Belle de Journal

Kazuo Ishiguro on public life, translation and technology

From The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction: No. 196.

On “the publicity side of a writer’s life—book tours, interviews:

It affects your writing in two obvious ways. One is that it takes up a third of your working life. The other is that you spend a lot of your time being quizzed by often very insightful people. Why is there always a three-legged cat in your stuff, or what’s this obsession with pigeon pie? A lot of what goes into your work can be unconscious, or at least the emotional reverberations from these images might have been unanalyzed. It’s difficult for these things to remain that way when you do a book tour. In the past, I used to think it was nicer to be as honest and open as possible, but I’ve seen the damage that this does. Some writers get quite screwed up. They end up feeling resentful and violated. And it’s got to have some effect on how you write. You sit down to write and you think, I am a realist and I suppose I am a kind of absurdist as well. You start to become much more self-conscious.

Do you actively think of problems translators might have when you’re writing?

When you find yourself in different parts of the world, you become embarrassingly aware of the things that culturally just don’t translate. Sometimes you spend four days at a time explaining a book to Danes. I don’t particularly like, for example, to use brand names and other cultural reference points, not just because they don’t transfer geographically. They don’t transfer very well in time either. In thirty years’ time, they won’t mean anything. You’re not just writing for people in different countries. You’re writing for different eras.

Do you work on a computer?

I have two desks. One has a writing slope and the other has a computer on it. The computer dates from 1996. It’s not connected to the Internet. I prefer to work by pen on my writing slope for the initial drafts. I want it to be more or less illegible to anyone apart from myself. The rough draft is a big mess. I pay no attention to anything to do with style or coherence. I just need to get everything down on paper. If I’m suddenly struck by a new idea that doesn’t fit with what’s gone before, I’ll still put it in. I just make a note to go back and sort it all out later. Then I plan the whole thing out from that. I number sections and move them around. By the time I write my next draft, I have a clearer idea of where I’m going. This time round, I write much more carefully.

Late bloomers

“On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure: while the late bloomer is revising and despairing and changing course and slashing canvases to ribbons after months or years, what he or she produces will look like the kind of thing produced by the artist who will never bloom at all. Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.”

- “Late Bloomers” by Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker

Photo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons: Ludovico Sinz

I.

When I was a child, my parents did everything to encourage my writing ambitions. They equated writing with first becoming a good reader. They gave me a library fit for an author-in-training —it even had abridged classics (Some plots were altered in the name of childhood education: I was disheartened to find in in adulthood that Beth really does die in Little Women.)

I developed a reputation as a bookworm. I would go to sleepovers and forage through the bookcase; in time the number of sleepovers I was invited to was inversely proportional to the number of books I had read. (Sidenote: When I was 12 years old and carted off to summer camp, I took John Galsworthy’s A Man of Property with me. I had seen the BBC mini-series, The Forsyte Saga, and become obsessed with the lives of this patrician family with their puritanical streak and penchant for debauchery.)

I wrote really bad poetry, prodigiously and with great passion. Sheets of foolscap carpeted my bedroom while I listened to melancholy rock songs with way too many guitar solos. (It was the ’90s.)

My grandparents encouraged my precocity as I rattled off self-indulgent letters and birthday poems every year.

In time I improved, earning third place in a middle school poetry contest. The subject of the poem was heavy indeed: a boy shoots a bird and then as it lies dying in his hands, he realizes that he is holding “the meaning of life” in his hands.

So I was a little melodramatic.

But in high school I flourished and even had a short story published in the local newspaper. It was generally assumed that I was destined for some success in writing.

Fast forward to 2011. I was out for dinner with a high school friend, Jamaal, in Toronto. I updated him on my life: how I had switched careers last year, that I had finally studied journalism and was now working my way up the lower echelons of publishing while freelancing along the way.

And he said: “What happened, Waterfall? You were the golden child.”

II.

Jamaal had struck a chord; it echoed the tiny, reproachful voice inside me that wailed: Why did you waste all those years not doing what you loved? Why did you get distracted by (INSERT boys, sports, life etc. HERE)?

