Nathaniel Brodie: Before the Infinite Play of the World

Northern Burma, a gang of bricklayers blasting traditional folk music out of an antique boombox. I stood there, my ears agape. Utter disbelief. Is this…music? It wasn’t so much the strange stringed and wind instruments but that the sound lacked what I associated as rhythm or harmony. It was all jangly discord, tinny chaos, alien tonalities, composed by a mind that worked at different angles and slants.  I was to hear it for months and never quite get it, never understand it. Once only, hanging off the back of a passenger lorry, did I catch myself enjoying it, understanding it, and then I realized that it was a Chinese cover of John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High.”

Dream: a boy with flies for teeth.

The Myth of Hermaphroditic Hyenas “undoubtedly arose when people noticed that hyenas with large pendulous udders (indicating they were obviously females) could suddenly develop impressive phallic erections such that they also looked like males. Interestingly, although a female spotted hyena has a uterus and ovaries internally, externally she does in fact appear to have “masculinized” genitalia. That is, the female’s clitoris is enormously elongated to form a fully erectile pseudopenis through which she urinates, copulates, and gives birth. “--www.hyaenidae.org

Amygdala: part of the brain pinged by, say, the word “fuck.” 

 “The fact that I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless.” –S. Dali

Fiona Wren’s first day of daycare and she can’t stop hugging the other kids.  Like that part in Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, when Jane placed a bunch of bananas in a clearing and two chimps came ambling up and spied the trove and stopped and broke out in huge grins and threw their arms around each other and started jumping up and down and hooting in delight, their arms still around each other, the celebration going on for a good couple of minutes before they even moved towards the bananas. But not really like that: the other kids don’t hug Fio back. They just stand there, and then eventually both of them topple over, and the other kid cries, and Fio’s like, what?

 “...a woman who was born with only stumps at her shoulders, and yet, as far back as she could remember, felt herself to have arms and hands; she even feels herself gesticulating as she speaks…People who for years had been unable to unclench their phantom fist suddenly felt their hand open; phantom limbs in painfully contoured positions could relax”—Atul Gawande, New Yorker, 6/30/2008

Sam Cooke played a Bob Dylan album to Bobby Womack and Bobby didn’t get it and Sam had to explain to him that it was no longer about how the music sounded or the singer’s voice but about believing that that voice was telling the truth.

Idiom: “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.”

When I fish I catch everything but fish. This doesn’t bother me, as perhaps the catch is not the point, but perhaps I should not call it fishing. Searching, maybe. Once on the slow brown Chehalis River I caught a river mussel. It had clamped its shell around my wormed hook. The same river, different day, I caught a rough skinned newt, though it was just stubbornly clenching the worm as I reeled it in. Today, as white-bellied swallows skimmed the surface of the lake, I cast and cast and caught a leaf. A brown, decomposed, soggy leaf that ever so slowly sank back down and out of sight. Searching.

Chinese eunuchs traditionally preserved their “bao”—their severed, pickled genitals—in a jar and carried them in a bag hung on their belt. This way, if a eunuch died he had his genitals on him and could be buried with them and be reincarnated as a "full man."

Airplaned next to a man whose mustache resembled a cumulonimbus cloud.

Barthes: “the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world  is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages.”

Listening to James Brown, Live at the Olympia, Paris, 1971, good stuff, and just realized that those moments when he is not gasping, grunting, shouting, or singing, but the band is still laying it down thick and the roar of the crowd picks up…it’s because he’s dancing. And it’s wonderful, ‘cause you can’t see it, don’t need to see it,  what’s lacking in the medium is present in your head: James Brown dancing the Buttered Popcorn or The James Brown, that fancy footwork, that effort, that sweat, that’s enough, that’s always enough, one of those emissions that is in fact a universe, an opening…

Dream: fucked her upsidedown.

Hungover. Something is disturbing the crow in the bigleaf maple outside the window—the morning light on yellow leaves against its black feathers, perhaps. It won’t stop screaming. Maybe the dump truck will scare it away. No, crows know dumptrucks. It barks anew. 

Watched Godfather II again last night. So many classic scenes, but the one sticking with me this morning was when Vito Corleone is sacked from his job as a grocer’s assistant because the local gangster wants the position for his nephew. Vito, confused at first, quickly grasps the situation and stops the grocer’s hand-wringing apologies with a firm “I understand; you have been good to me, and I thank you.”  No sniveling, complaining, self-pitying: nothing but calm, gracious, masculinity. Being a man might be confused with giving it, but taking it is the true measure of a man. Like Jesus. That’s what I aspire to, even if, every so often, I feel like Fredo whining “I can handle things! I’m smart! Not like everybody says…like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!”

