A TRICK… AND A TREAT
One wonderful thing about becoming an old woman is the revelation that there is always more revelation available. Lift the corner of the sheet on the bed, find a lost pajama piece, begin a fiction in your head: she is in a hotel room, morning has come, and revelation . . .
You are off into another, imagined life. That imagined life is a crazy-quilt of pieces, scraps of your own life, — a morning long ago when you lifted a bedcover, felt the air billow up under it, and made a major decision about your life. That, and where in the world did the hotel room come from?
I am reading Louise Penny’s mystery novel, A Trick of the Light, and she is teaching me something about my own writing. But let me back up and say that it was truly annoying to discover in April, 2013, that just as my book, How the Light Gets In, was being released by Oxford University Press, Louise Penny’s novel was also being released. Titled: How the Light Gets In! And she is a best-selling author. Two friends gently broke the news to me, but I had already known it and figured out how to deal. “Well, thank goodness she’s a best seller! Maybe someone will see mine next to hers!”
It took me a full year to wonder what Louise Penny is like as a writer. I went to the library, got her How the Light Gets In and did that wonderful disappearing act that happens in a really good novel. Reading it allowed me to live for a few days in a little Canadian town where all sorts of trouble happened to utterly believable people. I fell in love with her “Ruth,” suffered, laughed, learned, and had to go read more of her books. I liked it so much I wrote her a note telling her so. Only the third time in my life, I’m rather sorry to say, that I mailed (although I wrote many) a letter to a famous author to thank her or him for writing that mattered greatly to me: Janet Burroway, for one sentence in Raw Silk, and Philip Levine for his collected poems.
So, I am now reading Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light. She has caused me to acknowledge to myself how much in my life I have feared criticism of my poetry. Not so much my prose writing – there I seem to be able to receive and use critical response without the disabling inner voice that says, “Oh, why, why, why, did I show that to anyone? I know I’m not good enough!” But my poems – they come from a place so private in me, so vulnerable – hearing critique of a certain kind is simply a sharp jab into an already open wound.
Penny uses language precisely, beautifully. In A Trick of the Light her characters examine the life of the artist from as many sides as there are major characters, great artists and – well, not so great. Perhaps the most truly incapable artist in this novel, not at all a major or sympathetic character, really, stills deserves the compassion of Penny’s allowing us to see his disappointment: “ . . . the world-weary artist seemed to sag, dragged down by the great weight of irrelevance.” I recognized myself in him then – recognized myself twice, actually. First, when I was young, hungry to achieve, having no ladder to climb, no experience of life to write in the voice of what I was taught was “the greatest poet: T.S. Eliot.”
I was in college when for the first time I sent a poem to a magazine – Motive, a Methodist magazine for college students. It was accepted and printed. Then I wrote to the editor, scolding him for publishing such a bad poem! He wrote back a short note, obviously confused, saying that he had thought it was quite good. What a strange thing for me to have done! The hope, the need, the desire, and the self-flagellation! The shame.
Secondly, I recognize myself now, working on a new book of poems, coming back to poetry after ten years of focus on writing prose in my How the Light Gets In. Even now the old demons of self-doubt lurk. But that young poet that I was, did dare to try, and something in her already knew that leaning on the opinion of critics was dangerous. Thinking about that now helps me to remember that the important daring is simply to grow as a poet — to give time to reading poets whose work excites me, to learn from them and try to write better poems than I have ever written – for the simple sake of the poem. For my own sake. On the days, the hours, the minutes, when I remember that, it is a lovely freedom.
I closed Penny’s beautiful book (my favorite of the ones I’ve read so far) with the clear thought that my poems are irrevocably in the idiom of the language I myself own out of my particular and parochial sensibility. They require privacy for their gestation, and they require critical response for their ultimate maturation. But I need to be careful about whom I ask for response. I need to practice myself what I have taught: to know when to make changes that strengthen the work, when to toss out suggestions that take it away from my own vision, and I need to accept it when I am told that the work is good.
Penny is not going to tell me a way out of the tangle she so brilliantly studies in A Trick of the Light. I don’t even want her to, because the only way out of it is to write my way out. To write my way even more fiercely into my own voice, my own idiom, the rhythms, the singing of my people – the ones mostly gone now, except as they sing in my memory, and in my poems.
I think of Penny’s character, Ruth, a fierce old woman sitting on a bench, “stoning” the birds” – with chunks of bread. I want to be more like Ruth.
Thank you, Louise Penny.
