Have yourselves a merry little Christmas?

My son made this movie as a Chrismas present for his mom and me. In less than half the length of a Vince Guaraldi tune it captures just about everything I like about this time of year. The performers are Godzilla, Godzilla Junior, Gigan, and "Toho King Kong," who isn't really King Kong but has his own charms.

Learning in Public

I have this problem with always wanting to look like I know what I'm doing. So I sell the idea for The Undressing of America to FSG and I immediately assume my duty is to turn in a draft that shows what a great investment they made. I'm impressed with my editor, Eric Chinski, and promptly think, "I can't send this guy anything less than brilliant." Which by itself accounts for about a year's worth of abortive drafts.

      But as I blog about these questions I have around the strangeness of Bernarr Macfadden, the surprising ordinariness of his wife Mary, the implications of picking a beginning point, I realize how much learning I'm doing with this book—not just about the subject, but about writing itself. There's some tricky new stuff for me to master here, and that's what's best about Undressing right now. (And yeah, I do mean Undressing and metaphorically "undressing.") Whether I knew it consciously at the time or not, I took this book on not as a chance to prove what I'd already learned but to learn something new and hard. And working with Eric—whose reputation is as a brilliant text-editor—is a chance not to impress him but to learn from him. Starting today, stop thinking of this as my masterwork and think about it as a school project. Show some humility for a change, and come out of it with some tools I would never have found on my own.

John McCain's lesson to us all

I didn't expect much when I tuned in to the Al Smith Dinner, the charity event where presidential candidates make jokes about themselves and each other. I certainly didn't expect much from McCain, as stiff and old and tentative and angry and uptight and creepy and false as he's looked lately. But he was funny. He was sharp. He looked ten years younger.
       Most of all, he looked liked the McCain I'd almost forgotten about, the McCain beloved by reporters, the McCain who most Democrats grudgingly admired, the "straight talk" McCain who was likely to make a cutting joke about anything, even himself. I thought maybe that McCain was gone, lost to age or rage, but apparently he's just been hidden for strategic reasons. No wonder McCain's been so wooden and rambling lately. The man whose entire charm, whose political potency, was based on showing up as his idiosyncratic self has been pretending to be someone else. A mouthpiece for Rove proteges, a sidekick to Sarah Palin, a hireling of the Evangelical right wing. Afterwards I felt sad, because the old guy I saw telling jokes seemed to be having fun. He seemed to like who he was. I can't say that about the guy in the debates.
       None of his pretending can win him this election. On November 5 he'll have lost the race, lost the affection of a lot of people who used to like him, and muddied the reputation that obviously means so much to him. He'll have hated every minute of it. And he'll start asking himself, "What the hell was I doing?" Maybe that'll be John's final lesson to us: whatever you do, make sure it's really you who's doing it.

Where Do I Begin?

I don't have to know how a book starts before I can write, but it definitely helps. A lot of my writer friends say quit worrying about it, write it in any order and move the pieces around later. My head agrees, but it's never quite satisfying. I want something firm to push off from: this is the first thing I tell the reader, then this, then this. I know I can cut and paste when the draft is done, but I can't do a draft until I commit to an order and see it through. This book's been especially hard for me to figure out, I think because the story has so many movements. In my wild stabs at drafts so far I've tried a few starting points:

      Barney McFadden as a beaten little boy in rural Missouri, in church seething about the hollowness of Christianity, breaking away from the farmer who makes him labor him, running across the fields and into the bog where he feels an upwelling of the earth's "magnetic power," finding his new religion in his own body.

      Bernard McFadden on the midway of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, a small-time professional wrestler and fitness instructor, unemployed gym teacher looking for a way to make it big—when he sees the Great Sandow, the father of modern bodybuilding, perfect showman of the naked body, and is reborn as the seraph of Physical Culture.

      Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and special inspector for the Postal Service, grand high censor of America, on the day in 1906 he made enemies of both George Bernard Shaw and Bernarr Macfadden, kicking off a climactic battle in the Victorian war against truth.

      Macfadden's flight from New York to Chicago, across the border to Toronto and then to London, with the postal authorities coming after his publishing company, his shot at wealth and influence seemingly gone.

      All good hooks. And I couldn't figure out why none of them were working, until I realized that all of them forced Bernarr Macfadden to be the eyes through whom we see the story. The poor reader would be asked to inhabit that strange, impenetrable, narcissistic man. Forget the reader—the writer would have to inhabit him. I needed someone I could live with like a conjoined twin.

      So the book, in its current draft, starts with Mary Williamson, the 19-year-old Yorkshire lass who rode the train from to London to compete in Macfadden's "Britain's Perfect Woman" pageant and never went home to the life she thought she was going to lead. Then Bernarr is viewed from the outside, as an enigma, as nearly a force of nature or history, changing people but never really connecting with them. The story I write, and people read, is a human one.

