The Faraway Nearby (5 page)

Devastated and suicidal, though tenderly devoted to her daughter Fanny and eager to win back Imlay's love, Wollstonecraft set out for Scandinavia to locate his stolen merchant ship with its load of silver he'd had smuggled out of France, through the English naval blockade. It was a daring adventure, particularly for a woman with a small child (and French nursemaid) in tow, in remote lands where few spoke English. She confronted the dishonest captain in Norway and pursued the case with various authorities, but never recovered the silver or got recompense. What she brought back instead was a more precious load of observations, analyses, and emotions, first drafted in letters to Imlay, then recast as a travel narrative,
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

The slender volume mingled mournful personal expression and brief evocative descriptions of the terrain with headlong social and political critiques of the comparatively democratic, but to her eyes backward, cultures she encountered. Wollstonecraft spoke of death, of melancholy, of abandonment, of injustice, and more, taxing her distant lover with his sins again and again in letters that were better at establishing her neediness than winning him back. She made another suicide attempt when she returned, jumping into the Thames on a rainy night, only to be pulled out again. But her book was a great success.

The poet Robert Southey wrote of Wollstonecraft, “She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight.” She may have written the book to win back Imlay with a demonstration of her fine mind and strong feeling, but at this she failed. However, the middle-aged William Godwin wrote, “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.” He did fall in love and begat upon her Mary Godwin Shelley, who is thereby, in some sense, the fruit of a match made by a book on northernness, distance, and grief.

Godwin liked married life enough to try it again after Wollstonecraft died of birth, this time with a vehement, unintellectual woman who brought two illegitimate children to the ménage of Godwin, his daughter, and his stepdaughter Fanny Imlay. A son, Mary's half-brother, was born when she was six. This household of two adults and five children, no two of whom had the same pair of parents, struggled on, her father writing children's books under an assumed name and working as a bookseller himself. Not quite a wicked stepmother, the new Mrs. Godwin was nevertheless unsympathetic and perhaps hostile. One of Mary's childhood memories was being dragged by this stepmother out from under the parlor sofa where she had hidden to hear Samuel Taylor Coleridge recite his “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in 1806, a decade before she began her novel.

That poem of sin, accursed wandering, and its memorable scenes of icebergs sailing by, calving and cracking, may be another of the inspirations for her first novel, and wanderers and outcasts were fixtures in Romantic writing, from Wordsworth's displaced peasants to novels about the Wandering Jew. But despite the exotic settings, much of
Frankenstein
seems to be made direct out of the material of Mary's own life, even as Frankenstein's creature is made out of human remains. Her father had once advocated free love but cut off Mary when she ran off with Shelley. This parent who disowns a child is one version of the irresponsible, distancing inventor that is her Victor Frankenstein.

And Shelley himself is another. Frankenstein is likewise a firstborn son, likewise educated in old alchemical and magical branches and new electrical and medical branches of science. Shelley's willfulness, his pursuit of his destiny and his pleasures no matter the cost to others, is also an attribute of Frankenstein, who again and again distances himself from the family he claims to love. Early in the book, her protagonist himself proclaims that no man should allow his pursuit to “interfere with his tranquility and his domestic affections,” and similar arguments crop up elsewhere in the book. But Frankenstein shatters those things and travels far in lonely pursuit of his aims.

Young, poor, and female in an age where women had almost no power, Mary assumed the status of an omniscient giant in her book, describing the world on her own terms, depicting her own vision of a world gone wrong, and writing a masterpiece that would dwarf all the works of the Romantic poets in the directness of its impact on the collective imagination. The cinematic version has become so familiar that “Frankenstein” has become the oft-invoked byword for reckless, irresponsible science, and the template for a thousand imitations. It is the rare story that becomes, like a myth or fairy tale, part of the necessary furnishings of the imagination and shorthand for an aspect of the human condition. It is the progenitor of a whole genre of books and movies with mad scientists and has inspired the occasional masterpiece, such as the exquisitely melancholy Spanish film
The Spirit of the Beehive
.

In that burst of inspiration in the wintry summer of 1816, Mary Shelley drew ideas from the conversations of Byron and Shelley about the principles of life, electricity, and other developing scientific matters; from the horror stories they were all telling and reading and the macabre often invoked by Shelley; from a certain spirit of fearless ambition—and the milieu seems to have supercharged her. Certainly, she never again wrote anything so close to a myth in its power. But it is still her own creation, her immortal child. Frankenstein assembles a superhumanly powerful abomination but she composed an undying work of art.