I did enjoy some of my jobs some of the time — although much of that enjoyment was found in the people I worked with and not in the work itself. Experience materialized over time, neither rocketing me to the top of my department nor dispelling my sense that I was faking my way through my professional life.

I had basically been waylaid by routines: the regular paycheque, the “regular” job and the myriad distractions that plague a twentysomething woman when she isn’t sure what she wants to do.

In other words, my epiphany was slow to arrive. It was only when I was handed my walking papers that the possibility for change arose. But in that moment, I didn’t feel like celebrating. I remember furiously blinking back tears in the back of a taxicab. A cardboard box with my meagre, personal effects — Post-its, pens with chewed-off-tips and Christmas cards — sat next to me.

The taxicab driver feigned ignorance and turned the radio station up to muffle my sobs. (I was grateful for his discretion.)

I emailed my brother. The first thing he said was: “Congratulations!”

And then the life that I should have begun 15 years ago finally began.

III.

In a sense, being downsized out of a job gave me the freedom to figure out what I really wanted to do — 2010 was the year that I resolved to make up for lost time: I took a Travel Writing course and a postgraduate diploma with the London School of Journalism. I interned at an online magazine, Sweetspot.ca, and an independently owned newspaper, The Gleaner. In August I started working in digital media as an editorial coordinator. I felt re-invigorated.

But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m way behind. I believe the term is “late bloomer” (a lovely phrase that incorporates the word for a bulky, inelegant, 18th-century undergarment). The phrase does have a negative, slightly condescending connotation: in a society where you’re conditioned to aim high, no one likes to be on the “slow track” behind their peers.

But I read an article in The New Yorker, Late Bloomers, that disputes such a facile interpretation. The sub-head states: Why do we equate genius with precocity?

Writer Malcolm Gladwell focuses on one guinea pig, Ben Fountain, who “suddenly takes the literary world by storm”:

“But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief Encounters” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight…“

Gladwell agrees that genius is not just the republic of youth and uses economist David Galenson to support his argument. Galenson “quantified” literary merit (something literary scholars will certainly scoff at): He looked at 47 major poetry anthologies published since 1980 to count the poems that appeared most often. His conclusion was that some poets do their best work much later in their careers.

He also said that the late bloomer’s “approach is experimental”. Through trial and error, they craft their careers over many decades before achieving success.

IV.

I’m not a late bloomer in one respect: I don’t sense genius lurking below the surface. But I think that becoming a better writer is inevitable when it becomes a regular part of your life.

Galenson used Cézanne as a prime example of how some artists save the best for last. The painter  succeeded thanks to his support his network:

“He had a dream team in his corner…This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: his or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others…She believed in her husband’s art, or perhaps, more simply, she believed in her husband, the same way Zola and Pissarro and Vollard and—in his own, querulous way—[his father] Louis-Auguste must have believed in Cézanne.

Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

If this is the formula that presages the success of some late bloomers, then at least I’ve gotten the first part right. And it’s not so bad to be late if you — and your “patrons” — believe you’ll eventually get there.

Eternal summer

Maiga in the Mini, Toronto highway, Summer 2011.

“Lunch in Paris is often a glimpse of perfect happiness.”

Or so says Simon Kuper of the Financial Times.

He claims that it’s a break from the frenetic traffic of the city and the tourist’s nagging sense of not belonging. He argues that a companionable aura engulfs Paris as city-dwellers and tourists alike tuck into their déjeuner.

He says:

“In Paris, lunch is the compensation. The hardest thing about this city is the unfriendliness, the non-violent aggression, which strangely gets tougher to bear the longer you live here. It’s the motorbikes speeding along the pavement, the shopkeepers repelling intruders, the complaining neighbours, the constant sense that you’re breaking some secret code of etiquette.”

Courtesy of Dicktay2000, Flickr Creative Commons

Before my boyfriend and I lived in Paris in 2010 (during what I now call “my failed expat experiment“), I was consumed by the glamour, the cachet of Paris. But when we lived there, I felt exactly the way Kuper did: that being in Paris for much longer would only exaggerate the differences between me — and them. The most obvious divide was language, but there were greater subtleties that emerged in daily life.

