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“Sitting in a Grove Reading Shelley” by M. G. Turner

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I sat this afternoon in a grove reading Shelley. The sky was bright and the heat of the early spring a portent of things to come. The pages turned, the poetry passed, the phrases came to me with ease. I saw ancient lands that dissolved and rearranged as quickly as clouds. I saw fleeting glimpses of storied citadels and fiery furnaces. I saw riders on horseback pushing themselves toward an infinity of grandeur. My breath halted; I had finished the book.

Sighing to myself, it was lucky I had brought something else to read on this happy warm day. Another work sat beside me on a bench, of related and equal importance.

This new thing was the novel of his wife Mary, an immense book in some respects, a little book in others. I thought of them together, I thought of the dinner party with Lord Byron in Geneva when they’d each agreed to write a frightening tale—in her case, a classic to be. Had it come to her easily? Was it in some respects a presentiment of her approaching grief, Percy’s death at the age of twenty-nine, in a dreadful sailing accident? How do we remake the ones we’ve lost? Can they only be demonic when we’ve cobbled them back together by fragments, and by memories? The sky was turning a brighter shade of blue as I thought of Percy and Mary and their antique love; then I thought of my own lost loves, some that had drifted away, others that had collapsed in on themselves like ailing stars. Being alone was now a balm and not a travesty—at least not when Riverside Park was green and the sun shone down on me so freely.

Oh grief, which makes its home in human hearts, art thou not a monstrosity? Cursed be Prometheus who stole fire from the gods and raised us from our lowly origins. Cursed be the phantoms and phantasms that haunt our quiet moments, when all we would like to have is the peace which I, for a brief moment, experienced in that golden grove at the start of the spring, as I began to stitch together the many severed pieces of myself.

Soon enough I left the grove and went home, both Shelleys tucked snuggly under my arm. Reunited at last.

“The Funeral of Shelley,” Louis Edouard Fournier, 1889. Edward John Trelawny, Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, l-r. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

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“The Shakespeare Authorship Conundrum Society” by M. G. Turner

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The Shakespeare Authorship Conundrum Society met Thursdays at the public mansion on Riverside Drive and 107th street. It was there that Theodore Gurney, Teddy for short, had found his confidantes—a ragtag gang of young and old aesthetes united over the dubious though benign conspiracy theory that the Bard of Avon was not the author of the greatest plays ever written. And in a culture plagued by misinformation of a more destructive sort, their little club wasn’t doing much harm. In fact, it was a delight to meet each week especially on those often rainy April afternoons and discuss, argue, and interpret. Everyone there was well-educated and a lover of the Bard’s work—that is, whoever the Bard actually was.

For some it was Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. Several of his close family members had, according to Bennet Leach, a forty-three-year-old professional fact checker, been the supposed Shakespeare’s patrons. He, as well as several others in the group, adhered to the idea that Old Will was indeed a real person, but more of a steward, a frontman for the work of someone else who for reasons of political impropriety could not go public with their quill. How, this particular faction argued, could an uneducated man of humble background, whose father was a mere tanner, have written so penetratingly about kings, queens, and other members of the royal elite? How could he have always had the inside scoop on court intrigue? He couldn’t, they claimed—hence the existence of a secret that, if confirmed, threatened to unseat nearly five hundred years of orthodoxy surrounding the Bard’s majestic output.

But Teddy didn’t fall into this category. Nor did he fall in with the others, some of whom claimed Shakespeare was a Sicilian by the name of Collolanza who’d supposedly been puttering around England at this time, or that he was in fact Christopher Marlowe himself, who’d inexplicably succeeded at faking his infamous barroom death. Nor did Teddy believe he was one of the kings and queens who graced the English, French, or Spanish thrones, whose names over the course of centuries had been tossed into the hat for consideration by amateur critics and armchair scholars.

It is important to note that Teddy’s own belief about the veracity of Shakespeare’s genius lay in a more considered, accurate, though certainly less exciting realm. His own postulation which had come to him after several weeks of attending the Thursday meetings and taking in all the diverse opinions—as well as doing frenzied research of his own—was that Shakespeare was indeed Shakespeare, but that, seeing as he was part of the consummate Elizabethan repertory company at the renowned Globe Theater, many of the plays, including some of the most famous might have been written, or edited, or looked over by actors, namely Richard Burbage, who some scholars had even gone so far as to posit as the unacknowledged co-author of Hamlet.

But amid all the wild theories that dove inside his ears each week Teddy felt reluctant to lay bare this, by comparison, banal theory. To him the very fact of its subdued suggestiveness made it more stirring than say, the unsubstantiated idea that Shakespeare was really Sir Francis Drake, composing plays and sonnets while circling “the whole globe.” Thusly, it wasn’t until the sixth week of his involvement with the Society as he was now thinking of it, that his courage became plucked up enough to share his hypothesis. He decided to begin by validating all the other theories he had heard that day and in subsequent weeks before pouring the proverbial cold water on the wildest of them. “Never in my life,” he began, “have I had occasion to enjoy such compelling and consequential talk. But there is another theory which has gone neglected that I would like to share with you today.”

