Gonzalo Barr

Acknowledgments in books have only recently blown up to heroic lengths, what with the author making sure to thank everyone and everything who had any role, no matter how remote, in the composition of the novel.  Dedications, on the other hand, have always been a part of books in the West and they are not limited to novels.  (I specify “the West” because dedications are not customary in Japan, for example.  More on that below.)

The most common kind of dedication is that made to the person or persons closest to the author and those are usually spouses, children, and parents, with spouses taking the lead.  The thing with spouses, as opposed to other relations, is that while books are made to last, at least one hopes they will, marriages can come apart.

Nigel Farndale looks at the dedications to spouses more closely –

Nearly all of Julian Barnes’s 16 novels are dedicated to the same person, the agent Pat Kavanagh, his late wife—which shows either admirable devotion or imagination fatigue. […] Peter Carey—two-time Booker winner and one-time divorcé—asked his Australian publishers to remove the dedications to the ex-Mrs. Carey from future editions of his work. Saul Bellow, meanwhile, went through five wives, and his dedications reflect his ever-changing muses. His novel Ravelstein even contains an attack on his fourth wife and a dedication to his fifth. Norman Mailer dealt with the “which wife” problem with typical style, dedicating The Presidential Papers to “some ladies who have aided and impeded the author in his composition.” F. Scott Fitzgerald tended to write “Once Again to Zelda.” And with hindsight—his marriage was not a happy one—that “once again” is rather melancholy. […] Before Graham Greene left his wife, Vivien, in 1948 for Lady Catherine Walston, he dedicated The End of the Affair to “C.” By the time the American edition came out he could afford to be less coy. The C was replaced by “Catherine.”

The entire article is here.

I mentioned that in Japan it is not customary to dedicate a book and one example of a non-dedication, more of an epigram, comes to mind.  Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood has been translated to English twice.  The first time by Alfred Birnbaum, a version that was published in 1987 by Kodansha, the second by Jay Rubin, published in 2000 by Harvill in the UK and Vintage in the US.  The Kodansha edition contains no dedication or epigram.  The later Harvill and Vintage editions, though, include this at the front, on its own page –

FOR MANY FÊTES

What is that?  It isn’t a dedication because there is no dedicatee.  Is it an epigram?  Is Murakami, by apparently adopting a Western custom, provoking traditionalists in Japan who already accuse him of being too Americanized, of forsaking jun bungaku?

Murakami did not write a dedication, but an epigram of sorts, which are like keys to a work.  When you take into consideration that he has translated F. Scott Fitzgerald to Japanese, the resonance with another novel becomes clearer.

Fitzgerald dedicated Tender in the Night to Gerald and Sara Murphy, Americans who lived on the French Riviera in the 1920s.  Fitzgerald’s dedication went like this –

To
Gerald and Sara
MANY FÊTES

It is no secret that Fitzgerald modeled his characters in Tender is the Night, Dick and Nicole Diver, on the Murphys.  So is Murakami’s non-dedication a key to the source of Norwegian Wood?

A post on Gustave Flaubert and his dedication of Madame Bovary to his lawyer is here.

Photo:  Gerald and Sara Murphy, Pauline Pfeiffer, and Ernest and Hadley Hemingway in Pamplona, Spain (1926), photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston; Sources: Nigel Farndale, “This Book’s For You: The Thinking Behind Dedications,” Publisher’s Weekly (Aug. 9, 2010)(accessed Aug. 15, 2010); Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (1987, translated by Alfred Birnbaum), Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood (2000, translated by Jay Rubin), Alfred Birnbaum, “Introduction,” Monkey Brain Sushi (1991, Alfred Birnbaum, editor), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1933)

Soon after the long list for the 2010 Booker prize was announced, bookmakers in the UK started taking bets on who will win.  William Hill has David Mitchell and Tom McCarthy at 9/2, and Peter Carey and Christos Tsiolkas at 6/1.  Alan Warner and Lisa Moore have the longest odds, both at 16/1.

Ladbrokes has similar odds — David Mitchell and Emma Donoghue at 4/1, Peter Carey and Tom McCarthy at 5/1.  Alan Warner and Lisa Moore have the longest odds 14/1 and 16/1, respectively.

