15. October 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

This morning I came across this letter from Martha Graham  to Agnes DeMille, both dancers that left a long trail of amazing choreography, works which are not only still being performed, but which arguably form the backbone of  some dance companies’ repertoire.

A Letter to Agnes De Mille

There is a vitality,
a life force,
a quickening
that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time,
this expression is unique.

And If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.
The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine
how good it is
nor how valuable it is
nor how it compares with other expressions.

It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly
to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.
You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate YOU.

Keep the channel open…
No artist is pleased…

There is no satisfaction whatever at anytime
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes “us” MORE alive than the others.

Martha Graham
( - a letter to Agnes De Mille-)

On one level, Graham’s advice strikes me personally, defining my task as a writer.  Stop judging, stop seeing your work through the judgments of others.  Keep the channel open and respond to it, because whatever anyone else thinks of the work, including myself in any given mood, the task, if my unique personhood is to be expressed, is only to keep the channel open.  It’s the kind of advice that any artist must continually return to, other voices being so anxious to shout down the creative impulse. 

On another level, it challenges me to think about both Darwin and Einstein, subjects of my fictional biographies, to think about what they did to keep their channels open.  In Darwin’s case, I’m aware that despite excessive approval-orientation, he produced a work that brought down 150 years of controversy by identifying and connecting to his passion and following wherever it took him.  As a child, he preferred collecting beetles to memorizing Latin vocabulary.  As a young man he incurred the wrath of his father by dropping out of two academic programs–medicine and theology–to go aboard HMS Beagle as the ship’s naturalist, sending back barrels of specimens to be studied by men who were then England’s top naturalists.  He didn’t yet see himself in their company, but as his ideas morphed, he dared to follow where they led, understanding that he had immense problems to solve–such as how species crossed oceans and appeared on different continents.  He built on the work of his predecessors and communicated with his fellow scientists regularly, swapping ideas, and particularly with Joseph Hooker, the botanist that inherited the directorship of Kew Gardens from his father.  And he didn’t allow the fact that he was a less-than-competent writer–Did you ever wonder why you memorize bullet points but don’t read his work in school?–to prevent him pursuing his goal and publishing his work.

What of Einstein?  He began writing papers and publishing in the Annalen, Europe’s most prestigious journal of physics, during the frustrating nearly two-year period when he could not find a teaching job.  Rejected for one teaching post after another, he used his time to immerse himself in the content and arguments of his era’s current thinkers, particularly Boltzmann, Mach, Ostwald, and Lennard.  He kept his mind mulling the problems his contemporaries encountered.  He wrote and published, and though this wasn’t ultimately what opened the door to his job at the Patent Office–a friend’s father did that–he didn’t insist on a direct path.  All of his concentration culminated in an explosion of productivity–five papers in 1905, just two years after he took his job at the Patent Office.  Now granted, Einstein’s brain was different, and we all don’t have that advantage, but there are methods here.  

What have I learned?  

• Identify your passion and follow where it leads. 

• Pursue the passion despite the nay-sayers.

• Don’t allow the immensity of the problem overcome your pursuit.

• Build on your predecessors.

• Cultivate the company of like minds.

• Don’t allow your weaknesses to defeat you.

• Immerse yourself in your materials, even when your path is blocked.

• Don’t insist on one path to your goal.  Walk through open doors, pursuing alternatives.

• When you’ve done these things, wait patiently for the pay-off.

And incidentally, Agnes DeMille was not a very good dancer. 

Posted in Martha Graham, Agnes DeMille, innovation, making art, reading, Einstein, Darwin, genius, writing | 2 Comments »

18. August 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

I have just uncovered that greatest of all delights, a book that runs so close to my vein that I look forward to going to bed at night so I can dip into it.  The book is The Paper Garden:  An Artist {Begins Her Life’s Work} At 72 by Molly Peacock. Perhaps it was my recent birthday that drew me to the book–one of the dreadful decade birthdays where it’s impossible not to glance back at goals unreached.  Anyway, the book turned up on my Amazon recommendations and given the title, I ran to the library.

The Paper Garden defies category, for while it presents a biographical portrait of the 18th century paper-cut artist Mary Granville Pendarves Delany (1700-1788), it also contains memoir-like passages of the author’s journey of discovery and her reasons for attraction to the amazing flower collages which are reproduced (gorgeously, I might add) in the 2010 Bloomsbury Press publication.  Inspiration abounds to pursue whatever artistic passion consumes one, age notwithstanding, but what I find most riveting are poet Molly Peacock’s observations on making art.  (My novel, Shadow Dancing, (http://www.nancypinard.com/2.html) explored that subject, so it is dear and close, a subject I’ve tried to break down for my creative writing students into the bite-size pieces required when one embarks on eating any elephant.)

