July 06, 2007
The Writing of...The Lonely Season
I had moved to Berkeley in the spring of 1998 to dedicate myself to poetry. I took a student loan overage check, decided I was through with college, and took a bus to Berkeley to live in the Nash Hotel with my friends Scott and Joe. Needless to say, three guys in a cramped hotel that offered communal bathrooms and the bare bones of life's other amenities offered a volatile life experience. It was a time begging for the most earnest of bohemian pursuits. And Berkeley was the perfect place for us to adopt the writing life.
Berkeley is nothing if not a place of characters, and one of the characters I met while I was there was a PhD student of Mathematics at UC Berkeley, who I only knew as Stewart (Stewart will pop up again in a future story). I never thought to ask his last name, but I spent a significant amount of time with him at the Au Coquelet on University Avenue, just a few short blocks from the cafe where I wrote the first seeds for what would later become The Lonely Season. Stewart and I often talked about music, poetry, and literature. Sometimes he would even lecture to me about mathematics, even once showing me parts of his dissertation, which of course was merely symbolic to me.
I remember Stewart entering the Au Coquelet one night looking particularly tortured by some episode he had just endured with a woman. No details were forthcoming. He was a very soft-spoken man, and I can find no physical description more apt for him than Kafkaesque. After ordering a cup of coffee, he approached my table and told me that he was going to head home and immerse himself in Robbe-Grillet. He held up the small paperback he had in his hands with the pride of someone who knew a special secret. The book was Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy. Perhaps, it was the exotic sound of the author's name, or Stewart's tacit recommendation, but I took the first available opportunity to visit a used bookstore, where I bought Jealousy and Djinn. I tried to read Jealousy, but the tedium of Robbe-Grillet's description of banana trees nearly drove me mad. I new there was something special in his voice, but I was not quite ready for the tedious loops of Jealousy's prose. So, I read Djinn instead. I fell in love with the objective voice of the narrative, the dream-like world that seemed to ease in and out of some manufactured fog. It was honestly like a new door opened up and the writing world had all of a sudden become larger and I felt like it was a world that I wanted to be apart of.
I had thought of myself, at that point, exclusively as a poet, and now my perspective was shifting, the horizon of my work was being widened. Yet, after a few attempts at prose writing at that cafe on University Avenue, I learned that I was not quite ready to dive into storytelling. I had the beginnings of an idea, but I was not quite prepared for navigating the geography of prose. It just wasn't time.
Fast forward to November of 1998. I had been back at Ohio University for several months. My friend Scott, the same friend who talked me into moving to Berkeley, had moved to campus, and we began having nightly conversations about prose writing, long, late-night, coffee soaked conversations about themes, characters, and our burgeoning love affair with the authors of the Nouveau Roman. I must admit that Scott had more of an affinity for the authors then I did. I was much more in love with the concept of Robbe-Grillet's objective narration then I was in the content of the novels by the other New Novelists.
Regardless, these late night talks inspired me to take another crack at The Lonely Season. Unlike my previous effort, this attempt felt fluid. When I sat down to write, the words were just there waiting for me to put them to paper. It was a wonderful experience, the discovery of myself as prose writer. The story followed me around like a ghost. There was not a moment to escape from it. I was constantly thinking about it, traversing its possible twists and turns. I was writing every night and going to classes during the days. However, I became so drunk about the writing process that I ended up quitting school to devote myself wholly to the story.
I can't say exactly when I finished the story. My journals from the time are sporadic. My best guess is that I finished it by the end of January 1999.
As I reread the story, I found that its greatest gift is the mood it paints, the dream-like scenes that weave themselves throughout the piece like a Robbe-Grillet fog. It is true that a portion of the narrative is in the first person, but--true to the Nouveau Roman--I have maintained an air of the objective narrator throughout the majority of the story. Also, as with many of the New Novelists, time is not linear in the confines of this story, but I believe that the narrative is constructed in such a way that the reader should never be confused.
I have to say that it is certainly not a conventional piece of fiction, and the tedious and repetitive nature of the piece reflects the fact that I was working under the spell of the Nouveau Roman movement. There is no doubt that I would handle the story differently if I were to write it today. Some of the sentences are poorly structured, and several paragraphs--specifically in the hopscotch scene--are deliberately tedious, and I would scale those sections back if I were writing them today. All that being said, this story is a fair reflection of the volatility, the passions and the emotional devastations that were living within me at the time it was written.
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