Inside a Writer's Mind

Sometime I’m going to write a book about the history of dog breeds in the 20th century. The boxes of documents collected over a couple of years stand ready in the guest room closet — but I am not ready. So in lieu of that gigantic project, I’ve decided, for now, to write blog posts about the breeds that most interest me.

So here is the first one:

The Bloody Bloodhound’s Bad Rap

The model for Edwin Landseer’s “The Sleeping Bloodhound” was a dead dog, Countess. Jacob Bell, Countess’s owner, ran over and killed her accidentally, then took her to his friend Landseer to be painted as if alive.

Behind the lugubrious, long-in-the-face expression of the saggy dogs we call bloodhounds (or sometimes St. Hubert Hound, Chien de St. Hubert, Flemish Hound, English Bloodhound, Sleuth-hound) lies a sad history of being unjustly accused of viciousness.  Why? Because dogs with the same last name, Cuban Bloodhounds, tended, at least according to some sources,  to tear their human quarry to shreds after locating them. Cuban bloodhounds were associated with the killing of Maroons in Haiti during the Haitian Slave Revolution of 1791, and, albeit with poor results, they were imported from Cuba to track down Seminole Indians in the Florida Indian Wars of 1835-1840.  And these were probably the dogs who pursued escaped slaves and later acted as terrifying pursuers of Eliza over the ice in post-Civil War traveling troupes’ enactment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Perhaps a mix of Spanish mastiff and pointer, with pricked ears, Cuban bloodhounds were half again as big as English bloodhounds and looked nothing like them.

Adding to the confusion is the ambiguity of the name “bloodhound.” It does not stand for bloodthirstiness, as one might suppose, but comes from the fact that with their excellent nose the original bloodhounds, an ancient breed, trailed animals wounded by hunters following the scent of their blood.

St. Hubert bloodhounds were imported into England from France in the eleventh century. They were originally used to recover game and catch poachers, especially in  royal forests. In Midummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare described them well: “heads are hung/With ears that sweep away the morning dew;/Crook-knee’d,  and dew-lapp’d.” They were also used on the Scottish-English borders to trail murderers and robbers. It once was against the law in Scotland to refuse entry to a bloodhound pursuing stolen goods, and bloodhounds were so valuable that a tax was levied on those who kept a certain number of them. Gentle dogs, they did not hurt their quarry. In fact, sometimes they became friends with the animal they were after. For example, one bloodhound, who hunted down a tame stag kept by its owner just for tracking practice, would walk back home in its company after finding it.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the breed went into eclipse in Great Britain. Bloodhounds were no longer as valuable as trackers because policing turned modern and, with more cultivation of land, miscreants had fewer places to hide. Moreover, the British aristocracy took up foxhunting, which demanded a faster dog – the foxhound. Nobility who had deer parks were about the only people who owned bloodhounds. However, the late nineteenth century passion for dog breeding and the entertainment value of bloodounds’ ability to trail saved the breed from extinction. “Manhunting” with bloodhounds became a  sport for which English farmers’ sons sometimes volunteered as quarry for two-and-six pence and mug of ale.

The first bloodhound trial took place at Castle Park at Warwick Show of 1886, and the Association of Bloodhound Breeders started Field Trials in 1898.In 1888, breeder Edwin Brough brought  “real” bloodhounds (St. Hubert Hounds)  to the United States, and they were exhibited at the Westminster Kennel Club bench show in New York City. The English Bloodhound Club of America was organized in 1894.

Meanwhile, that other dog, the Cuban bloodhound, became notorious. The first to reach the New World were brought over by Columbus to subdue Native Americans.  Later, according to some spurious anti-French sources, on Sundays during the Haitian Revolution the French threw rebel blacks to Cuban bloodhounds to be eaten alive.  The dogs been trained to do this when young by caging them and feeding them animal blood and, when a little older, starving them and making them eat from a wicker “figure” of a black man stuffed with blood and guts. True? I tend to think not.

During the Second Seminole War in Florida, the Seminole Indians, rejecting relocation, attacked forts and plantations.  The Florida territorial government sent a sloop to Cuba to import 33 bloodhounds to track down Indians for the “cold and inhuman murders” they supposedly had committed. The enterprise was a failure. Three hundred men went about the countryside for ten days with the dogs, and no results. It cost close to $5000, big money in those days.

