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| M. Proust, Cat-about-Town |
Since today is the 151st Anniversary of Marcel Proust's birth, I thought I'd go behind the scenes at The Salieri Effect – you can read the Introduction, here – to tell you where it all began, back when I first cracked open Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (or, as it's known today, In Search of Lost Time).
First of all, I'm a composer (or at least trained as one) and began writing novels to explore my own creativity. So, in 987 words, let's step back to a distant time and place.
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As often happens in the creative process, one thing grows out of another, much the way leaves grow on a plant.
A composer-friend, something of a mentor for the few brief years I knew him, would jot down ideas in a notebook and try to come up with as many possible “solutions” as he could. He hadn't yet started writing the piece – he was pre-compositionally exploring its potential. Eventually, he would go through these options to select which might work the best, discarding those that didn't work at all.
But some of these he still liked and hated throwing away, so, like pot-shards, he copied them out into another notebook (back in the days before computers allowed us to do things like cut-and-paste). Perhaps, he hoped, they'll work better in the context of another, different piece. “I'm supposed to be writing a string quartet.”
Later on, he'd look over some of these discards. “I think this one will sound much better played by a clarinet.” Another one might lend itself to the flowing textures of a piano piece. Ultimately, he could have four new works from his initial idea, none of which sounded alike but all of them interconnected.
Here was a germ (perhaps budding from a motive into a melody), and from it “germinated” a whole host of opportunities. In every new configuration, you sensed the logic, the sincerity of its genesis.
As a composer, I was trained since my teens to start at the beginning and work my way to the end. Inspiration gives you your basic themes, you plop them into a structure (some standard “form”); and then, like those “paint-by-numbers” kits for talent-challenged amateurs, you fill it in with whatever instrumentation or voices you want. When my imagination could no longer come up with a decent theme or even a motive I could build from, suddenly I'm facing a Writer's Block that's telling me, “you have no talent!”
Lots of musicians have told me I was a good composer but curiously few of them wanted to perform my compositions. Giving up several times – it became too much work to overcome – I wasn't sure, if I had no talent, was it really worth the emotional turmoil? So I tried other ways to explore creativity.
During my first major “writer's block” – I was living in New York in the late-1970s – I toyed with the idea of “Writing” and of course immediately took the giant leap into “Writing a Novel.” The diving board was “Write What You Know,” and what I knew was “Composer working through a mid-life crisis Style Change.” The '60s I grew up in had warned us “Don't Trust Anyone Over 30,” and here I was now, pushing 30. I'd just quit my teaching job, disillusioned by departmental politics. Everything was new.
A friend gave me a copy of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past saying “now that you're 30, you're ready for Proust.” I'd balked at books telling me “How to Read Proust.” He said, “just dive into it” so I dragged it around, reading in the park, on the subway, and while normal people watched TV.
Naturally, this novel which I started writing not long afterward was a pale version, more a parody, of Proust, concentrating on the worst clichés imaginable about “stream-of-consciousness” rather than focusing on the roman fleuve. It seemed easy, since nothing ever happened, fueled by memory. As Proust sometimes rambled between past and present (and whatever Swann in Love was doing in there), I focused my own efforts on two simultaneous stories a century apart, set in the same house.
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The experience was dreadful, every page screaming at me “You Have No Talent!” Even though I filled numerous ring-binders with reams of notes, sketches, and drafts – research was more fun than actually writing it – I continued flogging at it over the years while pursuing two tangentially musical careers which continued to prove stubbornly unfulfilling. But through it all, I managed to learn a few things about my creativity I'd never figured out as a composer, and it was mostly about the mind and the heart: which came first?
Artists need to learn a thing called “craft,” which helps you create something – anything – even when you don't feel like working: doesn't matter if it's good; you show up at the page and work. Technique is like learning scales and arpeggios: there's nothing “musical” about them but it's exercise that keeps your fingers in shape.
My initial novel shifted back and forth between the 20th-Century's now middle-aged composer in this old house he'd inherited and his 19th-Century predecessor, an aging author dealing with the fact he'd never achieved “success,” no different than cross-cutting between scenes in a film where a secondary plot takes place either simultaneously or in another millennium. The title, regardless of the shift in focus from a “Coming-of-Age” Composer to a “Mid-Life-Crisis” Composer, had come to me easily: since the late-70s, I called it Echoes in and out of Time.
Instead of pursuing the Great American Novel, I accidentally began writing a parody of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code when the movie came out, but from a classical musical standpoint, called The Schoenberg Code. Thus I started a string of comic thrillers as applied to a Classical Music Appreciation course. (Talk about a niche audience!)
Then one night, thinking about Proust's original title, À la recherche du temps perdu, I wondered “but who's Tom Purdue?” And that quickly, my next book was born: In Search of Tom Purdue.
At this point, I was still halfway through The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben, but I knew Tom needed his own novel. Who exactly was Tom Purdue? How'll he fit in with my existing characters?
And then, halfway through that, it occurred to me: what if, like Salieri, Purdue had been accused of murdering another composer?
– Dick Strawser
Click here for the next installment of the novel; and here for the next "987 Words" post.
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