Review: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

 There was a time when I used to read many books about writing but I lost the urge as I passed my MA in ‘writing’ and quietly plugged away at my writing projects. I’d not heard of Bird by Bird until this year but for some reason, it kept popping up in my attention, the way things do. Then, I was in a charity shop and saw a copy, it seemed like fate.

Structured as a set of seminars, where Anne Lamott tells the reader what she’d tell her students, and also the things she’d like to say to them but probably wouldn’t. The book deals more with the writing life than writing itself, and the writing life as she sees it in particular.

I begins with a pretty typical ‘weird kid becomes writer’ story. Tom Gauld did this brilliant cartoon once where mysterious hooded figures come and take a child from their parents. The parents cry and wail, wishing they hadn’t gone to the library so much. The child declares “I’m a writer now” as they are taken away by the hooded figures. It does feel like that, some people simply get into these book things too hard and they are cursed to be the writers.

It’s in this first section that the first disquieting note arose. She says she loved to hang out with the oddballs. The oddballs are defined as “ethnic people, theatre people, poets, radicals, gays and lesbians”. I could generously interpret the statement to mean that they were different to the kinds of people she knew with her conservative background (and a later tangent on school lunches reveals how limited and conservative this background was) but in light of other comments, it does seem she sees anyone not from this background as strange. Soon after she says how all her stories involved a character meeting “someone like a clown, or a foreigner.”

I think it’s supposed to be a bit of jokey self-deprecation, playing a ‘bit’ on what a poor teacher she is, but she really has no generosity for her students. She mainly portrays them as irritating losers, too hung up on publication and generally rather pathetic. She sighs when they keep asking her about agents, and in some senses I should see why, the writing itself should be more important than the agent, but these are students on a writing course - of course they are interested in how to get an agent. What’s more, for her to dismiss the question about agents has a sour taste when you realise she simply used her dad’s agent and didn’t have to go through the process herself.

There is a good point to made in focussing on the writing not the publication, as there is in telling would-be published writers that publication isn’t the cure-all they are hoping for. There are some other good pieces of advice as well, the titular “bird-by-bird”, which could also be seen as word-by-word. Writing is a series of small decisions and work that lead to a larger whole. I like her insistence on writing at least 300 words a day to keep up a routine. I liked the reminder that plot springs from character, that a writer should trust their intuition and that the pain of perfectionism can be massaged out like a muscle cramp.

To be honest, it’s the reflections on life that made this a pretty unpleasant book. She really leans into the pain of writing and the self doubt. As someone who dreads the moment before I start writing and do all sorts to put that moment off, I understand where she is coming for but Lamott makes it sound like there is almost no part of writing that she enjoys. I actually have a nice time once I get started, it’s the getting started that hurts.

There’s also a lot in the book about jealousy. She condemns Muriel Spark to having “bad things rain down” upon her because she enjoys writing. There’s a whole chapter on jealousy and it’s really ugly. I think she’s trying to overstate her jealousy, create humour by hyperbole, but it’s just horrid. She talks about putting a friendship ‘on sabbatical’ because the friend was successful. It gets really ugly when she says about what got her out of her jealousy, a documentary in AIDS. She decides that if these people can keep going with the ravages of that disease, she can face her jealousy.

Another chapter is about how she does charitable work at an old people’s home and how she learns, shock horror, that the old people are people. True, not proper people, some of them smell of wee and have thinning hair, but something like people. It’s a true revelation to her. Another time she tells a story of a church committee and says that there were 3 African-American women and one white one - the race had nothing to do with the story, why did she need to include that?

I can accept a lot the ugly things she says are her playing a role, doing a ‘bit’, making herself out to be worse than she is but I think there is a real ugliness underneath a lot of it. She says she writes because she enjoys embodying other people, getting into her skin but a lot of her writing (including here) is about her, and a lot of her. There are too many instances where she seems to treat other people like props for it to seem like a coincidence. 

Some of the writing advice is good, some of the life writing engaging but I found this book too ugly to be enjoyable. 

Why join Grub Street?

 There was an anecdote that Samuel Johnson used to tell of his early days in London where he visited a bookseller called Wilcox. When Wilcox asked him how he intended to earn money, Johnson said he’d earn it with his literary labours. Wilcox looked at the tall, muscled and (at this point, not-fat) Johnson and said he’d do better-off buying a porter’s knot. 

