The Layla effect

I don’t think there’s a more powerful moment in all of rock music than the transition between the two halves of “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos. For three minutes, we’ve been living near the heart of a man’s romantic and sexual agony: the critic Dave Marsh calls it one of those rare songs in which “a singer or writer has reached so deeply into himself that the effect of hearing them is akin to witnessing a murder or a suicide.” Then there’s a trailing off, a pause, and we’re launched into Jim Gordon’s transcendent piano coda, which takes over the rest of the track and leads us triumphantly to the end. It’s unclear how the two halves are meant to relate, or whether the coda is the sound of love fulfilled or abandoned, but the juxtaposition of the two movements creates an effect that is far more profound than either of them taken separately. The result is a song that has obsessed me—and so many others—from the moment I first heard it, to the point where I’ve written much of my current novel with “Layla” playing in the background.

This sort of synergy, in which two seemingly unrelated components are set side by side to create a larger whole, is such a powerful artistic tool that it deserves special consideration. Some of the most memorable pop songs ever written, from “Hey Jude” to “Dry the Rain,” consist of two contrasting halves joined together in a way that only seems more mysterious with time. In many cases, the pieces weren’t originally meant to go together at all: the piano coda to “Layla” was composed as a separate piece, and was joined to the first half—which had already been written and recorded—when Clapton happened to hear Gordon playing it in the studio one day. These sorts of decisions may seem like serendipity, but they’re really an expression of craft on a deeper level: I suspect that Clapton intuitively sensed that the song was incomplete without some form of resolution, and that he seized on the coda as the missing piece he needed, precisely because it seemed like a dispatch from a different world entirely.

We see this effect in other forms of art as well. I mentioned recently that many of Shakespeare’s most resonant plots—from The Merchant of Venice to King Lear—arise from the combination or juxtaposition of two previously unrelated storylines. There’s no better example of this than The Winter’s Tale, the most beautiful and mysterious of the late romances, which moves from a tragedy of sexual jealousy in Sicily to the gentlest of pastoral comedies in Bohemia. (It’s a transition that may work better on the page than in performance: the production I saw several years ago at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, directed by Sam Mendes, did a fine job with the tormented first half, but turned the second half into an aimless hootenanny. As usual, comedy is harder to stage than tragedy, and this is never more clear than when one follows right after the other.) On a more calculated level, we find a similar transition halfway through Psycho: I’ve seen this movie countless times, and I still get a chill when I first glimpse the sign of the Bates Motel through the rain, which reminds me of which movie I’m really watching.

On one level, the impact of such juxtapositions is easy to explain: creativity, as Arthur Koestler points out in The Act of Creation, is about combinations, and when two contrasting pieces are set side by side, it’s no surprise that elements of the first half can bring out unsuspected qualities of the other. (You often see this in visual art, which has long been familiar with the power of the diptych.) But that doesn’t tell us why the pieces can vibrate so memorably in certain cases, while in others they just tend to lie there—or why two unrelated pieces are so much more effective than three, even as the rule of three works so powerfully in other contexts. A work of three parts, with its tidy tripod of effects, can come across as a piece of artistic calculation, or like the three stages of an argument, while two implies something deeper. There’s no better example than Chungking Express, with its two parallel stories of policemen in love: Wong Kar-Wai originally planned to tell three, but only had time for two, an accident for which we can all be profoundly grateful. Three stories would have come across as a narrative device, while two seem like life itself, and like the coda for “Layla,” it feels as if it could go on and on.

Quote of the Day

To design a good puzzle, first build a good toy.

—Scott Kim

Writing on the sidewalk

Yes, I write on piano and guitar, and I also sometimes write on the sidewalk…when I’m walking around on the street, without an instrument even. I think one of the major tactics of songwriting is dementia. And confusion. And unconsciousness. One of the best ways to get in touch with that is to walk around the streets of New York…

I think any songwriter, really, is basically a thermometer that’s taking the temperature of society. Great songs are essentially already written. You just have to discover them—and be open to them, [which] requires action in life. It requires participating in life.

—Rufus Wainwright

A few detached thoughts from William Shenstone

Long sentences in short compositions are like large rooms in a little house.

A poet, until he arrives at thirty, can see no other good than a poetical reputation. About that era, he begins to discover some other.

Critics must excuse me if I compare them to certain animals called asses, who, by gnawing vines, originally taught us the great advantage of pruning them.

