WILLIS ALAN RAMSEY & ME:
A Bad Case of Second Novelitis
All I want to do is lie on the carpet and watch the sun move across the sky. I want to track its path through the plate-glass windows of our living room, following it from the time it appears at dawn over my neighbor's house across the street until it slips behind our front eaves, lying perfectly still, sensing its presence above our roof, waiting for it to appear, hours later, over the back eaves, before it falls, at dusk, into the thicket of trees behind our house. If I could do this, I imagine, I might be cured.
“Pay attention to the fantasies of healing in your patients,” the psychologist James Hillman writes, “for often therein lies the actual cure.”
It's good advice, I suppose, but I can't take it.
In the grips of a feverish and undiagnosed case of Second Novelitis (an ailment on which the DSM-IV is silent), I can't permit myself the time. A harried sense of falling behind is the malady's prime symptoms: how can I lie on the floor all day when I have a second novel to write?
A second novel! In the compendium of universal archetypes, is there a more blighted concept?)
Lying on the carpet and doing nothing is the only thing that seems even less productive than the hours I spend each day at my desk.
“How's the new book going by the way?” asks a colleague of mine, a man who has no trouble turning out book after prize-winning book. Short stories, poems, novels, novellas fly out of him like ink from a leaky pen.
“Fine,” I say. “If I could only remember the fundamentals of narrative, I might begin to make some progress.”
The fundamentals of narrative!
Every morning, having failed to recall them to mind, I trudge dutifully to my desk anyway, where, like the Prophet Ezekiel contemplating the Valley of Dry Bones, I despair over anything returning to life.
I don't understand the book I've begun. I can't remember how to describe a room or a face. My characters seem lifeless, their dialogue unfocused and inane. I've placed them in the desert of the southwest although the book's themes, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with the desert or the southwest, and I don't know how to get them out of it again.
Having used an old short story as a starting point, I can't maintain the prose style I employed only a few years before. Worse, I have no other ideas.
Even worse, I know no matter how good the book might eventually become, it will never rival my first novel which feels to me, as the postpartum amnesia of its creation sets in, like an impossibly perfect jewel, a book that effortlessly wrote itself before going on to win a clutch of prizes and nearly unanimous critical praise.
A part of me feels finished as a writer, done, as though I've paid off a longstanding debt, and I doubt I'll ever write anything again as satisfying or as meaningful.
“Of course you're blocked,” says my friend Rick, when I complain to him, guiltily, about the consequences of my good fortune. He has yet to finish, much less publish, his own novel, and I feel like the narrator of a song I remember hearing during the Reagan era. Its four lines went: “I cried because I had no shoes/Until I met a man who had no feet./I said to him,/“Hey, can I have your shoes?”
But Rick is sympathetic. He tells me about a study a psychologist devised. Having noticed that a group of kindergarteners, during their free period, all loved to play with the magic markers, he divided the class into two groups.
Although the members of both groups could do whatever they wanted during the free time, the children in Group A were given graham crackers each time they played with the markers. When, after a while, the graham crackers were no longer given out as a reward for playing with the markers, Group A lost all interest in the markers, while Group B, the control group, continued playing with them as enthusiastically as before.
“You see what your problem is,” Rick says.
“Not exactly, no,” I say.
“You're in Group A,” he says. “Not literally, of course. But the rewards of publishing might be affecting your writing in much the same way.”
"That's probably what happened to Willis Alan Ramsey," I say.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about Willis Alan Ramsey.
When I'm not thinking about lying on the floor all day, I'm usually thinking about Willis Alan Ramsey.
Willis Alan Ramsey was an Austin songwriter who, in 1972, released a brilliant debut album called Willis Alan Ramsey. The record is to the ear what a cool beer and a tall woman in cut-offs and a tank-top on a hot summer day are to many of the other senses: a rapturously engaging aesthetic experience. If you were alive in the 1970s, you may still hear, as a memory in your inner ear, the pale cover versions of Ramsey's “Muskrat Candlelight,” which, as “Muskrat Love,” was a hit first for the group America and then, more anemically, for the Captain and Tenille.
Recently, you may even have heard Jimmie Dale Gilmore's plaintive cover of “Goodbye, Old Missoula,” but none of these would have prepared you for the rangy delights and the sheer wild-briar-patch musicality of Willis Alan Ramsey.
Wry, drawling, croaking, sly, seductive, innocently sincere, Ramsey's eleven performances, each better than the last, climax in a syncopated finale called “Northeast Texas Women.” A paean to geographically determined pulchritude (“…them Dallas women standin' up beat the others lyin' down…”), the song fades out at the end and fades back in for a brief coda.