For example, my boyfriend (a Parisian with impeccable manners) once admonished me for cutting my lettuce at a local bistro. At the time I was trying to find a practical way to eat an enormous leaf coated with balsamic vinaigrette; the thought of having it spray all over my face was more than I could bear — so I cut it.

“What are you doing?”

“The lettuce is too big so I’m —”

“No, no, we don’t do that here.” I just remember his head shaking, his cutlery paralyzed over his own carefully rolled piece of lettuce.

Then there was the issue of attire. As a kid, I was a (hyper-active) tomboy — bruises and scrapes were the norm. I wore the clothing that befits a child who had to attend classes, but wanted to climb trees instead. (It’s an aesthetic that I have relinquished with some misgivings in adulthood.)

But the damage had been done: I still gravitated towards clothing that was loose, sporty and..multi-functional. But in Paris, I was not allowed to look as though I had just rolled out of bed (although to all intents and purposes, that was exactly what I had done) — even if I was leaving the apartment for five minutes to pick up a baguette.

And then there are cultural differences in personality. As a Canadian, I feel a puppy best mirrors my personality: it’s characterised by a warmth, affability and general eagerness to please. On the other hand, the French are probably the antithesis of that: although the culture is inextricably bound to etiquette, it is also one that does not suffer friendliness or a degree of familiarity gladly.

But there was one thing that I felt Paris and I really had in common: our love of food. That is perhaps why some of my happiest moments involve eating at Le Bistrot Mazarin. Or devouring crêpes au beurre salé in the Jardin de Luxembourg. Or lining up at L’As du Falafel, Paris’ best falafel place (so anointed by The New York Times).

But I don’t completely agree with Kuper’s point of view. He says that “happiness is a table for one with something to read”. While Paris is ideal for the flâneur, my idea of happiness is a bit more inclusive. (Perhaps it is my North American side that delights in having company.)

And lunch is not the only repas where one can achieve this brand of expat nirvana, it’s at any table where food is shared. In that respect, Paris is not so different from other cultures: breaking bread together — or in this case, baguette — is a way to abridge the distance rather than augment it.

Un livre

Chez Béatrice et Jacques, Paris, novembre 2009.

Quote: On late bloomers

From The New Yorker, “Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity?“

“Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.”

Quotes from Stepping Stones: Interview with Seamus Heaney

Part 1:

On fishing:

“The trouble then was that I wanted to fish with a fly and just never stayed at it long enough to learn to cast so that effort fizzled out too.  But inside my sixty-eight-year-old arm there’s a totally enlived twelve-year-old one, feeling the bite. And that’s enough for a lifetime of poems. That, and the memory of being out with Barrie on the Nore and once with Ted in Devon. Fleetness of water, stillness of air, stealthiness of action. Spots of time.

On why there aren’t more poems about his children:

“There was something beautifully generative about living with this new life between us. But when the child is born, the child is more than enough. Poetry’s just not up to it.”

On his Aunt Mary whom he dedicated “Mossbawn, Sunlight” to:

“My memories of those years in the 1970s, before she had to go into special care in the Mid-Ulster Hospital, are of arriving with Marie and the kids from Wicklow and greeting first of all my mother and father and sister Ann in the living room, then going in to sit with Mary. Not a lot getting said or needing to be said. Just a deep, unpathetic stillness and wordlessness. A mixture of lacrimae rerum and Deo gratias. Something in me reverted to the child I’d been in Mossbawn. Something in her just remained constant, like the past gazing at you calmly, without blame. She was a tower of emotional strength, unreflective in a way, but undeceived about people or things. I suppose all I’m saying is that I loved her dearly.”

On poet Osip Mandelstam’s influence on his work during The Troubles:

“More like a shadow presence. A reminder that the anchor of poetry had to be lifted off the bottom of the ear and should drag a certain amount of inwardness up along with it. That it had to have phonetic purchase. That’s a politically correct purpose was neither here nor there when it came to saving your poetic soul.”