Listen to what Peacock says after noting how Mary Granville left unerased pencil marks on her cut-outs, as if unaware that anyone would ever view her work, let alone inspect her craft:

“Great technique means that you have to abandon perfectionism.  Perfectionism either stops you cold or slows you down too much.  Yet paradoxically, it’s proficiency that allows a person to make any art at all; you must have technical skill to accomplish anything, but you also must have passions, which, in an odd way, is technique forgotten.  The joy of technique is the bulging bag of tricks it gives you to solve your dilemmas.  Craft gives you the tools for reparation.  And teachers give you craft, for a good teacher urges you beyond your childish perfectionism.  From there you proceed into the practice that eventually becomes expertise.”   (Peacock, p. 28-29)

I’m thinking about this in terms of my own work–Isn’t the “childish perfectionism” what often causes me to be blocked?– the need for risk-taking in early drafts, before the slow, eventual process of plying and applying craft to remedy the problems.  I’m also thinking about Albert Einstein’s process and the question of the contribution made by Mileva Maric.

When I look at what the biographers report about how each of them managed their studies–Einstein able to dismiss the demands of academia and digest the newest thought (not being taught) at the Polytech in Zurich.  Maric, by contrast, was much more the disciplined partaker of academic demands–what normally is associated with being an A student.  She never missed class, did her reading and homework, took notes, attended labs, followed directions.  While Einstein got into trouble for “coloring outside the lines,” inventing his own protocol for lab experiments such that in Introductory Physics Lab he was flunked by Herr Professor Pernet, he was also teaching himself what worked and what didn’t.  He had disdain for repeating experiments and collecting data that had already been collected by someone else, saying “Nothing new comes of thinking about a problem the same way it was created.” In fact, he encouraged Maric to use data collected by others–a fact which annoyed Herr Professor Weber, as if Einstein was somehow advocating cheating.

Their particular, individual orientations toward problem-solving would seem to support the thesis that Einstein was in fact the person responsible for the theoretical leaps required to change the world’s thought.  Their son, Hans Albert, reported that his mother stayed up late at night, checking Albert’s work, re-working the math.  Where she scored a 9 to Albert’s 10 in theoretical physics, one might also imagine her usefulness as a sounding board for new ideas–that person who can see the notion, but possibly also the cracks.   Should she get credit for that?  Doesn’t it take both minds?

It would seem so , since the locus of Albert’s work was accomplished during their marriage.  Input from Michelle Besso, Marcel Grossman, and others continued after the marriage ended, but the revolutionary thought did not.

What conclusion do you draw?

Posted in The Paper Garden, Shadow Dancing, making art, Molly Peacock, reading, Einstein, Darwin, Mileva Maric, writing | 3 Comments »

11. August 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

For the second time since I began writing fictional biography, someone said, “But how am I to know what’s true?”  My answer is that the scenes are made up, the dialogue, the emotional movement, but the settings are as real as I can make them, and I don’t tamper with known facts–assuming they are recorded somewhere and that I have found them.  I don’t change dates or rearrange events to my own ends, either.  In the case of SANDWALK, my fictional biography of the Charles Darwin family during the 17 months preceding the publication of Origin, it was relatively straightforward, thanks to Darwin being such a frequent and thorough letter writer,  available online at www.darwincorrespondenceproject.com, and their daughter Henrietta’s editing her mother’s letter collection into two volumes called Emma Darwin: A Century of Family Letters.

In the case of the Einstein book, it’s not so simple.  The letters were written in German, for example, so I’m dependent on translations.  And the executors of his estate were perhaps too conscientious in wanting to preserve Albert’s sainted image and destroyed much that was inconsistent with it.  Consequently, for the period I’m writing about now–August, 1901-November 1901–after Mileva had failed her exams and went home pregnant to Vojvodina (Serbia) to tell her parents and the time she turned up in Stein am Rhein, Switzerland to be near Albert, letters were either never written (unlikely) or were destroyed.   That means it’s up to me to figure out, based on what I can learn about her family and the cultural mores and religious values of Vojvodina in 1901, how that scene might have played with no help from actual accounts.

