Monday, August 8th, 2011
The Centre for Fiction
I’m in New York for a couple of weeks, and for a few hours each day I occupy a desk on the 8th floor of the Centre for Fiction, on 47th St between 5th Ave and Madison. The Centre for Fiction, formally known as The Mercantile Library, is a non-profit-making organisation which promotes and celebrates fiction and fiction writers. New York writers can apply for a work space – the use of a desk, a printer, free Wi-Fi, the run of an extensive library and reading room, coffee making and shower room facilities and a key to come and go late on weekdays and at weekends. The building is old and quite grand – at street level there’s an ‘indie’ bookshop. I mailed them a few weeks ago. They don’t normally take visitors in their writers’ space but August is a quiet month.
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There are about eight desks set along a wall and in corners at each end of the long skylit room. Japanese-type screens provide privacy between desks, and the elegant conference room at the end can be used too. Usually it’s full, Kristin, the programs director, told me. There are four or five writers here today. The ubiquitous water bottle sits on every desk. Everyone works in silence, with an occasional smile as someone pass to make coffee. One girl comes over when the others leave at lunch-time and introduces herself briefly and then as she leaves, points to my laptop, says ‘Make it happen!’
This summer I finished work on a collection of short stories to be published by Stinging Fly Press in 2012. In the days and weeks following their handover to the editor Declan Meade there were times I wanted to pull them back again. I could keep tweaking forever. Paul Valery said a poem is never finished, only abandoned. The slight euphoria felt on the night I printed out the final story was swiftly replaced by a chronic anxiety. In the days following their relinquishment I would pick a book from the shelf and read a story and sink in despair and fear at the prospect of my own stories appearing before the public. Nothing could be worse in those moments. Except, of course, not being published at all.
There’s a novel pressing to be written. And more stories press forward, as stories do, forever germinating, forever fermenting. I cannot do the two at the same time – short and long fiction – or shift from one form to another. Each story takes up the whole of my head.
Here in New York, in this space, I have a sense of being a writer, admitting tentatively to being a writer. On the first of September, for the first time in years, I will not be returning to my teaching job. I will be a writer. In America people refuse to fail. I want to stay, I want to be one who refuses to fail too.
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
The Art of Lingering
I drop into a deli on Madison for water and salad for later. At the Centre I stop off on the second-floor Reading Room for a quick peek at today’s New York Times. Big mistake!! Every literary journal and quarterly in North America is laid out on the mahogany table and display shelves. My greedy beady eyes scan them all – the New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, The Yale Review, the New England Review, The Southern Review, the latest New Yorker, and my first ever sighting of a hard copy of McSweeney’s. The London Review of Books, and Granta too. And now, resting among the lot, is The Stinging Fly.
I take the NY Times and McSweeney’s to a table around the corner. On the table, by chance, sits a beautiful hardback book, entitled Writers. On the cover, a photograph of a young Saul Bellow. The book is a collection of photos of writers taken by Nancy Crampton. I read the intro by poet Mark Strand and turn the pages and am hooked.
Each writer’s photo is paired with a short paragraph on the writing life. I check my watch, it’s almost 11. I turn the pages: Updike, William Maxwell, Sam Shepherd, Heaney. The younger ones are here too – Franzen, Junot Diaz, David Foster Wallace – but it’s to the old and the dead I am drawn. I lose myself in the pages and go deeper into their faces and minds, and my own mind starts to swirl and I feel that delicious thrill one gets reading the interior thoughts and work habits of other writers. On the table beside me, untouched, McSweeney’s waits, and all around me shelves groan with books and journals that I covet. What great luck, I think, to have fallen on this book, left here randomly. I turn the pages slowly. There’s John Cheever sitting at the bottom of stone steps, looking pensive – no, desolate – while his dog looks down from a few steps above. I devour his words and my heart hops with the rightness of each one.
I glance at my watch, feel the compulsion to keep turning. One more page, I say, and I turn and there’s Philip Roth, and one more and it’s Alice Munro and the greedy eyes are triumphant and... one last turn... and it’s our own Edna, speaking directly to a heart and mind already in orbit... “Writing is an obsession ... that derives from an intensity of feeling which normal life cannot accommodate...” and I almost bow down to this most feeling of Irishwomen on the page before me.
