The Classical Grammy Winners for 2014

The winners of the Grammy Awards in the Classical Music division were announced this evening. (For the complete list of nominees, please check this earlier post.)

For Best Orchestral Performance:

Jean Sibelius: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 4
Osmo Vänskä, conductor (Minnesota Orchestra) on BIS Records

This was especially nice to see, given their recent history after a 14-month lock-out which included Osmo Vänskä resigning because the management could not settle it before the necessary rehearsal schedule before a Carnegie Hall concert and recording date. You can read about it in the morning paper, here, and at the musicians' own blog, here. Fortunately, no one from the board or orchestra management was on hand to pick up the award which will now be delivered by mail. I'm curious who it will be addressed to. This was the second recording in a projected series leaving the remaining three symphonies in jeopardy. (Here is the earlier recording of the 2nd & 5th Symphonies at iTunes.) A very sad state of affairs, so there is an extra kick of Schaddenfreude in announcing this particular win.

for Best Opera Recording:

Thomas Adès: The Tempest – Thomas Adès conducting, Simon Keenlyside &c, Metropolitan Opera on DG

for Best Choral Performance:

Arvo Pärt: Adam's Lament – Tonu Kaljuste conducting the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Sinfonietta Riga & Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, Latvian Radio Choir & Vox Clamantis on ECM New Series

for Best Chamber Music or Small Ensemble Performance:

Roomful of Teeth – Brad Wells & Roomful of Teeth on New Amsterdam Records

for Best Instrumental Solo:

John Corigliano: Conjurer – Concerto for Percussionist & String Orchestra – Evelyn Glennie, with David Alan Miller conducting the Albany Symphony on Naxos

For Best Classical Vocal Solo:

Winter Morning Walks with Dawn Upshaw, various conductors and ensembles on Artist Share

for Best Classical Compendium (listing only the conductors):

Paul Hindemith: Violin Concerto, Symphonic Metamorphoses and Konzertmusik – Christoph Eschenbach conducting on Ondine

for Best Contemporary Classical Composition:

Maria Schneider: Winter Morning Walks – with Dawn Upshaw & the Australian Chamber Orchestra on ArtistShare

Congratulations, for what little it's worth, to the winners of this year's Classical Grammy Awards!

P.S. Here's a thought-provoking article from Anne Midgette of the Washington Post, "The Classical Grammys (Remember Them?)"

Behind the Scenes: Torke, Bartok & Brahms with the Harrisburg Symphony

This is the script for the pre-concert talk I gave before the Harrisburg Symphony's January (Thaw) Masterworks Concert this weekend. You can read my posts on the orchestra's website about Michael Torke's Javelin, Bela Bartók's Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin and Johannes Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto.
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Who would have believed, after living through the coldest weather in 20 years, it could be almost 50° five days after the Invasion of the Polar Vortex!? But that's the way weather works, sometimes – as Mark Twain said about New England, “if you don't like the weather, wait a few minutes.” When they talk about “climate change,” I didn't think they meant every few days...

One could say the same about musical styles, though it may take a decade or two to see real change, historically: whether the pendulum swings back and forth or whether it comes full circle is immaterial. The fact is, every generation since, say, 1700 (as a handy cut-off point) has decided the previous generation was yesterday's “old hat” and anything that needs to be said should be said our way, only to become tomorrow's old hat. Today, most of us are not that conscious of the difference between Haydn and Beethoven or even – at least aesthetically – Brahms and Wagner, lumped together with the Great Romanticists, who in real life were arch-rivals and at the opposite ends of the classical music spectrum.

But in a period of a single concert, you can, however, experience several changes in this musical weather – all within a span of two hours. For some, a piece by Bartók could be the musical equivalent of the dreaded Polar Vortex which, after intermission, will be warmed-up by the sunny familiarity of Johannes Brahms.

Or you might find the newness and even strangeness of the unfamiliar on the first half of the program exhilarating – the way people talk about “a bracing chill” – just as others might find something as overly familiar as Brahms (an old chestnut, to be sure: one of the Three B's, after all) capable of inducing “lazy listening,” unaware there could actually be another way to listen to something you're already well-acquainted with.

If I tell you the first half of the concert is all-20th-Century, you may react one way – positively or negatively – just as if I tell you the second half is one of the great 19th Century Romantic war-horses (“oh, not that again!”).

But if I tell you the first half of the program was written by composers in their 30s and the second half by a composer in his late-40s – does this change the way you might... think about what you'll hear? How many people in our audience are within this age-range of, say, 33 and 48...? ...How many here are older than 48?

What if I told you Bela Bartók finished his ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin” when he was 38 but was still hoping for that first big break-through that would turn him into an internationally recognized “great composer” of the 20th Century? And what if I told you that when Johannes Brahms finished his 2nd Piano Concerto, he was 48 and at the peak of his popularity, having completed his 1st Symphony five years earlier and in between wrote his 2nd Symphony and the Violin Concerto? His 3rd Symphony was a couple years in the future.

What if I tell you Michael Torke was 33 when he composed the first piece you'll hear tonight, called “Javelin”? He'd written a series of color-inspired pieces with titles like “Green,” “Bright Blue Music,” “Purple” and “Ecstatic Orange,” but he seems to have passed a little beyond his youthful popularity, now, even though he's still alive and writing – he's now 51, three years older than Brahms was when he wrote this concerto. It's a little early to question whether he'll be forgotten in the next decade – or if he finds himself on the comeback trail as he reaches a new maturity.

He certainly writes very pleasant music – as one critic put it back in 1996, around the time “Javelin” was first heard and frequently performed, Torke writes "some of the most optimistic, joyful and thoroughly uplifting music to appear in recent years” – which is certainly saying something in the 20th Century. But, when we consider some of the music we consider “Great Art” – is being “pleasant” enough? Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto didn't become a war-horse just because it has nice tunes.

What if I tell you Michael Torke is one of a generation of composers who grew up listening to rock-n-roll and feels that is as much a possible resource for his own style as Leonard Bernstein devoured jazz or Antonin Dvořák absorbed the folk music of his native Bohemia?

Brahms at the Piano

Brahms once signed an autograph book by writing down the tune from Johann Strauss' “Beautiful Blue Danube” which he signed “Alas, not by Johannes Brahms.” We think of Brahms as this big, stodgy, cigar-chomping man with a big beard, but he was a big fan of Johann Strauss who might be the equivalent of today's “pop music” back then. Brahms would often be found hanging out in the smoky taverns of Vienna listening to gypsy bands which were the equivalent (both musically and socially) of New York City's jazz clubs – and this gypsy music found its way into his concert music quite often: not just the Hungarian Dances but also the finale of the Violin Concerto, the one he started writing in 1878 just as he'd begun sketching what would soon become his 2nd Piano Concerto.

And this Hungarian music Brahms loved and brought into the concert hall was not really folk music, as it's often considered. It's more like Urban Popular Music – the gypsies (who were not ethnically Hungarian) had a style of their own which has little to do with authentic Hungarian Folk Music, despite the popular perception of it, thanks to Brahms' dances and Liszt's rhapsodies. It wasn't until the early 1900s that Bela Bartók, himself a Hungarian nationalist, first heard what he realized was the authentic musical voice of the Hungarian people. He would quickly absorb this into his own style and create the voice we recognize as Bela Bartók.

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When Bartók began writing “The Miraculous Mandarin,” he was still virtually unknown: but there was another influence on his music, the economic and political realities of Europe, especially Hungary, after the 1st World War.

And even if you've only followed the trials of the Crawley Family on Downton Abbey, you'll realize what a change this event made in the social fabric of the time – now, imagine what it did to the people who lived where these armies fought, who lived in countries that, after the war, no longer existed or, more importantly, like Hungary, hadn't existed before and were now faced with a whole new and blank chapter in their history. Once a more-or-less autonomous part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – politically, maybe; culturally, not so much – what did they do, now that they were an independent nation?

All these questions were big news around the time Bela Bartók read a story by Menyhért Lengyel about a trio of thugs, a young girl and the strange appearance of a wealthy Chinese man.

It was published on New Year's Day, 1917, and was a scenario for a “grotesque pantomime” – rather than a fully danced ballet. The story goes that Ernst von Dohnanyi – in the Germanized form of his name: his Hungarian name would be Ernő Dohnanyi – was approached to write music for this pantomime but he said the “grand guignol” aspects of the story were better suited to Bela Bartók who'd just had the first real success of his career with the ballet, The Wooden Prince in April of 1917. (He'd written Bluebeard's Castle but it hadn't been staged, yet.) Whether Bartók had already started work on the music when Lengyel approached him or not, I'm not sure, but the music was sketched between the summer of 1918 and into 1919. (By the way, “Bluebeard” would be staged in May of 1918 but after one performance was banned and not staged again until 1936.)