      We open as Mary. The nervous train ride from Halifax is fresh in our memories. We're at Kings Cross. We see Macfadden in his "long rabbical overcoat." We step out. We greet him. And he takes our wrist.

Happy Birthday, Bernarr

Today is the birthday of the central figure of my book: Bernarr Macfadden, publisher of True Story magazine and prime mover in the "undressing of America." He'd have been 140 years old if his natural health ideas had worked as well as he said they would. I think I'll toast him by starting work on the next draft, the first "submittable draft" of Chapter 1. He was never a guy who shied away from reckless action, after all. And certainly never a guy who wasted time thinking....

The Writer Whisperer

I just found my new words to live by—in PetCo. I had to buy a Ph test kit for my kid's aquarium (for months the water's running acidic, and then I give it a little NaHCO3 goose and it jumps to pure-blue alkilinity—I figured I should buy a new test in case the old one was going whacky, but no) and while I was standing in line I started reading a poster advertising a new book by this guy who calls himself the Dog Whisperer. Three big words, his guiding principles, across the bottom:



EXERCISE. DISCIPLINE. AFFECTION.



And I thought, "That's what I need." I roll out of bed and go straight to my computer—until after Labor Day, when I'll roll out of bed, wake my kid up, drive him to school, and then go straight to my computer—check my email to make sure I still exist and didn't fade away during the night, mess with my Facebook page (which of course I only use to "promote my work"), check Google News ("Oh my God McCain's closing the gap again!"), and go to my blog pages and Red Room to see if anyone's commented. Somewhere in there I'll drink coffee, maybe eat something, and walk the dog. Then maybe I'll blog about how I'm not getting enough work done. For some reason.


      But these are things that I know from experience make me feel better and lead to more productivity: Running. (Lately I've been using the old "I'm too busy" excuse. Except that I secretly know that when I was running every other day months ago, 30-70 minutes per run, I was getting more work done than now.) Having to do work now because I have a deadline. (Best thing I've ever written was the Men of Tomorrow screenplay, up against the wall of the Guild strike.) And community. (In person, not electronically mediated. Sharing pages with writers. Meetings of this spiritual group I'm in. Talking to my family without a computer on my lap and one eye on the screen.) 



      Exercise, discipline, and affection make me happy, relaxed, productive, and well-behaved. But by some perversion of personality or old habit I pull toward indolence, chaos, and isolation. I need somebody to show up with a leash, that's all.

Out of Sheer Masochism

Some of my friends are jumping on me as I talk about my procrastination: "Snap out of it! Quit complaining and write!" What they don't understand is what a strange pleasure it is to be caught in that suspense: haunted by the book, putting notes and words down, throwing them away, never quite able to pull that trigger, say "This is it." It's an electric place. Tremendously alive. Full of possibilities that can't be grasped, ghosts in the corners. Agonizing—but sweet.

     It's not the high of pouring out good material, but a lot more fun than just doing work. And things come out of it too. All those insights I had in Ojai, about Bernarr and Mary Macfadden acting out the 20th Century drama of the Self, which shifted the orientation of the book and keep opening to new ideas—those came because I was fretting about the book but wasn't in a flow working on the book as it was. As much as I grind my teeth and say, "I should be months into the actual writing of a draft," the truth is that the draft I would have started months ago may not have been nearly as good as the book I'm still building up to.

      My favorite book about writing is Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage. Which is actually a book about not writing. Dyer told himself that he was going to write either a critical biography or a novel about his literary hero, D. H. Lawrence. What he actually did was squander years of his life, and a significant amount of his publisher's money, "researching" the book and frantically, angrily, insanely procrastinating. The title comes from a quote of Lawrence's, who went through similar agonies trying to write about his own hero, Thomas Hardy, before finally writing it "out of sheer rage." But Dyer's rage—although it builds relentlessly and poisons every last experience—never even drives him to write the Lawrence book. It only drives him to write a book about not writing the Lawrence book. And it's funny as hell. In a nauseating sort of way.
     

      This is the single most-recommended book about writing among the writers I know. But never quite out loud: it's never assigned at a writing workshop or listed on the website of any writer trying to sell his services as a coach or teacher. It's whispered about at intimate parties and passed from hand to hand in communal workspaces, like The Gulag Archipelago in the USSR. Because it tells a terrible truth about the writerly personality: we don't just have terrible neurotic blocks to getting our work done. We love having terrible neurotic blocks to getting our work done. The pain just feels so good.

      But of course that doesn't make our suffering seem noble, or even like just a minor neurosis to be banished by "shut up and do it" homilies. It makes us look like a bunch of freaky masochists. So please...don't tell anyone!