According to the liner notes, in addition to guitars, fiddles and drums, the rhythm section here includes “bottle,” “south wall,” “coke crate,” “knees,” “cowbell,” “carpet & hallways.” One by one, the instruments drop out, and the music begins to disintegrate. A drumstick rattles. A guitar is tentatively plucked. Something that sounds like a Coke crate being dragged across a hallway and banged into a wall is indeed heard and then, as though he were predicting his own future, Willis Alan Ramsey announces in his twangy drawl: “Thay-is it.”
And that is it.
Not quite forty minutes of music, it's all he's released over the last thirty-two years, despite shoals of critical praise, a well-financed tour, and a generous (although now thirty-two-year-old) advance from Leon Russell's (long-defunct) Shelter Recording Company.
“And so what?” I found myself reacting defensively against these thoughts and the self-pity they inspired. “So what if Willis Alan Ramsey never produces a second album? We're lucky to have one perfect album from him. Does the world really need a dozen middling others?”
(Ramsey himself seems peevish on this issue. Asked by the New York Times what had become of his second album, he fired back, “What was wrong with the first one?”)
“And you're fortunate,” I told myself, “to have written one satisfying novel. What law says you have to churn out book after book every two years?”
I remembered a Greek film student I knew in graduate school sighing over the year's paltry crop of films. “Where are this year's masterpieces?” he wondered gloomily.
“What's wrong with last year's masterpieces?” I chided him. “Isn't that the definition of a masterpiece, that it lasts for more than a year?”
And yet, I felt heartsick over my inability to write. What Rick had said about the kindergarteners seemed to apply only too accurately to me.
In the beginning, writing had been a personal quest, an adventure in meaning, a way of emulating the authors whose work had meant so much to me.
Now, it had become a career. It was like a dog I'd allowed to follow me home that I now had to take care of. And what once seemed like pleasurable daydreaming, especially to my mercantile family, was now a commercial venture that cast a real shadow in the world. The introverted practice of isolating myself in a room to arrange words on paper according to some idiolectic system had become a sales career, a shaky business venture that included conferences, meals out, airline reservations, public readings, interviews, autographs, articles, advertisements, and photo shoots.
There were galleys to proof, blurbs to collect, journalists and bookstore owners to charm, jacket copy and cover art to approve. There were phone calls to return, book festivals to attend, letters to answer from readers, from editors, from agents, from admiring women, from other writers needing blurbs, advice, professional introductions. There were inquiries about adaptations, questions concerning translations, invitations to speak, to write, to teach, to travel, to explain.
And in this noisy, boisterous confirmation of my most privately cherished hopes for myself, the quiet, solitary work that produced it began to seem unbearably tedious and lonely. Sitting at my desk, staring at my empty notepads, tapping my pen against my teeth, I waited for the phone to ring, for the fax to whir, for an email to appear, for anything that might liberate me from the task of writing.
Adding to my troubles was the fact that, though I couldn't quiet myself enough to write, I understood the continued health of this new career depended upon one thing only: the creation of a second novel.
I began to understand Willis Alan Ramsey's silence. Having created a flawless first work, how was he supposed to start again from scratch, disappointing everyone with an album certain to pale in comparison?
I'd already disappointed my editor. She so loved the first book that, one night in New York, after I'd given a reading from it, she mused aloud, in the cab we shared, how pleasant it would be if, instead of a second book, she could simply publish the first one again and again.
“Who wants to read about a musicologist having a nervous breakdown in the desert, anyway?” she said, perhaps as a way of keeping down the advance my agent was negotiating with her.
But when, as a dodge against confronting a second novel, I suggested I might write a collection of short stories instead, she was adamantly against it. “No, that would be a mistake. You've got momentum now as a novelist.”
But momentum as a novelist was the only thing I didn't have.
Instead, what I had was a bad case of Second Novelitis which, as it metastasized, began to infect other areas of my life: I felt like a fraud, teaching creative writing to undergraduates in the job my so-called brilliant career had secured for me. Worse, I envied my students' ability to construct stories and scenes at my command.
(Had I been enrolled in one of my own classes, I would have had to flunk myself.)
I felt out of place in an English department, a fabulist among scholars, my MFA a pair of two's against the royal flush of their Ph.D.s. I'd convinced myself that my colleagues were brilliant teachers, savvy theorists with a vast fund of critical knowledge and a complex inner life, which, in our anti-social department, they kept well-hidden from me.
Things were worse in the Jewish Studies program, where, as an associate faculty member, I was the person for whom the others had to speak English, instead of Hebrew, during our meetings.
And yet, each day I continued to write, getting nowhere, rejecting ream after ream of tepid pages. I considered quitting my job, leaving my family, buying a boat, sailing to New Zealand. (“Burn down your house,” a voice kept chanting in my ear.) Desperate, I retreated to an artist colony where I'd begun writing in earnest fifteen years earlier, but everything there seemed smaller and dirtier than I remembered it. The man who ran the colony was dead; his magnificent adobe house had fallen into humiliating disrepair.