The anecdote seems to have been one that Johnson told in both a self-congratulatory and self-deprecating way. Look how far he’d come, how well his literary labours had served him but also how unlikely it had seemed at the beginning. But why didn’t Johnson become a porter? It was heavy work, but it was steady. All that physical work in the outdoors among the people of London may have been more beneficial to his mental health than the locked in struggles of writing - a task he never really enjoyed. Why did people join the denizens of Grub Street? 

It seems that Samuel Johnson didn’t particularly. When someone approached him and later life and told him he’d have been a feted lawyer, Johnson mourned how his financial and social situation had blocked that path from him, and that he would have enjoyed that life very much. He tried to get other jobs than hack writer, applying to work in schools and even setting up a school of his own. What’s more, after he’d been a writer for a few years, editing The Gentleman’s Magazine, he tried again to get a job at a school.

In many ways, he really wasn’t cut out to be a Grub Street writer. He was dreadful at meeting deadlines, bristled under any editorship or management and while he’d write prefaces and articles for other people, he was a dreadful collaborator. What’s more, he really does seem to have found the act of writing to be incredibly displeasurable. It’s very noticeable that most of what he wrote was commissioned and that his output fell after his pension meant he didn’t need to write for money. He was always coming up with ideas of things he could write and projects he could carry out - and he never saw any of those projects through.

It seems that Samuel Johnson joined Grub Street because he’d run out of any options. He could have bought a porter’s knot and carried items for other people, or perhaps have used the skills he learnt in his father’s bookshop and entered the printing trade - but he had more education than that, and seemed to think it his duty to use his education to educate others, even if he found it dull drudgery.

Oliver Goldsmith is a different story. While it seems Johnson had some clear ideas about the kind of figure he wanted to be, Goldsmith seems to have drifted. He drifted from Ireland to Scotland, from Scotland around Europe and from Europe to London. He claims to have obtained a medical degree in that time but it seems unlikely. What’s more, even if he had the skill (I mean, he did essentially kill himself through self-malpractice), he didn’t have the demeanour. People may have enjoyed his company but he didn’t give off the air of authority.

He also worked in a school, where he was an usher. There he was dreadfully offended when a pupil was surprised that he considered himself a gentleman. It seems he fell into Grub Street because he wanted to elevate himself and make himself known. His first book, An Enquiry into the State of Polite Learning in Europe seems to be more about inflating his position as a learned man than any real inquiry. The way he chased trends in The Bee and The Citizen of the World seem to show a man who wanted fame an notoriety - which fits well with his complaint about readers going out there way to not know he had a new book out.

Unlike Johnson, he was good with a deadline and worked well with, and for, others. Most of his output consisted of compiling and retelling others work in readable ways. If he didn’t exactly love the task, Goldsmith does seem to find pleasure in doing something well. Although he describes the difficulties of writing, especially the absurdity of his walking about with a serious face, trying to write funny lines - he seems to enjoy writing. Eventually, of course, this brought him the fame and fortune he’d always wanted, for a time at least.

Then there’s George Psalmanazar, who worked steadily in Grub Street for the last half of his life. He wrote careful histories and parts of encyclopaedias, where he even taught himself Hebrew so he could fact-check. For him, Grub Street drudgery was the penance for putting all his ludicrous fantasies and misinformation about Formosa into the world.

Finally, I want to talk about Christopher Smart, who’s different from the others because he actively chose Grub Street, rather than fall or be pushed into it. He had a sweet deal in Cambridge, he’d gained a fellowship where he could live comfortably and convivially, gaining praise for winning the Seatonian Prize every year. Yet he gave this all up to move to London, write silly poems for daft magazines and run cabarets dressed as an old woman.

It could be that he gave it up for love, the reason he was eventually kicked out of Cambridge was his marriage to Anna-Maria Carnan, although he met her through his Grub Street connections, so it seems she was part of the package. Perhaps he saw it as freedom, but he signed such restrictive (and ludicrous) business contracts that he was rarely free. Perhaps he felt he could have more fun among the hack writers.

If anything, Christopher Smart seemed to really enjoy writing. When he was writing silly copy for daft magazines, it’s really enthusiastically silly copy. After he was incarcerated in a private asylum, he still wrote. Some of those texts were for publication, but much of it wasn’t - no one would publish Jubilate Agno. It seems that Smart was one of those people who needed to write.

All this leads to another question, why do people write now? There’s not even the camaraderie of Grub Street to keep us going, only the slow grind of words.

Fear of the moment - the hardest part of writing.

 The hardest part of writing for me, isn’t the part where I’m putting words on the page. While I can sometimes sit sweating at that blank space, or feel myself grinding out words as I grind my teeth, the act of writing is typically an enjoyable one - or relatively harmless at least. 

