13. May 2012 by Nancy Pinard.

I just returned from two days spent at the Ohio University Literary Festival, where lectures were delivered by writers Amy Hempel (if you don’t know her story, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” read it without passing Go), Richard Rodriguez (whom I will stalk in print for the rest of my days),  and 2010 NBA award winning poet, Terrance Hayes.  It was Hayes who brought up the topic I’m thinking about this morning; specifically, the difference between the terms in the title.  Until the conference, I wasn’t making distinctions between these terms.  To be honest, I didn’t think about them in the same sentence.

Terrance Hayes changed that.

Ambiguity is a lack of clarity that results in a question being unanswerable because the question itself is not clear.  Ambiguity, in writing, is a flaw.

Complexity is the result of the intersection of two disparate emotions or ideas.  It results from the character who acts against his own priorities and values, because, well, we all have internal conflicts that don’t make logical sense.  My March 20 post on internal conflict elaborates on this topic. Complexity, in writing, is necessary.

Mystery is the result of a clearly stated question that has no definitive answer.  It opens the work to the larger questions like, what makes life meaningful? or how is justice served? It enlarges what it touches by exposing the gray edges of certainty.  It is what I, as a writer, mean to poke in my work in such a way that the reader enters a larger sphere of questions than the ones s/he is already asking.

Clarify ambiguity, develop complexity, embrace mystery.

Posted in ambiguity, complexity, mystery, Terrance Hayes, Richard Rodriguez, reading, Amy Hempel, writing | No Comments »

5. May 2012 by Nancy Pinard.

I am a writer.  I am also a tennis player.  (In fact, I have torn the ligaments in my right elbow playing tennis, and in lieu of having Tommy John surgery, I wear a wrist-to-shoulder metal  Bledsoe brace on my racquet arm which makes me look like the bionic woman.)  I frequently think about what the two have in common–like the need to learn the craft by taking lessons, then putting in hours of painstaking practice, until certain skills become automatic.  How many top- spin forehands have I hit in my life?  Too many to count.  And how many balls did I serve before the ball consistently hit the court in the proper box, let alone where I wanted it?  A googolplex, at least.  I started as a child.

But am I obsessed?  It seems that I am not, for when a tennis friend suggested that I write a novel about tennis, nothing resonated. “Anne Lamott has already done that,” I said, referring to Lamott’s book Crooked Little Heart, as if only one novel could be written on any subject.  It was an excuse lamer than my right arm, so how do I explain that a sport I’ve allowed to occupy so much time, for which I’ve risked and sustained significant injury, is not an obsession?

It leads me to think about subjects that do resonate.  A writer friend who sees my drafts before they are published noted that all my books have young women who figure prominently.  Another said, “Everything you write is about death.”  Yes.  Because the one thing I’ve never gotten over is the death of my sister, never mind she died before I was born.

So how do my current topics–my historical subjects–draw on that obsession?  Both the Darwin and the Einstein marriages and careers turn on a dead daughter.  It’s well-known that Charles Darwin’s faith deteriorated at the death of his daughter Annie.  But imagine my surprise when, well into my research for the novel, I first saw a photo of her gravestone.  Her name was Anne Elizabeth–my dead sister’s name, spelled exactly the same way.  The god of synchronicity was laughing.  No surprise then, that Henrietta Darwin, Annie’s next younger sister, has a point of view in the novel. There’s the obsession:  how death affects young women.

Why young women?  Because this is an area of my life where I continue to come of age as I explore what my sister’s death meant to my life.  I was the youngest child in my family, but my sister, being the oldest, left her place vacant.  I leap-frogged my brother, the middle child, and took over for her, becoming both the youngest and the oldest, carrying on my back a rag-picker’s bag full of ambiguity and identity confusion.   So yes, Henrietta Darwin is me.  And Emma Darwin is my mother.  And yes, my mother really did carry my dead sister’s body around at the wake.  I wasn’t born yet.  But in the few moments when the subject came up–the subject shrouded in a sacred silence in my household–mother described how she couldn’t let her baby go, how in the years that followed–years she was taking care of my brother and me, both babies, she had trouble covering us up at night when Anne was out in the rain.   I don’t remember the context of these revelations.  Perhaps it was the day I unearthed an unlabeled box in the hall closet.  Inside were my sister’s tiny pink bathrobe, matching slippers, and her well-worn Raggedy Ann doll, called DeeDee Ann.

All the best details come from real life.

