The Bookmarked Series
John Knowles’ A Separate Peace by Kirby Gann
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five by Curtis Smith
Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children by Paula Bomer
Stephen King’s Different Seasons by Aaron Burch
Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano by David P. Ryan
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby by Jaime Clarke
Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves by Michael Seidlinger
Copyright © 2016 by Kirkby Gann Tittle
All rights reserved.
Ig Publishing
Box 2547
New York, NY 10163
ISBN:978-1-6324-6013-4 (Epub)
Contents
John Knowles’ A Separate Peace: Bookmarked
You don’t want a life based on your failure to understand life, right?
—Charles D’Ambrosio, “Salinger and Sobs”
WE DON’T GET TO CHOOSE WHERE WE COME FROM. Nor, for much of this life, do we get a say in determining the kind of person we are—I mean the bedrock foundational stuff—few are able to account for what we find pleasing and what we wish to avoid, what excites us versus what leaves us unmoved, and whether we have courage or suffer congenital cowardice; neither do we get to select which experiences will prove formative and which will fade lost memory’s oblivion. Only over time do we begin to suspect our possibilities; with luck, in time we learn to recognize this delirious freedom that allows us to hone the best parts of ourselves, to move more this way instead of that way, to create the kind of person we wish to be. This is one of the cool things that comes with being alive.
Writers are honed not only via efforts made in their own writing but also—maybe even more so—by what they read. Like strops whetting a blade, certain books sharpen the edge of our vision, widen the scope of what we might do in our own pages. Ask any writer and they will tell you of this time, of this one book in their personal history, when this sudden moment of recognition occurred and the book transformed from mere story to personal revelation, the text rolling away unnoticed stones to reveal what we must do with our lives.
For me it was A Separate Peace. I acknowledge up front that it’s not exactly the sexiest title to have chosen for this brief exploration into origins. Yet it is the most honest one.
It even seems unlikely to me now that a brief, quiet novel about the friendship between two boys at a New England prep school during the Second World War’s crucial year of 1942 has held sway over my sensibilities as a novelist for nearly three decades. Especially unlikely as A Separate Peace wasn’t a book I returned to again and again over the years, retrieved to study how its various elements of composition worked, or to imitate its voice or structures, pry apart its elements in the way writers do to better understand how one puts together a work of fiction. Reading for example and instruction has been my habit and process with nearly every book read since my teen years: on one level looking for the usual pleasures and transport, on another searching for clues to how to better my own efforts at putting words on paper; even, admittedly—and if the book is any good—hard on the lookout for what I might steal outright. (Every writer does this whether or not they are willing to concede it.) Nor have I ever returned to those pages for the simple pleasure of reacquainting myself with a story remembered as one deeply enjoyed in my youth.
It’s a peculiar thing about books: we don’t get to decide which ones affect us most. We don’t choose which stories stay with us after the cover is closed and the book is returned to the shelf, or loaned out to one of those friends who never return what they borrow. No one gets to determine what experiences prove formative.
Some books don’t overwhelm or especially impress us at the moment of reading them, and yet as time passes we come to understand that they have never entirely gone away—they haven’t slipped into that twilight background realm of titles we’re pretty sure we’ve read but maybe need to hear the gist of again to jog our memories. Quiet books of this nature don’t prove their ultimate consequence until later, often for years after we believe we have moved on. It’s as though such books don’t reveal their singular power until we’ve managed to live enough life, collect enough reading experience, to be able to see them properly, to see what shape they’ve made for themselves in our interior lives.
It can be difficult to express why. No doubt a lot of this has to do with who we are when we encounter the book in question. Everyone who reads knows that special feeling of meeting the right book at the right time, that rush when it seems the book in your hands was written specifically for you to read at this moment in your life, containing everything that interests you, with language that is both surprising and yet feels like it could have come from your own head—if only you’d had the chance to give voice to it; if only you’d had the proper idea. Like the book certifies truths you have only suspected before. The difference between a book and the right book feels analogous to the difference between a history of casual lovers set against the moment of falling in love. Amazement might be the most useful descriptive word. A sensation all the more amazing for having been inspired by something as simple as a story.
•
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” is one of many lines for which Joan Didion has been justly celebrated. Not only because it’s pithy and to the point and easy to remember. Yet it’s a remark I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with. I veer back and forth between resisting and embracing it, between mocking its crusty stench of empty platitude and accepting her words with my typical, characteristic ambivalence; the line comes up a lot in literary circles, reliably pronounced by someone in workshops and lectures and conferences. Often enough that you might feel obligated to have some rejoinder ready to add in response. I’m unsure of the remark’s context, if she said it in an interview or if it’s in one of her extraordinary essays; on the one hand it strikes me as irksome, a brash overstatement claiming greater cultural territory and importance for the all-cap WRITER, insinuating it’s only through literature that we are humanized, and only through story can we make sense of the world we live in, etc.—a claim that many days I struggle to accept. It’s apropos applied to my own life, certainly—I cannot imagine who I would be without my having read Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Nabokov and Proust et al, and my life has not only been enriched by such classics but also by innumerable novels of mystery and suspense, the noir and detective genres, thrillers—yet I see proof in the lives of friends and family that it’s possible to lead a deep, rewarding, meaningful life without having read any of the great novelists. Without having read any novels at all, even.
Then I wonder if what Didion meant was the use of stories as tools, literally, for creating our selves. A widespread view among psychologists and some philosophers involves the concept of “narrative identity,” a theory that we bring a sense of unity to our lives by creating narratives for them, providing coherence and purpose to our ever-evolving experience of everyday living. Each individual narrative constructs a past, a history in which we are the hero, the inviolable center, and, by posing causal links, the mind connects that past to the present as we perceive it and as circumstances demand. Via this stance we can imagine a future toward which we try to direct ourselves. In that sense, yes, to live is to tell ourselves stories; stories bring order to the chaotic mess of who we are.
The implications of such internalized self-storytelling can get weird, though. “Narrative Identity”—the notion that the self is a story—implies we must have a clear beginning (okay, creative writers: aside from being born, what would