No, the really difficult part of writing, the element that freezes me and has retarded every single writing project I’ve ever started, is that moment before I start to write. That moment, possibly just a few seconds is agony to me and I’ll do almost anything to put it off. It’s a moment where the blood runs cold and I freeze up. 

I think it’s something to do with turning the possible into the actual. That process has always interested me and is a core theme in my self-published novel, Death of a Dream Pedlar. The possible chapter, article or piece, the hoped for one, never translates fully from my head, through the string of words and onto the page. Sometimes it gets close. Often, when I’ve written something and re-read it, especially if I’ve left it aside for a while, I’m pleased with what’s there. No matter how many times i have sat and written something to a standard I feel is acceptable, there’s something inside me which never trusts I’ll be able to do it again. That minute, or even couple of seconds stands as an unconquerable mountain that I have to face each time.

I also find that if I am writing, hit a small bump in the flow, need to answer a phone or a call of nature, I return to the text and have to face that moment again. Even if, while writing, I has a good notion of what the next part will be, I find I have to build up my courage and determination and get over the pain again. One of the reasons I’ve kept writing this blog so long, updating every Wednesday, is to force myself to face the moment at least once a week. One of the benefits of writing theatre reviews was that the deadline was midday the next day and I usually had not time to meet it in the morning and so had to write as soon as I got home. I still had to get through the moment every time I started a review, but I could rely, intellectually at least, on the fact that all the previous reviews had been written.

Another strange thing, is that the times when I am most desperate to write, most fizzing with ideas and lines, frothing at the mouth to get scribbling, are the times when this is impossible. My biggest waves of inspiration or willingness are when I’m at work, teaching children about science or marking maths. I think it\s almost a cheat my brain has with me, that when the prospect of the starting moment is impossible, I’m eager to do it.

This difficulty in getting going is one that I find in much of my life, I’m bad at transitions. I’m terrible at getting up and then getting going, I’m slow to warm up when I get to work, I stay at work a little longer than I need to because I find it hard to transition back into a post-work state. It’s not that I am nostalgic or look backwards, I simply find the shunt between different modes difficult to do, and I suppose the shunt into writing mode is the most difficult of all. 

Generally, the biggest projects I have worked on are novels, but recently I’ve been embarked on the more physical challenge of stripping and decorating my house into somewhere comfortable to live. I’m really getting there now. I’ve had to balance this project with settling into a new workplace (a transition I’ve found harder than I expected), a new town (one I’ve found easier), rehearsing two plays as well as my writing, reading, leisure and bodily needs. It’s been a pretty full on year - and I’ve learnt some lessons.

Back when I was living somewhere else but doing this place up, I’d come here after work, put in a gruelling few hours scraping and then walk back to where I was living. As I’ve worked on the house while living here, I’ve managed to tear myself away from easier pleasures and get working. Last week I balanced painting my bedroom with rehearsing over six hours a week on a play I’m in. This has meant coming home from work, throwing on painting clothes, painting for an hour and a half, cleaning, changing and then going to the rehearsal. Normally, I’d have regarded the hour or so as dead space, but I managed to see the time as something I could truly accomplish a little more to my overall goal.

Writing and novel and gussying up a house are not too dissimilar. There’s an end goal in sight and a seemingly endless series of tasks to achieve to reach it. Just as I was able to transition into decorating mode and get started, reasoning that all little steps get closer to the final outcome, I hope I can apply the same in my writing life and really, finally free myself from fear of that moment.  It’s worth a try, anyway.

Playing with History: 3 (The Little Things)

 

It seems true, as Kitty Kallen said, that little things mean a lot. My experience these last few weeks have emphasised this. Living as a squatter in my own house, confined to a couple of rooms where everything else is mess and chaos, my recent reading of Hubbub about the small things that make life difficult, trying to get back into writing my novel about Samuel and Nathaniel Johnson - the all remind me of the difficulties of little things.

In the house, the difficulty of not having a proper place to sit and write has made it harder to do so. Not having a clean place to put my clothes where they don’t gather a thin layer of brick dust, or having to wear outdoor shoes to leave the little carpeted room I’m mostly holed up in, are all things that spins the sense of life off-kilter.

Similarly, the experiences read about in Hubbub, the neighbour who doesn’t empty their latrine pit often enough, the dubious freshness of meat and veg, the noise of pewterers hammering away on loud, empty vessels, all have an outsized impact on how lives are lead.