Howlin’ Wolf, classic 1950s Chicago Bluesman, 6’6 and 300 lbs, real name Chester Arthur Burnett.  His childhood idol was Jimmie Rodgers, and it was by trying to mimic Rodgers’ blueyodel that the Wolf developed his howl. Sam Phillips, of Sun Records fame, said:"When I heard Howlin' Wolf, I said, 'This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.' That’s how I felt when I read Hoagland’s “Learning to Eat Soup.” This is for me. Like a window thrown open wide. Like, “here, relax.” I didn’t care what it meant or didn’t. Later I read that Hoagland just selected various quotes and passages from his twenty-years-in-the-making, 500-page journal. The soul of a man.

Marx assumed that the notion of reconciliation was obsolete and added that all we can expect of our artists today is their acknowledgement of the impossibility of resolution.

*

Nathaniel Brodie received his MFA from the University of Arizona. Brodie served as an Agricultural Extension Agent in the Peace Corps (Paraguay) for two years, and has worked as a carpenter, farmer, backcountry stone mason, journalist, and beekeeper. His essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, High Country News, Terrain.org, and other publications. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon. 

Brian Doyle: It is a Shaggy World, Studded with Gardens

No man ever yearned more for a “hard & active life out-of-doors” than the great Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), and few men ever faced such an endless litany of ills keeping him, generally, from the wild world he loved so. (“My body which my dungeon is…,” as he wrote.) Yet the frail Stevenson, the most popular writer of his time, was able to catch and celebrate the vigorous natural world in work that ranged freely in genre (novels, essays, letters, stories, poems, fables, tracts, and prayers) and in setting—capturing the flavor variously of Scottish highlands, French countryside and mountains, Swiss alpine valleys, dense North American wilderness and plains, and the lush islands of the South Seas, where he spent the last six years of his brief and exuberant life.

Despite his spotty health, he spent much time in his adolescent years among the Scottish mountains and islands—hiking, sailing boats with friends, and working outdoors, one memorably strenuous summer, with his engineer father Thomas, the most talented in a family of engineers still famous for building lighthouses along the Scottish coast. After college he began to write, and his first books were Thoreauvian accounts of his travels through wild country – a canoe trip through rural France, which became An Inland Voyage, and then a long hike in the French mountains, which became Travels with a Donkey. The wild Scottish Highlands and coat he loved starred in his novels Kidnapped and The Merry Men, and the deep forests of New York’s Adirondack Mountains, where he spent one bitterly cold winter, are the setting for much of The Master of Ballantrae.

Everywhere he went he clapped his sharp eye on the land, and wrote of its temper and creatures with respect and affection. “The earthy savour of the bog-plants, the rude disorder of the boulders, the inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and the iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the isle, all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt with scarce a difference,” he wrote of the Scottish coast; and “it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens; where the salt and tumbling sea receives clear rivers running from among reeds and lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic world; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel,” of his native land as a whole.

Of the great plains of Nebraska, which he crossed by train, he wrote with amazement, “We were at sea—there is no other adequate expression. It was a world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board; on either hand, the green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven. Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers, no bigger than a crown-piece, bloomed in a continuous flower-bed; grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution…Day and night, above the roar of the train, our ears were kept busy with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers—a noise like the winding up of countless clocks and watches, which began after a while to seem proper to that land. To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration in this spacious vacancy, this greatness of the air, this discovery of the whole arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prison-line of the horizon…”

Of the Marquesas: “The land heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds. The suffusion of vague hues deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded with the articulations of the mountains; and the isle and its unsubstantial canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass…The cocoa-palm, that giraffe of vegetables, so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign, was to be seen crowding on the beach, and climbing and fringing the steep sides of mountains. In every crevice of that barrier the forest harboured, roosting and nestling there like birds about a ruin; and far above, it greened and roughened the razor edges of the summit.”

He was a student of the linguistics of the natural world: “The Scotch dialect is singularly rich in terms of reproach against the winter wind. Snell, blae, nirly, and scowthering are four of these significant vocables; they are all words that carry a shiver with them…the inclemency of heaven has thus endowed the language of Scotland with words…”

And he was eerily prescient of the future of the wild, too: “California has been a land of promise in its time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to perish, it may become, like Palestine, a land of desolation,” he wrote while living in Monterey. “We may look forward to a time when there will not be [a tree] left standing in that land… man in his short-sighted greed robs the country of the noble redwood. Yet a little while and perhaps all the hills of seaboard California may be as bald as Tamalpais...”

