But to truly write, you must first have something to say. Computers do not.
This imperative to avoid being – even appearing – unhappy has led to a culture that rewards a performative happiness, in which people curate public-facing lives, via Instagram and its kin, composed of a string of ‘peak experiences’ – and nothing else. Sadness and disappointment are rejected, even neutral or mundane life experiences get airbrushed out of the frame. It’s as though appearing unhappy implies some kind of Protestant moral fault: as if you didn’t work hard enough or believe sufficiently in yourself.
If the reaction of my friends when I mentioned I was writing this article is anything to go by, there is an overwhelming resistance to the idea of eating swan. The idea is so universally repugnant that accusations of swan theft and consumption have been used as slurs against Eastern European immigrants in the U.K. by right wing newspapers, even if the reports were complete nonsense.
According to food historian Ivan Day, it has not always been frowned upon to eat our long-necked feathered friends.
The Starless Sea rejects older stories: it makes its own. Its magic is based in the New York Public Library, in glittering hotels, and the beautiful blatant kitsch of a professional fortune teller’s house. Rather than a traditional fantasy novel, this is an artificial myth in its own right, soldered together from the girders of skyscrapers – a myth from and for the US, rather than inherited from older nations. Like any myth, it refuses to decode its own symbols. A reader might find this deliberate vagueness either uplifting or maddening, but the novel’s scope and ambition are undeniable.
Every artistic medium – and indeed every genre within a medium, every form – has its own particular and peculiar nature that allows it to express some things better than others. We don’t expect a poem to be able to represent the nature of conflict between characters with the same range and scope as a work of drama, say, any more than we expect a novel to provide us with the same satisfactions as a sonnet. David Constantine is one of very few contemporary writers to have been able to take all sorts of routes and paths and detours and to have produced a coherent body of work over many years in a number of genres and forms.
“Passing: A Memoir of Love and Death” is marketed by the publisher as Michael Korda’s “unflinching love song” about his wife of 40 years “and her battle with cancer.” In this instance, “battle” is more than a cancer cliche. We quickly understand Margaret to be a strong and willful woman, accustomed to being in control of her life and having her way. As her illness progressed, however, these traits that her husband had so admired in her — each of them had left marriages to be together — exacerbated his pain and complicated his ability as her caregiver. In unsparing prose, Korda, a successful author and former editor in chief of Simon and Schuster, does not excuse this about her, nor does he condemn her for it. He wanted to do for her all that he could for as long as he could, until he no longer had it in him. He never casts himself as a hero, but in his devotion, he was herculean.