My greatest problem — the dramatic conclusion

Finding a true bearing

Preamble

These are the first lines of the preface to a novel, about which I’ll have more to say below.

The small white steamer, Peter Stuyvesant, that delivered the immigrants from the stench and throb of the steerage to the stench and throb of New York tenements, rolled slightly on the water beside the stone quay in the lee of the weathered barracks and new brick buildings of Ellis Island. Her skipper was waiting for the last of the officials, laborers and guards to embark upon her before he cast off and started for Manhattan. Since this was Saturday afternoon and the last trip she would make for the week-end, those left behind might have to stay over till Monday. Her whistle bellowed its hoarse warning. A few figures in overalls sauntered from the high doors of the immigration quarters and down the grey pavement that led to the dock.

It was May, 1907. . .

Précis

This post is the conclusion to an essay which began with My greatest problem, part one, and continued in part two. Topics discussed so far include causation (causality); baffle camouflage (which is not actually camouflage¹); an abandoned attempt at a screenplay — inspired by Sunset Boulevard, set in the waning days of the Trump presidency; brains and minds; the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s essay ‘Where am I?’ and its connection to the ‘Tuvix’ episode of Star Trek: Voyager; and Kenneth Koch’s poem ‘Taking a Walk with You’ in the context of 20th century American poetry — in particular Koch’s line

It is Causation that is my greatest problem
And after that the really attentive study of millions of details 

which appears near the end of the poem of about a hundred lines that begins with the words

My misunderstandings:

In this post we will finally get to the part about ‘the really attentive study of millions of details,’ although only somewhat cursorily.

Henry Roth, my (literary) hero

Here’s a summary introduction, which I have condensed & slightly edited from his wikipedia page:

Henry Roth (February 8, 1906 – October 13, 1995) was an American novelist and short story writer who found success later in life after his 1934 novel Call It Sleep was reissued in paperback in 1964.

Roth failed to garner the acclaim some say he deserves, perhaps because after the publication of Call It Sleep he failed to produce another novel for 60 years. 

His Mercy of a Rude Stream is a monumental epic published in four volumes. It follows protagonist Ira Stigman from his family's arrival in Jewish-Irish Harlem in 1914 to the night before Thanksgiving in 1927, when Ira decides to leave the family tenement and move in with Edith Welles. According to critic David Mehegan, Roth's Mercy represents a "landmark of the American literary century".

The first volume, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park was published in 1994 by St. Martin's Press.

Subtracting 1906 from 1994 we deduce that Henry Roth published his second novel when he was 88 years old. And not just any novel. A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park was a literary sensation — as were the three other Mercy novels.

As I write these words on June 24, 2024, I am 71 years old. When Roth was my age he was living in a trailer park in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Presumably he was working on those novels that would take him another 18 years to finish.

That dazzling painting

As you recall, oh my best beloved, I kicked off part one of this essay with a discussion of this painting:

At that time I did not give proper attribution. The name of the painting is “The Outside Viewing-tank : Directorate of Camouflage, Naval Section.” It was painted by James Yunge-Bateman, and it is part of the collection of the UK’s Imperial War Museums. The “alt” text, above, is taken from the Museum’s website.

Those millions of details, really attentively studied

Long time readers of Sundman figures it out! are well aware that I have the brain of a squirrel in my head where a human brain might be more helpful. Little squirrel thoughts hop around and ramify and get all entangled, and, just like in that song by The Fixx, One thing Leads to Another — in my case what that song led to was a speeding ticket, as one time in 1986 or so as I was driving from Worcester, MA, to Gardner, that song came on the radio and I turned it up very loud and I guess its propulsive beat and lyrics reminiscent of the bonfire-bonfire-bonfire opening sequence of Aeschylus’s Oresteia got to me because I didn’t realize I was doing 85 until I saw the blue lights in the rearview.

In the context of today’s essay, the millions of details that particularly concern me are those that relate to the much postponed relaunching of my literary career with the republication of my four extant novel(las) (each having a new introduction), with new layout, covers, and brief afterwords by me, in English and in Spanish; in print, ebook, and audiobook formats, in conjunction with the publication of my new novel — a psychological (not science fiction) thriller, Mountain of Devils, set in the 1970’s, a prequel to both Acts of the Apostles and Biodigital.

Being one’s own publisher, on top of being a writer, and attempting to pull of a re-start of one’s literary career as complicated as this one would be difficult for somebody with a human brain as fine as yours, dear one; it is especially difficult when one has the brain of a squirrel. I won’t attempt to outline all the millions of details involved, but for a taste of some of my earlier adventures you can check out the essay previewed just below. Or skip over it, as you like.

Call it whatever

The opening paragraph I used to start this post is from Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep, a book I really like. I don’t know what I was expecting when I started reading my 1964 paperback reprint (third printing), but it wasn’t the incredibly intense yet surprisingly subtle work of literature that it is.

