the tertulia

Joyce Johnson (seen here, appropriately out-of-focus, in an image later used for a Gap ad) is perhaps best known for once dating Jack Kerouac, the writer who inspired many young English majors to come to Columbia and NYC.  This year, she will publish the most comprehensive-and accurate-biography of Kerouac to date.  But more than a famous ex-girlfriend and careful chronicler, Johnson is a great writer.  Her memoir Minor Characters, about being on the fringes of the Beat Movement in the 1960s, as well as growing up in New York City, has proven the ideal springboard for my own reflections on graduating, New York, and my friendships. 

I often find that when I write in this style of automatic writing, striving for instantaneous brilliance or at least comprehensibility, the hardest part is figuring out what to write when because my brain gets over-full with ideas, and I want them to be mostly cohesive, but sometimes a tangent will slip out which is good I guess but also there’s the problem of the ones that slip away, the pre-verbal images or whatever you call them of something that could have been great but as soon as you start writing they fade and writhe away from you and you’re left with a shadow of all the things your mind wanted you to say with such urgency just a moment ago.  And I guess in a way it can be a good thing because then there’s an added element, a second voice to your writing, if you will, that’s like chance or luck or providence or the environment, that is the space between your fingers and your mind, influencing those thoughts that make it through and the way you can convey them and in all of the things you lose between the honesty of your brain and the honesty of your written word is an element over which you have no control.  So it’s partly yours but never entirely you.  Or maybe better writers don’t experience this and eventually are able to reach a point where their communication is perfect, flawless, intentionally unintentional.  But there is something about this process of writing, the fear of leaving something out, the focus on one moment or idea that shines more brightly than others, that feels so familiar when reading Minor Characters, because I’ve been thinking a lot about the process of memory writing and memoir writing and how you could ever really fully write a life, especially your own life.

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A Short Story.

I guess I should begin by saying that I am writing this at the airport as I wait for my flight to LA and that I am a very nervous flier as of five years ago (this is another story for another time, but my anxiety stems from the time that my friends and I got into a horrible car accident on the Pennsylvania turnpike and everyone was okay but we rolled three lanes and Hannah was knocked unconscious and for a minute I thought she was dead and as we rolled I thought I was going to die and even though I was fine I remember getting out of the car through the smashed window and blood running down my leg and finally processing that the gum I was chewing had shards of glass in it crunching between my teeth and for a week I was convinced that the shards had caught in my throat and intestines and that I was slowly, internally bleeding to death).  But anyways, I’m in the airport and anxious and writing this story.

It seems that I always go to really sad theater when no one else is around, not on purpose, just that I saw The Cherry Orchard sophomore year with my NYU friends when Columbia was on fall break and when I came back to campus it was so quiet and lonely and Chekhov was still in my mind and I felt so empty.  And last night I went to see Death of a Salesman with Phillip Seymour Hoffman and he was phenomenal and that play always makes me so sad and when I came back to campus all of my roommates had already left for Spring Break and I was all alone in an apartment that had never felt so big and quiet and creepy.

And it was last night at the show that I remembered this story.  It was last year in Galway and Kali and I had left the rest of our friends to drink together before going out because we were always doing romantical things like that and spending all our time together and our time in Ireland was drawing to a close and we wanted to drink wine from the bottle by the boathouse on the banks of the Coiribe.  And usually over there it’s quiet but not entirely deserted, there are always high school kids picnicking—getting drunk on cheap cider and generic-brand vodka—and couples and people taking their dogs for walks.  And so we were sitting in our usual spot, on a bench by the boathouse drinking our wine straight out of the bottle and it was beautiful and a little bit too cold but still.  We were both so sad to leave and very nostalgic and indulging in reminiscing and trying to not think about the fact that when we came home I would be in New York and she would be in Minnesota and those places are pretty far apart and we might never see each other again (though, of course, we have and she is visiting next week and moving to New York maybe in September which I hope she does).  And we were looking at the green top of the Cathedral and there was a beautiful sunset the sun skipping the waves of the Coiribe in that golden sunset way and we were so happy to be there.  And it got dark and we drank our bottles and everything was so Irish and lovely we felt.  We talked about her boy and how she really did still like him and maybe they would date when she went home for the summer (though of course they didn’t and it’s still complicated and probably always will be because that’s how things always seem to be) and I don’t remember what I talked about but I mostly listened, I think, because I am always the listener and build my personality mostly around the singular tenet that I am a good friend, if nothing else, which is sometimes proven wrong and then I feel terrible for a while.

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