On bullfighting:

“I certainly felt that I’d been beyond my usual self, in an otherwhere. Alien isn’t quite the word. You’d been taken up to a high mountain and shown things in yourself and the world, things you couldn’t deny – like Hemingway – you had been there.”

On what it’s like to read about himself in an article by an old friend:

“I said to somebody at the time – it may even have been to Seamus Deane himself – that it was like going into the private room inside your head and finding somebody else sitting there.”

On the importance of Kavanagh and Yeats to his writing:

“Kavanagh was more important when I was getting started, Yeats more important when I had to keep going. Mind you, as you get older, there are twin dangers when you’re reporting on these early influences: you tend to either overstate or understate their effect. But there’s no doubt that, during the mid-1960s, I was more in media the res of Inniskeen than of Colle Park and Ballylee. In those days ‘The Great Hunger’ was to me the equivalent of wraparound sound in one of today’s cinepelexes. It had the wham of big-screen cinematic close-up, an amplified language that cold knock you sideways. Head-on, as cold-breathed and substantial as the stuff the potato digger was kicking up from the drills. Kavanagh walked into my ear like an old-style farmer walking a field. He had that kind of ignorant entitlement, his confidence contained a mixture of defiance and challenge. You were being told that you would never hit your stride if you didn’t step your own ground, and would never hit the right note if you didn’t sound as thick as your own first speech.”

On Naguib Manfouz’s declaration that the colloquial is “one of the diseases from which the people are suffering…one of the failings of our society, exactly like ignorance, poverty and disease’.

“I would grant credence to that. The  world is reduced by the reduced power of speech in somebody like George W. Bush. In a severly impoverished speech world, what Auden once called ‘the mass and majesty’ of the reality we inhabit and should be measured up to – ‘all/That carries weight and always weighs the same’ – all that is slighted. Which is not to say that the use of a plainer speech necessarily prevents a poem from attaining nobility. Think of Yeats’s ‘Long-legged fly’. Or indeed Auden’s ‘The Shield of Achilles’. Cadence with a head of intelligence and strong shoulders of syntax still has a lot of carrying power.”

On why he said that “reading your poetry as a breadwinning activity…commits some sin against the freedom of poetry. I do believe that poetry is in the realm of the gift and in the real of the sacred.”

“I realized that the ideal poetry reading would be the one you could preface with Yeats’s line, “Speech after long silence. It is right…” What began to disappear in the repetition was what I call the gift aspect, the genuineness of your pleasure in sharing the poem, in rediscovering it for yourself. In a good poetry reading – good for you, the poet, that is – you retrieve some of the quickening that you got when you first wrote the thing.” The surprise and gratitude are with you again for a moment – the old sense of having been supplied with the words you needed to summon. You have an obligation as a poet not to betray the reality of that. You have been mysteriously recompensed by the worlds and you owe some fidelity to the mystery.

On these lines, “There are charts’, you wrote in ‘Alphabets’, ‘there are headlines, there is a right/Way to hold the pen and a wrong way’.

“All of the above, yes. Mostly, however, the charts were in Miss Walls’s room, ones with pictures and – in big black letters – the names of things that appeared in the illustrations…What was odd and memorable was the otherness of the school at that moment: you were only a few yards away from life in the classroom you’d just left, but you felt a world away. You were outside, you had the whole sky and land to yourself, yet there it was in front of you, the silent building. You saw it in all its uncanniness and had a taste of yourself in all of your own solitude and singularity.”

Quote: Alfred de Musset

The Argentine attaché

This is my grandfather on the night he allowed himself to be mistaken for an Argentine attaché at a military shindig. I can’t remember the exact details from this story, but I do know that he cobbled together a very convincing outfit from his living quarters. A distinguished moustache and bravado are required to pull off this outfit – as you can see, my grandfather had both.

Quote: David Mitchell

On Murakami and being “overly impressionable”:

“I had a crush on Murakami in those days—specifically on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I was living in Japan, somewhat alienated, and not sure where the page ended and the world around me started, and in that rather porous state, I was overly impressionable.”

From The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction: No. 204