And don’t, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italian people, for the people are more marvelous than the land.

…And I do believe that Italy really purifies and ennobles all who visit her. She is the school as well as the playground of the world.

–Philip Herriton in E.M. Forster’s novel “Where Angels Fear to Tread”

Philip Herriton is in desperate need of a drenching rain to strip away all of his petty niceties. In the Italian, he sees a sort of coarse, tobacco-spitting “noble savage” who awakens a keen sense of pleasure in all those who come to his shores. (It is unclear whether the cringe-worthy depictions of Italians in the book belong entirely to the author himself.) “You’re without passion; you look on life as a spectacle; you don’t enter it; you only find it funny or beautiful,” a character says to Philip at the end of the book.

I have a great quote on my fridge: “Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place. Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”

That’s Annie Dillard speaking. Good advice for all of us terminal patients. I think that’s what Philip means when he says Italy is both the school and the playground of the world. He means, get into the thick of it, really feel life, engage and don’t hold back. Risk discomfort for the sake of all the pleasure you can stand and at the expense of everything you think you should be doing. I say this at the risk of sounding like a bumper sticker or a greeting card. “Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.” I think Philip only feels like himself when he is in Italy.

The Woolfs had a routine that seldom varied. Every morning at about nine-thirty, right after breakfast (which Leonard always served Virginia in bed), they went to their separate rooms to write. They wrote from nine-thirty until one. The Woolfs had spent so many mornings of their lives in this way that by 1934 they had written more than a score of books between them. At one, they joined each other for lunch…After lunch the Woolfs would read their mail and the newspapers. Afternoons were usually devoted to typing out and revising that morning’s work or taking care of business related to the Press. When the weather was fine (and often even when it was not), Virginia liked to include a long walk in her afternoon schedule.
–from Mitz by Sigrid Nunez

Sigrid Nunez has written a perfect little book about the Woolfs’ marmoset Mitz. Told through the eyes of this little monkey, the novel’s real focus is the Woolf household and the comings and goings of Mitz’s guardians, Virginia and Leonard. Their marriage is an extremely directed and productive union couched in much tenderness.

There are other recent examples of married writers who work in their own little hives. Poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon used to scribble away in adjoining rooms in their New Hampshire farmhouse. Jonathan Franzen has written about his marriage to his college sweetheart and the intense bond that allowed them to write around the clock and discuss books and ideas at all hours. (Much better than an MFA program!) And how about Sartre and Beauvoir?

Yes, the Woolfs (or Wolves?) were privileged but also extremely fortunate to have found in each other a real partnership, like perfectly matched tennis players. You could say their daily routine was rigid and unforgiving, but there is so much freedom that comes from discipline! No, the Woolfs weren’t closing bars most nights or dancing in fountains, but they were doing something just as exciting. Even a little girl like Mitz could see that while perched on Leonard’s shoulder or sitting snug inside his waistcoat. To Mitz, these humans were as singular as they were friendly–always providing fresh worms and a chin-scratch and as much endless entertainment as the biggest show on earth.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated, ill-shaven giant (but a giant who’s a genius on his best days)…How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length. I suspect that many novelists clock up sixty thousand words after a year’s work and believe (wearily, perhaps) that they are only half way there. They are slaves to the giant, instead of masters of the form.

–from “Some Notes on the Novella” by Ian McEwan (2012 New Yorker article)

Sigrid Nunez has written six novels and one memoir, but her entire literary output stacked back-to-back would be the size of a toaster. I first discovered her memoir about Susan Sontag (118 pages) a couple of years ago, and I felt that not one drop of ink had been wasted. In a way, it is sad Nunez has gotten so much attention for the Sontag book–mostly from those who want the inside scoop about the deliberately puzzling icon–at the expense of her six previous books.

Take her first novel–A Feather on the Breath of God. It is full of satisfying “writerly” description, such as “fiery red sausage with specks of fat like embedded teeth” and “the ash-pink dawn” and “women with feet like little deer hooves.” She also includes many insightful musings, like “I had discovered the miraculous possibility that art holds out to us: to be part of the world and to be removed from the world at the same time.”

Her second novel–Naked Sleeper–isn’t as well-combed as the first and there are several speed bumps that could have been worked out. But its 235 pages are still written with delicacy and a well-honed sense of humor. When her character Nona finally meets up with the man who has sent her so many heated love letters, the letdown is both devastating and absurdly comical.

Four more Nunez novels await to be polished off in a good binge-read, or maybe in a series of tiny snacks, like trail mix or exotic appetizers or a light borscht. (Not to mention a bottle of cherry Kombucha!)

The smaller, the better…

Edgar:

Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air
(So many fathom down precipitating),
Thou’dst shiver’d like an egg: but thou dost breathe,
Hast heavy substance, bleed’st not, speak’st, art sound.
Ten masts at each, make not the altitude
Which thou hast perpendicularly fell:
Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.

–from Shakespeare’s “King Lear”

Dr. Natalie Elliot–a Political Science professor at St. John’s here in Santa Fe–gave a talk tonight on “The Weight of Pathos in King Lear” and it was so hefty and lumbering (the most zaftig of discussions!) that I rushed home to unburden myself of a passion to reread the play immediately.

When Shakespeare was writing the play in 1606, falling body experience (the theory that all bodies fall at the same rate) was all the vogue in scientific circles.

So when it comes to the scene above from the end of Act IV (in which Edgar–disguised as a beggar–leads his suicidal father–the blinded Gloucester–over what Edgar pretends are the cliffs of Dover–and then makes his father believe he has survived a great fall) it is a sort of science experiment. Gloucester cannot trust his senses–and at the same time the language is all about “weightiness” and “welling up”–the “pathos” in the title of the lecture.

Six years ago, my father was hospitalized next to a Shakespeare scholar who had been run over by a taxi. (Leave it to my Dad to find his match as a conversationalist in his hospital roommate.) The two got to talking about “King Lear” and the academic said it was Shakespeare’s best.

“King Lear” is the classic father-daughter play. (Though I always feel sad when Shylock’s daughter Jessica runs off with his money and breaks his heart in “The Merchant of Venice.”) Cordelia is Lear’s heroic and truthful daughter.

At the time, my father had terminal cancer, and he had never read “King Lear.” What a perfect book to bring him, I thought to myself. Pretty heavy stuff but sort of a primer on mortality.

But when I handed him a paperback of the play, he was horrified that his roommate might see him reading it. He didn’t want to seem that uncool. Anyhow, he was reading a thick volume about World War II that he had just started digging into.

At first I felt sad that he was missing out on what I felt were “key” books–everything from “Anna Karenina” to “Middlemarch”–and so on. Shouldn’t he be burning to read the “classics” (i.e., all the books I held dear) before he died?

In the end, my father never did read “King Lear.” And was he the worse off for it? Probably not. His life didn’t need more heaviness and pathos. He was plenty wise. And if I had been very sick, would he have brought me a door-stopper of a book about World War II to cheer me up in my hospital bed? No, he would have brought me something I liked–just as he brought me comic books when I was a little kid with bronchitis.

And in the end, as Shakespeare wrote, “Thy life’s a miracle.” You don’t have to read “King Lear” to know that much.