Authors, my imaginary friends

My intention in writing this blog came from cherishing conversations about books। Also, there are a lot of times I wanted to talk with the author of the book. Authors being fairly inaccessible, the only easy place to find them was in my imagination. I construct personas for authors and talk to them all the time. Uh, don’t tell my psychiatrist, okay?

Sometimes reality comes crashing in and does a Katrina on my private fictions। For example, there’s Michael Dorris. I love his books, particularly his memoir of adopting and parenting his son Abel/Adam, who had fetal alcohol syndrome. His quest to bake the Ultimate Birthday Cake for Abel’s preschool had me laughing until tears came. He had tenacity in caring for a special needs child, plus associated bureaucracies, at a time when people didn’t “get” fetal alcohol syndrome.

I wanted to meet this guy who took on the role of a single father with such toughness and tenderness. I loved that memoir and his other writing.Then real life and media broke the fantasy. Dorris suicided. I felt awful hearing this, but not stunned, because there were undertones of pain woven through his writing. Then the media had a field day with the fact that his wife, the writer Louise Erdrich, had filed for divorce, alleging that Dorris had abused their children. True? I dunno, I’ve seen a few divorce cases where one spouse alleged the other abused the kids when it wasn’t true. Sometimes the allegations are true. I have no way to know.

Shit। Suddenly, I knew I had no idea who this guy I’d been talking with in my head was. I had no idea who he was in real life. All of the sudden, Michael Dorris became the cipher that he had been all along. He became so unknowable to me that the Michael Dorris in my head died from severe cognitive dissonance.

Lately I’ve been trying to construct another conversation partner from some books, J.R.R. Tolkien. Notice that he is safely dead. I anticipate no major crash with reality. And a new book of his has been published,The Children of Hurin, a beautiful and tragic saga in the setting of the romantic Elder Days.

Beginning to read The Children of Hurin, I’m struck by the way Tolkien’s language echoes of the majesty and grandeur of the language of the King James Bible. Everything sounds so momentous, and sometimes glorious, even in tragedy. It is a saga told beautifully.

I want to talk with Tolkien about how he could go through the mud, blood, and the monotonous horror of mechanized death that was World War I and then write of war with such beautiful language. I don’t see anything noble in WWI except for individual acts of selflessness, love and comradeship. I want to ask, “If you could not stay away from writing about war, why write about wars with noble causes?” Did it make you feel better to write about an ancient war of epic quality? An ancient war that had good versus evil, and thus had meaning? Did you find meaning in your ugly war by writing about noble wars? Did writing this help you find meaning in your war? Or did you think WWI was a mass European homicidal frenzy in rat infested trenches?

I want to say, “Mr. Tolkien, talk to me, how can you who lived through all this horror, tell such incredible sagas in which your characters’ lives and deaths have so much meaning? Maybe I answered my own question. Maybe J.R.R. Tolkien would say that that is one reason he wrote, to create a world where wars and battles had meanings as part of the battle of good and evil. I wonder. I want Tolkien to sit and tell me his response to the line, “Death be not proud.” My imaginary Tolkien does not answer when I ask him this. I turn back to his books to dig for an answer.Anyone see some good places to search?