16
MY ABILITY TO IMAGINE myself as Larry Peters improved with time, and I must admit that I used it now and then to get away. And I have continued to do so. I’m just old enough now—as I write these words I am forty years and thirty-eight days old—to be able to admit without embarrassment that I never really abandoned most of my childhood habits and interests, certainly not the pleasant pastime of slipping into the character of Larry Peters.
For several years, while I finished college and took a master’s degree in molluscan biology, my version of Larry developed without any apparent assistance from me. He simply sat in that comfortable corner of my mind, on Kittiwake Island, which came to resemble Small’s Island more and more, and a life grew around him while I neglected him, as beach grass will grow in sand under the worst conditions. Whenever I rowed out to the island to see what he was up to I was surprised to find how much more I knew about him, and how much more there was to know about him.
From time to time, I began jotting down my thoughts about Larry, conversations that he might have been involved in before the boundless summer in which all the adventures seemed to occur, or after that summer, when he went off to college, or later, when he returned to the island.
Albertine and I married, and, as most people who can read do at some time or other, often in their youth, I began to want to write a book. And, as most people do who begin to want to write a book, especially those who begin to want to write a book in their youth, I wanted to write a book about myself. Unlike many people who want to write books about themselves, I was embarrassed to admit it, even to myself, and so I cast about for a way to write a book about myself without seeming to. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to put into this book if I was going to avoid putting in anything about myself, if I was not going to admit that it was ego that made me want to write a book at all, that my only reason for wanting to write a book was to cry out in an acceptable way, “Look at me! Over here! Look at me! Watch this: no hands! See? Wait, wait! Look at this! I can do it with my eyes closed! Watch!”
Had I simply been willing to admit all that, however, I would have written, had I managed to write a book at all, a chaotic, pointless, formless book, because I hadn’t more than the foggiest, inchoate notion of what I was like. It took nearly twenty years for me to discover what my books should be like, and during all that time I wrestled every day with big, powerful ideas, ideas that were much bigger and stronger than I. How apt that time-worn image for struggling with a big idea is, the image of grappling, grasping, clutching, twisting, trying to hold on to a squirming, powerful, slippery idea that strives to elude you, to get out of your clutches. I wrestled with form and style and tone and argument, and the book grew larger and more diverse, more populous, more anarchic.
What headaches I gave myself over this. What pits of despair I threw myself into. How difficult I was to live with. What a pest I was at parties. More and more often, to get to sleep at night, to escape the big ideas, I would make my way across Murky Bay to trade wisecracks with Rocky and Lucinda and Marie.
In Topical Guide 202, Mark Dorset considers Writing: Beginning and Writers: Their Motivation from this episode.
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🎧 202: My ability to imagine ...