The faces of his co-conspirators glimmered under the resplendent lights of the Library Room. Several of them smiled, while some looked demonically expectant, as if daring him to outdo their spirited reveries.

“Go ahead, please,” said Margaret Crawley—a sixty-four-year-old librarian who was on the verge of retirement and was herself planning a “truth-seeking trip” to Stratford-upon-Avon, aka “The Birthplace” in the fall. “You have not spoken much in our meetings and we’d all be glad to hear from you.”

“Well,” Teddy cleared his throat. “As I see it, none of us will soon get the validation from academia required for a public acceptance of our theories, but there is one suggestion made by some scholars whose names I can share that seems to me almost indisputable.”

After a shared gasp there was a round of excited voices—some angry and some mortally pleased. Teddy went on:

“It is that, seeing as the Globe was a place of collaboration and collective creativity, portions of the plays—maybe even large portions of them—could have been contributed by the actors. It has even been suggested that the renowned thespian Richard Burbage—and in some ways the Bard’s right hand man—took a leading role in not only the production but in the writing of Hamlet. Who knows how many times an actor would flub a line, but in the process of this divine accident make it sound even better than it had been written on the page and Old Will watching from the back of the theater might have called out: ‘Forsooth, that is better than what I had quilled! Leave as is.’

“And though this line of thinking cannot be expressly proved it cannot be expressly refuted either, which I think lends it a great deal of credence and intellectual power. I would love to know your thoughts.”

As Teddy stopped speaking a great silence filled the Library Room, which was only broken several seconds later by Lloyd Hanger, a fifty-seven-year-old linguistics professor who was the unofficial “heavy” of the group, “THAT IS TREASON!”

“Yes! How absurd!” came another voice, which was met by a second chorus, some in defense, some in derision:

“I think Teddy has a point!”

“What does he know, he hasn’t even spoken until today!”

“But of all the theories his makes the most sense!”

“Don’t forget about Edward de Vere—you can’t explain him away!”

“I think this young man just did.”

“Oh, poppycock.”

“Care to take it outside?”

“I’d like to.”

“SILENCE!” This one word, from the instigator of the unexpected skirmish, quieted the rabble. Especially as Lloyd added: “Do we want to get kicked out of here?”

“He’s right.” Margaret let out a deep, feeling sigh. “This idea you have presented to us, Teddy, has certainly raised the temperature. How curious too, considering it is one of the most moderate we have heard. However, so as not jeopardize our position here, I suggest we move on to other business.”

With that mild word the war had been put down and Teddy sat in silence, unsure if another contribution of his was apt to be considered. But truthfully he didn’t have one and when he walked out that April day, after saying goodbye to his co-conspirators he made a silent vow to not return. For as the rain pattered down upon the earth and misted the Westside in its dew he felt as if he could, like Schrodinger, see all the possible identities of Shakespeare both having existed and not. He was simultaneously a great naval-man, a great earl, a great king, and a great scholar. He was a Sicilian wanderer and Miguel de Cervantes. But something all these theories seemed to reject, and something all the theorists seemed allergic to was that someone of so humble a background could be imbued with genius. Like most conspiracy theories, it neglected to consider a bare, and perhaps humdrum truth—in this case, that the embers of creativity can spark anywhere resulting in a blaze so tall and great we remain in awe for hundreds of literarily blessed years after.

And some five hundred years prior, in a green corner of jolly old England a bard was brought into the world—though in the minds of the most benignly credulous, who he truly was we’ll never know.

M. G. Turner
New York City
December 2023

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“Poe’s Farmhouse,” a story by M. G. Turner

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The house where Edgar Allan Poe lived in 1844, near the intersection of West 84th St and Broadway.

Peering through the pentagonal construction window the young writer gazed upon the barren wasteland that used to belong to one of his heroes. Poe’s farmhouse—or rather the apartment building that had once stood there—should have been designated an historical sight; yet the formerly empty structure had been flat-out demolished. There was nothing there now but rust-grey rubble and forgotten dreams—and of course a solemn-faced writer peering through the window and wondering what it must have been like for that giant of American fiction, that colossus of unhinged gothica, to have lived right on this spot.

The writer recalled his favorite stories. The Pit and the Pendulum. The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar. The Masque of the Red Death. Then he thought of the single novel that sickly scion had scribed, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Had all these grand, beautiful, and at times horrifying ideas gestated here? Was there something about this locale that helped engender frightening dramas to bewitch the mind and harry the senses? The air was cool and crisp; it was autumn. He peered even deeper into the mists of time, trying to discern what could not be immediately discerned. Where had the house stood? Was it there, by the empty wall, stained by rot and mold? What about the animals, if he had any? Where did they graze, where did they frolic? Where did Poe’s horrifyingly young wife find herself in the morning while her husband still slept off the inky dissolution of the night before? What about the visitors? What about his parentage? His friends? His longings? His lies? His life!