With Brush in Hand

As I got to work today, all the repellent implications of Caroline Paul's "sometimes you have to approach writing like cleaning the toilet" became clear to me. If writing is like kneeling on the floor with a round-headed brush, then what exactly are the words in my first draft? Nothing I didn't already know they were, I guess... But here's the good thing I've discovered: if you approach writing as cleaning, then the bad stuff, the feculence that must be effaced, is at least part of a job. For the first time I can welcome lousy sentences. That ridiculously self-conscious opening paragraph that strains to create a mood of urgency but says nothing concrete...it doesn't mean I failed! It means another piece of glittering porcelain to be revealed! Which means that I don't have to be afraid of...of...producing bad writing. I owe it to myself! (I was going to say I don't have to be afraid of putting out crap. But every metaphor has to know when to stop.)

It Has to Get Done

At the SF Writers Grotto about twelve of us are in this mutual goal-setting group. We meet every other Wednesday, tell whether we met our writing goals for the previous fortnight (you get a star on a white board if you did, you have to kick in five bucks to a group kitty if you didn't), spend most of an hour sharing thoughts on why we did or didn't and how to improve our work habits, then set new goals for next time. We call ourselves the Borstians, because it's a spin-off of a workshop we did with a great coach and consultant named Martha Borst. Our basic operating principle is that if we're having trouble getting work done, it's not going to help to keep beating ourselves up about it, worrying about it in solitude, or thinking endlessly about "what's wrong with me." The way to get something done is to decide what we're going to get done by when, tell other people about it who we trust not to let us off the hook, and do it. And if we don't do it, take responsibility for that and move to the next set of goals.

      It's pretty basic stuff—but it's infernally hard. For some of us, at least. Yesterday's meeting was full of wisdom, a lot of which boiled down to "Stop thinking about your book and just sit down and write it," and everything anyone said shot through me with an "Of course!" I talked about how I was feeling a bit overwhelmed or intimidated by new insights into the theme of my book, and Ethan Watters said how the only really effective thinking for him occurs in an interaction between his thoughts and the words on the page. You can bring head-stuff to the work, but nothing really happens until you try this, discard it, try something else, discover it works, keep going from there.

      Then Caroline Paul said, "Sometimes you just have to approach writing as a thing that has to get done. Like cleaning the toilet."

      We all jumped instantly on that one. So humbling, so quotidian, so elegantly inelegant; no false glamor or self-aggrandizing agony could survive it. A way better than Sisyphus—no French novelist ever wrote an existentialist essay about cleaning toilets, as far as I know. We all reminded each other of the importance of just taking action and not chewing over why we weren't taking action, and when we adjourned I felt lighter and ready to work.

      But then a feeling of familiarity stole over me. How many times had I said and heard phrases like that? Never as elegantly apt as Caroline's toilet, but still—the words are all around us. Advertising says it: "Just do it." Recovery programs say it: "Act as if." "Do the next right thing." Entertainment says it: "Don't think. Throw." (My friend Karen Green reminded me of that line from Bull Durham the last time I was fretting about my inaction.) We say these things to each other all the time, not just writers, everybody. And why? Because we can't fucking get it, that's why. Because the excitement of realizing yet again that action is the answer is such a big mental thrill that it alone can take the place of action for hours. And by the time the thrill wears off, we're back in the thinking again. Why am I unable to apply that epiphany about the toilet bowl again...?

      It is true, though, I know that. And when I wake up and start work again, it's Caroline's analogy I'll reach for first. I have to confess, though, when Caroline said that about the toilet bowl, my first thought was to wonder if I can get my cleaning lady to write my first draft.

The Haunting

This is the phase of every book that I call the Haunting. Actually, I've never called it that, I just all of a sudden thought of it. But it fits. It's when everywhere I go, everything I see, reminds me of the book. Even when I'm not writing it, even when I'm strenuously avoiding it, I find myself trying to connect every experience to it. I would say that's a good omen for actually getting it written except I'm afraid of jinxing it.

     What the book's haunting now is Ojai. My son and his mom flew to San Diego to meet me for half of the comic book convention and we spent a few days driving back to SF together. My first visit to Ojai, which Jennie's been wanting me to see for years. It's my kind of place, all right: hill-nestled oak valley, hot dry summer, white stucco, Spanish revival buildings, Arts and Crafts furniture, a main street colonnade, working fountains, outdoor dining, orange groves, ancient pepper trees, old Hollywood connections. My personal heaven, right this moment, would be Ojai with a gift certificate at Hacienda Antiques. But what put me in mind of the book was the role Ojai played in the history of 20th Century spirituality.

