The Statue in the Slab

By Edith Pearlman

I am not one of those lucky writers into whose ears a thrilling tale is confided on a train, in front of whose eyes is an anguished romance is enacted at a seaside hotel. My fictions begin as fragments, more irritating than inspiring. For instance: I find myself thinking of elderly Manhattan widows in apartments, resentfully growing frail. Or: In a dream a lost child and her mysteriously damaged younger sister, reunited, exchange a few surreal words. Also: I notice a patient waiting outside an X-ray office, shivering in his johnny. He is ignored by the surly attendant, who resembles a South American general.

No story yet – only pebbles in my shoe.

Standing at a distance from my desk, I glower. Then the ghost of Michelangelo taps me on the shoulder. Michelangelo claimed that he didn't create his statues but rather, released them. Find a slab of marble, he told younger artists; then take away everything that isn't the statue.

I need slab of marble. And I can't order it from Carrara. I have to build it, myself, around one of those damned pebbles.

This slab, which will later be ruthlessly hacked at, must be first made pretty big. It must contain a believable city or village – I've set my tales all over the world. It must contain buildings with doors, roofs, back stairs - my stories have played themselves out in a tobacco shop, a soup kitchen, a museum a pharmacy; in houses and lonely flats. The slab must hold history, and perhaps vision of the future. Inside the slab lurk characters and their children and their handkerchiefs and their Uzis.

 

So I read. I read about the streets my characters walk in and the wars they endure; about the work they do, about the diseases hiding in their bodies; about the pills they crave and the drink they can't leave alone.

And I play. For the sake of one story, I lost innumerable games of chess. For the sake of another, I spent a week using my left hand only.

And I write. Sentences, paragraphs, ages; reminders on three-by-five cards; a string of adjectives on the back of a charge receipt. I arrange and rearrange my characters' biographies, and also their rooms. I imagine their fantasies and I dream their dreams. I turn them toward each other and then transcribe their stunned declarations of love, their helpless lies. I design their wardrobe, and I equip them with hobbies (more reading!) And enemies and possessions. This material will continue to pile up. Not a comma will be discarded until the story is finished, revised, ripped into pieces, begun again, finished again, revised again, submitted again and again, finally published. My manual typewriter does not know how to delete. My wastebasket holds pussy willows, not crumpled paper. My folders stretch and eventually split open; still, the dossier expands. Nothing leaves this room! That diamond pin which in an early draft seems too flashy for the heroine may, the final draft, illuminate the entire store. That excessive metaphor, mercilessly pared, may become not only apt but irreplaceable.

What a mound of pages! At last it resembles a slab of marble. I walk around it, riffle silently through it – and, when I'm lucky, my tale's contour and its hinted truth reveal themselves in the depths of the slab. An elderly widow, visited wearily by her children one by one, will decide to leave her home: Independence can be cruelty. The lost child, before she finds her way back to her family will foresee that her future is inseparable from her afflicted sister's: In chance begins responsibility. The X–ray technician, rattling on to a stranger about his bedeviled country, will learn from his own words and his own omissions the nature of loyalty: flexible as a snake.

The story cannot be as dense as the slab of details I've constructed. No reader wants to know the name of the coffee shop the widow visits daily; or the etiology of the condition of the younger sister; or the succession of rulers in the country the X-ray technician has fled. These chunks of information would only encumber a short story.

But I know the chunks of information. I designed the coffee shop and installed its tolerant proprietor; my widow loves what she must leave. I read a shelf of books about the younger sister's affliction; her sweet face is properly vacant, her gestures properly vague. I invented the corrupt regimes that the X-ray technician refers to only by their soubriquets – The Coffee Revolution, The Month of the Colonels.

Now I chip away at whatever is not necessary, and polish and repolish what's left – leaving, I hope, characters who are affecting and a situation that is tense and a resolution that it satisfying.

What a mess, this way of writing. It is length and indirect; it ignores the notion that art is a free expression of self; it slams the door on autobiography; it leaves shards all over the floor.

On the other hand, efficiency is a third-rate virtue. Self-expression is often self-indulgence, best kept in firm check. Autobiography knows all too well how to creep through the keyhole. And those shards – sometimes they lodge like pebbles in my shoe, and become the centers of new slabs to be doggedly built up and then doggedly reduced, until all that is left is the story.