I enjoy dipping into a collection of short fiction entitled You’ve Got To Read This as much for the pleasure of the fiction itself as for gathering new ideas about how to organize writing.  There is something about the way short fiction writers tell stories that inspires the essay writer in me.  When I opened You’ve Got To Read This, my eyes fell on Francine Prose’s introduction to Isaac Babel’s story “Guy de Maupassant.” I started reading and experiencing what Prose claims:  “not even a close reading will take us all the way to the heart of the story—to which there is no access, except through some understanding that surpasses not merely the literary but the rational as well.”  She concludes that 1) we “can only reread the story—as if this time, at last, we will seize and reduce what was huge and inchoate before” and 2) that the story explodes the idea that “there can be any limit on how much larger and deeper something can be than the sum of its separate parts.”

Because her words describe my experience of writing and reading essays as well as my experience of reading Babel’s story, I re-read the story looking for a strategy that I might use to arrive at the place where mystery enhances meaning and the inchoate becomes articulated, learned-from experience.

Here is a summary of Babel’s story followed by an explanation of the strategy I borrowed:

The story begins, “In the winter of 1916 I found myself in St. Petersburg with a forged passport and not a cent to my name.” Even under duress, though, the story’s protagonist, who is a writer, refuses to take a job just to support himself.  Luckily, a teacher of Russian literature takes him in and a wealthy arms maker, who has created a publishing house for his wife’s translations, hires him to help his wife with her translations of Guy de Maupassant.

 The body of the story evokes his work with the not very poetic or skilled woman.  One evening, she stays home to work with him while her husband and relatives attend the theater. The two of them get drunk on a bottle of her husband’s rare Muscatel ‘83 while working on de Maupassant’s story “L’Aveu” (“The Confession”).  It is not long before the writer finds the previously unappealing wife alluring and makes love with her.  Wanting to leave his client’s home before her husband and relatives return, he springs up suddenly and knocks 29 volumes of books to the floor.  He returns home (sober, he says, but staggering because it is more fun) and finds the Russian literature teacher asleep. Quietly, the writer grabs a book on the life and work of Guy de Maupassant’s, which he reads to the end, learning that the author died at 42 from the syphilis he contracted at 25.  The writer sees that the fog has come in close to the window, and while the world is hidden, he experiences a foreboding, as if “some essential truth” touched him with “light fingers.”  Something has gone awry in his activities; he relates to Guy de Maupassant, who in his illness eventually became suspicious of everyone, unsociable and pettily quarrelsome.  In the story, our protagonist has translated Maupassant lines, “A white spavined mare was harnessed to the carriage.  The white hack, its lips pink with age, went forward at a walking pace.”  When the fog comes in and the sense of foreboding comes, it is not hard to think that some “white mare” of the character’s fate moves now, old and on its own path.

To develop a writing exercise based on the story’s strategy, one that would bring “some essential truth,” I thought about the steps I saw in the story’s flow.  The first was a statement about a time that was difficult for the character.  Next, the character includes information about when that time was, where he was, and what was wrong or missing.  The character names one lucky thing that happened during that time and describes at length what happened in his life after the lucky thing happened.  Then he narrates an activity he is involved in as a consequence of the good luck.  The lucky incident is meeting the person who knew of the translation job and the activity is the ongoing translation project.  In an essay, following a lucky transaction or connection, the activity might be traveling, gardening, visiting someone specific, building or cooking something, taking up a sport, teaching someone something or arranging flowers among many activities.  In writing the details of pursuing the activity, the essayist would, I believe, reach a moment that changed everything (for Babel’s character it was making love to the wife of the arms maker). In this way, an “essential truth” would, in the essay, touch “with light fingers.”  The inchoate (details of experience that lead to insight) would gel once the essayist repaired to a place of self-reflection (Babel’s character returns home late to find the Russian Literature professor asleep in his chair) and the eyes fall, even by chance, upon something in the environment (for Babel’s character it was the book about Guy de Maupassant).

To test this strategy, I wrote:  In the Fall of 2002, I found myself in Los Angeles with one or two friends and no work.  Next, I sketched out an essay by:

Comparing myself to someone else (someone I envied who lived in LA).

Refused something sensible and told why I did so (an invitation to start a particular job).

Letting some good luck take care of the problem and introducing a new turn of events (running into an old friend I knew from somewhere else and becoming involved in an activity new to me through this person).

Telling the story of being involved with the good luck (the new activity—attending religious services with her)

Describing the event during the activity that changed everything:  the death of my son

Ending by coming home after services and finding something to look at (a picture of my religious great grandfather).

Using the object to help the inchoate to gel for insight (a mysterious process as we write):  My grandfather, who had fled Russia to avoid the Czar’s army, obeyed all the customs and rituals of his Jewish religion. He had to leave the life he knew behind for a new one. Many of his family who didn’t flee were lost in the war or imprisoned.  I have to leave the life I lived as the mother of my son behind in some sense or I will be imprisoned.  I must move into a new life where I remember but my life is different.  What is the same are the rituals, the words, and the customs that bring me back to myself, to suffering as a thread of continuing.  Looking at the picture, I see that the life contained in the prayers and rituals are dormant as seeds until planted in the fertile ground of sadness and grief.

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If you try your hand at using this essay recipe, I think that you will surprise yourself with your power to reach new perception and insight, a power born of “understanding that surpasses not merely the literary.”  Images work in this way, and by trusting the images of the lucky incident, the ensuing activity, and your choice of a specific object in your environs, you, too, will exploit the power of lyric for reaching depth and insight.