      The Theosophical Society was a Victorian "spiritualist" group, one of those séance-and-medium deals, a lot of clairvoyants with huge beards and black-garbed ladies with scary gleams in their eyes, but one that opened up to an interest in Buddhism and Hinduism before such things were fashionable in America and England. They were a weird bunch, mixing valuable scholarship and social work with a cultish belief in the imminent coming of the World Teacher, the new incarnation of the Christ. Then, in 1909, one of their leaders discovered a beautiful, dreamy, gazelle-eyed, 13-year-old Indian boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti and declared that this was Him for whom they waited. The Theosophists persuaded the boy's father to allow them to adopt both him and his younger brother, and for the next thirteen years Jiddu was raised to become the new Christ.

      Part of the job of the World Teacher turned out to be lecture tours. In 1922, needing rest after an exhausting world circuit, concluding with a long voyage from Sydney to Los Angeles in the close company of his Theosophical handlers, Jiddu was allowed a little R&R in a cottage in a secluded California valley—Ojai—owned by one of his followers. His handlers mostly left him alone, and in the company of his brother and some Ojai neighbors and a few lower-level Theosophists more inclined to honor than indoctrinate him, he began to see things in a new way. He experienced the first of a series of spiritual crises that would eventually lead him to break from the Society and deny that he was any sort of Christ. He was no more, he realized, than a man with the opportunity, the knowledge, and the temperament to bring the philosophical insights of Hinduism and Buddhism to Western awareness in a way that was relevant to the modern world. He rejected organized religion as a whole, even the Hindu guru tradition, and gave his life to teaching an ethical and personalized spirituality that he hoped might lead to individual freedom and universal peace. "Truth is a pathless land," he said. The marriage of Eastern philosophy and Western individualism that underlies so much of modern spirituality and psychology was shaped more by him than any other teacher.

      Krishnamurti lived in Ojai until he died in 1986 at the age of 90, and around him the town grew into an artistic and spiritual center. It's still full of spas, art galleries, lecture facilities, and philosophical foundations, not to mention a lot of shops selling those big pink crystals and the rest of what I think of as the goofier accesories of individualized cosmology. Looking at all this in my current haunted state, I started lining up Krishnamurti's story next to the story of The Undressing of America. While the Theosophists were preparing the world for The Coming, a wave of natural-health gurus were seizing the American imagination, and just as young Jiddu was being drafted for his holy role, Bernarr Macfadden reached the first peak of his fame. Krishnamurti began to rethink his destiny during the same years Macfadden rode True Story and its tabloid children to a new kind of power and influence. And as Macfadden began to behave more weirdly, finally throwing away his own empire, Krishnamurti was coming into his own as a teacher.

      Suddenly some patterns started to emerge, and I had another one of those thrilling "So that's what this story's about!" moments. You have the messianic zeal of the early 20th Century, with all these charismatic eccentrics saying, "I have the Truth! Follow me and be saved!" Then the frightened pause of the War, and afterward a huge turn toward individualized, relativistic, experiential journeys, illuminated but not led by teachers who encouraged people to examine their own stories.

      Macfadden had always told his readers that listening to their own bodies and their own experiences was the best way to health, but in his earlier days he always drowned that out with his louder, "But of course what you will discover are the Laws of Nature, which I have already mastered." But with the publication of True Story, and its subsequent overshadowing of his health crusade, he became an intermediary for people to tell their own stories and learn by reading their peers'. Soon enough the true-story industry, the confessional culture, could roll along just fine without him, in the same way that Krishnamurti's message spread far beyond him until even his death was just a historical footnote.

      Then I started seeing the same wide cultural turn all over the place around the same time. Like how Bill Wilson and his fellow drunks seeking a spiritual solution to alcoholism made their slow, painful break from specifically Christian organizations in the early '30s to create the Twelve Step Program, the "higher power," "God as you understand God," a program that just keeps splitting and spreading and rambling along anarchically in the hands of a bunch of addicts with no leaders. Each story reveals the mechanisms, the rewards, and the costs of the same profound shift in our relationship with self and truth.

      I have a lot of those "So that's what this story's about!" moments, to the point that I could probably list twenty things the book is "about." But what starts to happen in this haunted phase is that those abouts all start to hook up and overlap, turning into one big—still probably too big, but at least comprehensible—story. Which reminds me that there may be a real reason to delay and procrastinate on writing the thing. It may still need something I haven't found yet. Like a trip to Ojai.

The Big Con

Tomorrow morning I'm driving to San Diego to attend Comic Con International. This will be my 25th straight year there.