Perhaps one reason I felt a connection to Call it Sleep is because of my own family’s connection to Ellis Island. Both of my father’s parents — Nana and Pop, who were part of the 11-person household I grew up in — came to America through Ellis Island (Pop from Finland, Nana from Ireland). My mother was an immigrant who sailed into New York Harbor years after Ellis Island had been shuttered, to be followed by her mother, my Grandma, who I first met when she disembarked from the Queen Mary onto a Manhattan quay. Lots of immigration-by-way-of-Ellis-Island/New-York-City in my family history.

Here’s a story about when Pop told me about Ellis Island. You can skip over this one too, if you want.

Henry Roth was a complicated and evidently not in all ways admirable man, which, if you care about that, you can look it up. But what I find interesting about his life story is what he did to make money during those sixty years between his first two novels. It was real working class hero stuff, as chronicled in his journal, sixty five pages of which were published posthumously in Fiction, number 57, 2011. Wikipedia:

The majority of these pages are about Roth's move to Maine, afraid that his associations with the Communist Party would haunt him at his factory job in Massachusetts. Purchasing a small farm, and surrounded by Yankee neighbors, Roth questions his identity as a Jew and struggles to wrest a living out of a Maine countryside where the soil is so hard that he has to dynamite in order to lay pipe deep enough to avoid the winter freezes. The extreme cold that he and his family endured, his work logging, bargaining over antiques and livestock with neighbors, and the world of backwoods and village America form the principal and unlikely drama of these pages.

I’m not Jewish and I’ve never lived in Maine, but I certainly can relate to the struggle of trying to get by by doing random kinds of manual labor while trying to think of yourself as a writer despite not doing much actual writing. My own intra-novel-publication gigs, some of which I’ve discussed in this ongoing meditation already, include long haul truck driving, working on an internet billionaire’s cursed trophy mansion, and crawling on my belly like a reptile under Carly Simon’s house. Here’s another story for you to either rabbit-hole or skip over:

So what is My Greatest Problem, then, really?

I’m sure you’ve figured out where this essay has been heading ever since I told you, in part one, how I woke up quite early one morning two weeks ago thinking about Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy and brains and sat down at the desk under the skylight in my attic office to write about them but got distracted by a memory of that line in Kenneth Koch’s poem, It is Causation that is my greatest problem, and after that the really attentive study of millions of details; and then told you about Sunset Boulevard; and then about dazzle camouflage, which was used to trick observers into making an inaccurate reading of a ship’s trajectory.

You have noticed how my situation, as an artist, is like unto those of Norma Desmond and Henry Roth, and how dazzle camouflage relates to this kind of situation.

Like Norma Desmond, like Henry Roth, long ago I had some initial success in my chosen artistic field — writing novels. Like Desmond, like Roth, I then got stranded for years in the doldrums. And now, like Desmond, like Roth, I am attempting a big comeback. In fact, I’ve bet the proverbial ranch on it.²

Norma Desmond, however, was delusional. Ensconced in her mansion, surrounded by reminders of her past glory, she was dazzled into misperceiving the trajectory on which her life going. It’s hard to say if Roth was bedazzled, but if he had told anybody, when he was 71 years old, as I am today, that he was working on some books that were going to cement his place in American literary history, I expect that his listeners would have thought that he too was delusional.

One of the reasons I’ve put so much work into Sundman figures it out! over the last year and a half has been to grow awareness of me as a writer, to find new readers, to stimulate discussion. If I had 25 thousand subscribers to this thing I’d be confident that I had a good shot at making a go of it. When I started out I fell confident that I would have 5k, maybe 10k subscribers to this substack by now. But I only have about 1,800.

So am I delusional too? Am I bedazzled and misreading my own ship’s bearing?

Sometimes I think I surely must be.³ I can’t even get you to ‘like’ this post, or comment on it, or restack it or share it. You! My own most dearly best beloved reader! So what makes me think that I can sell tens of thousands of my new books when they finally, finally, finally appear sometime this summer? I don’t know.

So the challenge before me is to be aware that I may need to change my course while not getting myself into some kind of navel-gazing tizzy. But that is not my greatest problem.

My greatest problem, right now, is not determining whether I’m Norma or Henry, it’s figuring out which few hundred details of my John Sundman, Famous Author(TM) project require not my really attentive study — I’ve spent far too much time really attentively studying them already —but my really focused deliberate doing. Not studying, not procrastinating in any of the hundreds of ways I’ve perfected to do that. Doing. Figuring it out, quickly, and then doing.

I think I’m almost there. Wish me luck.

1. Nor is it ‘100% Bafflegab” — that was the title my essay about my year as the technical writer for a cryptocurrency startup, the second-most-popular Sundman figures it out! essay ever.

2. This is a very scary situation in which to find oneself.

3. And you can be sure that some people have told me quite plainly that I am.