For nearly three years Stevenson wandered the Pacific, visiting the Marquesas, the Paumotus, the Hawaiian islands, the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Society islands, New Zealand, Australia, and the Navigator islands, better known collectively as Samoa. At each landfall he would wander briskly and joyfully into the forest and along the beaches, and spend many hours with residents; he was by all accounts an indefatigable walker and talker, no respecter of position or privilege, and so a man who explored nature and natives to a degree unusual among writers of his time. He and his wife finally settled in Samoa, on the main island of Upolu, where the Stevensons bought 300 acres of land, built a house in the hills three miles from the harbor, and settled in.

Their land was so veined with creeks and rivers, or “burns,” as Stevenson called them, that he named the property Vailima, Samoan for Five Waters. It was the first wild land he’d ever owned, and he reveled in it, partly for the stunning variety of its flora and fauna, but partly too because finally he had enough health and strength to work his land. “It is like a fairy story that I should have recovered health and strength, and should go round again among my fellow-men, boating, riding, bathing, toiling hard with a wood-knife in the forest,” he wrote. And in a letter to a friend: “Went crazy over outdoor work, and had at last to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board. Nothing is so interesting as weeding, clearing, and path-making…it does make you feel so well. To come down covered with mud and drenched with sweat and rain after some hours in the bush, change, rub down, and take a chair in the verandah, is to taste a quiet conscience. And the strange thing that I mark is this: If  I go out and make sixpence, plying the cutlass or the spade, idiot conscience applauds me; if I sit in the house and make twenty pounds, idiot conscience wails over my neglect and the day wasted.”

For three years he worked his woods and farmed the soil, hosted an endless stream of visitors (among them Henry Adams, who was peeved that Stevenson didn’t know who he was), became deeply involved in the chaotic political life of Samoa, and wrote furiously—most notably half of a Highlands novel called Weir of Hermiston that, had it been finished, might have been among his very best books.

On December 3, 1894, he “wrote hard all morning” on Weir, spent the afternoon writing letters to friends, and came down from his study at sunset. He opened an old bottle of burgundy, set to making a salad for dinner, and was cheerfully chaffing his wife when he suddenly clapped his hands to his head, cried out in pain, and fell to his knees. Within minutes the massive stroke sent him into a coma; and at ten minutes past eight o’clock he died.

At dawn, forty local men cut a path through the woods to the flat summit of Mount Vaea, “no bigger than a room,” where they dug a grave for the man they called Tusitala, the teller of tales. In the afternoon his hand-carved coffin was carried to the summit and laid to rest. Among the prayers said over his body was one he had written himself: “Lord, Thou sendest down rain upon the uncounted millions of the forest, and givest the trees to drink exceedingly. Teach us the lesson of the trees. The sea around us, which this rain recruits, teems with the race of fish; teach us, Lord, the meaning of the fishes. Let us see ourselves for what we are, one out of the countless number of the clans of thy handiwork. When we would despair, let us remember that these also please and serve Thee.”

Next day the chiefs of Samoa forbade the use of firearms on Mount Vaea, so that the birds and animals “might live undisturbed, and raise about his grave the songs he knew so well.” Some years later a large tomb was raised over his grave. On the tomb there are bronze plates with bas reliefs of a thistle and a hibiscus flower, the characteristic plants of Scotland and Samoa, and Stevenson’s poem, “Requiem”:

                                    Under the wide and starry sky

                                    Dig the grave and let me lie.

                                    Glad did I live and gladly die

                                    And I laid me down with a will.

                                    This be the verse you grave for me:

                                    Here he lies where he longed to be;

                                    Home is the sailor, home from sea,

                                    And the hunter home from the hill.

*

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon. His most recent books are the spiritual essay collections The Thorny Grace of It and Leaping (in a new and expanded edition), both from Loyola Press.

10 Things We Learned About Writing Nonfiction from Alissa Quart, a Journalist "Outsider"

Last year at AWP’s annual conference in Boston, Alissa Quart, Lisa Dierbeck, and Pagan Kennedy offered a panel on the art of the nonfiction idea, which included a clinic called the “Idea Hospital.” Audience members had a handful of minutes to pitch their nonfiction manuscripts to the panelists, who in turn gave them off-the-cuff advice on proceeding with their projects and finding publishers. A great idea! And damn if we at Iron Horse Literary Review didn’t miss it. Didn’t even catch our eye when we scanned the novel-length conference program.

Then, by chance, we found Alissa’s project with Maisie Crow on Atavist.com: The Last Clinic, a piece of long-form journalism about the only remaining abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi, a story that uses, in tandem, a documentary film, graphs, maps, photographs, and Alissa’s written essay (an extraction of which originally appeared in The Atlantic). We were enthralled!

