Monthly Archives: May 2010

structure echoes content

Posted on by

4

Fisherman’s Wharf in Provincetown Harbor

Annie Dillard’s novel The Maytrees [spoiler alert], begins with a short prologue from a storyteller narrator who is hereafter rarely noticed. Its first sentence interestingly begins with the couple not the individuals: “The Maytrees were young long ago.” Although it’s difficult to grasp on the first read, these four and a half pages tell, in a fairytale way, the story of the novel.

After the prologue is a preface, written in the point of view of Toby Maytree, that begins with this sentence that divides the Maytrees into two individuals: “It began when Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree first met.” This sentence in this point of view foreshadows the later division of the Maytrees by Toby.

notice board by Angel Foods

After the preface, there’s a page break and the apparent first sentence of the novel, in which the narrative distance has shrunk yet again:

“Of course she glared at Maytree that fall when he came by barefoot at daybreak and asked if she would like to see his dune shack.”

Or is it the first sentence? What follows those words are what appear to be eight unmarked, short chapters—some told by Lou, some by Maytree, and some by the narrator—in which Maytree courts Lou, they marry, and have a child. Then, the reader turns the page to find on page 61 the heading, “Part One.” This innovative structure is a way of saying you thought that was the story but now we’re getting to the real story. Apparently the preface consisted of nine unmarked, short chapters.

a P-town taxi

Here’s the first sentence of Part One: “That winter the crowd on the frozen corner parted for Lou, saying, He’s okay, it’s all right.” Later that day in real time (five pages later) the reader learns Maytree is leaving Lou to go to Maine with their friend Deary. Part One consists of six unmarked chapters and covers the time period it take Lou to become “happier and wiser,” to discover “that steady ground”—six months: from “that winter” to “one cold June morning.”

The novel continues with an Interlude of eight short unmarked chapters, the first of which is narrated by the Maytrees’ son Pete, that covers the twenty years—the interlude—Lou and Maytree spend apart.

welcome

Part Two is divided into five unmarked sections. In the first one, again narrated by Pete, Pete reconciles with his father. Then Deary becomes bedridden and Maytree slips on ice, becoming incapable of caring for them. He travels from Maine back to Provincetown to ask for Lou’s help.

Part Three begins with Pete carrying Deary into his mother’s house. It’s four short, unmarked sections that cover six months and Deary’s death.

The Maytrees concludes with an Epilogue in two short sections. In the first one, Lou and Maytree live together “many new years.” The second one begins “Tomorrow is another day only up to a point. One summer five years later Maytree began to die all over the place.”

P-town lobster traps

Dillard uses structure to clue the reader as to the real story, which in this case is not the courtship or the marriage of the Maytrees, but the much more interesting story of what happens after that: their breakup, how Lou got over Maytree…

She was ready to want to stop this. Thereby she admitted—barely—that she could choose to stop…She could climb the monument every day and work on herself as a task…Their years together were good. He was already gone. All she had to do for peace was let him go.

…and discovered her own life, as well as the story of two individuals who were, through whatever happened, the Maytrees…

Now in compassion they bore, between them, their solitudes each the size of the raveled globe.

on Rt 6 coming into P-town

Finally, if you’re not convinced, take a look at these words from page 22 about Maytree’s third book:

(After the book appeared, a poem in three parts, no one noticed its crucial—to him—structure. At thirty he feared being obvious….

Some of this post–what I understood about the structure from my 1st read–also appeared in my 1st post on The Maytrees.

Bookmark and Share

6 things I learned from annie dillard

Posted on by

6

On my second read of The Maytrees in four weeks, I’m slowly ingesting the writing. Here are six things I learned, or was reminded of, by reading Annie Dillard [spoiler alert]:

1) To add telling to showing with an unexpected sentence:

“Their intimacy’s height so far was drinking from the same canteen.”

2) To use images:

“Affixed to Deary was six-year-old Marie Koday, fist like a clothespin on Deary’s skirts.”

“In her company he wrapped himself in misery like a robe.”

“She found herself holding one end of a love.”

3) To choose actions that add tension and say more than words:

“Brandy he drinks? The tenth-anniversary-present brandy from four years ago we’ve sipped on Christmas mornings only?”

4) To use humor to deflect melodrama:

“Never her Maytree, who loved her, as he just unsaid.”

“If this was not shaping up to be Maytree’s finest hour, it might as well be hers.”

