Mountains Made Low

Two notes I’d like to add to the posts about Rebecca and the things that inspire writers, from yesterday.

A conversation I had later in the evening reminded me of another similarity between the the two books, and I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I overlooked it in the first place. Both books (Rebecca and Bag of Bones) have a “name thing” about them. In both my review of Rebecca and my later musings on it, I noted that the the narrator, the second Mrs. de Winter, is never given a first name in the novel. The later conversation, last evening, reminded me that this is, basically, the point of the novel: the narrator has no identity prior to her marriage, and her marriage identifies her as Mrs. de Winter, but she, as Max’s wife, lives throughout the novel in the shadow of Rebecca. Rebecca who was also Mrs. de Winter, but had mystique and gravitas all her own, and which the narrator feels she can never share despite her best efforts.

In Bag of Bones, all the characters are named: the narrator is Mike Noonan; his deceased wife is Johanna Noonan; the young woman he falls in love with is Mattie Devore. The play on names is not in this odd three-sided relationship (or, perhaps, four-sided, when we consider that Mattie, at 20, is also widowed, though her husband, Lance, plays little role in the tale). The name game in King’s work is what the narrator describes as “sound-alike kids.” He has discovered that there are a number of children in his little corner of the world with similar names: Mattie’s daughter is Kira; Mike and Jo’s unborn daughter would have been Kia; Mike’s caretaker, Bill Dean, had a twin sister named Karla; the carpenter who Bill uses for repairs on Mike’s house is Kenny and Kenny’s younger brother, also deceased, is Kerry; and way back at the turn of the 20th century, a young boy drowned in the nearby lake—Kito.

I am ashamed to admit that I overlooked this similarity because the unnamedness of the narrator is the point of Rebecca; it is an extremely prominent feature of the novel, and du Maurier acknowledged that it became a challenge that she set for herself. And in paralleling du Maurier’s tale, King also plays a name game, albeit a very different one.

So one more similarity.

The other note is much briefer. Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of Rebecca is airing this Saturday night at 8 pm (Eastern) on TCM. Talk about serendipity!

I clearly should have mowed the grass before tonight. I’ve known this. I want to be clear about that: I’m well aware that I should have mowed the grass about two weeks ago.

Seriously.

But life got away. I decided I’d do the mowing tonight. And I got about half of it done. You see, the grass was high enough that the mower was stalling frequently. And then the starter rope broke. There was enough left that I was able to restring it, and I thought I was ready to start mowing again.

Pulled the rope and it broke again. Need a new starter rope for the mower. It does, at least, look good looking out from the front of the house. I’ll need to get a new rope tomorrow, fix the mower, and address the inverse mohawk my back yard is currently sporting.

But I do love mowing the grass.

We put a premium on creative genius in our culture. I mean, no matter how much we all learned in our high school English classes that every story ever told boils down, basically, to one of five very basic tales (man vs. man, man vs. nature, etc.), we really hold creativity in high regard. And while we seem to place similar value on inspiration in poetic (used broadly) pursuits, we prefer our sources of literary inspiration to be…well…non-literary.

We like our poets to have muses: we want Dante to have his Beatrice, John to have his Yoko, and—frankly—Homer to have his Marge. We are even thrilled when Henry has his Walden and Robert his yellow wood.

But God forbid that a writer’s inspiration should be another written work. So much so, indeed, that any poem written in (basically) iambic tetrameter cannot help, in most minds, but be somehow derivative of Poe’s “The Raven.” That any tale of star-crossed lovers must needs remind us of Romeo and Juliet.

We call writers whose sources of inspiration we like things like “genius” and “master.” We laud their creativity, and we extoll the virtues of their craft.

We have words for writers whose sources we don’t like, too. We call their work “derivative,” and our words for them are even less kind: hack, plagiarist, fraud.

As I was finishing Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca, thinking about it, and preparing to write my review of it, I got to thinking about what had inspired me to read it in the first place. After all, it’s not the kind of book that I would normally even pick up off the shelf in a bookstore to browse, let alone buy of my own, well, inspiration.

I bought and subsequently read Rebecca because its opening line and the character Mrs. Danvers figure prominently in Bag of Bones which I’m sure I’ve said before is my all-time favorite Stephen King novel. What I realized, though, while reading, finishing, and processing Rebecca is that there’s more going on in King’s book than simply the literary in-joke from a well-read writer to the more literate in his audience. The reference to Manderlay and the recurrence of Mrs. Danvers as a figure of dourness and fright in Bag of Bones is not where King’s references to du Maurier’s work ends. In fact, these references might be so obvious as to not even merit mention as the beginning.

