"I see an eight-or-nine-year-old swinging hands with her father, chatting excitedly, and I know he is giving her a gift that she will carry all her life. But when I spot a man hurrying along, talking on his mobile, and a girl trotting behind him, trying to keep up, I want to scream, Stop! Pay attention before it's too late."
Ellen Feldman
Ellen Feldman, a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, is the author of The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank and Scottsboro, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Next to Love is her latest novel. She lives in New York City with her husband.
Monday
Here's the challenge: a woman who spends her life writing in libraries must find a way to make the passing of her days sound interesting. Then again, Flaubert said, live like a bourgeois so you can write like a king, or something to that effect.
Today begins, as most of my days do, with a quick look at The New York Times while waiting for the sun to rise so I can take Lucy, the Cairn terrier, for her morning walk. Then it's a run twice around the reservoir in Central Park. Lucy used to jog with me, but at fourteen she's getting a little long in the tooth for more than a few yards. People always assume I named Lucy after my novel Lucy about President Franklin Roosevelt and the great love of his life, Lucy Mercer, but she was already named when she followed me home from a run in the country one day many years ago and kept turning up at the house until her owners gave her to me. Obviously, this was fate.
Today I go to the Allen Room, a space in the New York Public Library designated for working writers. Though I didn't know it when I first landed a key to the room -- it's locked so you can leave your things in a carrel when you go out for coffee or lunch, and each writer has a shelf for research material -- the room was founded in honor of the late Frederick Allen, author of the classic Only Yesterday and grandfather of my friend, editor and writer Fred Allen. Fred insists, and I have no reason to think the story is apocryphal, that the room was established as a place for his grandfather, who was a chain smoker as well as an exhaustive researcher and prolific writer, to smoke while he worked. I am as opposed to carcinogens as the next woman, but the story does produce a frisson of nostalgia.
After struggling all day with the prologue of the new book - three pages written; two and a half thrown out - I meet my friend Richard Snow for a drink at an arts club near the library. While a high minded performance of Edgar Allen Poe goes on in another room, we huddle in the bar to gossip, grouse about the just past Thanksgiving weekend - a uniquely American holiday celebrating out-of-control eating and shopping -- and talk about the books we're each struggling to begin, his a biography of Henry Ford, mine a novel set against the cultural cold war. Richard tells me an outrageous story about a Christmas Eve that was a turning point in Ford's life, and I insist that is the way he must start his book. I'd like to think the idea was mine, but I know he led me to it, if only unconsciously. The exchange is odd, because neither of us is given to talking in detail about work-in-progress. When we part outside the club, I am thrilled for him, and awash in envy. My prologue has not fallen into place over a glass of pinot grigio.
Tuesday
On the way back from the park this morning, I see what I've come to think of as that picture on the fence of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. By now I should be accustomed to it - I pass but it still enrages. The photo is in an ad for an exhibit at the United Nations. It shows a bunch of African kids gathered excitedly around two computers. A few days ago I asked my husband Stephen if he noticed anything particular about the photograph when he passed it. He said he didn't. I pointed out that all the kids jostling around the computers are boys. There isn't a girl in the picture. I find it strange, or perhaps I don't, that no one associated with the show or the ad picked up on what that picture is saying. A few years ago, my niece Katie read an article about girls in Zimbabwe who were missing school because they had no money for sanitary napkins and could not leave the house when they were menstruating. She started a charity to raise money for them. I have done nothing to combat the story behind this photo. I may be the only grown woman who has a teenager as a role model.
Wednesday
Today I go to the New York Society Library to write. The oldest library in New York, it's run on a subscription basis - you pay a fee to become a member - and housed in a fine old mansion. The writers' room on the top floor used to be a faintly seedy outpost that few people knew about, but two summers ago the space was renovated and word seems to have got out. Now it's quite swanky and packed every day. I suppose it's churlish of me, but I liked it better when it was a down-at-the-heels secret club. Or maybe it's just that I'm still having trouble with the prologue. I tell myself I have been through this with every book I have written. I remind myself I spent months finding the voices for Scottsboro, the novel that was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. But I don't believe it.
I leave the library early in order to be home for a live chat on mumsnet. I'm apprehensive. I have no trouble fielding questions verbally, but will I be able to type that fast? The process turns out to be far easier than I expected and more fun than I dreamed. The group is wonderfully enthusiastic about Next To Love, and the questions are smart and thought-provoking. There's also a strange dynamic. Frequently, when I'm on tour for a book, the book itself seems to take second place to the logistics of the event. Here, we are all intensely focused on the novel, a fabulous experience for a writer.
Thursday
Keeping this diary has made me more aware of how my days are parceled. I spend the first few hours of the morning observing the world. For the rest of the day, I live in my head.
