So You Want to Tell Your Story . . .

BalthusBalthus

My friend Rachel Kranz, author of the novel Leaps of Faith, is visiting us at the moment, and we were talking about the number of times that people approach her about writing a book about their lives. As they envision it, they will tell her their stories and she will write them up.

We talked about what this meant. In one way they feel that (to quote Death of a Salesman) attention must be paid.  (I’ve quoted that magnificent passage at the end of this post.) They feel that their lives mean something and that a book about them would acknowledge that.

They are not wrong about their lives being meaningful. It is encouraging to see the respect they accord to books.

However, they may also be trapped by our celebrity, reality-television culture. and think that their lives will be validated only if their name appears on a flyleaf. They may want to be famous on the cheap. As Rachel says, it is as though they want to be stars in a movie without being actors. Being a good actor takes a lot of hard work and dedication.

So does writing a book. Rachel notes that sometimes people underestimate the gap between conception and execution. Having an idea for a book is the easy part. I have watched Rachel up close as she wrote first Leaps of Faith and now The Long Waves (complete but still in manuscript), and I am staggered at the research, the work, and the intelligence that goes into it. We readers often underestimate just how much is involved.

Some of this is the writer’s fault, I jokingly told Rachel. Good writers can make writing seem effortless. I read her the William Butler Yeats’ poem “Adam’s Curse.”


Yeats says that, while a line of poetry might require “hours maybe,” the poet strives to make it seem like “a moment’s thought.” Hidden from sight is the fact that the actual work is harder than scrubbing a pavement on one’s marrowbones or breaking stones like an old pauper. In fact, because their work seems effortless, writers can be seen as idlers by people with “real” jobs. Here’s the poem’s opening stanza, which shows us a group of friends (including Yeats and Maud Gonne, the woman he worshipped) discussing the topic. Note how the poem seems to move effortlessly like an actual conversation. Don’t think that this flow was easy to pull off:

We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, “A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.”

In response, Maud Gonne says that women face the same dilemma when it comes to their looks:

And thereupon
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There’s many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, “To be born woman is to know —
Although they do not talk of it at school —
That we must labor to be beautiful.”

Beauty then, Yeats concludes, always requires hard work. And he adds another example: to court someone takes work. He mentions lovers in olden times who would master the arts of “high courtesy” and quote “precedents out of beautiful old books”:

I said, “It’s certain there is no fine thing
Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.
There have been lovers who thought love should be
So much compounded of high courtesy
That they would sigh and quote with learned looks
precedents out of beautiful old books;
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.”

The poem becomes nostalgic at this point, leaving us with a sense that a fine old world has passed, that the embers are fading, and that we are being worn away by “time’s waters.” The new world is filled with a “noisy set of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen” who are caught up in the world’s fast pace and who think that high courtesy is an idle trade, a waste of time:

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

The poem concludes with Yeats’ fantasy of courting a beautiful Maud Gonne in “the old high way of love.” But the fantasy then gives way to a sense of defeat:

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

I realize I have strayed from my original topic. Let me return to it in this way. We may feel insignificant and think that a book written about us will pay proper attention. We may think that we are important only if our name is in lights.

But there are already books that have been written about us. You will find your tragic sorrows and your soaring aspirations in this play and in that novel. Great writers know that our lives have poetry and depth, and visiting their works confirms our inner magnificence. A nostalgic lament like “Adam’s Curse” may mourn the passing of a poetic age, yet in the very reading of it we rediscover our poetic souls. Maybe we are feeling “as weary-hearted as that hollow moon” because we are not reading.


From Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

Linda defending Willy to Biff: I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person. You called him crazy… no, a lot of people think he’s lost his… balance. But you don’t have to be very smart to know what his trouble is. The man is exhausted. A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man. He works for a company thirty-six years this March, opens up unheard-of territories to their trademark, and now in his old age they take his salary away.

Are they any worse than his sons? When he brought them business, when he was young, they were glad to see him. But now his old friends, the old buyers that loved him so and always found some order to hand him in a pinch–they’re all dead, retired. He used to be able to make six, seven calls a day in Boston. Now he takes his valises out of the car and puts them back and takes them out again and he’s exhausted. Instead of walking he talks now. He drives seven hundred miles, and when he gets there no one knows him anymore, no one welcomes him. And what goes through a man’s mind, driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a cent? Why shouldn’t he talk to himself? Why? When he has to go to Charley and borrow fifty dollars a week and pretend to me that it’s his pay? How long can that go on? How long? You see what I’m sitting here and waiting for? And you tell me he has no character? The man who never worked a day but for your benefit? When does he get the medal for that?

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