Interesting Abyss, Where Are You?

August—take out the ink and weep! That’s something Pasternak said about February, but I always think of it around this time of year. Definitely, I identify as one of summer’s severest critics, and I tend to say/ believe that my favorite season is fall, so why is the end of August so wrenching? The pumpkin spice signage comes out, and the banners welcoming the class of 2047, and I look at my sweaters in confusion and can’t remember where, across what crowded room, I saw them last.

Speaking of the class of 2047, I was just looking for poems that are actually about August, and found one that starts like this:

Here in the gloaming,
a wormwood haze — 
the “m” on its head,
a “w,” amazed
at what the
drink itself does:

Vermouth,
god bless you — th.

So grab your martinis because here are the first September announcements.

(1) This fall, The Idiot will be featured on the BBC World Book Club, a pre-recorded reader call-in show. Please send any Idiot-related questions to the producer, Karen, at karen.holden@bbc.co.uk by Sept 19.

(2) On Weds Sept 4 at 6:30 PM at McNally Jackson Seaport, I will be moderating a Q/A with Ross Benjamin, whose new translation of Kafka’s diaries is out now in paperback. RSVP here.

(3) I also have events coming up in Milan (Sept 22) and Minneapolis (Oct 25)—I hope to see some of you there!

I’m genuinely excited for all these things, but also a bit daunted, because I’m not where I want to be with writing. I don’t think this is uncommon for writers. If you look at Kafka’s diaries, he was often kind of down in August. OK, there’s the oddly jaunty one-liner you probably know, from August 2, 1914 (“Germany has declared war on Russia.—Swimming in the afternoon”). But this is four days later:

August 6, 1914

From the perspective of literature my fate is very simple. The penchant for depicting my dreamlike inner life has pushed everything else aside and all this has atrophied in a terrible way and doesn’t cease to atrophy. Nothing else can ever satisfy me. But now my strength for that depiction is quite incalculable, perhaps it has vanished forever, perhaps it will come over me again, the circumstances of my life are certainly not favorable to it. Thus I waver, fly incessantly to the peak of the mountain, but can keep myself up there for scarcely a moment… it is, alas, not death, but the eternal torments of dying.

I feel like this is a good reminder, for anyone struggling to find meaning in writing, at the current historic moment. Writing during World War I was also very challenging. And when we look back at that time and think about what it meant, Kafka’s works are part of what we think about.

This now reminds me of another August classic, from Virginia Woolf:

Saturday August 12, 1933

It strikes me—what are these sudden fits of complete exhaustion? I come in here to write: can’t even finish a sentence; and am pulled under; now is this some odd effort; the subconscious pulling me down into her? I’ve been reading Faber on Newman; compared his account of a nervous breakdown; the refusal of some part of the mechanism; is that what happens to me? Not quite. Because I’m not evading anything. I long to write The Pargiters. No. I think the effort to live in two spheres: the novel; and life; is a strain.

1. The colon/ semicolon use: I don’t get it; but I love it.

2. This is balm to my soul: “the effort to live in two spheres.” Yes! It is a strain. It’s a similar image to the one Kafka uses—“wavering” between “dreamlike inner life” (“the peak of the mountain”) versus “everything else” (“the lower regions”). Trying to operate in two places, either concurrently or in alternation. And that’s what writing is—because there’s you by yourself, and there’s the world.

3. You know what else was probably “a strain” was writing novels in freakin’ 1933. But she did it. Thank you, VW! The Pargiters is the book that became The Years. And she really struggled over it for years!

What I was about to type now was: “Because these August laments [complaints?] gave me strength, I decided to write one of my own—in case it has a similar effect for anyone else.” But when I think about those quotes, I don’t think they are laments or complaints. Though it is hard to think of a better word. How is it impossible to describe anything that isn’t 100% pleasant without “complaining”? As has often been noted, this is an unhelpful feature of medical language (“the patient complained of painful lesions”). What’s the right word for looking inquisitively into an abyss?

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For the past few months, I’ve been very stressed out about not getting as much work done as I had hoped at the luxurious residency I was at in Rome, which is the kind of sentiment you can’t express without sounding like a total wanker, and yet is one of the emotions of the human heart. At some point in March, I started to panic and dropped a chunk of change on a 3-week Airbnb on an island in Turkey for July, thinking I would hole up, talk to no one, spend no money, and work through all the chaotic impressions of the past months.