Given the aftermath of the War, getting the ballet (or rather, pantomime) staged was going to be a problem so, meanwhile, Bartók went on composing other, more practical pieces.

He didn't finish the orchestration until later and the full ballet wasn't staged until 1926 in Cologne, Germany, where it became a scandal, causing a riot that lasted ten minutes: it was closed down after one performance. As a ballet, it would only be staged two more times before Bartók died in 1945 – he never saw the work on stage.

Shortly after that disastrous premiere, Bartók created a suite out of the complete work, basically the first two-thirds of the score, with a brief “concert ending” tacked on. This Suite received its first concert performance in Budapest in 1928, finally – ten years after he'd started working on it – with, ironically, Ernő Dohnanyi on the podium.

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George Grosz, The Explosion (1917)

With the Industrial Revolution, the Big City became an attraction for many young people – looking for adventure and success, looking, primarily, for a job. The Big City was exciting, teaming with humanity and endless opportunity – but many others viewed it with fear and loathing, feeling it was dehumanizing to the spirit and man's dignity.

In one sense, the optimistic view of the Big City might be reflected in the jazzy, up-beat opening of George Gershwin's 1928 “American in Paris” so full of joie-de-vivre, complete with taxi horns; the pessimistic view would be heard in the opening of The Miraculous Mandarin with its whirring wheels and clanging machinery, the noise and hubbub of the factory and how it was grinding humanity down to being just another cog...

As he wrote to his wife when he began work on the music in mid-September, 1918,

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Its beginning—a very short introduction before the curtain opens—a terrible din, clattering, rattling, hooting: I lead the Hon[orable] listener into the apache den from the bustle of a metropolitan street.
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From there, we hear a theme that has, at its root, a folk song, possibly a lament, one way it represents the three thugs and then, with a more tender treatment, the girl. Cold and hungry (as Bartók often was himself during this time), they need money so they force the girl to stand in the window to attract a man to come upstairs – the plan is, then, they'll rob him. Sounds easy: what could go wrong?

The long, unaccompanied clarinet solo – almost like a snake-charmer's chant – represents the girl at the window. Her first responder is an old man – we hear him trudging up the stairs as the thugs go and hide. She is repulsed by him and his pompous little shadow of a march underneath an English horn solo. When they realize he has no money, they throw him down the steps.

She returns to the window and we hear the clarinet solo a second time. Her second respondent is a young student, shy, embarrassed, but she likes him and tries to get him to dance with her. But he also has no money and when the thugs appear, he runs down the steps and back into the street.

The third “siren's call” becomes a little more involved but then her third responder makes his entrance to some terrifying brass fanfares in a pentatonic scale – basically, the five-note scale you can create by playing on just the black keys of the piano. This is the mandarin, a wealthy Chinese man, richly dressed – awesome if not exactly miraculous, yet. He stands in the doorway and stares at the girl. She is, understandably, terrified.

But he doesn't respond to the girl who hesitantly begins to dance. Only eventually does she warm up to the task and only gradually does he seem to notice her. But instead he begins to pursue her around the room, in one of the great chase scenes in classical music.

And why, basically, a Mandarin? Why not an industrial tycoon or an Austrian general, representing the economic or political enemies of Hungary? Why, in the language of the day, a "Chinaman"?

Fu Manchu, film villain

Keep in mind Western Europe was in the grip of the fictional villain, Fu Manchu, created in 1912 by the English writer Sax Rohmer with a series of novels that eventually would become a series of films. He invented the phrase "Yellow Peril" and the character's mustache alone was enough the conjure up the image of pure evil.

But in Hungary, this dread of the mandarin's "otherness" is less brutal. There is a kinship sensed between Hungarians and Asians traced back to the arrival of Attila the Hun who rose out of Central Asia to forge a mighty empire that reached across modern Hungary from central Germany to the Black Sea in the 5th Century. The pentatonic music we associate stereotypically with Chinese music is also at the root of a great deal of Hungarian folk music. There is more in common between the aspect of the three thugs and that of the mysterious (if not yet miraculous) Mandarin who ends up as their victim.

Basically, this is the end of the suite – but since the ballet continues for another ten minutes, I'll give you a run-down of the rest of the story: the thugs attack the Mandarin, knock him down and rob him but they can't get rid of him, so they decide to kill him. They smother him on the bed under the blankets. But he regains consciousness and starts chasing the girl again. Next, the thugs take a knife and stab him, but he doesn't bleed. Again, he comes to and again he goes after the girl. This time the thugs bind him, then hang him from the overhead light and he dies. When they cut him down, he comes back to life but the girl takes pity on him, caresses him – it is only then that his wounds begin to bleed and he actually, finally, dies.

Again, that part of the story is not part of the suite but it is how the Mandarin got his title...

It's interesting to note that just a few days before Lengyel's story appeared in print, an event happened in St. Petersburg, Russia: the murder of the monk Rasputin who had had such a scandalous hold on the Imperial Family of Russia. The Empress hardly made a move without consulting her Rasputin who had prophesied that if he should ever be “separated” from them, the House of Romanov would fall.

Rasputin, 1914

In December 1916, various patriots decided it was time to rid the tsar of Rasputin's control, and so the monk was offered cyanide-laced pastries at the home of Prince Yusupov, presumably eating enough to kill a man quickly. But after an hour, he showed no signs of illness. So Prince Yusupov shot him 3 times in the chest and back, penetrating his stomach, liver and a kidney. When Yusupov returned moments later to check the body, Rasputin opened his eyes and grabbed at the prince, pulling off an epaulet and trying to strangle his would-be killer. He got up and stumbled outside into the courtyard where Yusupov again shot him – four more shots were fired – and also clubbed him over the head till he dropped. There is a grizzly photograph of Rasputin's body with a bullet hole in the forehead – no doubt that stopped him... A couple hours later, Yusupov and his fellow conspirators dumped the body into the river.

As Rasputin's prophecy foretold, only two months later the tsar abdicated the imperial throne during the first Russian Revolution in 1917. The second revolution occurred that autumn, led by the Bolsheviks who had the tsar and his family imprisoned and then executed in July of 1918.

That summer, Bela Bartók began writing the music for Lengyel's story about a Mandarin who wouldn't die.

According to Bartók's letter to his wife, he'd begun working on the music by September, 1918, but the 1st World War didn't officially end until the Armistice that November. The official treaty ending the war wasn't signed until late-June, 1919, around the time Bartók finished the first draft.

There was a revolution in Budapest in October of 1918 – again, before the armistice but while Bartók was composing – which overthrew the autonomous government under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, forcing the Emperor Karl who had only just succeeded to the throne following the death of the old emperor Franz Josef in 1916 at the age of 86, who was also nominally the King of Hungary. So, with him gone as the de facto ruler of Hungary, by mid-November, just days after the Armistice, a Hungarian Republic was proclaimed.

Hoping to remain neutral, the new nation found itself being invaded by its neighbors Serbia and Romania – but the United States and Woodrow Wilson had forced the disarmament of the Hungarian Army, leaving it with no defenses.

By February 1919, unable to control popular dissent or manage the economy, the republic fell in a second revolution backed by Lenin and the Russian bolsheviks, forming a Hungarian Soviet Republic. But the communists had never been popular outside the big cities and so a civil war ensued in which the Hungarian Red Army murdered hundreds of scientists and other intellectuals – some 590, many in Budapest – between March and August of 1919, mostly led by a gang called “Lenin's Boys” who were basically street thugs roaming the city.

Again, this was during the time Bartók was completing The Miraculous Mandarin.

The Soviet Republic fell in early-August when Romanian troops captured Budapest. The Reds fled the city (escaping to Austria after looting the banks and taking numerous “national treasures” with them), leaving now the conservative, pro-royalist faction, the Whites, as the sole fighting force, who managed to defeat the Romanian Army. But with no police force or national army, chaos ensued under the “White Terror” which lasted for almost two years and which aimed much of its anger against the Jews whom they blamed as supporters of the previous communist regime.

A former Austro-Hungarian admiral took charge of the Whites, formed a national army, tried to restore order and created the Kingdom of Hungary with himself as “Regent.” However, no one wanted the actual former Austro-Hungarian emperor as king nor could they find another likely candidate, so somehow Admiral Miklós Horthy served as Regent – that is, royal place-holder as care-taker – until he was ousted by the invasion of his former allies, the German Nazis, in 1944. By that time, Bartók managed to flee Budapest for the West and eventually New York City, but that's another and longer and even sadder story.