      The first time I was in my mid-20s, my first book had just come out, and I was researching my second, a history of '60s comics. I was also a rabid young comics fan, thrilled at the new directions the medium was taking in the '80s. Over the subsequent years I went back as an upstart comics writer networking like crazy, as one of the most prominent writers in the business locked into one signing or panel after another, as a burned-out comics writer bitching and moaning about the business, as a former comics writer skirting along the edges, and most recently as a comics historian honored by a small core of long-time fans but unknown to all the new fans in the field. And in the last couple of years I've started to meet young writers and artists who wanted to shake my hand because they'd "grown up on your comics, Mr. Jones."

      I've gone there umarried, married but no kid, with a baby, with a little kid who wanted to look at toys, in various states of marital break-up and reconciliation; this year I'll be there with a 15-year-old son. I've been there too broke to buy the comics I wanted, able to buy huge stacks of the things, loaded with cash but not wanting anything, and broke again.

     I've seen the convention change too, from a few thousand fans—mostly actual comics fans, and of the old nerdy school of hard-core collectors before comics got cool—in the dumpy old downtown convention to 120,000 people filling and overfilling the jet-hangar-sized center on the harbor. I've seen comics fans and creators become hipper, slimmer, more attractive, more ethnically varied, and more likely to be female, as I've seen the comics themselves pushed to the edges of the convention by the movies, TV shows, cartoons, video games, and collectible toys that have become the heart of the convention. I've seen the Klingons, Imperial Storm Troopers, superheroes, and other costumed oddballs come back every year but every year vanish deeper into the crowds of families in t-shirts and shorts. I've seen my generation of young turks become middle-aged veterans, seen the middle-aged veterans I admired become old-timers, seen the old-timers of another day become fewer and fewer.

      I can chart the course of half my life by just recalling each of those 25 sets of four days in the summer in San Diego. And this year, as most years, I go there in an interesting place, my career unfixed, opportunities open and closing like Venus fly-trap lips. I'm pushing these on-line humor books, wrestling with the nonfiction book that's given me the most trouble of any project in my life, and talking up the screenplay I've written about the early days of the comics business, which I know is a good piece of work—but which I'll also have to admit is trapped in a legal and financial dispute of the producer's.

      I never know how I'll feel about any of this as I talk to other writers there or as I think about it on the way home. I never know who I'll meet, either, because as the Con grows amoeba-like it slurps up more and more chunks of the culture outside it. I've just learned that several of my "real novelist" acquaintances will be there this year.

      So I'm going to let my Sisyphean obligation roll to the bottom of the hill and sit there for a week. This is no time to let my view of life be blocked by a big rock. I'm going to let my head empty out in the liminal state of the long I-5 drive. Then I'll plunge in, eyes and ears open, and find out who I am this year.

Collaboration

I think one reason I'm having trouble surrendering myself to this book is that I'm just burned out on the loneliness of the writing life. When I was a kid I was really isolated and had a lot of social anxiety, so pulling into myself and making things up was a great comfort. This, obviously, had a great deal to do with my decision to devote my life to writing.

      I climbed out of my hole in my early twenties, and as part of that started collaborating with another young writer, Will Jacobs, on humor books, light mysteries, fan-boy non-fiction and comic books. That was a true joy: We'd spend days at each other's houses, brainstorm and plot together, go off and write separate chunks and pass them back and forth, and read a lot of our stuff to our friends. Books got written, but it seemed to happen through play. And when I began to move back to solo writing, the doors I'd opened with Will led me into other collaborative work: comic books, where most of my artists and editors wanted to be real creative partners, and screenplays for hire, where regular meetings with eager young development execs punctuated the stretches of solitary work.

      At first it was a relief when I started carving out time to write my own books. Days of uninterrupted thought! The freedom to make huge structural changes without having to persuade an editor! I even took some comfort in retreating back to the solitude that had gotten me through anxious times as a kid. And even then there continued to be collaborative efforts. In researching Killing Monsters I did storytelling workshops with kids in classrooms, about as far from a quiet, lonely experience as I could get.

      Then, before I'd even started the writing in earnest, I began getting invitations to speak at conferences on media and child development, and I found myself part of a sprawling international conversation. Men of Tomorrow required a tremendous amount of face-to-face interviewing and regular email conversations with other comics historians. Big parts of that book felt like massive multi-player collaborations.

      But The Undressing of America, set further in the past (the heart of the story is the 1920s, and the principals were nearly all dead by the end of the '50s), allows for a great deal less interviewing. Although there are other students of the tabloids, the confessional magazines, and old health crusades, there is no vibrant subculture constantly arguing the details. There's a lot of library research, and I do like library research—but dear God! To fly to New York and walk through midtown and spend the day in that windowless room with those effing microfilm machines (whrrr—klak—whrrr—klak) when I could be out drinking coffee with my snappy Manhattan friends or looking at the spring light flashing on the Empire State Building? Whose idea was that?