The thought of these three weeks was a source of strength to me as I went on to accumulate more chaotic impressions. Then July rolled around and I actually got to the Airbnb and found it to be uninhabitable, by me, for a number of reasons that I won’t go into. (I will mention that the property contained a large indoor cat, not mentioned in the initial listing.) I came down with a low-grade fever and fled the island after four days. The host then declined to refund any part of the payment. When I tried calling Airbnb, I was told by a series of exhausted-sounding customer-service workers, based, I think, on the Indian subcontinent, that I had neglected to collect enough “evidence” for them to conduct an “investigation”; indeed, in my horror, I had fled without taking any photos of anything unpleasant, I had only cute pictures of the cat.

I had put so much hope on the 3 weeks, “the room of my own,” etc.—and then it was such a letdown—the whole thing was filling me with guilt and self-hatred (why hadn’t I taken pictures, why hadn’t I read the listing more imaginatively, why hadn’t I been able to work better in Rome)—and meanwhile there was a heatwave, and prices were way up from the previous year. A kind friend negotiated a reasonable rate for me at a pension where it turned out I was one of the only guests, perhaps the only guest; this left the proprietor a lot of leisure to remark on all my departures and, especially, arrivals (“What did you forget this time?”), in a way I didn’t find conducive to writing; in addition to which the window faced a highly trafficked clothesline. In the end, I decided to return to New York early—at which point I broke my toe, which put a dent in my mobility for the next several weeks.

Then I was pretty depressed for a while, but eventually I got out of bed and back to work—viz. back to the “formal question” about how to apportion large amounts of related-feeling material into multiple books, since it’s clear it won’t all fit into one. This has been going on for many years. Every now and then, I have an exciting breakthrough about genre; most recently, it involved how I had to put all the book-related ideas into a general-interest lit-crit book, separate from the novel. It felt like such a huge relief, like it would take so much weight off the novel to not have to keep summarizing, like, Boswell’s Life of Johnson—but once I started trying to actually write the lit-crit book, “life” stuff kept coming into it, it was impossible to keep them separate, soon I was rewriting whole paragraphs from the novel, and everything was more tangled than ever.

Earlier this year, when I was complaining about describing my book, a friend told me that he thought everything was actually already in place for it to be written—I just had to find “the way in,” and everything would unlock. Sometimes I believe this, and one way I keep up interest in my own daily activities is to think of whatever happens to be happening right now—e.g. hobbling to a slow flow (“no toe”) yoga class, while reading a particular series of text messages; or getting encased in a ginormous wild spherical flapping flock of pigeons at 6AM at the esplanade, where there is a lady in Reeboks who greets each new day by feeding the pigeons—is the place where the book really starts; this is the moment that somehow contains the jumping-off points for everything else. However, although this outlook makes life feel more livable/ exciting in the short term, it adds to the pile of “material” that I find sitting on my chest when I wake up every morning… so then I rush to the esplanade to the pigeon-sphere and the whole thing starts again.

That said, one of the recent “reality scenes” that has stayed with me, and feels more promising than the others, is the one where I fled the Airbnb after four days, after being unable to write a novel—specifically, the mood on the ferry in the pouring rain, and a small child was playing the accordion on the ferry. Was that the beginning of the novel? I tried writing it as a scene, and wrote two sentences that I liked: “Unfortunately, the house turned out to be haunted. I can put up with a lot in the way of inconvenience, but I draw the line at ghosts.”

One thing you hear of novelists doing sometimes, is writing short stories for fun on the side. This is something I attempt every now and then, even though I have yet to finish an actual short story, or have very much fun. So, I started writing a story about a novelist who stays in an Airbnb that turns out to be haunted. The way it’s haunted is, it contains a large, strangely charmless cat that insists on sleeping in bed with the writer, sometimes actually sitting on the writer’s chest. And one morning, the cat sits on her chest and starts speaking Greek (the language historically spoken on this island).

This sent me down a rabbit-hole of cat phonetics where I was trying to figure out what the cat would sound like, i.e. which IPA sounds a cat can produce. I tried to establish this empirically, but, after objections from the cat, I went to the library. And you know, all my expectations turned out to be wrong: both the expectation that nobody would have studied cat phonology in any systematic way, and the expectation that, if anyone had studied it, they would have reached some kind of clear answer about what sounds are articulable by a cat.

