Break Every Rule Read online

  But I am delighted and in great awe over the resonances I can perceive. And the repetitions. At the Karolyi Foundation in the form of two extraordinary women, Judith Karolyi and Zenka Bartek, the reiteration again comes of who I am and why I live. I am reminded again of what I must do. It comes through with great force and clarity. They press me on, they press me further. I have stepped off the plane and into the care of these two women, lovers, both in their seventies, who offer me, like guardians at the doors of the psyche, fearlessness, diabolic and sometimes harsh judgments, support, and after awhile unconditional love. And they watch me unravel, as I will in the next months, and they will stand by and they will watch out for me, protect me, wait for me—as I too wait. Until I can take the vow again—having gone a long way off.

  And in the New York I inhabited and left in 1988, my publishing house closes, and Helen, tired of all the separations, tired of all my antics, goes off with another woman, and I become lost. Almost irretrievably. I had left her again. Because I had to. But she was tired, bitter, lonely. Fed up finally.

  I had left her behind, again—because I could not write—write, that is, on my own terms, without concern for the marketplace, without selling out in small but grave ways: writing for magazines, or teaching prematurely, or making unconscious decisions that might make the work more sexy, more accessible—but for all the wrong reasons. It seemed crucial not to derail myself now, not to subvert myself, not to give in. But she is less and less capable of understanding all this, or caring.

  I was too afraid of not allowing my talent, my potential, to go where it needed to go.

  I begin, as I often have, a long series of affairs. Because the body all along has been a kind of home to me. But I am sad, and deranged, and so far away. And I miss New York, and I miss her, but there’s no place for me there, and no way I can afford to continue writing.

  And I write down what happens because it is the only way I know to do. I write it all down, and eventually even it takes on the glow of the imagination, freeing itself from the known world. And I give it in the end a title of dislocation, my novel of France. I call it The American Woman in the Chinese Hat. I return to New York; I return to France. At some point Helen and I are reunited. I go back to France a third time. I am writing a wild, visionary thing, The Bay of Angels—but my precious time doesn’t last, can’t last.

  AMERICA 1995

  This country is not a home to me. I am tired of the America that has increasingly come to mean selfishness and avarice and cruelty and meanness of spirit. I have had it for good this time with the Republicans. I am disgusted by an America that loathes difference, otherness. An America indifferent to beauty. A country hostile to art and to its artists—and to all that makes life worth living in the first place. Ruskin wrote, “Great nations write their deeds in art.” We are lost, violently blinded, bankrupt. The children are hungry, the elderly are frightened, the mentally ill wander the streets. Whose family values are these? If it were not for the handful of people I love too much, I would have found a way out of here by now.

  I am leaving out many of my moves at this stage, many changes of address; I tire. Other temporary residencies: Park Slope; Washington, D.C.; Normal, Illinois. In four years, I will teach in four schools; I despair. I am tired of roaming, exhausted, depleted. About to give up.

  HOUSE

  It is a quiet September evening when the phone rings, and as in a movie or a dream, the world changes in an instant. Various people on the unreal speaker-phone saying “fiction,” “prize,” “fellowship.” It’s the Lannan Foundation, audacious angels from Los Angeles. “Fifty thousand dollars.” Impossible. Awards like this one, when they come, arrive like blizzards or love, seemingly out of nowhere, a kind of grace. Such gifts open a whole new realm of imagining. They give the recipient an audacity of purpose, alter previous self-conceptions, make the impossible suddenly possible again: house.

  That I found the house with ease surprised no one; it was, of course waiting for me—an 1840 white eyebrow colonial, in the enchanted, beguiling Hudson Valley. It had everything: a pond, a smokehouse, a bank of lilies; it was not hard to recognize. Nor was the ghost of the woman who greeted me when I opened the door. Her joie de vivre, her intelligence, her wit, a spirit present through the presence of possessions. A Chinese scroll, a clay bird, a chaise lounge, and in the closet Christmas ornaments, a kitty-litter box. A dulcimer, a violin in an unopened violin case—the house had been filled with music… Schubert on the record player.

