literally did pick this thing up to see if it resonated with my own experience of addiction and sobriety. It super did! I have no idea if King had this in mind when he was writing, but the idea of burying the part of you that wrote your most popular stuff—because it’s evil, but still, don’t you want it back? Don’t you need it back?—has a pretty clear parallel in the fear many alcoholic writers have that if we quit drinking we won’t be able to work. I was afraid of this. I had to reach a point where I was desperate enough to quit drinking that I would quit writing too if that was what it took. In the end I drafted both Gay and Catholic and Amends in my first year of sobriety, n.b. your mind lies to you a lot. In general the writing I’ve done in sobriety is better than the writing I did while drinking, although I hope I’ve stolen some treasures from the thirsty muse, and carried them out of her drowned kingdom into light.
I didn’t notice this until the very end, but The Dark Half is suffused with shame. And while you might expect to find shame attached to addiction, in this book it clings instead to imagination. The literary writer Thad Beaumont is ashamed of his violent, cruel creation, the living pseudonym George Stark. And the narrative basically says he’s right to be! Stark is everything that lives in the slimy, lightless places in the imagination—and Thad chose to set him free. They are twins, they are bound up in one another’s lives, and the gory decay that grips Stark is a living image of Thad’s unseen imagination. At least Stark suppurates openly instead of hiding behind the plausible deniability of fiction!
The book isn’t quite that neat. One of the smart, weird touches in an intermittently smart but always weird book is that Stark can somehow borrow or participate in or emanate the scent of Thad’s gentleness. It means a lot that in the aftermath of the book’s climax, Thad reaches out to a character to comfort him with a hug.
But it means more that the character he tries to touch steps away from him. And thinks, “Standing next to you is like standing next to a cave some nightmarish creature came out of.”
We always want to say that what we write is fiction; it’s costume, not nakedness. A novel is not a cavity search. Stephen King basically shrug-emojis this, says, But what if it is though. And then writes The Dark Half, to resist and display his fear of exposure.
icymi
I wrote about the slow congealing of a lot of different storylines into the narrative trope of the “redemption arc.” Why did we make this thing a trope? Can you love stories of redemption and reject redemption arc discourse? (Yes. Yes you can!)
Now Playing
Kimya Dawson, “The Beer.” And the beer I had for lunch was my crazy neighbor’s pills/We had to sit on our skateboards just to make it down the hill.
Image: Eyeball in my martini, via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.