Issue #20 - An Audience of One
To Whom It May Concern
Writing is something that is famously done alone. Only one set of hands fits on the keyboard. For me it used to happen late at night. Then I became an adult and got jobs which needed me to arrive awake, so writing moved to early mornings. Now it often happens in the middle of class while I have students working on their own assignments, or in the car tapping out syllables on the steering wheel, or right now behind the cloak of invisibility provided by sound-canceling headphones while I’m sure the house is burning down behind me.
For all the solitude, writing isn’t really solitary though. Sitting down to write requires that one imagines an audience. Sometimes before I write an issue of this newsletter, I browse through the disparate list of subscribers. One of you might strike my imagination, and the subsequent essay is my consideration of a subject with you in mind the way an oyster worries a pearl. The words begin specifically as a gift to you, or sometimes in spite of you. Either way, you’re there.
Wendell Berry
I work alone, but always with [my wife’s] presence in my mind. And she is somebody I want to impress. I’m going to write this with the hope that it’ll help her to love me. I feel the stakes are pretty high. I’m in a conversation with her that hasn’t ended yet. - Wendell Berry. “Going Home with Wendell Berry.” The New Yorker, July 2019.
I’ve returned to this interview often. Wendell Berry, who writes prolifically in every genre–fiction, essays, poetry about everything from farming practices to corporate exploitation to theology–says that he’s always trying to win the affection of his wife through what he writes. That he’s always writing for Tanya first because she’ll be the first person who reads it and is his primary editor.
I wonder about his statement. He writes in hopes that it will help her to love him. I’ve read a fair amount of Berry’s writing and romance only arrives occasionally, and usually in service to a bigger idea. My wife and I have had several “discussions” over the years about my lack of romance. Early on, she mentioned to me that even though I considered myself a poet, I had never written her any poems. She had in mind that I was some sort of closeted Cyrano with a normal nose.
So for Christmas 2008, I wrote her a cycle of poems and had them laid out by professional designers. I chose difficult forms to demonstrate how much effort I was willing to put into the gift. I thought this was a romantic gesture. Not one to settle for easy platitudes– no roses are red from me– I challenged the notion of romantic love with a love that I found greater and deeper. I based this cycle of poems on Luke 14:26, where Jesus says, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father, mother, wife…etc.” Admittedly, that’s a high-wire concept, but I think I pulled it off. See for yourself:
I love my wife quite a lot actually.
You’ve no reason to believe otherwise;
Examine the evidence factually.
Yes, let’s see what the display of fact decides:
First, see these receipts for flowers I’ve bought.
I’d show you the flowers, but they’ve wilted;
They were lovely, but they’ve been tossed for rot.
And what of this home, my work has built it:
Three bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen with stove.
Of course, in a few years we’ll outgrow it.
Well, she’s the prettiest woman I know of
Although, she hides wrinkles and I know it.
Hmmm… A lot my love does seem to say
When all our lives are bound to this decay.
Anyway, she stopped asking me to write her poems. It’s known as the Christmas Poem Disaster of 2008. I promise, if you were to read the entire cycle, it ends well. But that was a rough open for my wife who had visions of me in a cape, climbing a balcony to compare her to celestial bodies.
For the following decade of our marriage, she was not interested in reading anything I wrote. We kind of assumed that husbands and wives often have different interests and tastes. My writing would simply be something that was compartmentalized like some husbands go to the man-cave to watch sports.
The problem, of course, is that this wasn’t a passive way for me to catch some alone time. This was work for me. Granted, it was work that had to be squeezed into hours outside of work that paid the bills, but it was no less serious to me. She saw me reading while certain household obligations fell by the wayside, and she interpreted it as laziness, and even my wanting to escape our family. She saw my bookshelves fill up, and she understood it as a tendency to hoard and waste money. Eventually, I felt like I needed to write in secret like I had a gambling problem. I’d finish a story or poem and there was no one to share it with. That sort of writing is unbearably lonely.