Albert and Mileva Einstein also “lost” a daughter, but the fact was either unknown or obscured until their love letters surfaced in the closet of his oldest son’s wife, the person who cleaned out Mileva’s apartment in Zurich.   The little girl lived until she was two, at which time she contracted scarlet fever and likely died.  But the best efforts of scholars have not turned up documentation of her birth, baptism, or death–either because the shame of her being born prior to their marriage caused Mileva’s father to make certain records were destroyed, or because the records were destroyed in Serbia’s many wars.  My novel, as yet, is incomplete.  I’ve not yet written the passage where the baby is born.  But I know my identification with Mileva is so strong, it takes conscious effort to write Albert’s side of the story.

It takes this kind of obsession to sustain the work of writing a novel–the way the work gives back to the author.

What obsession is driving the work for you?

Posted in Zurich, Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, Einstein's Daughter, Charles Darwin, Annie Darwin, obsession, Einstein's children, point of view, Mileva Maric, Einstein, death, reading, historical fiction, Serbia, writing | 1 Comment »

20. March 2012 by Nancy Pinard.

I will be teaching a workshop on writing the endings of short stories and novels at the Mad Anthony Writers’ Workshop April 13-15 in Hamilton, Ohio.  In the process of preparing, I was made conscious of subjects that generally remain unconscious as I’m first-drafting a novel; specifically, my point-of-view character’s inner conflict.  The inner conflict is that struggle by which a character prevents himself from getting what he desperately wants.  Sound counter-intuitive?  It is.  And yet we all sabotage ourselves for perfectly good reasons.  So do our characters.

Charles Darwin, the subject of my currently circulating novel, SANDWALK, provides a case in point.  Here was a man who desperately wanted to be a gentleman, as defined by 19th century Britain.  He was afraid to upset the status quo, and yet, his life work was to develop a theory that would challenge the very existence of God.  How did he deal with this?  He dawdled.  He spent twenty years on his research, writing directions to his wife to publish the material after his death.  What compelled him?  The death of his daughter, whose suffering led him to deny the possibility of a loving God.  It happened, when he received an essay from Alfred Russel Wallace describing a theory too like his, that he was faced with the necessity to publish immediately, or lose credit for his twenty years of work.  Ambition, specifically the need to prove himself to a father who predicted Darwin would never amount to anything, drove him to establish himself as co-author of a theory that would make him the target of 150 years of debate.  Some argue that this internal conflict was the cause of the sickness that made him an invalid for the productive years of his life.

And what of Albert Einstein?  A story was aired on “All Things Considered” last evening announcing the web publication of Einstein’s letters.  The letter read aloud on the air was one he wrote to his mother, Pauline, when she was terminally ill with stomach cancer in which Albert describes his sadness at the extremity of her suffering.  The fragment of the letter, considered by itself, would suggest Albert was a dutiful son who dearly loved his mother.  Not so!  In fact, she was the source of his greatest inner conflict, her demand that he conform to the bourgeois standards of middle class German Jewry in conflict with his desire to live a Bohemian lifestyle and marry Mileva Maric, the Serbian Orthodox Christian his mother despised.  The drama of his life played out in opposition to his mother, while, at the same time, he was unable ultimately to disobey her, finally leaving Mileva and marrying his cousin, Elsa, as was the common practice among the Jews of Germany.

How are inner conflicts resolved in fiction?  There are two choices:  The character realizes he is sabotaging himself and changes, or he fails to realize it.  The meaning of the ending is affected by this choice.

The techniques for delivering the choice will be covered in my workshop.

Posted in Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, Charles Darwin, inner conflict, historical fiction, Pauline Einstein, Einstein, Mileva Maric, reading, writing | No Comments »

10. December 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

I’m just finishing up a debut novel by Debra Dean called The Madonnas of Leningrad, a must-read for art lovers and anyone who wants to know what it was like to survive the terrible winter of the Nazi seige of Leningrad.  The protagonist is a docent in Leningrad’s enormous museum called The Hermitage, but as the Nazis descend, she is called upon to help pack up the art works to be shipped to a safe location, then to spy out fires set by Nazi bombs, then to maintain a water-soaked building.

Juxtaposed against this story in intermittent chapters is the story of her marriage and descent into Alzheimers in old age.

The dramatic fracture the juxtaposition causes is not disorienting, though I am continually evaluating which story most intrigues me.  The stories each inform the other, so for example, the Leningrad material gradually reveals how the marriage actually came about, and the Alzheimer’s story (interesting in itself) is delivering material that might be delivered in an epilogue in a linear novel.

In addition to the time being fractured, so is place.  The historical Leningrad setting is radically different from the contemporary American locale of the Alzheimer’s story, where we meet the protagonists eventual family as they meet for a wedding and struggle to deal with the problem of how to secure their elderly parents’ increasingly endangered lives.

