An Author's Confessional

Using Pain to Explore a Book's Truth

Readers who wish an #Audible promotional code (US or UK only) of Volume Seven of the Bennet Wardrobe Series—The Pigrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion—are invited to request it in a comment below. NOTE: The Wardrobe is best enjoyed by listening to the volumes sequentially as considerable world-building frames the tale.

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Before retirement, my “day job” was as a college history instructor. Returning to the classroom was a later-in-life calling, growing from a terrible crisis my family endured in the mid-1980s. After the ground had firmed beneath my feet, I decided that the path I had been on—advertising—was thin tea.

True, advertising did leverage my writing skill—something some outstanding high school and college teachers had nurtured and encouraged. However, my path to that was circuitous and happenstance rather than an effort made through conscious decision-making. I “ended up” working as an advertising manager at a company or an account executive/copywriter at an agency. And the process seemed informed. I needed a job, a salary, to help support my growing family.

My argument to my wife, limited to where she could work in her profession (television producer/programming executive), was that I could write anywhere.

But I never did.

The central employment certainly involved writing at its periphery: company newsletters, press releases, speeches, and reports. Nothing fed my soul but instead provided food, shelter, and the tiny bricks that slowly built a life. Oh, I did take odd jobs—today, we would label them side gigs—at small local newspapers writing news and features. But, outside of ads, brochures, and direct mail pieces, I never really attempted to do more with my writing. Yes, in 1985, I managed to get a book, Caving, published. However, ’twas written in 1974 while I was still in college and well before I had begun settling.

My next book was written after my life was reshaped by tragedy. The One Pan Gourmet was published in 1995. It took twenty years for me to face the gorgon and move from informative to creative, from non-fiction to fiction, writing.

The prospect of building worlds, creating universes within which the characters existed as flesh-and-blood, was terrifying.

As a lifelong reader, I understood that the best literature grew from somewhere deep inside the author. The act of creation needed some ground upon which it could stand.

The idea that I would have to reach into places deep in my soul turned my bowels to water. Non-fiction was safe. Fiction was dangerous.

It took courage on the part of another—my daughter, who herself was transformed physically and emotionally by the event—to break the logjam. She published a YA novel. That got me, as my friends from New York City would say off the schneid.

While I have no pretensions about being the fount of received wisdom, I have grown, over the past thirty-seven years (this Memorial Day) into a person different from the one who existed in the thirty-three years before that one in 1986. Greater thinkers than I (Lewis and Okakura, to name two) have contemplated the web we call life. In my own, perhaps feeble but I hope understandable way, I have tried to encapsulate my thoughts and place them in the mouths of my characters.

“Life, my dear boy, is composed of a thousand mundane moments, and these may be equally disposed between joy and trouble. Each, though, like a small pebble resting in a river’s current, contributes to the grand arc of existence, bending it toward its ultimate end.”

Lydia Fitzwilliam, Dowager Countess of Matlock (8^th)

As persons, as writers, we tend to look at single events in a conflict/resolution matrix. While many traumas forcibly shape a person’s life—for instance, Mrs. Bennet’s miscarriage in 1801 created the Kitty Bennet persona—a thousand more gently guide the persons we crave to know better, longer. That is why I find something like the magisterial Randolph Churchill/Martin Gilbert Eight-Volume biography of Winston Churchill so satisfying.

The most profound experience I have ever endured as an author was articulating the seminal events in Lydia Wickham’s life in the seventh and penultimate volume of the Bennet Wardrobe series. The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion charted the long life of the youngest Bennet daughter.

The weeks required to write the middle section of that book (about eight chapters) were the most difficult ones I have ever undergone as a writer. I went to places deep in my being that I never wished to revisit. I unearthed grief that I, as do we all, wanted to keep buried. Curiously, I was not afraid of reader reactions. The book could only ring true if I walked that sad path.

I feared the pain that this truth would inflict upon me. Even though I knew what a hot stove could do, I tentatively placed my hands back upon the burners like a child who knows.

Books Mentioned in this column

The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion

mybook.to/PilgrimLydiaWardrobeMP

Winston Churchill (8 vol, US Link)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074C9NV2R?ref_=dbs_p_mng_rwt_ser_shvlr&storeType=ebooks

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This excerpt from “The Pilgrim: Lydia Bennet and a Soldier’s Portion” is © 2019 by Donald P. Jacobson. Any reproduction without the author’s consent is prohibited. Published in the United States of America.

Entr’acte

The Beach House at Deauville, July 2, 1943

’Twas not pain. No, not pain, for the concept of pain implied that t’was an extraordinary circumstance: something outside the realm of ordinary existence. This agony and chasm of despair into which she continued to tumble, day after day, week after week, was not exceptional but the regular currency of her life. Awake or asleep, the lifeblood she poured into the vessel of her soul seeped out between seams rent asunder by ineffable loss.

Lydia Wickham was caught in a netherworld between cherished memories, perhaps delusions, and a reality that worried the edges of her very being like a flint etching the tender skin sheltered beneath a lady of leisure’s satin slippers.

Days curled up on the library’s sofa, gazing at nothing but the great marquetry doors of the Wardrobe, merged into equally wakeful nights staring into the featureless plane of matte white that arced above her bower. Even when her sister or old Jacques sat beside her in their own clouds of bereavement, Mrs. Wickham followed her kindred spirit’s path. As Gaia moved in an elliptical orbit, so did Lydia as she trekked from her chamber to the bookroom and back again. Neither pole exerted a dominant pull over her. She slid through her cosmos like a rogue asteroid, unseeing, uncaring, awaiting that inevitable moment when the Universe would interpose a greater body that would shatter her into smithereens.

Whether she would re-coalesce into something recognizable remained a question of small concern to her.

A void of indescribable potency yawned in the core of her being. T’was beyond the actual event itself, the fact of which she had come to accept if only to maintain a tenuous grip on sanity. There were so many ancillary losses arising from the first one.

Her identity, expanded from its original with the splitting that began in the time of one Tyrant and ended during the reign of another, had been erased in an instant.

That which she had become was no longer and never again could be.

Then there was the instinctive camaraderie shared by all women of her situation…and the equally awful revulsion evidenced by those same females when they recognized that which had been. Instead, unsure of how to respond, they glanced up and away, literally anywhere but into her eyes. Conversations were hushed. Head bobs and shoulder points cautioned that a dead woman had walked through their midst.

She needed to reset her life but could not because nothing had been resolved. Scenarios played out behind her emerald green eyes. Yet, no clear explanation could ever be understood as she turned the problem over and over in metaphorical hands. No matter what variable Lydia changed and no matter which what if she applied like Herr Einstein twiddling with its building blocks, the Universe, the Old One always brought her to the same terrifying finish line.

She would die: she would if only to bring surcease from the clawing ennui.

Except that she had neither the energy nor the inclination to destroy herself.

Even in her less-than-half-a-life reality, she comprehended that she was bound by the remarkable energies flowing above, around, and through her.

Her trail was far from over, her curse yet unrelieved, and she despised the Wardrobe that demanded her to be its Galahad.