Douglas Bauer on Delving into the Scenic Moment
Bauer advises us as readers and writers to linger, hover, join, and deeply commingle with the moment at hand.
Greetings, friends.
Today I welcome to Writers at the Well Douglas Bauer, author of seven books and editor of two. His most recent are The Beckoning World, a “Must Read” selection of the Massachusetts Library Association and a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in fiction, and What Happens Next: Matters of Life and Death, which won the PEN/New England award in non-fiction. He’s been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and creative non-fiction, and has taught at Harvard, where he was given two Harvard-Danforth Center awards for excellence in teaching, and at Bennington College, Rice University, Smith College, Wesleyan University, and the University of New Mexico. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Doug offers insights on the writing of historical fiction, the incorporation of iconic real life characters, and how to avoid “literary taxidermy.” He explores the future of literature and reading given our growing inattention to the physical world, and advises aspiring writers to slow down, linger, and delve into the scenic moment at hand. I hope you enjoy this deep dive with author
.Stay tuned for upcoming interviews with poet/essayist
, novelist/memoirist , novelist , Buddhist lama/nonfiction writer , novelist/short story writer , and author/meditation & lucid dreaming teacher Andrew Holecek. Previous posts include written interviews with essayist Sven Birkerts, novelist Karen Dukess, poet/sculptor Don Freas, novelist JoeAnn Hart, a poem by Caprice Garvin, and podcast interviews with screenwriter/novelist Alan Watt, novelist Mar’ce Merrell, and thrutopian novelist Manda Scott.If you enjoy these interviews, please comment, share, subscribe, and suggest writers you’d like to see interviewed!
Yours at the well,
Tess
What was the seed image (visual, auditory, conceptual) that gave rise to your most recent book, The Beckoning World?
I see The Beckoning World as an intense love story, I hope an engagingly complex one. Indeed, the main character, Earl, reflects at one point on the intensity of the love he feels for his wife, Emily, and he thinks:
“what a relentless thing it was. How could you not admire it, the way it just kept coming for him?”
However, the “seed image” from which the novel grew is something very different. Reading the New York Times one morning, I was drawn to a story about the discovery of an early home movie featuring Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig mingling at an outdoor reception with the leading citizens of Sioux City, Iowa after they’d played an exhibition baseball game there, one of more than 20 such games that made up a cross-country barnstorming tour they took after the season had ended.
I’ve been a baseball fan all my life and when I saw this story -- the idea of Ruth and Gehrig descending for a day on a small Midwestern city in 1927, then on to the next town and the next, Ruth in his early 30s at the height of his fame, Gehrig almost 10 years younger, a painfully shy young man at the start of his great career and very much in awe of Ruth, the two of them sharing a splendid Pullman lounge across the country for three weeks until they reached California -- I immediately thought, there’s a novel here.
But as I continued to think about it, the even more interesting notion to me was the impact of these two gods descending on an isolated Midwest town for an afternoon, then leaving as suddenly as they’d arrived. Who, what sort of person among the locals, would be most affected by the dream-like quality of it all, and why? Which led me to Earl, and the story of his life leading up to the fateful visit. He’d been a promising baseball pitcher who’d sacrificed the possibility of a career, choosing, or being helpless against, that “relentless” love that “just kept coming for him.” That was the story. Or my story, at least.
So Ruth and Gehrig became secondary characters, appearing half way through the story and influencing the lives of Earl and his young son, Henry, from that point on.
What do you make of this quote from the Gnostic Gospel of St. Thomas? “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
Sounds like a strong recommendation for psychotherapy. Which I agree with and am all for, but, otherwise, I’m not so sure. I’ve been in situations -- who hasn’t? – where it seemed the better option, if I wished to be saved, was to keep what was in me right where it was.
Your book on craft, The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft, covers topics such as dialogue, characterization, openings, and closings. In a chapter on action, you mention a student whose novel was so swollen with dramatic events that there was no depth in the narrative, only a wildly shifting surface. What advice do you have for fellow writers who wish to draw not from the surface chop, but from the depths of their wells? How do you personally access those deeper waters?