The odds change daily. And there is nothing remotely scientific about predicting the winner.

Meanwhile, The Paris Review has an interview of David Mitchell –

Is there such a thing as overreading? Just because it wasn’t part of my grand design doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Things do happen in books that the writer is too submersed in bringing the narrative to life to notice. To put it a little pretentiously, Cloud Atlas is a novel about whose echoes, eddies, and cross-references even its author possesses only an imperfect knowledge. That’s not unique—many writers can say the same about many books.

Image: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Cardsharps (about 1594), Kimbell Art Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas, uploaded by Hugh Manatee, from the Wikipedia article on gambling; Sources:  William Hill website (accessed Aug. 4, 2010), Ladbrokes website (accessed Aug. 4, 2010), David Mitchell, The Art of Fiction No. 204, interviewed by Adam Begley, The Paris Review Summer 2010 (accessed Aug. 4, 2010)

Edith Grossman is one of the finest translators of literary works from Spanish to English.  She has translated Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others. In 2003, her translation of Don Quixote received acclaim from writers and critics alike.

In a recent interview, she detailed her method of revision [my translation to English follows the original quote in Spanish] –

Algo que me ayuda mucho es leer en voz alta porque el ojo perdona todo pero el oído no perdona nada.

***

Something that helps me a lot is reading [my work] out loud because the eye forgives everything but the ear forgives nothing.

Image:  Gustave Doré, “A world of disorderly notions, picked out of his books, crowded into his imagination” (1863) in Miguel de Cervantes, The History of Don Quixote (1906, J.W. Clark, ed.), from the Wikipedia article on Don Quixote; Source:  Emma Restrepo, “Conversación con ‘Edie’ Grossman,” El nuevo Herald (Apr. 11, 2010)

If you are thinking about writing historical fiction, David Mitchell may put you off the idea. He is the author of Ghostwritten (1999) and the brilliant Cloud Atlas (2004). This year, he published his fifth novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, about Dutch traders in pre-Meiji Japan.  Writing a novel set almost two hundred years ago requires a lot of research.  Here’s Mitchell, from an article that appeared in The Telegraph –

Why write a historical novel? Writers’ motives are as varied as criminals’, but I suspect that the historical novelist’s genetic code contains the geeky genes of the model-maker – there is pleasure to be had in the painstaking reconstruction of a lost world. A second reason is banal but overlooked: a novel must be set both somewhere and “somewhen”, and the choice is restricted to the present, the future and the past. A third motive is the challenge (and perverse pleasure) of tackling the pitfalls, foremost of which is research. Film-makers ruefully observe how every decade back in time a film is set, x million dollars gets added to production costs. The same principle applies in novel-writing, but instead of dollars, read “months”.

The historical novelist must learn how the vast gamut of human needs was met in the “destination period”: how were rooms lit and heated? How were meals prepared, clothes made, bodies bathed (or not), feet shod, distances covered, transgressions punished, illnesses explained, courtships conducted, contraception considered, divinities worshipped and corpses disposed of? The more Moleskines you fill with the fruits of research, however, the more determinedly it must be hidden: lines such as “Shall I bid Jenkins ready the Phaeton coach, or might Madam prefer the two-wheeled barouche landau?” will kill.

In the article, Mitchell also takes the reader through a very brief tour of the genre’s development in English letters. The rest of the article is here.

Image: Dutchmen with Keisei’s Nagasaki, circa 1800, by unknown artist, reproduction in “Encounters” Anna Jackson, from the Wikipedia article about Dejima island. Source: David Mitchell, “David Mitchell on Historical Fiction,” The Telegraph (Mar. 8, 2010)

Some realities about the professional writing life in the Twenties –

Fitzgerald never wrote what is now called a blockbuster. This Side of Paradise (1920) made the Publishers’ Weekly monthly best-seller list twice, reaching number four; The Beautiful and Damned (1922) appeared three times, reaching number six. The Great Gatsby never made the best-seller list and did not break 24,000 copies in 1925. Tender Is the Night was number two for April 1934, but did not sell 15,000 copies that year. In 1929 his royalties on seven books totalled [sic] $31.77; and eight Post stories brought him $31,000.

