“All writing is stylistic extravagance, no matter how simple the writing might initially appear to be.” That simple, extravagant sentence appeared a little over a decade ago in “My Ulysses,” an essay by the poet and literary critic James Longenbach, and I have not forgotten it since. Longenbach was a professor at the University of Rochester from 1985 until his death in 2022. Alongside his courses on poetry and creative writing, he taught an undergraduate seminar on Ulysses. He realized fairly quickly that in order to make James Joyce’s novel “available to young and often inexperienced readers,” he needed to articulate his own “most basic notions about writing.” Drawing on his understanding of how poems make meaning by turning against their own best discoveries, Longenbach focuses in his essay less on the inner and outer lives of the Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and Bloom’s wife Molly and more on the elaborate verbal confection that is Ulysses.
What is fiction in the first place? Despite common usage, philosophers agree that we can’t equate ‘fiction’ with ‘false content’. On the one hand, the inclusion of falsity isn’t enough to render a work fiction. Books with false statements – old science textbooks with disproven theories, history books with mistakes, memoirs with contradictory events – don’t change their status from nonfiction to fiction when false content is identified. Instead, we judge them to be bad nonfiction. On the other hand, not all fictions include false content since there are fictions that include only actual events, such as Helen Garner’s The Spare Room (2008), a factual account of the author’s experience of nursing a dying friend. And the fact that historical fiction exists – that a fictional work can be consistent with all known facts, yet still be considered fiction – shows that fiction doesn’t need to include (known) falsity.
Because I am still grasping my way out of a dream about pregnancy – blue fluid in the womb, a set of twins already born but they are not mine, I didn’t labour, my child is still inside – he gets out of bed first. When he comes back, it is with coffee and Alphonso mangos. He halves and scores the fruit with a knife. They are faintly nice, but out of season. We agree not to be greedy next time, to wait until June.
We eat. Everything quiet. There is the faint buzz of a podcast coming out of his earphones and the jagged whisper of pages turning in the books I am browsing while I decide what to write; the intermittent drop of mango skins onto a plate resting between us. Our unspoken agreement, as on most Sundays, to spend the first half of the day in bed – him on top of the duvet, me under it, the cat at our feet. I reciprocate his breakfast with lunch some hours later by chopping basil, tomatoes, and mozzarella in the kitchen and spreading them over rocket. I add oil and salt. I take this meagre offering back to the bedroom in silver bowls. No, he says, it’s good.
Pain, joy, love, fear: these are the gifts and burdens of life, and in this profoundly affecting book, Beecher has articulated them with precision and beauty.
Now, with Mothers and Sons, he has written a book that circles around an absence: the alienation of a son – Peter, a lawyer in his 40s – from his mother, Ann, who runs an “intentional community”, a women’s retreat in the hills of Vermont.
Steeds’s depiction of Ettie’s suppressed talents shines a light on generations of female artists who no doubt suffered similar obstacles, making for a hugely accomplished portrait of ambition and self-fulfilment.