A cautionary tale from Lev Grossman , author of The Magician’s Land , the stunning conclusion to The Magicians Trilogy .
Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed
The nearest I've ever come to losing my mind was in the fall of 1991 in a small town in Maine called Ellsworth.
I was 22, just out of college. I'd spent the summer after graduation in Boston working on a travel guide to Mexico, but I knew that wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. And not just because I'd never actually been to Mexico (still haven't). What I wanted to do was write novels. I wanted to write them desperately. It was the only thing I could imagine ever wanting to do. So when September arrived, and the travel guide had gone to press, I bought a car — a 1985 Subaru GL, herb green — and set out west to find somewhere to write them.
At that point in my life I had written a handful of short stories, a smaller handful of which had been published in college magazines. Sophomore year one of them even won a campus prize. Second prize, but still: I felt like I was ready to step up to the big canvas. I'd never been west of Chicago, but the West seemed like a place where you could lose yourself and hunker down and get some real work done. My plan was to drive till I got to a suitably small town, a dot on a map somewhere, get a job in some unstrenuous service industry, fall in love with the local lonely librarian, and write my books.
I dropped off an already-ex-girlfriend at her parents' house in Queens, then drove on through the industrial countryside of Pennsylvania as it softened in the first autumn rains. I drove all day, no specific destination in mind; I figured I'd know it when I saw it. I'd never done much long-haul driving before. It was harder than I expected: less romantic, more boring.
I listened to the Clarence Thomas hearings on the radio. I ate alone at roadside diners, reading a copy of Mao II. One evening I stopped on a roadside embankment to pee and a swarm of crickets leapt up at me out of the grass in a solid wall, which caused me to fall over backward mid-pee. At night I would find an empty field, or a dead-end street, or a neglected parking lot, recline the front passenger seat of the Subaru back as far as it would go, and sleep in my car.
But I hadn't counted on the sheer, dispiriting width of the state of Pennsylvania. It took the fight out of me. While superficially high-functioning, I was in fact easily daunted, and instead of driving west I gave up and veered north to Niagara Falls. If I failed to cross the country I could at least check off one major geographical milestone.
The falls were surrounded by an outer corona of honeymoon motels that underscored my growing sense of isolation. I had second thoughts about what I was doing. My friends were getting on with their lives, moving to plausible-sounding places like Seattle and Atlanta, starting sensible jobs and graduate schools and professional schools, and what the hell was I doing out here, all by myself? Did I really think I was some kind of novel-writing genius person? I got out of my Subaru and saw the falls and was duly impressed. Then I got back in and headed back east.
Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed
But I couldn't go back to Boston, not yet, not when I'd just lit out for the territories so dramatically, so I angled northeast instead, through Adirondack State Park and the Vanderwhacker Mountain Wild Forest. It rained harder. I spent another night in the front seat and was awakened by a farmer shooing me out of his field, where I'd parked in the dark. My car wouldn't start, so we walked up to his house together and called a garage. The farmer wasn't interested in my voyage of literary self-discovery. He was a sober and pragmatic man. He had actual important work to do. I felt very young and very callow next to him.
But I kept driving. I was clinging to my dream of glorious literary isolation, and it was dawning on me that I could still save it. I could turn my vision of a dusty town in Idaho into a vision of a snug farmhouse in Maine, thoroughly socked in by a deep silent winter. That was the thing for a writer! Having grown up in Massachusetts I always knew that our winters were a half-hearted, watered-down version of the real thing, the sort of thing they had up north. I thought of The Outermost House by Henry Beston. I'd never actually read it, but the title always evoked for me a powerful sense of contemplative isolation. I was going to get me some of that.
I drove through Portland — which was charming but didn't seem northerly or outermost enough — and stopped just short of Bangor — didn't want to overdo it — which left me in Ellsworth, Maine. I bought a copy of a local paper for the real estate listings. Then I parked on a back road, wrapped myself in my overcoat and got ready to sleep in my car again. A kindly passerby stopped to ask me if I was lost. I told him I knew exactly where I was going.
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