  I leave her there in winter and begin the long ordeal of securing a mortgage. The mortgage broker wonders with some exasperation who will give me a loan as he examines my “unorthodox employment history,” my living from one grant to the next, a visiting professorship here or there—and me like a child holding my one golden egg with pride. “It doesn’t look very good,” he says, as snow continues to fall. I dream of lilacs and mountains and Chinese scrolls and snow all jumbled up. I cling to these things in sleep: the body of a violin shaped like a small, insistent woman or the rowboat’s shape next to the pond. Having let in the possibility of house, I cannot bear to be houseless again—and without her. But all winter I cannot see it; there’s too much snow and the house seems suddenly to disappear as fast as it appeared. But Elizabeth is fierce: “Don’t be silly,” she whispers, “it’s yours now. You deserve it.” And she passes me a ring of shining keys. She’s handing them to me because it’s the end of her time here—and the beginning of mine.

  I’d like to sit with her for a minute, safe within the sanctuary of our study, the lilacs like an ocean in the distance, and just talk, the way you can with those you genuinely admire but don’t really know. I would like to whisper my fears to her, tell her I dread the impending publication of The American Woman in the Chinese Hat. Tell her I fear the person I was when I wrote it and know, on any day waking, I might be again. Almost everyone else is less patient with this sort of thing. They just want you to get on with it—enjoy your successes, don’t worry so much about the past. But she’s more understanding. This time around at any rate. I am afraid of the person I was then, so resigned, so desirous of death, I’d tell her. And I imagine she’d say, “I, too, was afraid at times.”

  She is like the women, starting with my mother, I have tried to keep up with my whole life. You must run breathless just to sit next to them. They prod. They urge. “Look closer; be braver,” they say.

  Everything of hers is gone now: the dulcimer, the bells, the music she loved preserved on vinyl—all the books. It’s okay; she’ll grace these halls a long time, I know.

  We’ll sit until the light is gone. She’ll ask if I’ve found the asparagus patch yet, seen the mockingbird who lives near the mailbox.

  She’ll wonder how my new work is going. She’s stretched out on the chaise lounge, her hand keeping time to some irresistible music. Her beautiful voice drifts through this precious house. She closes her eyes—says she’s so happy about the prize—pats my hand, this drowsy angel, already two years dead on the first day we meet, whom I love.

  PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

  That nearly perfect lilac-infused existence I am already forced to miss. To in some way already give up.

  I am returned to the state of my making. Back to the state of my conception, the very idea of me. Returned to the place of my invention. Home of water and watery memory and pull. I am a little at home. I have come to direct the creative writing program at Brown University. It is perhaps the job that will best allow me to continue doing the writing I need to do. I will only have to teach a little.

  HOME

  I am a wandering soul—but not an aimless one. I’ve learned well how to listen and I’ve gone wherever my work told me to go. Wherever my work took me, insistent, I went. I have been forced, in order to continue writing on my own terms, to leave over and over again. I who live everywhere and nowhere have built a home of language. I have been forced to create a home of my own making. A home of music and desire. I can at this
point make a home wherever I go. I open my large artist’s notebook, I pick up a pen, I turn on the radio; I dream of you—the best, the most mysterious one, the most remote and beautiful aspect of self.

  The necessity to find ways to continue, without for the most part the luxury of financial reward, has made it imperative to imagine a home that might be moveable. It has had to be okay to live outside familiarity, outside comfort, outside anything that seems mine. All along I have found it necessary to live with a home that can be conjured within.

  Home might be a studio in a loft in Tribeca, a room in Provincetown, an office in Normal, Illinois. Home is anywhere my mind catches fire, my body. Where language trembles and burns.