Meanwhile, in Paris in 1920, the Western Nations carved away at Hungary, slicing off some 72% of the original country and giving it to Romania, to what would become Yugoslavia and to the new country of Czechoslovakia as well as to what was left of Austria, once a vast empire sprawling across central and eastern Europe, now this small land-locked nation, a shadow of its former self. These divisions were done along ethnic and linguistic lines rather than political and historical lines – but from the standpoint of a Hungarian, it was humiliating, and now almost 3½ million ethnic Hungarians no longer lived in Hungary. Bartók's hometown was now in Romania; the largely Hungarian village where his family moved after his father's death later became part of Ukraine; the city he grew up in was now in Czechoslovakia (and presently in Slovakia).

So perhaps this brief summary of the historical background with its political and social turmoil not to mention the economic instability during the times when Bartók was composing The Miraculous Mandarin might give us an appreciation for the violence of the story and the music he wrote for it. Harrowing music from harrowing times.

Thinking about Bartók's dystopian world, it might bring to mind things we see on our news every night: this growing game of “knockout” or a man shot to death in a road-rage incident, school shootings, drug-related killings... As Bartók wrote to a friend following the horrors of World War I, “all art should face the unspeakable and the horrific without fear.” To someone who wanted to protect himself from such reality, he wrote “why do you want to be protected like a child from what is hard and harsh? The doors of your heart would be closed to human feeling. Do you not want to struggle, to be shocked, to experience life-threatening situations? How else will you understand Beethoven, Goethe, Nietzsche? Whoever wishes to experience ideas which are born from suffering must himself suffer.”

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Johannes Brahms had died in Vienna about 20 years before Lengyel's story of the Miraculous Mandarin. Generally, Brahms had a fairly dull life as great artists' biographies go, and he was fortunate to live in a fairly stable society both politically and economically. He was, by the time he composed his 2nd Piano Concerto, at the height of his fame – his conductor friend Hans von Bülow had already coined the Three Bs, Bach Beethoven and Brahms – plus he was quite well off, enough so he could set royalties aside for a secret fund to help his old friend Clara Schumann, who wasn't having that good a time of it toward the end of her career as a solo pianist.

The day after Brahms premiered his new Violin Concerto, Clara lost her youngest child, her son Felix – she had been pregnant with him when her husband Robert had attempted suicide only five months after a 20-year-old Brahms had introduced himself to them. Brahms' 1st Piano Concerto in D Minor had started out as a theme sketched a few days after Robert Schumann threw himself off a bridge into the River Rhine. Now, Clara was celebrating her 50th year as a concert pianist but arthritis, hearing issues and the failing health of some of her children made it difficult for her – for one thing, she found she could no longer play Brahms' D Minor Piano Concerto. She would never accept outright charity but somehow, through his publisher, Brahms managed to see Clara would get a steady income she thought was from her husband's music.

In April of 1878, Brahms and a few friends of his took a vacation – not a tour, just a trip, tourists in the sunny land of Italy, the first of nine such holidays he would take there – the only country he visited purely for pleasure. It was there that he sat down and sketched some ideas for a NEW piano concerto – but the next month, when he began his summer's composing, he put it aside to write a violin concerto for his friend Joseph Joachim which was premiered on New Year's Day, 1879.

Brahms hated touring as a performer, in fact hated performing, probably almost as much as he hated practicing. Joachim complained frequently about their being under-rehearsed while they were on tour. In the spring of 1880, with Clara Schumann unable to play because of her arthritis, it was Brahms who played Robert Schumann's piano quartet at the unveiling of a Schumann memorial in Bonn and Clara wrote how she suffered listening to her friend “grope and growl” his way through her husband's music, a piece she often played. “It was like I was sitting on thorns.” Joachim, she said “cast despairing glances at me...”

Brahms was often one to keep his work to himself: during the summer of 1880, he composed two piano trios, one of which never saw the light of day, as well as some piano pieces, the 2 Rhapsodies, Op. 79, and the 2 overtures – the “Tragic” and its companion, the “Academic Festival,” musically the equivalent of the theatrical masks of drama and comedy. He also was working on a new piano concerto.

Standing over Taormina

Before he finished it, there was another trip to Italy in April, 1881, where three friends had trouble keeping up with him, he was enjoying himself so much. His doctor friend, Billroth, wrote that one of his favorite places was to stand on the cliffs overlooking the village of Taormina on Sicily, in the shadow of the volcano Mt. Etna, and gaze out over the sea and he found the wine of Venice so much to his liking, when a fan recognized him on the street, he was enjoying himself so much, she had to grab his arm to keep him from walking off into a canal.

It's an interesting image to keep in mind – this idea of Brahms the bon vivant enjoying himself in Italy – during the last movement of the concerto, which if it doesn't paint musical images of the places he visited, gives us an idea of how he felt when he was there, certainly one of the happiest times in his life.

A few months later, then, Brahms announced to his friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg he'd completed a “tiny concerto with a tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo.” Now, if you know the piece, it's hardly tiny – in fact, at about 50 minutes, average, it's probably one of the longest concertos in the standard repertoire. A scherzo, which makes this a four-movement concerto rather than the typical three-movement form, is usually a light-hearted dance-like movement (it means “joke” in Italian), but this one is neither “tiny, tiny” nor a “wisp,” but a full-throttle drama with a full-bodied dance in the middle to... sunshine? Or wine, perhaps? Brahms explained he felt the first movement was so “harmless,” it needed something passionate between it and the slow movement. We know he'd originally planned for an added scherzo in the violin concerto – so this is where that idea (if not the music itself) ended up.

Brahms, of course, would often have his little self-deprecating joke about his music – not that he was ever modest about it (in fact, he could be one of the biggest jerks in classical music when it came to that). But unlike the D Minor Piano Concerto which had been a failure at its premiere in Leipzig – where barely three pairs of hands started to applaud before the hissing began – this new concerto was a huge success and Brahms quickly took it on tour both as soloist and as conductor (he and his conductor/pianist friend Hans von Bülow often traded places on the stage).

Clara Schumann wrote in her journal that “Brahms is celebrating such triumphs everywhere as seldom fall to the lot of a composer,” not easy for her to admit, given her own husband's lifetime of neglect. The spring before he'd first sketched the concerto, he was given an honorary doctorate degree and was even offered the job as music director of the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where he would've become the successor to Johann Sebastian Bach – an honor he quickly turned down, however (imagine, the city where, 19 years earlier, they'd hissed his 1st Piano Concerto!) – but Clara also knew him well enough to know that whatever his triumphs on the world's stage, in reality Brahms lived a sad life... and always would.

So in the condensed period of one evening, you can explore three different musical eras and worlds – stylistic, personal, historical... Starting with Michael Torke's javelin-like rise to what promised to be an exuberant career (“Javelin” is, after all, only 20 years old) – to the dystopian dysfunction of a world of violence and inhumanity in Bartók's “grotesque pantomime,” to some of the happiest music a lonely man could ever write at the peak of his career.

Enjoy the ride!

- Dick Strawser

Writing a Novel: An Ineluctable Modality - Part 4

(This is the last - I promise - in a series of posts about writing my November Novel, An Ineluctable Modality. You can start at the beginning with Part 1 here; you can begin reading the entire novel, here.)

One thing I've learned from reading about writers or their styles, no matter what somebody comes up with, somebody'd already come up with a term for it. No matter how natural it may seem to you the reader (or you, the author), finding an academic term applied to it makes it sound like one of those “write-a-scene-using-one-of-these-three-techniques” assignments. I suppose it's the way many people speak – without being conscious of what tense, what grammatical or syntactical rules, or whether they're spelling and punctuating it properly. We do it automatically, speaking, having absorbed rules, examples and influences in the process of our education and experience, knowingly or not, without knowing “what it's called.”

It's the same thing in music where critics and theorists can spill a lot of ink trying to tell us about what composers have written or what we're listening to. It often doesn't make compelling reading and often isn't going to help the average listener enjoy it any more. And appreciation may be a different thing than enjoying, anyway: we can appreciate what might have gone into it but, frankly, if you don't like the sound of it, chances are understanding the technical details or the historical background isn't really going to make you like it. If you do like it, then yes, appreciation can deepen your response to it. Or not.

Listening to Frank Delaney's weekly podcasts about James Joyce's Ulysses may seem like a lot of detail (excessive, you might say) and an incredible amount of additional information. (As of Dec. 25th, 2013, three and a half years after his first post, Episode #185 is about a passage in Chapter 4, p.67 to be specific, barely 11% of the book, so far.) “Do I need to know this to understand Joyce's book?” It depends on the depth of understanding you want, I guess.

As someone who drives, I always use the analogy that I don't need to understand the physics behind the combustion engine to get from my home to the grocery store. If I'm trying to figure out why my computer is screwed up (again), do I really need to look up dozens of technical terms that explain the science behind the software?

