I am at that stage of the book I am working on where I wake up, about every third day, feeling like the cat who has fixed on its prey: my whole being seems focused exactly on the placewhere I will soon pounce. It is as if my body is completely still, save perhaps for the slightest lifting of one foot. All my muscles are leaning slightly forward, my eyes feel young and keen. I can see the arc I will soon fly along; I can see where I will land.
I’m an old enough writer to know this is a very good thing. But I can’t write just yet. There are a couple more stories I need to settle into, to understand. People with whom I yet need to spend time, to sit with, and a few with whom I still need to argue. There are yet short pieces, clues left behind by others, that I have already marked in three different inks but that I need to read one more time, to know how they fit.
The book I am writing is not a history book, exactly, not in the usual sense of history books. Its genre is more of the garb my muse feels happiest wearing: a sort of walkabout history—the literary version of the hooded wool cape I wear in the fall. One with all of the attentiveness of the scholarly monograph, with all the attention to chronology and context, but also with the honesty of the junior ticket-taker who knows she’s in there, asking impolite questions that elicit not the facts one would better obtain from the written record, but that draw out the relieved laugh, the frightened insight, the sadness of time and consequences, and particularly the hope of being understood finally. That draws out, perhaps even, an answer to the question of motivation (that golden ring of the carousel we call history).
The interviews I am now doing feel as important as anything I will ultimately produce. These discussions have no public existence outside of what I will ultimately produce. But they are rare instances of individuals recounting, reflecting, understanding, and I very much have the sense of humility I ought to have at being a witness to those oral cave paintings. I do not feel I can rush them so I can get to the writing, tightly wound as my body may be. I need to listen longer.
And so, as relief, when I can’t listen and process anymore (which is almost every evening right now) I am doing what I do at this stage, and reading P.D. James. Murder mysteries.
Blessedly, James has given us a new Dalgliesh mystery, The Private Patient, into which I can and do now sink myself when I can process no more reality. I do not read novels, ordinarily, unless a gig requires it. But I do read James and Dalgleish, over and over if I must. There is something about her methodical development of the plot and the characters—the way she understands that characters are what create plot—that soothes me as I work on my own story of character-driven plot.
I have a very keen sense of character, and a fine ear for dialogue. It is one reason my prose wins me awards and accolades. The reason, I tell myself, that I cannot simply switch over to fiction and write mystery novels instead of works of real history is this: James has England, and I do not. The Private Patient reassured me of this excuse on the first page. (Good, kind James!) She begins with the aged bones of London, making so clear how it isn’t really impolite to murder a perfectly good character if what you’re doing is throwing her bones on the great giant heap of all the people who came before. Ashes to ashes, and all that, and London has a lot of ashes. Murder away!
I couldn’t possibly murder anyone around here, even if I wanted to. There are no bodies in my little village backyard, save those of the dozens of bluejays and crows massacred by West Nile Virus a few years ago. Unlike England, I do not have the fens, nor the ancient urban churchyards, nor the human and structural remains of wars so numerous only schoolchildren required to do so can remember them all. How could I murder in a place so young? My house counts as “historic,” yet the truth is only five families have lived here, and three of them for less than three years each. The coffee shop where I write looks old only in the sense that it is stuck in 1990s decor. This place is still an architectural toddler, with toys, not bodies, scattered in the cellars.
I do think about it, though—murdering someone. I think about what a nice protagonist I could make, with just a few minor improvements—a troublemaker historian of medicine, with a habit of cooking when intellectually blocked and of seeing in people what the polite don’t see. (I have, for example, a bad habit of being able to discern people’s hidden fetishes without prompting or desire.) And academia—what a perfect place for a mystery series. So many ways to kill people, and so many reasons to do so.
I fantasize about giving up my subjugation to non-fiction and writing, as it is jokingly known to my household, the LMS: the Lucrative Mystery Series. It would be so pleasurable, too. In fiction, I could go wherever I want without having to put my toiletries in three-ounce containers. I could sleep with whomever I want, without scandal or guilt or fear of infection. Hell, I could sleep late.
