The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Self-censorship
Building a book, finishing a book
I once visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to see drawings by Agnolo Bronzino, court painter to the Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici and compared Bronzino’s drawings—drafts of his work—with his paintings.
Bronzino’s drawing Madonna and Child with Saint Elizabeth and Saint John (1540) was used to prepare for the oil painting by the same name (1541—1543). In the drawing, Saint Elizabeth appears as an old embittered crone and the Madonna seems sad and preoccupied—these women react to this child’s brutal future. But in the painting, Saint Elizabeth is portrayed as a congenial old woman and the Madonna’s face bears a half smile. The drawing is more powerful; the painting, more decorative. Bronzino has revised his earlier, complex vision of grief into saccharine sweetness.
Bronzino’s drawing Dead Christ (1538—1539) differs, too, from the Pieta with Magdalen (1538—1539). The drawing presents Christ realistically; he’s strong, even in death. He appears unwounded, so he’s not presented as a victim; he’s filled, instead, with resilience and purpose. The painting, though, depicts a pitiful, dejected Jesus. Bronzino has revised his powerful idiosyncratic portrayal of Christ into a stereotype.
Bronzino prepared for his painting of St. Mark (1525—1528) with a drawing depicting a grotesque, sneering St. Mark with glazed eyes, disheveled hair, and clenched fist. The painting, though, has revised the drawing into a sweeter, gentler depiction of what had been fury incarnate.
Bronzino, employed by the rich and famous, blunted his idiosyncratic vision in continual acts of self-censorship. And who could blame him? Still, Bronzino never transformed his early vision into robust oil paintings. The drawings remain as testimony to what his paintings might have depicted had he not needed to please his patrons.
As we revise our work, do we expunge our quirkiness; sweeten our tough-mindedness; transform authentic, complex portraits into sugarcoated misrepresentations; delete the defiance and power in our work? If we read our early drafts or process journals against our latest revision, we can determine whether we’re censoring ourselves.
I once taught a student whose writing didn’t feel real, so I asked to see her earlier drafts. In them, she’d developed lucid, complex portraits of people she’d later rendered as vapid nonentities.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t want to upset them,” she replied.
I told her only she could decide what to do. But she had to consider the consequences of artistic self-sabotage and of waiting until the people in her narrative died before writing honestly about them. Still, even as accomplished a writer as Joan Didion admitted she couldn’t have written Where I Was From (2003), her book about California’s underbelly, while her parents were alive.
The Pulitzer Prize—winning novelist Carol Shields noted that every student she taught worried about “the injury they might cause” to family members. She advised them “to set those fears aside and to write without being throttled by them” because “you can always go back and change details later.” Shields was struck by how reluctant her students were to reveal the “darker self,” the source of our authentic work.
I once had a student who showed every version of her work to her parents. She wanted to describe her father’s abandonment and her mother’s subsequent depression. But she circled around this material. I couldn’t see these people, couldn’t understand what had happened.
“Try not showing your parents your work,” I suggested. But she never did, and never completed her memoir.
I wrote a no-holds-barred portrait of my father in Vertigo while he was alive. Contrary to what I expected, I found it easy to write about him. I ignored the possibility that he might read the book until I’d finished the manuscript. When the memoir appeared, my father found out about its publication, and my husband and I decided to meet with him and his second wife to discuss the book.
“What did you write about?” my father asked.
“Everything,” I responded.
“Everything?” he asked.
Whereupon his second wife said, “You know, you were very scary, and she was just a little girl.”
I suggested they not read the book. He didn’t; she did. But my stepmother found my father’s portrait to be fair and well balanced. And my father became something of a local hero when his friends found out about it.
“How could you write about him when he was still alive?” I was asked. “He did what he did,” I replied, “and that gave me the right to describe it.” Like many writers—Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot, is one—I never let anyone read my work until it’s finished so I don’t risk changing a work because of an early reader’s response. Eugenides has remarked that if he “can still make the book better” on his own, he’s “not eager to show it to anyone.” Early criticism, though well intended, might cause us to blunt what’s most courageous about our work. Unlike Bronzino who censored himself with time, as I write my later drafts, I seem to find the courage to write those tough moments I wasn’t ready to describe earlier.
Before attending the Bronzino exhibit at the Met, I’d glanced at the prologue to the book about my father. There’s a phantasmagoric scene where I imagine taking my father’s body back to the island where he served during World War II and giving him a hero’s burial like those given to the indigenous peoples on that island. In the ceremony, which I’d researched, the bones of the dead are wrapped in cloth and worn by the bereaved. I’d written an imaginary scene, called “Wearing My Father’s Bones.” In the margin, I’d written a question mark. “Too much?” I’d asked myself. Not too much, I decided, after I came home.