Wednesday, Aug 10th
Tiny Marks
I think I am becoming American – suddenly I cannot bear to waste a minute. An early rise at 6.30am (it is unthinkable – and impossible – to waste time sleeping in this city), then the NY 1 city news while I make coffee, Sunday’s newspaper with the toast, the morning bus ride, then the short walk to 47th St.
I set up the laptop and delve into the notebook – underlining words, asterisking sentences, drawing arrows across pages. I try to nudge my way into a new story. I have to think my way into characters and map them and their tiny marks on the human register. I circle the perimeter fence. The voice is not right. I am hesitant. I try to slide in sideways, grope my way in the darkness and, if I am lucky, fall down a rabbit hole.
I cannot start a story until I have a bank of notes accumulated. I ‘open’ a notebook as soon as an idea emerges and start to gather. By the time I sit to write I have enough images, snippets, even narrative, to trick my way in. The notes are crucial. (James Salter calls this his ‘ammo’ – he likes to have plenty of ammo before he sits to write.)
I break for lunch and walk out into the Manhattan sun. I have a coffee and cigarette at the ‘wichcraft’ kiosk beside Bryant Park. I check my watch, edgy, then return to the Centre. Time flies. I wrestle with words for two more hours, then head over to the NY Public Library, or MoMA or take a bus home through the late afternoon traffic to York Avenue. On good days, on lucky days, words come as I go. Because fiction seldom happens when or where it’s supposed to. So I open the notebook and catch the words wherever they fall.
I am a different person when I write. James Salter again... a character, a struggling writer, is never helpless: he lives one life, but imagines ten.
Thursday, August 11th, 2011
An Unquiet Mind
I feel the others around me. I am acutely aware of the little rituals and routines we each practise before settling in: setting the desk at a slightly different angle, repositioning the lamp or the water bottle, removing a watch, a ring, blowing dust motes from the surface – and am I imagining it or do we sniff the air a little too - in that urgent timorous search for perfection?
I nip down to the 2nd floor Reading Room for a quick peek at the NY Times. At the display table I check out the latest offerings and suddenly I am transported across the floor to a bookshelf where my hand, of its own volition, falls upon a name. JM Coetzee.
I will always find Coetzee. Or he will find me. This, a selection of essays on his work. I check the contents and turn the pages, and instantly I’m a goner. The book suffuses. The essays make me think. I want to log each thought. I want to write about Coetzee. I look up and out the window.
I took the train to Philly yesterday. I want to write about that too, and other journeys and impressions that spill from each day, each moment. I wish for ten hands and ten minds. This mind flits from one thing to the next, feeling the force and pulse of the city, being swept away. Here, I see more. I see differently. I want to catch it all but my attention is fragmented. I jot notes constantly. I start a piece about the Alexander McQueen exhibition at the Met which closed on Sunday. Then, a Philip Roth essay on Kafka that I found at the Strand bookshop scrolls down my mind.
The soul is stirred by everything. I have no firewall. The smallest detail inspires, elates, and one thought leads to a thousand, and the mind and the imagination are in a terrible state of chassis and the cup overfloweth. I think I have strayed into a field live with ADHD and any minute now my circuits will short and I’ll suffer an outage and I’ll sit gazing at the screen, not knowing my name, or the name of another soul in the city.
So… I slow down. I cross the room to the Nancy Crampton book on the mahogany table and sit and calmly turn a page. Just one page. It is Isaac Bashevis Singer. He says we are all surrounded by mysterious powers which play a part in everything, in every human deed, in every love story... ‘For thousands of years people used to wear woollen clothes and when they took them off at night they saw sparks. I wonder what these people thousands of years ago thought of these sparks they saw when they took off their woollen clothes. I am sure that they ignored them and the children asked ‘Mother, what are these sparks?’ And I am sure the mother said ‘You imagine them!’