And in the interview at the end of the audiobook version of Bag of Bones, King very nearly admits as much.

Here are the similarities I noted off the top of my head:

• The main male character in the book is middle aged, widowed, and falls in love with a woman young enough to be his daughter;
• The main female character in the book (the young woman) in some way idolizes the man’s dead wife;
• The main male character owns a country home much too large for him to inhabit alone, and has a number of regular employees/servants
• The first person narrator learns the circumstances surrounding the death of the main male character’s (first) wife as the story unfolds
• Both dead wives are (assumed to be) pregnant at the time of their death

And this last is where King’s admission comes in. Part of the inspiration for Bag of Bones, he says, was a wondering whether he could reverse the story of Rebecca de Winter in his character of Johanna Noonan. Rebecca was not pregnant at her death, but led Max to believe she was, like the result of one of her many affairs. Jo was pregnant at her death, and her husband Mike comes to believe that her pregnancy might have been the result of an affair, but it was not.

I realize, now, that I’m doing a quite poor job explaining this.

Suffice to say, there are parallels between these novels. Well, more inversions. Mike Noonan’s housekeeper is an utter inversion of Mrs. Danvers: the former as raucous and bawdy as the latter is prim and reserved. Jo Noonan is every bit as faithful and devoted as Rebecca’s narrator presumes Rebecca to be; though Mike doubts Jo’s devotion and we all learn that Rebecca’s is far from as the narrator imagines it.

These parallels and inversions might, just might, be enough to level charges of “derivative” or affix the label of “plagiarist” to Stephen King. Just as fantasy writers from Terry Brooks to Robert Jordan to J. K. Rowling have been accused of (on some level) ripping off J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories.

But we would do well to remember what Solomon said in Ecclesiates: “There is nothing new under the sun” (1.9). I would submit that genius lies not in coming up with the crazy ideas. That, indeed, is often best labelled as “crazy.” Perhaps genius lies in putting a new spin on the old ideas; in arranging, rearranging, tweaking, and changing those ideas so that they seem new again.

Perhaps in making the figurative ghost that haunts Manderlay into a literal one (or more than one) that haunts Sara Laughs.

Even Shakespeare, that nearly universally acclaimed greatest writer of all time, had sources. His genius was not in the creation of stories, but in their retelling. And that’s what writers—great writers—do: they put a new spin on old ideas, they retell old stories and make them new again, they take their source material in different directions.

And this is not merely the fan-boy’s apology for King’s act of derivation (for such I believe it now to be). But it’s a call and challenge to all who would dismiss any work as derivative of some perceived and proclaimed “great work” of literature. You’ve read my call; the challenge is this: Ask yourself what the writer has changed, how the derivative work is different, how it might be homage to and extension of the “original.”

And remember, too, that the original you have in mind probably isn’t all that original, either. It has sources. Its writer was inspired. And there is little—not nothing, but little—more pedantic than insisting that a work is somehow cheating just because it’s not 100% original. Shakespeare had sources. Chaucer “stole” from Dante. Inspiration is not always about Eurydice, Rosaline, or Courtney Love.

Sometimes it’s about reading something great, powerful, interesting, or intriguing, and responding to it as a writer. Sometimes its about retelling the truth but telling it slant. And sometimes it’s about being so enamored of an idea that we simply have to see how it sounds in our own writer’s voice. It’s not about saying something new, that is, but something newly said.

And I’m quite certain that everything I’m saying here has been said before.

In the course of the previously mentioned travel adventures, I finished Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca. It took me a month. In part because I’ve been busy (and consequently tired), which means I haven’t been reading every day (or writing, obviously). But mostly, it’s because the book didn’t reach out and grab me.

It was a slow starter. After the great opening line, “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderlay again,” it takes a while to get going. But when it does, it really does. I almost couldn’t believe the turn around. After forcing myself to slog through about the first 100-150 pages, the rest of the book went by in a blur.

At the beginning, I was starting to believe the novel’s unnamed narrator’s assessment of herself: that she’s thoroughly uninteresting, boring, and has nothing of value to say. But she was wrong, and so was I.

It is the story of a young English woman who begins that story as a paid companion to an overbearing and socially grasping American woman on holiday Monte Carlo. While her employer is ill, this young woman meets Maximillian de Winter, a wealthy Cornish gentleman, the owner of a famous estate known as Manderlay.

Instead of returning to America with her employer, the narrator married de Winter, a man of middle age, and returns to England with him. The remainder of the story focuses on the narrator learning the story of the life and death of the first Mrs. de Winter, Rebecca.