On the other hand, developing an awareness of what interests me will increase my enjoyment of something I already enjoy. Otherwise, our enjoyment remains purely superficial: some people expect deeper understanding when it comes to certain things that we deem important in our lives but art, no matter what kind of art, is fine at the “I-know-what-I-like” level.

So I'm not particularly interested in dissecting my own writing style and applying the appropriate technical terms to describe this and that. There are things, however, that an author's insight can help explain and would be better than – should it ever come to that – having some third-party thirty years down the road guessing what I might have meant by that.

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One of the things that drew me to writing this novel was the challenge of paying dialectic homage to two of my favorite novels, neither of which are typical novels: James Joyce's Ulysses (begun by 1914) and Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Swann's Way published 1913), both originating around the same few years that Schoenberg wrote his Pierrot Lunaire (premiered in 1912) and Stravinsky was composing The Rite of Spring (premiered in 1913), two of the most important musical works at the beginning of the 20th Century.

And since my starting point was Proteus, the idea that things can change (and suddenly) as Proteus could change, the idea of changing my style – as Joyce did from chapter to chapter – became a given. I wanted the style to change between Joyce and Proust as the novel unfolded or as my narrator's mood changed with the course of a day.

In opera – at least in the standard 17th-to-mid-19th Century operas – if you were telling your story, advancing the plot, you would use a musical approach that, if not outright dialogue, was musically one or two steps beyond speech (called “recitative”); if you were allowing the characters to react to events, to describe their responses (their emotions) to these events, to develop their characters in these responses, you used more poetic language sung to more melodic music, sometimes where the words took second place to beautiful music, where repetition didn't really matter and where, basically, the action came to a halt – but that was okay as long as the music was beautiful or thrilling to listen to.

So I have certain episodes in my novel which are stories, where the narrator is relaying events in a fairly straightforward manner. Then there are episodes where the narrator dwells on the implications of these events or characters in language that might become more poetic, ambiguous, often filled with personal references (not to mention literary allusions). These might, at times, overlap or occur as if shuffled together. Or he might be thinking about creativity – his, in most cases, or how other people react to artists, since this is a very central part of his identity.

Early in Joyce's “Proteus” chapter, he mentions two German words: nacheinander and nebeneinander which ought to be spelled with capital-Ns since they're technically nouns. “Nach-” means, in this case, “one after another, (in time) and “Neben-” means “one next to another” (in space).

Whatever Joyce meant by this, he'd apparently read (and Frank Delaney said it's very likely he knew the essay) Lessing's 1766 essay on the ancient Greek statue Laocoön in which he discusses that fiction is good at describing the “Nacheinander,” as in a tale told sequentially where events happen one after another, and that painting or the plastic arts like sculpture are good at describing the “Nebeneinander” where things (objects) occur side-by-side in space but which can be seen “all at once” or – and I'm not sure if this was Delaney's take, another Joyce scholar's or mine, entirely – where the eye can start on one object and move spatially around to other objects, in other words, non-sequentially to take in the whole piece in a way that might be different from another viewer's.

My own use of these two words – which for me recur frequently throughout my novel – is to imply how one can be sequential and another one can be non-sequential in a quantum physics kind of way, not necessarily in chronological order, the way our own thoughts often sweep through our mind (consciously or otherwise) not always in “correct” order.

In my narrator's mind, ideas, events, people, associations, and the odd word-or-phrase-that-pops-up-unexpectedly can occur either way: since he's writing it down, it's told through his perception, not as a direct observation. And so, in the middle of a “nacheinander” passage will appear a flash of “nebeneinander,” which brings to mind an Italian term used in painting – pentimento – something from the past appearing visible through the present either as a faint imagine behind the surface (as a painter might paint over an already used canvas) or, by way of some “tear-in-the-fabric,” peeking through the surface.

While Proust essentially tells his life-story in chronological fashion once he's past the opening sequence usually called “Overture” - you can read Part 1 here - there are frequent passages that are clearly from other time-planes, past or present. His rich curlicues of historical name-dropping (familiar to his readers in the early-20th century, perhaps, but requiring footnotes today which still don't do anything more than identify who these people were) and references to great paintings of the past (most of them, at least, unknown to me in such detail) are similar instances of this “other-timeness.” One of the most famous of these (and most difficult to explain) is the whole “Swann in Love” episode, nearly half the first volume, which has a viewpoint that isn't Swann's but can't be the narrator's because these events take place long before the narrator's birth. But Proust is fully capable of switching gears in the middle of a phrase with a seemingly additional two hundred words explaining an event, a vision, an emotion experienced in his childhood that can already occupy a hundred words of its own. And even the events he's describing cannot be the same ones seen through the eyes of the narrator as a child: while Swann visits them in Combray, we learn details about Swann's presumably double existence as the son of a stock-broker and the friend of princes, about the various attitudes of the narrator's family – the grandmother, her husband, her well-meaning but completely air-headed sisters, as well as Great-Aunt Leonie and the parents – all in great detail, all the while the narrator is obsessively concerned about the depressing realization his mother will not be coming up to give him her usual good-night kiss.

Compare that to the way Joyce opens A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which, when I was in high school, I thought was the stupidest stuff I'd ever read – and yet here he's telling it from the vantage point of a five-year-old child, intrigued by the moocow, not as the adult narrator looking back fondly on his childhood. While he'd begun working on it in one fashion or another as early as 1904, he didn't begin rewriting it as the novel it became until 1907, and it wasn't published until 1914 (presumably he went on from there to begin work on what eventually became Ulysses published in 1922). Here, he is “baby tuckoo” whose life-philosophy seems to revolve around wetting the bed – first it's warm (pleasant), then it gets cold (unpleasant). A far cry from Proust's tendril-entwining loops of memory even if at the root of it lies his desire for his mother's kiss.

Since my novel would only be about 50,000 words, there was no need to go into such detail, both past and present. It was merely a short chunk of the narrator's life – the month of NaNoWriMo – in which are embedded memories from the past but nothing so consistent as a life-story though eventually there are sufficient memories to begin forming the idea of one.

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

As Joyce plays with words and makes oblique and often inscrutable references (some, in foreign languages) to everything from other writers and an often arcane and unspoken bibliography, I decided I would try this as well, though I'm more likely an imitator badly showing off rather than creating anything nearly as virtuosic as Joyce manages (the whole trick of a virtuoso is to make it seem effortless; those who play at being virtuosos merely imitate and show us, inadvertently perhaps, how difficult it really is).

Though the opening is fairly straight-forward, it is, immediately after the Joycean title, entirely a parody of Proust: instead of going to bed early, as Swann's Way famously opens, my narrator used to wake up early. Here is the idea of changing things, of using (or implying) the opposite. Things contradict. Time, aging and the clock are all quickly presented (with a Joycean interpolation, “tick tock”) but with the appearance of the narrator walking on the beach (wearing borrowed boots) is pure Joyce (Stephen Dedalus on Sandymount Strand in Dublin, wearing boots and trousers borrowed from Buck Mulligan). My narrator inherited his boots from the uncle whose house he also inherited. It is as if the narrator is thinking as much about the same thoughts Joyce's Dedalus is thinking as he walks along his own beach which, eventually, we find out is in Maine.

Mythological references abound – his own name, Proteus; the identity-changing names he assigns to others – come not only from Homer but also Joyce's chapter: the narrator's father is Joyce's Adam Kadmon, the “first man” by way of the Kabala (I had initially thought it had something to do with Cadmus). Since his father would be the “first man” in the narrator's experience, the other fathers in his family tree must be given other names (what comes before “father” in our perception?): grandfather, Adam's father, becomes “Pater Hemon,” from the Greek for “Our Father” and at least is someone the narrator, as a child, meets. The other, even earlier but unexperienced fathers are all faded photographs (see Chapters 8 and 11) – or a memory that his father had of his own grandfather's funeral, Grandfather Khronos (the God of Time, not to be confused with the Titan Kronos, the father of Zeus, who killed his own father and ate his children). There is mention of the Union Ancestor, Great-Grandpa Logos (the Greek for “word,” as “in the beginning was the Word”); his wife is called Bereshith (the first word in the Hebrew Bible, the account of Creation, means “beginning”). What comes before the beginning? There is neither memory nor photographic proof.

On the other hand, the narrator's uncle, his father's older brother, is known only as Junior, even when he dies, a man in his 90s, the family nickname that robs him of his own identity. It is assumed he is Father Hemon, Jr. but it is never mentioned.

The quip about maestro di color che sanno is also quoted directly from Joyce who borrows it from Dante's reference to Aristotle (who was not bald, by the way). It means “master of those who know.” I also use, later, the expression maestro di color che sente, changing it to “those who feel (or sense)” and together refer to the left-side of the brain and the right, regarding an artist's creativity (if not our own non-artistic personalities).