And the truth is, I could murder someone around here. The more I think about the LMS, the more I come into my own as the writer I’ve always hoped to be, the more I feel a sense of place that feels open to fiction. The courtroom of our little city hall, with walls as thick as the local politics. The warrens of low-ceilinged tunnels under my medical school, full of pipes, leading so conveniently (for my murderous purposes) to the anatomy labs and the furnaces. The little old liberal arts college on the hill out west where I will be a visiting fellow next year, with its old chapel and towered classroom buildings clad in rough red brick.
I even have a plot sketched out for the first book, which takes place during my protagonist’s dissertation year, as she toils at a Mütter-like museum, accidentally uncovering systematic murder happening under the guise of what appears to be a benevolent research protocol. Her dissertation director necessarily becomes annoyed with her growing conspiracy theory and the increasing lack of dryness in her project. (Wetness is not, after all, valued by academics, even as they lap it up.) There’s a delicious love interest in the form of a cop who wonders why anyone who can think so clearly about cause and effect would bother only to do history.
The truth is, the reason I don’t slide into the LMS isn’t a failure of locale. It is that my muse is a truth-bitch. She does not approve of that which is even the slightest bit false. She does not put up with a date out of place, a minor misquotation, or even so much as the tentative presentation of a theory I don’t really feel in my gut is true. She surely would not put up with whole tales spun, even if I did not spin them from thin air.
I sometimes think I ought to resent her for this. Why can’t we fool around with fantasy play? That I want to try doesn’t mean I don’t love her and appreciate her. Really, I assure her, I do not wish to blur the line between fiction and non-fiction, the way some writers do (while claiming, annoyingly, that their work is non-fiction—you know, as in “a little bit pregnant”). I remind my muse that I (we) write non-fiction not only to document what really happened, but also to draw forth the lessons, from real life, of what real life is. If you make up sections, well, then, it isn’t really real life, is it? So I wouldn’t….
And yet, even I—the truth-bitch’s lover—know some of the truest insights about humans come in the guise of fiction. I don’t have to go back to Homer and Shakespeare and Austen to to prove my obvious point. Just poke your head in at my department in Chicago, where everyone can easily be assigned a character from Pooh whose personality will match his or hers shockingly well. (I am Rabbit. I am actually more Rabbit than Rabbit himself.)
James’ new book has the necessary disclaimer:
The Manor [where the private patient is murdered] and all connected with it […] exist only in the imagination of the author and of her readers and have no connection with any person past or present, living or dead.
But of course that is in itself a fiction. If the book had no connection to the living and dead, it would be a horrible book. And it is a very good book. She’s writing real people, even if they are made up in the particulars. I want to bed Dalgliesh as much as ever (though I’d also be happy to take Benton—he cooks!). I want to have a beer with Kate as much as ever.
The best part about writing fiction would mean I could stop living such a crazy life. I look like I lead a crazy life—full of intrigue and characters and coincidences and drama—because I am into a crazy life. But the people closest to me know the truth: I have to be able to write a good story to be happy, and my muse is a truth-bitch. So I have to live fiction to do what is my purpose in life: writing. I live fiction so I can write non-fiction. I am the novelist’s shadow.
If I wrote fiction—if I could write fiction—I could live an ordinary life. I wouldn’t be caught in the strange position of being interviewer and interviewee on the same day. I wouldn’t have Harry, my private investigator (“my special librarian” as I call him sometimes) who helps me find hard-to-find people and facts. I wouldn’t be the subject of odd people’s conspiracy theories. I could just stay home and murder people. I would never have to witness the tragedy of the way people really are. Never have to wonder how I am going to do that person’s story justice. Never have to agonize over which details to leave out. Give up the cowgirl boots of the sheriff historian I’ve accidentally become—the Ph.D. in the cape sorting out the good from the bad—and settle into my pajamas and my lamb’s wool slippers. Sleep the sleep of death.