To start, let me say that this student was one of the two or three best in my more than 30 years of teaching, and has gone on to have a highly successful career as a novelist and essayist. As for the narrative I described, with its “wildly shifting surface”, I thought and still do think that it illustrates the fact that as writers we naturally tend to overdo what we do best, and that early in our committed writing lives we haven’t yet learned to recognize and work to control this. Among this student’s many gifts were the creation of terrifically inventive plot and, as well, an exceptional awareness that there are readers out there whose interest must be captured and held. Hence, a narrative “swollen with dramatic events” in a commendable effort to attract and keep readers’ engagement. And it seemed to me the student could be advised to look for the excesses.
As for the thing I say most often to students about their writing, it couldn’t be simpler: slow down. Linger in the scenic moment, hover over it long past the point where you instinctively want to get to the next one. Linger, hover, delve deeply.
This will likely result in a first draft that needs to be pared down in many places, but that’s the job, and a relatively easier one, of revision. Also, more recently, I’ve urged students not to observe the scenic moment; join it, commingle with the characters who inhabit it. Which, as I said, is what I learned myself, more fundamentally, from my experience during the pandemic.
What are you currently drawing up from your well? What can readers expect from you next?
I’m putting together a collection of literary essays. Most all of them have or will have an inspection of some element of the craft of fiction at their heart, similar to those in The Stuff of Fiction, which you mentioned. But in comparison these will be more autobiographically tinted.
For example, one of them discusses the work of Willa Cather, particularly how it uses the physical landscape not merely as setting, however scenic, but as an active participant, an essential actor in the drama. (The late Joan Acocella, in her fabulous book, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, said for instance that “Nature was the inspirer of Cather’s irony”.) What gives my Cather essay an autobiographical grounding is its discussion of a class I taught at Bennington College that included her fiction, which to my delight students invariably admired, especially, to my bemusement, the way her work conveys the physical world. Bemusement because like students everywhere -- and like the populous in general -- they’re increasingly unaware of the physical world in their own lives, moving through it as they do while paying addicted attention to the cellphones in their palms or the conversations they’re having with the voices coming through their ear buds, or the music from those ear buds, or all three. The essay, then, rests on that juxtaposition and from there I go on to wonder what literature and its readers will be like in the future with this growing inattention to the physical world.
Another of the essays, maybe the most autobiographical so far, recalls the two years or so when I was revising The Beckoning World and the world was not beckoning, it was in the depths of Covid.
Like all writers, my day is made up of two, what I’ll call environments. At the desk, at the keyboard, I’m in conversational solitude with my imagination. And quite happy to be. God help the writer who doesn’t like to be alone.
Still, for me, an essential part of what makes that solitude something I welcome is the what comes when I’ve finished work for the day and I’m eager to rejoin the populated world. Go to the gym. See a friend for coffee or wine. Grocery shop for supper. The most mundane activities, but they seem almost an indulgence after the working hours are done.
But for those two pandemic years these two environments reversed themselves entirely. It was during my working hours that I was among other people, the characters in the story, Earl, Emily, their baby Henry, a large handful of others. Joining them, that was my populated world. It was from them that I got a certain social energy. After which, I looked up from the desk and was reminded every day that there was no real populated world to rejoin.
Gradually, then, this led to a kind of hybrid universe. By which I mean that the busy world of the book that was living in my head, and the rigid quiet of my real world, the two sort of merged. You could say that I was living simultaneously in both, as I never had before.
And the point, regarding craft, that the essay makes is how essential it is not to merely observe your characters as you create them, but to join them, to mingle among them, to become both their intimate as well as their inventor. I’d always known this, of course, and practiced it as well, but the dynamic became something I learned, like a lesson, as an element of craft during Covid.
The Beckoning World includes real events such as the Spanish flu and a barnstorming trip by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehring to Iowa. How does the inclusion of historical events fuel your imagination?
