A Portrait of the Artist from a Young Sentence
Transformation Is the Theme
On Thursday, I will announce some notable but not too dramatic changes of Homo Vitruvius as a writing project and explain the reasons for them. The changes will take effect next week. This essay, substantially revised from its original publication last August, when I had about a quarter of the subscribers I now have, will thus be entirely or significantly new to you and an appropriate lead in to my Thursday thoughts.
The first artful words I ever wrote, the first artful sentence -- I remember it still, I was 15 years old -- was "I died in a fire." You see my narrative conceit right there. I had done "creative" writing before that, to fulfill school assignments. One of them I recall, in the 8th grade, led me to describe the flow of water over its whole natural course of recursive exchange between atmosphere and ocean, into human systems of carriage, to its destined stream from some faucet into a glass. Of all the student submissions, the teacher chose, with praise, mine to read aloud to the class: the self-affirming pride I felt, sorely needed amid my early-adolescent, melancholic insecurities, when I realized that the words our teacher had begun to pronounce aloud were mine.
And then the class began openly to scoff.
It was too good some called out. It was fake. No eighth grader writes like that, a voice came from the seats around me. The writer had plagiarized the passage, taken it from somewhere. They dismissed it.
The giving and then the taking away became a kind of pattern for my writing life.
(Not that I'm not responsible, too, for that life. I produced what I produced, or not, in my own manner, out of my own abilities and disabilities.)
But those school assignments were efforts that enlisted and practiced skills.
"I died in a fire" was my first attempt at self-originating artifice, my first uprising in artistry.
During the remaining winter of my fifteenth year, leading to sixteen in March, I wrote several somber short stories. One I recall that I titled, I believe, “Come December,” I drafted long hand sitting at a window in my parents’ bedroom after school, while they were still at work in Manhattan. It was the deadest of winter – all winters on the Rockaway Peninsula of New York City are the deadest, most desolate of winters – and the snow drifts high. Winds cut to the bone even viewed through an eighth-floor window, and their otherworldly howling through the casement cracks were actual and only felt as if they came from me. I worked at setting that scene and conveying those feelings.
Sometime after that sixteenth birthday, I fell in love for the first time, and that ultimately led to grief, so I gained a lot more pain from that endeavor to feed my creative sublimations. I didn’t write poetry about it, which is common for sensitive teens in pain – I didn’t begin to write poetry for many years – though I did study it for the first time in a high school senior year elective, along with a first creative writing class. I wrote fiction. And then, because I wanted to be a filmmaker too – I studied film in college and made a second home of the city’s filmic art house theaters – I wrote screenplays.
By the time I was 22, living in my first, small studio apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, driving a taxi and attending the City College of New York for the second of multiple undergraduate stints, I had been working on my first screenplay for two years. I was also writing film criticism for the Observation Post, City College’s second, alternative weekly newspaper. As it is recorded in history that Pauline Kael wrote her famous review of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris for The New Yorker, so did I, to less historic note, write the review for the Observation Post.
The title of that first screenplay is Children of Darkness. I took it from a song by Richard and Mimi Farina. Their version of it is a authentically styled pre-Sixties folk rendition, but the recording by Mimi’s sister, Joan Baez on her 1967 Joan album, with the haunting gravity of its Gaelic, marching piano and bagpipe is far weightier and superior.
Oh, now is the time for your loving, dear, And the time for your company Now when the light of reason fails And fires burn on the sea Oh, now in this age of confusion I have need for your company. - For I am a wild and a lonely child And the son of an angry land Now with the high wars raging I would offer you my hand For we are the children of darkness And the prey of a proud command.
The screenplay is autobiographical, though not in many literal senses beyond that the protagonist is 22, newly on his own, and driving a taxi in Manhattan. The protagonist’s name is Harry Shaw. I took the Shaw from Irwin Shaw, a Jewish-American writer of some early critical and later great popular success but not talked about today. Shaw’s real last name was Shamforoff, until he changed it in college. At the time, this background suited my sense — despite my, and my character’s, surroundedness by Eastern European refugee Jewish relatives — of my own Americanized nature. The Harry, too, is as ordinary, frank and American as I wanted Harry Shaw to be.
But here is the point I’ve been working towards.
Harry Shaw isn’t a writer.
Throughout my 20s, the method I used in my fictionalized autobiographical writing to explore my feelings of pain and grief and despair was to make the character who might be based in myself someone who wasn’t a writer. To throw the character’s desolate alienation from emotional connection and any sense of meaning in the world into the starkest possible relief, I purposely chose for him not to have writing to save him.
Because writing did save me. Over and over again. How would I survive, I investigated through the drama of Harry Shaw, and other characters after him – what could life possibly mean – if I didn’t have writing to give me purpose and rescue me?
I’m not talking about “getting my feelings out” on paper. Writing isn’t therapy. I go to therapy for therapy. I’ve done that plenty. By purpose I don’t mean higher purpose, delivered from any higher source, or of value because it serves some higher end. I mean my purpose and fulfilling it.