(Being an art lover myself, an additional intrigue is all the named paintings.  Many of the paintings I’ve seen in person–living in a city with a wonderful art museum as well as traveling to many I’m wanting to reread the book with a computer so I can  examine all the details.)

The madonna motif is presented in many paintings, then completed by the mysterious pregnancy of the protagonist, this in utero character appearing as an adult in the contemporary story.

I really love this novel.  Though the protagonist is not a famous person as in my fictional biographies, the structure serves as a paradigm for a way to set up a life where the time frame is not limited to 17 months as in my Darwin novel.

Here’s the Hermitage Museum website:

http://www.hermitagemuseum.org/

Here’s an interesting interview with the author where she describes her process:

http://conversationsfamouswriters.blogspot.com/2006/03/debra-dean-madonnas-of-leningrad.html

Posted in The Madonnas of Leningrad, Debra Dean, Hermitage, Siege of Leningrad, methods for creativity, Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, reading, Fictional biography, historical fiction, writing | No Comments »

1. December 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

In keeping with my resolve not to change the historical record where it exists, I still wrestle with how to handle the gaps.   The writing of fictional biography gives me some license, of course, but I mostly interpret that to mean that I am imagining the scenes that are suggested by the historical record and making up the dialogue.  I’m also inventing characteristics and histories for minor characters who are documented in the record, but about whom little is written.  Mrs. Grut is an example, in my Darwin book.  She was the children’s  governess at a critical time in the Darwin household and appears in the Darwin letters but in no other place.  I knew she tried to make a proper Victorian household out of Emma Darwin’s fun house full of children–to the chagrin and detriment of all.  I had to create a character who was motivated to put things in order and provoke consternation.  Okay.  I’m fine with that.

What I find more troubling  is a matter like Mileva Maric’s sister Zorka, who was known to have developed something like schizophrenia.  What I don’t know is when it developed.  I can read statistics on when young women typically develop symptoms and I can read letters, but it seems that as soon as I write her into a scene with symptoms at an age of onset consistent with statistics, I read that Milos Maric (Mileva’s father) sent all his children abroad to school.  Now, how likely is it that an 18-year-old would thrive abroad at school with symptoms of schizophrenia?  I’m certain that Zorka was suffering symptoms by age 24, but then, after that, she went to help Mileva with the children during periods of Mileva’s debilitation after Einstein left the family. It doesn’t make sense to me that someone with unmedicated schizophrenia would be able to run a household with young children.

Perhaps the diagnosis is wrong.  Zorka was in Serbia and would have been hidden in the attic like Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre to avoid sending her to some brutal asylum where, at that time, she would have been chained to a wall or confined in some torture device and possibly put on public display like at Bedlam Hospital in England.  Zorka would not have been seen by a professional until later, when she went to Zurich and was treated at the Burgholzli Psychiatric Hospital, where the Einstein’s son Eduard, also schizophrenic, was interred at times.   So, there was a serious dysfunction of a psychological nature, which eventually Zorka self-medicated with alcohol, but it seemed to relapse at times.  One relative/neighbor interviewed by Michele Zackheim for her book Einstein’s Daughter said that before Mileva came home to visit her in later life, Zorka stopped drinking and put the house in order.   There’s volition, devotion, and shame in that behavior.  She knew she didn’t want Mileva to see how she was living.  Is that kind of self-awareness typical of schizophrenia?

There are two other bits of data that make me put age of onset sooner rather than later.  One is that when Mileva, already pregnant with Lieserl and still unmarried, traveled from Serbia to Switzerland to visit Albert in secret, he sent her a book on hypnotism by Auguste Forel who was then the director of the Burgholzli.  Why that book?  While it is true that Mileva took a psychology course at some point in her education, they were not known to have read and discussed anything but physics together, so it seems out of context unless Mileva had requested he send her anything he could find to help her help Zorka.  He was in Schaffhausen, tutoring a young Englishman, and living in a household with a family.  Perhaps it was the only remotely relevant book he could find in a Schaffhausen library.

Conjecture.

The other data bit that makes me wonder about early onset for Zorka is that after Mileva’s baby was born, Albert and Mileva considered putting her up for adoption.  Why would they not have asked the Maric family to keep the baby?  She had already caused them shame by the fact of her unwed pregnancy.  They were wealthy and had servants, though Marija Maric (Mileva’s mother) continued to help with all house and farm work.  That means she was healthy.  The little girl lived there for 18 months, which seems a long time if she was going to be given up.  Perhaps Mileva’s parents couldn’t handle another dependent in addition to Zorka?