His life was here amid the stones, amid the acrid dust and shattered pebbles. His life was in the breath of the sky and in the soughing of the wind and the drizzle of the rain. A movie theater stood nearby, the equivalent of the three-penny opera of his day—the type his actress mother might have played in—easy entertainments, easy evenings, easy exigencies, as opposed to what he’d tried to compose in the dark of the night. Perhaps he had seen ravens floating up past his window or circling in the sky; perhaps birds of prey had perched upon the house in the depopulated twilight—evil portents of his young wife’s demise.

The writer thought on all of this; then his thoughts turned to himself and to his own stories which whispered to him at inopportune times. Had E. A. Poe faced the same daily struggle? Had he put off engagements, social calls, daytime explorations, nighttime ventures, all in the service of his craft? We are all in thrall to something—in some cases it is the noble work of helping our fellow man; in others it is the timeless pursuit of perfection, artistic or otherwise which makes our bones quake and our eyes water and our hearts yearn, but nevertheless answers the age-old question, the shifting, drifting dreary query the universe is always posing to, and imposing on, our six senses; the question of, what shall we do with our life?

The house was there as these thoughts and more fled through the writer’s mind. These thoughts and more consumed him, to the point where he could almost see it: a slightly dilapidated gabled home, modest in size and style, that once contained a dream. He thought of his own dreams, his own missions, his own eager anticipations. Life was moving too fast for him, the daily clip of days was maddening, he rarely took a moment to rest. But there’d be time enough to rest in the grave, time enough to contemplate the great mysteries when soil and dirt and grime had covered over the last of our remaining solidness and rendered us forgiven.

Forgiven for what? Perhaps for the sin of existing at all, for the sin of taking from the land what we could. Perhaps art is how some of us pay our rent, the metaphysical rent required of staying on Earth. Amid all of that is the urge to let go, to go mad, to exhale, to die! When the farmhouse was destroyed to make way for the next modern monstrosity, was something lost or something gained? The answer did not come to the young writer then, whose mind remained a flurry of activity. The only word that echoed in his brain as he turned from that pathetic makeshift window, that dreaded depressing spectacle was nevermore. He laughed to himself as he walked on home, thinking the hour would soon be fit for ghosts—not men.

But who was to say? If a ghost is only the shell of a man, could the reverse also be true? Could Poe’s spirit feel the same dismay at the destruction of his home as a living breathing being? Could his spirit still yearn to pace its grounds, to walk its halls, to reside inside its chambers? What about telling tales? What about weaving lies? Did the urge to create extinguish at death, like a sorry candle being snuffed? Or did ghosts seek to unfurl lays, spinning stories to each other in the tomb? What great masterpieces then have been lost to practicalities of creation? What noble dramas have only played out to an audience of spirits and shades? Do we carry on or did we cease? Do we suffer in sorrow or in peace?

To these questions and their antecedents the young writer had no answer. But he was no longer compelled to find one. For upon the heath that constituted his lost and lonely neighborhood he realized something else: he had finally broken through. He had finally landed upon that grimmest of possible isles, though the north star itself had vanished. He had entered the realm of the dead, that hallowed harbor of goodbye, and immortality was there for the taking. All he needed to do was put pen to paper, before the resplendent lights of the workaday world went forever and finally out.

M. G. Turner
New York City
October 2023

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“On Browsing in Bookstores, a Pastime” by M. G. Turner

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There is something uniquely magical about walking inside a bookstore, preparing to browse: you cross the threshold and suddenly you have been transported, quite literally, to a world of books. As the atmosphere settles, you notice there is a quiet here that reigns supreme, a quiet comparable perhaps only to that of a library; a pregnant hush fills the air and instills a state of calm that you would be unlikely to find elsewhere. Especially in New York City where the aggressive frenzy of life never ceases, the bookstore—and its ill-treated cousin, the library—can be an oasis, a place of refuge, a second home that can be utilized when other options of play or fun or drink have been depleted or appear uninviting.

When times are tough the world of books calls to us, and if we’re lucky we heed that call—the call of what we must do and not what we ought to. There is no greater pleasure than going to a bookstore with an objective in mind, say to purchase some work or other by Balzac and leaving inexplicably with a Faulkner. Bookstores divert our expectations. The shelves in many of New York’s finest are crammed high to the ceiling with both old and new tomes that at first speak to us in voices we may only hear subliminally. Thus visuals are our calling card, our way in. Often it is the seductive glint of a spine or the flicker of a cover that catches our eye, and as we pull the book off the shelf, and stare at it, a love affair begins. The eye tries to comprehend what the soul sees clearer. We know there is some future here for us, our paths will diverge together, we will save that spark and let it grow—that is, if we are lucky and decide not to put whatever work we have found back on the shelf where it will be consigned to wait a while longer for the coming of its true owner.