I ride the elevator up to my 8th floor nest and open my file and crawl, mole-like, into my tiny universe. Around me the others sit. Pages turn. My character smiles. In Dublin my stories wait and I wait and with anxious hands I tap my way towards a spark.
Friday, August 12th
Inmates
Yesterday the guy next to me couldn’t settle. He left his desk repeatedly, called the elevator, disappeared for an hour, returned, adjusted the air-con, made coffee, sighed. There is nothing to be done. We all have days like this.
I went out to Starbucks with another writer. Two years ago she left her job in the corporate world to write a novel. She’s in the Gotham Writers’ Group. She lives on 106th St and walks all the way down to 47th each morning, passing through Central Park, down 5th Ave, crossing at lights, in the thick of the crowds and the traffic. She thinks about her novel as she walks. By the time she gets to the Centre, she’s with her characters, ready to be immersed. She breaks for lunch at 2. She works till 6.
Saturday, August 13th
Falling
When I left the Centre yesterday I took my 20-year-old niece, who’s here for the summer, to the Guggenheim, and then she took me to a vintage shop in the Village whose Turkish owner finds her Irish charm so appealing that he knocked $30 off a ring for her last week.
“Tell me about this writers’ place,’ she said to me over a beer on Carmine St. “What did you do today?”
I looked at her. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I got there about 10.30, the first to arrive. The place was boiling. I went over to turn on the air-conditioning. The switch is on the wall right next to the desk holding the printer and a notice board. I needed to go up on my tippy toes to read the settings and I put my right hand out on the desk to steady myself, just for balance, you know...’
And then something happened. The world shifted and swayed. I tilted to the right and things came crashing in a great commotion around me. At my touch the desk folded and collapsed. It fell, all to the right, and then paused and emitted a tiny hingey groan, and, I think, a sigh, and then, near the ground, it halted. My heart froze. I thought there’d been an earthquake on 47th Street.
I picked myself up. The printer and notice board clung on at a dangerous angle. The desk chair had spun itself across the room. I thought I heard sirens. The NYPD were coming to get me. I had to own up, plead my innocence before they got here. I looked down the length of the room, then up at the ceiling. Where was I anyway? I ran to the elevator, rode down to front desk, jabbered to the poor receptionist about collapsing desks, falling buildings, earthquakes. She smiled reassuringly and continued typing.
The printer was fine. I tidied up the desk parts. The screws had been slack, the woodchip worn. Mortified, I emailed Kristin and explained, full of apology for being here only five minutes and already taking down the building. She emailed me back, saying the desk was on its last legs, and anyway what can you expect from Ikea? Everyone was so understanding.
All day long I moved with caution. I stepped into the elevator and when the door closed and it shuddered and jolted I thought now, now as soon as I hit the button it will fly down the shaft into a black hole. In the restroom I drew back for a second, certain that the tap would come away in my hand and water would gush out in torrents and flood the place.
This morning I worked at home. The apartment cats, Geoffrey and Fiona, slept soundly at each elbow, bookending my thoughts.
Sunday, August 14th
The New York Sunday Times
Eli Zabar owns a little cluster of upmarket eateries, foodstores and delis on the Upper East Side. One of these, The Vinegar Factory, is across the street from my apartment. It opens at 7am and stocks The NY Sunday Times.
The NY Times writing is fluid, intelligent, full of clarity and precision. Most of the commentaries, features and books reviews are written in an interpretative style that is personal and insightful. The writing sparkles, making the reader feel imaginatively and intellectually alive. I look out the window and sense the presence of exceptionally clever people on the streets, and privately hope that something will rub off and enhance my own ability.
A review of one book, entitled The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, which ‘offers views on everything from subatomic particles to the shaping of the universe itself’ almost proves this. Deutsch is, unquestionably, a genius, but it is the reviewer David Albert, himself a professor of philosophy at Columbia, who succeeds in translating and analysing and delivering these complex thrilling theories to the reader in a way that both renders them accessible and imbues the reader - this one anyway – with the feeling of command and understanding of a subject normally beyond one’s ken.
