Morning after another last week I woke up wanting to get to the computer to start writing. It’s all because of Jewish-American writer, André Aciman, whose first feature book, Out of Egypt, put me under his spell.
Aciman had given a talk on his latest book, Eight White Nights, at Washington, DC Jewish Community Center on March 14, 2010 and I listened to the recording several days in a row while working the treadmill at my gym. Hearing him talk about his writing had me hot and bothered and ready to go: do my own writing!
I found Eight White Nights (published Feb. 2, 2010) at Half Price. I read four pages then dipped here and there throughout the book. I knew I wouldn’t read it through so I returned it. What happened?
I love reading memoirs when they are written to evoke that certain quality we have as children and that consummate writers alone can recreate. Out of Egypt was such a book. More than any other book I’ve read before or after, the book is the very incarnation of a book on nostalgia, that quality of remembrance so sweet to many of us maybe because nostalgia is our first experience of love. The sum of vivid memories from our childhood—the fragrance of flowers, the trees and foliage outside the door, the aroma of cooking food and the feast days of our childhood, the look and texture of images like cloth woven from our richest store—on this we model love long before we’re old enough to know what love is.
Love here is not love that is the biological basis for relationships that grownups mean when they conjure up the word. Love here is something more fundamental, something closer to the soul perhaps, the basis for everything we are that as adults we forget in an avalanche of grownup understanding. To evoke nostalgia is to go back to that first love we had when love was like food or breath of air or thoughts incandescent.
Reading Out of Egypt I not only entered Aciman’s childhood world of Alexandria; I entered into my own childhood in La Paz on the banks of the Iloilo River in the Philippines. Reading Aciman’s description of his family and what they all did in those days I met my own nostalgia for those things in the past that are forever lost to us and that we seek not in life again but in art or literature or the highfaluting philosophies or religions of our adult years.
In fact, after Out of Egypt, André Aciman’s next book was Call Me by Your Name, a book about first love. For me, this second book fulfilled the promise of the first. It was not as richly larded with details of memory but “trailing clouds of glory” still, not yet cut off from the naïve love of our childhood when as Wordsworth wrote we were closer to our beginnings, to God “that is not now as it hath been.”
Did he perhaps exhaust his store of nostalgia, that primordial energy seeking its source in divinity, writing Out of Egypt, then Call Me by Your Name? One would hope not. Novelists often find the seeds for their first book or two in these pregnant memories and those that become writers must find other sources within themselves. Eight White Nights is not the book that establishes Aciman as a fiction writer.
What were missing were the trailing clouds of glory. And admittedly, for me, the setting. As much as I love New York City, my first home town after coming to America, the Big Apple does not evoke the powerful attraction close to the soul that places around the Mediterranean hold for me. We can’t go home again but in a world that turns like a ball we can go to another part of it that is like that source home we came from yet different enough that we can be “a child” again with what we have learned along the way to becoming an adult.
The settings that appeal to me have bougainvilleas and oleanders, palm trees and mountains that lie not far from beaches kissed by briny breezes or stalk the shores with towering cliffs and over everything sun and sunshine. Out of Egypt was set in Alexandria, a little bit of Greece on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, Call Me in Italy across the Roman Sea.
We are the products of our past, the adults that grow from the children that we were. Writing on nostalgia can be indulgence in feelings unless writers can couple them with artifice, the craft of altering intent to suit the needs of the moment. Through these naïve emotions a man reaches back into his childhood for that forbidden fruit he was once privy to—when the world was Paradise and he was Creator of the little known world, the secret world of procreative energy.
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