Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life

  Dedication

  For Eric Karl Anderson,

  A lover of literature

  Epigraph

  Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?

  Then crouch within the door—

  Red—is the Fire’s common tint—

  But when the vivid Ore

  Has vanquish’d Flame’s conditions,

  It quivers from the Forge

  Without a color, but the light

  Of unanointed Blaze.

  Least Village has its Blacksmith

  Whose Anvil’s even ring

  Stands symbol for the finer Forge

  That soundless tugs—within—

  Refining these impatient Ores

  With Hammer, and with Blaze

  Until the Designated Light

  Repudiate the Forge—

  EMILY DICKINSON, 1862 (365)

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I. THE WRITING LIFE

  Is the Uninspired Life Worth Living?

  This I Believe: Five Motives for Writing

  Anatomy of Story

  The Writing Room

  II. CLASSICS

  My Life in Middlemarch: Rebecca Mead

  Charles Dickens: A Life: Claire Tomalin

  “The King of Weird”: H. P. Lovecraft

  My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz

  Simenons

  Two American Prose Masters: Ellison, Updike

  A Visit with Doris Lessing (1973)

  III. CONTEMPORARIES

  The Childhood of Jesus: J. M. Coetzee

  The Detective as Visionary: Derek Raymond

  “Catastrophe into Art”: Julian Barnes

  “When the Legend Becomes Fact”: Larry McMurtry

  Paper Losses: Lorrie Moore

  Emotions of Man and Animals: Karen Joy Fowler

  Wiindigoo Justice: Louise Erdrich

  In Other Worlds: Margaret Atwood

  The Storyteller of the “Shattered Personality”: Patrick McGrath

  Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?: Jeanette Winterson

  Diminished Things: Anne Tyler

  Smiling Woman: Margaret Drabble

  The Inventions of Jerome Charyn

  “After Auschwitz”: Martin Amis

  London NW: Zadie Smith

  Joan Didion: Risk and Triumph

  Unflinching about Women: The Short Stories of Lucia Berlin

  Edna O’Brien: The Little Red Chairs

  “Disputed Truth”: Mike Tyson

  The Fighter: A Film by David O. Russell

  The Mystery of Muhammad Ali

  IV. REAL LIFE

  A Visit to San Quentin (2011)

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Nonfiction by Joyce Carol Oates

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I

  THE WRITING LIFE

  IS THE UNINSPIRED LIFE WORTH LIVING?

  Thoughts on Inspiration and Obsession

  This is not a traditional lecture so much as the quest for a lecture in the singular—a quest constructed around a sequence of questions—Why do we write? What is the motive for metaphor? “Where do you get your ideas?” Do we choose our subjects, or do our subjects choose us? Do we choose our “voices”? Is inspiration a singular phenomenon, or does it take taxonomical forms? Indeed, is the uninspired life worth living?

  Why did I write? What sin to me unknown Dipt me in Ink, my Parents’ or my own?

  Alexander Pope’s great “Epistle to Dr. Abuthnot” (1734) asks this question both playfully and seriously. Why did the child Pope take to verse at so young an age, telling us, as many a poet might tell us, with the kind of modesty that enormous self-confidence can generate—

  I lisp’d in numbers and the numbers came.

  —by which the poet means an intuitive, instinctive, “inborn” sense of scansion and rhyme for which some individuals have the equivalent of “perfect pitch” in music: you are born with it, or you are not. For sheer virtuosity in verse, Pope is one of the great masters of the language; his brilliantly orchestrated couplets lend themselves ideally to the expression of “wit” (usually caustic, in the service of the poet’s satiric mission). The predilection to “lisp in numbers” suggests a kind of entrapment, though Pope doesn’t suggest this; the perfectly executed couplet with its locked-together rimes is a tic-like mannerism not unlike punning, to which some individuals succumb involuntarily (“pathological punning” is a symptom of frontal lobe syndrome, a neurological deficit caused by injury or illness) even as others react with revulsion and alarm. Pope’s predilection for “lisping in numbers” seems to us closely bound up with his era, and his talent a talent of the era, that revered the tight-knit grimace of satire and the very sort of expository and didactic poetry from which, half a century later, Wordsworth and Coleridge would seek to free the poet. Pope never suggests, however, that the content of poetry is in any way inherited, like the genetic propensity for scansion and rhyme; he would not have concurred—(who, among the poets, and among most of us, would so concur?)—with Plato’s churlish view of poetry as inspired not from within the individual poet’s imagination but from an essentially supra-natural, daimonic source.