In the antebellum South, according to the New York Evangelist (1835), dogs were trained in the following manner to pursue escaped slaves: a slave would be told to go into the woods and tie himself to a tree, then a hound was put on his track. An 1855 ad in Lexington, Missouri Democratic Advocate offered “Negro Dogs” (probably Cuban bloodhounds) for hunting and catching escaped slaves for  $15-20, more if the slave was armed or killed the dogs. A comment in the Lexington Tribune condemned it: “If there be a single reader of THE TRIBUNE with heart so dark and skull so dense as to uphold that system with its blazing pyres and hounds of blood, let him examine the simple, unadorned brutality of the above advertisement.”

After the Civil War, Great Dane crosses and Cuban bloodhounds stood in for bloodhounds as cast members in traveling troupes, though not one bloodhound was mentioned in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel of the same name. In the show, “bloodhounds” chased a terrified Eliza over the ice. As Field and Stream put it in 1896: “The plot rested on blood spattered about, poor negroes torn apart in their gentle, defenseless strife for freedom; large, savage-looking dogs with pricked ears and ferocious aspect . . .”

After the Civil War, police continued to use bloodhounds to track fugitives. The dogs’ job could be dangerous. When horse thief Flora Mundis, alias “Tom”  King, “pretty but awful wicked,”escaped from jail in 1893, bloodhounds found her, but she shot them and attached a note to the ear of one with a hairpin: “Turn luse som more of your dogs of war. I have still twenty rounds in my belt.”

Bloodhounds can find their quarry almost anywhere (for example, one bloodhound found a sheep-stealer buried in a manure pile) and can follow a trail at least 24 hours old (some say much older) for a hundred miles or more. In 1922, bloodhounds tracked the robbers of a mail train in Casper, Wyoming, for 36 hours in the desert. Bloodhounds also tracked James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King Jr.’s murderer after he escaped from prison in 1977; they found him in the hills of Tennessee.

Today bloodhounds participate in search-and-rescue and trail fugitives for the police. Not very popular as pets (their AKC registration ranking was number 48  in 2011), they deserve a higher place:  As a writer for Outing said in 1896: “Instead of being a huge beast with an insatiable appetite for gore, the bloodhound is a medium-sized dog, with a heart full of love, a head full of brains, and possessing scenting powers of extraordinary delicacy.”

“The story has a shape. and that comes first, and then the story and its shape need substance and nourishment from the haunting past, clear memories or incidents suddenly remembered or invented, erased or enriched. . . . And if I am lucky what comes into shape will, despite all the fragility and all the unease. seem more real and more true, be more affecting and enduring, than the news today, or the facts of the case. . .” Colm Toibin, “What Is Real Is Imagined” (The New York Times (July 15, 2012)

My novella, Joan and Bella, the latest in my trilogy, Extraordinary Loves, was inspired by a photograph. In the photograph, my sister, Susan, who has Alzheimer’s disease, is holding hands with another woman in the care facility where they both live. My sister’s smile, mysterious and triumphant, fascinates me. I had thought her life was over when her memory faded. But the smile says it was not. It says she lives in a world real to her that I can never enter.

But Joan and Bella, an attempt in words to enter that world where words have been lost but something remains, is not about my sister, but Joan, a fictional woman, who is, like Susan, afflicted with Alzheimer’s. It is also about how the  linked pasts of those who love Joan affect their present relationships with her and each other.

My sister does not make fabric art. My character Joan does. Why? Because through art, which is wordless, she can express herself, and I wanted her to be able to do that. The sinister pieces of art Joan creates were inspired by the much sweeter fabric landscapes I once saw at a friend’s house. My decision to make Joan’s sister Francie a paleontologist came from an incident that happened to me at least ten years ago: A professor who had taken his class, certainly far from his first, for a field trip to bluffs at the beach, turned to me, a stranger, not in his class, and said, “This fossil is forty-million years old!” with a wonder I have not forgotten to this day. And I wanted Francie to be someone with the imagination to be fascinated for a lifetime by something as hard to grasp as forty-eight million years. Mrs. Cruz, the manager of The Home, where Joan and Bella live, shows a non-sentimental compassion reminiscent of that of my cousin Tim, who runs a retirement home in Massachusetts.

And my sister and I are not twins and never went to a prom together, though I wish we had.

