Seducing the Demon (13 page)

The question remains: How to pierce the veil of the unconscious? Better than the elixir is ritual or routine. Sometimes I start the day writing nonsense until it turns into sense. I scribble, never lifting the pen from the page and never giving in to self-criticism. I knock my mother and grandmother off my shoulder. This is a kind of automatic writing, which puts me in touch with my unconscious and what it needs to tell me. It is a sort of dreaming on paper. I do it better on a yellow legal pad with a fast-flowing pen than on the computer, where writing looks too much like print.

Meditation sometimes works (the best mantra I have found is:
No thought, no thought, no thought
), as does playing music, or reading poetry, taking a walk or a swim. When all else fails, there’s prayer. As Thomas Merton says in
New Seeds of Contemplation,
“It is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God who chooses to awaken us.”

The notion of God brings us to the muse—the male writer’s form of the demon. The muse also embodies creativity. She’s fickle. She appears and disappears at will. We can’t control her. And because we can’t control her, we hate her as much as we love her. We try to summon her with sex, with falling in love, with mind-altering drugs. But the fact is, she won’t be summoned. She alights when it damn well pleases her. She falls in love with one artist, then deserts him for another. She’s a real bitch.

For me anyway, the muse takes the form of the demon lover—the one Singer wrote about. He appears at dusk and is banished by dawn. He is part vampire. We long for him to come and drink our blood.

Of course, the muse or demon lover is an aspect of self. I know damn well that when I am summoning this creature, I am really trying to connect with the part of myself that is free, imaginative and able to fly. This part of myself often gets lost under familial obligations and duties. I objectify my imagination as a separate creature, knowing this is metaphor. The muse or demon lover is inside me. I have to release the inhibitions that imprison me. I have to get rid of the voices that urge:
Write nice things, don’t embarrass the family; remember the plight of the Jews; and be sure to write good things about Israel
.... Nothing freezes the imagination like family loyalty or political correctness.

What we all live for, hope for, would die for is what Henry Miller calls “the dictation.” That’s when the words take off on a frolic of their own, when you don’t seem to be writing or thinking but rather taking down some divine dictation. When Miller said, “A writer shouldn’t think much,” he meant that we are better off tapping into the dictation than thinking about it. But the problem is that the dictation comes so seldom. Sometimes you wait and wait and wait for it and it seems like it will never come again. And sometimes it doesn’t.

 

 

We can’t dismiss the fact that for most of human history, we’ve been flirting with various modes of intoxication—whether for religious ecstasy or erotic. I’m convinced that a lot of our flirtation with drink, drugs and mind-altering love affairs is an attempt to summon the dictation. We want to get to Xanadu on the express train, but Coleridge’s person from Porlock keeps on blocking our way. (Coleridge tells the story of composing a great poem in a dream but losing it to a knock on the door from a mysterious “person from Porlock.”)

In my dreams, I am often climbing stairs or trying to get to airports or train stations, but my luggage impedes my progress. I attempt to hitch rides with strangers who take me far out of my way and lose my luggage. Sometimes my dreams resemble Escher stairs that lead up and down but go nowhere. I look down and there are galaxies below me. At times I dream that I have written an amazing book, dictated by the demon, a book far better than any I could have written awake. All my mentors praise it, and when I wake up, it’s gone. My deepest wish is to find that book.

A dream:

The dream couldn’t be more obvious—at least to me. The three are the three sisters of whom I am the middle, the meat in the sandwich, the tale-teller. The book is my novel-in-progress-which I’ve buried and reburied for the last five years (though in the dream, to disguise it, it seems to be
Sappho’s Leap
). The dream is my way of telling myself, Get going already! You can’t live forever. This book seems to be the necessary link to the next. It is taking me there by revealing my self-deceptions. It’s also telling me I can’t write unless I’m willing to unbury the dead.

In my dreams, often I am writing what Henry Miller, in his
Paris Review
interview, called “cadenzas”:

So I live with a ravine between my wishes and reality. Most days I sit at the machine or the yellow pad, doodling and feeling like an abject failure. Ecstasy eludes me. Even clarity and simplicity elude me. Then one day the cadenzas come. But they only come because of the days of doodling.

 

 

I know a writer who writes two books a year, drives a Rolls, has several yachts and planes and houses and lives like a WASP rajah.

“How do you write so fast?” I ask him.

“By lowering my standards. You could write faster if you lowered your standards too.”

Maybe this is true, maybe his attempt at a joke, but I have no interest in reading his books. I only want his freedom from economic insecurity. Yet many people do read his books. They devour them like candy. And probably don’t remember them. But in the depths of my envious heart, I tell myself I wish I could lower my standards. But then I catch myself. I am lying to myself again.

I am doing the best I can—and so, probably, is he. I could write faster, but the books would suck. Plus, this guy has a formula that works. Formulas are a gift. I don’t disparage the ability to entertain. But I will never be that kind of writer. Katherine Anne Porter said, “I look upon literature as an art, and I believe that if you misuse it or abuse it, it will leave you. It is not a thing you can nail down and use as you want. You have to let it use you, too.”