But if we hold in our hands the book we are meant to read, then we are giving ourselves over to something unconscious and in some ways very powerful. What we are giving ourselves over to is Fate. For reading books, and at the outset, buying books, is very much like making friends. The object itself transcends the lucid boundaries of paper and ink; it is so much more, and because of that the weight of a decision rests heavily on our shoulders. Do you buy another Nabokov? No, you’ve already read four of him. Another Tolstoy? You haven’t even finished Anna Karenina. A new edition of Ulysses? You have two already, dog-eared and disgruntled and waiting to be finished. You walk on aimlessly, through the aisles, dodging people taking on a similar pursuit: beautiful girls in faded jean jackets and sunglasses on their foreheads, old men stooping over dangerously to get a look at some old and beaten Melville, and the others like yourself trying to work themselves up into a state of rapt determination, studying the walls, trying to discern the titles of famous works, squinting as if at the hieroglyphics of Luxor.

The weight of a book in hand is equivalent to the weight of gold. You measure it, test it, consider whether you can withstand the flurry of its pages, the emotional impact of its premise. Stories are contained within stories, characters within characters, subtlety gives way to novelty, novelty to extremity, enjoyment to a cessation of pain. For that is what all the browsers, including yourself are looking for: a place to stop and sit awhile, to direct thought consciously toward a more righteous purpose, feeding the imagination a meal it cannot make on its own.

The shelves are calling to you. You know not to make a mistake. Occasionally you do make one and you are back at the register the next day making the same hurried, nervous claim: “I bought this for my friend but it turns out he already had it.” Several Hemingways have found their way back to this bardo. Tolstoy’s What is Art? was too polemical for your taste. A copy of the Master and Margherita whose translation you utterly hated was happily parted with. Silently, the cashier, gives you store credit and with this slip, handed over with a subdued frown—half-judgement, half-dismay—you are now able to go back to the walls, back to the drawing board as it were, to feast your eyes over the multitude of possibilities, the bold, broad scope of world literature staring you so determinedly in the face.

And finally you find what you’re looking for. And that pain does cease. Until of course you finish the book at a remarkable clip and opt to do it all again. The energy to read recycles, reincarnates, reinvigorates, and you hope never to give up the journey; even after you have lined up your finished books like the proud trophies they are, there is always a little more room, another book case to fill, another story to sink into. Finished Mann’s Buddenbrooks, well there’s always The Magic Mountain or Doctor Faustus. You’ve read those two Flauberts but there’s more Proust to dig into, a seemingly endless supply of it. Turgenev always wins over the other, more popular Russians, but there is not much of him along the walls, save the obvious in Fathers and Sons. You’d read more Dostoyevsky if you didn’t hate his guts and think he was an anti-semite and in many ways a difficult and stifling writer. You need to read more women, it’s a fault of the whole system, the whole structure, but for your part you do love Woolf, Chopin, Cather, Stein; Wharton is an undeniable great but her meanness never ceases and it’s not clear she even likes her characters.

But no matter who you choose—or rather who chooses you—the point is never to give up on books or decline what they have to offer. The point is to never cease searching for some little taste of paradise that we had previously lacked, to find the good in the bad, the large in the small, the mediocre in the great. You can see in three dimension and you can read in four. To live other lives is to live your own more fully. You can’t believe it sometimes, the depth, the brevity, the longevity, the incalculable gifts given to us by people who worked sitting down. It is connection that we are looking for when we pace like ghosts up the hallways of some magnificent temple of literature, filled to bursting with every voice; male, female, Black, white, and all varieties of humanity. Nothing can touch us, and by the same token, everything can. For we want it to. We will it to. For if Fate has deemed it, we go home happy—and if we’re lucky, stay that way.

M. G. Turner

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David Lynch: Archaeologist of the American Unconscious by M. G. Turner

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I became fascinated by David Lynch roughly eight years ago, during a difficult and crucial period of my life. I was lucky though, for while I was garnering an appreciation for the artist I now consider the leading archaeologist of the American unconscious, I also acquired the practice of Transcendental Meditation, of which David Lynch is among the world’s foremost proponents.

It came to me almost magically. I had been thinking about adopting a meditation practice, and had dabbled in several forms, until a good friend—whose family happened to be acquainted with Lynch himself—learned the practice and I subsequently joined the party. This experience in meditation was followed by an appreciation of the filmmaker-turned-meditation-advocate: I watched all his movies.

