Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's LifeBy Michael Greenberg Bloomsbury, 216pp. £16.99
THE Times Literary Supplementeditor who commissioned Michael Greenberg to write the "Freelance" column should get some credit for Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life. It is an arrangement of 45 of those columns. The essays were to be 1,100-1,200 words, on any subject, but each was required to spill one "drop of blood". The author of Hurry Down Sunshine was a good choice for the job in terms of charm, humour, and the aesthetics of self-harming.
Michael Greenberg has learned from two literary masters of the New York scene. Like the New Yorker’s Joseph Mitchell (Joe Gould’s Secret), he is a reporter fascinated by deadbeats, eccentric geniuses, and the historical geography of the metropolis. Like Philip Lopate (Against Joie de Vivre), he is a philosopher of the everyday and a writer who deploys himself as an anti-heroic character, someone who is hapless, not wise, and always seeking to know what’s secret.
In these autobiographical meditations, Michael Greenberg is not exactly the same as “the writer”, any more than Tim Dowling is the beleaguered stay-at-home dad of his Guardian column, or Larry David the maddening “Larry David” of Curb Your Enthusiasm. They are all aesthetes of the real; the perfection of form is essential to them.
The essays in Beg, Borrow, Stealare handled like Shakespearean sonnets: a theme, a counter-theme, a dialogue between the themes, and a close. In Chapter 34, 'The importance of pronouns', the writer's wife, Pat, brings a friend home from work, Georgina, but she is obviously not a woman. That's the first theme. In the second, Pat and Georgina begin to chat away happily about a time in Pat's life when she was a street performer, a creative aspect of her life that marriage somehow ended. The writer then comes into the living room with his notepad and begins quizzing Georgina about her sex change; he's turning him/her into material. "You're embarrassing me, Michael," Pat says; but he doesn't stop: "I just want to get his language right." That his is annoying.
There’s nothing here like a sonnet’s couplet at the end; closure is artfully scuffled. Asked why he butted in, the writer claims to have felt threatened by the opening of an old rift in the marriage. “I can assure you, Michael,” Pat laughs, “that was all in your mind”. If that isn’t irony, it is a blankness just as deep.
The reader gets not only a profile of Georgina, who is “a polyamorist, a vegetarian, a transgender activist, and a student of Lacan” (only in New York), but the scene of a writer at work, and then a drama of the tension within a marriage. The frames open quickly, wider and wider. It’s exciting.
What a strange sort of person the writer is, and feels himself to be. He’s a soul thief. A parasite. A user.
The writer’s brothers are closing down the family scrap-metal business after the death of their father. They become uneasy when the writer shows up, because he is there “for no apparent reason other than to scrutinise their lives”. The writer is professionally, excruciatingly conscious. He does not keep secrets; he sells them, often for almost nothing.
His daughter has a psychotic breakdown at 15; 12 years later, he writes a book about it (Hurry Down Sunshine). She is then living in a “therapeutic work community”. When, weeks before publication, he sends the manuscript to her for approval, she lets him off (don’t worry, that was years ago, dad; I thought your book was beautifully written). She loves him and understands that he can’t help himself.
Philip Roth is quoted on the “voracious, voyeuristic using up of other people’s lives” by authors. “It’s a false me acting like me,” the writer’s brother complains; “I wish you’d stop.” But he can’t; he’s a writer.
It is very strange to wish more than anything to have one’s work enjoyed when one is dead. Non-writers don’t take on jobs, and say, you can pay me later, when I’m dead. People don’t fall in love, and hope that their love is reciprocated when the funeral’s over.
Beg, borrow or steal – the boundary-lands into which writers are driven by the marketplace is amazing. There was a delightful picture in The Irish Times of Kevin Barry smiling a few weeks back, accompanying an item about how he had a story in the New Yorker.
Kevin Barry says that years ago he gave up journalism and moved into a trailer in the back garden of a house that was not his own, and began writing stories, over and over. And now success! But for a story in the New Yorker one is paid less than for putting new slates on a bungalow. As Greenberg remarks, literary work makes a mockery of the normal relationships between intelligence, labour, and money.
Mike McCormack, who was spoken of recently by John Waters as having written the greatest Irish novel of the decade just ended, spent seven years on Notes from a Coma. Someone told me that once she rang the place he was living, and asked the address; she had a cheque to send him. He had to put down the phone and go out front to check. He was that deep in the dream and the discipline.
A writer’s life may not be a steady earner, but when you are as good as these three writers , it may still pay off. Your life may last forever in your books, and in the pleasure of readers.
Adrian Frazier is the director of the MA in Drama and Theatre Studies and the MA in Writing at National University of Ireland Galway
