Naming a blog is far more difficult than I had considered. There are schools of thought about it. Some opt for opportunistic titles that can be provocative and or cute. The idea being to catch flies in one’s honey trap. I eschewed this, although I know some might find ‘Bell’s Lettres’ on the sappy side. It also won’t catch any flies.
My defense is that it captures what’s here, my belles lettres. The play on my name is circumstantial. But some of my work is predicated on the ridiculous, ostensibly at least. So the title works that way too. It also works to emphasize my execrable French. I am held in contemp by sales girls, medical workers, acquaintances and family because after 35 years here I do not speak French.
So I use a doggerell Franglais title to further prove ownership, like pissing on fireplugs.
The pieces I include are the novels and a select collection of short stories that I’ve been writing since I was in my late 20s and early 30s. In 1985 when I relocated to France I stopped writing to concentrate on creating my business. Twenty years later I went bugs for a few years and that too postponed my return to literature. It’s obvious to me now that writing has been part of my recovery. Cheaper too.
All this to explain to myself why my compositions are relatively few and are shaped by divergent enchoate events. The last of these when at age 55 or so I was at last diagnosed as bipolar, which has become a turning point because both the hitherto inexplicable and to me invisibly alternating episodes of euphoria and black depression were at last ostensibly explained. Dearest lithium, you’ve written my life.
“Who Cares” was my first published piece, a short poem. It was accepted and printed by the national childrens magazine of the Methodist church, which in the 1950s was a big deal. It was a lament by a nine year old. I’d seen a delivery truck hit and kill my dog Lucky, good name that. So writing as therapy began early for me. More catharsis too.
Next I wrote a play about the devil, called The Wrong Man. A title, like that for this blog, which needs little further commentrary.
At 11 I had passed through puberty, more timultuous for me than the 100 Years War. That stopped my literary ambitions for a few years. It wasn’t until I was a junior in high school, Wichita HS North, that I again caught the writing plague. I was editor of the front page of the North Star, and later ‘student life’ editor of the school’s Tower yearbook. I was so arrogant, so full of myself.
Amazing Grace. To save a wretch like me. This meager training in journalism, monitored with dragon ferocity and tough love by Miss Minnie Drowatsky was enough to land me a job years later working on a trade journal in New York. Miraculous at the time as I had made some 200 job applications in the City without luck and was down to my last $50. I don’t believe in God, luck or miracles—but of course I secretly do like everyone else when not feeling at our pluckiest. All except unpleasant scientists and insufferable behaviorists.
This job in journaism humble as it was, began another phase of my life that in fact brings me back again, indubitably, to here.
Me, I’m like a submarine. My time, experiences, feelings, beliefs, physical and mental states are totally discrete one period from another, like in sealed air tight chambers. When I pass through one to another I turn back to close the wheel securely on the door, basically obliterating the previous chamber and most all that was once on the other side of my subarine portal.
Then I forget and move on. I am a great forgetter.
But more of this to come.
If I remember.