I have finally discovered a “how to write” book that makes sense. (As it turns out, the book was there all along, but it took a friend’s advice to steer me to it.) Dorothea Brande’s 1934 work, Becoming a Writer (Penguin Putnam) tackles the fundamental challenges confronted by struggling writers. She offers specific advice on a range of writing topics like: what to do when you get up in the morning, how to spend your free time, what kind of people to avoid, and how to handle caffeine addiction. And yes, she explains, these are writing topics.  

Brande challenges would-be writers to “shit or get off the pot,” as my father would say, suggesting that we make writing appointments with ourselves and, if we fail to meet them, just give it up. I tell my students that showing up is fundamental, but have never applied this strict discipline to my own writing schedule.

 

Brande uses the “magniloquent” term “genius,” to describe the source of a writer’s inspiration. Then she argues that we all have it. We just don’t know how to use it. “No human being is so poor as to have no trace of genius; none so great that he comes within infinity of using his own inheritance to the full.” (p. 157). She demystifies the muse with specific advice on harnessing inspiration when we need it.

 

Then Brande cautions that we are a bunch of word-addicts and if we don’t get away from them we risk losing track of our own voices. She  recommends leisure activities that have “rhythm, monotony, and silence.” She says writers must be free of words both to tap into the unconscious sources of inspiration and to avoid contaminating our own styles. No wonder my friend Beatrice Hale is so productive - when not writing, she's walking or gardening.

 

Like John Gardner (On Becoming a Novelist), Brande advises that we husband our words carefully. Gardner prohibits his writing students from talking about their projects. Brande does the same, suggesting that once the words have escaped, the urge to write will dissipate. This reminds me of Lynley Hood’s suggestion (Sylvia!) that Sylvia Ashton-Warner wrote fiction to create an acceptable escape from an unacceptable reality. Had she accessed an alternate escape route (like chatting in a coffee shop, emailing a friend, or blogging) the world of literature would be diminished.

 

Brande says nothing the business or the craft of writing.  She gives the would-be writer something far more important: permission -- permission to be silent; permission to be alone; permission to be eccentric; and, ultimately, permission to be genius.
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"Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop."
-- Sportswriter, Red Smith

The waiter's tattoo said, “envy is ignorance.” I replied, “No, it’s a deadly sin.” He smiled and gave me a roll, but there wasn’t time to tell him the whole story, though I’ve told it to my children so often that they can recite it from the first line.

I was a quivering mass of insecurities in my 20s, eager to please anyone who looked like the father who didn’t give a rat’s ass, kept from an early grave by manic energy and an inborn capacity for locating the closest emergency exit. I’d planned to marry at 27, and I did. To a good man, as it turned out, a lawyer. He lived on Guam and so did I – both conditions that wouldn’t endure but embracing impermanence wasn’t something I’d master for a very long time. So those days seemed like forever.

Kate worked in “the” law firm. The one my husband joined. She was many of the things – at the time I thought everything - that I wasn’t. Mostly the confidence she brought into a room. It’s a confidence I have come to associate with prep school, that sense that everyone’s looking at her and that’s as it should be. Yes, in retrospect there was a certain, “preppiness” to her though at the time I just thought she had things together. She did have most things well in hand: a matching husband who knew how to work a room, two babies who knew not to cry, drool, or drip snot in public, a house, real furniture  doubtless bought new, silverware that matched (something I’ve still not managed to achieve) and my scruffy old beloved even thought she was smart.

The envy crept up on me. I was just curious at first, sniffing around for the flaw, observing with intense disinterest the community’s embrace. Expat lawyers have a built in radar for detecting their own. With me the “blip blip” meant “foreign object approaching.” But she slipped underneath into the welcoming smiles of senior and junior partners alike. She was, truly, in. And as I realized that I was not and never would be the envy got its first toe-hold. In time I couldn’t meet her smiling eyes. I’d say something banal about the bouncing babies -  “Oh my, have her eyes changed color?” Remembering little old me, crying in the bathroom stall when the inevitable drops of blood signaled another failure of our meek attempts at reproduction. That was probably the crux of the matter, though the husband didn’t help. Charming and all, he never did remember my name.