My other recently published piece of fiction, A Provençal Mystery, is also somewhat based on real life: the year I spent in France researching my dissertation like the protagonist, Dory Ryan. Like her, I did take my dog with me. However, my dog, Puppy, was female. Dory’s dog, Foxy, is male. Why?  Because it made the use of pronouns easier. (Sometimes transformations from life to fiction are not so profound.) I didn’t know any nuns when I was in Avignon, not did I come upon a nun’s diary (it’s quite possible none exist), but the subject of my dissertation was a religious order whose mission it was to reform fallen women. Dory’s Avignon apartment is modeled on my English friend Jon Skinner’s apartment there; I lived in a motel on an island, which, it turned out, was a place where Avignon businessmen and their mistresses came for nooners.  I didn’t experience any murders while working in the Avignon archives, though Dory, of course, does.  Rachel Marchand is based on my friend Sharon Rawley, who was not a historian at all. So why did Sharon become Rachel? It has something to do with her hair, which was very silky, her sharp intelligence, and her straight-on view of life. I needed a character who would complement and contrast with Dory. But of course Rachel is not wholly Sharon, but a chimerical mix of real and imagined.

Though Dory Ryan and I have things in common (concern about weight, for instance), I can see  in her Vikki Bynum, my friend in graduate school, who was then studying unruly women in the American South of the 1800s. Vikki once said, as we were drinking wine on a Friday afternoon, that she felt great obligation to the women she was writing about to tell the stories true. I never forgot that, and I give Dory that same sensibility, which I greatly admire and have tried to emulate.

It feels wicked to shape reality into fiction, but it’s too intoxicating to resist.

On Biggest Loser, contestants talk emotionally about their progress from obese to thin as a “journey.” The journey is not just about weight loss but about a change in attitude, world view, and self-perception. (The contestants on Biggest Loser also live on a “ranch,” without a cowboy or a cow, where they undergo “challenges,” i.e., contests, and are attached to the “house,” which is not a building but a group of people.)

Suddenly the word “journey” is everywhere. (This trend likely started before Biggest Loser, but I just didn’t notice.) Journeys through marriages, college courses, therapy, life. Where’s the train? I find myself asking. The footpath? The car? The space ship? Something passive about it, being carried from here to there. This idea of a journey transposes experience into a linear and metaphorical geographical progression. What about side trips? Blind alleys?

Then I think of Pilgrim’s Progress, which also describes a psychic change in terms of a journey. Nothing so new about the concept, after all. Notice, though, in the map above, that the pilgrim’s progress has many blind alleys and side trips; it also doesn’t go straight from A to Z.

This use of the word “journey” puzzles me with its proliferation, but I get it.

What happens to the people on Biggest Loser is also called “amazing.” (Actually it is. What fascinates about the show is watching human beings morph from one body shape into another.) But ordinarily when I hear the word  “amazing” used in that modern sense, I roll my eyes and want  to scream. A new dress is amazing. An “A” on a paper is amazing. A five-year-old is amazing because he does a “good job” of tying his shoes. The guy next door is amazing for some unsaid reason.

Because of the way my mind works, “amazing” makes me think of “dazzling,” shimmering with light.  It once was applied to those things and experiences that were so out of the ordinary that they made you stand in awe.

Which reminds me of another word that has amazingly taken over the vocabularies of many – that word is “awesome.” “Awesome” once was an adjective used to describe things like mountain tops at dawn. God, if you believe in it/her/him. Large things that inspire us with awe. Things that are not us but bigger than us and make us feel small  – and that’s not so bad sometimes. Certainly not a dish of ice cream or a new hair cut or a car.  The use of the magnificent word  “awesome” to describe the mundane goes back at least as far as That 70s Show. (I watch re-runs while using my exercise bike.)

But it is not a recent thing – precise words being slopped into ordinariness. We all know that. We will soon have another word to describe how we feel about mountain tops at dawn and extraordinarily accomplished people. Maybe we’ll call ourselves ”dumbfounded.”

When I was around twelve, I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula (or did I see the old movie?) and was obsessed with it: the horror of the phantom scary stranger on the roof behind the blowing window curtain and the thrill of that juicy sexual component, the neck bite. Perhaps my fixation on Dracula had something to do with my fear of the helplessness that came with what my mother called “becoming a woman.” In that puritanical time, it was better to be one of the living dead than to be penetrated “down there.” Strictly speaking, Dracula got nowhere near third base and seemed to have no interest in it. The vampire virgin, like the possessed, was not responsible for her condition, and being a vampire negated the usefulness of reproduction in a system where life replaces death. .

As an adult, I have had little interest in vampires, though I suppose I should in view of the fact I would just love to live forever. I think what turned me off originally is an aversion to extreme horror and the utterly repulsive, like the sea of blood in the movie Interview with a Vampire. I’m a lot more queasy than I was at twelve – and the world of horror has gotten a lot more graphic. Also I have had the impression, without reading any contemporary vampire novels, that many of them are shallow horror-romances.