First I saw “Blue Velvet” which represented for me the ending of my childhood and the beginning of what came next. Then I went back to his earlier work, the beautifully absurd “Eraserhead” and the quintessentially humanist “The Elephant Man” which may in posterity’s light be seen as his greatest achievement. Later, “Mulholland Drive” revealed the depravity of an alternate, or perhaps not so alternate, Los Angeles while nodding humbly at Hitchcock and other suspense icons; he has also cited Edward Hopper as an influence. “The Straight Story” is a surprise in and of itself, and adds a touching element to Lynch’s oeuvre and doing much of what the title implies without sacrificing his innate artistic vision. “Twin Peaks” changed the calculus of what American television can accomplish and fashioned a bizarre and complex world that pulsed with reality and intricacy.

It has taken me a few years to really grasp what Lynch’s output means for the larger culture. Not to mention his meditation foundation which these days seems to be his main mission and is doing important work. Its positive impact is well-established and the results it’s achieving in the areas of PTSD and relief of trauma among vulnerable populations deserves the Nobel Peace Prize—if only that institution were more forward thinking, and more open to alternative modalities. However, I want to focus on his artistic output and its importance to contemporary culture. The truth is, America has never felt like more of a Lynchian hellscape. On the surface, as in “Blue Velvet,” there is wealth and beauty, green lawns and bright sunshine—but below the surface, if one simply peers down, there is corruption, degradation, and a deep moral failing at the root of our materialism.

And yet, I have never felt that Lynch was preachy. To the contrary, his view is objective. He is simply presenting reality as he sees it—no matter how bizarre, depraved, or alien. This is where the absolutism of meditation comes in. I use the word “absolutism” to demonstrate the totality of the unified field, the field we reach in Transcendental Meditation, of which Lynch himself is a perennially committed diver. This field feeds the artist’s creativity; in Lynch’s own words it “serves the work and serves the life.” But through Lynch we are also being served a meal of oddities and profundities, which he has dived within to capture and present. For there is something almost incidental about Lynch’s own role in the artistic process. I’m not sure if he would describe it this way, but his language surrounding “catching fish,” which he likens to ideas, seems a unique endeavor in an industry where being a go-getter is praised and people supposedly make their own luck.

The ideas themselves, these fish which he has so patiently waited for and watched swimming under the surface of the mind, and which he has then skillfully fished out—these ideas, in sum, say something vital about our culture. It would be reductive to suggest they say only one thing, but every great artist may only be able to tackle one great idea over the length of a career. In Lynch’s case, with respect to his reluctance to give voice to his reasons and motivations, the question is, how with all we have, with every rolling hill, with every shining sea, with every great thoroughfare to drive down, with every beautiful house that has out front a rich, green lawn, how is it that we are all at base so desperately unhappy? Why do we distrust our neighbors? Why do we hate each other? Yet the corruption Lynch points to is not seen by him as ubiquitous; instead he seems to suggest that these dangerous impulses only control us when we have no conscious knowledge of them. We cannot see them, because most don’t bother to go to the place from which all matter springs; or in other words strive for something deeper.

This brings me back to meditation. It is impossible to look honestly at Lynch’s work without seeing it in the context of a committed meditator, and a man who has faced his personal darkness every day and put it into his art, rather than into the world. There is a moving anecdote in the probing documentary film “David Lynch: The Art Life” in which he describes taking his father down to the basement of his home to show him his “experiments,” which included the carcasses of dead animals, rotting fruit, and similar earthy paraphernalia. Later, as they are climbing back up the stairs Lynch’s father says “David, I don’t think you should ever have children.”

Naturally, Lynch is devastated by this. But in his narration he seems more devastated by the fact that his father misunderstood a pursuit he was deeply excited about, rather than his insensitive command to refrain from procreating. He wants to be understood—but for Lynch the type of understanding he traffics in is not of the conscious understanding that can be easily categorized. His movies enter you at a different, more subliminal level than most movies being made today—perhaps ever. It stands to reason that would be the case, given his almost fifty-year meditation practice and the wisdom he has gathered from it, the wisdom he has sought to infuse, perhaps furtively, into the movies we have all enjoyed and embraced.

All this meant a lot to me eight years ago and still does; given the few degrees of separation between us I could very well have met him, though never have. But I don’t have to meet him to appreciate his work, nor feel personally connected. Truly great artists make us feel as if we know them; they consciously lower the barriers of morality and good taste so that we can have an experience that is free of judgment. These days when most of what is being peddled smacks of 16th century morality plays, where good always wins and the bad are always punished, it is refreshing to have someone stepping in to say “Not so fast. The world is much more complicated, and much more nuanced than anything you can reduce into a simple catchphrase.” Maybe a more concise statement is what the character named Donna Hayward says in “Twin Peaks”—“It’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream and the most terrible nightmare all at once.”

If that doesn’t describe America today, I don’t know what does. All I know is I’m glad David Lynch is around to illuminate us. It’s nice to know someone is meditating for our sins. Maybe one day soon the world will join him.

