The Other Shore
The Other Shore
ESSAYS ON WRITERS AND WRITING
Michael Jackson
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEYLOS ANGELESLONDON
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2013 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jackson, Michael, 1940-
The other shore : essays on writers and writing / Michael Jackson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-520-27524-9 (cloth : acid-free paper)
ISBN 978-0-520-27526-3 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
eISBN: 9780520954823
1. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. English literature—History and criticism. 3. English language—Writing. 4. Authorship. I. Title.
PS379.J23 2012
813’.509–dc232012030150
Manufactured in the United States of America
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on 50-pound Enterprise, a 30% post-consumer-waste, recycled, deinked fiber that is processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free and meets all ANSI/NISO (Z 39.48) requirements.
Man is that which is incomplete, although he may be complete in his very incompletion; and therefore he makes poems, images in which he realizes and completes himself without ever completing himself completely.
OCTAVIO PAZ
The Bow and the Lyre
To be alive and to be a “writer” is enough.
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
Journal
Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life.
Thomas Mann
Death in Venice
All that we do
Is touched with ocean, yet we remain
On the shore of what we know.
RICHARD WILBUR
“For Dudley”
CONTENTS
Preface
1 · The Other Shore
2 · The Red Road
3 · Kindred Spirits
4 · Writing under the Influence
5 · A Typewriter Collecting Dust
6 · Writing in Limbo
7 · The Magical Power of Words
8 · Flights of Fancy
9 · Writing Fellowship
10 · There Go I
11 · Love Letters
12 · Writing for Bare Life
13 · Writing So As Not to Die
14 · Chinese Boxes
15 · The Writing on the Wall
16 · Writing out of the Blue
17 · A Storyteller’s Story
18 · Writing in the Dark
19 · Writing in the Zone
20 · Writing, Naturally
21 · Writing Workshop
22 · The Books in My Life
23 · Writing Utopia
24 · Writing in Search of Lost Time
25 · Writing about Writers
26 · Writing in Ruins
27 · Writing as a Way of Life
Notes
Acknowledgments
PREFACE
I considered myself a writer long before I completed a volume of poetry, wrote a novel, or published an anthropological monograph. Writing, for me, was a way of life. As for the origins of this calling, I suspect that it was a longing to connect with places, people, and periods of history that lay beyond the provincial town in which I came of age. Fascinated by exotic worlds, I saw writing as my means of transport and escape. Writing, I came to realize, was a techné,1 like prayer or ritual, for bridging the gulf that lay between myself and others. In this sense, writing resembles religion, which also works at the limits of what can be said, known, or borne, entering penumbral fields of experience where the absent is made present, the distant becomes near, the inanimate appears animate, and the singular subsumes the plural.2
In the half century since my first book appeared,3 I have witnessed—and adjusted to—mind-boggling transformations in communication technologies. I have switched from fountain pen to typewriter to word processor. In the early ’60s I worked as a letterpress machinist before the offset press made me redundant. Nowadays, books are published online and read on electronic tablets.4 But while many claim that these new technologies are “disruptive,” undermining and transforming the way we work and live, I see them as “sustaining” what we have always sought to do5—bearing witness to what we learn of life, struggling to express it adequately, and comparing our findings with the findings of others.
Yet ours is, undeniably, an information society. We move about with our heads in clouds of data. E-mail, Skype, Facebook, and LinkedIn keep us in touch with scattered friends, family, colleagues, and collaborators. We cross streets with cell phones pressed to our ears, or stand on the sidewalk using earphones and microphone to talk unselfconsciously to an invisible other, oblivious to those around us. Though ethereally elsewhere, we can always be located. No one has to guess where we are, where we have come from, or where we are going; the details are relentlessly tweeted, twittered, blogged or e-mailed. We pass the time playing interactive games alone, unsurprised by this apparent contradiction in terms. Our most banal opinions can be accessed by all and sundry. Our perverse yearnings, romantic longings, and wild imaginings are disseminated without a moment’s thought. Hardly a month passes without some new App or device promising still faster and more fantastic means of making connections. The safe storage of personal files is no longer entrusted to memory, which is fallible, but to cryptic facilities with multiple backups. Our computers are not simply extensions of our brains, they have minds of their own, and dictate the terms on which we comprehend our own psychology. As books morph into e-books, read on iPads, Nooks, and Kindles rather than printed pages, machines translate our spoken words into visible signs. In The Idea of the Holy, Rudolph Otto used the phrase mysterium tremendum to capture the awe, humility, and fascination we feel in the overpowering presence of “the wholly other.”6 Technology now