It’s all puzzling.  Then there is the fate of Lieserl–another unknown–except that Mileva clearly knows what happened to her and she’s a point-of-view character, so how do I get around that one?  I’m leaning heavily on Michele Zackheim’s interviews with family members and friends in Einstein’s Daughter, though I’m not certain how to explain a few things there, either.  For example, if Lieserl was born with Downs Syndrome–as Albert seems to have reported to a colleague later in his life–why would Albert have at the time written “I’m very sorry about what has befallen Lieserl.  It’s so easy to suffer lasting effects from scarlet fever.”  To me, this sounds as though scarlet fever caused a disability she didn’t have before.  If Lieserl had died of the scarlet fever (lasting effect, indeed!), he would not have written the sentences that follow:  “As what is the child registered?  We must take precautions that problems don’t arise for her later.”

What is the likelihood that Lieserl was a Downs baby?  95% of Downs children are born to older mothers with no hereditary component.  Mileva was 25 at the time of conception.  The percentage of Downs children born due to other factors is 2-3% and then, only 1 in 3 due to a hereditary defect in one parent.  The fact that their third child was schizophrenic then, hardly seems to be related.

And, if Lieserl had been born a Downs baby, would Albert have been pleased when Mileva got pregnant a second time, after they were married? Even without a hereditary factor–likely not known at that time–wouldn’t the feelings be more complex at the thought of a second go-round?  But that same letter begins “I’m not the least bit angry that poor Dollie [his nickname for Mileva] is hatching a new chick.  In fact, I’m happy about it and had already given some thought to whether I shouldn’t see to it that you get a new Lieserl. . . .  Brood on it very carefully so that something good will come of it.”

So what can I conclude that will satisfy the parameters in this letter?  This is the primary source.

Posted in Michele Zackheim, Eduard Einstein, Zurich, Einstein's Daughter, Marija Maric, schizophrenia, Bulgholzli Psychiatric Hospital, Zorka Maric, Milos Maric, Auguste Forel, Serbia, reading, Mileva Maric, Fictional biography, historical fiction, Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, point of view, writing | 2 Comments »

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 »

24. September 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

Einstein spent his childhood from age one to fifteen in Munich, though the Munich of today is a reconstruction of the city, thanks to Munich being the Nazi headquarters and therefore the target of Allied bombs in WWII. When it became apparent to Hitler that Munich would fall, he didn’t move the art work out of the cathedrals because he felt it would demoralize the population. Instead, he had everything photographed. From these Nazi photographs the old city was reconstructed so that in the Alstadt, much appears as it did before.

The two gates that remain from the medieval city are the Isator and the Sendlinger Tor. Both Einstein households—his parents moved farther out of town as the business prospered—were near the Sendlinger Tor, so I was particularly interested in what a child could actually see from there. In the opening scene of my novel, Einstein is a three-year-old, left by his mother in the city to find his way home—a practice she was committed to in building his independence. This is fact, but how he learned to find his way home is a matter of fiction. Originally, I imagined that he oriented himself by the towers of the Fraumunster Kirche, but standing at the Sendlinger Tor, I realized that these towers, high as they are, are not visible. As if to oblige me, there stood a child, a little girl of about three, and through her eyes it was apparent that I needed to revise the scene so that three-year-old Albert would orient himself by the Tor itself.

I also sought out the Luitpold Gymnasium, the high school that Einstein attended, hated, and from which he arranged to be dismissed at age fifteen when his parents moved to Milan and left him behind to finish school. (He had a dual purpose. Not only did he hate the militaristic German educational methods, but if he did not revoke his German citizenship before age seventeen, he would be obliged by law to serve in the German army.) The school itself looked too new to be over one hundred years old, which leads me to believe that it was rebuilt after the war, the school he attended possibly having been destroyed. This is a subject for further research.

It happens that Munich is celebrating Oktoberfest during our stay, though, unlike four million people annually, it was not the purpose of our coming. Oktoberfest is the annual celebration of the wedding feast of the long-dead King Ludwig I and has continued since 1810.  That means Albert might have attended as a child.  My husband and I took a stroll through the celebration, an immense fairgrounds full of the most hair-raising rides I’ve ever seen, plus booths selling wurst, very fishy-smelling fish on a stick, pretzels, and decorated, heart-shaped cookies worn on a string around the neck by both men and women, all dressed in traditional Bavarian costumes. The main attraction, however, seems to be the ubiquitous beer halls where hundreds pack in to get drunk, sway, and sing both American and German songs, loudly, to the music of an oompah band.