What is my purpose? I’m a writer. I’ve had no surer sense of identity in my life since that first artful sentence. It is felt as a need, by which I am driven, and because of which, if I don’t meet it — which I’ve allowed myself to do in life — I feel diminished and in time misdirected and lost. Empty. I begin to feel like Harry Shaw.
The Hellenic Greek concept of aretē, variously defined as “excellence,” “virtue” and more, Aristotle developed in his Nichomachean Ethics most extensively in its human application, with regard to an individual’s fulfillment of his potential as a person – as athlete, baker, statesman. It then becomes a matter more, as a full person, of character virtue. Virtue ethics. What is one’s aretē as a human being? But the idea isn’t restricted to the human. It is the aretē of a hammer to hammer, of a lyre to be plucked and sing. When I think of the idea in relation to myself, then, I mean it almost as much in that more objective sense as the human. A tree trees – it rises out of the earth, branches out, and leaves. A river flows. A writer writes. That is their aretē. When they fulfill their inherent nature or purpose in this way, they express their excellence, their virtue as what, innately, they are. There is no question, unless prevented, external to its nature, of a tree ceasing to be a tree, of a river ceasing to flow.
I understood long ago, very early, that I would always write. Whatever worldly success I achieved, recognition or recompense, or not, I would always write. There was no giving it a good go and then moving on to something else if some measure of success went unmet. If I were to end my life aged and living wretchedly alone in poverty (and there were many times I thought I might), I knew I would do it sitting at some kind of desk before a window – there has to be a window – writing. That’s what I do, like branching out. Like leaving.
Or in other words, take my word,
borne out of the buzzing hive,
deep dark and honeyed down the fervent center where
I was born, to bear the words
into this bare barkless
leaving and unleaving left to go.
"The Words"So far, it hasn’t turned out that worst way. I had a career as a professor of English, during a period in which, as it happened, the esteem for and value of the professoriate became greatly diminished. Though I was lucky enough, especially in a “second career,” to be granted tenure, both in absolute numbers and percentage of instruction delivered, contingent, part-time faculty came to predominate, at substantially lower – even, often, low – salaries. Over those same years, almost exactly the lifetime of the World Wide Web, writers, especially creative writers, devolved to increasingly low and unpaid piece workers. With writers even more than teachers, the presumption by their employers, even the reliance, by just as poorly remunerated publishers or editors, developed that writers would work just for their love of the work alone. And most — all, if they’re really writers — would. But that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be paid, that they couldn’t use the money, or that what they offer isn’t a valuable worthy of recompense for the provision of it. I’ve tried here in this essay to offer that valuable, and what this Substack is actually about: a Grecian urn, in that portrait the title promised, a “foster-child of silence and slow time.”
I sit at my desk before a window – so many windows over so many years – and on white space (“White. A blank page or canvas”) I inscribe dark letters into words and sentences. In sight of something not there out the window, I move the words and sentences around, to draw from nothing, bit by bit, something into creation, something, in truth, already part of the world but as yet unseen in it. I switch the position of a phrase. I delete a word. I add a detail, of sight or sound or situation. I highlight to define, recall an unremembered meaning, say, yes, I like that, it adds, and keep it. I turn this word into a verb, that a pronoun. I hunt down and kill all forms of “to be.” I balance serial commas against successions of conjunctive phrases for the rhythms they offer, count no metrics but listen to music and beat and revel in the jazz of syncopated consonant and vowel. I fall on a periodic sentence, rise and climb on cumulative. I go simple. I switch the order of sentences. I pick and pluck and punch the keys, as with mallet and chisel at stone, of the paragraph, the paragraphs, the whole. I imagine the unrecorded real of a true event five hundred years ago:
On Friday of the second week of August, 1520, Ferdinand Magellan fasted, as penance for his sins, those committed and to come, and in recognition of the sacrifice on the cross for those sins by the Lord Jesus Christ. At day’s end, the captain general descended into the hold of the Trinidad, to its far dim reaches, and finding at his destination Antón de Noya seated on a stool to guard Juan de Cartagena, motioned the apprentice with head and hand to ascend to the deck. Juan, who had been reading his Bible beside a hung lantern, looked up in quiet surprise and placed the book in his lap.
“You have been informed tomorrow is the day,” Magellan asked in statement.
Juan gave no answer but seemed by the attitude of his head to examine his antagonist.
“You may not believe this,” the Portuguese went on, “but I have asked myself many times how it came to this. How you came to despise and oppose me as you have.” He shook his head. “I have no answer.”
Magellan stepped closer, more directly before Juan.
“It cannot be merely – so simply – that I am Portuguese.” Magellan paused, peered. “Vespucci was Florentine,” he offered, “who sailed for Spain, and after for Portugal, but then sailed yet again for Spain, and your uncle appointed him master navigator of the Spanish fleet. Did you know that? I wonder. You were probably still in university when he died.”
