A Writer's Roots by Deborah Batterman

Back in the days when I first became a fan of Patti Smith, I knew virtually nothing about her life, except maybe that she hailed from New Jersey.  I was drawn to her poetry, her style, her music. The striking photograph of her on the cover of Horses seemed to epitomize who she was, artistically. This was her debut album, recorded and mixed at the West Village studio built by Jimi Hendrix, produced by John Cale. The photo is classic Mapplethorpe.

All of this information is on the back of the album cover, and yet very little of it registered until recently when I read her very poignant memoir, Just Kids. While the frame of the story is her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, the heart is her evolution as an artist, as well as his.

During my formative years as a reader of serious fiction and a writer, I resisted knowing much more about the writers I was growing to admire than the fiction or poetry that identified them. Professors would instill a little background here and there, maybe put out a list of biographical resources. I took it all in, made mental notes, but the truth, simply told, is that any illuminating tidbits about Yeats’s politics and esoteric leanings, or Isak Dinesen’s life in Africa, or diatribes on whether a man of humble origins could become a Shakespeare were no match  for the stories and poems and plays that captivated me.  What else besides her poetry and The Bell Jar did I need to read of Sylvia Plath to know there was darkness? It was enough for me that her only novel was autobiographical. To match the fiction, point for point, against real life seemed pointless.

Maybe, too, there was something in me that needed a sense of who I might be as a writer, something that insisted I uncover a voice of my own before delving into how other writers found theirs. Yes, I bathed myself in the tales of rejection, all the more confounding (even if perversely reassuring) when it came to books now considered classics.  In writing about her own years of failure, Madeleine L’Engle says, with such eloquence, in A Circle of Quiet: “I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their validity, no matter what . . . .And I think, too, and possibly most important, that there is a faith simply in the validity of art; when we talk about ourselves as being part of the company of such people as Mozart or van Gogh or Dostoevsky, it has nothing to do with comparisons, or pitting talent against talent; it has everything to do with a way of looking at the universe.”

And I held to my conviction that the only true apprenticeship to writing is reading the novels and stories, poems and essays of writers who have earned their place in the world of letters. As Francine Prose lucidly points out in Reading Like a Writer, even when writers take a more formal approach to learning the craft, there’s a kind of ‘osmosis’ that comes into play. “After I’ve written an essay in which I’ve quoted at length from great writers,so that I’ve had to copy out long passages of their work," she writes, "I’ve noticed that my own work becomes, however briefly, just a little more fluent.”  I couldn’t agree more; just reading the fiction of Richard Powers has a way of charging me.

Curiosity is a writer’s stock in trade, and somewhere along the way, youthful insistence on not knowing the facts behind the fiction softened.  A Quality Paperback Book Club edition of Out of Africa came my way.  Janet Sternburg published The Writer on Her Work (Vol. 1, to be followed by a second volume ten years later). I became fascinated with Nabokov – his fiction, his essays, his butterflies. Speak, Memory, as close to an autobiography as Nabokov gets, speaks worlds about the underpinnings of brilliance and what it means to leave one culture for another: “This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place,” he writes in the Foreword, “proved to be a diabolical task, but some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before.”



It’s no small irony that this year’s Summer Fiction issue of The New Yorker is filled with tales of becoming – Jhumpa  Lahiri’s reflections on reading as an act of discovery,  Jennifer Egan’s foray into archeology,  the teenage disenfranchisement that figures in both Téa Obreht’s “High School Confidential” and Salvatore Scribona’s “Where I Learned to Read,” and, yes, some delightful letters from Nabokov to his wife when he was on a two-month lecture tour through southern and midwestern U.S.  Only three pieces of fiction in the issue.

The more I delve into the lives of other writers, the more I perceive the process of becoming a writer as less a ‘how’ and more a way of being that evolves. The  power to imagine is fluid, memory always at the ready to provide a place, a person, a scene that, in the hands of a skillful fiction writer is turned forty degrees to the left or right, the hidden order of art at work.  So when I’m asked about the autobiographical elements in my own stories, “Shoes,” in particular, the answer just rolls off my tongue: yes, the genesis of the story was my mother's death and the months of cancer preceding it; and, yes, my parents’ relationship saddened me. The rest, as the saying goes, is fiction.