After a several mile circle of the grounds at 6:00 PM, having sampled nothing, we were driven home in a bicycle-powered, two-seat carriage—the vehicle of choice in the car-and-taxi clogged roadways. The driver told us that to get a seat in a beer hall, one had to go at 10:00 AM. Since Albert Einstein was an introverted child who preferred building houses of cards, watching chickens, and proving the Pythagorean theorem, I suspect he might have been as anxious to leave as I was. Furthermore, he didn’t drink—he claimed it made one stupid—and while not a teetotaler myself, after seeing Oktoberfest, I’ve no doubt he was right.

Posted in Sendlinger Tor, Luitpold Gymnasium, Oktoberfest, Nazi headquarters, Munich, Einstein, Research methods, writing | No Comments »

15. September 2011 by Nancy Pinard.

My husband and I arrived in Milan yesterday after the (for me) sleepless overnight flight that is penance for the luxury of European travel, meaning no taxi fare seemed too high if it meant we might settle in at our hotel sooner. And Tremezzo, the small village on the west shore of Lake Como, midlake, where I had booked our room, couldn’t have made it more worth it. What overwhelmed me more than the lake itself, is the geography of the basin it’s in. Carved out by a glacier, the foothills surround the lake are covered in lush foliage with darker vertical veins, which in the haze of humidity appear velvetine, like the iris petals in the flower paintings of Georgia O’Keefe.

On the lake shore, the Hotel Villa Marie, complete with its own cupola (on left, below), is the most picturesque in a row of tile-roofed and pastel-painted Italian villas.

This is not where Albert and Mileva stayed, though it’s one km from the Villa Carlotta where they disembarked from their ferry to tour the house and gardens. The ferry boats are still the most efficient means of transportation to various villages on the lake, so today Beloved and I boarded the “slow boat,” (Centro Lago in Italian), and took a gestalt tour of the mid-lake villages, including Bellagio, home to luxury shops, and Varenna, a charmingly-preserved fishing village with an 11^th century stone chapel and unrestored 14^th century frescoes. Tomorrow we will tour the Villa Carlotta. Today it was focused on what it feels like to be here. This morning, in addition to the lapping of water against the stone walls that separate the land from the lake, I heard the church bells ring two strokes with a non-melodious “clong.” I heard the rigging of the sailboats clinking against aluminun masts in the tiny harbor in front of the hotel, but masts were wood in 1901, so perhaps chattering would be a better word. Regrettably, the traffic noise is loud now on the road that wends around the lake. Albert, unlike Beloved, would not have needed to jerk Mileva from the path of drivers speeding around blind curves.

At our sidewalk cafe dinner last night we sat at a small table among many other couples at small tables, all speaking in whispers, until, as invariable happens with my friendly husband, we all began talking to one another. Beside us was a couple of honeymooners, obvious and perfect for imagining Albert and Mileva, though they were not yet married on their May, 1901 trip, but their heads likely inclined toward one another in the same way, though Albert didn’t drink so they wouldn’t have shared the same bottle of expensive wine, (red, of course.) Still, they might have lingered long, ordering each course and eating it before deciding on the next, sharing each as if unable yet to acknowledge different preferences, she serving out his helping first while he sat by helpless and helplessly in love.

Around these two sat three couples of oldlyweds, none of us jaded, I hope, but clearly in a different place as we lounged back in the wicker chairs, drinking from different liters of wine—his red, hers white, ordering not multiple courses—who can eat like that after 35?–but trying not to lick the plate of our measley one course apiece. One man called the rising, almost-full moon, the sun and told the groom to enjoy the next six months as if life would never be like that again. Perhaps not, but I didn’t sense regret from any table. The most senior were a couple from Wales and England, clearly enjoying their holiday together, though they were supposed to come six months earlier for a wedding and had to postpone for his illness. I was thinking how Mileva would have envied us all—the young lovers and the mature ones with our children grown and ably fending for themselves–she who was abandoned and left to care for a schizophrenic son.

Now my patient Beloved waits, out on the balcony of our room, overlooking the lake. The rocky tops of the Alps to the north—in fact in Switzerland—turn pink at sunset. His wife writes on, but it is dinner time and he is getting hungry. I suspect we will return to our same cafe, The Helvetia, because our Welsh and British friends—last night the end of their holiday here–confirm it has the freshest food in Tremezzo.  The veal in mushrooms and wine the newlyweds were eating looked stupendous.

Posted in Generating Fiction from History and/or Fact, historical fiction, Tremezzo, Bellagio, Varenna, Italy, Lake Como, Einstein, Mileva Maric, Research methods, reading, writing | 1 Comment »

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 »