Henry James wrote that, “The charm of the past as it is used in fiction depends on its proximity. It has to be almost touchable.”
I know it’s foolhardy to quibble with The Master, but I’d amend his advice only by deleting that “almost”. For me, one of the great rewards in writing fiction set in an earlier period is the relative ease I feel in finding it and, to borrow from James, touching it. Orienting myself to a time that isn’t this one, a time where I fit much more comfortably than I do in the present. Increasingly, the world we live in now, with its high-tech habits, feels far more distant, more inaccessible, than whatever historical time I’m drawn to.
So the rewards are plenty, and as for the challenges, it’s essential to keep constantly in mind that characters in a fiction set in the past don’t think of themselves as living in the past, don’t think of themselves as historical, and neither must the writer. They’re living in the contemporaneous moment, events are unfolding as they confront them. As far as history goes they’re moving through their days with no idea they’re making it, or somehow consciously dramatizing it for a reader.
I’m reminded here of those venues with names like “Pilgrim Village” or “Frontier Town”, where visitors, tourists, come to watch actors in period costumes reenact various chores and customs. “Here’s how they churned the butter!” “Here’s a traditional end-of-harvest dance!”
I used the words “visitors” and “tourists”, which are helpful keys, I think, to warn a writer how not to think about rendering the past. It’s deadly to think of the reader as some sort of visitor or tourist observing a world the writer is resurrecting with a conscious emphasis on the charm of its quaintness, the alluring ironies of its obsolescence.
Historical fiction that’s vividly alive on the page, novels such as Doctorow’s Ragtime, Karen Joy Fowler’s Sister Noon, Thomas McMahon’s McKay’s Bees, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, all of Toni Morrison, much of Hilary Mantel, the characters in these novels and stories, to repeat myself, don’t think of themselves as historical, wearing the costumes, enacting the customs.
If writers approach the past with the idea of making a record of the past, they’re guaranteed to merely, cosmetically preserve it. Which inevitably leads to characters who are generic, who are historic types, which will likely make them lifeless, which will surely make them soulless. And which makes the act of writing them, replicating all the external details so precisely, a kind of literary taxidermy.
Can you talk about your title, The Beckoning World?
I do like the title a lot, and I only wish I could take credit for it. Titles had always come fairly easily to me, percolating up in the process of creation and composition. Not this time. I had a working title, So Many Miles Between Here and Anything, which I swore was a line I’d read from a letter Willa Cather wrote to someone, but I couldn’t find the source, and as a title it sounded sort of precious and it was awfully long. Until my agent, Henry Dunow, was getting ready to send the manuscript out to publishers. We were brainstorming on the telephone and I don’t recall the comment that precipitated his saying, “How about The Beckoning World?” And that was that.
Once I had the title, I noticed only then how frequently the word appears in the text. The world does beckon nearly all the characters in various ways, and just what world it is that’s doing the beckoning keeps shifting and getting recast, particularly for the main character, Earl Dunham. First, he needs at age seventeen to flee an impoverished coal-miner’s world with an abusive father, flees that world for the world writ large. His being beckoned initially is a fundamental act of survival.
Once freed, living on his own, he’s beckoned by a world in which it seems he might prosper as a professional baseball player, and then by a world in a life with a young woman he falls desperately in love with, and then by a domestic world, farming with his father-in-law, and then the preoccupying world of single fatherhood, and so on and so forth. The last sentences in chapter one find Earl at seventeen, newly escaped from that world of poverty and abuse, riding on an Elevated train in Chicago, looking into the windows of a tenement as the train passes slowly and extremely closely. The sentences read, “Each world, framed by its window, drew him powerfully in . . . Every room, every person in every world he passed, seemed to beckon him; to beckon him; to beckon him; to beckon him.”
A friend, the novelist, Meg Wolitzer, said she thought the title should be The Beckoning Worlds, plural.
You can find out more about Douglas Bauer’s work at: www.douglasbauerwriter.com.