In bringing the creature to life, the medical student becomes three things that echo one another: a parent, an artist, and a god; three kinds of makers. The responsibility of the creator to his creation is the overarching question in this book that is sometimes also about our responsibility to each other, about the empathy and engagement that might prevent such solitary experimenting, such willful individualism. It's a conservative book at heart, not in favor of conventional mores but of the ties of obligation and affection over individual pursuits, and in that too is a veiled reproach of her husband, the willful, restless, and often selfish poet.

Frankenstein brought fascination and dedication to the making of the creature and little forethought to its actual existence. He made it; he was frightened and repulsed; he ran. His moral weakness, his irresponsibility, is what sets everything in motion, that and the deeply human emotions of the creature who wants fellowship, love, and understanding, and receives rejection. That hideous creature is all too human and particularly adolescent, with an adolescent's furious sense of justice. The novel prefigures not only debates about scientific responsibility, but also liberal arguments that blame environment and upbringing for bad behavior. “I am malicious because I am miserable. You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph,” says the creature, blaming his parent for his crimes.

Loneliness is his justification for killing, and had the doctor met his creation with compassion, they might yet both have been redeemed. They go on instead at odds with each other, the creature inflicting misery on him by proxy with its murders. After he murders Frankenstein's bride on her wedding night, the tables turn and the creator hunts his creation across the north by sledge until he ends up in Walton's ship, dying. He represents artists, makers, parents, and gods, but also something more essential, the self and its limits, for at a deeper level the monster is not his creation so much as it is the self he will not face, not own, not know.

Two novels at the other end of the nineteenth century,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
and
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
make explicit the idea of another, monstrous self hidden from itself and from others. Both writers make beauty, the beauty that makes others empathize, and its opposite, repulsion, forces in their novels. The ugliness of Mr. Hyde is testament to his criminality—he is Dr. Jekyll's own dark side separated and let loose—but Dorian Gray sells his soul for a beauty that remains unchanged by his crimes and his coldness, until the end, when his decaying portrait and corporeal self change roles. Wilde is more distrustful of beauty.

Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotion, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel. You see the not-knowing in wars in which the reality of death, the warm, messy, excruciating dismemberment of bodies, the blood and the screams, and the unbearable bereavement of survivors, is abstracted into collateral damage or statistics or overlooked altogether, or in which the enemy is recategorized as nonhuman.

You see it too in the small acts of everyday life, of the person who feels perfectly justified, of the person who doesn't know he's just committed harm, of the person who says something whose motives are clear to everyone but her, of the person who comes up with intricate rationales or just remains oblivious, of the person we've all been at one time or another. Taken to an extreme, it's the mind-set of murder; enlarged in scale it's war. Elaborate are the means to hide from yourself, the disassociations, projections, deceptions, forgettings, justifications, and other tools to detour around the obstruction of unbearable reality, the labyrinths in which we hide the minotaurs who have our faces. Walton imagines a north pole where it is perpetually light, eternally summer; he hides from the darkness and the rest of the year, as Frankenstein hides from that part of himself that looks like a monster. Accident and abuse make destructive people in civilian life; the military makes them intentionally, through training procedures that make killing automatic, reflexive, and the enemy unreal.

Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act. It's also a narrative art of explaining the connections between your food or your clothing or your government and this suffering far from sight in which you nonetheless play a role. The suffering before you, in your own home or bed or life, can be harder to see, sometimes, as is the self who is implicated.

The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on. We make ourselves and in so doing are the gods of the small universe of self and the large world of repercussions. If
Frankenstein
is to be thought of as a fairy tale, it would be the tale of Walton, who in the midst of his folly rescues a dying stranger, or is rescued by that stranger's tale. He learns from Frankenstein's mistakes of vainglorious isolation and prepares to turn back from his pursuit of polar death and glory, toward the temperate world, fellowship, and survival. The brief tale of Walton wraps all around Frankenstein's story like an outer shell, and around the whole book hovers the tale of Mary Shelley.

In the years she gave birth to all those too-mortal children, she also created a work of art that yet lives, a monster of sorts in its depth of horror, and a beauty in the strength of its vision and its acuity in describing the modern world that in 1816 was just emerging. This is the strange life of books that you enter alone as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes in which we meet.

M
any stories are told about the Tang dynasty artist Wu Daozi, sometimes named as one of the three great sages of China: that he ignored color and only painted in black ink; that he transgressively painted his own face on an image of the Buddha; that he painted a perfect halo in a single stroke without the aid of compasses; that he painted pictures of the dragons who cause rain so well that the paintings themselves exuded water; that the emperor sent him to sketch a beautiful region and reprimanded him for coming back empty-handed, after which he painted a hundred-foot scroll that replicated all his travels in one continuous flow; that he made all his paintings boldly and without hesitation, painting like a whirlwind, so that people loved to watch the world emerge from under his brush.