Then, with a new awareness of these things, I return to my novel and find those little details, the things that make life real are the hardest ones to know about. This is especially true because of the domestic nature of the book. What little jobs and bodges existed in the Johnson’s home at Breadstreet? Where were the draughty areas? What little jobs did the family mean to do but never got round to because ‘it wasn’t that bad really’? These little details are the elements that really shape a life. As Johnson said, “There is nothing too little for so little a creature as man”. 

I’m lucky that the Johnsons were so written about and recorded. I know where there house was, the layout of it. I know that the kitchen was the lowest room in the house, below street level and that the fire was kept lit, and many times the only fire lit. I know that the family, despite the size of their house, mainly decamped to this dingy, warm snuggery. I know that Samuel sat and read by the fire, because that’s where he was when he was spooked out reading Hamlet. 

I also know a little about how they ate and drank. Johnson was given coffee in the morning but Sarah was prohibited to keeping a tea-caddy and inviting friends over. Samuel loved boiled pork, rump steak and plumb pudding. He drowned his food with gravy. As a child, he’d snack on toasted oats, which he’d carry loose in his pockets much as he would later carry his snuff. He was inordinately fond of fruit and could eat dozens of plumbs when in season. We also know he found a book that he loved when he was rooting around the top shelves of the bookshop for apples Natty had left there to dry. Samuel never reports of going hungry.

The Johnson family seem lucky. When reading about the town’s infrastructure compared to the descriptions in Hubbub, Lichfield sounds like a well ordered town. The water supplies are well regulated, inspected and maintained. The industrial problems of towns like Birmingham don’t really affect the place and Lichfield doesn’t seem to have the outbreaks of cholera that other cities suffer. 

Yet, the family did live next to the main marketplace. How noisy was it? How dirty? How much did it impinge on the family in the house? There’d have been animals, litter, vegetable debris. What about the cries, calls and general noise of market days? Was the house an island from noise or a noisy place itself? It was a new build, organised in the modern way of many smaller rooms, but those rooms were filled with books, skins, paper and all the work and stock for the shop. John Wain points out how all the Johnson males were large and that “when they squeezed past each other on the stairs, or in narrow spaces, between bookshelves, they must have seemed like mastiffs in a terrier’s kennel.” Michael himself often found reasons to be away from the house for long periods, Samuel didn’t want to return after months of visiting a cousin and Natty seemed to have liked the company of a pub. Perhaps they were all trying to escape. Poor Sarah didn’t have that outlet.

Of course, this is where knowledge and imagination need to blend. It feels as much as I know (and posts like this are partly an exercise in recalling and organising the knowledge I have) I will never know enough to convey the texture, the rhythms of life for this one family, in this one time, at this one place. And with the disorder swirling round me at the moment, it’s hard to concentrate on what I know as it is.

600th Post: SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

I’m very happy to announce that my novel Death of a Dream-Pedlar is now available from Amazon as a paperback or an ebook.

My launch price for the paperback is £10 and the ebook is 99p. Naturally I recommend the paperback.

In many ways, this book has been some time coming. I started a short story with many of these ideas in 2005, a chunk of the book formed my Masters dissertation in 2009 and I first finished it and tried to get it crowd funded in 2014. 

Ten years later, heavily re-written and here it is, actually coming out. Part of that has been laziness, part of it life, part of it the insistence that only standard agent-publisher publishing is the only legit kind. I’ve rather come around to self-publishing as the only really Grub Street approach to new publishing - but I’ll write another piece about that.

It’s funny all the comments I’ve got from agents. So many pieces of praise, so many agents describing the book (and me) as wonderful or great but always the ‘but’, they thought many people would really enjoy the book but they didn’t know how to place it in the right market who’d try it in large numbers.

So here it is.. I’ve tried to solve those problems myself. “A mystery, a lark, a look at the nature of dreams and a celebration of the triumph over suicidal ideation - Death of a Dream-Pedlar is a lively exploration into a curious world with an unforgettable heroine.”

And to make it easier to try… the ebook is only 99p., Be brave, give it a go.

Oh, and I just made a hardback also.

The Problem of Nathaniel Johnson

 

Did you know that Samuel Johnson had a younger brother?

I did, but the significance of that didn’t register until I was skimming Wayne Jones’s My Sam Johnson. In this book, Jones gives a clear and condensed version of Johnson’s life and, as a result, all the known elements of Nathaniel Johnson, Samuel’s younger brother, were put together. The information that struck me was that Samuel left for London, at the age of twenty-seven, in the same week that Nathaniel died at twenty-four. 