My first perception this morning is Christmas. The decorations have been up for more than a week and the stores are filled with cloying music that stays maddeningly in my mind, but this morning I smell Christmas. Men are unloading a truck full of freshly cut trees in front of the Convent of the Sacred Heart for its annual fund-raising sale. Ninety-first Street is as fragrant as a New England forest. The pleasure is enhanced by the early-morning light that fills the air with gold dust and turns the windows in the apartment houses of Central Park West into blinding mirrors.
On the way back from the park, I make my way against the tide of girls heading to the various private schools in the neighborhood. I cannot help watching them with a novelist's eye. Is this adolescent beauty swinging down the street with such self-assurance doomed to spend the rest of her life remembering her brief moment of glory, like the hero of Irwin Shaw's short story, The Eighty-Yard Run? Will that unhappy looking teenager hiding behind a curtain of hair find a cure for Alzheimer's or write a great novel? Or am I stereotyping? I see an eight-or-nine-year-old swinging hands with her father, chatting excitedly, and I know he is giving her a gift that she will carry all her life. But when I spot a man hurrying along, talking on his mobile, and a girl trotting behind him, trying to keep up, I want to scream, Stop! Pay attention before it's too late.
Then I get to the library and put all these perceptions aside. Or do I? Even when the book is set in another era, the observations and insights of the day creep in.
Friday
Today the characters in the new novel actually breathed once or twice. Too early for celebration, but perhaps occasion for an iota less despair.
Saturday
This is the first time we've been to the house on the Eastern End of Long Island in a month. The trees are bare. I take the leaf blower to the deck; Stephen climbs out on the flat roof to sweep. His joy in rustic chores eludes me, but the man does know how to build a fire. We settle down for a bout of reading in front of it. Later, with a slight assist from me -- he's the weekend chef; I'm the weekday cook -- he makes his fabulous fish stew.
Sunday
Back to the city. When I started this diary, I didn't realize it was going to end with one of my favorite events of the year. Tonight is the Park Avenue Christmas Tree Lighting. Everyone knows about the Rockefeller Center Tree Lighting, a huge televised spectacle that shuts down midtown Manhattan. Natives stay away if they can. But on the first Sunday in December, outside the Brick Church at Park Avenue and 91st Street, a few thousand upper east siders and their friends gather to sing carols and celebrate the illumination of the trees that line the Park Avenue traffic dividers.
We leave home a little after six. Families are already spilling out of apartment buildings and town houses. Toddlers ride fathers' shoulders. Older children chase one another through the closed-off streets. Amazingly, there are no honking horns, traffic jams, or incidents of road rage. Teenagers try to act blasé, and fail. Adults, one or two in Santa suits, stroll, martinis or eggnogs decorously in hand. Dogs, including Lucy, sensing that something is up, strain at their leashes. It is a John Cheever scene without the dark underbelly.
Led by the minister of the Brick Church, the crowd sings the usual Christmas carols, but an ecumenical spirit hangs in the chill night air. No one threatens law suits because of offending religious symbols or complains about Christ having gone out of Christmas. It is all easy camaraderie and good cheer, until the closing moments.
A bugler steps forward on the church portico, and a hush falls. As the mournful notes of "Taps" float out over the crowd, small children halt their games and dogs prick up their ears. Adults feel a chill down their spines. The last note dies, and the minister utters a short inclusive prayer for peace. Then, one after another, like a wave rushing down the broad avenue as far as the eye can see, and beyond, all the way to 46th Street, the trees on the islands in the road flare to life.
The ritual began in 1945 to pay tribute the fallen of World War II. Now it honors America's dead in every war since, as well as 9/11. Perhaps because I have just published Next To Love, a book about World War II and its aftermath, this year I find the ceremony especially moving. The river of light shines as a beacon of hope in the dark winter night. We have lived through more dire times, it reminds us. And in the spirit of the season, we will endure and go forward.
...............................................................................................................................................
Next to Love by Ellen Feldman is published by Picador.
...............................................................................................................................................
Monday, 5 December, 2011
In My week
- Ellen Feldman
- Craig Taylor
- Andrey Kurkov
- Amy Waldman
- Moni Mohsin
- Luke Williams
- Sam Leith
- Dan Rhodes
- Reggie Nadelson
- Elizabeth Day
- Dinaw Mengestu
- Fannie Flagg
- Gary Shteyngart
- Adam Haslett
- Shane Jones
- Rupert Thomson
- Marilyn Chin
- Samantha Harvey
- Paul Murray
- Marcus Chown
- Charlotte Grimshaw
- Susan Hill
- Ed Hollis
- Ali Sethi
- Wells Tower
- Con Coughlin
- Dirk Wittenborn
- Kathleen Kent
- Daniel Everett
- Mark Crick
- Glyn Maxwell
- Rabih Alameddine
- Nicholas Hogg
- Charles Boyle
- Mohammed Hanif
- Sarah Hall
Newsletter
Untitled Books
Your account
Register for an account and review books, comment on articles and build a list of your favourite reviews. Coming soon.
