The Red Chair
Patricia Foster
It’s a beautiful spring day and I’ve invited five women writers to my home in Iowa City. It’s 1994, and I’m new to the Midwest, new to gritty banks of snow and thin sheets of ice glazing the sidewalks, new to my job teaching graduate students at the University of Iowa, and yet today I’m stepping outside that life, anxious to meet some of the women in this town who write. Four women are scattered around my living room, sitting on the sofa and chairs, drinking coffee and doing what we do best, yakking about our lives, when a tall, dark-haired woman rushes up my front steps. She smiles at me and introduces herself while handing me a tangled bunch of daffodils. Over my shoulder she waves to several of the women, then spies the red chair. “Oh, I love that chair. That’s my chair,” she says, and immediately takes possession, settling into its thick, ample cushions, her sky-blue skirt flounced over the edge, one sandal swinging loose from her heel. It’s a high-backed, deep-seated chair in front of double windows, a place where a leafy fern drapes across one arm.
My husband and I call it the Queen’s chair.
The truth is, I’d intended to sit there myself, and for a moment, my mind spasms: what are you doing in my chair? I’m annoyed by her presumption and equally surprised by my own curious excitement as if something new is about to be revealed. Well! I stare at her pale skin and elegant bone structure, at the way she glances restlessly around the room as if assessing its charm. She lets one shoe drop idly to the floor and then turns to chat with the woman on her left. I haven’t read this woman’s writing, and yet I have an intuitive, startling premonition that she will not only survive but flourish. Ridiculous! But let me explain: though I know her only casually (I have actually met her once before), I recognize the territory. What she’s got is appetite, a big, greedy hunger, urgent and demanding and publically displayed. In fact, she’s got what I’ve come to think of as the claiming gene. Mine, she says. I want that and that and that.
When I say that she will do well, I am not talking about the quality of her work, but about her persistence, a way of being in the world that predetermines, if nothing else, that I will notice her. Not only notice her, but begin to fantasize about her, to be haunted by her, which means, of course, to consider her in contrast to myself. I see her at her writing desk in the early morning light, slightly disheveled, the sleeves of an old navy sweater pushed up to her elbows, thick socks warming her narrow feet. She’s working on a novel about her childhood and has almost finished a first draft. I see the cats roaming around her chair, purring. I hear the telephone ringing, her email flashing, the Sprint bill lying on the table, demanding payment. But she stays focused. She’s writing a novel and she intends to finish it, the rest of the world be damned! I smile to myself. I know she’ll get rejections. Of course, she will. All writers do. In my mind, I see her opening the envelope that says, “I’m sorry to inform you. . .” those dangerously benign words beneath the editor’s address. “Asshole,” she mutters. She tears it up and kicks the leg of her writing table, brews a fresh cup of coffee, and then pulls out her latest chapter to begin revising. I persist in this fantasy about her because, as you can already imagine, I am both her and not her. I too have a big hunger, urgent and demanding, but alas, I am easily distracted, surprised by the bright flutter of a cardinal landing on my deck, by the creak of the floor as my husband paces upstairs, by a sudden, inescapable need to email my niece right now. I want that and that and that. But I rarely say it aloud. In truth, I’m embarrassed to admit many of my desires both to myself and in public as if such ambition might be foolish. Too big for your britches, little girl! Who do you think you are? And rejections? Send me a rejection and I take this as a cosmic message to stay in bed.
What I’m talking about is attitude and how one’s attitude towards desire affects the writing life.
The desire to write, I believe, has nothing to do with legitimacy. Nothing to do with talent. Nothing to do with entitlement. Nothing to do with virtue. Instead, that desire is the raw, unrefined, unfiltered self in action. It’s the thing that comes before writing, the crucial element in any self-creation. It is the bold, risk-taking instinct, that buzzing, slightly hallucinatory feeling that engulfs your whole body when — bingo!– you click with an idea. As the famous adage asserts, “It is not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.” And that’s what I am talking about here: the ongoing and often precarious fight inside, the determination to stay afloat, to do what you want to do, to define your turf, no advisers allowed. If you want to write, you have to follow your own instincts even if that means sabotaging the prevailing codes, turning left when everyone else swears all the good stuff is to the right. “Turn right,” the majority keeps saying. “All you need to know is to your right.” But you turn left, subverting predictability, even at times the predictability of your own organizing intellect. In writing, instinct often trumps intellect.
If you want to write, you don’t ask, “Am I good enough?” You don’t ask, “Do I deserve this?” You don’t ask, “What will other people think of me?” You don’t ask, “What if I fail?” You don’t ask, “How can I do this when I don’t know enough, when I’m too young, too old, too scared, too poor, too sensitive, too needy, too everything-wrong-with-me?” You say only, “I love that chair. That’s my chair.”
