Writing From the Bottom Up

“Having made an utter failure of my life, I found myself one day, in the midst of my poverty and wretchedness, thinking about the female companions of my youth. As I went over them one by one, examining and comparing them in my mind’s eye, it suddenly came over me that those slips of girls – which is all they were then – were in every way, both morally and intellectually, superior to the ‘grave and mustached signior’ I am now supposed to have become…I had brought myself to this present wretched state, in which, having frittered away half a lifetime, I find myself without a single skill with which I could earn a decent living. I resolved that, however unsightly my own short comings might be, I must not, for the sake of keeping them hid, allow those wonderful girls to pass into oblivion without a memorial.

 

“Reminders of my poverty were all about me: that thatched roof, the wicker lattices, the string beds, the crockery stove.  But these did not need to be an impediment to the workings of the imagination. Indeed, the beauties of nature outside my door – the morning breeze, the evening dew, the flowers and trees of my garden – were a positive encouragement to write. I might lack learning and literary aptitude, but what was to prevent me from turning it all into a story and writing it in the vernacular?”

 

From the first chapter of “Dream of Red Mansions” by Cao Xueqin

 

And so the inspiration of the greatest novel China produced began when a writer hit bottom and looked beyond himself. The books of mine other people have liked the most had the least to do with me.  The novel I wrote that came the closest to publication was about a samurai who was duty bound to kill himself, but did not so he could help save a child. The conflict between honor and compassion defined his character… the editors loved it, the marketers vetoed it. I had simply wanted to illustrate the most difficult part of Japanese culture for Americans to understand.

 

I wonder what hitting bottom would mean for me.  I’m not sure it’s possible, since I always have the cushion of family to land on. To ‘hit bottom’ would require a Bruce Wayne-like determination.  In one of the movies, the crime lord scolded Wayne for being too soft to understand crime, so Wayne gave his coat and money to a beggar and went hunting for the bottom, not so much to join it as to understand it. It took a certain arrogance on his part to assume he would survive it, of course, but that’s what happens to obsessive people.

 

The narrator, which commentators have assumed is Cao, argued against the assumption that poverty prevented inspiration. In contrast to the West, where poverty is assumed to be fuel for inspiration, in China most writers were independently wealthy scholars who belonged to little clubs where they shared their work with each other. Word of mouth was the only advertising.

 

Sometimes in Chongqing I would be sitting in my 15^th floor apartment thinking, is this really my life? Coming home every evening to a lonely apartment I haven’t even bothered to fully furnish because I know I’m leaving the country anyway?  Then I would stand on the balcony and look down at the people who make their living selling food on the street, either as groceries or cooked, and I would wonder how they managed to eek out a living.  I was a regular at one stand where the woman basted chicken and grilled it right in front of us. She was an expressive woman; I didn’t need to know Chinese to know when she and her husband were arguing. Most days they were happy, some days they would be working side by side without looking at each other. The Chinese are much more willing to reveal their family difficulties to the neighborhood.

 

But I don’t generally need to hit bottom to kick myself in gear again. I can use the shame of making a mistake to guilt myself into writing. I can give myself deadlines. Right now I have a post it note on my computer, “What have you written today?”

 

But it’s not just about how much one writes, but what one writes. If I hit bottom, what would I write about? Would I be too ashamed of how I got there to be honest about what it was like? Would I fall so hard I’d crack the mirror and find a distorted reflection?