One story about him I read long ago I always remembered. While he was showing the emperor the landscape he had painted on a wall of the Imperial Palace, he pointed out a grotto or cave, stepped into it, and vanished. Some say that the painting disappeared too. In the account I remember, he was a prisoner of the emperor and escaped through his painting. When I was much younger, I saw another version of this feat that impressed me equally.

In an episode of the Road Runner and Coyote cartoon, the eternally hopeful predator makes a trap for the bird. At the point where a road ends in a precipice, he places a canvas on which he paints an extension of the road, complete with the red cliff on one side and the guardrail on the other. The Road Runner neither smashes into the painting nor falls through it, but runs into it and vanishes around the painted bend. When the coyote attempts to follow him, he breaks through the painting, plummets, is smashed up, and then, yet again, as always, he is resurrected. Your door is my wall; your wall is my door.

The one creature embodies grace, the other foolish desire, as though they are two elemental principles that can never mingle, in body or spirit. Chuck Jones's Wile E. Coyote is a version of the great creator deity of the North American continent, Coyote. This is the god whose eyes and cock sometimes detach to seek their own satisfactions, who is often broken, occasionally killed, always resurrected, and never annihilated, who represents the comic principle of survival. But only as I write do I also notice the bird is a Taoist master, like the calm masters nothing could touch in the stories of old China. They walked through fire, through rock, and on air with aplomb.

These feats of the bird and the painter are paradoxical and impossible, but only literally, or only in some media. People disappear into their stories all the time. We live in stories and images, as immersed in them as though they were Wu Daozi's inkpots; we breathe in presuppositions and exhale further stories. We in the West have been muddled by Plato's assertion that art is imitation and illusion; we believe that it is a realm apart, one whose impact on our world is limited, one in which we do not live.

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me, my mother liked to recite, though words hurt her all the time, and behind the words the stories about how things should be and where she fell short, as told by my father, by society, by the church, by the happy flawless women of advertisements. We all live in that world of images and stories, and most of us are damaged by some version of it, and if we're lucky, find others or make better ones that embrace and bless us.

As I wrote this my friend Annie sent me a note from Easter Island, where she was working on a radio story. She wrote me of “sweeping grasslands, dormant volcanoes, sheer black volcanic cliffs dropping into the sea and those magnificent, stern moai”—the great stone heads—“scattered all over the island. I can't stop wondering what possessed the Rapa Nui to build them and then after that was over to conceive of the birdman cult.” Hundreds of years after the cultural near-extinction of their makers, the heads were still provoking thought; they were still in our heads; Annie wrote to me and put the birdman cult in mine.

After their devastating contact with the European world, beginning on Easter of 1722, the Rapa Nui, the Easter Island people, made the cult with its dangers and arbitrarinesses more central to their lives. Those who had the gift of prophecy would choose the contestants in their dreams. To be dreamed of was a dangerous thing. The contestants would swim to an islet off the coast, attempt to collect the first sooty tern egg of the season, swim back, then scale a cliff without breaking the egg. The losers sometimes drowned, or were devoured by sharks, or fell from the cliff. The winner was given a new name and isolated but exalted status for the year, and his clan won exclusive rights to the season's egg gathering from the small island where the tern's egg had been seized.

The birdman cult might be just an extreme case of the stories we weave all the time that make a small item a trophy, a sign of spiritual or social status, a token that changes your life. Only the unfamiliarity of the birdman cult makes us remark on its arbitrariness, since in our society people die in the attempt to climb mountains for no practical reason, kill because of words that insult them or their gods, and revere those who have won a prize handed out by a whimsical jury or because a combination of factors sent a ball into or over a net.

We live in dreams; we go into the shark-filled sea to carry them out; we make one egg of the sooty tern, also known as the wideawake, into something to organize a whole society around. The tern's egg is small, speckled, nondescript. The god who presided over all this was named MakeMake. “The things we dream up . . .” wrote Annie. To become a maker is to make the world for others, not only the material world but the world of ideas that rules over the material world, the dreams we dream and inhabit together.

Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. What surprised and still surprises me is that there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, that I came out that other side and met people there. Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

These vanishing acts are a staple of children's books, which often tell of adventures that are magical because they travel between levels and kinds of reality, and the crossing over is often an initiation into power and into responsibility. They are in a sense allegories first for the act of reading, of entering an imaginary world, and then of the way that the world we actually inhabit is made up of stories, images, collective beliefs, all the immaterial appurtenances we call ideology and culture, the pictures we wander in and out of all the time. In children's books there are inanimate objects that come to life, speaking statues, rings and words of power, talismans and amulets, and most of all, there are doors, particularly in the series that I, like so many children, took up imaginative residence in for some years, the Chronicles of Narnia.