M. G. Turner

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Ernest Hemingway and the Agony of Inspiration by M. G. Turner

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As a writer, I’ve had multiple run-ins with Ernest Hemingway. The first was in the spring of 2021, following the airing of the Ken Burns documentary, and the most recent was last month, after buying a large Hemingway boxed-set, which I wolfed down in two weeks. The set included The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms, which I had previously tried to read all the way through and failed.

This time I did not fail. But perhaps I should have. You see, for the past year I have been completing a novel that has its stylistic roots in what I like to think of as “modern gothic” with what I hope is fluid and frankly beautiful prose. My work tends to come from a much different aesthetic place than those who follow the Hemingway method, i.e., Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and George Saunders; yet to my chagrin I found, as I pressed through the great and tragic author’s oeuvre I was losing my sense of self, my sense of who I am as a writer. There are some writers, and artists in other fields, whose voice and style are so magnetic, so enveloping, that they instill in the reader or viewer the sense of nothing having existed before or after them. Hemingway is a quintessential example of this, and an author whom most aspiring writers need to tangle with at some point. And for me, this past month, my collision with Hemingway came, and I left the ring, as it were, feeling as if I’d been continually punched in the face. This could be due to the quick, jabbing, declarative nature of Hemingway’s prose—it stands to reason that he himself was an avid boxer—and clearly brought this quality into even his most lengthy, involved novels such as A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Some writers—I’d even say most—try a different approach with the reader. Some lull, some soothe, and some entertain. Hemingway does none of the above. Hemingway berates and belittles, but he also rescues and redeems. Which is why, even when I recently felt his voice becoming my own, and my boundaries yielding to his force of will, I did not put his books down, did not shunt my new boxed-set onto a high shelf, did not flee the ring. I stood firm. I withstood. I, and most importantly, my young novel survived.

***

I work with fiction writers almost every day, as an editor and a literary representative. Most of the time I think half of my job is to help each writer tangle with the demons embedded in their prose, thorny eruptions that can spring up at any moment. In even more poetic terms, I see myself as a Horatio, Hamlet’s loyal friend, who stands fast as the ghost of his father the fallen confronts the young prince and forces him to wrestle with his conscience. On the page we come face to face with ourselves, and when we read books we come face to face with other people. Naturally every writer, when working in the most effective capacity, will bring themselves to the page, so it stands to reason that when one reads Hemingway they not only read him, they face him, and sometimes even face off with him.

If you’ll allow one more boxing metaphor, when we pick up, say, A Farewell to Arms, we are contending with an experience that Hemingway has transmuted to the page in terms as stark as he could muster. He dares you to withstand him and what he experienced. You feel like you are slogging through the mud, feel like you are tangling through the trenches, and when Henry’s dear love Catherine Barkley dies in childbirth he makes you go through it with him, mourning her to the last page as he denies us even a smidgen of satisfaction. “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Henry does not cry. He does not scream. He simply stumbles on, injured and broken, just as we, having made it to page 332 stumble on.

I know all this sounds like I don’t like Hemingway very much. Quite the contrary—I love him. But it is precisely this love, this agony of inspiration, that writers must learn how to handle. When I was younger it was easy to read a page or two of A Moveable Feast and think, okay this is how it’s done, and immediately run to the computer or a notebook and put down a litany of irredeemably declarative sentences. Now that I am a bit older, this doesn’t happen as readily, and I am able, perhaps because of my sense of self—fragile though it continues to be—to manage it, and am able to cross the tightrope of influence and homage.

As Rainer Maria Rilke posited in Letters to a Young Poet an artist must work with whatever is only theirs, and no one else’s. This sounds easy enough, and yet it is probably one of the hardest things a writer can do, and maybe the biggest accomplishment next to putting a period on the final sentence of a great work. How does one withstand, to use a word I’ve deployed already too often, the gravitational pull of someone so monumentally important to our culture and still have faith and confidence in what they’re offering a reader? I know I used the second person when posing that question, but I am talking about myself as much as others. How was I supposed to let my own novel live when Hemingway had seemingly dashed apart my style with a few choice sentences? The word “confident” kept flooding back to my mind, because the way he comes across on the page is as someone who is so utterly convinced of his literary excellence and aesthetic brilliance that anything less—or more importantly, different—is exactly that, less.

But I am here to say: this is false. Though his confidence, even certainty in his style, made him the great writer we know him as, it does not mean other possible fictive valences are worthless, or worth less than his own. When analyzed further, how could it possibly be the only way? A signature of life is its diversity and essential uniqueness. Human beings are varied, not only in terms of race and creed, but also in personality, and yes, style. One writer cannot define the entirety of the canon, no matter how hard they try, or people try for them.

***

But again, I love Hemingway. And I also love what I am working on—you must. This may sound conceited, or foolhardy, but I think loving the pages on your desk is essential to those pages finding an audience and living. I believe a literary figure like Hemingway must be seen in the context of his times, for today, due to his lack of preamble and exposition, he might not have made it out of the pages of minor publications. But in the same way, do we judge Wilt Chamberlain, the only professional basketball player ever to score 100 points in a single game, by the standards of excellence in the current NBA? We do not.