  I am at work now on several projects—a book of rage called Defiance, a book of desire: The Erotic Etudes. And The Bay of Angels, of course. The continued exploration of the possibilities of language is the only real life I know, the only place I’ve lived truly, fully, all these years. I have spent fifteen years of devotion at the altar of the impossible. I’ve spent fifteen years building my unshakable home of language and love. The place of longing and failure (for who could succeed?) where I live recklessly, without concern for the product, or the consequences, or the future. My house of yearning and mystery and peace. A place of grace. My mother praying for a child to be born, to come to term, and another mother singing French songs—and the war. And in the étude I’ve just finished—a woman on a bridge, dressed in white, dipping her hands into the sacred Ganges—it is and is not me. One lives in awe, next to the silence and the strangeness as the lost or hidden or forgotten aspects of self and world, only glimpsed at, are sensed, if only a little. In the challenge, I am at home. In concentration I feel at ease—pure pleasure, pure joy, as I have not experienced in any other way.

  After a week of interviews, readings, anxieties, stresses of all sorts—no time to write—I finally can get back a little to some work on Defiance. Having been away, disoriented, without anchor, and coming back, I write the line, “Who will mind my savage goat and pole dog?” and this arrangement of words makes me feel more calm, more relieved, more at home than I have felt in some time. Why? Why does this sentence have such an effect over me? It is because a sentence like that completely embodies in language all of my anxiety and frustration and uncertainty and rage—it is an awkward sentence, strange, off-balance, precarious. Darkly imagined, it seems to break off from the body of the rest of the text it is a part of, to assume an eerie and haunting independence. A splintered, troubling thing. It so captures my emotional state in language that I am no longer so alone, marooned in it: the emotional state is approximated through the physicality of language, mirrored, and as a result becomes company, something present, something palpable…. The language construct is no longer about an emotional state for me, but has become one, and in that way I am no longer utterly isolated in it and without a viable structure. Home is any ordinary, gorgeous sentence that is doing its work.

  Home for me is in the syntax, in the syllables. In the syncopations and in the silences. A movement in the mind, the eye, the mouth. Home is the luminous imagination. India haunting me after the Satyatjit Ray retrospective. Home is in Sappho’s fragments, in imagining what was there before the papyrus tore. The imagination providing a foundation, a roof, and windows that let you see forever.

  The glowing imagination. The place in the distance, amidst the maelstrom of the blizzard toward which “poets will walk without thinking, as if walking home,” as Tsvetaeva has said. That place, distant, mysterious, ever-fleeting, changing and shifting, but glimmering in the distance.

  Home is that drugged, seductive other state—creation not so unlike the dark, sexual descent. Now a house burns on the page. Now I am in flames. This is the aim of my erotic études: to explore those relationships between language and desire, my sacred, twinned notions of home. In this alternate place, this other reality, outside, apart from one’s other life (having moved again, having left, been displaced, been hurt, been diminished and forced to operate in a world so unlike one’s real world). A state so deeply meditative, so deeply sexual, so like music. Home is still the music drifting. My parents whispering. The precious alphabet she taught me. And her lovely body. Home is the bodies of women: safe. And all the songs they sang—and sing.

  One afternoon while I am dreaming Defiance, I finally realize, I know, yes, the little girl Bernadette and Fergus, her older brother, will go fishing—that is it—and somehow it all falls into its proper balance: austere, mysterious, impossibly simple and elegant. Yes, that is it. And I am completely elated and then serene. As happy as I have ever been. Who would not choose to live there?

  When I write sentences I am at home. When I make shapes. When I do not, I am damned, doomed, homeless; I know this well—restless, roaming; the actual places I’ve lived become unrecognizable, and I, too, monstrous, am unrecognizable to myself. In the gloating, enormous strangeness and solitude of the real world, where I am so often inconsolable, marooned, utterly dizzied—all I need do is to pick up a pen and begin to write—safe in the shelter of the alphabet, and I am taken home. Back into the blinding waves, the topaz light, the fire. Or far off into the enthralling, voluptuous dark.

