mallorys_camera | Doorstops and Their Discontents

Stopped writing yesterday in the middle of the Yeltsa/Vanya dialogue – it was a beautiful day, windy, golden, and I wanted to be in the middle of it with simpatico people who would laugh at all my jokes, not alone in a morgue inside my own head.

Feeling a certain resistance to going back inside that morgue this morning. Eleanor called last night, we talked for an hour and maybe this was one of those messages in a bottle the universe sometimes sends, dunno: she read Saturday Night in several versions and she thinks it's brilliant. In fact, the thing she takes me to task about the most is that I don't take it seriously enough. "You wrote a great book," she said again last night, "and nothing in those agents' letters changes that."

If a book falls in the forest and nobody hears it, can it still be great?

Meanwhile – don't ask me why – I am reading an account of Leo and Sonya Tolstoi's difficult marriage. Not a big Tolstoi fan. Hate War and Peace. Anna Karenina is okay, but can't really wrap my mind around Levin and Kitty. Interestingly, much of Sonya Tolstoi's own suicidal ideation drew its inspiration from her husband's work – thus, she was always looking for trains to throw herself in front of and snow banks to freeze to death in. The relationship between art and its real-life muses is a very interesting one indeed.

It's also enlightening to read about Tolstoi's own struggles with the writing process. War and Peace is such a doorstop, so monolithic, it's hard to believe it ever was a work in progress. In every universe, it's always just been there, to torture college freshmen in their English classes. Yet, here is Tolstoi writing in his letters to Turgenov as though it was a book that needed to be written, that didn't already exist, that he was having his own difficulties wrapping his mind around. Very bizarre.

Back to the Vanya and Yeltsa show. The mantra this morning: it's-OHMnly-a-first-draft, it's-OHMnly-a-first-draft...