Casual
Caldwell, Christopher
Casual SHUTTERED THOUGHTS From early adolescence, I never doubted that my writerly life would lead me into a romantic European exile. I was right. Here I am! Just like Goethe, just like Henry...
...This brings me close to admitting that political journalists all belong to one type: failures...
...We're different...
...There's no arguing with Rilke...
...One "development facilitator" in Bosnia was a bossy American girl of 24, whose job "qualifications" consisted of her having worked for two years after college in an "interracial high school...
...And suddenly, it's evident what all this research, all this "reporting," has been for...
...Unfortunately, they're all shit-in-the-shuttered-château thoughts...
...Is that a great setup for a novel or what...
...And, to follow his reckoning that one is more poetic in "everything real," it's the arms-control specialists and the union-hall political hacks at this conference who are the real poets, not us novelists manques gazing goofily across the lake, pretending we're F. Scott Fitzgerald...
...in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art—as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature...
...By these I mean the ones Philip Larkin evoked in his most burningly jealous poem, which describes his own writerly routine...
...As will the château...
...I already have it picked out...
...For me, at least, it looks like help is on the way...
...This was literature as lived by: The shit in the shuttered château Who does his five hundred words Then parts out the rest of the day Between bathing and booze and birds...
...If that guy thinks you're poetic, you can take it to the bank...
...Most learn to make a virtue of necessity—I've heard even ballet critics dismiss any attempt to treat them as writers with a scornful, "Nah...
...But don't think I'm jealous...
...Okay, not standing, exactly, more like stooped over and pecking nearsightedly at my laptop...
...At the conference a European delegate told me stories of how Western aid workers in the mid-1990s provoked resentment in the Balkans...
...If political journalists don't suffer "real writer"-envy, they ought to...
...Ah'm jessa beat reporter...
...I believe I committed that passage to memory before I became a journalist...
...Right now, I'm just worried about getting the novel finished...
...This was not the writing life as he'd imagined it in his youthful fantasies, which dogged him well into middle age...
...The bathing and booze and birds must be across the lake, where the novelists live...
...But it's enough to bring a rush of writerly thoughts to mind...
...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL...
...It's the one over there on the left, behind those yachts...
...Then there are the better kind, my kind, in fact: those born denizens of the shuttered château, who would abide there today but for some petty piece of bad luck (slobbering inarticulacy, say, or abject laziness...
...Just like Goethe, just like Henry James: standing on the edge of Lake Como, staring a mile across the water at the wall of pine-speckled, auburn-colored Alps that rears up behind a row of villas, gardens, and sailboats...
...We journalists are artists, too...
...But as long as reporting consists largely of trying to find a comfortable spot in a hotel room without a chair, and spending an hour working up the nerve to call some local political hack who doesn't want to talk to you, the shuttered château will probably continue to beckon...
...She got not only $120,000 a year but also a driver (a Bosnian former surgeon), a cook (a Bosnian former fashion designer), and a gardener (a Bosnian former dentist...
...This was something Rilke understood when, in his Letters to a Young Poet, he wrote to congratulate his correspondent for having enlisted in the army: "Art too is just a way of living," Rilke wrote, "and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it...
...We're more like . . . well, we're like the other trainer on the high school basketball team...
...Just substitute "working lunch" for bathing and "roundtable discussion" for booze, and it's the same literary life...
...I figure the film will take care of itself...
...This is the conference part of the lake, where writers of my sort get to discuss the "European-American Security Landscape after September 11" and related topics...
...Political journalists all belong to one of two types...
...But of course we're not...
...Larkin scratched out poems in hours stolen from his job as a university librarian...
...They're like the kid who knows exactly how to slam-dunk, but happens to be 5'2"—and so becomes the trainer on the high school basketball team...
...Some are political junkies who want to be politicians and have all the necessary insight to do so, but lack the God-given pizzazz—so they take a job that allows them to be in the presence of politicians...
...You wonder how they (we) live with them-(our-)selves...
...And maybe a week doesn't count as an exile...
Vol. 7 • June 2002 • No. 40