5) To think associatively and let what the character sees reflect her state of mind:

“Do not drive in breakdown lane, said the Route six signs. Do not break down in driving lane. The sea poured over the stone lip at Gibraltar and emptied.”

6) To use echos:

Petie: “Did his brain contain a pack of selves like Musketeers, each smaller and farther back and waving a sword?”

Lou (11 pages later): “How she wished she could see all those displaced Petes and Peties once more!

Final post on The Maytrees (for the foreseeable future anyway) coming up: the relationship of structure to content

Bookmark and Share

so this morning

Posted on by

12

So this morning, at the suggestion of a reader, I took myself outside before I did anything else. Up and out my driveway for a walk–to wake the mind and the body at the same time.

Seventy-four degrees in Columbus, Georgia, with a light breeze. Wonderful in the shade.

And on my walk it came to me that I hadn’t taken an essay I wrote for my last packet of the semester (dropped in the FedEx box last night around six) far enough. This is the kind of thought that’s most likely to occur when my mind is free to roam. Which underscores the importance to writing of time away from desk or computer.

From The Maytrees:

Every book he read was a turn he took…He started new notebooks without having made the least sense of any old notebook.

Bookmark and Share

the person underneath

Posted on by

5

Well I’m going to momentarily halt my attempt to reduce the number of books in my to-be-read piles and reread The Maytrees.

Because I want to, she sings from the rooftops.

In the comments to my first post on the novel, I admitted that when I began reading it, I wasn’t sure I liked it, that the tone seemed brusque and clipped, almost as if the book were a person who wanted to keep to herself.

The more I read, though, the more the tone seemed to soften, and I discovered I liked the person underneath.

Often when I suspect I don’t like a book, I read quickly–to get it over with. Now I’m going to reread The Maytrees so I can enjoy each word.

At the very end of my edition of Annie Dillard’s The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a nonfiction narrative published in 1974, she writes an Afterward, written in 1999, and then a More Years Afterward, written in 2007. In the latter, she describes the style of The Maytrees as one of spareness–”short sentences, few modifiers.” She also writes:

“The Maytrees are a woman and a man both simplified and enlarged…The Maytrees’ human tale needs only the telling. Writers’ styles often end pruned down. (I knew this happened; I did not know I was already that old.)”

Bookmark and Share

time to adapt again

Posted on by

20

I was going to write a bit more about The Maytrees, but yesterday I read a post by Alexander Chee in which he wrote about, in addition to many other wonderful things including the connection between novels and the news, his pre-writing rituals and the need to adapt. This post was timely. For the last few days I’ve been thinking about changing how I begin my day.

Let me interrupt this logical sequence to say I just now realized yet another possible reason why this post came back to me this morning as I was crossing the border between asleep and awake (as I was leaving my sleep–still playing these CDs constantly). One of the things the novel I finished a year ago (and that I have not sent to very many agents yet and that I keep telling myself I need to make time to do so) is about is the impact the news has on one woman.

Nabokov, in an interview for Playboy in 1964, wrote that in the winter, he would wake up to an Alpine chough (which I thought was a typo for church until I just googled it) alarm clock around seven and then that he would lie “in bed mentally revising and planning things.”

Dani Shapiro wrote, in one of the How We Spend Our Days posts, that as she gets her son off on his morning, she tries to “reserve just a bit of myself in that quiet, dreamy state of just-waking, so that once my family is out the door, I can turn to my work.”

For a little more than a year, my black, rectangular alarm clock has been waking me up at 6:30. I get right on the treadmill and watch Morning Joe for thirty minutes before getting my son off to school. This morning, I lay in bed for that thirty minutes and a thousand things entered my mind and they’re still coming. Maybe, as Chee wrote, “It is time for me to adapt again.”

Bookmark and Share

the maytrees

Posted on by

19

Annie Dillard published her most recent book, The Maytrees, a novel, in 2007. The cover of the paperback has recessed letters that I can feel with my eyes closed and uneven pages that make me think the book was created by a real person. It’s interesting, I think, coming from me that the unevenness makes me think of a real person.

On the inside are characters I can see with my eyes closed and imperfect lives that echo our own. The Maytrees is the story of two individuals who came together once upon a time in a place I love–Provincetown.

The following sentence from a storyteller narrator who is hereafter rarely seen begins the four-and-a-half-page prologue:

“The Maytrees were young long ago.”

There’s also a preface, which starts out with this sentence that divides the Maytrees into two individuals:

“It began when Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree first met.”