So we invited Alissa to come to Texas Tech and read from her latest book, Republic of Outsiders, which introduces readers to people who think outside the box: Occupy Wall Street’s alternative bankers, members of Mad Pride, transgender activists, amateur filmmakers (like the producers of Beasts of the Southern Wild), Etsy entrepreneurs, and even Kickstarter phenom musician Amanda Palmer.

And even though West Texas harbors few such “outside” thinkers, Alissa came! All smiles and generous and energetic and feisty. She even taught a Master Class, which four of our graduate students were lucky enough to take. In it, Alissa workshopped an essay written by each of them and parceled out some amazing advice. In particular, we loved the way her “journalist’s” mind—what some in creative writing programs might call the “outsider” mind—refreshed our understanding of writing literary nonfiction. She gifted us with new ways of thinking about our usual problems when writing:

1. Think of the title as part of your manuscript’s “packaging.” We all know that you better have a good title that conveys what’s inside the essay and makes people want to open the box, but contemplating it as wrapping paper was new for us. The visual metaphor in our heads now, it’s impossible for us to be complacent about titling, sending hideous gifts into the world, wrapped in newspaper or topped with some crumpled bow because we think no one will notice. One effective type of title Alissa discussed: “Verb” titles such as Branded, Hooked, or Breaking. And as if Alissa had some sort of generating software in her head, titles whizzed from her mouth seconds—I mean, milliseconds—after each of us pitched ideas to her. And her titles were stunning—layered with meaning, symbolism, and word-play, all of them multitasking in the way that good titles do.
2. Sure, open with a scene or introduction to an intriguing character, but then position your “nut graph” by the third paragraph. Yes, yes, creative writers that we are (and journalists that we’re not), we thought at first that Alissa said nut grab. Which as a metaphor makes some sense. Here’s where you grab your readers by the nuts. In a more professional vein—those journalists are such straight-arrow types—the nut graph is the paragraph in which you broadcast the “news value” or “informative merit” of your story in a nutshell. If you open an essay with a scene or character, you get to enter the essay in a more dramatic moment, stalling the facts or information that might serve as a more traditional, perhaps stodgy, lead. Even so, you still need to ante up somewhere in the opening paragraphs.
3. Imagine the nut graph in other terms—cinematic terms, to be exact. Since Alissa’s parents were film critics, she has a firm hold on visual storytelling as well. A good film may open with a close-up of a main character or someone’s car or a dead body lying on the living room floor, but the camera eventually pans backward and gives what is known in the movie industry as an “establishing shot”—a view that shows us where and when the story takes place and how the key figures fit into the context of the storyline.
4. When writing a memoir, find the “source of entry.” What are the personal stakes in your manuscript? One of the students in Alissa’s master class, for example, had written about his experiences teaching English in Kazakhstan—an essay chockfull of interesting encounters with his students and their manipulations of the English language. But so what? What did all of these interesting encounters mean? In the course of discussion, Alissa turned on her interviewing skills and ferreted out some answers. The writer, fresh out of a master’s program, couldn’t find a job in America (one of the richest countries in the world) and so had to seek employment in Kazakhstan (ironically, one of the poorer countries in the world.). Too, the writer grew up in the Mormon faith and is a practicing Mormon today. In the year prior to his departure for Kazakhstan, before he married, he had struggled with the Mormon church-structure, which requires single people over the age of thirty-one to leave the “Single Ward” and advance into the “Single Ward II” or “Mid-Singles Ward”—which could seem to ostracize the “old maid” types, both male and female, who wouldn’t get married already. But once newly married and living his foreign adventure, how did this particular writer fit in with the Kazakhs? What happens when everything you know—the traditions of your faith, your belief in the American dream, and even the rules governing your native language—break down? That’s the source of entry.
5. Keep a good novel with you at all times so the language of storytelling remains in your head. Because, Alissa warned, the language of journalism, of conveying facts, often sounds depleted. Find a good novel on the nonfiction subject you’re tackling. For the student writing a nostalgic retrospective of his hockey days, Alissa recommended Rabbit, Run, John Updike’s narrative about a former high school basketball star. For the student writing about a coup in Honduras, which she experienced as an American tourist and addressed in an manuscript that occasionally slipped into the first-person plural, Alissa suggested Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a dystopian science fiction novel told in the first-person plural. This novel fluctuates between the grim reality of the protagonist clones and their encounters with the world of “real people,” whom they long to join—a perfect mirror for our student writer who found herself caught between the safety of her known American world and the intensity of her new experiences in Honduras.
6. Even with that resonant language of fiction in your head, don’t lose sight of the essay’s purpose. After a moment of grandiloquence, pan back and land on your main subject again. For example, in the Honduras essay, the writer included this lovely paragraph: “In the distance on a road leading out of town, what seems like a mirage at first morphs into a line of soldiers, seemingly weightless as they float in our direction. The sweat of their cheeks reflects the sun; their eyes hide under hats of silver and gray fatigue.” Magnificent, Alissa said, then added that before moving on with the story, the writer should give us another look at Honduras, something about its politics, something factual, something like hard evidence, to remind us why we were there.
7. For those of us writing nonfiction with a literary bent (particularly personal essays or memoir): extract a 1,500- to 2,000-word version from your manuscripts. Shorter articles sell well to mainstream outlets. For example, a thumbnail version of the English in Kazakhstan piece would be a perfect fit with Instructor, Educational Leadership, even The Chronicle of Higher Education. Note that Alissa’s shorter version of “The Last Clinic” originally appeared in The Atlantic before it’s “larger” glory at The Atavist.
8. Experiment. Create multimedia long-form essays—a hot new breed that online platforms are particularly interested in. Read some at Guernica or The Atavist. In fact, Alissa’s long-form multimedia essay, accompanied by Maisie Crow’s documentary, is available for only $3.99 at Atavist.com. And you can join Creatavist.com for free. On this site, writers can build and publish their multimedia stories. At the very least, writers who are savvy enough to know how to illustrate or package their essays are more likely to snag the attention of editors by including these suggestions with their submissions to online platforms.
9. Read. Of course. Two books we heard Alissa recommend over and over again: Fairyland by Alysia Abbott and Stoner by John Williams.
10. Finally, tap into your own “outsider” voice. When she asked our West Texas audience who among them felt like outsiders, not a single person raised a hand. Shocked, she said that had never happened to her before. Usually, everyone raises their hands—which is a different type of irony. But Alissa was in Lubbock, Texas, after all, where outsiders are strung up in trees on a regular basis. Few people take the outsider’s side here. “You better hurry and tap into rebellion,” Alissa said. The best nonfiction writing comes from that part of ourselves in conflict with the “insider” world. Look for places where you resist mainstream society, where you don’t fit in, and strike out bravely from there.