      Fellow writers can be a huge comfort. Being able to talk about all this with my pals at the Writers Grotto has kept me sane and gotten me through some of the worst resistance on the book. But here's a perverse twist: When I'm having trouble with the writing, I find it hard to show up at the Grotto. Or at least be open about what I'm going through. Part of it's that I don't want to be the whiner in the room. And part of it, as my cohort Jennine Lanouette helped me see recently, is that I punish myself by isolating. I get down on myself, feel like other people don't want to hear about this shit, tell myself I'm better off just staying home and working at the kitchen table where at least I have my dog to keep me company, and so I hold myself in that juvenile space where I resent the book and resist entering it. (I'm at my kitchen table, not the Grotto, as I write this.) It's easiest for me to be at the Grotto when I'm washing dishes after a party or leading a meeting of the goal-support group some of us have formed. Collaborative efforts again.

      No shock, then, that I seized on the chance to start collaborating with Will on humor again. Or that I find it easier to blog about writing my book, with the payoff of quick comments from other people, or at least being able to imagine readers out there the instant I hit "Publish Post." And I make comments on other people's blogs, post other writers' humor pieces on our Friends of Will and Gerry blog, and...collaborate with the blogosphere.

      So here's the big thing for me: For 35 years I've been running on the unexamined assumption that I'm basically a loner who should be happiest when he's producing personal work in solitude. In fact, I think I'm a lover of people and a natural collaborator with some moderate social phobias who got set on the wrong path when my mom—in her alcohol-muddied anxieties—pulled me out of the world at a crucial moment. And who has been able to ignore that disconnect because most of my writing career has, in fact, been far from solitary. The idea that I would someday be a Real Writer (which in my mind has meant the generation of work from some lonely internal singularity) has sat there like a vision of manifest destiny. But really: It ain't me.

      This is a good book I'm writing, and I believe that the people I'm writing about deserve to have their stories told. I think it will add something to our understanding of how we as a culture got where we are. And suddenly I realize I'm doing it a disservice by making it "my book." How do I get it out of my head? How do I make it into a collaboration? And with whom?

The Anonymous Writer

I said a few posts ago that most of my professional writing so far has spared me a lot of critical scrutiny as a writer. I've sold my non-fiction mainly on my knowledge of the subject matter, thus taking the spotlight off the writing itself. Writing comic books I can hide behind artists and established characters. But with this book, about subjects that few people are aware of, I'm really forced to present myself as a "writer," to succeed or fail on my ability to capture and hold readers through my narrative. This is the first book I've sold because an editor wanted to work with me and my literary voice as opposed to a subject matter.

      That led me to think that my challenge here was to deliver a powerful enough voice and authorial presence to justify the book. To put me at the center of the process, demanding attention as me and then delivering a strong enough authorial presence to justify the attention. But now I'm starting to wonder if I don't have it backwards.

      My thinking's been shifting since I spent the past weekend at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Friday night I saw Harold Lloyd's The Kid Brother. Saturday it was William Desmond Taylor's Soul of Youth, René Clair's Les Deux Timides, Carl Maria von Dreyer's Mikäel, and Paul Leni's The Man Who Laughs, with Conrad Veidt. Then four more on Sunday: Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Coleen Moore in Her Wild Oat, Teinosuke Kinugasa's Jujiro, and the King Vidor/Marion Davies/Marie Dressler The Patsy. Movies ranging from the good to the incomparable, with superb live music and a Castro Theater full of joyous worshippers. The effect of the whole was transcendent.

      The emphasis of the introductory speeches and the program notes was almost entirely on the directors and actors, with occasional mentions of cinematographers, producers, and studios. Almost never was a writer mentioned, and yet silent movies had writers. Between the desire of Universal Pictures executives to adapt Victor Hugo's L'Homme Qui Rit and the astonishing on-film work of Paul Leni and Conrad Veidt lay a writing process, no doubt hard and chaotic and hair-pullingly fraught, during which at least four scenarists had to chop a sprawling, wordy, twelve-volume novel down to about a hundred pages of visual continuity. Events had to be cut, rearranged, stripped down, and invented. Image and movement had to be substituted for conversations and exposition. Characters had to be sharpened to points of light. And then, to convey the information that only words could carry, a fifth writer was brought in to script the intertitles, in each of which a transition had to be carried or a backstory evoked in a third as many words as a typical Hugo sentence. A great silent movie was also, usually, a writerly triumph.

      But of the five writers on The Man Who Laughs, I'd heard of none of them. And I know a fair amount about old Hollywood, too. Only one of the five, whose name I can't remember now, got credit on screen.

