Surface Truths

When we're kids, we don't have the ability to do all the things we want to, though we have a certain freedom from obligation that makes them tantalizing. And when we're adults, when we finally could, conceivably, do things like travel all over the world, sit on the couch and read a book all day, eat ice cream for dinner--we have too much obligation.

Sometimes, I wonder why it is I know that I could write a novel, or an essay, but not a short story with any depth. When I sit and read other people's short stories, there is an effortlessness that I find unobtainable. For me, everything is either tied to what I know already, or there is not enough room in 10,000 words to create a world, and a people to populate it.

Here is what Jeanette Winterson writes in her introduction to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit--which, if I'm really going to be honest, is probably my favorite part of the book:

"I…couldn’t bring myself to hold down any job that hinted of routine hours.”

There is something unspeakably alarming about routine hours. It is odd for me to feel this way: I like routine. I adhere to one. I can't do anything in the morning without a bite to eat, not even the dishes. I like knowing the general rhythms of a week--Sundays that, aided by wine and a heavy meal, stretch out for ages; Mondays that feel flat in comparison (almost a buffer day: a day made to get back into the swing of things); Thursday nights when he goes to football and I curl up on the couch. But still.

She also writes this: (and I know it's long, but I couldn't weed much of it out without feeling I'd given something up)

“Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was written during the winter of 1983 and the spring of 1984. I was 24. At that time I was sharing two rooms and a hip bath with the actress Vicky Licorish. She had no money, I had no money, we could not afford the luxury of a separate whites wash and so were thankful of the fashion for coloured knickers which allowed those garments most closely associated with our self-esteem, not to be grey. Dinginess is death to a writer...the damp small confines of the mediocre and the gradual corrosion of beauty and light, the compromising and the settling; these things make good work impossible. When Keats was depressed he put on a clean shirt. When Radclyffe Hall was oppressed she ordered new sets of silk underwear from Jermyn Street. Byron, as we all know, allowed only the softest, purest and whitest next to his heroic skin, and I am a great admirer of Byron. So it seemed to me in those days of no money, no job, no prospects and a determined dinginess creeping up from the lower floors of our rooming house, that there had to be a centre, a talisman, a fetish even, that secured order where there seemed to be none; dressing for dinner every night in the jungle, or the men who polished their boots to a hard shine before wading the waters of Gallipoli. To do something large and to do it well demands such observances, personal and peculiar, laughable as they often are, because they stave off that dinginess of soul that says that everything is small and grubby and nothing is really worth the effort.”

After I read this, I thought it is probably why, before I sit down to do a task, particularly to write something, I must always clean up first. I do the dishes, I reorganize the lounge to my liking, I file papers away, I wipe the kitchen counters and hang the laundry out to dry. Because it is summer and our energy bills are low, I sometimes do do a separate white wash. Then I put my focus where it's meant to be; but never before. Despite my Californian propensity towards nudity (bare feet, sandaled feet, short shorts, short skirts, and very little clothing at all when I'm home alone, sometimes, or in the hours just before bed) I loathe to work without proper attire. If I really want to get something done, I get dressed.

"To do something large and to do it well demands such observances..."

Surface truths: I first learned this phrase when I was reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the 12th grade. Surface truths are what keep you afloat, I learned. They are things like polishing your boots before sloping through a muddy, bloody war, or--less dramatically--cleaning your kitchen before sitting down to lose yourself in a mess of words, even though you don't have a handle on anything else, like rent or a proper job. In Conrad, one colonist at a far outposts of the jungle paid such meticulous attention to his own appearance that he looked, despite being away for years, as if he was just freshly arrived from Europe; he did it so as not to go mad, so as not to let the wilderness infringe. Another man read the same book over and over, obsessively, so that he would not forget himself. The further they journeyed down the river by steamboat, the more ludicrous such things seemed; and the more necessary they became.

In Hurst Street, we have finally found a decorator to repaint our house, to replace the mouldy linoleum in the bathroom, to repair the tiny crack in our bedroom wall that has been bothering me of late. We will not (indeed, do not) live in dinginess!

Valencia Oranges

So I was perusing the books in the downstairs bathroom at the boy’s parent’s house. Every time I’m there I find something I want to read. This time it was Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson, and I was very surprised. I never thought I was someone who wanted to read Jeanette Winterson.

I’ve tried, you see.

It goes like this: I first heard of Jeanette Winterson through a girl I spent a month living with, at a summer school for the arts in a hot, horrible inland place. Her name was Caitlin and she looked as if she had never spent more than five minutes in the sun, despite living all her life in sunny Santa Monica. She had thick, dark hair that she straightened every morning, though I could never tell why, as it seemed to fall straight to begin with. She used to spend actual hours in the shared bathroom applying stage makeup, which she’d gotten after a school production, to enhance the pale moon glow of her face.

