The Story of a Story

Note: This essay, like many others on this site, was originally written as a Substack post. My previous post was the short story Worlds in Collision, and this essay was meant to throw some light on how the story developed.

My previous post didn’t start as a story. It was going to be an essay about the nature of evil, a topic relevant to the current state of the union and the world. It’s what’s on my mind, and very much on my mind. The essay, however, was giving me trouble, not because of a lack of things to say, but because there was too much. I decided, instead, to clear my mind and try to write something completely different—a piece of fiction. An image popped into my head of a fellow working away at some kind of solitary, scholarly pursuit, and that was my starting point.

It’s never a good idea to insert one’s ideas into fiction, but your state of mind is bound to influence what you’re creating. I pondered what kind of obscure research my character was involved in. Drawing from my sordid past as a graduate student in Classics, I imagined the fellow immersed in scholarly research on the Catilinarian Conspiracy. Cicero’s oration accusing Catiline of attempting to overthrow the government has some resonance for our times, and has always been linked in my mind with the “Have you no sense of decency?” speech aimed at Joseph McCarthy. If only some stinging bit of rhetoric had stopped the MAGA crowd in their tracks, but that would require them to have a sense of shame. In the end, I decided to take a different tack, wishing to write a story, not an allegory or a political screed.

I hit upon something far removed from politics (and anything else relatable to most folks). As a Research Assistant in those long-ago grad school days, I had to summarize and critique journal articles for a prof writing a book about Virgil. I’d recently run across my old notes and was tickled by a paper attempting to re-interpret Virgil’s 10^th Eclogue citing the method of propagation of the green alder. That was just the kind of thing I wanted, but I couldn’t use actual research, so I created my own bogus thesis about a phrase commonly translated as flowering fennel. I imagined the protagonist spinning a tenuous thesis that would almost certainly never be published or read (after all, he was just a hobbyist, not affiliated with a university), about a fairly obscure and inaccessible poem in a dead language. (It should be noted that to the literati this poem is quite famous and the source of the phrase love conquers all.) Having myself recently completed a novel that isn’t likely to see the light of day, which I was thoroughly consumed by for over a year, I know what it’s like to create something that no one else will see. As I wrote, the character of Gerald started taking shape. He would want to close the curtains to shut out the nastiness of the outside world, symbolized by the cold rain and blowing wind, and surround himself with things that made him feel safe and comfortable.

Of course, something had to happen to shake his equilibrium and make him confront the very things he was trying to shield himself from. That came in the form of a young woman who was his opposite in every way. Since he was cautious and fastidious, she needed to be rambunctious and unpredictable. After struggling to come up with a rationale for her appearance, I settled on a flat tire. Yeats’ poem The Scholars, long a favorite of mine, that brilliantly contrasts tedious old scholars with the ardent young lovers whose passionate words they fill their dull lives analyzing, provided a theme. I tried to incorporate it in the story, but seeing no way to do so, used it as a preface to set the mood. Would Gerald remain absorbed in ancient, fictional characters and eschew real life, or would the encounter with his guest wake him up (woke-ism again!) and change the course of his life?

Once I brought the uninvited guest into the story, the writing got to be a lot more fun. She aggravated Gerald no end, but also aroused him, a fact that he went to great lengths to hide from himself. He assiduously avoided looking at her panties atop the pile of laundry he carried, hesitated to touch her skin without wearing gloves, tried not to look at her exposed breasts, and squirmed when made to look straight at her face. The story went in different directions. Before I thought better of it and realized she was a roller derby queen, the woman was a dancer, lithe and beautiful and was given a name. She and Gerald binged on his expensive single malt scotch, and her boisterous friends entered the story for the finale. A romantic relationship seemed all but inevitable. But I scrapped all that, deleting as many words as remain in the final version.

The story builds toward a climax. Gerald’s life will be transformed. Love will blossom in his heart and he will awaken to the world outside. Then, suddenly, the woman is gone, and so is her car, so there’s no reason for her to return. So much for a relationship. Still, something significant happens to Gerald. He feels a yawning emptiness after her departure, a longing for something briefly present but now gone from his life. Through his suffering, Gerald gets to appreciate, for the first time, what the protagonist of Virgil’s poem must feel at the loss of his lover. It’s a little sad, but at least Gerald is changed, has grown, is not the same person he was. Or is he? As we leave him, he has found a new thesis to occupy himself with. Yes, it’s of a higher order than the original one, but he’s still vicariously experiencing life second-hand through literature, instead of living his own. He’s seems more connected to his guest after her departure than when she was there in the flesh. It’s hard not to conclude that Gerald is who he was before he opened his door to the stranger.

Only at the end did I understand what the story was about. It wasn’t a love story, or a satire of sterile academicism, or a farce about mismatched personalities, but a gentle tragicomedy about how hard it is for people to change. There is within us a compass that brings us back to who we always were, despite experiences that ought to change us. It’s a sobering thought that change is, if not impossible, at least extremely difficult, at a time when our survival may depend on our ability to change, to open our minds and hearts, or to put it another way, to become woke.