     Sometimes you'll hear a spiritual writer speak of writing not for personal glory but for God. Those silent movie writers were doing that, in a sense, although the gods they were giving expression to were Paul Leni and Conrad Veidt and Olga Baclanova and "Uncle Carl" Laemmle's Universal Picture Corp. Their motives were scarcely holy, of course, but what they asked of their talents was the same: They turned their writing not toward expressing themselves or calling attention to themselves but toward making a larger project work. They directed their art through others because it was through those others, those actors, those crew people, that the story would be revealed.

      All of which puts my own past work in perspective. Whether I was subsumed in a collaboration with cartoonists or serving as the vessel for some non-fiction subject matter to find its way to the readers interested in it, my relative anonymity was a gift to the project. I was far more useful leading the readers attention away from me instead of toward me. So now I'm thinking that even in this book, in which the author and his skills and his voice are so much more important than in past work, I might still do best to make sure that the process is not about me. Maybe the best thing I can do is forget not only about the readers' eyes on me. Let go of both the fear of not living up to critical expectations and the hope of receiving critical accolades. Be just a conduit for the story and for the immortality of the people I write about.

But what's this book ABOUT?

My friend Todd Oppenheimer at the Writers' Grotto asked me that the other day. Todd and I are in a sort of mutual support group that meets every two weeks to set and compare personal writing goals. "You've been talking about this book for a while," he said, "but you always call it just 'the FSG book.' You've never said what it's about."



      I had two reactions to this. My first was, "Screw you, Todd." That's the one I didn't say.

The one I said was, "That's a really good question, Todd. Thanks for asking that." Then I explained that although I was very clear on the subject matter and the central characters of my narrative, I felt I was still in the process of zeroing in on the major points I wanted to make and the specific focus of the story, and so I was still wrestling with issues of timeline, entry point, structure, voice, and point of view. As a result of this, I was still uncertain about my title—I'd gone through True Story, American Madness, and Mad Fortune on the way to The Undressing of America—and so tended to refer to it as simply "the FSG book." But now that Todd led me to think about it, I saw how that vagueness only compounded the problem of writing chapters that I could commit to well enough to send my editor, and how referring to it in terms of the publisher that was waiting for it only kept me locked in thinking of it as an unfulfilled obligation rather than a book unto itself.


      So I made a resolution, right there talking to Todd, that I would settle on The Undressing of America as a working title, at least, and refer to it by that. (It helped that I'd already run it by my editor and he liked it.) That's why I chose the name of the book as the name of this blog, so that every time I came here to write about it I would be engaging with the book itself at least nominatively, instead of some new, separate entity like "It Sure Is Hard to Write a Book" or "The Agony of Being Me" or "Out of Sheer Pique." And I told Todd what I knew for sure about what the book was about. Not so fully or so neatly as this, but in essence:



      In 1919, a husband and wife team named Bernarr and Mary Macfadden published a magazine that transformed American culture. It was called True Story, and although few remember it now, and cultural historians are inclined to give it a passing nod at best, it became the best-selling and most widely imitated magazine of the 1920s, upended publishers' perceptions of what the public wanted to read, shifted the relationship between media "producer" and "consumer" forever, and discovered a vast new market among young women negotiating a changing moral climate. And it accomplished more than any other enterprise to shatter the culture of Victorian concealment and usher us into a "culture of the explicit," a culture that still shapes our public discourse, in which increasingly frank confessions of our private emotional struggles become essential threads in our social fabric: guides to living, subjects for bonding, moral crucibles, self identifiers, class identifiers, entertainment, titillation, grist for outrage, commodities. True Story's immediate descendants were the tabloids, true crime stories, celebrity gossip rags, "women's issues" magazines, and the mainstreaming of soft-core pornography (and the Macfaddens published all of those in their earliest days). Its longer-term descendants include almost everything we lump under "reality media."


      Bernarr and Mary Macfadden themselves had hardly any idea what they were doing. He grew up an abused, neglected, and sickly farm boy in the 19th century Ozarks who discovered body building and turned himself through sheer will and desperation (desperation to be something, to be noticed, to have power over his life, to drive away the illness that take his parents from him as a child) into a paragon of health and strength. He knocked around the carnival circuits of mid-America for years as a strongman and a professional wrestler before he went to the 1893 Chicago world's fair (the "White City" fair) and saw people making a killing on the new "fitness" fad. Over the next decade, Bernarr made a modest success of himself selling exercise gadgets, running health farms for rich hypochondriacs, opening health-food restaurants, and publishing Physical Culture, the first magazine to call attention to body building as a pursuit and a subculture and the first to demonstrate that you could sell a lot of magazines with pictures of nearly naked men and women if you did so to demonstrate exercises. He reached the second tier among health gurus, grinding out book after book on his self-generated ideas for health and happiness, rejecting traditional medicine, and getting himself on the AMA's enemies list
.

