The first panel of the book fest I attended was Fiction: Grace Under Pressure. Barbara Isenberg was the moderator and she guided a lively discussion between Bruce Bauman, Gina Nahai, Andrew O'Hagan and Arthur Phillips.
As Gina Nahai breezes in, perfectly pulled together in black sling backs and a white linen shift dress that has nary a wrinkle, despite the 100 degree heat, I am struck by how fresh all the authors look. How light-hearted, how freshly pressed and pleasant they seem. I am also struck by how the audience sits a few feet away from these well turned-out writers and is anything but freshly pressed. The audience is clammy, sweaty, smelly. Even this early in the day. The only relief is the panel auditorium, which is so intensely air-conditioned that the clammy, sweaty, smelly bunch is at once freeze-dried, all brow sweat stopped in time. We could not be more different from they. Yet I realize that this is how the audience wants to see their authors - as visions, freshly pressed. A perfect panel of perfect authors to take them out of the (thankfully) air-conditioned rooms and up, up and away. Wouldn't it sort of kill the dream if a writer appeared sweaty, dripping onto his notes, armpit stains growing with each question?
The book fest crew in their Kelly green t-shirts worries about who is allowed to sit where and they are religious in their efforts to maintain the "media" and "VIP" sections that are cordoned off by the ever-powerful, no-getting-past-it, masking tape. The tape must be unattached and re-attached repeatedly to allow those deemed worthy into the taped-off inner sanctum. Moments before the panel begins, the inner-sanctum contains fourteen seats, only three of them are full. But no one, NO ONE, is to question this or ask to be let in. Someone very important might arrive and what would happen if they could not sit in the front row? Oh, the repercussions.
Barbara Isenberg begins the proceedings with a brief introduction about each writer and their work. She is lovely as she reads her opening remarks (without her reading glasses) and it is her introduction of Bruce Bauman that sets in motion a recurring joke for the rest of the panel. Isenberg's bio of Bauman includes his work, and his background and then this zinger: "He grew up in publishing..." Bauman's face skews and his head cocks to one side, as if to say "I wish I had grown up in publishing but that is simply not the case." Isenberg stops for a moment, says "Oh, let me put on my reading glasses" and re-reads that phrase. On the second try, it goes like this: "He grew up in Flushing, Queens." As if on cue, the audience roars, the panelists giggle with glee. Publishing, Flushing. An easy mistake without one's reading glasses, eh?
With that, we are off and running.
Bauman talks of how his book, And The Word Was, is based on mythology. Phillips (who is quite dashing and who is also a 5-time Jeopardy champion...who knew?) talks about his novel, Angelica, and how it deals with good behavior vs. bad behavior and with issues of who is right (both morally and factually). He makes an open plea to the audience: buyer beware, my book does not contain a clever ending, in fact many have told him his ending seems to be missing pages. He assures us, there are no missing pages, as he likes novels that don't wrap things up too perfectly. He neatly ties all this back to the theme of the panel (I hate the panel themes) by asking aloud: so who is graceful under pressure in my novel? It's up to you.
Gina Nahai talks about Caspian Rain and its focus on loss and how we deal with loss and the stark differences between America's concept of dealing with loss vs. Iran's.
Andrew O'Hagan jumps in with his this excellent tidbit: Grace is always under pressure, that's why it's called grace. He then talks a bit more about works he has always loved - the kind where there is both internal and external pressures, novels with moral drama like Fitzgerald's or the work of Keats that deals in beauty and truth. He then describes his process in developing the drama within his LA Times Book Prize-winning novel, Be Near Me. He talks of seeing a character and hearing voices and having always to ask aloud, "is this an irritating aspect of myself coming out, or is this a character?" (It is here that my crush with O'Hagan begins, as in one fell swoop he has relieved me of the notion that I am insane.)
He talks of two specific events that struck him over the years and how these events seemed unrelated until they began to pile on and become part of a larger framework, something he couldn't stop thinking about and so had to write about. The first event involved the angry mobs in Scotland who went in search of pedophiles, banging on their doors and rioting in large crowds below windows of those they believed to be criminals. (Heavy stuff, but O'Hagan brings levity by pointing out that it was a terrible mess when the angry mobs accidentally knocked on the doors of pediatricians.) He had to see what these mobs were all about, had to witness it for himself. So he went with a crowd that ended up in front of a priest's home, banging on the door and rioting in the street. What surprised him most was that despite the seriousness of the occasion, people were enjoying themselves...they had even brought their children. As he stood there, he noticed a slight movement of a curtain in an upstairs window and he was just gutted - he knew that the priest was up there, watching the mob below. It occurred to him that a whole life existed behind that window and he began to wonder what that would be like...how one becomes that priest at that window and lives through it.
Later (I'm not sure how much later, here my notes fail me), O'Hagan is in a cafe in Paris on the Rue de Balzac and he is quietly drinking coffee and reading when he notices a priest sitting alone in a corner. He watches him for some time and then notices one tear running down his face. O'Hagan's excellent quote on this matter: "For a novelist, that is gold. There is a whole universe of possibility in that."