There is also a playful exchange between the Narrator (now introduced as Proteus courtesy of the opening line stolen from Moby-Dick) and Henry Jordan, the would-be author, who addresses Proteus as the “master of those who know.” Proteus calls his friend Herr Liebhaber, “those who have love.” In Goethe's day (if not before) scholars (or professionals) were referred to as Kenner – “knowers,” in other words – and amateurs (from amat, Latin for “he loves”) were Liebhaber or “love-havers.” It is only more recently that this division was made by quality than by training. I have often been tempted to name two contrasting and argumentative characters Dr. Kenner and Mr. Liebhaber, a Dickensian touch.

Among Joycean puns, I would point out those about omphalos (Greek for “navel”) in Chapter 5, especially the umbilical “chord” which resonates throughout the world. From Homer comes Achilles but here, courtesy of Zeno and his paradoxes, he is forever chasing the Tortoise. Later, as a boy, in Chapter 20, the narrator observes a box turtle his elders have named “Achilles.” It is a moment of idyllic happiness and ends with a reference to Goethe's Faust, the moment Faust discovers true happiness: “Stay a while, you are so fair.” With this, as part of their bargain, Mephistopheles can then claim his soul.

In Chapter 6, over dinner, Proteus and Henry are talking about creativity when Henry stumbles on an explanation: “it's like... like a...” and Proteus adds “What is Semele standing in the meadow for?” Semele, the mother of Bacchus, stands in for Henry's unformed simile and what is the difference between that and a metaphor? (You may groan.)

When we first meet Sybil, a discourse on religion turns into her latest crisis and ends with Proteus admitting, yes, he could understand how she feels about it (experiencing someone else's thought through one's own mind), but it ends with a reference to the final line of Joyce's Ulysses, the orgasmic conclusion to Molly's long soliloquy, which suggests a slightly different turn of events as the chapter ends rather abruptly.

The chapter for Veteran's Day begins with a reference to Virgil's Aeneid but focuses mainly on the warriors in the narrator's family and the rivalry between the narrator's father and his older brother, Junior.

Creativity and Experience are frequent topics – how the artist thinks, how the listeners or readers or viewers respond – with frequent references to familiar and unfamiliar pairings (like the styles of Joyce and Proust, often contradictory elements) as well as how the non-artist perceives how the artist works (how one can experience something through someone else – again, a riff on the opening lines of Joyce's “Proteus” Chapter). We (the listeners to music) are comfortable with the traditional forms, for instance (Chapter 26), these “long sonatas of the dead.” This is a line with a somewhat different emphasis taken from Samuel Beckett's Molloy. The narrator's creativity is a “hobbled Prospero” (a reference to Shakespeare's Tempest by way of Beckett) leads to a Latin quotation, Oportet me pergere, non possum pergo, pergam, which is really a (possibly) bad translation of a purposely misquoted line, “I must go on, I can't go on, I will go on” [originally “you must go on...”] which concludes Beckett's Joycean whirlpool, The Unnameable. Later, this changes to “O ineluctable modality, I must see, I cannot see, I will see,” harking back to Joyce's opening lines from the “Proteus” Chapter that set my own novel in motion:

= = = = =
“The ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.... Shut your eyes and see.”
= = = = =

In the next chapter, one other reference might need explaining: in this chapter, Proteus sees Joyce Diotimopoulos, the new librarian he has long been thinking about but has yet to work up the courage to meet. She is leaving the library with a friend (in a rather Henry James-like turn) “not just two people but people sharing an intimacy.” What he has thought possible (introvertibly) he now sees as a likelihood (extrovertibly) followed by a play on the word “hypostasis” (from hypothesis to the observation of Aristotle's “material substratum underlying change” as well as the psychological use of the term to describe aspects of a personality exhibited through its internal and external realities). Proteus imagines them as Joyce's “red Egyptians” (near the end of the “Proteus” Chapter) and he includes a musical reference to a famous and quite “modernist” madrigal published in 1611 by Don Carlo Gesualdo – “E chi mi può dar vita, ahi, che m'ancide., more or less” – “she who can give me life, ah, kills me” from Moro lasso (“I die, I mourn”).

The chapter in which Proust meets Joyce – the 28th, Thanksgiving Dinner – is not so much stylistic as physical, as referential as it might be irreverent: they share the same space as the narrator, his son Stephen and his friend Sybil (all three of our dramatic threads combining in one space at one time).

Proteus takes his son to dinner at the Balbec Inn, preesumably one of those old grand hotels (fictionalized, of course) typical of the Maine seacoast. This one, however, takes its name from the fictitious seacoast town in Brittany where Proust spent many vacations. In the dining room over by the windows overlooking the sea sits a grandmother speaking quietly in French to her pale grandson, looking out wide-eyed to the sea beyond (Proust's young narrator); meanwhile, at the bar is a tall thin man wearing coke-bottle glasses – clearly, James Joyce who suffered from bad eyesight and wore glasses with very thick lenses (sometimes an eye-patch). When he leaves, he stumbles past the narrator's table, complaining incoherently about gas.

Proust and Joyce, the two greatest literary figures of the age, both lived in Paris but met only once. Instead of being this great discussion of the novel and their respective aesthetics, neither would admit to having read the other, and if they did converse, it went along slowly until Proust (a notorious hypochondriac only a few months before his death) responded to Joyce's complaints about his health. From there, Proust apparently asked him if he knew various aristocrats in Paris society, none of whom Joyce would ever have been able to or be interested in knowing. So my chapter ends with Sybil asking Stephen, Proteus' son, if he knows any of his father's friends, to which Stephen replies, one after another, “no.”

It was pure irony that on the morning of November 1st, setting about to begin my new novel, I was troubled by an attack of “floaters” in my left eye, those wafting dark spots and filaments that create an annoyance more than anything else (scary though they may be, especially to one who cannot afford health insurance). More distracting than anything, waving in slow motion, back and forth, like lace in a breeze – “diaphane; adiaphane,” I thought, from the opening of Ulysses' third chapter – I found myself improvising a patch to place over the left lens of my glasses. Then I picked up my copy of Ulysses which has on its cover a classic photo of James Joyce with his eye-patch. Fortunately, for me, my floaters gradually dissolved rather than required the ten eye surgeries Joyce required during his lifetime, but it was a little too close an homage to be comfortable, however humorous.

When I wrote the novel's last lines – not sure even that morning quite how it would end – I found myself almost unconsciously tying in so many lines from Joyce after one more reference to Goethe's Faust-moment:

= = = = =
...I watch the clouds come in from the east – the sign of a storm: snow, maybe – still. Home. Stay a moment.

Creation here from nothing, the past (historic, personal – the same), pentimento of the future – visible, audible, ineluctably forging the cloud as others see it, hear it, over the living and the dead.

Old man, old creator, stand me now in good stead evermore. The ship comes in, homeward, silent, a way, a lone, and yes, I will say – yes –
= = = = =

There is the pentimento once again looking out from the past, the ineluctability of the visible and the audible from the opening of the “Proteus” Chapter in Ulysses, the cloud as seen by him (is it the same as seen by others?), the coming of storm clouds (from the end of the chapter) with the possibility of snow falling over “the living and the dead” (the final line from “The Dead” which concludes Dubliners).

Then, it's the final line from The Portrait: “Old father, old artificer [Daedalus, of Greek mythology, is an inventor], stand me now and ever in good stead.” Then back to the “Proteus” Chapter, ending with the appearance of the three-masted schooner – earlier references to the ship coming to take away our souls when we die, referring to the flag “Blue Peter” which means the ship is ready to sail, but there's no reference here to that.

Instead, it's off to the final line of Finnegans Wake – “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” – which stops without punctuation, but here morphs into Molly's final “and yes I said yes I will Yes.” (which does end with punctuation).

When I looked at this, I couldn't figure out if Proteus died – between the Faust reference, the quote from “The Dead” and the image of the ship (used already several times, most notably after his “panic attack” at the end of Chapter 19, as an image of Death's possible arrival) and the open-ended dash (accepting death as a door opening to a new journey?) combined with the circular infinality of Finnegans Wake – or if he just fell asleep. Personally, I'm not sure, so I'll leave it up to the reader to decide (or not) for himself.