But of course, I’m getting ahead of myself. The women in my living room have opened a bottle of wine and now we get to the nitty gritty about what we’re up to, about the snarls and surprises and hesitations of a writing life. One woman is finishing a book of short stories and she’s worried about her agent’s response. “She’ll tell me I need to write a novel. She’ll tell me that only novels sell and if I. . . but dammit, this is what I’ve written.” Another woman has brought her first book of poems, a book that just got a pretty good review, but also a so-so review that’s making her hands sweat. Three of the women are teaching and writing and there’s the inevitable anxiety about time management, “Oh, god, how to squeeze in a few hours of writing every week between all those papers to grade.”
“Hey, you guys,” the woman in the red chair suddenly blurts. “I’m a new writer. I don’t have an MFA or anything. I’ve never even taken a writing course, but,” she leans in close, “I’m reading a lot and figuring it out. I’m pushing hard to finish my book.”
I glance at her, both irritated and interested. She has all the hallmarks of an exhibitionist, but what peaks my interest is her confidence: she doesn’t seem the least bit worried about her status, about whether she’ll be seen as smart or stupid in this group of women who all have MFAs and Ph.D.s. Instead, she begins telling a story about being at a recent literary conference. “I was maybe fifteenth in line to see this literary agent and when she ran over the time limit, she looked up with apology and said she was sorry, but she wouldn’t be able to see anyone else. Well, I hadn’t waited in line all this time for that. I went right up and handed her a copy of my work. ‘You need to read this,’ I told her. ‘And I want you to call me.’ Then I stood right there until the woman looked me in the eye and put the manuscript in her pile.”
I smile at such presumption, but the upshot to this story is that the agent called her a week later and signed her.
As she talks, I stare at her, my thoughts somewhere between suspicion and envy. I can’t help but notice how comfortable she looks in my red chair. At first, I admit, I don’t like her very much. There’s something about her that reminds me of those girls in elementary school, the ones who boss all the other girls at recess, the ones who knit a tight, cloistered circle around them, whispering and plotting, excluding everyone who’s not “in.” “You’re not with us,” the alpha-girl will call out if you try to sit beside someone in her group. Or sometimes a reprieve, “Com’on, squeeze in.” And despite yourself, you’re pleased to be included.
The truth is, I can’t keep my eyes off her as if she’s wrapped in glitter, sparkling with diamonds because she’s so refreshingly self-confident and I too wish to be bold with my desires, to demand that people listen. I too want to stand in front of a group and without premeditation say “Mine.” I know appetite. I know ambition, but mine has claws that sometimes rake and scratch at my insides. If I’m honest, my ambition is some fusion of dangerous and exhilarating rage and clean-hearted desire in which the rage often wins. And yet I feel ashamed of this rage because it’s the anger of a wounded self, the embodiment of my unease in the world. It’s a troublemaker. I feel I must hide it, deflect from it as if it’s a sick, paranoid animal I need to keep on a leash. And in trying to hide it from the world and from my writing, an alter-ego who is timid and self-conscious and careful often takes over. On the days of the alter-ego’s ascendency, I am sucked into quicksand before I’ve even written a sentence. On such days I have to battle not just the blank page but the skepticism of an obnoxious chorus that croons, “What makes you think you can do this”? What makes you think you’re so special?
Since that day many years ago when five women in Iowa City came to my house, I’ve often asked myself, how do you claim the red chair? How do you learn to say both privately and publically “I want” and keep going? How do you undo your own divisiveness, rebuild the synapses, remap the sequence so that you turn left when you damn well feel like turning left? How do you learn to be both reckless and patient – curious enough to try the impossible and patient enough to keep going when the going feels like self-surgery? And perhaps more important for me: How do you learn to use rage rather than subvert it – use it wisely, even humbly?
All of this is a way of asking the crucial question: Can you change yourself, change the attitude of desire?
I believe that you can. I trust that change is both our psychological and biological destiny. For one thing, there’s not only personal proof but also historical reference. For centuries it was assumed that only men deserved to be seated at the writing desk. Think Montaigne, Shakespeare, Donne, Swift, Poe. For centuries only white writers said Mine. For centuries only the intellectual elite and entitled claimed space in publications. But since the 20th century we have seen that the traditional codes and conventions of culture are slippery and malleable. The door is open. The writing desk is ready and waiting. Sit. Or not. Your choice. And beyond that, we’ve learned that the brain is plastic, capable of rewiring itself, sneaking around damaged parts to create new and ingenious pathways. The brain can relearn. You don’t have to stay in old fixations.
