Requiem for an Enamoration

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Monday, May 23, 2005
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Ten years ago, I gave up on a novel. It was the Spring of 1995, and I was taking a novel writing workshop with Daniel Stern. Workshops, by their nature, are better suited to short fiction, but there's always pressure from students to expand the parameters because there's such a small market for stories. So when I found out that Stern was offering a novel workshop, I signed up immediately. My plan was to write a novel that semester and revise it as my thesis. For study, Dan assigned four novels: Balzac's Pere Goriot, Henry James' Daisy Miller, Don De Lillo's White Noise and Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter. During the course of the semester, we would talk about the form and structure of these books as a way of gaining insight into our own projects. A few other titles came up, too: Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and Isherwood's Prater Violet. In addition, we would each be expected to produce four segments of work (chapters from our novels) and at least one revision of a previously-critiqued chapter.

My plans were ambitious. I was going to produce a "tight, beautiful work of art" (according to my notes from the time). The title was Enamorations and it was to be a novel in three parts, each divided into three titled sections, like so:

I: Enfant Sublime / The Underground / Sociology
II: A Burial / Ars Erotica / The Night Class
III: The End of the Affair / Bohemian Summer / Reunion

Enamorations was an part artist story and part bildungsroman, the tale of young Martin's ill-fated entanglement with the beautiful Nicola. It drew shamelessly on the geography and chronology of my college years, perhaps because that's all the experience I'd managed to process by that time.

Dan used The Heart of the Matter as an example of how to begin a novel. Since he's a cellist, he was fond of musical analogies. In this case, the opening of the novel -- the first fifty pages or so -- lays out the theme, and the rest of the book pursues variations and changes. Everything in that opening, he said, should be overdetermined. Everything needs two or three causes. He said, "Set the stage for the end in the beginning."

Unfortunately, Enamorations did none of this. While other writers in the workshop produced long sections of manuscript, I spent the semester writing and re-writing the opening fifty pages. If anything, that only made them worse. While other people's characters struggled through crisis and change, my hero was still observing the telling arrangement of four or five possessions on his nightstand. It was an embarrassing spectacle. I entered the workshop with high expectations and left with my tail between my legs. After that workshop, I abandoned the novel. Soon afterward, I started working on A Soldier of Misfortune -- but that's another story.

In 1999, Enamorations enjoyed a temporary resurrection. I'd been on an unofficial sabbatical since getting married in 1996, and I needed to complete a book to count as my thesis. Unfortunately, I only had a semester to write it. I pulled out my old outline for Enamorations and simplified the structure. Now it would be a simple novel in five parts:

I. Enfant Sublime
II. Mal du Siecle
III. Underground
IV. Amor Fati
V. Astraea Redux

After a week, though, I decided that there was a reason this thing had never been written. I didn't have enough time to write a good novel, anyway, so I focused on the perennial cop-out: the short story collection. As a result, Enamorations remains a failed project, and I suppose it always will be. That's no reason not to commemorate it ten years later.