Most of the book takes place in a certain eastern city, so I'll be there later this week, taking pictures and doing "setting research" to spiff up my recollections of the place. Apparently it'll be raining most of the time I'm there, but that won't stop me from riding around on my bike (yes, I have one that fits in a big purple suitcase, so I'm bringing it along). There will be a visit to the cathedral, perhaps the local clandestine deviant rendezvous spot if it's not all muddied up (for research, not sex), a swing through the queer part of town to observe the natives, and maybe a drink at a particular bar of note if I can manage it, because sometimes I'm nostalgic for events that occurred before I was a blastula.
But really, the best part of this is the energy...creaking creative conduits beginning to flow with idea-juice, or some other overwrought metaphor about actually paying attention to what I intend to do with my life and putting renewed effort into it. Fab!
I will for now ignore the looming Terror of the Middle. I will also take heart from Malcolm Gladwell's piece in last month's New Yorker, titled Late Bloomers.
When Cézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on a hundred and fifty occasions--before abandoning the portrait. He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.
Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain's trial-and-error method: "His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again." Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on "Huckleberry Finn" so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.
Not that I am equating myself with Cézanne or Twain, of course. But there's a great deal of comfort in knowing that people who pay attention to this sort of thing have noted that there's more than one kind of creative process, and that I needn't feel like an abject failure just because I haven't yet hit my stride as I approach the beginning of my fourth decade on the planet.
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