Ninety years ago, even fifty years ago (in Cheever and Updike’s time), a writer could make a living publishing short stories.  Numerous mainstream magazines published short stories and serialized novels and they paid very well. The late Fitzgerald scholar, Matthew J. Bruccoli, blamed the rise of television in the Fifties and Sixties for the demise of these magazines.

The [Saturday Night] Post and the other “slick” magazines…paid well because pre-television Americans had a large appetite for magazine fiction.  […]  During the Twenties, the Post’s circulation and advertising revenues enabled it to provide between 200 and 300 pages each week for a nickel.

Two to three hundred pages each week amounted to a minimum of 10,400 pages a year that the Post needed to fill. And that was only one magazine.  Fitzgerald’s work also appeared in Collier’s, Red Book, Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s, Metropolitan and Hearst International.  It is not surprising that Fitzgerald made significantly more money from his magazine writing than from his novels.   He was not alone.  The same was true of William Faulkner.  Even Hemingway could not live off the royalties on his novels until many years later.

Photo of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1937) by Carl Van Vechten, Lib. of Congress, Wikipedia article about F. Scott Fitzgerald; Source: Matthew J. Bruccoli & Judith S. Baughman, editors, F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship (1996), at 13, 14

The truism, “write what you know,” probably got its start with the French realists and, if names be named, my guess is that it started with Gustave Flaubert’s almost maniacal approach to creating a scene.  One of the copies that I own of Madame Bovary brings with it a facsimile of the manuscript and notes Flaubert himself scratched, including the duration of each leg of the infamous Hirondelle passage.

Rules are made to be broken (albeit at your own risk), so it is no wonder that such a fundamental rule as “write what you know” is also a prime target in the know-it-all atmosphere of some creative writing workshops.  (The rule is scorned as simplistic by students and workshop leaders alike, until the day you write about something you do not know and fail miserably. Then the same workshop leader who earlier laughed off such a simpleton rule will look you straight in the eye and recommend that you stick to writing what you know. The world is full of people like that and they are not all in politics.)

James Collins, author of Beginner’s Greek, set part of his novel in southwest France.  After the novel was first published in 2008, Collins described the public’s reception –

[…] I received particular compliments on these passages, which made me enormously proud. Why? Because I had never in my life been near [that part of France], and my descriptions of it were entirely made up. To a writer, it may be gratifying to capture reality with uncanny accuracy, but it is even more gratifying to successfully fake it.

Later, Collins accepted an invitation to rent a house in the region that he had described in his novel.  That’s when he discovered how much he had gotten wrong in his made-up passages.  He had missed the wildflowers, the foie gras, and the warm summer evenings.  Collins concluded –

Reality is usually so disappointing!  But in this case, the opposite was true.

Some places are like that.

Perhaps the moral of this post is first, write what you know, but if you don’t, if you make it up and you are successful at faking it, don’t tempt fate any further by then verifying how close your invented passages came to the real thing.

Image: Detail of Flaubert’s drawing showing the route that Emma Bovary and her lover took by coach, in Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Conard ed.1930), at 499; Source: James Collins, “Better Than Fiction,” Departures (Oct. 2009), at 84

the hardest part is picking yourself up to do another draft.

Photo: Nick Hornby, by Joe Mabel, Wikipedia; Source: John Jurgensen, “‘An Education’ in Filmmaking
Novelist Nick Hornby writes for the big screen,” Wall Street Journal (accessed Oct. 3, 2009)

Yes, and in that month when Proserpine comes back, and Ceres’ dead heart rekindles, when all the woods are a tender smoky blur, and birds no bigger than a budding leaf dart through the singing trees, and when odorous tar comes spongy in the streets, and boys roll balls of it upon their tongues, and they are lumpy with tops and agated marbles; and there is blasting thunder in the night, and the soaking millionfooted rain, and one looks out at morning on a stormy sky, a broken wrack of cloud; and when the mountain boy brings water to his kinsmen laying fence, and as the wind snakes through the grasses hears far in the valley below the long wail of the whistle, and the faint clangor of a bell; and the blue great cup of the hills seems closer, nearer, for he had heard an inarticulate promise: he has been pierced by Spring, that sharp knife.