Monday, August 15th
On the corner of 47th and Madison
I ran into a man with the head of Obama today. I went down to buy water, and was turning off 47th St onto Madison when we almost collided. His skin was lighter and he was a little shorter but he had the same perfectly sculpted, intelligent head and the long, lithe beautiful limbs of Obama. It was the head, that small, regal African head, like those displayed in museums exhibits and archaeology books and brings to mind the word refined, that I was taken with.
I know where it came from – I know the trajectory of that honed head as it came towards me. I had been trying all morning to find the co-ordinates of a character’s face, to map her cheekbones and dark Levantine eyes. I had dropped into one of the deep reaches of the rabbit hole, where the room and the city dissolved and words and random images brimmed up, and that rare brimming was with me still and she was with me again when I walked out and ran into the president’s head on the corner of 47th and Madison.
Tuesday, August 16th
Picked Up Pieces
Last November The Old Town Bar on East 18th St threw a 100th birthday party for its urinals. There was a champagne toast, and a congratulatory letter from Mayor Bloomberg. Presumably everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday’ too.
On Friday evening, on the 86 cross-town bus, the man sitting next to me held in his hand the latest issue of The New Yorker, just out that day. As I stood to let him out he said ‘Have a nice night,’ and I, surprised and unaccustomed to such civility on public transport, replied, ‘Thanks, I will,’ and then added ‘Enjoy The New Yorker.’ At which point he paused and turned and held out the magazine. ‘Would you like to have it?’ he asked. ‘I’m done.’
I was at the apartment of a friend of a friend the other night. The friend of a friend has a brother, recently divorced, to whom she is close. He’s a successful businessman, much travelled, a sensitive man who misses his family and domestic life. He’s eager to settle down again but has not had much luck with the women he dates. He fell hard for a woman with two small kids and an addiction to tranquillizers. Recently he met a woman of forty from Iowa – beautiful, successful, who owns her own home and has no baggage.
‘This one sounds good,’ I said.
‘Yep. That’s what I thought too,’ she said. ‘Till I heard she collects guns. She’s got 22.’
Wednesday, August 17th
Not Easily Forgotten...
Calling out the cable guy after Geoffrey the cat parked himself on the remote and scrambled the signal.
The incredible politeness and civility of New Yorkers.
The literary quotes in sepia inside the elevator at The Centre for Fiction.
7am opening hours at The Vinegar Factory.
Manhattan’s privately owned public spaces, hidden gem gardens.
Thoughts burning bright on the 8th floor of a building on 47th St.
Three cats on a leash on the esplanade by the East River.
Friday’s NY Times film reviews.
Knowing that other writers are at least as neurotic as I am.
The bargain books on the sidewalk outside the Strand bookshop.
The surplus supply of well-being at the sight of large bunches of fragrant roses for $10 each on a street corner on 2nd Ave.
The surplus supply of well-being.
Fiona the cat, airborne, shooting past my head when I come in, and then skidding to a halt, a la Jim Carrey, on the worktop in the kitchen.
The Klimt torte and The Duino Elegies in the basement café of the Neue Galleria on 86th St.
The particular light and the particular hush and a particular book at a table in the Reading Room of a Wednesday afternoon.
Answering ‘I’m a writer’ to a question at dinner in a 29th-floor apartment on 3rd Av.
Thursday, August 18th, 2011
Adieu to all that
I drop by Admin on the third floor and hand the key back to Kristin. I’m incredibly grateful for these past weeks at The Centre for Fiction.
I’ve cooked up a whole set of tactics to remain here. My fantasies run riot: the plane on the tarmac at JFK tomorrow, and me inside, all belted up, like Charles Grodin in Midnight Run, feigning a flying phobia, before two beefy Homeland Security air marshals escort me off the aircraft and accompany me to a ‘secure facility’ upstate.
When I wake on Sunday morning will the Kimmage light enfold me or will I blink at the strangeness of the room, at some vague indefinable absence? Will there be a brief up-flow of images – the stretch of Madison where the sun dazzles in early morning, the rooftop view of the astro-pitch across the street and the East river in the distance? I might close my eyes for a second to recover again that tightly packed urban grid, those large emotional spaces to which I was, temporarily, given access.