      It wasn't the AMA that drove him to the edge of bankruptcy and forced him to flee the country. It was the censors, led by the great "social purifier" himself, Anthony Comstock, who had developed a special enmity for Macfadden. When Physical Culture ran a serialized novel dramatizing the causes and costs of venereal disease, Bernarr was convicted of peddling pornography, and when he fought back he became a cause celebre, an opponent of the early 20th Century equivalent of "abstinence only" sex education, the mad idea that is always held up by cultural conservatives that we would not have any moral or sexual problems if we just never talked about them. In the end, the President himself pardoned him, but the opponents of sexual discussions would not relent, and in 1912 Macfadden fled to England.



      There, at the age of forty-five, he met and pursued and married a nineteen-year-old amateur swimming champion named Mary Williamson. He won her by staging a pageant called "Britain's Perfect Woman," promising a glorious tour of England to the winner, knowing full well that his object was to secure a young bride who would bear him heirs, a "Phyical Culture Family" to promote his program for achieving perfect health. Mary herself was a young woman of simple goals, a carpet-mill worker, a Yorkshire lass who just wanted to swim, enjoy the days, and raise a family. She was lonely, too, having been kept house-bound by illness for much of her childhood, and susceptible to a man who seemed to need her every minute, who told her how to live her life, who spoke of the crusade they would lead to restore mankind to health, who was sexually insatiable, who wanted to be her father and lover at once.



      The Macfaddens had just begun to build their new life in England when the Great War came. They retreated back to America, back to poverty and trouble. Bernarr tried every trick he could to boost the sales of Physical Culture, to launch a new health farm, to invent a new exercise gadget that would make him rich. Everything backfired. Then Mary had her idea.

      Physical Culture published letters from Macfadden's followers in which they described their own struggles with illness and triumphant returns to health. Mary help select and edit the letters, and she knew very well that young women like herself would be most interested in those that veered into moral and marital and emotional issues as well. No other twenty-five year old, lower-middle-class woman in the world was in a position to create a new magazine, and perhaps no one else could have imagined True Story.

       It was an instant success. Within a few years it had turned the Macfaddens into milloinaires and inspired Bernarr to go head-to-head with William Randolph Hearst for mastery of the newsstands.

 Then everything began to change. A new figure entered Bernarr's life, an amateur stage magician and crime novelist named Fulton Oursler who began to whisper things in Bernarr's ear that Mary didn't like. Bernarr came to see himself as man's salvation and diverted his resources to a man run for the presidency. And there was the terrible thing that befell the Macfaddens' baby son, thanks to Bernarr's devotion to his own odd health precepts....



      By the time I'd reached that point in my quick summary of all this to Todd, he was nodding enthusiastically. "It sounds like a great story," he said. "And it sounds like just the sort of thing you'd do well, like it's right in line with your interests and your strengths." I thanked him for that. It did sound like a compelling book when I described it, and the decisions about what to include and how to present them didn't seem so daunting after all. Then Todd asked, "But what's the 'ah-ha' of the book? What is it that's going to make it stand out, that's going to get you the NPR interviews, the reviews, the attention that a book needs to get anywhere these days?"



      And I thought: "Screw you, Todd."

Sisyphus Rocks

A Facebook friend was comparing herself to Sisyphus this morning, which got me thinking about the old stone-roller's dilemma. You know the myth: the arrogant king whom the gods punished by making him roll a huge stone to the top of a hill, only to have it slip away from him right at the crest and roll all the way back to the bottom every time. Anyone who's ever tried to write a book can identify. I've thought about old Sis a few times myself while pushing The Undressing of America toward completion.

      But today something new occurred to me. What turns Sisyphus's task into torture? The disappointment and frustration of seeing the rock roll back down the hills, right? So his problem is the expectation that one of these times, maybe this time, he's actually going to get it to the top. But what if he changes his attitude? What if Sisyphus says to himself, "Okay. This is what I'm doing with my eternal life. This is who I am. I push a rock." Maybe then he could start to enjoy it. You know: fresh air, exercise, the feel of the rough stone against his palms, the smell of the loam as the boulder's weight breaks the soil beneath it, the regular break when the rock rolls back down, the pleasant walk to the bottom to start over again. And no worries about what he's going to do next. After all, it's not the destination that counts, right? It's the journey.
      

      So starting tomorrow, I'm reinterpreting the Sisyphean challenge of writing my book. After all, as Olympian punishments go, this one's pretty sweet. I'm not a bodiless shade drifting through a lightless limbo. I'm not being tantalized by food that's snatched away. I get to wake up every morning and push my rock, and if I don't get all worked up over how it's all supposed to come out, what's not to like? If Sisyphus has learned any wisdom and humility in all those centuries in Tantalus, I'll bet he's pretty grateful to the gods for the assignment. Am I supposed to rage against the job they've given me? What's that but arrogance?