This is all to say that ideas about the greatest writer or the greatest style are inconclusive. I firmly believe anyone, regardless of ultimate success, when they put pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard—are trying to put down the greatest sentence ever. No one enters this field with dreams of mediocrity. We slip into the ring bravely, and work with what we have, with what is most accessible; eventually, if we are lucky, we eschew all influence and find that now vague concept: our voice, that which comes solely from ourselves. We may have influences. We may have shadings in our work that relate or are in conversation with those who came before, but at heart our best work is apt to come when we are in touch with our innermost quality of command, our innermost narrative, our personal dreams. Hemingway had his dreams. And we have ours. But I suspect we will continue to box with him, and writers of all styles, backgrounds, and understandings, until this experiment ends—and let’s hope it never will.


 

 

 

 

M. G. Turner
June 2022

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Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Pioneer and Childhood Hero by M. G. Turner

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When I was eight years old I had the privilege of meeting one of the greats—in fact the greatest cinema special effects pioneer of the 20th Century. That man’s name was Ray Harryhausen, and to movie fans worldwide he represents the start of a great age in filmmaking, where the previously unthinkable could be projected on screen, using two primary techniques, known as Stop-Motion Animation, and Dynamation, which each pushed the boundaries of what had previously been possible in the fantasy, adventure, and sci-fi realms. But to me, Ray Harryhausen, for all his cinematic splendor and cultural renown, represented something else: magic. For me, this took the form of an idea, that art was not only impressive and important, that it could also be fun.

I can’t recall which Harryhausen movie I saw first, but it was probably Jason and the Argonauts, which remains my favorite of his films, though Mysterious Island is a close second. In those days—the early 2000s—I used to watch films on our bulbous, analog TV set. This included VHS tapes and eventually DVDs that we rented from our neighborhood video store and some of the first films I watched were Harryhausen’s. Something I used to do, in lieu of being in a real theater, was use chairs, pillows, and then a large bed-sheet to create a kind of makeshift fort, inside of which I could watch films. This had a curious cave-like effect and helped pull my focus to the images on screen, which were dazzling, especially to my young, uncritical mind. This was long before IMAX, and 48 frames per second, and on the fly CGI; this was an only child discovering one of his first artistic heroes, a man I would go on to meet, whom I would initially correspond with over a series of letters, first sent in the fall of 2003.

At that time I was starting second grade, and for my first two years in school had faced a great deal of bullying and harassment from other kids. I was always shy and quiet, preferring to read Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings instead of running wild with my classmates on the playground. As many people are subjects of bullying and intimidation early in their school years, I don’t suggest I was unique in this, but do think it intensified my wish to escape into other worlds, to lose myself in some grand swashbuckling action. I was looking for something to fill the void, and though the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Star Wars space opera did some of the work, it was really Harryhausen who made me feel complete, Harryhausen who opened my mind and showed me that movies could be both entertaining and meaningful. In short, that they could be art.

With my mother herself being a visual artist, I already knew that art was an important element of one’s emotional and intellectual life, but I didn’t know it could also be fun. Seeing Harryhausen’s creatures come to life not only felt like the most special sort of magic trick, but an experience akin to walking through the halls of a wondrous and thought-provoking museum, which in those difficult days of 1st Grade helped me see that there was something outside of the difficult, tedious, and at times Kafkaesque experience of New York public school with its inane standardized tests, its lack of discipline, and myriad bureaucratic cruelties.

Thus I escaped into Harryhausen’s movies, watching them on the weekends, and sometimes on school nights. I even watched all the Sinbad films in succession when recovering from a traumatic ear operation. Because I was so moved by them, and because they meant so much to me, and because they had granted me my first glimpse into seeing film as an art-form, and not just a mode of entertainment, I decided to write him a letter.

I was luckier than most kids in this endeavor, because my father was and still is an influential book editor and was able to obtain Harryhausen’s address through his publishing house. In the letters, which I wrote the summer before first grade began, I told him how much I liked his films, that I wanted to be an animator when I grew up, and even included some drawings depicting his monsters. I simply wanted to connect with the man who’d brought wonder into my life, to convey to him, in no uncertain terms, my appreciation, childlike as it might have been. Of course, in our overly critical culture some might look back and say the Harryhausen icons such as the skeletons in Jason, or his Emir from 20,000,000 Miles to Earth, or any of the other colossal creatures which graced his films, didn’t look real per se, it didn’t matter and still doesn’t. There is a suspension of disbelief necessary for appreciating a Harryhausen film, a suspension that modern audiences have become poorly practiced at, but remains important to one’s overall aesthetic health. For a child it was easy to deploy this ability, and to derive enjoyment from the visions he conjured, and so I felt a letter was the best way to express my, well, gratitude.