There are many lines from Joyce's chapter that find parallels in my novel. One I hadn't been aware of until the last day as I finished the first draft is a few pages from the end of the “Proteus” Chapter, and might be overlooked in passing:

= = = = =
“Who watches me here? Who ever anywhere will read these written words?”
= = = = =

Then I recalled in my second chapter, still writing on that first day, where I'd written the typical blogger's lament:

= = = = =
“You don't know me, probably won't, and since no one will likely read this... it is a way for me to express myself without actually telling anyone. It's the internet equivalent of a note-in-a-bottle.”
= = = = =

When finishing something, it is not so much a sense of relief that a work is done – a composition or a novel, in my experience – but a sense of loss. I wait a few days before reading through it, trying not to be too critical (does it hold together?) and a few days later, I go through and take a few more swipes with Occam's razor, cutting out paragraphs that don't fit, tighten things that seem too baggy, reword things that don't flow as well as I'd like, then a few days later, do it again. I'll fuss over the right word (or a better one), adjust a rhythm – put it back, take it out, move it around, leave it alone – wonder if I don't explain this, why would I spend so much time explaining that, keeping in mind a spontaneous bit of “streaming-of-consciousness” is not always so fresh on the third or fourth pass.

As if writing a novel weren't bad enough, it's a bit more hubris to then write an essay about writing the novel, as if anyone not interested in reading my book would be remotely interested in reading about how it was written.

Yet, curiously, there have been slightly more hits on the first two parts of this essay than there have been on the whole novel combined, so far. Maybe I should write more about writing novels than actually writing novels?

Anyway, this is where I now put the essay and its accompanying novel aside and, if I can muster the courage, get back into writing Part Two (of four) of The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben.

To recall Samuel Beckett, “I must go on, I can't go on, I will go on.”

End of story.

Dick Strawser
© 2013

Writing a Novel: An Ineluctable Modality - Part 3

(Initially, I'd set up this blog to cover (among other things) stuff like creativity, being a composer and writing frequently about music. But since I'm not composing any more (and I say that in order to goad my creativity into jump-starting a new piece of music, with any luck) and instead writing novels (usually about music), I can still write posts about the creative process (at least, my limited experience with it) since this seems to be something people who are not composers or writers are sometimes curious about if not exactly interested in.

These posts are about the process behind writing my most recent novel, An Ineluctable Modality: you can read the earlier posts here and here, and you can begin reading the novel here.)

One of the things I like about the NaNoWriMo experience is the fact many people who might never try it will actually take the time to find out what it's like trying to write a novel. Those of us who read novels might think it'd be easy to write one – you start at the beginning and keep writing till you're finished. How difficult can that be, right?

But once would-be writers have taken a shot at it, they might realize “just because you speak the language doesn't mean you can write a novel.”

One of the things I don't like about the NaNoWriMo experience is the fact there are an awful lot of bad novels as a result and people who've met the 50,000-word challenge may feel, now that they've written a novel, that the next logical step is getting it published so they can make enough money to retire to that summer beach house they're going to build from its royalties.

There are certain realities of the business that go far beyond the ability to put words on the page to tell a story. Quality of the end result is not the point but unfortunately quantity is not the end of the process – in many cases, it's only the beginning.

While it's fun to reach that goal, I'm not sure receiving an e-mail from somebody on the NaNoWriMo Team congratulating you on becoming An Author (one that is usually rife with grammatical and spelling errors) makes you one. But at least you're finding out what it takes to become one.

And while I don't need to get into the whole American Idol mind-set that society foists on the Arts these days, let's leave it that coming to terms with a dream is good for the soul and sometimes that is success enough.

Rather than sitting down and starting a novel “from scratch” on November 1st and seeing where it went by November 30th (all the while keeping track of my word-count), I decided to do some planning beforehand – though this time, I gave myself less time to plan it because until the day arrived I wasn't even sure I was going to write it. I needed to get to a point in The Labyrinth of Klavdia Klangfarben where I could put that one aside to say, “and now for something completely different.”

After all, I spent months working out the details of the plot and the setting and many of the characters before I began writing the opening paragraph of The Labyrinth which will be a novel of less than 150,000 words. As a mystery, it has to have a particular flow to keep the reader's interest going (“and now, once again, our host, Paige Turner”) and, like a piece of music, there needs to be some variety and contrast to keep it together and give it a sense of rhythm. For my taste, too many page-turners are so high-speed – where not only ever chapter ends in a cliff-hanger but almost every paragraph – they leave you breathless, exhausted by the time you reach the goal.

This time with NaNoWriMo, I really only wanted to write a “short” novel (considering my others were planned to be between 130,000-180,000 words – figure the difference between a 50,000-word novel of about 120 pages, and a 180,000-word novel of maybe 425 pages), but I wanted it to be complete, not just the start of a longer novel I would continue working on for several more months beyond December 1st. None of my previous November Novels were intended to be complete in themselves.

Since I had decided my “story” (or “plot,” using these terms loosely) would be told basically in the format of daily blog-posts (a modern-day “epistolary” novel), I felt these episodes (chapters in a more traditional sense) needed not only to be complete but have a place in the overall “arc” or shape of the novel, the usual beginning, middle and end of a traditional story (the exposition, development and denouement – or in music, the recapitulation – that ties it all together).

Now that I had my characters and a setting to place them in, I started fleshing them out. Fortunately, not everything needs to be understood from the very beginning. Notice that my narrator doesn't even introduce himself by name until the opening of Chapter 2. Other characters only hinted at may not show up until considerably later. Others, mentioned in passing, may never show up at all. It's possible that some of this may change – but how: in the way the narrator perceives them or by discovering things he hadn't noticed before? Or is it something that doesn't explain itself well – aside from having blue eyes in Chapter 5 and brown eyes in Chapter 29 – and may need to be rethought? That is what the editing process is all about – checking for inconsistencies and correcting or explaining them if needed or, as happened a few times with me, weeding out things that had nowhere to go (one thing I've remembered, now, is giving the narrator a sister but then never mentioning her beyond that: if she's not going to become a character, that's one thing, but why would he never mention her again?).

Characters may come and go as the story-line requires but why are they in these settings? Why did my narrator end up in Maine? What happened to his wife? How did he become estranged from his son? Why is his friendship with Sibyl such an annoyance? What purpose does Henry and his on-going novel-project serve? How do these lines evolve or intertwine?

As it turned out, Henry's line receded considerably as my writing progressed: eventually, it was there more to remind the narrator his friend was working hard to do something he'd never done before while he's working hard to overcome his own creative issues as a composer who finds himself unable to compose. But no, I didn't want to have Henry calling up and saying “I wrote 3,000 words today” or “at this point, I decided I need to kill off my heroine's friend – how can I best do that?” That was not important to my narrator's thread.

Lots of these details can be left till later – the problem is finding yourself backed up into a corner without any idea how to make the reader believe what's happened unless, of course, the old deus ex machina works for you (it happens more often that it should even in the best of stories and films, the hero arriving in the nick of time against all odds, for instance). But it is sometimes fun for a writer to let his characters (as well as the plot) reveal themselves in the process. How do they react to this situation? Why did they make the choices they've made?

And of course there's always the wonderful “what if” method, wondering what might have happened if they'd made different choices or if something else had happened instead. We all have doubts: why can't our characters have some, too? A novel is as much a personal journey for the characters as writing it can be for the writer.

So given all that, what was I going to do with my handful of characters?

As a composer aware that music either fits into a pre-existing form or creates it own, I started to work out a “form” for my novel, how that beginning-middle-and-end would unfold. Since I like pacing things according to the natural divisions of the Golden Section, I decided there would be three individual threads for my narrator – his own personal concerns; another regarding his son; and a third regarding his friend, Sybil. The main climax of this arc, then, would be his own personal concern about his health which in essence is the result of his creative crisis, his fear of aging and his dread of stagnating, of being useless.

If there are 30 episodes in this story – a month's-worth of daily blog-posts – that means the Golden Section falls in the 19th Episode (not the half-way point). This creates two “halves” of the arc and I chose to put the son's conflict primarily at the Golden Section of each of those sub-segments. The son is a distant figure (in more ways than one) but Sybil is “local,” and so he rubs against her tension more frequently; the Golden Sections of these further sub-segments are given over to various encounters with her. Sometimes they're combined; sometimes they are not the focus of the whole chapter – and then, too, each chapter basically has its own proportionally divided arc.

In between these specific chapters are those needing less tension, the contrasting “release” chapters, which perhaps might not have any character or plot-thread associated with it. These might be more lyrical episodes or, in the manner of one having a creative crisis, meditations on what it takes to be an artist. These might have no “action” in the sense of driving the story forward but they give the narrator, in particular, a chance to evolve. If the other chapters, the “action” episodes, are what the characters do, these episodes might be where the characters think about what they'll do or might do or might not do or why they won't do something or how they reacted in the past, consider their historical legacy to better understand themselves. If we the readers have a chance to watch them act and react to something, we get a better chance to understand “where they're coming from.” And also, eventually, where this novel is going.

Now, because I wanted it to have some sense of “shape,” I decided my series of climaxes (great and small) should somehow reflect each other in the way they build and recede. This was not a mystery where the final resolution needs to happen on the last page – solved it! – but the delineation of a process in which my narrator comes to terms with himself in some way during the course of one month of his life.

