LEAVING JANET MALCOLM

Abstract

7 6 Y L E A V I N G J A N E T M A L C O L M M A R K O P P E N H E I M E R Soon after I met the woman who was to become my wife, I nearly ruined everything by showing her a book chapter I was writing. I had recently finished a dissertation in American religious history, and, with the sort of kinetic energy burst that only ambitious, childless men or women in their twenties possess, I had taken a cannonball dive into a new project: a study of the bar and bat mitzvah as practiced across the United States, from Tampa to Anchorage. After crisscrossing the country for six months by plane, train, and automobile, crashing bar and bat mitzvahs and the afterparties , I had touched down again in New Haven, where every day I arrangedmylaptopcomputerononeoftheleather-toppedtablesin the grand reference room of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, and, flush with anticipation of my own productivity, got down to writing . In ten days in the spring of 2003, I produced about ten thousand words of my book’s introduction. On the eleventh day, I showed the pages to Cyd. Cyd and I were broken up, just then, but I hoped that we would get back together, and that this law student, who always neglected her legal studies to read George Eliot or re-read young-adult literature , would someday be my wife. I trusted that showing her 7 7 R pages, the first pages from my first nonacademic book, would advance my cause. She loved reading; I was a writer. She was the kind of girl who sheltered herself with books; her only act of nesting was to outfit any new apartment with bookshelves she built herself, using skills learned as a set carpenter in college theater productions. There was something gallant about showing fresh pages to a girl like this: they were like rose petals at her feet, or my coat laid across a puddle. The only problem was that the pages I showed her were some of the worst I had ever written. They were aggressively, impudently bad. They were the Yugo of drafts, the CW television, the Christine O’Donnell. Sitting on a bench on the porch in front of her apartment house, she said, holding the pages in her hand, ‘‘These need some work.’’ We talked some more, then parted amicably. Convinced that she misunderstood my genius, I felt bad for her. Months passed. I moved to California. I finished a draft of the rest of the book. I sent it to her. She called me and said, ‘‘The rest of it is really good. But the introduction is still dreadful.’’ I got o√ the phone and pouted for a day. Then I re-read that introduction, and I realized that it was not very good. And I thought about it, and I saw what the problem was. I had been imitating Janet Malcolm. Inhisearliestyears,ayoungwriterhassomethingtosaybutdoesnot yet know how to say it. The ideas are born long before their expression . By twenty, a writer may have beliefs, ethics, mores, aesthetics, intuitions, feelings. But making those into literature requires apprenticeship . Just as music in one’s heart can only with great work be transmutedintomusicatthepiano,poetryinone’ssoulcanonlywith long practice become poetry on the page. And the practice comes from imitation, of all the di√erent tempi and phrasings and structures and specialized vocabulary found in other people’s writings. For some, this process of imitation begins at a very young age. There are children who read Where the Red Fern Grows or Island of the Blue Dolphins or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and determine right there, at age nine, to write books like that someday . And maybe this little girl – let’s say she’s a girl – takes out notepaper and in big, looping, novice cursive letters writes her own version of a blue tick-hound adventure, or island fantasia, or 7 8 O P P E N H E I M E R Y winter dreamscape with lions and large quantities of addictive Turkish delight. It is likely...