The fifteen years between my first stay and this one only accentuated how little I'd accomplished in the interim, and still I couldn't write.
I spent a part of each day weeping on the floor.
As a more or less unsuccessful playwright and screenwriter, I'd spent years using rejection as a spur. (I once watched a play of mine while a woman in the row behind me kept whispering, “This is so stupid,” to her husband, and felt nothing but a self-ironic sense of pride.) Hardened to criticism, I now found myself vulnerable to praise. It was as if my nervous system, having never encountered success, hadn't developed the antibodies necessary for fighting it off.
I wasn't alone. Willis Alan Ramsey and I weren't the only ones unable to face down the roadblocks thrown up by a successful first work. American literature is strewn with victims and near victims of Second Novelitis: Harper Lee, Marilynne Robinson, J.D. Salinger, and for thirty and sixty years respectively, Harold Brodkey and Henry Roth.
A recent documentary about William Styron never even mentions his second book, the disastrous follow up to his highly praised debut. It's interesting to note that, in the wake of that disappointment, Styron produced his two masterpieces, whereas twenty-five years after the triumph of Sophie's Choice, his published fiction comprises fewer than half a dozen stories.
Clearly, failure is as essential as success for a long career.
Prolific writers like John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, and Philip Roth, who churn out a book every two years, or compulsive filmmakers like Woody Allen, may end up repeating themselves or even undergoing decades-long sloughs, turning out, for every masterpiece, three or four perfunctory pieces, but in the end, publishing steadily, they'll have created a large body of work which will more than likely contain the same small number of masterpieces as their less prolific, more circumspect peers.
I had lunch one day with Bruce Cockburn. Starting out three years earlier than Willis Alan Ramsey, he's produced over twenty-five albums since. He agreed with me that failure is necessary for a long career, but added that he didn't think it mattered if the failure was in your life or in your work. He'd had no trouble making another album after reaching a pinnacle with Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws, he said, but only because he'd gotten divorced immediately after it.
“There was nothing I could do but write songs,” he told me.
Still, there'd been a stretch several years later when he couldn't write anything at all. Finally, in frustration, he gave up trying. Perhaps his career was over, he thought. He considered applying to art school, but after about eighteen months, he found himself sketching out a song he could stand and the albums that followed are among his strongest.
“Are you still working on that book?” a friend asks me.
Sheepishly I admit that I am.
“Do you have a deadline?”
“Of course,” I say.
“When is it?”
“Uh … it was about two years ago, I think.”
My fifteen minutes of literary fame are clearly over.
Following a British book tour and a paperback tour in America, the world finally forgets about me and my book. The hullabaloo dies down, the advance money runs out. I avoid talking to either my agent or my editor on the phone. There's nothing to do but return to the lonely life that awaits me at my desk every morning.
Eventually, I find myself, for the hundredth time, going over a scene I can't make work, when a small voice whispers in my ear, “You could cut that scene, you know, and end the section a scene earlier.”
“Oh, no, I couldn't possibly do that,” I say. “I couldn't possibly.”
I don't want to take time for any unexpected turns. I'm two years behind schedule, as it is, and though my plan for the book obviously isn't working, at least I have a plan.
“Try it,” the voice is persuasive and reassuring.
Because it's a Friday afternoon, and my work week is essentially over, I decide to think about cutting the scene over the weekend and leave it at that.
On Monday morning, when I come into my study, I stretch out on the floor hoping to be as relaxed as possible while I read over the pages. In this position, it's clear to me that the voice is correct. The scene is superfluous. In fact, there's only one sentence in it that I'd be sorry to lose. I make the decision to cut it and discover, to my delight that, when I have, the entire section, which I'd been laboring over, takes on a new, dynamic energy, and springs to life.
After that, the rest of the book flows easily. Somehow, I understand what the book is about and how to move it forward.
When I'm almost done, I send a draft to a critic who agreed to comment on my work as part of the academic tenure process. He'd given my first novel a rave in a major paper and I imagined he'd be a safe bet as an outside reviewer. I hardly know him and he isn't supposed to contact me during the review process, but one day he calls me at home to complain about the amount of material my university has sent him and also about the difficulty he's been having getting a check from them for his work.
“And the only reason I agreed to do any of this,” he grumbles, “was because I wanted to read your new novel.”
Tensing up, I wait to hear what he might have to say about it.
“And?” I finally have to prompt him.
I stew nervously. It's a delicate moment, waiting for a comment like this.
“Well,” he says, pausing, perhaps searching for the right way to phrase it. “It's no A Blessing on the Moon, I’ll tell you that,” he says. “I mean, I couldn't really get into it.”
My shoulders sink. I sigh. I thank him, and I tell him I'll look into the check.
I hang up the phone, and I think, "Ah, at long last -- sweet failure!"