Rhymes, in elegant poetry, should consist of syllables that are long in pronunciation, such as “are, ear, ire, ore, your,” in which a nice ear will find more agreeableness than in these: “gnat, net, knit, knot, nut.”

Prudes allow no quarter to such ladies as have fallen a sacrifice to the gentle passions; either because themselves, being borne away by the malignant ones, perhaps never felt the other so powerful as to occasion them any difficulty; or because no one has tempted them to transgress. It is the same case with some critics, with regard to the errors of ingenious writers.

People in high or distinguished life ought to have a greater circumspection in regard to their most trivial actions. For instance, I saw Mr. Pope—and what was he doing when you saw him?—why, to the best of my memory, he was picking his nose.

—William Shenstone, “Detached Thoughts on Writing and Books”

“Ethan went into the gallery…”

(Note: This post is the forty-eighth installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 47. You can read the earlier installments here. Massive spoilers follow—you’ve been warned.)

In many ways, this is the central chapter of The Icon Thief. It’s the scene that gets mentioned to me the most often when I’m asked about the book, and it clearly had the greatest impact on readers. It’s also one of the few sections that I go back and read when I’m trying to convince myself that I actually wrote a decent first novel. (Most days, I feel pretty good about the whole thing, but like all writers, I cycle through varying degrees of enthusiasm for my own work.) When I first started writing this author’s commentary, this was the chapter I looked forward to discussing the most. It certainly seems to have shocked a lot of people. And the strangest thing about this chapter, which now seems so crucial to the development both of The Icon Thief and of the novels that followed, is that it wasn’t part of the plot as originally conceived. If the surprise here works, it’s partially due to the fact that I didn’t know it was coming until very late in the game: as with the revelation of Karina’s true killer, I wrote most of the novel with one plan in mind, only to switch it at the last minute, which bakes an organic form of misdirection into the story itself.

As I’ve mentioned before, the Maddy and Ethan storyline was largely inspired by the real case of Teresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, the New York art world couple whose lives ended in paranoia and a baffling double suicide. In most respects, Ethan isn’t much like Jeremy Blake, but I’d always been haunted by the accounts of Blake’s final walk into the sea, and in the first draft, Ethan dies in much the same way. He and Maddy have both grown increasingly paranoid, largely as a result of their unwitting exposure to a neurological agent at the party several days before, and in the end, they turn on each other as well. After Ethan accuses Lermontov, Maddy’s mentor and former employer, of being part of the plot, she leaves his apartment in a rage. The next day, Ethan takes a train to Far Rockaway, leaves his wallet and keys on the beach, removes most of his clothes, and walks into the water. But we don’t see it happen. Maddy receives a call from the police telling her that her friend is dead—her number was the last one dialed on Ethan’s phone. And that’s how his story ends, even as hers is still several steps away from its ultimate resolution.

This version of the story persisted throughout more than a year of rewrites. It’s possible that I clung to it for longer than I should have, if only because I liked the idea of Ethan’s senseless death and its connection to the novel’s original inspiration. At some point, however, my agent made the case that it wasn’t a very satisfying way of writing out such an important character. My first solution was to dramatize his suicide, rather than leaving it offstage, and the result was a fairly strong chapter. (At least, I think it was fairly strong—I haven’t read it in years.) My agent still pushed back, though, saying that the fact of his suicide itself had inherent narrative problems. At this stage, remember, we’d been revising this novel for a long time without going out to publishers, and the last thing I wanted was to change the plot in a drastic way. After mulling it over, however, I began to see a possible way out, and I wrote my agent the following:

After his final argument with Maddy, Ethan, brooding over the situation, decides that he can only convince her of his theory by proving that Lermontov is involved. He walks around the city for hours, trying to build up his resolve, then leaves a note at Maddy’s house and goes to Lermontov’s gallery. Ethan doesn’t really expect to find Lermontov there, but he does. He introduces himself, lays out what he’s found, and demands that Lermontov tell him the truth about the Rosicrucians.

And Lermontov kills him.

