A few Super Tuesday night notes…
1. It has been fifty years since the first California primary I can remember. 1974 was a midterm year, and the most important race was to determine who would succeed Ronald Reagan as our governor. Mama supported William Matson Roth; a dignified old school liberal. We listened on our battered old Zenith radio (we would not have a television until 1978) as the results came in. Mr. Roth finished fourth in the Democratic primary, well behind a triumphant Jerry Brown.
William Matson Roth, urbane also-ran
In our family, we rarely vote for winners. Pretty sure I didn’t vote for any winners today.
2. As part of a discussion yesterday on an email list to which I belong, I shared a link to the last few paragraphs of The Great Gatsby. I shared it in the context of making a point about the seductiveness and danger of nostalgia, but I shared it also as a reminder to myself. I read Gatsby when I was fifteen, and like so many, fell in love with Fitzgerald’s prose. The final lines are quoted as often as any ever written by an American. They make me cry. If I am not careful, they make me not want to write.
The Great Gatsby was, in many respects, a collaboration between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his brilliant editor, Maxwell Perkins. Perkins was a master polisher of others’ work, relentless and patient. We like to imagine that Fitzgerald wrote those lines in one sitting, perhaps in a trance, channeling them from the heavens. No doubt his early drafts (which we do not have) were splendid, but what we fall in love with and memorize and recite today is the result of a long and delicate process. We who torture ourselves that nothing we write is half as good need to remember that nothing most of the greats wrote at first was half as good as it ended up being after multiple revisions.
Maxwell Perkins
It is true that sometimes a single line will come all at once, or an image, and then you work it in. Perhaps the words “where the dark fields of the republic rolled on” came into Fitzgerald’s head early, and he saved it, not sure where it would end up, until it found the most felicitous possible home in his penultimate paragraph. Perhaps Perkins suggested it. We don’t know. All we do know is that the best writing -- like the best soccer playing or the most beautiful runway modeling or the most skillful suturing of a wound -- is the visible and transcendent outcome of what is often a very obscured, tortuous, and prosaic process.
We say of sausage that we love the taste, but we don’t want to see how it’s made. With writing, readers fall in love with the final drafts, and in order to keep a little mystery, we let them imagine that the last one was also the first. That’s not helpful to aspiring writers, who deserve to remember that mostly, the way you make a living in this business is committing to writing a certain number of words every day -- and committing to welcoming revisions and edits and criticism as indispensable to the process. If you’re going to be in the sausage business, feel free to keep your customers in the dark, but you might as well be honest with yourself about the unholy mess the “making” requires. (And if you get lucky and you write something brilliant the first time, consider it a single gift of unmerited grace — and get back to the slog.)
3. I have gone back to therapy for the first time in years. I have reconnected with Danielle, a therapist I had from 2015-2018. Back then, she was fresh out of school, accumulating her hours for licensure, and I saw her for $7 a session at a community clinic. Now, she is on her own, fully accredited. I am not exactly wealthy, but I am willing to pay full freight to see her once a week. It’s a stretch, but I think a necessary one for my health.
I don’t just want someone to whom I can vent. I certainly don’t need additional insight into why I do what I do. (I have a brain injury; I experienced trauma as a teenage sex worker; I went through additional trauma associated with the shame and scandal of losing my teaching job; I have a long history of addictions. It is best for me to not drink or do any sort of drugs, and it does seem best for me to stay away from sex and relationships too.) How I ended up here is a wonderfully interesting story to me, and (largely) to me alone. What is far more important is figuring out how best I live going forward.
I grew up in a family where it was frequently said that it was not good for aging men to be on their own. Widowed, never married, and divorced women flourished in our clan. Oh, they might get lonely or miss the departed husband, but they generally didn’t go batty or fall prey to conspiracy theories or forget to bathe. It was widely said among my people that the two worst misfortunes that could befall a man were too much inherited money and the absence of a wife. The former could lead someone to dilettantism, indolence, and consequent shame; the latter would make a man very odd indeed.
What we are trying to avoid
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The younger generation declared an exception to this rule: gay men tended to be just fine on their own. It was those who were oriented romantically towards women, but who had none, who were wont to go a little bit bonkers.
As I told Danielle today, I know that at least in part, this idea that aging heterosexual men do not do well in singleness is a myth. It may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy in my clan, but I’ve heard enough contrary anecdotes from other families to reassure myself that there are guys out there in their sixties, seventies, and beyond doing just splendidly without a wife (or a polycule.). My goal is to make sure that I am on a trajectory to be one of them.
I also note that I am very much an introvert, and so joining seventeen book clubs and fourteen hiking groups and three neighborhood committees is not a solution. I volunteer at my children’s schools out of obligation, not desire. Substituting a very active social life for a wife strikes me a bit as defeating the purpose of learning how to thrive not just in singleness, but for the most part, in solitude. (One coffee date a week with a friend is manageable, and I do need to keep volunteering for the good of the world, but I find that most such things drain more than they sustain.)
In any event, I write to solicit your stories. Tell me of fathers, uncles, grandfathers, and other older men whom you have known and loved who have flourished in their aloneness. In the meantime, Danielle and I will continue to reflect on what it means to live alone and live well.
"The Great Gatsby was, in many respects, a collaboration between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his brilliant editor, Maxwell Perkins."
And likely stolen work by Zelda Fitzgerald, since he was known to steal her work and claim it as his own...