The vampire is a hot academic subject. When I plugged “+vampire +edu” into Google, I got almost eight million hits. “Evolution of Vampires” was a topic at Human Behavior and Evolution Society’s conference in Eugene, Oregon, in June 2010. And Purdue’s Comparative Literature and Culture (June, 2007) presented a paper, “Globalization, Empire, and the Vampire,” by Mario Vrbančić, in which, according to the abstract, he “analyses the vampire as the nation. . . . The vampire always occurs in the wake and decay of Empires. . . .[I]n America vampires disperse and multiply in popular culture and the mass media; in a newly emerging global order (Empire) they may embody the power of the multitude.” Dr. Thomas Garza (University of Texas, Austin) has studied people who identify themselves as vampires, and 20/20 did a segment about them. These folks start wanting blood as young teenagers, have (or want to have) fangs, don’t like sunlight. They obtain their blood from volunteer donors, who get an erotic thrill out of their thralldom; they don’t suck the donor dry but most monitor the amount of blood they take and are antiseptically clean in performing the procedure..Some experts view such real-life vampires as physically or psychologically damaged or as prototypes for the next step up the human evolutionary ladder.

It is all so interesting that I considered writing a piece of academia-tinged non-fiction, which might address one or more of these questions:

Do vampires represent a leech on society?

Can vampirism be somehow related to the Christian ritual of the eucharist, where humans drink Christ’s blood? Are the fictional vampires that go blood-less, having converted to vegetarianism, analogous with Protestants?.

What do changes in vampire gender relations signify? Do male vampires really combine “dad with cad,” as one academic believes? Why have male and female vampires become “cute,” not at all the repugnant rotten corpses vampires once were?

On the other hand, perhaps I can introduce a vampire into my fiction. I won’t take a blood oath that I’ll do that, but if I do I’ll have to live forever to follow my character through the course of his endless life.

In the fourth season of the tv prime time soap opera Brothers and Sisters, Sarah goes to France and meets a hot artist, Luc, with whom she has a storybook romance. You know the settings for such storybook romances: picnics with tablecloths, whole roast chickens, and wild strawberries; vineyards and olive trees;  winding country roads. All these settings actually do exist in France in profusion. However, what takes place in them is rarely romance for the average American, though one spring, driving through flowering trees on the road to Chateauneuf-du-Pape, I myself came close. Anyway, as Sarah and Luc are driving on a country road not unlike the one to Chateauneuf-du-Pape, we television viewers see a road sign: “Cliché sur Mer.” Neither character seems to notice it. I wonder about the sly writer who arranged for that silent, fleeting prop that undercuts the story. It amuses the hell out of me

The clichés of Brothers and Sisters — the machinations of the control-freak mother (played masterfully by Sally Field), the disastrous family dinners — have something to do with my addiction to the show:, as does, of course, the excellent scripting. I watched all 87 episodes available on Netflix in the space of ten days and wanted more. Why was I so addicted? I asked myself when feeling almost as guilty as if I’d consumed ten non-gourmet chocolates. Clichés!

Brothers and Sisters is a testament to the value of the cliché — the comfort food of drama. Writing courses warn over and over again against clichés, but, in the end, they often win out. We love them. They tell us we are in familiar territory, maybe even taken back to the security of those night times when our mothers and fathers read us the same story over and over – wouldn’t we have been disturbed if, say, the stepmother in “Hansel and Gretel” turned out to be warm and cuddly? It would have ruined everything.

Clichés can be words and phrases: the “you got it!” when you tell the waiter you want a burger with fries (hate that one), “amazing” to describe the most mundane accomplishment (hate that one, too), “good job” to reward a child for getting into the car (hate that one even more); characters: the hero who seems to be more flawed than he really is  (Jane Austen),  the misunderstood adolescent (James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause); situations: the French man and American woman engage in a romance, the alcoholic has a relapse, the lost dog comes home.

So as writers what do we do about clichés? Maybe we use them in unfamiliar territory, just as road signs to tell our readers we know where we are. We put them in the mouth of a character  to show, with that shorthand, how conventional he really is, thus throwing into sharp relief (cliché! – why is relief always “sharp”?) the originality of our protagonist. And isn’t the protagonist with originality a cliché in itself?

Maybe it’s a cliché to say we should avoid clichés. Myself, I sometimes love them, sometimes hate them. It all depends on what they are and where they are. And whether I absolutely have to use them in something amazing that I’m writing.