  The child draws the letter A.

  She closes her eyes and is surprised to see Matisse

  sitting on his balcony in Nice, looking at a woman

  a bird, a hat, some fish in a bowl, turning them over

  and over in search of serenity, until he sees a pattern

  finally, turning them over until they glow.

  Miracles might occur…

  Movement and stasis:

  We took the overnight train.

  You kissed me everywhere.

  A beautiful, passing landscape. Imagined in the dark.

  Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose:

  A LIFELONG CONVERSATION WITH MYSELF ENTERED MIDWAY

  AN EROTIC song cycle.

  AVA could not have been written as it was, I am quite sure, if I had not been next to the water day after day. Incorporating the waves.

  Making love those afternoons at dusk, just as the shapes were taken back. Afterwards darkness. Provincetown in winter.

  The design of stars then in the sky. I followed their dreamy instructions. Composed in clusters. Wrote constellations of associations.

  Loving the world, and needing it, as I did. Wanting to transmute it into shapes. Begging it to—

  “Stay a little.”

  Virginia Woolf: “The idea has come to me that what I want to do now is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes—It must include nonsense; fact; sordidity; but made transparent.”

  The desire of the novel to be a poem. The desire of the girl to be a horse. The desire of the poem to be an essay. The essay’s desire, its reach towards fiction. And the obvious erotics of this.

  Virginia Woolf knew the illusion of fiction is gradual even if moments are heart-stopping, breathtaking. There is a pattern, which is only revealed as patterns are, through elongation and perspective, the ability to see a whole, a necklace of luminous moments strung together. How to continue the progression, the desire to go beyond the intensity of the moment or of moments. Like sex, one has to figure out how to go on after the intensity of the moment—how in effect to compose a life afterwards, how to conjure back a world worth living in, a world which might recall, embrace the momentary, glowing, obliterating, archetypal. One longs for everything. For the past one never experienced, for the future one will never know—except through the imaginative act. One longs to be everything. To have everything.

  A certain spaciousness. There would be time and room for it all.

  The creation of an original space. The desire for an original space in which to work.

  Passion of the mind. Persistent desire for form to meld with idea and emotion in organic ways.

  Restlessness of the form. Every rose pulses.

>   Gertrude Stein: “It can easily be remembered that a novel is everything.”

  Accuse me again, if you like, of over-reaching.

  The novel’s capacity for failure. Its promiscuity, its verve. Always trying to attain the unattainable. Container of the uncontainable. Weird, gorgeous vessel. Voluptuous vessel.

  Room for the random, the senseless, the heartbreaking to be played out. A form both compressed, distilled, and expansive enough to accommodate the most difficult and the most subtle states of being.

  Musings, ideas, dreams, segues, shifts in key, athletic feats of imagination, leaps and swirls. Or small, nearly imperceptible progresses. The unarticulated arc of our lives.

  Many fiction writers do not, I believe, acknowledge reality’s remoteness, its mysteriousness. Its inaccessibility to us and to our modes of expression, though the novel is one of the very few good places for this sort of exploration.

  Together, many novelists, now commodity makers, have agreed on a recognizable reality, which they are all too happy to impart as if it were true. Filled with hackneyed ways of perceiving, clichéd, old sensibilities, they and the publishing houses create traditions which have gradually been locked into place. They take for granted: the line, the paragraph, the chapter, the story, the storyteller, character.

  I love most what the novel might be, and not what it all too often is.

  Reach.

  The novel as a kind of eternity. A kind of infinity. Inevitable progressions of beauty—with room and time enough for it all.

  Not to worry.

  Lyrical novels imply a formal design—an aesthetic patterning in order to achieve the desired intensity.

  A personal sensibility projected through the minds and actions of others so that both the lyric and the narrative might be achieved. The lyric self coupled with the novelist’s “omniscient” visions.