So, how does that work?  As a novelist, I have to look to the end game.  I know what happened to various family members, ultimately.  I know that Mileva’s father, very successful in terms of worldly goods, owning as many as four farms in various sections of Serbia and two other houses as well, felt he had failed with his children, that they had betrayed him.  I know that Mileva left Serbia to marry Albert after nearly dying, unwed, in childbirth with their first child Lieserl, that Albert never saw the baby, that she disappeared after age 2.  I know that Mileva’s brother was assumed lost in WW I, but then turned up in Russia and became a professor in a university, though his fellow Serbs and family considered his abandonment traitorous.  I know that her sister Zorka became schizophrenic and that she died on a bed of straw surrounded by 43 cats.

So, knowing those things, what can I assume about these people’s characters and their likely responses to Mileva’s news?  Another interesting fact that seems totally out of context is that when Mileva was in residence at Stein am Rhein, Albert sent her two books.  One was a book on hypnotism by Auguste Forel, the most recent director of the Burgholzli Mental Hospital in Zurich.  Since nothing psychological has ever entered their letters before, what might that suggest?  Mileva found the book disgusting, though she’s not very specific on that score.  Perhaps because Forel was into eugenics?  Or is that why he disgusts me?

That’s another problem, of course.  The matter of being revisionist.  I know that Forel’s work was used by Hitler, but it’s 1901 and no one knows that, yet.  It’s got to be kept in mind.

So, therein lie a few of the problems and my manner of addressing them.

Posted in Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, fictional truth, Stein am Rhein, Auguste Forel, Milos Maric, historical fiction, Fictional biography, Einstein, Darwin, reading, Serbia, writing | 2 Comments »

25. April 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

One of the ways writers make decisions is to read similar work by other authors.  I have recently begun to check out fictional biographies from Dayton’s three library systems, to see how other writers have handled some of the problems.  For example, how does the writer address the reader’s question, But how do I know what’s true here? 

Historical fiction and its subset, fictional biography, is a strange hybrid, and writers deal with it differently, usually by means of an author’s note, sometimes placed at the beginning, other times at the end.  I favor the beginning, but that’s likely my preference for being upfront about things in general.  In Max Phillips’ fictional biography of Alma Mahler, The Artist’s Wife, the note appears at the end.  In it, he confesses that he has strayed from the record at will, to his own ends.  The subject of the novel, and its point-of-view character–the profligate wife of Gustav Mahler whose particular passion was the conquest of geniuses–was merely the suggestion that set him off on a fictional journey?   I find myself unsettled by this confession, as if the only value in reading anything is to get at historical fact.

But I wouldn’t be a novelist if I believed that.  Truth, for me, is larger than fact, and fiction is particularly good at delivering the emotional truths that transcend facts.

That said, I’m not comfortable with borrowing an historical figure, then distorting known facts.  It’s a personal bias, I guess.  I’m delighted to discover that Jim Shepard–one of my mentors in the craft, though I’ve never met him–agrees.  In an essay called “Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact” contained in The Writer’s Notebook:  Craft Essays from Tin House, he says this:  “Literature that deals with history the most effectively, in my mind, . . . understands two things:  (A) that fiction about real events needs to respect the facts and (B), as our politicians have taught us, facts are malleable things.  The trick, it seems, is to do everything possible to honor A, as you understand it, while taking full advantage of B to shape your material into something aesthetically beautiful.” (p. 244)

What kind of distortion, then, might shaping the material bring?

Shaping might be best understood by looking at a painting such as Diego Rivera’s Flower Festival:  Feast of Santa Anita.   The central figure in this painting bears a heavy burden, a basket of calla lillies.  The shape of the figure, and particularly Rivera’s choice of white for his robe, makes it reminiscent of the cross of Christ.  The lilies themselves are shaped like hearts–and the stamen is exaggerated in a phallic way–a distortion introduced.  The children kneeling in the forefront, suggestive of worship, wear blouses with yokes that are also shaped like hearts.  Even the strands of hair in their braids are shaped like hearts, the braid image repeated in the binding on the basket.   The red flowers, poppies, look like mouths–or vaginas.  This painting, then, obstensibly about a figure at a flower festival, is really about love–both eros, and agape.

In literature, shape is delivered with a similar kind of repetition of an image.  In my novel about Darwin, the Sandwalk, a circular path on a bit of land rented from a neighbor, appears repeatedly in the novel as does the image of walking in circles, in general.  In the novel’s opening scene, Darwin’s daughter Henrietta is walking the fairy ring that has appeared in the lawn outside Darwin’s study window.  Now–here’s where the distortion comes in.  Yes, there really was a Sandwalk and Darwin walked it almost daily, assuming he was healthy enough. He called it his thinking path. But was there a fairy ring in the lawn outside his study window?  Who knows?  The fairy ring introduces an important concept in the novel–the relationship between what we can know (that a mushroom-like fungus causes the grass to darken in ring-like patterns) and the realm of the intangible–in this case, cavorting fairies who draw the unsuspecting into the ring to dance to their deaths.  It’s a metaphor for everything the book will tackle.  Is it a device?  Yes.  A useful one.  Is it fiction?  Yes.  Does it tamper with truth?  I don’t think so.

