Storytellersunplugged

by George Guthridge

As I write this I am sitting in my apartment in St. Lucia. The oppressive September heat has abated. My apartment overlooks a tiny bay extending off the harbor and is framed by greenery. One of the trees at the harbor’s edge is a coven of egrets, which are white witches born to mesmerize. Each morning they sit amid the branches – it looks as if someone has thrown a dozen towels into the tree after a morning swim. I am up before six, as usual, getting my son off to school, then supping on Thai coffee as I work on my latest book, a combination dissertation and what I hope will be a book for teachers, entitled Using Enthymematic Structure to Teach Impromptu Fiction Writing. Sexy, no? Obviously, I am on a hiatus from writing fiction.

And, because Janet Berliner just made a very insightful suggestion regarding the book – Chuck the first chapter, George – I am thinking about the years I spent huddled in the basement of my apartment in Gambell, the Siberian-Yupik village on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, wearing my parka and fingerless gloves in the unheated room, storms raging so fiercely outside that snows would mist through the concrete and pile up on the table and on my computer, which was the size of most 24” televisions, writing a trilogy, the third book of which was set in the rainforest of Madagascar. The book would win us a Stoker.

So it is not without good reason that Janet and I have been called the hot and cold team.

There is more truth to that than her having grown up in Africa and, in the quarter century we have known each other, having lived in southern California, the Caribbean, and now Las Vegas; and my having lived in rural Alaska during that time. She is dynamic and mercurial, so capable of talking to strangers that she has made book deals with top celebrities; while I am (paraphrasing a preface she once wrote about me for one of my stories), shy, essentially Eskimo, internally cautious. Parties petrify me.

As writers we are also polar opposites (excuse the pun). My style is extremely visual, almost pyrotechnic, everything always teetering on the lip of the pan above the fires of overwriting (you see what I mean?). Janet writes a lovely narrative prose, calculated and controlled. If the three books and dozen short stories we have written together are indicative, she does almost no research before writing a first draft. I so bury myself in research that one of my proudest moments as a writer was that the good ship Altmark, with its contingent of 144 Jewish prisoners, was at exactly that spot on the day I said it was. Okay, there were no Jewish prisoners aboard, but there soon would be British prisoners – who were rescued in one of the most daring commando raids of WWII. That, though, is another story.

But there were problems. There always all in collaborations. But ours were not just the result of intellectual and artistic differences. The outside world haunted us throughout the process of writing the trilogy. Janet has suffered from myasthenia the whole time I have known her. At the same time, I came down with a rare form of mononucleosis, which took three years to diagnose. Janet sometimes could not work or else wanted to get the book done quickly because, understandably, she needed money for living expenses. Conversely, my illness involved a depression so severe that it left me mentally and, often, physically incapacitated. To make matters worse, our illnesses did not coincide. When she was healthy, I was not; and vice versa. We tried to pull each other through those bad times, but they grated on both of us.

Then there were the logistics. Oh, to have had the luxury of email! We both had computers, but in keeping with our personalities, they were not compatible. Everything had to be retyped, discussed over myriad phone calls or in seemingly endless letters. We tried to get together during my Christmas and summer breaks, but she often had business matters to attend to, and I was always trying to cram in family time, given that my wife and daughters had just endured winters where the windchills were often -150.

The greatest obstacle, though, was what I think of as a clash of culture. I grew up in a military family in Germany. Because my father’s dream was for me to attend West Point, I was reading war histories by the second grade. I have long been interested in Rommel, a patriotic German who opposed Hitler’s evil on several occasions, including having refused direct orders to execute Jews and Allied commandos.

The trilogy, The Madagascar Manifesto is the story of Hitler’s (actual) attempt to send European Jews to Madagascar. It involves three childhood friends – taciturn, contemplative Solomon, who is Jewish; vivacious Miriam, as cosmopolitan and as she is resilient, also Jewish; and headstrong Erich, a Gentile. I wanted to portray Erich as a sympathetic Nazi, someone caught up in the forces over which he had no control, but Janet would have none of it, reminding me that many of family had perished in the ovens. I conceded to her request.

However, since we had agreed that I would write the first draft, a terrible difficult resulted. The book in its first manifestation involved the eternal triangle; but if Erich wanted to rid himself of Solomon, his rival, he could have walked up to Solomon in broad daylight in the middle of Berlin and shot him in the head, no questions asked. Given that my illness left me balancing on the edge of sanity anyway, trying to devise plot twists that would keep Erich away from Solomon nearly plummeted me into real insanity. Janet hated several of the chapters, and rightly so. The writing was awful.

In fact, it was probably only the intensity of our arguments that kept us from trashing the project. Something kept telling us not to abandon the books.

Then one day – I don’t remember who – one of us said, “Well, he’s Gatsby. Erich is Gatsby,” a character we both love almost to the point of artistic worship. And suddenly we saw where we had gone wrong. Solomon is (I think Janet will agree) the most complex of the three characters; and Miriam is excellently drawn (I really think she is Janet in disguise). But to my mind Erich is the most tragic. Because the book is not about lust or love but about friendship. Erich does not realize until too late that friendship is what drives him above all else – above vanity, vengeance, and ambition.

We recast the book. We started by summarizing it in one sentence, looking for its ticking core. I think we finally decided on, “What is the relationship between friendship and love?” In marriage, real friendship usually grows out of love. For our three protagonists, it was the other way around. After we realized what the book was about, we were able to pare away huge chunks of extraneous material.

With that trilogy, we learned two lessons – the hard way – involving collaboration. First, decide beforehand exactly what the book is about. Decision-making in a collaboration is not at all like the artistic decision-making we do as individual writers. There needs to be a focal point to which the writers can return, one that acts almost as a referee.

Second, delegate a decision-maker. Collaboration looks like a democracy, but it isn’t. Someone has to have the final say-so if both writers disagree. We did it this way: Janet had finally decision rights to Miriam, and I did to Erich. We decided to work out characterization together involving Solomon. I had no problem with having her make final decisions involving him – after all, I am not Jewish – but I did so much research into some of the more esoteric elements of Jewish intellectual history that Janet often deferred to my ideas. You might say that I came to understand his head, and Janet helped me see into his heart.

The final reward was more than the award we received. It was a project that, we both have agreed, neither of us could have written separately. The prose is so entwined that to figure out who wrote what would mean taking the book apart sentence by sentence.

Too, we began to take on each other’s strengths. The project made us much better writers than we probably ever would have been otherwise.

But above all, it made us friends. Despite rumors to the contrary, we have never been lovers. Just friends, like the protagonists we wrote together. Fast friends. With the exception of my mother and my wife, I feel closer to Janet than to any other person on the planet.

–G.G.