We waited a month or two, and in that time worried that the letter might have gone astray or hadn’t reached him, until finally from England, where the great man lived, a reply came, a photo of which is depicted below. I remember holding the letter in my hands in disbelief, a similar disbelief to the kind I felt when I watched his movies: utter amazement, combined with sheer joy. Reading the letter over and over, I felt I had finally made contact with someone who understood me, and who, in a sense, had freed me from the fear and worry that pervaded so much of my existence. We exchanged another letter or two over the course of the next few months, and after a time our correspondence faltered.

But it did not falter for long, as roughly a year later, my parents received word that a special “Harryhausen Night” was being held at Lincoln Center. Our eventual meeting occurred on a rainy evening in the autumn of 2004, after I had turned eight years old. My mother had discovered that for the release of his heavily illustrated book Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life (co-authored with Tony Dalton, Watson-Guptill, 2004), the man himself would be speaking and signing copies at Lincoln Center. And like a great New Yorker who knows what she wants and how to get it, she took me to meet him, and managed to get us to the front of the line.

There he was: a handsome, distinguished older gentleman with fraying white hair and a round, inviting face, who in some ways reminded me of my own grandfather, a civil engineer who had his own meticulous pursuits. I remember being nervous but Harryhausen being welcoming in a way that went beyond simple politeness; he seemed genuinely touched that we’d come out to see his classic films, and touched by the nervousness we both showed. And luckily Ray and I were not complete strangers! My mother and I were sure to remind Ray—he was now Ray in my mind—that we’d had a brief correspondence. To this, he said he remembered us and that he was happy to finally meet me in person. It didn’t matter if this was true or not—for all I know he could have received hundreds of fan letters a year from kids like me—but this was all I needed to feel like I had been seen and heard and accepted.

While we stood there, with a legion of people behind us, each waiting anxiously for their own moment with him, I repeated how much I loved Jason and the Argonauts, and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and him smiling and saying how he appreciated my interest. He was also extremely patient as my mother attempted to take a photo of us. After several failed tries—in the picture below you can see in my eyes the fear that this moment would be lost—she managed to snap a few good ones. Ray smiled at us and signed our book and the line continued moving.

There was a screening happening in tandem with the in-person event, and soon we found our seats in the Walter Reade Cinema at Lincoln Center, settling in for a night of his classic films. Previously I had only been to the theater to see The Lord of the Rings, so this was a special night for me—perhaps one of the most special nights of my young life, and something I consider to be a personal success, though it occurred when age was still in single digits. I was having an experience that most people had not had since the sixties and seventies when his films first hit theaters and later the small screen. In fact, I don’t believe I had had such a unique experience until then, unique because I not only got to see his films in a more enjoyable setting—a great improvement over my unwieldy TV set, over which I had thrown a literal tarp—but meeting my hero in person and being touched by his genuine warmth.

Later, during a break between movies, we met the actress Kathy Crosby (listed in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad as Kathryn Grant) who starred in that film alongside Kerwin Mathews; she was lovely and down to earth and I think this was the first time I realized that actors and artists and performers were heroes, not only because they achieved the astounding feats of slaying dragons, and fencing with skeletons, and battling evil sorcerers, but because they were, just like Ray, real people. Real people, with the ability to practice a kind of cinematic magic, a shamanistic talent at making the impossible possible. The fact that Harryhausen had not forfeit the interests of his own childhood lent me hope I could participate someday in a great creative enterprise, or even make a career out of it, just as he and his lifelong friend, the renowned sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury had, whose work I was also beginning to discover.

I did not meet Ray Harryhausen again that night; nor did I meet him ever again. He passed away in 2013, long after I had garnered new heroes and new experiences. I changed schools; took up acting; picked up the guitar. My interests waxed and waned. I was drawn more to writing. But even with all the changes I went through, both mental and physical, I never forgot the person who had first made me believe in the unbelievable, who had altered my perception of the movies and made them a place where art happened and not just entertainment. He’d taught me that art, whether it be the manipulation of molded figures, or the manipulation of words on a page, or some other equally valid creative endeavor, is worthwhile and can be meaningful. Sure, you can become discouraged by the elements of creativity; you can be stymied by the logistics of plot and character; you can be interrupted in your painstaking work by a ringing phone or a director calling “Cut!”; you can be disheartened and lose interest altogether in the projects you’d previously been bound to—all that being true, Harryhausen’s lesson is one we can all learn from and take to heart. And it was that magic matters. Stories matter; they make our lives richer. To an only child who had faced some difficulty early in his life, I can honestly say that Harryhausen saved me, not only by his technical prowess, and controlled mayhem, and the delight of sharp teeth and clashing swords, but by the kindness he showed, in replying to a seven-year-old’s hopeful letter. Sometimes the best magic is the kind exchanged from person to person. Or to put it another, clearer, more perfect way: sometimes kindness is the real magic.

M. G. Turner
February 2022

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