Alissa Quart is the author of Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreams and Rebels; Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers; and Hothouse Kids. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, Quart has written for The New York Times Magazine, O Magazine, The Nation, Marie Claire, The Atlantic, and The Columbia Journalism Review. Her poetry has appeared in The London Review of Books and in many other publications. With filmmaker and photographer Maisie Crow, Quart has also completed a short documentary based on her long-form journalism. She has also served as editor for Atavist.com and has taught at Columbia University’s Journalism School.

Leslie Jill Patterson has recently published nonfiction in Texas Monthly, Grist, Baltimore Review, meatpaper​, Earth’s Daughters, and Bring the Noise: the best pop culture essays from Barrelhouse. Her recent awards include a 2012 Embrey Human Rights Fellowship and the 2013 Everett Southwest Literary Award, judged by Lee K. Abbott. In 1999, she founded Iron Horse Literary Review, and she serves as copy editor for the journal Creative Nonfiction. Today, she has a growing interest in social justice literature and serves as the case storyteller for the Texas Regional Public Defenders Office for Capital Cases, where she assists a terrific team of attorneys who fight the death penalty at both the state and federal levels.

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. On Dostoevsky as essayist, traveller and hedgehog

I wonder if Fyodor Dostoevsky had read Thoreau's Walking before writing his famous 1880 “Pushkin Speech”, delivered in Moscow at the first public commemoration of the poet in Russia since his suspicious death in 1837. In this discourse, referring to Alexander Pushkin and the characters of his works, Dostoevsky coined the term Russian wanderer, a metaphoric personification of the contradictory nature of Russian national identity. As Ingrid Kleespies explains, “the perception of Russia as a figuratively nomadic nation and of Russians themselves as nomadic wanderers excluded from, or confined to the margins of, European civilization and history came to be a central topos of nineteenth-century Russian national thought”.[i]

This idea nourished a fertile tradition of literary wanderlust that encompasses the works of authors such as Nikolai Karamzin, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Alexander Herzen or Fyodor Dostoevsky himself. However, it probably was the symbolist poet Alexander Blok who summarized this conception more accurately and radically: “Yes, we are Scythians!”.[ii] His verses, as Henry D. Thoreau's essay, suggest the innate character of the wandering temperament. Ambulator nascitur, non fit.[iii] And yet I feel, quite incongruously, that the coiner of the expression Russian wanderer, who was also the author of a hallmark in Russian travel writing, was not such an enthusiastic traveller. He was a hedgehog.

