To speak of not writing, of being blocked, stalled, stumped, or abandoned by the muse–such is to court disaster for anyone who dreams of fluency, no less fecundity, of output. So it’s strange to come across Howard Nemerov’s Journal of the Fictive Life (recommended to me by Janet McAdams, whose latest collection, Feral, is out). Nemerov wrote Journal of the Fictive Life in the midst of an awful case of writer’s block, as a kind of talking cure for not writing the novel he had intended.
“The only way out is the way through,” he says, “just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present–henceforth?–the subject to which you are condemned.”
The idea of being condemned to a subject such as the inability to write seems, at first glance, more purgatory than paradiso. And indeed, Journal of a Fictive Life is a strange read, composed of discrete chapters or “Reflections” each of which is broken into occasionally sequential, reflective utterances:
“Suppose a man inhabited by ghosts. What are these ghosts? Pathetic incompetents, for the most part, revenants who don’t know the way back; a good phrase for them would be what M applied to certain artists: would-be has-beens.”
On the one hand, this seems like brilliant commentary on the nature of art and those who practice it. Imagine the artist not so much a ghost-hunter but rather one afflicted with the shades of what has passed. Imagine him, further still, as one whose affiliation to the past leaves him stranded there. Is this, in fact, the subject of Nemerov’s novel as well as the subject of his reflection on the failure to write a novel? Who is M? Perhaps that’s obvious to those who know Nemerov better than I do. Here’s a little more:
“Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose?” What precisely we understand the great outdoors to be–the depth and complexity of social life, the natural world, the work of the mind–may not matter. That generality serves as a mechanism of defense seems not only persuasive but very sharp. One can’t approach Journal of a Fictive Life with the desire for coherence, lest the whole seem less than the sum of its parts. But it’s an ideal example of thought unhampered by the consolations of ambition, project, even form–all that makes us feel secure in ourselves as writers. This book may be genius running on empty, but far better to witness a great intellect floundering and feeling its way to truths most of us prefer not to entertain.