Nahai jumps in with her take on loss, prompted by Isenberg's question about the famed jar of tears in Iranian culture. She describes the jar of tears as something that you cry into during times of great sorrow and that it was handed down from generation to generation - as a daughter gets married, her family gives her the jar of all their past sorrows. She contrasts this beautifully with how the West deals with loss and how our view is always about being happy, shedding our sorrows to become stronger. We would never think to have a new bride's married life begin by saddling her with the years of sorrow that came before - we are a society of "happiness", of starting a new, with a clean slate. She points out that America is the only country she is aware of that is founded on this very principle, the pursuit of happiness. I've never thought of Americans this quote way but I agree with her entirely and must now read her book.
Isenberg asks Phillips what is was like to create a ghost story and if conjuring that time and that place was difficult for him as he wasn't from that time or place. Deadpan, Phillips responds: "I knew nothing of that time period. Ignorance is my great strength." He jokingly (but perhaps not?) says he wrote the entire book as he saw it and then went back and "removed all the references to Blackberries." He was reading a lot of Dickens at the time and said the final result was a blend of "research and faking it" as, he is, after all "in the faking business." The story that came to him begged to be set in 1800's London. He didn't feel it was his right as a writer to change the nature of the story because it would be difficult to write about 1800's London. "The story I envisioned was set in 1800's London. Now that becomes my problem to solve."
Of process, he says: Novels come out of those moments of gold (that O'Hagan referred to earlier), out of that machine in your brain that makes those connections. Some of the best moments of my life are when those moments become something larger.
Bauman does a nice riff on the importance and beauty of Fitzgerald and he invokes The Great Gatsby, noting that he re-reads it every year (just like someone else we know). Phillips interjects with: "Rosebud is a sled, right?" Bauman continues: "I've never written anything without thinking of Fitzgerald, because he understood his characters." He begins this exchange, of course, with this intro..."Well, given my upbringing in a vast publishing empire..." Laughs all around.
Isenberg asks the panelists if they feel that acting is similar to creating characters and if they ever read their work aloud during the writing process to "act out" the scenes they've just written. O'Hagan relays a wonderful anecdote about Bruce Chatwin who was at a writer's retreat in Italy. A maid had apparently run out of the villa, freaking out about strange noises coming from upstairs. She was shrieking about the noises of animals and small children and that some very strange, odd party seemed to be taking place and it scared her. The reply to the maid: "Oh, that's just Bruce writing his novel." O'Hagan notes that he, too, does a lot of shouting while writing. "I can't believe the sentences until I hear them out loud."
He then talks of Norman Mailer - say what you will about the man, but he was fearless as a stylist. He asked Mailer during an interview (the last interview of Mailer's life, it turned out) what profession he felt writing was most like and Mailer said acting. O'Hagan then asked Mailer which actor he was most like and Mailer said "Warren Beatty." Loud chuckles all around.
Phillips on acting: I was a speech writer which is a fantastic foray into fiction. He also reads his work aloud. "You're trying to hear what this thing is going to sound like."
Nahai: "As a novelist, we all hear voices and often it starts not with a voice but an image. 90% of my books are true and I add more to it." She relates a funny incident with her editors on her first book when she was asked to make the men in her book more likeable. With each revision, it seems, she made them less likeable and eventually they had to go with the first draft.
Phillips then jumps in on process with a wonderful point: Your first go-to is what have I seen and what have I done, how would I react in this situation. The magic comes when you think of other characters outside yourself. What have they seen, what have they done, how would they react in this situation. Write what you don't know.
O'Hagan picks up this thread and invokes A Farewell to Arms: In those first lines of the book, Hemingway persuades you to have emotions that you don't understand at the time. O'Hagan believes this to be writing at it's best.
O'Hagan then talks of process again: Empathy for your characters is the cornerstone of novel writing. Of his character in Be Near Me, he says he was so shocked by his character's own deluded nature and he had to continually remind himself that he had created this deluded character, so how could it be a surprise. He says he was terribly unhappy about how ill one of his characters was becoming - that he was in a state for days about it - but that "I was the one who made her that sick." Phillips agrees that it is when your characters do things you don't like, you know it's working. When they take over, you know you're on the right path.
O'Hagan then says that you have to be true to what you've planted, you must water it and give it sun so that it can grow.
When asked by an audience member how you know you're done with a book, Phillips answers: You live with your characters as long as it takes. You only know you're done when you've finally figured them out. Then the book is done.
Take-away: It was an excellent first panel - full of wonderful writerly nuggets about process and character development. Just the kind of thing the hometown crowd wants to see and it was well-received. I was struck by how fascinating it is to be introduced to a writer you've not read, but after hearing them talk about process, you become interested in reading their work. For me, the work nearly always comes first. I hear of a novel and I want to read it. It is a lovely twist when I see the writer, like what they have to say, and then want to read their work. Writers I now want to read not based on what I've heard of their work, but based on how they talk about process: O'Hagan, Phillips, Nahai, Bauman.
Also, if I'm entirely truthful, I must share that I teared up a bit when O'Hagan spoke of those "golden moments" and how important it is to listen to them, to hear them, to honor them and that entire worlds can open up for you if you're a writer and you pay attention and recognize those moments for what they are.
Wise words indeed, and this panel set a high bar for the rest of the festival.