Waiting for the dictation
(la dictée,
as in French class) is one of the ways in which it uses me. There are thousands of other ways. I have to humble myself for the demon to come at all—no matter how many Rolls-Royces, yachts or planes I promise him. Why should a demon care about cars or yachts or planes when he has his own wings?

The first time I came to Venice as an adult, it was after a trip to Russia, then the Soviet Union. The Soviet trip was purgatorial, as Soviet trips tended to be in those days. It was a literary junket organized by the late Harrison Salisbury. Robert Bly, Gwendolyn Brooks, Susan Sontag, Studs and Ida Terkel, Irving and Jean Stone, Arthur and Alexandra Schlesinger, Harrison and his wife, Charlotte, were the American guests.

Harrison, who was a one-man cultural exchange maven, invited us to meet our Soviet counterparts and tour the parts of the country we especially wanted to see. Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrey Voznesensky were promised, among others.

The wonderful Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks and I shared a double-decker sleeping compartment from Moscow to Kiev, but we didn’t sleep. We stayed up all night talking about poetry or reciting it to each other. Robert Bly wandered from compartment to compartment, playing his balalaika.

When we arrived in Kiev, we were paired up with our translators, who were clearly also reporting to some lowly apparatchik at the KGB about everything we said and did. That was also standard in 1983.

Matrons in black guarded each floor of the hotel and impounded our keys and passports.

For most of the day we sat in meetings, wearing headphones in which we could listen to endless droning speeches in Russian or English. Every hour or so we were summoned into the hallway for frozen shots of vodka, which I guzzled (not abstaining then), and gray greasy beluga in buds of butter, which we perched on toasted pumpernickel crescents or ate with spoons of abalone shell. What beluga it was! Could Marx have known that the best beluga would be reserved for Party members and their guests?

At lunchtime, there was another three-hour food orgy with more beluga caviar, borscht, mystery meat and icy vodka. For dessert, there were pastries and sweet Georgian champagne.

Susan Sontag, who was nothing if not pragmatic about her career, toasted “the kitchen staff that prepared the meal.” Clearly she had been here before and understood the full spectrum of appropriate Communist behavior.

Only at night, when the vodka flowed even more freely, did my sloe-eyed translator break down and weep.

“Soviet Union no good place for womens,” she whispered. “Men drink too much wodka, become
why-o-lent.”

Studs Turkel would roam the city with his tape recorder trying to collect impressions of life under Communism, but an overenthusiastic comrade confiscated his machine.

During a performance of the opera
The Bartered Bride,
my translator lushly whispered to me, “Dat is fate of all Russian womens!”

The sense of being constantly spied on, the compulsory toasts, the never-ending drunkenness got to me quickly. It was a country I couldn’t wait to leave but was afraid would never release me. I went to Odessa in search of my Russian relatives but never found any—even with my translator’s help. I assumed my mother’s family, the Mirskys, had perished in pogroms or fallen into a ravine in Babi Yar or emigrated. Jews of my grandparents’ generation couldn’t wait to get out of Russia. My grandfather left twice—once at fourteen, once at sixteen. The first time, he was captured crossing the border and was sent to the tiny town of his birth, where he knew no one. Two years later, he made another run for it and wound up in Paris, where all young artists wanted to go.

“If I’d been killed in the Manchurian war, you wouldn’t exist!”

I was six, and when I tried to think of not existing I couldn’t.

At the Moscow airport, where we spent hours having our exit papers shuffled, I panicked and was certain I’d never get away. The Soviet apparatchiks would keep me there for various dreamlike Kafkaesque crimes. I would never see my dear daughter or Dart of the curved cock again. I would be tried for the sins of my grandfather Mirsky, who escaped the draft and wound up in Paris, living as an art student on bananas donated by a shadowy French Rothschild.

Arriving in Venice from Moscow was like escaping to Shangri-La. The pool at the Cipriani was a magical baptism, restoring your right to be free (and bankrupt). Venice was freedom itself. Whatever restriction there was in the stone city was washed away in the reflected one. The doubleness of Venice and its reflection left room for everything.

Dart and I wallowed in luxury at the Cipriani—and damn the cost (all on my tab). We stayed in bed all day, ordering up room service between frenzied bouts of lovemaking and wandered the streets all night. I thought I knew Venice as a city of sex and opulence, but it would take twenty more years before I
really
knew Venice. I would have to visit it with friends and alone, with lovers and bereft, in shabby houses and elegant hotels, before I had any idea of what Venice meant in my life.

Venice was my touchstone. For years, I went back there to finish each of my books. And each time Venice was different. Or was it? Was the city merely a screen onto which I projected myself?

Both my demons and angels accosted me in Venice, but often they changed places so that you hardly knew who was who. Sometimes the city held me bewitched by its beauty. Other times, I couldn’t wait to flee. Venice is an island—gossipy, claustrophobic and haunted. The people who live there all the time are ravenous for new blood to slake their boredom with each other. They fall upon the newcomer like vampires.