Needless to say, that’s what eventually happens, and I think the result is the best scene in the book. In my note to my agent, I pointed out that this change solves a number of problems at once: it offers us a more compelling death scene for Ethan, gives Maddy a more urgent reason to believe that her life is in in danger, tightens the screws on Ilya—who will potentially be framed for the murder—and transforms Lermontov into a more imposing villain. (Interestingly, it’s only after reading over the note again today that I remember that I briefly considered having Reynard, Maddy’s boss, kill Ethan instead, which would have been even more out of the blue, but probably unworkable.) And it shifted the terms of the rest of the novel in ways I only gradually began to realize. At first, the chapter stood more or less on its own, with the remainder of the story proceeding along the same track as before. Eventually, though, I realized that I had to fully confront the implications of this scene. In the original version, the novel ends with the arrest of Lermontov and Vasylenko in London, with Ilya working with Powell to take them down. Reading it over again, however, I saw that this ending no longer worked. Lermontov had to be forced to pay a greater price. And Maddy was the only one who could do it…

Quote of the Day

Do unto others twenty percent better than you would have them do unto you, in order to allow for subjective error.

—Linus Pauling

My browsing life

I’m grateful for a lot of things in life, but if there’s one blessing I could stand to appreciate more, it’s that owning a home full of books is still a socially acceptable form of hoarding. If I were addicted to buying kitten statues or cartons of discount detergent, I’d look a little crazy, but keeping more books around the house than I could ever possibly need just makes me look cultured and smart—or so I’d like to believe. I’ve bought maybe five to ten books a month since I was old enough to spend my own money, and the number has often been much higher: back in New York, when I lived only a short train ride from the Strand and its amazing dollar bin, I probably bought twice that amount, and occasionally even more. And I’ve long since come to terms with the fact that I love buying books for their own sake, and not necessarily because I intend to read most of them cover to cover. (It’s an urge that can only be satisfied with physical books, the older and dustier the better: after more than a year and a half, I don’t think I’ve bought more than ten books for my Kindle.)

Looking around my office now, I’d say I own about a thousand books. This a rough estimate, based on the assumption that I have fifty shelves with twenty books each, which almost certainly undercounts the true number. It also doesn’t include my wife’s two hundred books or so, which live in a separate room: even after close to four years of marriage, we still haven’t integrated our libraries, and we probably never will, given my own obsessive tendencies. The number used to be much larger, too. Before my move to Chicago, I forced myself to reduce my library to what I could fit in six large boxes, meaning that I donated or gave away something like five hundred books. How those six boxes multiplied to fill fifty shelves in less than four years is a mystery I haven’t been able to solve, although the fact that I’ve bought a hundred books a year in the meantime might be a clue. And while my acquisitive tendencies have been slightly reduced by the birth of our daughter—I just don’t have as much time to go to bookstores—it isn’t hard to foresee a future in which the house has been totally taken over by books, a prospect that fills me with delight, although my wife seems a little less enthusiastic.

As for how many books I’ve read—well, that’s another question entirely. Even under the most generous assumptions, it’s unlikely that I’ve read more than a couple of thousand books in my adult life, and I obviously acquire books at a greater pace than I could ever hope to finish them. I’m reading all the time, but my browsing tendencies are evident here as well: at any given moment, I usually have one big literary novel I’m trying to finish, a paperback thriller, and four or five nonfiction books in various stages of completion. (These days, for instance, I’m halfway through Infinite Jest, The Fist of God, Inventors at Work, and the letters of Maxwell Perkins, and I’m still technically reading Walter Kerr’s The Silent Clowns and Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation.) Most of the books on my shelves have been read at least in part, and I take comfort in the fact that they’re always there to be browsed through again. I’ll often pull a random volume from the shelf and leaf through it for a few minutes to relax, and I try to make some quality time now and then for my eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The bottom line is that I’m clearly more of a browser than a reader, and I’m comfortable with this. You see it in every aspect of my life, from the small to the large: it’s possible that I became a novelist mostly as a way to rationalize my browsing. As a result, I’ve become very protective of it. Browsing is an art form, like loafing, that has been compromised by modern technology: it’s properly done in a comfortable chair, with a cup of coffee or something similar, with a book—or a stack of them—that has already passed through the hands of many other readers. Ideally, the book should be a little tattered or yellowed, which makes it seem happy for the attention, even if it’s never going to be read straight through. It requires a fine appreciation of opening a book to a middle and seeing where it takes you, or flirting a bit with a few tempting prospects before committing yourself to an after-dinner read. Above all, it demands a love of the arcane, the obscure, the obsolete, and the useless. And while it’s satisfying enough when done for only a minute or two, it expands to last a lifetime.