Inspired

I’ll admit that I haven’t written blogs over the past few weeks because I’ve felt, for lack of a better word, uninspired. It’s not that the authors I was reading from T.S. Eliot to Faulkner to Plath were uninteresting; I just felt no need to add words to a page saying what everyone else had already said about them. The nagging question of “what makes them uniquely American” and the need to relate them to one another and the American experience has been driving me crazy over the past month as we’ve gone through what seems like a laundry list of 20th century writers (39 in fact). I feel overwhelmed when I sit down in front of the computer, stare at the blank page, and try to decide who and what and how any and all of these writers are important to American literature, to the American mind, to me as an American.

I guess I’ve waited until my senior year to take my big survey courses because I hate the speed. I simply read to finish—hence the lack of inspiration. What can you do? It has to be done. There isn’t time in this world, much less a three hour once a week English class, to spend a week just on Sylvia Plath. I want to savor the words, but I have to swallow them in one bite instead.
All of this is to say, that today, finally, I feel like writing. This I owe entirely to Alice McDermott. I went to a “chat” she held on campus. My incentive, besides the fact that I admire her use of language and description in the two pieces of hers that I have read, Child of My Heart and After This, was to learn how she begins to write fiction. I often freeze before beginning to write, as mentioned above, because I am overwhelmed by the sheer number of ideas scrambling and colliding in my head. How to choose from the chaos?

McDermott didn’t exactly address that question, but what she did say gave me hope. She demystified writer’s block as a romantic idea and instead replaced it with a realistic trudge through language. Words have to be written, thrown away, and rewritten. They are sometimes bad, sometimes pointless, but eventually right. Writing takes practice—something I’ve always been told but finally understand (especially in the context of fiction). I’m often afraid of imperfection in my nonfiction and literary analysis papers, but I am even more afraid of failing at an attempt to write fiction. I’ve been duped by the romantic ideal of sudden inspiration. I keep waiting for the day when I hear a story, see a person, visit a place, etc. and get that sudden burst of inspiration that will guide my whole story.

McDermott also surprised me by saying that her characters are not taken from any specific reality; they are only real in the context of the novel. Of course the characters are combinations of anyone and everyone she has encountered in her life and the setting is built around her own experience as a Long Island resident and an Irish Catholic. In that way she says it is autobiographical. All writing is autobiographical—a notion I have always believed and was extremely excited to hear her confirm.

To me autobiography is power. No one knows your life and experiences like you—you are the expert in this area at least. Autobiography means the chance to express the world through your own eyes—a world which is uniquely yours yet at the same time humanity’s common property. All literature seems to struggle with this: Are we individuals or are we the same? Do we have a duty only to ourselves or do we have a duty to humanity? Do we move forward linearly and form our own unique historical place, or are we just a part of a cycle repeating the same themes and questions of the past?

After This answers these questions in its own way. It is all about relationships, but it also has personal revelations. It is about a community facing the Vietnam War with a “we are, all of us, more or less in the same boat” (McDermott 62) mentality, but it is also about how the war affects each individual differently. In the chat, McDermott said that she wanted to show the rhythm of war inside and outside the circle of this family, the Keanes. Rhythm is a very appropriate word. The Keane’s story begins with the sound of the long-eye-lashed “piano player upstairs” (24) in the background as Mary and John conceive their first child, Jacob—their “baby grand” (27). The novel also ends with a long-eye-lashed boy playing the piano at the wedding of their youngest child, Clare.

In this rhythm, McDermott suggests that there is something cyclical about life, yet she also repeats over and over again the fact that “time was marching on,” (56) indicating that each moment, like the scene in the car at the beach or the scene in the basement during the storm, needs to be savored because it will soon disappear into the past; life will move on; the family will change as everyone grows older, and that moment can never be returned to again. There is a sense throughout the novel of moving ahead full speed to the future, leaving behind remnants of the past—the old church, the courteous gentlemen and helpful department store attendants (according to Pauline), World War II veterans (to be replaced by Vietnam veterans).

Ultimately, however, McDermott ends with the idea of life as cyclical—the idea that “you could not have one [the future] without the other [the past]” (277). Earlier in the novel John realizes, when contemplating the links between his son Jacob and the boy he met in World War II, that “there was some comfort to be discovered, no doubt, in the odd connections, and repetitions, in the misapprehensions themselves, some pattern across the years that would convey assurance” (129). Assurance of what, I wonder? Assurance that lives do not end with death—that we live on somehow in others? I find myself asking this same question, and like John, I find every connection between different pieces of literature, different classes I take, different people I meet both thrilling and comforting because it suggests that we (humanity past, present, and future) are all in this together; we are not alone after all. This theme has occurred countless times in the literature I read, and this striving for connection is the reason I am an English major.
At the end of the novel, McDermott, in describing the boy playing the piano, writes:

“Then there was a kid like this, who played in a trance, eyes closed, transformed, transported, inspired (that was the word)—not the engine for the instrument but a conduit for some music that was already there, that had always been there, in the air, some music, some pattern, sacred, profound, barely apprehensible, inscrutable, really, something just beyond the shell of earth and sky that had always been there and that needed only this boy, a boy like this, to bring it, briefly, briefly, to [the priest or listener’s] untrained ear.” (278)

There is little to say after a paragraph like that. It describes perfectly the essence of art and its importance to humanity—the essential link between us all. Inspiration—that is the word.