  To Plato, poetry had to be under the authority of the State, in the service of the (mythical, generic) Good; that it might be “imitative” of any specific object was to its discredit. “No ideas but in things”—the rallying cry of William Carlos Williams in the twentieth century— would have been anathema to the essentialist Plato, like emotion itself, or worse yet, “passion”—“the passions.” Thus, all “imitative” poetry, especially the “tragic poetry” of Homer, should be banished from the Republic, as it is “deceptive”—“magical”—and “insincere.” With the plodding quasi-logic of a right-wing politician Plato’s Socrates dares to say

  In fact all the good poets who make epic poems [like Homer] use no art at all, but they are inspired and possessed when they utter all those beautiful poems, and so are the good lyric poets; they are not in their right mind [italics mine] when they make their beautiful songs. . . . hing, a winged and a holy thing; he cannot make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his senses and no mind is left in him. . . . Not by art, then, they make their poetry . . . but by divine dispensation; therefore, the only poetry that each one can make is what the Muse has pushed him to make. . . . These beautiful poems are not human, not made by man, but divine and made by God: and the poets are nothing but the gods’ interpreters.

  Ion, Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W. H. D. Rouse

  The poets whom Plato disdained (and feared) were analogous to our rock star performers, before large and enthusiastic audiences; we can assume that it wasn’t the fact that these poets were popular, as Homer was popular, to which Plato objected, but the fact that his particular heavily theologized philosophy didn’t form the content of their utterances. The poet’s right mind should be under the authority of the State—indeed each citizen’s right mind should be a part of the hive-mind of the Republic. That the free-thinking, rebellious, and unpredictable poet-type must be banished from the claustrophobic Republic is self-evident. (In one of the great ironies of history, it was to be Plato’s Socrates who was banished from the State.)

  The work-sheets of poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, William Butler Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Larkin suggest how deliberate is the poet’s art, and how far from being inspired by a (mere) daimon; though it is often the poe
t’s wish to appear spontaneous, unstudied—see William Butler Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse”:

  We sat together at one summer’s end,

  That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,

  And you and I, and talked of poetry.

  I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;

  Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

  Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

  Better go down upon your marrow-bones

  And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

  Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

  For to articulate sweet sounds together

  Is to work harder than all these, and yet

  Be thought an idler by the noisy set

  Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

  The martyrs call the world.’

  And thereupon

  That beautiful mild woman for whose sake

  There’s many a one shall find out all heartache

  On finding that her voice is sweet and low

  Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know—

  Although they do not talk of it at school—

  That we must labour to be beautiful.’

  I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing

  Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.’

  Very different from the Beats’ admonition—“First thought, best thought.”

  To appear spontaneous and unresolved, even as one is highly calculated and conscious—this is the ideal. As Virginia Woolf remarked in her Diary in an aside that seems almost to prefigure her suicide in 1941, at the age of fifty-nine:

  I do not any longer feel inclined to doff the cap to death. I like to go out of the room talking, with an unfinished casual sentence on my lips . . . no leavetakings, no submission, but someone stepping out into the darkness.

  Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, April 8, 1925

  “Inspiration” is an elusive term. We all want to be “inspired” if the consequence is something original and worthwhile; we would even consent to be “haunted”—“obsessed”—if the consequence were significant. For all writers dread what Emily Dickinson calls “Zero at the Bone”—the dead zone from which inspiration has fled.

  What does it mean to be captivated by an image, a phrase, a mood, an emotion—

  A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

  Most serious and productive artists are “haunted” by their material—this is the galvanizing force of their creativity, their motivation. It is not and cannot be a fully conscious or volitional “haunting”—it is something that seems to happen to us, as if from without, no matter what craft is brought to bear upon it, what myriad worksheets and note cards. Here is Emily Dickinson’s cri de coeur—

  To Whom the Mornings stand for Nights,

  What must the Midnights—be!

  Most of the Dickinson poems we revere, and have lodged deeply into us, are beautifully articulated, delicately calibrated cries from the heart—formulations of unspeakable things, at the point at which “poetic inspiration” has become something terror-filled:

  The first Day’s Night had come—

  And grateful that a thing

  So terrible—had been endured—

  I told my Soul to sing—

  She said her Strings were snapt—

  Her bow—to Atoms blown—

  And so to mend her—gave me work

  Until another Morn—

  And then—a Day as huge

  As Yesterdays in pairs,

  Unrolled its horror in my face—

  Until it blocked my eyes—

  My Brain—begun to laugh—

  I mumbled—like a fool—

  And tho’ ‘tis Years ago—that Day—

  My Brain keeps giggling—still.

  And Something’s odd—within—

  That Person that I was—

  And this One—do not feel the same—

  Could it be Madness—this?

  This is the very voice of inwardness, compulsiveness, the “soul at the White Heat” of which Dickinson speaks in the remarkable poem that seems almost to deconstruct the Platonic charge of “god”-inspiration:

  Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?