The other day, driving the car on a boring section of road, with other, better things to occupy my mind (things I didn’t want to let in), I found myself thinking about the word outlandish.  It came to me for the first time that its root was outland. So why had I never, in the thousands of times I have seen outlandish, realized this? Perhaps because  I thought that outland was not a word? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which I consulted when I got home, outland actually is a word, though some of its uses are archaic, as in “A fine romantic tale of Cornwall in the days when the strange people of that strange outland were in the throes of ranting Methodism.” (1934, Tablet).

But then, if outlandish came from outland, why not inlandish and uplandish?After all, inland and upland are much more common words today.

By then, in my head, Outland became an imaginary place, where strange and impossible (outlandish) people and things revel in their oddities. A place perhaps without geographical dimensions? But some real places are Outlands. Brooklyn (maybe once upon a time). All those Left Banks, where eccentric artists and just plain eccentrics live. These are places on the edge – the outland of a mainland, which is seemingly of the mainstream, a turbulent place where, among other things, capitalists make money seem like something real and build financial castles out of some kind of trading I don’t understand. So, on second thought, could Mainland be an Outland, too? No. In spite of those castles,  the mainland has a sober affect. Its buildings are grey, and its people more often dress in plain suits and keep their eccentricities indoors.

And why don’t inlandish and uplandish exist? Certainly, where I live, in Southern California, the people who live inland have, according to us snooty people on the coast, an inlandishness. They wear socks under their sandals and bring too much paraphernalia – coolers,umbrellas, and big towels –  to the beach. We might say, if the word existed, that a pair of sequined sunglasses is inlandish.

As for uplandish, I don’t even want to think about that. And I need to keep my mind on the road.

The other night I had an intense argument with an artist friend in which I embarassed myself by saying my life’s raw material “informs” my writing of fiction. (I hate the word “informs” used in that sense; people inform, not things.)  In retrospect, I wish I had said something to him about how imagination is tied only by a thin string to reality.  (That also might embarass me when I think about it.) He says that the reality of my life is interesting enough in itself and suggests that I write it up as I remember it happening. (He doesn’t paint according to that idea, though – his paintings incorporate figures into landscape in a way that is not a strict reflection of reality at all.) I suppose I could write a memoir even if more documents did remain of my life, and they would if only I hadn’t thrown all my old papers into a bonfire in an used oil barrel right before I moved to California. But I won’t. It isn’t just because I can’t remember enough, and it isn’t just because I doubt my life is of much interest to anyone, including me.  It’s more that I don’t want to relive my past but to create something from it – to spin stories about fictional people and places around those bits of memory that remain in my head.

The discussion brought me to thinking about the raw material of my life that exists in See What You Have Done, my coming-of-age novella set in the late Depression. At that time, I was growing up in idyllic Saddle River, New Jersey, with its trout stream,  ice-skating pond, woods, and elementary school with two grades to a room.  My memories of it come in flashes, usually triggered by something in the present. The smell of lilacs: Easter and, for some reason, a peasant blouse. Deep shade of summer: picking watercress in a spring in the woods. Pork under plastic in the supermarket: our two pigs, who were doomed to die and hang naked by their heels from a limb of the apple tree above their pen.

Some of those childhood memories inspired scenes in See What You Have Done: the woods and the pigs, for instance. But no Uncle George inhabited our attic, and though my friend Connie’s uncle (whose name I forget)  lived in her attic, we had little to do with him except to mock his opera records. Though I took piano lessons from the organist for the local Episcopal Church, she, unlike Miss French, was married and not at all interested in any Uncle Georges. In the story, it’s the description of our hands poised above the keys that comes closest to the reality of then.

Memories from later times and places in my life are responsible for other scenes in the story. It was long after my family had moved to an upstate New York farm (I was then in my twenties) that my father found his flute somewhere, perhaps in the attic (I don’t remember); he  took it from the faded red velvet interior of its case, lifted it to his lips, and tried to play but could not elicit a note. It’s the look on his face in that moment that lives on in See What You Have Done. As for the parrot, I did not meet a parrot when I was three, but when I was forty, and it was not in a New Jersey attic but in a  California living room. That parrot, whose name was not W.C.,  waddled across the floor in a way that even to an adult like me seemed more than a bit sinister.

And I was never Jane. She’s a lot more interesting than I am. With a kinder heart. And isn’t that a little miracle of fiction?

See What You Have Done available at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DFQZWE