“I don’t know if you’re really a writer. I don’t know if you’re crazy enough.”
These were the words said to me by a mentor in graduate school. I had honestly forgotten them, until an old friend from graduate school mailed me back the long letters I had written her during a period I think of as my apprenticeship as a writer, when we wrote each other fervently, and I, especially, set down the long (and sometimes self-dramatic) struggle to become a writer.
Not surprisingly, these words came from a male mentor. I believe he looked on and at me with some affection—I have memories of him smiling, eyes twinkling, when I spoke in workshop; of driving with him around Providence, RI, where he was looking at a house he was thinking of buying, and, as he told me, “wasting his time so he avoided writing.” I remember he often singled out my work, but wanted it to take a distinctly more avant-garde and dark direction. I remember one such story that I considered finished, unto itself, and somehow, after workshop, I had persuaded myself to now tell the story from the point of view of the son, as an unborn child. Another story, which again seemed finished, but for some odd details that needed fixing, was revised over and over again after his comments, until it became a muddle. The first I published as a chapbook; the second story I let go.
The word “crazy” deserves some examining. I do not know if my mentor held in his world view an idea that women writers needed to be ‘crazy’ to be good or true writers, or if he thought all writers needed to be ‘crazy.’ I do know that is a trope often dispensed on the female writer—yes, that neurotic, ungainly woman ill-suited for the regular world. Her bleeding life is her art—the crazier she was, the more of an artist she must be. But the notion of a ‘crazy’ woman author means that ambition and debilitation are always bound together. One asserts and is made helpless at the same time—think Plath, Sexton, Zelda. I was never interested in ‘crazy,’ honestly. I was interested in hard, steady work, in finding how to steady myself as an artist, which wasn’t always easy.
When I was a child, I studied with a wonderful artist, a European who lived across the street in Parkway Village; he had a slightly haunted quality, having come through the war, and ran painting classes at the back of his framing store. He seemed to think I had some talent, and he became like an artistic father to me—I relished those hours in the turpentine-smelling room, where he would lay out books of Impressionists and Fauve painters and we would try to copy and learn with oil paint. After he and I took the long walk home, down Parsons Boulevard, pausing at the bridge over the Grand Central Parkway, the cars humming beneath us, to see a sky streaked and swollen with vibrant hues, no different than the Fauve paintings I had just been poring over.
In the early days, I painted instinctively, still a child, still unafraid, lavish in my sense of color and brush stroke. I got into an art high school, but then suddenly retreated, afraid of being pigeon holed as solely a painter.
Then there was a break—my mentor’s wife passed away, he shut the store and took a teaching job to support his family, and then remarried and went to live elsewhere—not far away, in the neighborhood next to my elementary school. I became a teenager, with a boyfriend, friends, diffuse in my likings. I picked up painting again with him, this time in a room on the second floor. But something was broken and lost—in our connection, and in me. His stepdaughter, who was quite adorable, would come wandering into the room. There were no spattered and dog eared art books splayed open to show me how to do it; no smell of turpentine. My boyfriend was idling in his car across the street. I worked on one painting—of a man in a chair—and the more I worked on it, the worse it got. The palate became muddier and muddier. I had lost my way. Shortly after I stopped our lessons. There was no point.
The same could be said of the fiction writing in graduate school—the revisions I was doing that muddled my original sight, my original sense of freedom.
I was trying to please. And maybe, in some way, he was right—that pleasing side of myself was what he saw in the hothouse atmosphere of graduate school—I was the acolyte tipped forward, showing her eager and agreeable face, wanting praise, wanting attention, wanting to get it right, like a good student. Surely not a good creed for becoming a writer. One muddies–and muddles–one’s own sense of color and purpose.
And finally, he was being an a***hole. Continue reading
