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June Mansfield Miller
Dec. 11th, 2015 10:02 amThe June novel is substantiatively different from anything I’ve ever written before.
I wouldn’t say, It writes itself, but there have been a number of moments writing it when I’ve gone into a kind of trance. So that while I know the incidents I’m writing aren’t real, they’ve lodged in the same part of my brain that stores memories of incidents that are real. If that makes any sense at all.
Last time this happened to me was when I was writing the Hazard scenes in Saturday Night in the Sky. In fact, I pretty much fell in love with Hazard while I was writing that book – as though he was a real human boy and not some phantom I’d conjured from my own writerly ectoplasm.
The challenge is to compartmentalize. To make sure I have the four or five hours of untenanted time I need each day to make slow and steady progress. Given everything else I have to do in a day. Given all the other ways I have to make myself think in a day.
Gotta resist the fantasy that I can just somehow lock myself up in a room and just write.
Because I can’t.
For example: I stayed up writing last night till three in the morning, candles burning, Rachmaninoff blaring, Rutger trotting over every so often to meow, What the fuck?
So now, I feel like shit.
###
There’s a kind of a template. The bare facts of June’s life. Extensively chronicled throughout her years as Henry Miller’s la dame sans merci and Anais Nin’s recycled muse. This takes us to the mid-1930s. After that, June falls off the map.
We know – because we like reading the 5-point footnotes in various Henry Miller biographies – that she marries again. We know that husband leaves her for an actress in the late 1940s. We know she spends the next decade drifting through a series of flophouses on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, magnets for drunks, vagrants, and deinstitutionalized mental patients.
We know she has a psychotic break some time in the mid-1950s.
That she falls off the table in the middle of electroshock treatment and is crippled.
That somehow, she ends up as a social worker.
That she dies in Arizona – where she’d gone to live with her brother – in 1979.
###
I’m imagining a passionate affair with a religious Hassid during those flophouse years.
Who, of course, rejects her because – hey! religion!
But dammit, it is True Love! And doesn’t June deserve true love? After putting up with the deeply selfish and utterly boorish Henry Miller for all those years?
###
In other news, the Hudson Valley thinks it’s April. It was so warm yesterday that I went running without a jacket.
LiRong exasperated me by demanding an explanation for the difference between aerosols and droplets, and refusing to understand my explanation for over an hour.
I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in explaining the difference between aerosols and droplets, not even in the interest of promoting Sino-American relations, but I forced myself to be patient because… Well… Suppose, just suppose, I was in Beijing, and the Ministry of State Security was at the door, preparing to cart me off to the reeducation camp, but I could deter them! Merely by reciting the difference between aerosols and droplets.
Have to start cooking for tomorrow night’s dinner party.
Stephen is signing books in Beacon tomorrow, but I can’t go because I need to prep for party.
I wouldn’t say, It writes itself, but there have been a number of moments writing it when I’ve gone into a kind of trance. So that while I know the incidents I’m writing aren’t real, they’ve lodged in the same part of my brain that stores memories of incidents that are real. If that makes any sense at all.
Last time this happened to me was when I was writing the Hazard scenes in Saturday Night in the Sky. In fact, I pretty much fell in love with Hazard while I was writing that book – as though he was a real human boy and not some phantom I’d conjured from my own writerly ectoplasm.
The challenge is to compartmentalize. To make sure I have the four or five hours of untenanted time I need each day to make slow and steady progress. Given everything else I have to do in a day. Given all the other ways I have to make myself think in a day.
Gotta resist the fantasy that I can just somehow lock myself up in a room and just write.
Because I can’t.
For example: I stayed up writing last night till three in the morning, candles burning, Rachmaninoff blaring, Rutger trotting over every so often to meow, What the fuck?
So now, I feel like shit.
###
There’s a kind of a template. The bare facts of June’s life. Extensively chronicled throughout her years as Henry Miller’s la dame sans merci and Anais Nin’s recycled muse. This takes us to the mid-1930s. After that, June falls off the map.
We know – because we like reading the 5-point footnotes in various Henry Miller biographies – that she marries again. We know that husband leaves her for an actress in the late 1940s. We know she spends the next decade drifting through a series of flophouses on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, magnets for drunks, vagrants, and deinstitutionalized mental patients.
We know she has a psychotic break some time in the mid-1950s.
That she falls off the table in the middle of electroshock treatment and is crippled.
That somehow, she ends up as a social worker.
That she dies in Arizona – where she’d gone to live with her brother – in 1979.
###
I’m imagining a passionate affair with a religious Hassid during those flophouse years.
Who, of course, rejects her because – hey! religion!
But dammit, it is True Love! And doesn’t June deserve true love? After putting up with the deeply selfish and utterly boorish Henry Miller for all those years?
###
In other news, the Hudson Valley thinks it’s April. It was so warm yesterday that I went running without a jacket.
LiRong exasperated me by demanding an explanation for the difference between aerosols and droplets, and refusing to understand my explanation for over an hour.
I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in explaining the difference between aerosols and droplets, not even in the interest of promoting Sino-American relations, but I forced myself to be patient because… Well… Suppose, just suppose, I was in Beijing, and the Ministry of State Security was at the door, preparing to cart me off to the reeducation camp, but I could deter them! Merely by reciting the difference between aerosols and droplets.
Have to start cooking for tomorrow night’s dinner party.
Stephen is signing books in Beacon tomorrow, but I can’t go because I need to prep for party.