Years passed. My own babies came. We moved away. Lacking anything to draw us together with loads to push us apart, I forgot about Kate. Rumors of her divorce trickled out from Guam, triggering a brief image of perfection marred. She left the law firm, went out on her own to do divorce work. Hers had been “acrimonious,” we heard, with a nasty custody dispute that spun out for years. I couldn’t figure out why she wanted to keep revisiting divorce. You’d think she’d have run like hell. As it turned out, she should have.

Friday August 12, 1989 was the middle of Guam’s rainy season. Clothes and shoes full of mildew, streets slippery with coral oil, smells magnified by heat and moisture and nerves frayed knowing that it will go on and on. Always prompt, at ten minutes to nine Kate walked up the courthouse steps for the fourth hearing in a custody dispute almost as ugly as her own. Turns out the husband was waitingin a dark corner of the parking garage, smoking cigarettes (several) with his new hunting rifle in hand. He was a good shot - hit her right in the back of the head with a bullet that killed her instantly. Kate’s children went to her husband and my green-eyed envy turned into guilt.

Guilt tinged with a hint of sadness. I’m not sure why. I don’t really think I could have saved her – really. But she was suffering and I missed it. Suffering’s a magnet for me, that’s why I went into social work. On some naive level I think “trouble shared is trouble halved.” So yeah, if I hadn’t been so busy cringing in the corner and feeling sorry for myself I might have been able to help.  I think that. 

Emerson to the contrary, envy is not ignorance. It’s a deadly sin.

The cover of the June ’09 Atlantic Month features a radiantly happy young man and the promise of lessons on happiness from “an amazing 72-year study" (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness). Who could resist?

Turning to page 36, the cover shot makes more sense. The study in question was the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the not-so-aptly named longitudinal study of Harvard men conducted by George Vaillant. (Gee whiz, I thought he was dead! I also thought the era of the generic “he” long past.) We studied Vaillant in college as a classic example of psychologists who use a male metric to measure all of humanity. Yep, George derived his elaborate theory of human development from a sample of 268 men – but these were HARVARD men – and a special group at that, HARVARD men selected because their early selves promised success. So, with untold (literally, unmentioned) amounts of foundation money they were poked and prodded in periodic physical exams while social workers visited their families, RA’s mailed them surveys, and the occasional graduate student met them for in-depth interviews ever 15 years.

Caveat reador, I guess. Atlantic author Joshua Shenk goes along with the program, skipping past the blatantly unrepresentative sample to get to the meat of the matter.

“Where’s the beef?” Others might disagree, but to me the crux of the findings is found on page 46, where Shenk lists the “seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.” Measured at age 50, they were: education, (no surprise there, though one wonders what kind of variation they had) stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Those with five or 6 of these factors had only a 7.5% chance of ending up at 80 in the category Vaillant called “sad-sick,” whereas half ended up “happy-well.” Among those with three or fewer factors at fifty NONE “ended up happy-well.” Sorry, but I remain unconvinced.

I wonder, for instance, how Vaillant evaluated happiness among his 80-year olds. Might it not have a wee bit to do with the very factors used to predict it? I can spot a tautology at 50 yards and this shaves pretty close. The factors that “predict” healthy aging look very much like the definition of healthy aging. How can we tease out what “predicts” (the implication here is “causes”) well-being from our very definition of well-being? A lot hinges on how well-being was measured, which is, conveniently left out of the article.

Methodological limitations aside, the piece does tell an interesting story of Vaillant’s progression as a researcher. Enamored of his method, Vaillant said, “To be able to study lives in such depth, over so many decades, it was like looking through the Mount Palomar telescope.” (p. 40). But a telescope’s gaze is hardly appropriate for understanding the complicated lives of individual humans. As his successful career moved on, it seems that Vaillant’s passion for his method shifted. Described by Shenk as “more like a biographer,” (p. 44) Vaillant sought to make sense of individual lives for their own sake, rather than for the pursuit of generalities. Then things started to get interesting.

Where Vaillant’s generalities are suspect, the stories he collected reveal their own truths. There’s the story of a beloved physician and husband. For his 70th birthday his wife asked his long-time patients to write letters of appreciation. The result was a flood of missives packed with love and gratitude that, as it turns out, eight years later the man had never opened. Now that’s poignant! Or something. There’s the man whose life froze when he failed for the first time after a life full of glorious success. Or the one who came out at 70 and told his middle-aged children he was gay.

Though he doesn’t seem to have cracked the happiness nut, as a “keeper of biographies” Vaillant makes a tremendous contribution.