In the preserved fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus, we can read: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. Isaiah Berlin transformed this taxonomy into literary theory: Herodotus, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, Pushkin and Joyce are foxes; Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Dostoevsky and Proust are, to a greater or lesser extent, hedgehogs.[iv] As a matter of fact, Lucretius had enough with De rerum natura, Proust more than enough with going In Search of Lost Time and his madeleine, and Dostoevsky with his literature of the underground and gambling.

This remark on Dostoevsky's addiction might seem pointless and tasteless, were it not for the fact that casinos (and not a medical consultation to do with his epilepsy, as he assured his brother) probably constituted one of the main goals and lures of the two and a half months' journey he made to Western Europe in June 1862. After spending only one day in Berlin, he lost a substantial sum of money during his stay in Wiesbaden, a city which some years later would see how he dilapidated his already exiguous fortune. However, Fyodor Dostoevsky did not mention this detail in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, the depiction of his trip for the readers of the periodical Vremya (Time), published in its February 1863 issue.

“But, my friends, I have warned you as far as the first chapter of these notes, you know, that I may tell dreadful lies. So don't stand in the way. You surely know too, that if I tell lies I shall tell them in the conviction that I am not telling them. Personally, I think this should amply suffice you, and you had better give me full freedom”, Fyodor argues. I suppose full freedom is part of the agreement that you are forced to make when reading a hedgehog. As one of Fyodor Dostoevsky's literary grandsons, Saul Bellow, points out, it is characteristic of this writer that he does not conceal his bias or limitations, his unreliability: “For him this revelation of bias is a step toward the truth”.[v] Once the readers have accepted that unavoidable premise, they can take a seat next to Dostoevsky in the railway carriage, converse with him and hear the truth, his truth, about the journey that took him to Berlin, Dresden, Wiesbaden (of course), Baden-Baden, Cologne, Paris, London, Lucerne, Geneva, Genoa, Florence, Milan, Venice and Vienna.

While listening, we must take into account that this was his first trip after returning from the journey that changed everything: his sentence to four years of hard labour in Siberia and his subsequent conscription to the army in Kazakhstan. After that odyssey, every journey should have seemed dull and meaningless. We must also take into account the hedgehog point of view, which explains his initial reluctance to talk. “What shall I tell you? What shall I depict? A panorama? A perspective? A bird's-eye view of something? But you will probably be the first to tell me that I have flown too high”. A fox like Tolstoy would not have hesitated one minute to try to imagine the bird's viewpoint; the hedgehog, quite the contrary, is aware of his shortcomings, and thus he will resign to report his version, which is an interpretation of the details noticed by a creature stuck to the ground (or even to the underground).

Nevertheless, as Fyodor assumes, we have not chosen precisely this seat in the train to hear accurate information; not in vain, the title of the travelogue already hints at its fragmentary, incomplete, and subjective nature, at the spatial and temporal confusion, at the role of memory as a filter, which is not always the most trustworthy one. “Ah! say I, so what you want is just gossip, light sketches, fleeting personal impressions. That certainly suits me, and I shall immediately consult my diary. And I shall try to be as simple and frank as possible. I only ask you to bear in mind that I shall often be wrong in the things I write about. Not wrong about everything, of course...”

And so he starts off with his digressions, “often intemperate, worse than unfair and even frivolous”, as Bellow notes, which ramble from past to present, from Russia to Europe, from Pushkin and Turgenev to Voltaire and Rousseau, from flogging to French coats, from tradition to social modernization, from the Orthodox Church to Catholicism and Protestantism, from capitalism to socialism, from utopia to the real implementation of liberté, égalité, fraternité... “But anyway, where did I stop? Discussing a French coat! That is what it all started with. […] As a matter of fact, these were not thoughts, but a sort of contemplation, arbitrary notions, daydreams even, ‘of this and that, and nothing else’. To begin with, I made a mental journey back into olden times and let my thoughts wander […]”. Nothing is as convenient for the creation of literary hybrids as the transient condition of the traveller: Dostoevsky's Winter Notes transgress the boundaries between travelogue and fiction, between essay and polemical journalism, both in terms of their conception and their form. And nothing is as fruitful for the ruminative mind as travelling: the tempo of thoughts accommodates fast and eagerly to the banging and rattling of the train in an effort to populate the plains of boredom.