The narrator comes to Manderlay with an image of Rebecca in her mind, an image of the ideal lady of the manor, a devoted wife, and, in short, perfection. Rebecca is the standard to which she can never live up. And this image is constantly reinforced by Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper at Manderlay, who has, for years, helped Rebecca in maintaining that facade.

Our narrator soon learns, as do we, that all is not as it seems at Manderlay. The reality of Rebecca is nothing like her image, and her ghost haunts many of Maderlay’s inhabitants—those who knew her, to be sure, but not least the young narrator who has taken Rebecca’s place as Mrs. de Winter. Rebecca did not drown in a boating accident, and she and Max de Winter were not, as was publicly presumed, devoted to one another in love.

While I won’t give away the ending here, I will say that it is disturbing. Perhaps not in the same way that American Psycho is disturbing, but disturbing nonetheless. For there are no heroes to be had in this tale’s denouement: everyone, it seems, is equally guilty. But our narrator at least, who goes from wide-eyed ingenue to crafty woman before our eyes in the last third of the novel, takes a measure of the guilt upon herself for that noblest of reasons: because she loves Max de Winter. In the end, of course, none of it is right—not Rebecca’s life, not her death, not the actions of Max de Winter, Mrs. Danvers, or even the narrator. There is nothing right here; except, perhaps, for the narrator’s motivation.

A minor postscript, here: Rebecca has been put on film, and more than once, I understand. The most famous, perhaps, is Alfred Hitchcock’s version. It is my ambition, now, to see this film, and when I do, I will, I promise, blog about it.

I noticed, when I posted earlier, that I hadn’t posted previously in a week. It must be the end of the semester. That time, dreaded by students and teachers alike, when the work stacks up and there’s nothing to be done but hole up, isolate oneself from the world, and ride out the remaining days, hours, minutes, and seconds before the end of the semester.

No mean feat. But one I have always been the equal of in the past. The semester will end, and life will return to some semblance of normalcy (or some semblance of the semblance of normalcy that customarily passes for normalcy in my life). And then it’ll be summer—time to write.

I did some traveling over the weekend. I left very early Friday morning, and I was scheduled to return very late Sunday night. And, yes, “scheduled to” is the point of this post.

I was connecting in Memphis. My flight to Memphis, however, was delayed by about ½ hour. I was scheduled for a 40-minute (about) connection. You can see where this is going.

At most airports, under most circumstances, when the flight that is supposed to land at about 6:40pm lands at about 7:20pm and the next flight on one’s itinerary is slated to take off at about 7:20pm, it’s not a big deal. One simply waits for the next flight to one’s destination—perhaps at 8:20 or 9:20 or even 10:00pm. But, no.

Not in Memphis, no.

You see, the flights in Memphis stop at about 8:00pm. And the 7:21 departure is the last Memphis to Greensboro flight of the day. And there’s no work-around. None.

I was left with the standard option: wait for the next flight…at 9:30am.

The airline put me up for the night. They gave me hotel and food vouchers. It wasn’t a bad experience. Just inconvenient.

And it came on the heels of a good weekend away. A weekend, indeed, that got me ready to face the last week of classes and my finals.

But I don’t think I’ll be traveling through Memphis again any time soon.

I hadn’t planned on going in to the office today—it is Tuesday, after all, and I’ve been doing better lately with the not going into the office on Tuesdays. But then I got an email and a call and another call. All of which culminated in me going into the office to locate, prepare, and deliver the Rhetoric program’s cute little video camera to another instructor who forgot, until after noon today, that he needed it at 2:30 for his class.

And I’m sort of glad I did go. But I’m sort of not glad, too. Because after I put out the fire that took me to campus, I got some “interesting” news.

Or downright freakin’ disturbing might be a better way to put it.

There is a major reorganization coming to this campus. I won’t go into the details, because they’re apparently not public yet, even among the faculty here—the news I got today was a bit of a trickle-down effect.

But I’m pretty sure it’s news, and not a rumor.

Apparently, it’s an idea that’s been kicked around quite a lot, been in the rumor stage for a while, and is going to be implemented for next year. That this is the first I’ve heard of it is slightly disturbing, but I get the sense that most people had the feeling that it was going to be tabled, go away, not happen.

But now, apparently, it is.

These changes impact me directly, and that’s the most disturbing part, paired with the lousy communication of major change, that is.

Comes down to another fine example of why I should have stayed put where I was…. And why I’m glad I’ve still got one other line in the water for next year.