Years ago, I studied for a week with author Paul Harding. His book Tinkers is one of those books I keep going back to, because the language is so rich and the images so captivating. I rarely find those qualities in a modern book (though another is James Galvin's The Meadow.) Harding won the Pulitzer prize for Tinkers, and nothing he has produced since has come close. I think he got self-conscious, as tends to happen when great accolades are thrown at an author. I remember him saying to me that he was afraid all the attention would just disappear. And it did. But, as I told him, the book that won the prize is still worthy, still in print, ever more worn and thumbed through on my shelf.
I recently came across a diary entry I made during that period of study, and I wanted to blog about it, because I think it raises an interesting question about how much of their own self a writer interjects into their characters.
One last harp on having studied with Paul Harding a couple of weeks ago and then I'll let him go: I had a question I was bursting to ask him or any other significant writer which had to do with how much the author inhabits his or her characters. See, when I started my own book Veil Of Time (which then became a trilogy) I thought to myself that for once I would have a protagonist who wasn't sort of a mirror doppleganger of myself. It's not that I'm an especial egoist or overly vain (though I might also be both of those things), but just that somehow my protagonists mostly are me with my set of values and ideas, my cosmology. I called this character Maggie Livingstone, who was a childhood friend of mine (still is, in fact, and lives now in the exact location of my book.)
So, my question to Paul Harding was just this: how can you keep yourself out of your writing and create rounded characters who aren't you. (I put this to him when the rest of the class had gone on coffee break.) I was a little bit surprised by his answer, because (being an egoist and vain) I had thought this was a problem unique to myself. But no, he said he had struggled with the same thing and that every author did. He said from time to time he wondered that if he were a better writer, he might be able to write protagonists that weren't him, but ultimately the author is putting his or her self on the page and that's the way it should be. (I'm not talking about genre writing here - John Le Carre didn't need to be a spy himself, though he did need to have an overwhelming interest in the subject. Formula novels don't run into this problem so much because the characters are more cookie cut out of material that is already made to a certain recipe.)
I was looking at Elizabeth Strout's new book "The Burgess Boys," her follow-up to "Olive Kitteredge." I wasn't surprised to find another Olive Kitteredge between the pages doing business under another name. Location was the same, character almost the same. It's just that our psyches are populated by certain characters or archetypes and the author would have to twist him or herself into all kinds of contortions to make this inner world come out on the page as something else.
So Herman Hesse wrote a large number of books and basically they all come with the same message, the same set of values and the same array of characters. (I read them all nevertheless.) DH Lawrence, the favourite of my youth, wrote the same book over and over. The point is, in the words of Martin Luther in the fifteenth century, "Hier stehe ich. Anders can ich nicht" (the famous, "Here I stand, I can do no other.")
So I got my question answered, and I feel better about Maggie Livingstone turned Claire McDougall (though she may not!) Paul Harding said that the opening of "Tinkers," where his protagonist hallucinates that the ceiling is cracking and falling in on him springs right out of his own history with his grandfather.