“Thus did all these thoughts assail me in my railway carriage on the way to Europe, partly in spite of myself and partly because I was bored and had nothing to do. To be frank, only those of us who have nothing to do have hitherto given thought to this sort of thing. Oh, how boring it is to sit idly in a railway carriage! In fact, just as boring as it is to live in Russia without having anything specific to do”. In fact, just as tedious and overwhelming as it seems at times for a hedgehog to travel through the land of holy miracles, as the Slavophile poet Khomiakov baptized Europe. Berlin was so similar to St. Peterburg that Dostoevsky could not help wondering if it was worthwhile spending forty-eight back-breaking hours in a train only to see a replica of what he had just left behind. Paris was the most moral and the most virtuous town in the whole world, so perfect that it had fossilized in stillness and order. London, on the contrary, was immense, and chaotic, and polluted, and crowded: an apocalyptic view bustling night and day. Englishmen, on the one hand, looked solemn, serious, not to say sullen. Frenchmen, on the other, turned out to be irrational, fussy, eloquent just for the sake of eloquence. Frenchwomen, the cherry on top, proved to be superficial, affected, devious intrigants. “Oh, but for Heaven's sake, don't run away with the idea that to love one's country means to revile the foreigner or that I think it does. I don't think so at all and have no intention of thinking so, on the contrary even... Only it is a pity I have no time to explain myself somewhat more clearly...”

Of course, we don't take your downright opinions the wrong way and rather take into consideration your sick liver, your feverish haste to arrive at Wiesbaden, the brevity of the trip. “And so you see, my friends, you cannot look at everything in two and a half months and never make a mistake […]. I must willy-nilly be untruthful occasionally, and therefore...”. Enough, Fyodor, enough. Even though your categorical tone and dispersed ideas, every now and then, make me think of Nabokov's asseveration of you being a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian (sic).[vi] But maybe we shouldn't take his opinions too seriously, either. After all, his uncle Ivan Nabokov was part of the investigative commission that sentenced you to death and sent you to Siberia, which makes good old Vladimir suspicious of congenital ill will. Maybe we should find an explanation for your dispersion and sharpness somewhere else. What about Virginia Woolf? “[…] For nothing is outside Dostoevsky’s province; and when he is tired, he does not stop, he goes on. He cannot restrain himself. Out it tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed, marvellous, terrible, oppressive — the human soul”.[vii]

Patricia Gonzalo is a translator and an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa Spanish Creative Writing program.

All Fyodor Dostoevsky quotes come from Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2008). Trans. Kyril FitzLyon.

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[i] Ingrid Kleespies, A Nation Astray : nomadism and national identity in Russian literature (DeKalb, IL: NIU Press, 2012).

[ii] Alexander Blok, The Twelve, and other poems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

[iii] Henry D. Thoreau, Walking. In: Essays: a fully annotated edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013): 243-280.

[iv] Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: an essay on Tolstoy's view of history (New York: Simon         & Schuster, 1953).

[v] Saul Bellow, “The French as Dostoevsky Saw Them”, New Republic 23 (May 1955): 17–20. Rpt. in slightly revised version as Foreword. In: Feodor M. Dostoevsky. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (New York: Criterion, 1955): 9–27.

[vi] Alvin Toffler: “Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov”, Playboy, 11 (1) (Jan 1964): 35-41, 44-45.

[vii] Virginia Woolf, “The Russian Point of View”. In: The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1948).

On Robert Louis Stevenson's "An Apology for Idlers"

At around two a.m. I finally stop working and sit on the back steps of my home. I am exhausted from a day defined by checkmarks slashed through boxes drawn in my planner, a wearisome day of social patty-cake with hyper-intelligent students and peers. And I stayed late at the letterpress studio so I could finish printing a poster for one of the visiting writers who periodically drop into Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. The lead from metal type still blackens my hands because I forgot to scrub away the grime.

From my stoop, I study the sky. A lunar eclipse had taken place earlier that night during a Hunter’s Moon. And from my Iowan vantage point, had I been outside when it occurred, I would have seen a feint penumbral shroud smearing the lunar light.

But instead of moon or stars, I notice that the bad mitten net in my backyard has come unanchored and one end sinks to the ground. In the way that ordinary things take on meaning, those cheap plastic poles (mended with sticks and duct tape) mirror my own life: laundry spills over in the hamper, I haven’t eaten a single meal with my partner in over two weeks, I can’t recall the last time I laughed. What else has fallen without my noticing? What other beautiful thing have I missed while trudging through my overburdened schedule? A schedule taxed from my inability to say no and my desire to “become” a teacher and finish my first book.