Juan felt lorded over, condescended to and remonstrated. He burned with resentment.
“You thought me a tyrant?” Magellan acknowledged. He tossed his head. “All ships captains are tyrants to men who wish never to go hungry, or to be battered by a storm, or to sail beyond the horizon. And the more such men oppose a captain, the more tyrannical he appears to them. Do you think a captain who gives in to the fears and perpetual grumbling of his crew can long remain a captain?”
Juan blurted out. “You seek to justify yourself?”
“I have no need to justify myself,” Magellan answered coldly. “I stand here, and you sit there.” The Portuguese tilted his head. “I only give you the world as it is. Of which you, señor, knew too little.”
“And the men of the Santiago you nearly killed in search of your legendary sea passage, and only by the grace of God did not – what do they know of the world now? How will they be led by you after?”
Magellan felt the fierceness of Juan’s undiminished opposition, which he now saw as constitutional, beyond any reason, though he had long suspected a cause. He felt, too, the sting of truth. But he had survived Moorish lances; he would survive an accountant’s stings. On his return to Spain, though, would he survive this act? Yet though he said he required no justification, how had Cartagena’s unrelenting rebellion, in its very acts, not justified him? Who could justify not crushing such repeated uprising?
Meditating the floor, the Sabrosan had not spoken for a long minute. All the while, his Castilian prisoner had observed him, yet not in his observing, Magellan thought, studied the captain general at all. Juan sat in relation to Magellan now in some way, it seemed, beyond any study of his agonist, any insight or understanding of their contest, rather only as if just one natural element in juxtaposition to another nearby – rocky shore to battering sea.
“I dreamed about you last night,” said Magellan looking up, turning.
Juan’s face flushed with anger.
“I did.”
Magellan waited.
“Would you like to know what I dreamed?”
Now Juan strained visibly against his own inner restraint, his torso and head feeling as if to reach up and across the shadows toward his tormentor in pure opposition to an interest, his life spared, he would rather die than express.
“I dreamed you never existed,” Magellan said.
Grabbing Noya’s stool and quickly planting himself on it in front of Juan, Magellan poured out all that remained.
“I was the one person you should have made a friend. How did you not understand that? You thought the preening Quesada could lead a great expedition to anything but ignominious retreat? That loud, grousing Mendoza? Was retreat – to produce from all this worldly effort and expense – nothing – was that what you wanted? Was that why you left what you left and went to sea?” Magellan waited. For what did he wait? “Don’t you see? All you thought you knew was wrong. Everything you believed was false.”
It was almost as if Magellan thought there might be magic. But Magellan did not believe in magic, and Juan lived now beyond further humiliation, or passage beyond the humiliated state.
“You’re not better than I am,” Juan responded evenly in utter, composed conviction.
Magellan’s head dropped. He almost whispered it with a sigh, “Is that” – and rising, looking up, clearer, more plaintive: “– what this is?”
Taking up the stool and spinning, bending to return it to its place, the captain general said, “If we are equals, inspector general,” – Magellan straightened, still looking down – “then you and I will see each other again in Seville.” He looked at Juan. “But tomorrow you will see me from the shore.”
Ferdinand Magellan walked off into the dark hold. Juan de Cartagena heard his footsteps recede, sound harder and scratch harshly limping up the stairs, then disappear.
I don’t recall any longer what greater resonance I may have intended by the “fire” of that first artful sentence. I was fifteen years old. (Yesterday. Forever ago.) I hadn’t yet read Delmore Shwartz and “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day”:
What will become of you and me (This is the school in which we learn …) Besides the photo and the memory? (… that time is the fire in which we burn.)
AJA
Writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range. Become a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius today. You’ll get access to the full archive, You’ll also have access to a free digital download of Waiting for Word and the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
“Not just words about the ideas but the words themselves.”
I love the way you describe your writing just before the Magellanic excerpt. :-) I, too, write beside windows. I wonder what would change if I wrote in a closet. Maybe I’d concentrate better! You give me an idea of something to try.
Your Magellanic novel has sounded very ambitious to me. Thank you for the excerpt. I can’t tell: Do you have a “favorite child” between these two characters?
Jay, thank you for that scorcher of poem by Schwartz, the Baez song (which I’d forgotten), and above all your writing and wisdom about producing a newsletter while working on a novel. Another Substacker I admire has also cut back on frequency, as I probably will myself when my spark of a big idea demands more attention. There may be those who can toss off an essay. I am not one. I can’t imagine offering a suite of services, as some writers here are doing, to justify paid subscriptions. The small minority who choose to pay me, you or anyone are those who have both money to spare and profound admiration for the words that are everything to us. Do you know Gillian Welch’s song “Everything is Free” (I prefer the Holmes Brothers’ version)? “Someone hit the big score, they figured it out/ That we’re gonna do it anyway, even if it doesn’t pay.”