What I Owe to Sylvia Townsend Warner

THE REDWOOD COAST Volume 13, Number 2 REVIEW Spring 2011 A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer POP CULTURE me for college. He believed in my talent somehow and understood, perhaps, why I might want to get away, although he couldn’t understand why I didn’t wait until after I’d graduated. Coming of age About that during the Depression, from a poor family, he hadn’t been able to go to college and to him a degree seemed almost like some Sexy Girl kind of Holy Grail. The evening before I left, my mother and I had supper together. We were sip- Jonah Raskin ping white wine I’d brought home for the occasion, and Mother was beginning to get wound up in her old stories, which un-of-the-mill novels—say, she did almost inevitably when she drank Charles Jackson’s Lost Weekend, wine. And almost inevitably she would RMickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly somehow manage to segue into the story —make for more riveting movies than of my birth. First of all how—for the classic novels such as Moby-Dick and entire nine months—she wanted nothing Swann’s Way. Great novels have style, and to eat but bacon and watermelon. Then style gets in the way of directors cutting to the part about my actual birthing, how the cliffhanger and the big cinematic kiss. my oversized head had almost killed her. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy “And at the worst part of the pain, when —The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2005) I just knew I was going to die and was The Girl Who Played With Fire (2006) almost afraid I wouldn’t, I felt a presence and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s above me and the entire room lit up with a Nest (2007)—is better on screen than golden light. And standing there over me on the page, though the hit movie hasn’t was the figure of a man, an Indian warrior. stopped readers from buying the book ‘Hold on, Christine, he’s coming,’ he told and reading it. The first two books are me. ‘It’s going to be all right. Sometimes in paperback now and on bestseller lists the great ones are hard to birth.’” around the country, though not currently I sat and squirmed and patiently in parts of the Bay Area. (At City Lights listened to this story for perhaps the Bookstore, Peter Maravelis said, “We’d twentieth time, somewhat less pained on rather turn over our real estate to Rebecca this occasion than on most of the others, Solnit’s new book than a pop thing.”) The when she told it in the presence of family third Larsson book won’t be a bestseller or friends. It seemed right, in a way, that I at City Lights, either, but it will soon be should have to be subjected to it one more available in paperback in all the chains time before I left. and in many libraries, too When she’d finished, she stubbed out The books sell the movies and the her cigarette without lighting up another, movies sell the books. Knopf recently LEPKOFF REBECCA which was unusual for her, and looked published, after all the movies were out, through my eyes straight into my heart. a boxed set of all three novels along with Reaching across the table, she put her a third volume entitled On Stieg Larsson hand on mine. that includes emails between him and his The Physics of Walking “Please, Mikie, don’t go, “ she said, editors, but no revelations about his pri- using the name she’d called me all vate life. Of course, for the novels to sell through my childhood. “We need you well, and to go on selling, and for Larsson How I became a writer in New York here. You . just aren’t ready to go off to become a kind of cultural avatar, the like this.” Her great, hazely brown eyes movies had to be entertaining. Mike Tuggle were brimming with tears now and it The success of the films is due to was all I could do to keep from crying. the Swedish producers who slashed and With just that look and those few words it burned the novels to make them box-of- t was late September 1960 when gling to hold down a job for the first time seemed to me that she managed to express fice hits. In the first film, The Girl With I arrived in New York City on the in her life. My younger brother and sister all the sorrow and disappointment and the Dragon Tattoo, the two main charac- Greyhound, my portable Olivetti were still in high school. My mother, I hardship she had felt her entire life. But ters have sex on movie-time, and not on in one hand, raggedy suitcase in felt, was beginning to depend upon me if my resolve to leave had been wavering Larsson’s book-time. The movies are also the other, ready to take the city by to replace my dad as head of the house- at all, the sound of her calling me ‘Mikie’ more suspenseful, more action-packed, Istorm. Longing for the life of the writer hold, which was scary in several ways. I had settled it. and with clearer development of the major and desperate to get away from home, I’d wasn’t ready for this, to work full time, “I’m sorry, Mother, but I have to, I characters. Critics agree on those points, decided not to go back for my senior year which I had done all summer and which I can’t explain exactly why, just that I have though not on others. at Texas Christian University, where I’d feared was expected of me. I was a writer to find myself, in my own way.” Had I From England to the USA, they’ve held the undergraduate creative writing now and needed solitude and experience. been conscious enough and brave enough observed that no one reads Larsson’s scholarship and been the recipient of My dad had given me his blessing and and brutal enough to put it into words, I fiction for exactly the same reasons, and several little English department awards. promised to send me 35 dollars a week, might have told her that her terrific loneli- certainly not for exquisite style or estheti- It was time, I felt, to venture out on my which was what he’d intended to give ness and need at this time were suffocat- cally pleasing literary form in the way own. Getting experience in the world ing me. There was something I couldn’t of Henry James. Written in Swedish, the seemed far more important than a degree, quite articulate that was threatening to me Trilogy was translated into sturdy English which I could always pick up later on, I honestly believed in a personal way, besides my obvious by one “Reg Keeland” who turns out to if necessary. I wanted to be a writer in that my mother was fear of getting trapped into working full be a pseudonym of Steven Murray, an the larger, professional sense and live time and becoming the main support of award-winning translator born in Berkeley in the literary center where all the wires wrong. In my more our family. and a graduate of Cal State Hayward, and connected and reputations were made. And I honestly believed that my also known for his translation of Martin So I had quit my job at A. J. confidently deranged mother was wrong, that I was ready. In Andersen Nexo’s Danish classic, Pelle the Anderson’s Sporting Goods and moments I believed in my more confidently deranged moments Conqueror. Hardware, abandoned what I genuinely I believed in my talents completely, that I “Once a book translation is finally felt to be my responsibility at home, my talents completely, was destined to become a great writer, or printed, I sometimes can barely remember packed my suitcase with what I believed great something, as the Indian warrior had doing it,” Murray says. “But occasionally was absolutely necessary—two pair of that I was destined to suggested to her in her vision. I was ready a really good book will stay with me, like Levis, three shirts, one wool sweater, a to cross swords with Styron and Mailer, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.” corduroy sport coat, some underwear and become a great writer, and sometimes sacrifices had to be made Murray calls Larsson “a brilliant socks, one small edition of Webster’s or great something. in the name of Art. writer.” If so, he deserves credit for com- Unabridged, two black, lined notebooks, municating the brilliance. Larsson is, a folder of poems and another folder I was ready to cross y family could get along fine without indeed, brilliant, though it’s heady, not containing the beginning of my novel, a Mme. I’d come back someday a suc- heartfelt, a matter of thinking big thoughts few photos of my family, a copy of James swords with Styron cessful author and make it all up to them. about big ideas and translating them into Baldwin’s Another Country, toothbrush, and Mailer, and some- There wasn’t a doubt in my head that this big bestsellers. For all his artistic genius, safety razor, a bar of Palmolive soap was going to happen. I even had an inside however, Larsson never learned the art of and plenty of guilt—and caught the times sacrifices had to connection—the name and address of a structuring a book gracefully, and so the Greyhound going east.

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