Author: Elisabeth

How books are made.

The dentist did not send us a
reminder of our half yearly visit this year and I have used it as an excuse to
avoid the visit.  Even though I
know in the back of my mind that I should call for an appointment, I use the
dentist’s failure to send out a reminder as an excuse to avoid doing what I
know I must eventually do.  
I’ve
signed up for the Keiser weight training though, that’s a tick in the box of
the doing-things-good-for-you category, but for the dentist and the rest I
can’t claim much success.  The rest
being all those other jobs I put off until I must get them done, the washing,
report writing, cleaning out cupboards, but I will get there. 
Procrastination I call it, the
demon of progress.  My greatest
avoidance is to immerse myself in the book I tell myself I am writing.  Actually it’s written, mostly, only I
must put it together, make the pieces into a whole, and eliminate that which is
unnecessary.  
I joined a class recently, six
sessions,  to help us produce a manuscript, and Lee Kofman who takes this class gave me the task of working on my structure, at least four hours a
week.  Lee knows how much I hate
structure. 
Even the word sends shivers through
me.  I gather that structure is
like a skeleton on which the flesh of the story hangs, but then I think of what
Julian Barnes has Flaubert say to us in his novel, Flaubert’s Parrot:
Books aren’t
made in the way that babies are made: they are made like pyramids.  There’s some long pondered plan, and
then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s
back-breaking, sweaty time-consuming work.  And all to no purpose! 
It just stands like that in the desert!  But it towers over it prodigiously.  Jackals piss at the base of it and
bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc.
I lack structure, I entirely lack
structure through out my life.  The
obvious example to me comes in my approach to housework.  I might start to tidy up the kitchen sink,
put dishes in the dishwasher, wipe nearby benches, but as I stand stacking and
wiping a thought will come into my mind about what needs doing elsewhere or an
object will appear in my line of vision that needs to be put somewhere else and I
will traipse up through the hallway to the bedroom or bathroom or wherever and
while in this new room I will see something else that needs attention, the
bathroom cupboard calls for re-arranging for instance, and I will work on
this.  Pathetic really.
I hold my experience of my father
responsible.  My father may have
been a man of structure but he passed none of it down to me.
 The man of structure even as underneath the neatness he was beginning to fall apart.  
When my daughters complain about
writing an essay, their father will insist they come up with a plan first of
all.  Then he will urge them to
work on a beginning, a middle and an end. 
Say what you are going to say, say it and then say what you’ve
said.  Simple. Hey presto – a
typical academic essay. 
To me it’s boring, but if I had
learned this, whether from my father or from the nuns at school, I might not be
in trouble with this book as I am today. 
I do not plan anything in this way,
not anything written.  No, I simply
plunge in where the fancy takes me and I wind up with many possible beginnings,
several chunky middles and an occasional ending, but they do not necessarily
fit well together.   I
cannot get the form.  As Julian Barnes writes:
Form isn’t an
overcoat flung over the flesh of thought (that old comparison, old in
Flaubert’s day); it’s the flesh of thought itself.  You can no more imagine an Idea without a Form than a Form
without an Idea.  Everything in Art
depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of
Alexander.  You must write
according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything
else go hang, when a line is good, it ceases to belong to any school.  A line of prose must be as immutable as
a line of poetry.
Blogging is the perfect medium for
me because it can be more chaotic than a novel.  My only structure is the weekly post.  The rest I leave up to chance.  And chance is a fickle creature,
sometimes she offers wondrous gifts and at other times, a load of crap.  

My grandfather’s clock

My mother does not have much by way
of a literal inheritance to leave her children,  but she tells me each of us can have one of the ‘precious’ items from our childhood that now take pride of place in her living
room. 
‘I don’t want you to fight over them,’ she said when I visited last week.  
I don’t see that we would, at least not overtly, but there is one single
item that to me stands out above all others – the grandfather clock – my grandfather’s clock, the one he
sent to my mother in Australia from Holland way back in the 1960s. 
‘It’s the only thing of real
value,’ my mother said.  ‘It’s an
antique.’
I’m not sure I can speak for the clock’s actual value but its sentimental value to my mother and to her children is
great, or at least I imagine it is great for my siblings as well.  
My mother has elected to give this clock to one
of my brothers.  It is the only
item that she has itemised specifically for one or another of us, except for her
piano, which goes to my older sister, the only one who ever learned to play properly.  That is a given. 
I don’t know where the idea came
from, but for several years now I have lived with the belief that one of my
younger sisters coveted that grandfather clock since we were children.  
You know how it is, in those conversations
children sometimes have with their parents: ‘When you die, Mum, I want you to
leave me your banjo…’
In this way, my daughters divide up my
jewellery – what there is of it – again not for its actual value, but for its emotional value, particularly my wedding ring.  Given the fact I have four daughters and only one ring, a
ring created and cast in gold by a friend now long dead, we have thought to
make a fresh cast of the ring so that all my children can have a copy.  But that’s another story.
My mother says she wants to be
buried with her rings, or else they will need to be cut off.  
That’s fine, my older sister reckons,
but to her it seems a waste to bury diamonds. 
There seems to be a debate between
the actual value and the emotional value. To me, my mother’s diamonds hold little
value.  They come from the rings her second husband gave her.  I
care only for the rings and things that come from my childhood, narcissistic as
that might seem.  
The things that
existed in my childhood that live on in my memory, they are the things I desire
most:  the paintings of windmills in Holland,
and of Europe in the winter, the wall hangings my mother hand embroidered, the
statue of the blessed virgin Mary, and the crucifix.
I sensed my mother was a little
surprised when I asked if I might have the crucifix, not for religious reasons – though I did not tell my mother that – more for its significance as an icon from
my childhood that sits in my memory like a beacon.  
‘Take it down now then,’  my mother said.  ‘Write your name underneath.’  I suggested that – with help – she might
like to write behind or underneath each object or painting the name of the
person to whom she wants to leave it. 
‘But I prefer to give each of you
something you like.  I want you each to choose.’
All except the grandfather clock, and I told my mother then how much my younger sister had always wanted that clock,
she perhaps more than any one of us. 
But no, my mother still wants to give it to my brother.
Why, I asked, why this
brother?  
‘He never married,’ my
mother said.  ‘He lives
alone.’ 
A clock like this could make his
home homely.  A clock like
this belongs in a cosy house.  A
clock like this would keep him company.
My mother went on to tell me how
she had stopped the clock from working when the grandchildren came along.  She did not want any of them to get
hurt playing with the brass metal weight on the end of the chains at the base
of the clock. 
But my brother could reassemble
it, she said.  He could get the clock working
again.
And so he could measure the passage of time, tick tock, tick tock, the
grandfather clock his constant companion.
I do not know what will happen to
the clock or the crucifix or any of the other memorabilia of my mother’s life,
but at least I can write about it, as I did once in a short story – literary license and all that: 
The girl hesitates
at the front door as she pulls it shut behind, long enough to catch a glimpse
of the statue of Jesus hanging from his crucifix on top of the piano
in the front hall.  His feet are cracked
where the nail has been driven in and although someone has tried to glue the
feet back in place the plaster has split up to his knees and he now hangs
loosely from his arms and swings in the updraft from the open door.