Bloomsbury, London
Oct. 10, 2023
Use third person pronouns instead of character names to increase the reader’s sense of intimacy with the characters, the writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz said in their class in 2016, back when they were team-teaching together at Bennington’s low-res MFA program. They were in a beautiful contemporary classroom with dark wood and carpeting, like it was a board meeting in a science fiction television show. A dark January, as cold as Vermont gets. He watched as this starkly elegant advice from his legendary co-teacher brought the room briefly to silence, and then ever since then, he has tested it in his mind as he reads or writes.
Advice like this often feels like a dare and it did that day. Dare to try it. Dare to prove it or prove it wrong. And he has observed in himself this sense of the difference as he read fiction in the third person. The use of and repetition of the name like some kind of interruption in the reader’s sense of the character and the reader—say, him for example—like a child at times, holding the character like a doll in the dark bedroom of their mind. Mine, all mine. Only I really know you! Sometimes feeling you know the character better even than the writer.
Her advice connected in his mind to an observation from the cartoonist Scott McCloud that had likewise captured his imagination. McCloud felt that the more developed a figure was on the page visually, the more distant the reader felt. Readers paradoxically attach more to a figure with just a few details, like the way McCloud appears throughout his own book: a pair of glasses, a haircut, a plaid shirt over a t-shirt with a lightning bolt. In comics, characters can be rendered as visual puns, occupying a narrative role and a symbolic role simultaneously. Back in 2006, when he first realized that, he wondered if he could do the same with prose.
The tiny imaginary hat of the American novelist, then, invisible yet visible, hiding on the back of his head but sometimes right on his forehead. The big orange Hoka sneakers with blue soles. Not much hair to speak of, almost a five o’clock shadow but across his head, the beard slightly darker. The large forehead, or really a fivehead as the expression goes, all five fingers on his hand fitting between his eyebrows and the start of his widow’s peak, which a friend once named his “Iberian peninsula.” Sometimes he “looks Korean” and sometimes not, it seems, like he is a racial mood ring but to the person looking at him, not himself.
Is this too much detail? Maybe so. Almost.
*
Morning, a Sunday in Bloomsbury. He can hear a few cars going by outside, the sound like a wave building and coming toward the shore. He got up twice in the night to use the bathroom and each time heard the same people somewhere down below having a chat on the sidewalk. They are gone now. He has been making coffee, up first as is his habit, and he enters the bedroom as quietly as he can, on a mission to retrieve the computer power cord he left plugged into the wall in the desk by the window just past the bed. His husband, Dustin, is asleep still. As he loosens it, the prongs make a tiny noise. Dustin opens an eye to look at him and then closes it.
“I was on a party boat with Paris Hilton,” he says. “You were there. Veronica Klaus also.”
He isn’t often in Dustin’s dreams, so this pleases him even as he is also sorry to think this is what he’s just interrupted. “Were we having fun?” he asks.
“Yes,” Dustin says, his eye opening again. “What time is it?”
“9:17,” he replies and Dustin’s eye closes again immediately. He gently tiptoes out the door, power cord in hand.
Dustin’s dreams are often like this. His own are not. He does not remember his dreams much and when he does, over the last decade or so, they are often dull. The boring dreams began in college several decades back and eventually grew in number. In the first boring dream he remembers he was just walking down a sidewalk and it kept going, on and on, a sidewalk in Middletown, CT, and so he engaged in something like lucid dreaming and said Come the fuck on and woke himself up.
He has wondered over the years if this is his unconscious mind’s way of calming him down. Dreams of checking email and then after Twitter was invented, dreams of checking Twitter followed. One dream was just him reaching for a Kleenex. He told Dustin about that one, and he said, “Another victory for your unconscious.”
Dustin regularly delivers one-line zingers as he emerges from the depths of sleep, like a gunslinger who naps with his pistol.
Sometimes his dreams are more forceful. A dream of setting fires with his mind. “That wasn’t a dream,” Dustin said, when he told him. A dream of sitting on a mountain with Dustin watching whales flying in the sky. His own dream of Paris Hilton from over a decade ago: They were dancing on a table together at a club called Spy downtown in New York City, gossiping about the people around them but he does not recall who they were.
His unconscious mind was doing a series then, four dreams about blonde celebrities. Two dreams about Britney, and one of Madonna, Martha Stewart and Paris Hilton each. In the first Britney dream, they were at a dinner party and Britney asked him to go with her to the bathroom, where she sat down on the toilet and told him about her new boyfriend. In the second he drove her around Manhattan at night in a Volkswagen Bug, with her on a swing mounted to the roof of the car. She swung back and forth as he drove up Lexington Avenue. With Madonna, they were in a Jordan Marsh department store in Maine and she for some reason needed clothes there, and he was offering advice on her choices as she changed repeatedly. In the Martha Stewart dream he held her hand as she walked him through her Maine summer home, introducing him to people. He recalls being embarrassed by the hand holding and thinking, “Well, this is just how she is.”
One of Dustin’s favorite memories of him, sometimes repeated at parties to tease him, is of him saying in his sleep to him Don’t… press… the Retweet button. There’s a good chance he told this story to Paris Hilton and Veronica Klaus on that party boat.
When Dustin wakes up later, he asks if he can use the dream in the newsletter. A fact check follows: a party bus, not a party boat.
*
“Do you go by Alexander or Alex,” the head of the Queen Mary office asks, and then laughs, adding that she’ll probably give him a nickname all the same. “Alexander,” he says, hoping all the same for a new nickname.
He has taken himself over to the Queen Mary University of London campus at Mile End to meet with his colleagues there and familiarize himself with the campus, get his ID, find his office. It is Tuesday now. The commute is approximately a half hour from Bloomsbury whether he goes by train or taxi. The woman giving him the tour—he isn’t sure of her title but wants to call her the office queen?—has a gravelly voice he finds charming as she shows him the coffee room and mailboxes, and how to open the door to the hall—it needs a button. He cannot stop looking at her bright rainbow colored lanyard for her ID.
His office, he finds, is clean, carefully arranged. “A professor on leave,” the office queen says as she leaves him to it. He follows an intricate series of postcards and posters around the the walls, many of them of illustrations by Blake, and takes a kind of selfie in the last one, over the computer on the desk: Ode On The Death Of A Favorite Cat. Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes.
The absent owner loaning it to him is a professor of Romantic poetry. The large office has windows and a table with a few chairs, and in the back, a desk along the far left corner. There is clean new wall to wall grey carpeting and a high ceiling. He is quietly exhilarated but afraid of touching the books, so he sits down and opens his laptop, working happily until around 6:30PM. He puts together his things and opens the door to leave, where he surprises a woman in a gold sequined hat who is vacuuming. She looks at him suspiciously as he quickly understands no one else is around. Everyone has left for the day except him.
He apologizes, goes downstairs and finds the doors locked. A sign he somehow missed earlier tells him the building is locked up by 6PM. He returns upstairs to find the cleaner and asks her if she can let him out. He apologizes for staying late. “I’m American,” he says, as if that explains it, and she just pulls her keys out. He notices her eyeglasses are psychedelic, pale blue swirls moving in opposing directions, and decides she must be the Cosmic Cleaner.
She unlocks the front door and he thanks her and leaves. His own little hat in the wind again.
This is the second letter in this series of third person letters. The first is here. Project introduction is here. Thanks for reading and supporting the Querent.
This is so interesting about the pronouns. I have done this without realizing why in a big project.
Wonderful! I am quite taken with this third-person voice for a personal essay. And now that you’ve brought in Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s advice on the intimacy of pronouns, I’m thinking about intimacy as what’s calling me in. Thanks.