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

Time, of course, is an important part of this novel, even as short as it – by comparison to Ulysses or In Search of Lost Time – and the flowing of tides (living near the seacoast) is as much a part of it as our perception of the speed with which time flies (or doesn't).

I didn't want to have a strong and tidy resolution at the end – the son doesn't solve his problem, Sybil doesn't find the Man of Her Dreams and the narrator isn't going to wake up with the solution to that elusive new composition he's been trying to get started. At the end of 62,000 words, the son is only taking what might be one step in a possible direction but at least he seems to be taking a step; Sybil is making plans for a change in her life as well, though there's no indication it will work or even happen – again, it is only one small step away from the hamster-wheel of her frustration.

As for the narrator, I'm not even sure how his works out, if it does, since he's writing this himself. It's one of those things that doesn't end as much as it stops – or like Finnegans Wake goes back to the beginning again to start over (the famous last line which, unpunctuated, recirculates to the novel's opening line some 600 pages earlier, a thought overheard in the middle of a sentence).

Even in Proust, the plot is ultimately circular – the whole time Proust's narrator is describing (in often excruciating detail) the story of his life, it is only at the end he discovers he has the necessary life-experience if not the skill, finally, to write the great book he has always dreamed of – and it's the book you've just read.

In Homer's tale as well as Joyce's riff on it, Odysseus and Leopold Bloom reach their destinations – the conjugal bed, beside their wives – but Stephen Dedalus' own journey is not yet resolved: his search will continue past his final appearance, past the final curtain of Molly's famous soliloquy, whether the novel you've just read will actually be the one he now feels mature enough (as a person but more importantly as an artist) to write.

In this sense, I drew two parallel lines, one from the opening to the main Golden Section (phi) which will include 19 chapters, the other from there to the end, which will include 11 chapters. The beginning and the ending are therefore parallel points on the now potentially connectable lines.

Then, I marked the various levels of climaxes, given Greek letters to distinguish them – the narrator's at phi, the son's at the two alpha points and Sybil's at the four beta points – at corresponding, parallel points. These should be related if not necessarily in some mirror-like fashion as they approach and recede from the central phi-climax.

The chapters in between these climactic points could be about almost anything, but I decided, however they fit in, they would also follow this structural mirror. The content of these non-climactic episodes may change in the writing process (and usually did), but I knew that whatever topic I chose for this early episode would be met again in the corresponding later episode. In the process, these correspondences may become more ambiguous than initially planned; on occasion this outline only became a point-of-departure. The whole thing, after all, is only meant to give the writing process just that, a point-of-departure, rather than starting each day from scratch and wondering “what next?”

So now I have a kind of graph for my novel – a skeleton, more than a map. Within this – rather than thinking of it as hills and valleys – are sections that increase tension and others that resolve it or, as often happens in music and many other novels, disperse it with contrasting material: another plot thread, a different sense of rhythm and energy, reflection rather than action, background rather than forward motion, perhaps even a change of style.

Now comes the flesh. I was ready to begin.

(You can read the next – and final – installment, here.)

Dick Strawser
©2013

Writing a Novel: An Ineluctable Modality - Part 2

Places & Names in An Ineluctable Modality

(The second in a series of posts about writing my November novel. You can read the first post, here. You can read the entire novel beginning here.)

In the sense of Proteus as the shape-changing mythological figure in Homer's Odyssey and the way Joyce applied it to his third chapter of Ulysses, I decided to “change” some real places into my fictionalized setting. Because I wanted to reflect some of the references in the “Proteus” Chapter, I saw the line “bald he was and a millionaire” with a reference by way of Dante to Aristotle (who was not bald – one of the changes Joyce applied) and saw there was a place called “Bald Head” just down the Maine coast from a place near Kennebunkport called “Prouts Neck.”

Marcel Proust

Now, another book that is important to me and to this particular writing challenge is Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (it was still Remembrance of Things Past the first time I read all seven novels back in the '80s). Since I first started Swann's Way (volume 1) in the late-70s, then, I have read the whole novel once, the first half a second time, Swann's Way yet a third time in the new Penguin Edition and recently begun the second novel (now entitled In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower as opposed to Within a Budding Grove) which I put aside because I had started writing a novel of my own, again, and didn't want to be distracted by Proust or any other writer who would influence my style (reading other writers' mysteries becomes “research” but reading Proust or Henry James or James Joyce becomes a distraction, I'm afraid). I have just purchased the annotated Centennial Edition of Swann's Way and hope to read at least two or three pages of it a night whether I go to bed early or not.

One important historical conjunction is the publication of Swann's Way in November of 1913 and James Joyce beginning work on the novel Ulysses in 1914, as it evolved out of a story originally intended for Dubliners. Ulysses was not finished until it was serialized between 1918-1920 and not published in book-form until 1922. Proust completed In Search of Lost Time in 1922, the year he also met (tangentially) James Joyce, and then died later that year.

As disparate as their styles may seem to the average reader, I liked the idea of combining them in some way in this novel of mine because, when you get down to it, both of them deal with elements of time, perception, creativity and the subconscious, just approaching them in different manners.

Another thing that drew me to “Proteus” as a source was the very essence of the chapter, with Stephen Dedalus walking along the beach having, basically, a creative crisis (among other things). That Proteus – at least in Greek myth – was a constantly changeable god or demon also appealed to me. Though I was not initially aware of the extent of “change” in Joyce's chapter, with a little research I found he is not only constantly changing his literary style from chapter to chapter in the whole novel, he is often changing information or concealing the truth behind statements that, if you “got” his puns and ambiguous references, would add an entirely different, perhaps parallel possibility to what you're reading.

Stephen, in his walk, experiments with experiencing what he sees – and then, by walking with his eyes closed, doesn't see. He also imagines stories behind the people he sees (as many of us do when “people-watching”) and other things he experiences. When do we realize our perception of what we experience and the whole idea of something we experiences through our own senses is not always being the same thing someone else experiences? One of the first puns I came up with was, dwelling on this solipsism, to have a teacher named Sol Lipsitt.

So I decided that, in and out of this novel, there would be numerous and frequent references to Joyce's “Proteus” Chapter specifically, Ulysses more generally and occasionally from The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and, less, from Finnegans Wake.

But I also wanted to tie in Proust's novel, like Ulysses a search for artistic identity: like Stephen Dedalus, Proust's narrator is also trying to build out of his voluminous experiences the person who would eventually become the Great Writer capable of giving voice to his inner novel which, at the end of seven volumes, becomes the novel you've just finished reading.

In this sense, my novel opens not with a line from Joyce (the title aside) but with a parody of the famous opening line of Proust's Swann's Way: “For a long time, I went to bed early” becomes “For a long time, I used to wake up early.” The first of many such contradictory changes.

In this sense, every person who ventures forth on November 1st to engage their creativity in the NaNoWriMo Experience is recreating this journey of self-discovery whether for the first or (as Stephen Dedalus points out near the end of The Portrait) for the millionth time. In the case of my novel, here, one of the characters is doing just that – but my narrator (whom I decided to name Proteus) declines the challenge, instead facing his own crises in the process: in addition to his on-going creative dilemma which lies behind almost every chapter, there is the conflict with his friend Sybil and with his son whom I named Stephen, as well as his own health and the thoughts of a man on the verge of his 65th birthday (at one point, the narrator refers to The Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Has-Been).

First, the names of places (itself a pun on two lengthy segments of Proust's novel: Place-Names: the Name and Place-Names: the Place).

As I said, rather than just plopping everything down in an existing realistic setting or creating an entirely fictional place, an American Wessex or a New England version of Yoknapatawpha County, I chose a real place but changed the names to protect the innocent – also as I said because I am in no real sense familiar with them (and did not wish to encourage “tours” of my locations as Dan Brown, through his voluminously detailed research, does in his novels set in Paris, Rome or Washington D.C. – or, ironically, Joyce in Dublin, for that matter).

Aside from “Bald Head” being an actual location south of Ogunquit, Maine – and I needed a place with a beach like Dublin's Sandymount Strand – I found one of the hills not far inland was named Mount Agamenticus. Considering all the Native-American names associated with Maine for places not tagged by British colonials, this one had a strange ring to it and I immediately decided it would become Mount Agamemnon, after one of the major players in Homer's Odyssey. This is where I placed my narrator's home. He is a fairly recent transplant to the area, moving here after his retirement: a former college music professor and composer used to small cities and proximity to New York City who is neither a beach person nor a mountain-and-lake person – but the house has been in his father's family since the years following the Civil War. In a sense, he has “come home,” whether he likes it or not.