I don’t yet know what image will shape the Einstein novel, though it seems that a departing person–on a street or in a train station–keeps turning up in the text so far.   The working title of the novel is Quanta, because I’m writing in bursts/part(icles) that are not necessarily chronological.  Perhaps Departures would be a better title, suggesting all the personal abandonments that characterized his life and also his departure from current thought.

Time and many pages of writing must pass before I will know.

Posted in The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, Jim Shepard, Fictional biography, historical fiction, fictional truth, The Artist's Wife, Max Phillips, Darwin, Einstein, reading, Diego Rivera, Flower Festival: Feast of Santa Anita, writing | 2 Comments »

9. November 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

In a letter to writer/publisher A. S. Suvorin, Chekhov wrote, “You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude toward his work, but you confuse two things:  solving a problem and stating a problem correctly.  It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.”

I used this quote as a guideline in writing the Darwin book, where a reader might expect me to resolve the theological conflict between Charles and Emma and thereby make some pronouncement about my position.  But that is not the place of fiction.

This quote might be my guide once again, on the controversial issue of Mileva Maric’s possible contribution to Einstein’s work.  I will merely state the problem correctly:

He is married to a physicist classmate who once attended class and took meticulous notes while he went to coffee houses and read the work of contemporary physicists.  Gradually, he enticed her to join him there.

They enjoyed discussing physics together and read the same materials.

She sat in on his meetings of the Olympia Academy, contributing little to the discussion.

Einstein told her Serbian friends that she solved all his mathematical problems for him.

When he divorced her, he immediately reunited with his friend, mathematician Marcel Grossmann, the other meticulous note taker at the ETH. Grossmann was by then chair of the department and a specialist in geometry.

Geometry was the course that Maric failed twice, the score that prevented her graduating from the ETH.

The geometry of the fourth dimension was worked out by the math professor at the ETH who had once called Einstein a “lazy dog.”

Einstein regretted having paid so little attention to math when at the ETH.  He hadn’t understood its necessity in relation to theoretical physics.

Several international conferences have convened around the subject, the apparent conclusion being that she did his math but there is no evidence that she generated the creative ideas.

This is a but a partial list of the facts, composed from memory after a hiatus on Einstein research, but I shall continue building it as I re-engage and read more.

Posted in reading, Anton Chekhov, Mileva Maric, Darwin, Einstein, writing | 6 Comments »

16. October 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

I heard from my agent about the Darwin novel, who asked me if I might write an epilogue.  One occurred to me immediately, a scene that took place twelve years after the publication of Origin.  Consequently, I’m back looking at the Darwin novel, which feels like crawling into flannel sheets when the weather turns chilly in the autumn.

Einstein presents a different kind of challenge.  Darwin’s family was enough like my own Victorian upbringing, that the challenge has been elsewhere.  Einstein was at least verbally abusive–with other possibilities looming in the divorce documents–that is so unlike anything I’ve experienced in my own family life that I’ll have to lean on research and other writers.  Mary Karr?

Posted in Research methods, Darwin, Einstein, writing | 1 Comment »

8. October 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

Darwin, an invalid, went frequently to various water cure establishments where he repeatedly encountered the same fellow clients.  One such, Georgiana Craik, was a novelist of the sentimental romantic genre that Darwin himself preferred.  While Georgiana never used Darwin in a novel, her sister-in-law, Dinah Mulock Craik wrote a short story about a water cure that was likely Moor Park.  In the story, the establishment’s doctor and a client vye for the same beautiful woman. Some speculate that the client was based on Darwin.  (Moor Park’s doctor, Edward Lane, was in fact accused of making inappropriate advances by a female client, but was acquitted in court.)

