I Have Just the Book for You!
For long-time readers suffering from short attention spans
A reader commented on last week’s Postcard that she was glad for the reminder that books can be healthy distractions in times like these. But she regretted that her attention span has become so short. This week I’d like to tell her, “I have just the book for you!”
You might know of many of the writers, painters, performers and other artists in this book, through their reputations and their published works. In Daily Rituals: Women at Work they tell you, often in their own words, about how they work, about their passions and their struggles. Their guard is down. It’s as if they have written you a personal letter. Or you found their diary under a couch pillow, and it’s open.
For instance, you might know Françoise Sagan was 18 when she published her sensational short novel, Bonjour Tristesse in 1954. But you may not realize that the book was the result of pure youthful nonchalance. She said, “I simply started it. I had a strong desire to write and some free time.”
Once she started, she “wanted passionately to finish it.”
Her passion emerged on the pages of Bonjour Tristesse. In the quote below, the 17-year-old narrator Cecilé is about to light a cigarette. She is with Anne, the fiancée of her widowed father. Cecilé is sometimes afraid of her. She writes,
My heart was beating violently. I tightened my fingers round the match and struck it, but as I bent forward my cigarette put it out. The matchbox dropped to the ground and I could feel Anne’s hard, searching gaze upon me. The tension was unbearable.
I remember reading Sagan’s whole book one day in high school, under my desk or hidden in papers on top of it. It was not like me to do that!
When I flip through it now, I have to be kind to my youthful self as a reader. Obviously, I was as passionate as the writer. But I didn’t smoke, so I probably had little faith that I could actually be a Cecilé.
Virginia Woolf and her sister the artist Vanessa Bell are also in Daily Rituals.
In a 1933 speech, Woolf said that a writer
wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day… while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living.
About that world of illusion — the Woolf’s servant, Louise Everest, reported hearing Virginia talking to herself during her post-breakfast bath. She said,
On and on she went, talk, talk, talk: asking questions and giving herself the answers, I thought there must be two or three people up there with her.
Another writer in Daily Rituals is Zora Neale Hurston.
Hurston travelled throughout the South and outside the country, finding the people and places that made up her great body of work, the African-American story. She not only pioneered “folk-fiction”, but also published it, and she seemed at home in these two different worlds.
But this book showed me that writing wasn’t always easy for Hurston.
She never followed a writing routine or plan, and she went through ‘terrible periods’ when she couldn’t write at all.
‘Every now and then,’ she wrote in a 1938 letter, ‘I cannot bring myself to touch it. I cannot write, read, or do anything at all for a period. … Just something grabs hold of me and holds me mute, miserable and helpless until it lets me go. I feel as if I have been marooned on a planet by myself.
‘But I find it is the prelude to creative effort.’ Once she was seized by a creative idea, everything changed. … Once she began Their Eyes Were Watching God, she worked with amazing speed.
I’ve written here about three writers, but in Daily Rituals you will meet 140 more creative women of all kinds, each in two or three short pages, from:
to:
to:
and to:
Marian Anderson said in this book something about music that I wish we could say with confidence about the struggle for civil rights in our nation. She said, “Music is an elusive thing.” Some weeks she worked on a song every day without making any progress. “Then,” she wrote,
suddenly there is a flash of understanding. What has appeared useless labor for days becomes fruitful at an unpredictable moment.
As for many of us now protecting democratic institutions, our work is all. Mid-20th century painter Tamara de Lempicka said,
There are no miracles. There is only what you make.
I hope you will enjoy this little book about the process of creating.
I am going to order this book for myself! You continue to inspire me, Deda!