It’s kind of a long story, but the short version is that cats have a very similar vocal apparatus to humans, and produce some of the same sounds that are found in human speech, but sometimes the sounds are made in different parts of the mouth and in different ways; most interestingly, there are some phonemes, both vowels and consonants, that cats are “theoretically” capable of uttering, but that haven’t yet been recorded.

As I was mulling this over, I skimmed a couple of books on the history of the island, and the other islands in the same cluster (in the Sea of Marmara), so I could figure out whose experiences had informed the speech of the cat… and there was such a long list of Byzantine people who had been exiled there, with or without having their eyes gouged out, and fishermen starving to death, and population exchanges, and the dismantling of monastery-prisons with libraries full of Homer and Euripides, that it seemed like an impossible burden to put on even a relatively large cat.

So that’s how my “relaxation” project was going.

Meanwhile, the only way I was able to move forward on the actual book was in the form of an email to my agent about whether I was indeed proposing to write a lit-crit book, either in addition to or instead of the novel. Then I thought: “OK, maybe this is how the book starts.” Then I heard, in my mind’s ear, an eye-rolly voice saying, “Elif Batuman’s new book starts with a 10,000-word email to her agent about what her book should be about.” Then I thought, “Wait till they get to the part about how it just wouldn’t come together on a months-long fellowship in Rome.” In other words… Christ, what an asshole. (I just looked at this blog post for the first time since 2006, and it still holds up!)

Last week, having confessed to a critic friend that I was hard at work on a book-length email to my agent, I began musing aloud: how much email about being a writer can people even tolerate; how much can I tolerate.

[Now I am remembering this review of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (how do I viscerally remember this book review from 2015): “As the book opens, the unnamed writer is enjoying an opulent meal with his agent, celebrating the six-figure advance he has secured for his as yet unwritten follow-up: ‘We were eating cephalopods in what would become the opening scene…’” It stressed me out so much that I didn’t read the book. I should probably read it!]

My friend then asked if I had read Beautiful World, Where Are You?, which she said consisted largely of real-seeming emails and texts, sent or received by a Sally Rooney-like writer and her friends. “Is it unbearable?” I asked. My friend said that she liked it, but that her other friend (also a critic) didn’t.

I’m now 53% through the audiobook of Beautiful World, and I’m listening with COMPLETE FASCINATION. The part where I totally bought in is where the Sally Rooney-like writer, Alice, starts laying into book publicity/ publishing. This is from one of Alice’s emails:

What do the books gain by being attached to me, my face, my mannerisms, in all their demoralising specificity? Nothing. So why, why, is it done this way? Whose interests does it serve? It makes me miserable, keeps me away from the one thing in my life that has any meaning, contributes nothing to the public interest, satisfies only the basest and most prurient curiosities, and serves to arrange literary discourse entirely around the domineering figure of ‘the author’…. I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe that she is me… it has made me loathe myself to an almost unendurable degree.

What about this feels so exciting to me? Certainly, there’s nothing new about complaining (complaining) about book PR; I myself have feebly bleated about this in the past, with the result that interviewers occasionally ask questions like, “Are you suffering terribly right now?” But how can you talk about it honestly, when publicity means sales, and sales are how everyone gets paid—not just writers, but also editors, book designers, booksellers, and everyone else whose work makes books possible? So partly I just really appreciate that Sally Rooney isn’t scared of sounding like a wanker, and to me she does not in fact sound like a wanker. But, even more than that, I don’t think I have ever formulated, with such clarity, the link between publicity and self-loathing (and maybe loathing in general).

It’s like book publicity is designed to create a fiction of a self-contained person who has intentionally achieved some goal, and is therefore being elevated to some special level. Whereas a writer is really just a messy guilt-ridden ball of desires and theories, passionately wanting not to be elevated above other people—especially not above their families of origin, or the guys they meet on Tinder (see Beautiful World). Yet you aren’t actually allowed to be a writer without collaborating in the elevation of yourself above the level of other people—because most people (“normal people”) don’t get to take themselves seriously enough to write anything.

Beautiful World, I am pleased to report, includes a lengthy email about Alice’s inability to read “contemporary fiction,” after starting to attend book festivals. At first it seems like she’s just annoyed at actual particular writers (people who have been “complaining about bad reviews since 1983”). “Why don’t they write about the kind of lives they really lead, and the kind of things that really obsess them? Why do they pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism—when really they’re obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in the New York Times?”

