Writers on Writers Writing, in Various Writerly Ways

A good piece, for me, makes me feel nostalgic for something I didn't even know I could be nostalgic for. Makes me miss something I've never really known, where writers writer about writers make me nostalgic. The south makes me nostalgic. As does fantasizing about a writer's life, a sort of yearning for an artistic community a la the "Twelve Southerners," or for an off-the-grid cabin with damp floors and a narrow bed piled up with quilts where people talk in airy abstractions ("He, for his part, called me boy, and beloved, and once, in a letter, 'Breath of My Nostrils.'). In this week's pieces we get writers as the subjects in all their (wonderful) writerly cliches: promiscuous, rebellious, reclusive, peculiar, stubborn, elusive, lovable, unlovable, forgivable.

I love how these three pieces work on a meta level. As not just profiles of great (or I suppose, according to Sullivan, almost-great) writers, but as pieces where the authors are sharing their first-hand experiences with these writers. Janet Malcolm's words rang clear for me: "The autobiographer works in a treacherous terrain. The journalist has a much safer job." In these pieces we get to see writers attempting both, openly admitting their personal connection to what they're writing about, and in Rolphie's case hearing her talk about her interactions with Malcolm, but we get the added benefit of hearing how Malcolm tests the boundaries journalism. As Rolphie puts it: "One of the most challenging or controversial elements of her work is her persistent and mesmerizing analysis of the relationship between the writer and her subject."

I love that these three pieces dance around this relationship in such different ways. I'm most interested in talking about Sullivan's piece, though, simply because I loved the writing the most. (And as I write this I become--unnecessarily, I know--disappointed in myself for being drawn to the one male writer in the bunch, who is nonetheless writing about an uber-male writer. But his writing was just the best.) I found Schenkar's piece to gush too much about Keogh, and Rolphie's was just the opposite--a little too cold and calculating. Although I really love how she allows Malcolm to call her out on that in this piece:

Earlier you had made the distinction between writers for whom the physical world is significant and writers for whom it scarcely exists, who live in the world of ideas. You are clearly one of the latter. You obediently took out a notebook, and gave me a rather stricken look, as if I had asked you to do something faintly embarrassing.

 I really like what Rolphie's doing in this piece, the way she allows her experiences with Malcolm to reflect what makes Malcolm's work "controversial," that relationship between writer and subject. But I'm just a sucker for a good story, and on that front Sullivan delivers.

I admit I felt disoriented at the beginning of this piece--trying to figure out where we were, what time period we were in, what country even. I'm glad Sullivan admits that "Middle Tennessee at the crack of the twentieth century [had] more in common with Europe in the Middle Ages than with the South he lived to see." This scene of coffin building--the green cedar, the beeswax, the harried and anxious coffin-builder, the scrollwork--all seems too quaint to be true. And what stunning details to characterize a person right off the bat--the formality of his name (Mister Lytle) vs. the strange familiarity/formality of what Lytle's sister calls him (and perhaps here is our first clue of a geographic setting within the pronunciation of "brutha."). The "mon vieux," "breath of my nostrils," and "beloved;" they're all so strange yet endearing and funny at the same time. We get a good sense of what this person immediately via names/naming, even though we technically haven't even "met" him in the essay yet. I suppose death always provides a good scenario to reflect on a person's character with such poignant precision.

I appreciate the sentimentality of this essay, because I admit I'm a sucker for sentiment as long as it's in the right hands. And of course Sullivan defies being gratuitously so by being completely honest at the same time. I found myself wishing I could have had that experience, that I could have spent those months in that house with the peculiar writer who had for some reason taken a liking to me. I love how Sullivan admits that he was totally aware of the objectification going on--the chopping wood, etc., and that he just didn't seem to mind. It isn't until he's groped and nibbled by Mister Lytle that my charm for the man is broken, despite previous misgivings about his fascism, racism, annoying habits, etc. Because Sullivan gave him the benefit of the doubt and still found him remarkable in his own way, I'm compelled to do the same.

Continuing further in the nostalgia vein, there's a certain level of yearning that's evoked when people write about certain time periods in their lives, or when I'm reminded of a certain time period in my own. Sullivan was twenty when he lived with Lytle. He was young enough to afford such an open-mindedness towards this man who easily could come across as a tyrant if I were to come across him now. Reading this piece and wanting to have been Sullivan in that experience (of living in the house not the groping, that is!) I had the profound sense that I'm simply too old for such an experience any more. My time for quirky and cantankerous mentors is over; I simply wouldn't put up with it now. But ten, twelve years ago, sure. And reminiscing about such time periods--when I could be so moved by a person--is mixed up with this romanticized South--the misty Tennessee back woods with its enclaves of eccentric artists.

I became a little disappointed when we meet the girlfriend in the essay, simply because she broke the spell of the relationship that had been developed so far in the writing. But clearly she broke the spell in reality, too, as we get to witness Lytle's infantile reactions to her. So where that was a noticeable shift in the essay, the scratching of the  needle across the record, it was for good reason. The era, like Lytle himself, was simply coming to an end.