December 30, 2009
Lore Segal's Lucinella was written in the 1970s as a very funny satire of the New York literary scene. The heroine Lucinella is a poet and we first meet her at Yaddo, soaking up the atmosphere and as many drinks as possible. The funniest bits of the book still ring true today (maybe that is why they are so hilarious) and demonstrate that there are immutable truths about writing and the writing process that will never change, only rotate a bit, under the new regime of e-books and Kindle and Nook and Amazon sales ratings. There will always be writers workshops heavy on the drink, deep in conversation, but light in production. There will always be the fragile writer's ego ("The poet goes to heaven. For three weeks the choir of angels sings his praises, then they take a coffee break. The poet cries, 'Nobody loves me!'"). There will always be the symposium where such topics as "why write", "why read", and "why publish" are debated. And there will always be the party where luminaries are honored by being slighted ("I refuse to add my attention and turn my back. Now my back gives him my attention") as much as by being doted upon, and where the shadows of past rejection lurk, ready to pounce and pierce the slightest balloon of good feeling.
As a portrait of a poet, Lucinella is again both funny and accurate; it illuminates the poetic process and made me think of another book I read recently, Lit by Mary Karr. Lucinella takes the light touch whereas Lit takes -- with great justification -- the tragic route to explain where poems come from (or don't come at all). For Lucinella, the sharpened pencil and clean-paged journal are as essential to poetry as inspiration, and much easier to locate. For Karr, banishing alcohol and the demons from her past are the key to productivity, and as goals, are very, very hard to reach; only a conversion to Catholicism and a commitment to herself finally bring her to sobriety and renewed scholarship. Of course Lucinella is meant to be funny and Lit is meant to be true; what is interesting is that both offer a portrait of the writer that is real.
With the portrait of dear, sweet, honest, struggling, and fun Lucinella, Segal warns against becoming a writer but at the same time, she does give her Lucinella a really good time. I just wish Lucinella's long and torrid affair with Zeus (the God and a fellow-writer) could have brought her immortality. Instead the book ends when Lucinella does, not with a bang with a whimper (and one last attempt to clean up the apartment).
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