But then she’s like, if people did write books about that, nobody would read them, and everyone would finally have to confront

how wrong, how deeply philosophically wrong, the current system of literary production really is—how it takes writers away from normal life, shuts the door behind them, and tells them again and again how special they are and how important their opinions must be. And they come home from their weekend in Berlin, after four newspaper interviews, three photoshoots, two sold-out events, three long leisurely dinners where everyone complained about bad reviews, and they open up the old MacBook to write a beautifully observed little novel about ‘ordinary life’. I don’t say this lightly: it makes me want to be sick.

This, too, was balm to my soul—especially the part about photo shoots. In Venice, I tried to decline a photo shoot for a university or alumni publication. I remember saying I was happy to meet with students, but not to have my picture taken again (there were other photo shoots on this trip). The publicists said OK, but when I got to the venue for my event, a physically large man cornered me in an elevator and said, “You must be Elif, I was told you have a problem with the little Q/A for the university, we are hoping you’ll reconsider, the university is the biggest sponsor for the festival, so you’ll reconsider, right?” I told him that if they had new questions that I hadn’t answered already, I would be happy to answer them, but I couldn’t do any more photo shoots. He explained again about how important the sponsors are, and about how it wouldn’t be a big deal for me to do the photo shoot because it wouldn’t take any of my time. I said (trying really hard to sound reasonable, and not like an ungrateful shithead), “If you’re saying you need me to do the photo shoot for fundraising purposes, I will do it. I’m just saying I would prefer not to.” And he sort of laughed bitterly, and said, “We’re not forcing you to do anything you don’t want to do, we’re just really hoping you can do this one short photo shoot.” Then we got out of the elevator, and met a second person who was some kind of a liaison for something—and he was like “I have been telling Elif how much we hope she can do this photo shoot”—and then they both talked about how important the sponsors are, and how little of my time the photo shoot would take.

A photo shoot, much like a visit to whatever ob-gyn you can find who takes your insurance this year, is unpleasant, not because it takes so much time, but because it involves someone you’ve never met treating your body as a work problem that they have to manipulate and solve. You know what’s the true caption of every author photo? “Relax your face.” And then a week or two later, out come more pictures of your face, to annoy the people who find you annoying.

So then you go back to the hotel and turn on your MacBook and write—what?

Which is all to say that I really appreciate Sally Rooney’s structural critique of the publishing industry, and how it plays into her (I assume) inability to read contemporary fiction. And into the nature of the fiction itself. How could it not?

Relax your face!

The rest of Alice’s email goes in a different direction, drawing a connection between contemporary novelists’ omission of their PR… complaints (here the word feels appropriate), and the contemporary novel’s omission of large-scale human suffering.

The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth. To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful. Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species? Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter? So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world — packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together—if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything. My own work is, it goes without saying, the worst culprit in this regard. For this reason I don’t think I’ll ever write a novel again.

I do feel sympathetic towards this kind of argument (“the special unifying problem with everything right now is this”), but, as usual, when you think about it for a few minutes, I think it gets more complicated and historical. The thing with contemporary writers getting whisked out of real life… true, it’s more extreme now, but it definitely happened before. (See for example Somerset Maugham’s 1930 novel, Cakes and Ale. There’s an incredible riff that starts, “I began to meditate upon the writer’s life”—ahhh too good. Mentions photographers.) And, although one thinks of Kafka as someone who hardly ever published anything and never dealt with this BS, such was not the case; see the diary entry of August 11, 1912: “Nothing, nothing. Of how much time I am robbed by the publication of the little book.”

I’m not sure, either, about the idea that we live in times of unprecedented destruction and exploitation—“the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species,” etc. Definitely, exploitation is better documented now, and WAY clearer and more visible; and it hasn’t stopped, which means it’s also more cynical. But I don’t think it was less widespread or brutal, fifty or a hundred years ago.

I did just get curious and tried to look at the numbers. The data leaves much to be desired, and is subject to multiple interpretations, but it does seem that basically, on the whole, global poverty is going down.