Last summer I re-read Joan Didion’s essay on the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. In this essay, Didion defines O’Keeffe as a straight shooter, a woman who has no truck with self-deception, no intention of asking permission or seeking praise. It seems too good to be true and I’ve spent a lot of time scoffing at the gaps in Didion’s portrait, questioning some of her gendered judgments. But in some ways, it is true: O’Keeffe claimed an artistic life at a time when women were discouraged from the attempt. During the 1920s and 30s’ when the male artists and writers, the prevailing elite, applauded only the sophistication of Europe – Paris! London! — talking incessantly about Cezanne, O’Keeffe went to rural Texas and New Mexico, places with endless prairies and luminous skies, places where “clubbing wild rabbits to death was a Sunday family sport,”1 places where she could walk across the flat tableland at dawn, her face scorched by sun and wind, her mind awake to the subtle quilt of colors. And it was here in these rural landscapes that she found her style – not in Paris or New York or London. Imagine how surprised the men must have been! O’Keeffe focused her mind’s eye on that barren landscape, that strong sun, wearing clothes caked with brown dust, her hair pulled severely back. She went left because she wanted to.
By chance, last year I read the work of a psychologist at Stanford, Dr. Carol Dweck, who studies the perceptual aspects of two kinds of mindsets. She calls them the “fixed mindset” and the “growth mindset.” I confess this binary approach seems way too simple, the words “fixed” and “growth” as slippery as the concept of “safe” banks or “the war to end all wars.” And yet sometimes simplicity can clarify a perception that should have been obvious to all of us, but isn’t. Many of us, Dweck notes, grow up believing that our intelligence and talents are innate, god-given, something that is fixed, carved in stone, unchangeable. “You’re smart, now use it” is the story. The problem with a fixed mindset, Dweck believes, is that your innate ability must be constantly validated; and because success is the only validation in our culture, you have the urgency to prove yourself over and over, deflecting from challenges that might make you appear not as smart or as talented as you want to be. According to Dweck, you begin to hedge your bets, to strategize success in order to avoid failure. In essence, you tighten up. And tightening up is, as we know, a symbolic death, the first step towards renunciation, a fatal trap door. By contrast, in a growth mindset you are driven not by the “given,” but by curiosity and desire, by the more progressive idea that with energy and determination, you often surprise yourself and perhaps write what you need to write. Instead of being embarrassed by your flaws, you assume that whatever they are – your impulsiveness, your distractability, your awkwardness with dialogue, your complete spaz with plot – they might be as interesting as your gifts, might in fact, influence your style. You recognize that “ordinary” isn’t a permanent condition, but a jumping off point. You don’t worry so much about failure.
And to my mind, the ability to reckon with failure, to swim through that darkness, is perhaps the crux of it all.
Samuel Beckett once famously said, “Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail better.”
I love that quote because the truth is: Everybody fails. That’s the old news. But it’s so old, we forget it. We forget that failure is part of any creative effort and it’s not failure per se that is the end point, but what you do with it. How you use it. How you move through it and past it to claim again the red chair. Last week a friend and I were talking about what writers do with rejections. I said, “Well, first you medicate yourself with ice cream and chocolate chip cookies and then you watch TV.” Which still seems to me true enough. And let’s not forget sleep. In the short term, rejection is a stinker; it’s the catalyst for crawl spaces and prayer-bargains, for cranky diatribes against everyone else’s success. But after that – after the sting is gone — what gets you past rejection is new work. There’s nothing like really sinking your teeth into a new story or poem or revising an essay to take away the pain of rejection. There’s just something about the new thing, the fact that whatever you’re working on has the promise of “becoming” that soothes the spirit and jazzes the psyche.
I don’t doubt that the woman in the red chair failed many times. I know, for instance, that she applied to MFA programs and didn’t get in. But that didn’t stop her from writing her book – and later getting it published to strong, impressive reviews. Because we live in a culture that validates only success, we have to insistently remind ourselves that failure is merely a part of the story, not THE STORY, and often the beginning of more interesting ideas. Look at the life of Samuel Beckett. For years in his 20s, he couldn’t get out of bed. He felt incapable of making a living. He couldn’t write. Boils erupted on his neck and scalp. There was a time when he was so pathologically frightened that he had to sleep with his brother. But one day he did get up out of bed and began writing criticism; after a few years, he expanded to plays and novels. And, of course, he used what he understood about his own trauma to create shamed and cranky characters, begrudging, cantankerous men stuck in beds and chairs, characters who lived in the existential dilemma of limitation and desire, but always characters who wanted something and wanted it badly, even if it was just to get out of bed.
Examples like this abound in any casual look at literary success, past or present. Look at the Pulitzer Prize winner for 2010, Paul Harding, author of Tinkers. It is, in so many ways, the perfect Cinderella story: He wrote a novel and his agent sent it out to every editor in New York where it was rejected by every editor in New York. He put it away for awhile, and then, on a whim, sent it to a small press, Bellevue Press, a press most people had never heard of it. They took it, paid him no money, but to his surprise the book became a favorite of independent booksellers. Why? Who knows? Who can ever predict the serendipity of a book’s success? A year later, Tinkers won the Pulitzer Prize. Who could have guessed?