Einstein was most assuredly the model for the character of Johannes Kepler in Max Brod’s novel, The Redemption of Tycho Brahe. Brod met Einstein during the latter’s brief sojourn in Prague, and whether consciously or unconsciously, Brod drew a portrait of Kepler that many readers recognized as Einstein.  Passages of this novel are quoted in Philipp Frank’s biography, Einstein:  His Life and Times and are interesting for their description of Einstein’s mien.  The point-of-view character is Tycho Brod:

“. . . Kepler now inspired him with a feeling of awe.  The tranquillity with which he applied himshelf to his labors and entirely ignored the warblings of flatterers was to tycho almost superhuman.  There was something incomprehensible in its absence of emotion, like a breath from a distant region of ice. . . . He recalled that popular ballad in which a Landsknect had sold his heart to the Devil and had received in exchange a bullet-proof coat of mail.  Of such sort was Kepler.  He had no heart and therefore had nothing to fear from the world.  He was not capable of emotion or of love.  And for that reason he was naturally also secure against the aberrations of feelings.  ‘But I must love and err,’ groaned Tycho, ‘I must be flung hither and thither in this hell, beholding him floating above, pure and happy, upon cool clouds of limpid blue.  A spotless angel!  But is he really?  Is he not rather atrocious in his lack of sympathy?’”

Posted in Darwin, Einstein | 1 Comment »

2. October 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

As my novel about Charles Darwin’s family goes to market, I’m thinking about the differences in the two men’s methodology. Darwin was an experimental biologist, such that his home, Down House, was filled with tanks of salt water, plants that intrigued him, animals that he was skeletonizing in potash. The saltwater tanks were filled with rotting plants as he tried to figure out how seeds might have migrated from one continent to another. He was enthralled with carnivorous plants which his wife quipped he would somehow make into an animal. The animal skeletons helped him theorize how one animal might have morphed into another, say a flying squirrel into a bat. We can only imagine the stench—all over the house, as sometimes, such as when he was studying the impact of music on various species, say earthworms, he’d place them in containers on his wife’s piano.

Einstein, by contrast, avoided experimentation whenever possible. He preferred using the data from other people’s experiments and conducting his science in his head. Thought experiments, he called them. This preference caused trouble with Heinrich Weber, premier physicist at the Polytechnic in Zurich where Einstein went to undergraduate school. In physics lab, Einstein circumvented the actual experiment, solving the problem in another, more theoretical way, by mathematical calculation, for example. When Weber complained, his lab assistant defended Einstein, insisting the alternate method was interesting, and furthermore, produced the correct result.

Posted in Darwin, Einstein, writing | 1 Comment »

2. October 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

As my novel about Charles Darwin’s family goes to market, I’m thinking about the differences in the two men’s methodology. Darwin was an experimental biologist, such that his home, Down House, was filled with tanks of salt water, plants that intrigued him, animals that he was skeletonizing in potash. The saltwater tanks were filled with rotting plants as he tried to figure out how seeds might have migrated from one continent to another. He was enthralled with carnivorous plants which his wife quipped he would somehow make into an animal. The animal skeletons helped him theorize how one animal might have morphed into another, say a flying squirrel into a bat. We can only imagine the stench—all over the house, as sometimes, such as when he was studying the impact of music on various species, say earthworms, he’d place them in containers on his wife’s piano.

Einstein, by contrast, avoided experimentation whenever possible. He preferred using the data from other people’s experiments and conducting his science in his head. Thought experiments, he called them. This preference caused trouble with Heinrich Weber, premier physicist at the Polytechnic in Zurich where Einstein went to undergraduate school. In physics lab, Einstein circumvented the actual experiment, solving the problem in another, more theoretical way, by mathematical calculation, for example. When Weber complained, his lab assistant defended Einstein, insisting the alternate method was interesting, and furthermore, produced the correct result.

Posted in Darwin, Einstein, writing | No Comments »

14. September 2010 by Nancy Pinard.

The biography reading is so extensive, it would be easy to digest entire volumes and have no clue where anything is. That’s what an index is for, of course, and they are blessedly helpful. When I researched the Darwin book, I used yellow sticky tabs (made by cutting up Post-its) throughout the reading, marking everything interesting, every bit of essential information, description, or anecdote that suggested a scene. At the end, the books had a rumpled yellow fringe but no way to distinguish anything from anything else.

This time I have different colored tabs.  Orange is for an incident in what I perceive so far to be the present story. Green is for a flashback possibility. Blue is something I deem blogworthy, either for its general interest or because it makes me think and I want it on the record. Pink is for a character generalization that I need to keep in mind–such as a statement of internal conflict. That leaves yellow, which I eschew. Perhaps I associate it with Darwin. The full-size yellow Post-its I am using for possible ending materials, as endings are so important and therefore proportionately scary to write.

I’ll see if this works better. There is much information that is contained in every biography of course, that is becoming part of my Einstein vocabulary. There is the usual problem, then, that once I am very familiar with the material, I forget what others don’t know. I assume. Thank goodness for my faithful reader who raises the red flag to say, “Wait. I don’t know what this is about!”

Posted in Research methods, Darwin, Einstein, writing | 4 Comments »