After the preface, there’s a page break and the apparent first sentence of the novel in which the narrative distance has shrunk yet again:

“Of course she glared at Maytree that fall when he came by barefoot at daybreak and asked if she would like to see his dune shack.”

Or is it the first sentence? What follows those words are what appear to be eight unmarked, short chapters. Then, you turn the page to find on page 61 the heading, “Part One,” and this first sentence:

“That winter the crowd on the frozen corner parted for Lou, saying, He’s okay, it’s all right.”

I wonder if this is a way of saying you needed to know all that came before but now we’re getting to the real story. The novel continues with an Interlude, Part Two, Part Three, and finally an Epilogue, which includes a space break and another short section.

My favorite passage comes right before Part Two and shows Lou discovering who she is:

“The one-room ever-sparer dune shack was her chief dwelling…Lou had long since cut out fashion and all radio but the Red Sox. In the past few years she had let go her ties to people she did not like, to ironing, to dining out in town, and to buying things not necessary and that themselves needed care. She ignored whatever did not interest her. With those blows she opened her days like a pinata. A hundred freedoms fell on her. She hitched free years to her lifespan like a kite tail. Everyone envied her the time she had, not noticing that they had equal time.

And then toward the end of the book, after a certain event, she discovers something else about herself:

“She bade her solitude good-bye. Good-bye no schedule but whim; good-bye her life among no things but her own and each always in place; good-bye no real meals, good-bye free thought. The whole flat flock of them flapped away. But what was solitude for if not to foster decency?

So much to say about this one, but for now I’ll leave you here.

Bookmark and Share

from their flat, yellowed pages

Posted on by

9

A Literary Tour

In her first album in 7 years, Natalie Merchant brings 26 poems to life…

“I pulled these obscure and eccentric poems off their flat, yellowed pages…”

With her young daughter in mind and often on her lap, Merchant was inspired to show her that “speech could be the most delightful toy in her possession.” I love her description of childhood with its nod to the underside of life:

“that time when we wake up to the great wonders and small terrors of this beautiful-horrible world of ours.”

An 80-page book comes with this 2-CD collection of 26 songs (so don’t download). It’s beautiful on the outside and the inside–with copies of the poems, pictures of the poets, and odd little details Merchant discovered as she delved deeper into the worlds of these artists.

One of my all-time favorite poems, “maggie and milly and molly and may,” by E. E. Cummings is included in the collection. “Estlin, as he was called,” she writes. And then,

“In just scratching the surface of his life I found this one lost and unrequited daughter.”

A new favorite, “The Land of Nod,” by Robert Louis Stevenson, put to music with a full orchestra and on top, Merchant’s voice light as frosting, gave me goose bumps. She writes of his gift of a piano to a leper colony he visited on route to Somoa and of his “trance-inducing doomed and luminous eyes.”

“I used music to enter these poems, and once inside I was able to understand how they were constructed with layers of feeling and meaning.”

I will leave you with this March 9, 2010 interview–Natalie speaking with Granta Magazine’s deputy editor Ellah Allfrey about Leave Your Sleep:

Bookmark and Share

How We Spend Our Days: Daniel Asa Rose

Posted on by

14

Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” On the first of each month, Catching Days hosts a guest writer in the series, “How We Spend Our Days.” Today, please welcome writer Daniel Asa Rose:

Having yet another midlife crisis. About two-thirds of the way through this one, best I can tell. Can’t blame it ALL on my last book–but yeah I think I will.  The extended family was annoyed that I would help my cousin Larry procure an illegal kidney in China when he had given them nothing but grief for years; the immediate family didn’t like my spending precious resources being away two months; the intimate family discovered it was more peaceful at home without me. Less “stormy,” she said.  Plus, of course, then I was Storm Central writing a book about it for the next eleven months. So yeah, I WILL blame the book.

Accordingly, I find myself in the desert.  Fleeing everyone I’ve ever known, I have taken myself far from my 1780 Colonial in the lush farmland of Massachusetts and am holed up in southwestern New Mexico where I am slowly reconstructing myself, day by day.  Here’s how it’s going today so far.

Feeling fragile, in biking clothes and cowboy hat, I step out of my sublet with a wrench to refasten the license plate which has been clattering in the dust storm all night.  Cast a baleful look at my enemy, the empty mailbox heating under the baby blue sky.  Hop on my motorized mule of a bicycle and ride two blocks past the empty ragtag storefronts of Broadway to an organic café where Outlaw Ray is behind the counter, for some reason looking more skittish than rakish today. He’s been hitchhiking for 25 years, either that or he’s hitched the country in its entirety 25 times, I always forget which.  Whenever he got in a tight spot, he told me once, he’d “make like smoke and blow away.”