And while I brood under the Hunter’s Moon, I think about Robert Louis Stevenson’s “An Apology for Idlers.” It’s an apt connection to make I suppose. Stevenson’s essay defends idle time in the face of steadfast ambition. Published in Cornhill Magazine in 1877, just before his career took off, Stevenson’s treatise on idleness scolds blind devotion to professionalism, scholarship mostly, in favor of the educative qualities of “idle” observation. To clarify, Stevenson’s idler is no slacker. His idler is not apathetic in the least. Instead, idleness, to Stevenson, demands the difficult work of appreciating one’s environment, one’s friends and family. To idle is to allow one the time to enjoy his or her own mind at work.

When I think of all the things I haven’t noticed or given time to, Stevenson’s “Apology” hits me like a reprimand. Though his tract defends the idler, his defense is constructed around what the idler is not rather than what the idler is. And though I am inspired to be more present in my day-to-day by Stevenson’s essay, the idler is not who I am at this point in my life. Throughout “An Apology,” Stevenson establishes an opposition between those who choose “Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market,” and the “truant student” that rests “on some tuft of lilacs, […] smokes innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones” while birds “sing in the thicket.” Career oriented determination “to what a man calls his business,” Stevenson writes, “is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things,” and therefore demonstrates “a symptom of deficient vitality.” And it is this accusation, in part because I agree, that feels like I am being scolded. Though it is not entirely a life overburdened by obligations that Stevenson argues against, instead, it is the person who ignores friends and environment in favor of ambition.

And though merchants and lawyers are tossed into the mix, it is the scholar who takes the biggest lashing. Because, as Stevenson writes, “Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.” Thus calling the ardent scholar vain if his or her endeavors sacrifice enjoyment and reflection:

They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play.

While the idler gains intellectual nourishment from contemplative and corporeal meditation the diligent worker pushes himself into an early grave. This lack of “play” thus embitters the scholar because there is no guarantee, no definite appeasement or assured recognition.

As Stevenson argues the distinctions between idler and non-idler a very disconcerting claim emerges—no endeavor truly matters in the grand scheme of things. Stevenson proffers that bitterness stems from investing too much energy in pursuits that demand a return and he suggests that even success is a small reward if one lives his or her life too narrowly. If someone “publishes three or thirty articles a year,” or “finishes his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to the world.” The world, as Stevenson sees it, would not even lament the historical absence of Shakespeare. If Shakespeare had been bludgeoned “some dark night […] the world would have wagged on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss.” And this, obviously, is a claim that nags at my discontent. More than my exhaustion it is the thought that readers will not enjoy my books, students will not learn from my lessons, or that the gatekeepers will not allow me through. Stevenson writes, “The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them indifferent.” In a different mood, I might choose to read this claim in a positive light. I might see that Stevenson is simply reminding his reader that he or she has no control over the outcome of any endeavor, but that they do have control over their own happiness in addition to their work.

            For Stevenson it seems clear that one so diligently devoted to his or her goal that they are blinded to finer, calmer things “sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return.” Stevenson never suggests that hard work is bad, but he does argue that overwork apparently makes men and women anxiously “deranged.” Instead, he seems to argue for an inclusion of joy that can only come from being present and observant. “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.” Thus Stevenson calls for a balance between idleness and busyness. He demands that duty to one’s happiness is as important, if not more, as duty to one’s career and life goals.

Stevenson’s “Apology” is a dark, yet hopeful call to arms for a more attentive existence. And I feel the pressure of this contradiction as I finally trudge off to bed, too tired to shower but with just enough energy to wash my hands and brush my teeth. And Stevenson’s essay is a good reminder that downtime is as important as diligence. But I can’t shake the knowledge that hard work is the only thing I have control over, and that makes me uncertain of Stevenson’s reliability. All of the sudden his anxiety, his “nervous derangement,” throughout “Apology” is palpable. Stevenson is a narrator frightened that his own endeavors, his own art, might fail in the world. And so his argument for idleness begins to resemble a psychological escape hatch. As if he is really saying to himself: if it all fails at least I can find happiness smoking on a field of lilacs. And yet, a maybe whispers between all the lines. But Stevenson did not fail.

And so I crawl into bed, noticing that my partner put on fresh sheets, and take out my day planner. Underneath the next day’s to-do list, crowded at the bottom of the page, I write “Date Night” and draw a little box next to it. Content, at least for a moment, with the potential of sharing an idle evening with someone I love.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. "An Apology for Idlers." The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. 222-228. Print.

M. Owens is a fiction writer and essayist from Memphis Tennessee whose work appears, or is forthcoming, in The Oxford American, Crazyhorse, Redivider, and Hobart: another literary journal. He now lives in Iowa City where he is an MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing Program. Contact him at www.randalowain.com.