But what if Harding hadn’t won the Pulitzer Prize? In many ways that’s the more interesting question. Most of us would not have read Tinkers. But Tinkers would still be out in the world, published and passed along through the grapevine. And Paul Harding would still be writing, having begun a second novel before Tinker’s publication.
The idea that hard work leads to great success is only one of the myths that dominate the writing life. And diminish it. Here are some others I’ve been thinking about.
It’s naïve –though popular — to think that the writing process involves only solitude, that the writer must be locked in her garret to accomplish significant work. Of course writing involves many hours of solitude, but I’ve come to realize that a writer also needs people who support her writing and the act of writing. As my friend Bev says, “You may do the writing alone, but you also need some team support.” This can be different than needing a workshop where people critique your work. That too can be important, but sometimes not as important as having someone to confide in, someone you talk to about the pleasures and angst of sitting there day after day, writing, someone who “gets it,” this self-imposed plight we so often complain about.
Equally unfounded is the myth that wildly exotic experience is necessary to a writer. This suggests that experience itself is the crux of the matter whereas, what you learn while sitting at your writing desk is that only your perception of experience is important. You can have the most profound perception while walking around your overly familiar neighborhood or your cluttered room and you can have the most provincial thoughts while trekking in Tibet. I have many graduate students who travel the world. I’m glad for them. But I also have graduate students who rarely leave the U.S. or even a particular region of our country. The exotic is not innately better than the familiar; it’s only the depth of one’s perceptions that help a writer.
Perhaps more difficult is the belief that you, as a writer, can always find something to help you through the hard spots. The truth is, sometimes you don’t. I’m reminded of one of my favorite passages in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. In this section, she’s mourning her losses: her lover, Denys Hatton Finch, has been killed in an airplane crash; her beloved farm is in debt and will have to be sold; she will have to leave the place she’s loved, Kenya, the place she felt born to, and go back to Europe. She feels devastated by all these loses and believes she deserves some hope, a turning, something to lift her spirits. She looks around her for a sign. What she sees is a chameleon and a cock. “The Chameleon stopped up dead at the sight of the cock. He was frightened, but he was at the same time very brave, he planted his feet in the ground, opened his mouth as wide as he possibly could, and to scare his enemy, in a flash he shot out his club-shaped tongue at the cock. The cock stood for a second as if taken aback, then swiftly and determinately, he struck down his beak like a hammer and plucked out the Chameleon’s tongue.” Astonished and sobered, she takes this as her sign: This was clearly not the hour for coddling. She’d have to feel what she felt with no reassurances. She’d have to “get through it,” as Faulkner made his characters do. Survive. Buck up. She began to write. Perhaps this is how you get through the hard spots: by writing out the misery.
And finally, there is always the myth that once you’ve published, once you’ve won a prize, once you’ve – fill in the blank –that you will be satisfied with your work. But I know no writers who are satisfied with their work. What they’ve learned is to push against their limitations and open themselves to what is deepest and most difficult in themselves. As Joy Williams wrote in her essay “Why I Write”: “A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.” Even when you finish a piece of work. In Melbourne, Australia in August, I had the good fortune to go to the opening night of the Melbourne Writers Festival where Jonathan Franzen gave the keynote address. One of the things he said gave me that –ah-ha! moment of recognition, the moment you know you already know but have managed to bury. He said that with each book, a writer has to remake the self, that everything you know about yourself and about the world has been given to the previous book, and with each book you begin again, naked and alone. The struggle is conceptual: you have to rebirth the self.
The reality in writing – as in all things – is that you have to show up. Which means you have to be able to take the heat when something you write isn’t up to par and be upfront with others when you’re asked to critique their work. Or as George Bernard Shaw put it: “You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well-hammered yourself.”
Oh, dear! I put that quote on my wall because it seemed necessary for my careful alter-ego to remember. One early spring day I read it to my mother over the phone. “Getting hammered?” she said. “Why would you want to do that?”
I tell her you do it so that you can fail better. I say this in a teasing voice and in the silence that follows I can almost see her rolling her eyes, wondering at such a philosophy. After all, she grew up in the Depression where desperate failure was all too common, where even a discussion of failure is now taboo. “Just write your book,” she says. “You’ll be fine.”
“I’m trying,” I say, my eyes veering towards the red chair. I sit in it now whenever I feel like it.
“Good,” she says. “That’s the spirit.”
I smile to myself. “I know,” I say, looking out at the trees ready to thicken into spring. The bare limbs look fragile, tiny green buds barely visible at the end of branches. The sky a pastel blue, the grass changing from yellow to green. I live, I believe, like everyone else, in suspended breath, working every day and waiting for the world to bloom.
Notes
- Lisle, Laurie. Portrait of an Artist: a Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe, Washington Square Books, N. Y. (1980); 110.