Immediately my novelist’s alarm went off. There’s something very tidy (in a shaped narrative sort of way) of one brother leaving to make his fortune the same week the other died. Especially because the brother leaving was destined to become one of the most influential writers of his age, and he was doing it super late. The Samuel Johnson that left for London was a man approaching thirty who’d thus far failed at every endeavour he’d tried. What’s more, he was going to flounder for another fifteen years before anything was going to happen. And what about the younger brother? Nathaniel had spent his whole life in the orbit of this future ‘great man’ and had seen nothing but a failure. 

What’s more, where had Nathaniel died? He was buried in Lichfield but had recently set off to the south coast with the aim of hitching a boat to Georgia before working in Frome. If he’d come back to Lichfield ill, wouldn’t Samuel have delayed his London trip to be with him? Some people have suggested that Nathaniel killed himself, but he was buried in holy ground and his epitaph, written by Samuel, talks of a ‘pious death’. For him to lie on an epitaph in a church seems very unlike Samuel.

Delving deeper, what is fascinating about Nathaniel is his absence. Samuel rarely talks about him and, in anecdotes where it seems plausible Nathaniel might have been there, he is not mentioned. We know their father, Michael, taught Samuel to swim, did he teach Nathaniel at the same time? It’s presumed that Nathaniel went to the same grammar school, given the boy’s nearness in age it would be presumed they were in the same class. We hear of Samuel being forced to perform for guests, we don’t know if Nathaniel was also made to do that.

Pouring through biographies, anecdotes, ‘Johnsonian Gleanings’ and all sorts of other texts, this is pretty much all we have about Nathaniel:

He was born in 1712, when Samuel was just over three years old. Their mother, Sarah, had actually been pregnant with him when she took Samuel to London to be touched by Queen Anne. At Nathaniel’s christening, she made Samuel say the words ‘little Natty’ and spell them out for guests.

When the boys were six and eight, they were sent to Birmingham to visit relatives. Samuel was offended when their father referred to them both as ‘boys’, not wanting to be thought the same as Nathaniel. When the spire of their local church fell in, Samuel’s parents and Nathaniel went to worship in the chapel of the nearby Christ’s Hospital, while Samuel stayed out in the fields to read.

Nathaniel took on duties at the bookshop, especially after the death of their father. He rode frequently to other branches and, during a discussion about how bad the roads were, said he’d never come across a bad road. Samuel took this as an example of how ‘manly’ he was, that he was tough and little things didn’t annoy him. We also know that Nathaniel had a habit of hiding apples on the top shelves of the shop, because Samuel was looking for some of these when he came across a copy of Petrarch.

Later on, after his time in Oxford and his brief spell in Birmingham, Samuel tried to gain subscriptions for a translation of Latin poetry to be handled by him and ‘N Johnson, Bookseller’. 

Nathaniel then ran a bookshop in Burton-on-Trent. Something happened there. We don’t know exactly, but it was dishonourable, maybe illegal. There is some speculation that he may have committed some fraud, which was the drive for Samuel’s support of William Dodd many years later.

Nathaniel wrote to his mother from London, complaining about her and Samuel’s lack of support, not lending him bookbinding tools or money to buy so much as a ‘quire of paper’. He complains of Samuel would ‘scarce ever use me with common civility’ and that he’d have preferred to run a bookshop in Stourbridge but Samuel’s influence over their mother had squashed that wish. He says that he’ll go and start a new life in America because “I know not nor do I much care in what way of life I shall hereafter live, but this I know that it shall be an honest one and that it can’t be more unpleasant than some part of my life past.”

Years later, Samuel tries to find out a little about his brother’s next steps. He writes to Frome in Somerset to get information, though doesn’t actually admit that it’s his brother he was talking about. In it, he describes Nathaniel as “likely enough to attract notice while he stayed, as a lively noisy man that loved company,” and suggest that people in a pub may remember him. We don’t have the reply but it seems that Nathaniel ended up there on his way to catch a boat to Georgia. Nathaniel then turns up dead in Lichfield.

Writing a prayer for his mother’s death, Samuel notes down that he’s had ‘the dream of my Brother’, and that he shall remember it. Later on, in one of the books he used for the dictionary, he marked the words ‘my brother’ next to a passage. The passage is about how Christ’s sensitivity would have made his agonies more than if they’d happened to a less sensitive man. The suggestion is that the less sensitive man is Nathaniel.

Johnson wrote Nathaniel’s epitaph, “born in 1712, whose powers of mind and body held out great promise, but his short life ended with a pious death in the year 1737,”

And that’s all there is. What kind of character can be created from these snippets? That’s the next job in preparing for my new novel. It’s a fun ride to be starting (but I’ve got some definite ideas).