  Then crouch within the door—

  Red—is the Fire’s common tint—

  But when the vivid Ore

  Has vanquish’d Flame’s conditions,

  It quivers from the Forge

  Without a color, but the light

  Of unanointed Blaze.

  (DICKINSON, 365)

  There is another Dickinson whose inspiration is clearly more benign, drawn from the small pleasures and vexations of daily life, a shared and domestic life in her father’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts:

  A Rat surrendered here

  A brief career of Cheer

  And Fraud and Fear.

  Of Ignominy’s due

  Let all addicted to

  Beware.

  The most obliging Trap

  Its tendency to snap

  Cannot resist—

  Temptation is the Friend

  Repugnantly resigned

  At last.

  (DICKINSON, 1340)

  (This is surely the most brilliantly crafted poem ever written on the subject of a rat found dead in a rat trap—in the cellar perhaps.) And, behind the house—

  A narrow Fellow in the Grass

  Occasionally rides—

  You may have met Him—did you not

  His notice sudden is—

  The Grass divides as with a Comb—

  A spotted shaft is seen—

  And then it closes at your feet

  And opens further on—

  Several of Nature’s People

  I know, and they know me—

  I feel for them a transport

  Of cordiality—

  But never met this Fellow

  Attended, or alone

  Without a tighter breathing

  And Zero at the Bone—

  (DICKINSON, 986)

  In the tersely titled “Pig” by the contemporary poet Henri Cole, the (trapped, doomed) animal that is the poem’s subject fuses with the poet-observer in the way of a vivid and revelatory dream:

  Poor patient pig—trying to keep his balance,

  that’s all, upright on a flatbed ahead of me,

  somewhere between Pennsylvania and Ohio,

  enjoying the wind, maybe, against the tufts of hair

  on the tops of his ears, like a Stoic at the foot

  of the gallows, or, with my eyes heavy and glazed

  from caffeine and driving, like a soul disembarking,

  its flesh probably bacon now tipping into split

  pea soup, or, more painful to me, like a man

  in his middle years struggling to remain

  vital and honest while we’re all just floating

  around accidental-like on a breeze.

  What funny thoughts slide into the head,

  alone on the interstate with no place to be.

  HENRY COLE, “PIG,” IN TOUCH

  (Parenthetically, I should mention that when I taught several writing workshops at San Quentin in 2011, on my first meeting with the inmate-writers I read this poem; in fact, I had to read it twice. The students were riveted and moved by this poem in which they saw themselves all too clearly.)

  In these striking poems by Dickinson and Cole the poet appropriates a “natural” sighting of “one of Nature’s People.”

  These are not “found” poems except in their suggestion that the poet’s sighting has an element of accident, one within the range of all of us—the rat in the trap, the snake in the grass, the pig on the flatbed being borne along a highway to slaughter. The poet is the seer, the poem is the act of appropriation. We might wonder: Wo
uld the poem have been written without the sighting? Would another poem have been written in its place, at just that hour? Is it likely that the poet’s vision is inchoate inside the imagination and is tapped by a sighting in the world, that triggers an emotional rapport out of which the poem is crafted? If we consider in such cases what the poet has made out of the sighted object that is, but is not, contained within the subject, we catch a glimpse of the imagination akin to a flammable substance, into which a lighted match is dropped.

  Dickinson’s poems, and her letters as well, which seem so airy and fluent, give the impression of being dashed off; in fact, Dickinson composed very carefully, sometimes keeping her characteristically enigmatic lines and images for years before using them in a poem or in a letter. It is a fact that the human brain processes only a small selection of what the eye “sees”—so too, the poet is one who “sees” the significant image, to be put to powerful use in a structure of words, while discarding all else.

  This is to be fairly short; to have father’s character done complete in it; and mother’s; and St. Ives; and childhood; and all the usual things I try to put in—life, death, etc. But the central figure is father’s character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel.

  Here is Virginia Woolf musing in her diary for May 14, 1925, on To the Lighthouse, about which she will say, months later, that she is being “blown like an old flag by my novel. . . . I live entirely in it, and come to the surface rather obscurely and am often unable to think.” (Woolf, A Writer’s Diary)

  A different sort of inspiration is the sheerly autobiographical—the work created out of intimacy with one’s own life and experience. Yet here also the appropriative strategy is highly selective, as in memoir; the writer must dismiss all but a small fraction of the overwhelming bounty of available material. What is required, beyond memory, is a perspective on one’s own past that is both a child’s and an adult’s, constituting an entirely new perspective. So the writer of autobiographical fiction is a time traveler in his or her life and the writing is often, as Virginia Woolf noted, “fertile” and “fluent”—