And that means the nearby towns are spread out along the shore of southeastern Maine between Portsmouth, NH, and Portland, ME. Mt. Agamenticus is near York and the village of Cape Neddick. These, through a process of association, become Langley and Cape Edmund – “Ned” being a nick-name for Edward or Edmund (Edmund, I was thinking initially of the villainous character in King Lear) and Langley from the historical if not necessarily Shakespearean first Duke of York, Edmund of Langley.

The fact the CIA is based in Langley VA has nothing to do with my choice of name but if it resonates with a reader, so much the better: isn't the whole process of writing a novel and creating a character a process of spying on people to gather information to form them? Many of the incidents told in the course of this novel may be ones I experienced directly or picked up (and often adapted) from friends or acquaintances (Facebook is a great resource in collecting potentially fictional experiences) or from what I might hear (or read) in the news.

And of course there are also those that are borrowed (in the light of “parody”) from other literary situations.

In the Thanksgiving Day chapter, the narrator and his son go to the restaurant at the Balbec Inn which takes its name from the seaside resort where Proust's narrator spends his holidays with his grandmother and meets, among others, his future obsession, Albertine.

There are three unnamed characters among the other diners at my Thanksgiving dinner: one couple is a grandmother talking quietly in French to her pale grandson who is looking wide-eyed out at the sea; the other is a tall, thin man with coke-bottle glasses standing at the bar who lurches past the narrator's table on his way out, mumbling incoherently about gas.

These are Proust's narrator and his grandmother, transplanted from Swann's Way; and the other is the biographical James Joyce himself, with his thick-lensed glasses (his eye-sight was always delicate and he underwent several operations to improve it) and his penchant for drink.

Though Joyce spent much of his life in Paris where Proust lived, they only met once, at a party given to celebrate a recent collaboration between Stravinsky and Picasso. As great meetings between the leading literary figures of the age went, it was quite the anticlimax and much of their conversation, such as it was, is recreated near the end of this chapter between the name-dropping Sybil (standing in for the mature, name-dropping Proust) and Stephen (standing in for the out-of-his-element Joyce). While it might not be LOLful comedy per se, it is only one example of what might pass for literary humor in this particular novel.

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

As for the characters' names, my narrator starts off Chapter 2, "Call me Proteus" in a direct reference to the opening line of Melville's Moby-Dick (which also gave me a line I had to use, when Ishmael describes the “damp drizzly November in my soul” as his reason for setting out to sea again). And he calls himself this because, in the past, the music he writes has been described as “Protean” and because he is often accused of being inconsistent which he views as both a teacher's and a creative artist's prerogative. He also says, “in the realm of blogs, real identity stands for nothing,” and so none of his characters are given their real names.

For instance, we've already met his friend, the painter turned would-be novelist, Henry Jordan. Originally, he was going to be named (in the manner of conflicted artists dealing with right-brain and left-brain personalities) Henry James Joyce after my two favorite and wildly disparate authors. But I also liked the “would-be novelist” idea which was more important here – I'll save Henry Joyce for later – and so I borrowed Jordan from Monsieur Jourdan, the “would-be gentleman” of Moliere's play, Le bourgeois gentilhomme. (As it happened, I was preparing a blog-post about Strauss' incidental music/ballet for a setting of the play which the Harrisburg Symphony would be performing in November.)

Would I expect a reader to “get” that? No, but someone might and it would be one slightly deeper level of frisson rather than just calling him Henry Smith. I usually do that more obviously with the comic thrillers I write where characters are given punning names as we've already seen here with the archetypal teacher, Sol Lipsitt. Or the detective from The Lost Chord named Jenna St.-Croix (from “je nais c'est quoi” which seemed so perfect for somebody who uses deduction for a living). And, of
course, who can forget Yoda Leahy-Hu?

While Madeleine LeMare, the family lawyer who makes a brief appearance in Proteus' inheriting the old family homestead on the road leading up to Mt. Agamemnon, is taken directly from Joyce's “Madeline the mare” where it is a pun on Proust's episode of the memory-inducing pastry and the cup of tea, with Stephen standing by the sea (la mer), the constantly induced memory of Proteus' late wife, Madeleine Elstir, is something of a double pun. Trained as an artist, a painter, she gave up her hopes for a career to become a wife and mother – I could point to several such examples both known and known-of – while her husband strives to pursue his own career as a composer. The Proustian madeleine aside, Elstir is the name of a painter in Proust's novel; and Madeleine Elster is the name of the mysterious woman in Hitchcock's film, Vertigo.

Proteus' friend Sybil became, unfortunately, a one-dimensional character whose obsession with her failed romances is the main conflict between her and Proteus – friends who place their friendship in constant turmoil by her single-minded selfishness (speaking of solipsisms). “Sybil” was originally from the clinical study of a patient with multiple personalities but of all my names in this short novel, one I might, in another pass, change to something more obsessive. Or I may simply let it go as a Joycean contradiction – a woman of implied multiple personalities who is focused entirely on only one.

(At one point, Proteus imagines she would make an interesting character in the novel he might write, if only he could make her sympathetic.)

Her last name, mentioned twice, is Icarus, after the son of Daedalus, famous for his “flying machine.” It is Icarus who flies too close to the sun, melting the wax holding the wings together. This causes him to crash and burn – something Sybil has a long history of doing in her relationships.

And of course, Proteus' son is named Stephen – after Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's novels. There is a brief moment in the Thanksgiving Dinner scene where Proteus realizes the woman talking to his son at the restaurant is Sybil, perhaps trying to pick up a new boyfriend. He introduces her to his son as “my friend, Sybil Icarus.” If that was something you'd “get,” you'd probably smile.

And Stephen, a gay man in his thirties, is a recently laid-off California-based computer engineer whose partner is Leopold or Leo (as he's usually referred to), of course a reference to Leopold Bloom, the Odysseus at the heart of Joyce's novel. When Leo leaves Stephen, it is because he wants to go off and experience adventures “before he's too old to care,” but that journey is for another story. They are, like the characters of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, an unlikely pair of attracted opposites – again, a reference to inexplicable inconsistencies.

Meanwhile, Proteus himself is becoming obsessed with an unknown woman he has yet to meet: the new librarian in Langley named Joyce Diotimopoulos. Her first name, of course, is James Joyce's last name and her last name (her own family's or her husband's is not made clear) comes from Diotima, the advocate of Platonic Love in Plato's Symposium. Diotima is also the nick-name given to the main character's cousin in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, but that's another association.

At one point, Proteus (who finds himself going to the town library more frequently, now, in hopes of meeting her there) observes her leaving the library with another man in a situation indicating he is more intimate with her than “just a friend.” Considering Henry James' The Golden Bowl, the process of jumping to such ambiguities could create a whole new world of near-experiences (it is the process behind the entire plot of his slightly earlier novel, The Sacred Fount): Proteus sees the two of them as the “Red Egyptians” Stephen Dedalus sees (and fantasizes about) on the strand in Joyce's “Proteus” Chapter.

There's even a box turtle who gets a Homeric reference: he is named Achilles as a pun on the famous paradox of Zeno about Achilles and the Tortoise (also famous from Lewis Carrol's parody of it), itself frequently referenced throughout my novel.

Proteus is a small child visiting his grandfather's neighbors on Mt. Agamnenon, where they've rescued the turtle who's lost a foot due to a trap or a predator. The neighbor is named Homer Eckles – Homer, clearly, from the Odyssey's bard – his children are Thena (from Athena) and Troy – but Eckles is specifically from Eccles Street in Dublin, where Leopold Bloom lives in Ulysses. In fact, Joyce often referred to his novel with its blue-colored cover as “The Blue Book of Eccles” and as such it puts in an appearance in Finnegans Wake. There are frequent puns on the Latin words, ecce homo for the biblical line, “Behold the man” – so perhaps Homer is more than just a reference for the Greek Bard (see how these associations can work?) – as well as in ecclesiam referring to “in the church” (a constant conflict with Stephen Dedalus' faith). And so I named Troy Eckles' son Sam.

These names may have been an arduous process – they were the last I came up with and that was actually after the November challenge closed – but even though it may seem an incidental experience in the narrator's memories, it ties in in the end to something more profound and more worthy a degree of association than simply calling them Jones.

Another character, also introduced late in the novel, is Ferdinand, a former student of Proteus' who had helped him out years ago after he'd had his heart attack and who returns for a Thanksgiving holiday visit. This is an awkward name as names go, but the association here is with the son of the King of Naples in Shakespeare's Tempest – my character even arrives from Naples, FL – and since Proteus once referred to himself as a “hobbled Prospero,” the idea of Ferdinand developing at least a potential relationship with Proteus' son Stephen (since I couldn't exactly call him Mirando) is one of the implied tidinesses at the end of the novel.

To be continued: you can eventually read the next installment, Reference and Reverence.