I read one in fourth grade after a teacher who barely knew me handed it to me in the school library; I can still picture his mustache and the wall of books. I read it and read it again and then began to save up to buy the seven books, one at a time. The paperbacks came from the enchanted bookstore in the middle of town, whose kind proprietor rewarded me with the case in which the seven books fit when I had paid for the last one. I still have the boxed set, a little tattered, though I think no one has ever read them other than me. When I took one out recently, I noticed how dirty the white back of the book was from my small filthy fingers then.

Much has been written about the Christian themes, British boarding-school mores, and other contentious aspects of the series, but little has been said about its doors. There is of course the wardrobe in the first book C. S. Lewis wrote, the wardrobe made of wood cut from an apple tree grown from seeds from another world that, when the four children walk into it, sometimes opens onto that world. Two of the other books feature a doorway that stands alone so that when you walk around it, it is just a frame, three pieces of wood in a landscape, but when you step through it, it leads to another world. There's a painting of a boat that comes to life as the children tumble over the picture frame into the sea and another world. There are books and maps that come to life as you look at them.

And there is the Wood Between the Worlds in the book
The Magician's Nephew,
which tells the creation story for Narnia, a wood described so enchantingly I sometimes think of it as a vision of peace still. It's more serene and more strange than the rest of the books with their busy symbolism—talking beasts, dwarves, witches, battles, enchantments, castles, and more. The young protagonist puts on a ring and finds himself coming up through a pool to the forest.

“It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing. The pool he had just got out of was not the only pool. There were dozens of others—a pool every few yards as far as his eyes could reach. You could almost feel the trees drinking the water up with their roots. This wood was very much alive.” It is the place where nothing happens, the place of perfect peace; it is itself not another world but an unending expanse of trees and small ponds, each pond like a looking glass you can go through to another world. It is a portrait of a library, just as all the magic portals are allegories for works of art, across whose threshold we all step into other worlds.

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds. All readers are Wu Daozi; all imaginative, engrossing books are landscapes into which readers vanish.

The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another. The child I once was read constantly and hardly spoke, because she was ambivalent about the merits of communication, about the risks of being mocked or punished or exposed. The idea of being understood and encouraged, of recognizing herself in another, of affirmation, had hardly occurred to her and neither had the idea that she had something to give others. So she read, taking in words in huge quantities, a children's and then an adult's novel a day for many years, seven books a week or so, gorging on books, fasting on speech, carrying piles of books home from the library.

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone. Or rather writing is saying to the no one who may eventually be the reader those things one has no someone to whom to say them. Matters that are so subtle, so personal, so obscure, that I ordinarily can't imagine saying them to the people to whom I'm closest. Every once in a while I try to say them aloud and find that what turns to mush in my mouth or falls short of their ears can be written down for total strangers. Said to total strangers in the silence of writing that is recuperated and heard in the solitude of reading. Is it the shared solitude of writing, is it that separately we all reside in a place deeper than society, even the society of two? Is it that the tongue fails where the fingers succeed, in telling truths so lengthy and nuanced that they are almost impossible aloud?

I started out in silence, writing as quietly as I had read, and then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers entered my world or drew me into theirs. I started out in silence and traveled until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away—first the silent voice that can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud. When I began to read aloud, another voice, one I hardly recognized, emerged from my mouth. Maybe it was more relaxed, because writing is speaking to no one, and even when you're reading to a crowd, you're still in that conversation with the absent, the faraway, the not yet born, the unknown, and the long gone for whom writers write, the crowd of the absent who hover all around the desk.

Sometime in the late nineteenth century, a poor rural English girl who would grow up to become a writer was told by a gypsy, “You will be loved by people you've never met.” This is the odd compact with strangers who will lose themselves in your words and the partial recompense for the solitude that makes writers and writing. You have an intimacy with the faraway and distance from the near at hand. Like digging a hole to China and actually coming out the other side, the depth of that solitude of reading and then writing took me all the way through to connect with people again in an unexpected way. It was astonishing wealth for one who had once been so poor.

•   •   •

My own story in its particulars hardly interests me now. The incidents have dissolved into the dirt from which certain plants grew, and the blooms of those plants or maybe only their perfume on the air, the questions and ideas that arose, are what still signify. Or so I think, but maybe a moment in the dirt of that apricot summer is necessary. The apricots arrived in early August, and then everything with my mother began to deteriorate more ferociously.