Source

There was a spike for COVID (source)

Definitely, huge numbers of people are living lives of unimaginable suffering, especially in war zones and crisis areas… but I don’t think there is a significantly bigger gap now between the lives of novelists (or their characters) and the lives of the majority of the world’s population. Or that the contemporary novel faces a particularly high burden of glossing things over with a glittering surface. To the contrary, this is the time-honored burden of “the novel.” It’s right there in Anna’s dream in Anna Karenina: how can the romance with Vronsky matter, when peasants and workers are being so horribly maimed; and doesn’t that maiming have some nightmarish connection to why the romance will end badly.

This issue is already there ~65 years earlier in Jane Austen, except the romance doesn’t end badly, and the maiming is way less visible. Still, it isn’t omitted. Austen tells us, without making a big deal of it, that Mansfield Park is funded by Sir Thomas’s plantation in Antigua… and, insofar as that information penetrates the reader’s consciousness, I think what it does is actually raise the stakes of Fanny’s romance—because, in such a brutal, large, and terrifying world, love is the only protection we have.

So Beautiful World is basically raising a canonical question—“How can we read or write novels (or care about love affairs) in the face of human misery”—and addressing it in the traditional way: by representing interiority and love affairs compellingly enough to keep you turning the pages—ideally, persuading you that, when people are fighting for their lives in situations of geopolitical or environmental extremity, that’s what they’re fighting for: the right / ability to live private dramas. And Beautiful World fails or succeeds on these terms; it isn’t trying to create new terms.

I already went through the journey of feeling disappointed that Sally Rooney isn’t more radical than she is. I read Conversations With Friends when it came out—in preparation for a joint Conversations / Idiot event (did we make the “conversations with idiots” joke at the time? I think so?) at the Charing Cross Foyle’s. I remember reading the hardcover on a particular sofa in London, and being so excited about how queer and Marxist I thought it was going to be (the book of course, not the sofa)… and then I got to the end, and back in 2017 I was kind of a hothead so I was like, “Why is she into this traditional Jane Austen wish-fulfillment?” But now I’m more chill and I just think: she’s into it because she’s into it! like most people are—including me, TBH, though in my case it’s something I’m always trying to change or outthink. But maybe she doesn’t want to change it or outthink it. (Yet.) (Heh heh.)

“a queer marxist radical sofa”

"a queer marxist radical sofa in london"

That said, I do think there’s some radical potential—some vision of how publishing could be different, and could enable different kinds of books—in the observation about self-loathing, and its tendency to flip outwards. (Why didn’t I read 10:04 when it came out? Why didn’t I read Beautiful World before now?) There were moments when I was listening to the audiobook and I thought, “How do I get Sally’s email, we have to DO something, we have to unite to change publishing!”

Then I thought, “‘We have to unite to change publishing,’ she typed on her Substack”—which brings me to how grateful I am to YOU, dear readers, for enabling me to talk through these questions in this way. And I am grateful to my friend for telling me to read Beautiful World (thanks, Sarah!), because it really is helping me to think about how to include emails in a novel! On a most basic level: I think the emails work fine, there is no intrinsic reason not to include a lot of emails in a novel! (Thanks, Sally!) As for the meta stuff with agents… maybe it comes down to the publicity-mediated self-loathing loop. When I felt so crushed by the thought, “Elif Batuman’s new book starts with a 10,000-word email to her agent,” I was internalizing someone who finds my existence annoying—and also internalizing the annoyance / despair I’ve felt at various moments, e.g. hearing about my own tedious opinions, or reading that review of 10:04, in 2015 (at a time when I was in despair about ever having a contract to write a novel).

But I think Beautiful World at least partly defuses that loop, or manages to stay out of it—and when I think about how to replicate that, I wonder if it’s about staying interested and curious. I was about to say “calm and curious,” but part of what I’m enjoying about Beautiful World is that she’s so angry. Maybe it’s about finding a kind of anger that doesn’t preclude or inhibit curiosity. This feels related to not using the word “complain”—to taking some aspect of value judgment (the accusation?) out of an observation of something unpleasant, without pretending that it doesn’t hurt. Is it just about saying “This is painful” rather than (or in addition to) “Christ, what an asshole”?

Well, thanks for coming with me on this journey! I do have a LOT of outtakes, some of which I’m planning to put in a special thank-you post for paid subscribers. That means more thoughts about photo shoots, more cat phonetics, more accordion-playing children, the Cakes and Ale quote, and maybe some bonus photos of me relaxing my face.

Thanks for reading!