Photo:  Gonzalo Barr; Source: Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (Modern Library 1929), at 95

In the US, Labor Day marks the end of summer and a time to return to work.  This is a formality for everyone except the full-time student.  The employed adult has a different story to tell, especially in a country where “workaholism” is a kind of virtue.  But there is still something about summer as a period of legitimate idleness that lingers into adulthood.

Writers don’t vacation.  They may travel or take a day off, but if they are in the middle of writing anything — and they usually are — the work continues in the unconscious.  Which explains why you can put something aside and come back to it later with fresh eyes.  You see problems that you did not see before.  The work has not changed.  You have.  And the reason you have changed is because you have continued to work on it, even if you did not do so consciously.

That is what happened to Ernest Hemingway with his first novel –

“I started ‘The Sun Also Rises’ on the 21st of July, my birthday, in Valencia,” he wrote.  Work on the first draft was continued through the last ten days of July and the month of August in Valencia, Madrid, St. Sebastian, and Hendaye, and a complete run-through was finished in Paris on September 21, 1925.

“There is only one thing to do with a novel,” he once told Fitzgerald, “and that is to go straight on through to the end of the damned thing.”  […]  The first draft of The Sun Also Rises was set down in approximately forty-eight writing days, but Hemingway nearly killed himself in the process.  “I knew nothing about writing a novel when I started it,” he realized in 1948, “and so wrote too fast and each day to the point of complete exhaustion.  So the first draft was very bad…I had to rewrite it completely.  But in the rewriting I learned much.”

Following a rest period…[to give] the first draft a chance to settle and objectify itself, he went down to Schruns in the Voralberg in mid-December.  Here he spent the period before Christmas in skiing and revising his book.  A trip to New York in mid-February provided a brief interlude in the concentrated labors of rewriting.  These filled January, part of February, and the month of March.  By April first the book was ready for the typist.  Heavy cuts in the original opening and elsewhere had now reduced a much longer novel to about 90,000 words.  The completed typescript was mailed to Maxwell Perkins on April 24, 1926. The total operation had covered nine months of extremely hard work.
– Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (1972), at 75-76 (emphasis mine)

The word, “objectify,” is not in quotation marks, but it might as well be.  It sounds like a word Hemingway would have used.  And it refers to what happens when you set aside your manuscript and give the unconscious a chance to work.

One day, I am certain neuroscientists will strip away the veneer of mystery surrounding the creation of art.  Until then, it is enough to know that we must make time and room for the unconscious and accommodate it as part of creating fiction.  Writers too need their vacations, even if they are still working.

Photo: Gonzalo Barr; Source: Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (1972), at 75-76

What good are writers’ readings?  They are a seminal part of the book tour, of course, a means for readers to meet the writer personally.  You show up, talk about your latest book, read selections from it, take a few questions, then autograph copies, leaving in your wake goodwill and sales receipts.

Anyone who started publishing this decade has by now surely discovered that publishers are less than enthusiastic about funding book tours.  Let me restate that:  If the book tour was a natural part of marketing a new book in the last century, it is not necessarily so this decade.

Today, writers have so many electronic means of “meeting” readers that the cost of touring almost doesn’t make sense except in a few cases.  Of course, meeting a writer on line is not the same as meeting a writer in person.   Don’t personal meetings, by their very nature, create a greater impact in the audience, establish a deeper and more immediate sense of rapport and name recognition, help the “brand,” if you will?

Well, not always –

[British writer, Graham Swift] recalls a time an audience member asked him why he had chosen to a read a particular passage, and he explained as best he could. “No, no,” said his questioner. “What I meant was, why did you choose that particular author?”

Photo:  Graham Swift; Source: Phil Baker, “Colours of memory,” Times Literary Supplement (May 8, 2009), at 13 (reviewing Graham Swift, Making an Elephant:  Writing From Within (June 2009))