She woke up at 5 a.m. no matter what, and because she did, I did too, and I would go for slow runs around the campus in half-darkness until I became too tired, and then I would lie back down in bed and go to sleep until the bathroom was free and I could have a shower. Because I was leaving the building so early, I had to lodge a water bottle in the front door so that I wouldn’t be locked out. Once, the door shut anyway, so I had to sneak around to the back of the building and tap helplessly on the glass until my other roommate, who rather pragmatically had not tried to wake up at such an ungodly time, came and rescued me.

Caitlin appealed to me for reasons I could never place. She was mysterious, though whether or not this was an act I never quite discovered. She liked to shut herself away; she had a fickle appetite, and a fragile look about her: on hot walks to the strip mall where we would rent DVDs and buy groceries, she used to breathe heavily, as if her tiny physique was not used to such strenuous activity.

We spent a lot of time in the campus café, where we befriended a pair of 26-year-old music students. One was a composer with shocking blonde hair and a slightly dark edge. The other was cheerier. I was 16, so I had a crush on everyone, but especially these two. I drank more coffee than any 16-year-old should just to be close to them. And to her. My favorite thing was to watch her talking to them about God and philosophy; she stumbling charmingly, them enchanted, me sipping a hot latté, sweating into the cup.

My favorite way to pass an evening was to order Thai food and sit with a cold Thai iced tea while watching episodes of Queer as Folk, much of which I think I enjoyed because of its softer pornographic aspects, with my two roommates. I ate a lot of ice cream, too. I spent a lot of time forgetting that we were meant to be there studying, and suddenly it would be midnight and I would have to write a poem. I was nursing a longstanding crush on a boy back home, so I thought a lot about him, too, and knew I would never have the courage to act on it.

Caitlin was trying to decide if she was gay or not. She never said this outright, but she let it stand between us as a barrier: I’m having an identity crisis, how about you? I had never thought about thinking about being gay or not, but suddenly I wondered if it was the sort of thing that might just appear, out of the ether: borne of a single doubt. One day we were exploring the darkened rooms and theaters of the campus together; we had the sense that we weren’t supposed to, which made it a thrill. We stood backstage, cramped by boxes and curtains. She said, “this would be such a romantic place to make out with somebody.”

I thought of what it would be like to reach across the darkness for her lips, which were, as always, painted redder than their natural shade; and in that moment discovered my own essential straightness: if it had been the boy from back home, or even one of our café men, I might have gotten a thrill of sexual pleasure from the thought, but as it was, all I felt was blank.

I think I wanted to fall in love with her, for poetry’s sake, but I never could, quite.

I was just emerging from the awkward throes of a particularly uncomfortable few teenage years, and vestiges of the clumsiness remained. I wore the same Belle & Sebastian t-shirt every other day, with huge dangly earrings and khaki shorts. I hadn’t yet learned to cut my hair in a flattering way, so it just hung limply on my shoulders, thick and sun-bleached brown. I didn’t really know how to converse with people, so mostly I just admired from afar. The first time I had to read a story out loud to a workshop group, I burst into hideous, childlike tears midway through, and I didn’t even know why.

“Every writer could stand to read a lot more Virginia Woolf,” said Zay Amsbury, the impossibly hip teacher with the black glasses, the shiny bald head, the twenty-something slouch. He wrote a story in lilting singsong rhythm once and read it to us and we all fell helplessly in love with it. “It was a beautiful love affair…” is how it started.

So when I got home, I bought Virginia Woolf, but it would be three years before I would pick it up (and then another three years before I would be able to struggle through the first sentence). And I bought Sexing the Cherry, because Caitlin said that Jeanette Winterson was a genius. I’ve still never read Sexing the Cherry.

Six Degrees of Literary (and Cultural) Separation

There's a story behind my decision to read Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but now is not the time to tell it.  Now is the time to say this: it must, must be the lovechild of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Nigel Slater's Toast--the two books met on a shelf somewhere, had a torrid affair, and spawned a Winterson novel.  (I do realize Slater wrote Toast quite a bit after Oranges, but it's still a tempting thought).

Moreover, the protagonist's adoptive mother is a dead ringer for Mrs. Kim, the bible-thumping seventh-day-adventist Korean mom from The Gilmore Girls.  

It may be a bit wrong to publicly betray one's feelings about a book just halfway through, but I can't resist.  Every time I start a paragraph I have to remind myself what I'm reading.