Ray giving the horns to his girlfriend Tessie at the Safe Haven

But like many of the dislocated souls here, he was just passing through when the town grabbed hold — specifically, in his case, Tessie, the pretty but no-nonsense 40 year old granny who owns the Safe Haven and who’s fallen for him but regards him sternly.  He tries hard to please her but does have those decades of open road under his belt, after all, and a stint in the slammer for armed robbery.

(“You’re 20 years old,” he explained to me once when Tessie was out of earshot.  “You hook up with a buddy who’s also 20 years old, you both want to be outlaws, bingo: armed robbery. Showdown ended with my buddy sticking his shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. Closer than you are to me right now.  Two years in the county jail and two years in the pen.  But I learned my lesson: Come at the day with what YOU can bring to the day, not with what the day can bring YOU.”)

the blessed hot tank in my dirt yard

In various ways it’s done my heart good to have witnessed this romance develop over the four months I’ve been here. Right now it makes me less apprehensive about the rest of my day.  Maybe I’ll soak in the hot tank when I get back to the trailer. It’s a steel cattle feeder in my dirt yard; all I have to do is twist the spigot and out gushes 112 degree water from the ancient volcanic lake just beneath my feet. In ten minutes I’ll be sinking up to my armpits in 385 gallons of hot springs with no sulfur stink, and more minerals than anywhere on the continent – including lithium which my grateful pores drink in until the words “blessed, blessed” escape my lips.  And then the stars!

Or maybe I’ll drop in on Toni for an all-afternoon massage ($50 for three hours).  Or find a fax machine somewhere to send in my application to adopt-a-highway, a barren stretch of stunted cacti and wondrous sunsets I want to take care of.  (If I can’t nurture my boys at home, at least I can nurture a road, right?)  Or ride the motor mule along some desert trails and watch coyotes scamper daintily out of the way. Or take the bed sheets off the line, which in the bright wind of the high desert will have dried in the twenty minutes I’ve been gone –

“Sorry, no truffles today,” Outlaw Ray informs me.

I am bitterly let down.  These are world class truffles Ray makes from scratch, with coconut flakes on top and a ganache center.

“Got this here lasagna just out of the oven, though: spinach, mushrooms, and béchamel.  I just love sayin’ that.  Bechamellllll.”

Tessie watches through narrow eyes as he cuts an overgenerous piece and charges me $4.49.  Pricey for this town, but it IS organic. And will take care of dinner.

“Is the rumor true that Real John was forced to move his van from the corner?” I ask.

“Building inspector ran him off.”

“I’m gonna miss his midnight yodeling.”

a study of ray

“Know what, though?” Ray says. “It’s spring, sap rising, man gets hankering.  I think he was HAPPY to go park on the banks of the Rio Grande, all that breathing room …”

I note his wistful expression.  “YOU stayin’ put, Ray?” I ask.

“Yes sir I am.” He looks at me solemnly, as if making a vow.  “Despite an overnight tomorrow in Amarillo, seeing my only son for the first time in three years.”

“Nervous?” I ask.

“Naaaaaah!” he says nervously. “Am I nervous, Tessie?”

“Only thing he talks about.”

“How old’s the kid?”

“Be four tomorrow.”  He kisses Tessie, who raises her eyebrows skeptically, then kisses him back hard.  “But I’ll be back straightaway.”

I walk out with the lasagna in a white Styrofoam container with raised letters on its top:  “Have A Nice Day.”

And you know what?  I’m starting to.

the open road

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

  • I REREAD MY OLD FRIEND TOM COBB’S BOOK “CRAZY HEART” AFTER SEEING THE MOVIE TO SEE IF IT WAS AS GOOD AS I REMEMBERED WHEN HE PUBLISHED IT SOME 20 YEARS AGO.   IT WAS.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

  • BE A GOOD BOSS TO YOURSELF: GENEROUS WITH PRAISE, LIGHT WITH CRITICISM, RELAXED, KIND, FORGIVING.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

  • TAKING MY NOTEBOOK TO BED WITH ME?  THO IT SEEMS PERFECTLY NATURAL TO ME.

Books by Daniel Asa Rose:

Larry's Kidney--out today in paperback!

Hiding Places

Small Family With Rooster

Flipping For It

Bookmark and Share