I say all of this with her approval now. And I understand why she perceived my actions in those ways. I loved her in a way that an ambitious young man, recently escaped from bachelorhood, is able to love someone. I remember lifting weights as an adolescent and thinking, “This will make the girls like me.” When my body peaked at mediocrity, I turned my efforts at improvement to other proclivities. Graceful feats on an athletic field were out of my reach, but turning a sonnet on a precipice of ideas was another thing of beauty. This will make someone love me. Robert Bringhurst said in “These Poems” that “These poems are the poems of a man who would rather sleep with himself than with women.” Of course, I didn’t read that poem until I’d been married for a decade.
I also blame romantic comedies which she loves to watch. Every writer boyfriend in a romantic comedy is either a deadbeat or someone who is more in love with his own writing than the girl. Tropes are a sort of true.
Wendell Berry Again
As I see it, when we marry we give up romance by submitting love to the limits of mortality. The traditional vows seize love by the scruff of the neck and set it down in real life, in the real world. Marriage in the traditional sense is also an economic connection, making a household (from the same interview).
Before we got married, I noticed that nearly every major writer I admired had at least one divorce on their curriculum vitae. If not a divorce, then at least some unconventional domestic habits. Cormac, Steinbeck, Marilynne Robinson, McMurtry, Robert Penn Warren. I can put my finger on four or five authors per shelf in my library.
I’m not here to judge people who are divorced. Marriage is difficult. No one has ever found my most vulnerable insecurities and relished to poke them with a red hot iron like my wife, and I hers. But I figured that in the course of my life, no literary ambition would be worth the wake of human wreckage left after a divorce. Anything that I might write would lose credibility, maybe not in the eyes of readers, but in my own eyes. And if I cannot trust what I am saying, then I don’t need to be foisting my words on someone else.
But then there’s Wendell and Tanya. Like he said, the stakes are high, and they’re in a conversation that hasn’t ended yet.
Lately, Katie and I have been attempting to make a connection over poetry. One of the problems we’ve discovered nearly 15 years in is that she simply didn’t understand the field of literature. When we were courting, I told her I wanted to write. She’s since lamented that she didn’t know what that meant. I’ve responded every time, saying “I didn’t know either.” The apprenticeship to become a writer is long, especially in my area of the world. I remember reading when I was 23 that the average novelist achieves their first success at 40.
On Sunday afternoons, we sit on the porch, and I read her poems. We’re slowly making our way through Wendell’s Sabbath Poems. One poem a week. This rate has an end date of eternity. That’s ok. I’ve taught for ten years, and I have some students who can sit in my class for nine months and walk out as blank of a slate as the day they walked in. Katie loves me, and as I’ve discussed before, love is the best way to learn.
What if everything I write begins with an audience, in my imagination, first of my wife. How does that change what I write? How does that change the vocabulary? How does it change the tone? How does that change my marriage, that I’m no longer compartmentalizing whatever thing has won my attention, that keeps me up at night or wakes me earlier or has me counting syllables, but that I’m imagining trying to communicate whatever it is first to my wife; that I want to share this thing that has won my devotion with her, that we can commune in it for the moment it needs. I haven’t done that well and I think it’s hurt both my writing and my marriage.
Humans perceive the world primarily through sight. However, recent studies figure that the (human nose can smell one trillion scents.
Of course, there’s no way to meaningfully catalogue all of those scents because there’s only about 600,000 words (in English). But one can perceive them if one pays attention.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…
Your Scent
Japanese Cherry Blossoms
and Tahitian Vanilla
are corporate trademarked scents
we massaged into each other’s
newly naked shoulders.
Not cherries or vanilla
but honey and the moon.
I was drunk on rum.
The bed orbited the room.
The spirit loosed my tongue.
I stood in the wind and recited
psalms to the ocean.
I’m Seth Wieck. Thanks for the company. Stay in touch.