Stacked up in Seussian Piles
I sent a pretty good draft of my new prose book, Happiness
Exposed, to my editor about three weeks ago and told
myself to stop rewriting until I heard back from him. In fact
though, I entirely rewrote the book’s final chapter
and then asked him to swap out my new one with my old one.
Then I reapplied myself to leaving the book alone, “let
some body heat get out of it” as E.B. White said about
Charlotte’s Web, explaining why he left the
manuscript in a desk drawer for a while. My plan was to wait
for comments, and in the meantime I’d “read for
the book,” a term I don’t generally voice, which
means read books that in any tangential or immediate way might
bear on “the book.” Too bad for me, I discovered
that I don’t feel like reading anything about the stuff
I’ve already written about—the things I really
wanted to read about, say, drugs and happiness, got themselves
read during the processes of my writing. By “got themselves
read” I mean that while I am writing my prose books,
which are history, philosophy, and I supposed cultural studies,
I have relevant books all over the apartment, in Seussian
piles, and I read them all at once. I have to set this up
in advance, so in expectation of writing a chapter I seek
out and buy online the books I will need: while I’m
finishing chapter one, chapter two’s books are speeding
towards me. Then I look the books over for a thesis I want
to know about at the outset, and if I don’t see one
in these fresh books, I turn from them and start writing.
(Of course I’ve been thinking about and reading about
the chapter subject for a long time, that’s why I’ve
got a chapter on it.) I go back to the books when I have specific
questions, and when the book is good, I read the whole thing,
otherwise perhaps only the relevant chapters.
The categories of books that were strewn vertically and in
concentric circles around the chairs for Doubt had
subjects that varied across the world and the centuries, (enough
to make my husband laugh at the weird combinations of books
that arrived), but their variety was not as pixilated as for
Happiness Exposed. Here are five that were great
for the book and that are still out on my tables: The
Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies by Lane;
Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography, by Dominic Streatfeild;
the brilliant Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
by Jane Ellen Harrison; Hard at Play: Leisure in America,
1840-1940, edited by Kathryn Grover; and Marina Warner’s
wonderful From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales
and Their Tellers. Lane’s book is a pretty remarkable
treatment of what we have learned about happiness, or think
we have, from statistics, questionnaires, and other studies—it
might be too dense if you weren’t a motivated reader,
but if you want to know the answer to that question, I like
this book better than some others that have gotten broader
attention. It could be a little passionate and extensive for
some, just like Warner’s and Harrison’s, but I
love them all. Streatfeild’s book is journalistically
chatty but smart and even subtle. It answered what I wanted
to know about the history of cocaine and happiness. Harrison’s
edited volume is scholarly essays, but I can’t imagine
anyone not having some fun here.
Writing my happiness book made me think a lot about how we
enact happiness through celebration and community, and how
meanings of different happinesses change over time. Sometimes
a nice happy girl ought to take her laudanum and stay away
from sports; sometimes it is the other way around. I’ve
also been thinking a lot about the way our stories work for
us, in poems, movies, myths, and the evening news. Which is
why one of the two books I am reading now is The Sociology
of News by Michael Schudson. He says interesting things,
like how “the news” as we know it was born in
the era of the telegraph, and so, in rejection the usual ideas
of narrative (in which you do not “give away”
the story), news articles “telegraph” the who
what when where, so that the important headlines could, in
fact, be telegraphed. Good, right?
The other book I am reading was oddly chosen. I don’t
read fiction. I think the last fiction I read was Jhumpa Lahiri’s
short stories, which I also read when I was pregnant and trying
to not write for a little while. Anyway, a few months ago
I got an email from A.M. Homes asking me if I had a relative
named Hecht who was a butcher in the East Village in the early
twentieth-century. That is where my family’s Hecht’s
were at the time, so I asked my 94-year-old grandmother, who
is as lucid as I am, though at this point much shorter, and
she didn’t recognize the idea or any of the other info.
My sister and our friend James both responded to the anecdote
I told about this in the same way: so ardent was their love
for A. M. Homes, that they would have me lie to A. M. and
invent some Hechts, just to have her in our lives. I emailed
her the sad news: no butcher.
So when John was on his way to Barnes and Noble with the baby
the other day, I requested some A. M. Homes. I was wanting
something critical, non-fiction; something that might give
me an insight that would help me finalize the conclusions
in "Happiness." I did not recall what A. M. Homes
wrote, but I remembered the adoring response of sister and
James and took a shot. Husband, John, came back with a novel
and with Things You Should Know, which is short stories.
I was sorry it wasn’t criticism but since I am trying
to put down “the book” for a few more days, I
picked up the short stories. Wow, so much flesh and effluvia!
Reading philosophy all day, you do happen upon the sticky
body, but not with such intimacy of perspective. Anyway, it
is great and surprising and probably just what I need right
now.
My virtual bedside table, meaning those books now speeding
toward me, include poetry by Deborah Landau and Joy Katz,
poets who I know and I just sort of got my act together to
order their books; a book on the art history of clothes by
Anne Hollander; and two books by Janet Malcolm. Oh and my
new poetry book, Funny, came in the mail two days
ago! The five copies I have (having given one to my in-laws
last night) are scattered around the apartment in their glory!
I took the cover photograph: a nice bowl of soup with a fork;
my favorite photographer, Jean Jenesque, took the author photo
on the back. It is very exciting.