Journal of the Fictive Life by Howard Nemerov

First published: 1965

Type of work: Autobiography/diary

Time of work: The early 1960’s

Locale: Bennington, Vermont

Principal Personages:

• Felix Ledger, a fictional novelist struggling with writer’s block
• Howard Nemerov, a poet

Form and Content

Howard Nemerov’s scrutiny of the relationship between everyday living and the creative process is presented in two books and a coda. Book 1 purports to be the journal of Felix Ledger, a novelist struggling with writer’s block; it is organized in cryptic paragraphs titled “reflexions” and alphabetized A through J. This format is abandoned after some fifty pages for book 2, 130 pages of journal entries in which Nemerov drops the mask of Felix Ledger and openly probes his own psyche. After his father’s death, Nemerov copes with his wife’s pregnancy and seeks to make sense out of dreams, travel, family memories, friendships, and creativity and literary form. “The Pond,” a meditative poem of more than one hundred lines, concludes the volume.

In book 1, Felix Ledger addresses the various fears that can keep a novelist from writing. Ledger discusses the fear of what others may think, the fear of offending colleagues, family, and friends in the portrayal of character. He also discusses the deeper fear of what one thinks oneself, the anxiety of not satisfying one’s own sense of what art is. Once the aspiring novelist has overcome his anxieties of beginning and his aversion to the protracted labor a novel entails (complicated in Ledger’s case by a predilection for writing poems), he still must struggle daily with the ghosts of memory and strive to construct a viable narrative. Ledger conceives of a plot about a young lady who is rescued from drowning by a stranger. She lies to him that she was attempting suicide in order to make herself more appealing to him, lures him into marriage, but then discovers that she cannot endure being married to him.

Ledger is concerned about how he can proceed with his novel without offending others, how he can deal with the implicated pasts of himself and the characters and manage the unresolved present, and how he can bestow sufficient life to the characters he has set in motion. He intends his novel to take up something he believes that most novels avoid: “the problem of memory.” Aristotle held that character is revealed only in action. According to Felix Ledger, “The novelist as a rule deals with more quotidian people than Aristotle’s dramatists did. . . . Therefore the novelist must to some extent deal with dreams, but to what extent does he deal with dreams as though they were realities?” The problem for the novelist becomes compounded “when the mind, unable to bear the richness of consequences entailed upon one idea, forthwith produces another instead.” The assimilation of memory is an important part of the novelist’s work.

In book 2, Nemerov abandons the fictional Felix Ledger and begins to record his own reflections. He seeks to understand the significance of his dreams of operas and journeys and to work out his true feelings toward his roles as son, father, husband, and writer. He continues to examine the Game of the Novel fitfully, though thoughts of the novel become increasingly subordinate to the discovery and clarification of his own past. He at last realizes that he has learned as much as he can, probed as deep as he is presently able, despite an apprehension that “there is no self, there is only an echoing emptiness within.” Against despair comes acceptance: “A voice speaks as though in answer, saying only: Life is the Lost and Found.” Later, within that same entry (written in the summer of 1963), Nemerov writes that “our son” is born.

Nemerov is able, after a season of fits and starts and conflicting impulses, to see the statue move, to find the drowned child, and to hear unearthly music. Life has moved to its own rhythms and granted him the metaphor of reconciliation he had been seeking. He can compose the poem “The Pond,” about a child lost through drowning, as “a memorial” to “boy and dragonfly together,” to the realm of man and nature, life and death, memory and misgivings reconciled. Nemerov is able to close the inquiry into the sources of literary creativity, the mind-transposing act of “taste, skill, vigor, and intelligence” that makes personal experience bearable, and memorable, the fictive reconstruction that redeems losses. He discovers that the filtered prose of everyday can bring forth poetry; experience can become art, words compose a music of their own, and life continues to contain the living.

Critical Context

Journal of the Fictive Life takes its place among those mid-twentieth century works that are concerned with the self-reflexive nature of literature. Felix Ledger observes, “a fascinating theme . . . debating the extent to which speculation has in the past couple of decades visibly begun to replace art, how much the making challenges artistic interest more than what is made; how art as adventure seems for the present almost to have overthrown the work of art.” Early in book 2, as Nemerov discusses his own dreams in his own voice, he addresses the relationship between state of mind and possible literary achievement:

Now this dream occurs in and refers to a period of my life in several respects critical. I am about to be a father once again, fully thirteen years after the first time. Toward the end of my wife’s pregnancy I have been unusually listless about sex, and though her appearance supplies an innocent reason for my want of interest in her I have characteristically had the glum thought that I might be getting a bit past it. And I have been for some time in a (corresponding?) period of artistic impotence, or paralysis, partly involving the choice between poetry and fiction (the two ways again!), a condition which I have been trying to examine in these pages, which may represent in themselves a “third way” of writing, as well as being an attempt to find some third way, probably combining the linguistic powers of poetry with the architectural qualities of the novel.

The “third way” remains conjectural; Nemerov’s power to illuminate with elegance and grace is a given.

Journal of the Fictive Life is a book that begins with the attempt to achieve a novel, an affective fiction at length. The effort results in an account and shift of voice that strives to be true to feeling and, in so doing, manages to achieve a fictive, or imagined, work that commands much attention. From the start, the reader is reminded of the journals of Andre Gide and his Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925; The Counterfeiters, 1927), a novel of a novelist writing a novel about a novelist writing a novel. Nemerov may also have been influenced by Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910; The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1930, 1958) and the work of Wallace Stevens, for whom “fictive” was a favorite word. Later American writers who may have found Journal of the Fictive Life useful in developing their own voices include John Barth, William Gass, and Robert Bly, for there are aspects in the work that both autonomists and activists can draw upon, especially the element of abandoning a form that is not fulfilling itself and openly asserting the reflexive nature of the literary endeavor, coming forth with a form frankly artificial and not striving to be representational but faithful to the emotion intended.

Such a shift of form and frank avowal of artifice may result in greater creative force, more resonance and radiance within the work itself. The important thing is bringing forth the form that sustains the illumination sought, no matter if others may charge inconsistency or accuse of formal violation. Nemerov sought to find the form and fix the feeling that would bring forth the cycle of life-death-birth and demonstrate the interdependencies of memory and family, dreams and fantasy, and selection and self-scrutiny. He initially wrote a fictional journal but abandoned that form when it was not producing a character or life of its own. Adopting his own dream-journal form, Nemerov succeeded in achieving a more suitable imaginative entity; he was true to his observed self and created an aesthetic experience of integrity and individuality. As the critic Ross Labrie remarks, “Whatever the future of Nemerov’s unusual narrative method, he has written a book of considerable power whose images and anxieties cling to the mind.”

Bibliography

Bartholomay, Julia A. The Shield of Perseus: The Vision and Imagination of Howard Nemerov, 1972.

Duncan, Bowie, ed. The Critical Reception of Howard Nemerov: A Selection of Essays and a Bibliography, 1971.

Labrie, Ross. Howard Nemerov, 1980.

Meinke, Peter. Howard Nemerov, 1968.

Mills, William. The Stillness in Moving Things: The World of Howard Nemerov, 1975.