The Man Who Loved Solitude
Terrence Murphy was a carpenter, still young but with middle age bearing down on him, and the prospect did not please him. He was a bachelor, not through choice so much as bad fortune; he had not met that special woman, that love of his life, to grace him with a home and children. And so he lived, or rather subsisted, in a routine that was tinged with melancholy, colored by declining hope for a hearth and, more precisely, for membership in a family and community.
Manhattan, the Manhattan of the early 20th century, was a community in a sense but it was a community that was anarchic in its essence, one that encouraged wildness and anonymity rather than loyalty and tranquility. The streets were in a constant bustle, the life was fast paced and tawdry. Manhattan life had its own rhythms and they were not the ones that Murphy, growing up, had dreamed of. And yet they offered their own grim satisfactions. Going out into the street from his fourth floor walk-up each morning, and returning every evening, Murphy had a sense of being part of something that was bigger than he, that caught him up in its flow and swept him along, no matter how routinized his life might be. In a sense he did belong, but it was not to this or that person specifically, but to the great broad sweep of humanity.
His life on the whole was uneventful. Not inclined toward drink or swagger, he did his job in silence and then, in silence, came home; not a dour man by nature so much as laconic, not comfortable with speech. This lack of verbal dexterity cast a wall between him and others. It was not a wall he minded. He was comfortable behind it; he had his own life, he had his own thoughts, he had his own routine, and by and large, although he might have dreamed of other things, that was enough for him.
One day he came home from the job and unlocked the door to his modest two-room apartment to find, huddled in a corner, a young woman. A girl, actually: She was just at the point where a girl begins to become a woman, twelve or thirteen. A quick glance at the window told Murphy how she’d entered—by the fire escape. She was wearing a cheap dress and a torn shawl was pulled tightly around her. Murphy looked at her, paused, and then continued into his apartment and removed his coat. Only then did he turn to her again.
“What can I do for you?” he said.
She didn’t reply, only stared at him from the corner of the room with wild eyes peering out from matted, filthy hair.
Murphy pulled a chair out from under the kitchen table, turned it around so that the back was facing him, and sat down on it, leaning forward with his forearms resting across its back. From across the room, he addressed her: “Are you hungry?”
She said nothing, only continued to stare at him with her round, watchful eyes. Murphy contemplated her and then said, “I don’t know why you’re here or what you’re after but I’m surely not going to ask you to go. I’m going to make myself some dinner. I’ll make enough for you.”
She didn’t eat; not that night and not the following morning, either. She remained in the corner, staring out at Murphy, watching him as he went about his life, a perfect, impenetrable mystery.
As he was about to leave the apartment for work, Murphy turned to the girl and said, “I’m leaving now. Will you be here when I return?”
She said nothing, and so Murphy opened the door and left, closing it gently behind him, as if not to disturb her.
She was still there when he returned that evening. And this time she ate; voraciously, like a person who hasn’t eaten for days. Still she did not speak, only ate, consumed by the desire for the food, and when the meal was finished she returned to her corner and sat there, watching him.
This went on for several days; she watched him warily but showed no inclination to leave, and happily accepted the food and drink that he offered her. She was a strange, wild creature; a runaway, Murphy decided, a girl perhaps beaten or worse by her father; and here she was, alone and lost in the city. He had no inclination to seek out her family or report her to the authorities; no inclination to do anything except feed her.
On the fourth night after she had appeared, Murphy was sitting at the kitchen table, cutting himself a piece of bread, and looking at the girl as she sat in her corner. He felt almost barred from entering that section of the room, as if she had staked out her own turf and it would be a violation for him to intrude. Suddenly Murphy smacked a palm onto the table and stood up.
“I know what I’m going to call you,” he said, pointing a finger at the girl. “Your name is Solitude.”
And that is what he called her; that became her name, and her only name, during the years they spent together. At no time did she show any sign of leaving, nor did she ever express any inclination to discuss what had brought her, so huddled and hungry, into his apartment that night. She simply allowed herself to be taken in by him, and accepted his affection, and in accepting his affection so absolutely she also gave herself, in a way, to him. She spoke even less than he, but she did become, in time, more social. She emerged from out of her corner, she cooked and cleaned with him, and in her own silent way gradually became a companion to him.
Murphy could not keep the girl hidden in his apartment forever; besides, he had no reason to, no shameful secret to hide. But emerging with her, making public the fact that he was sharing a small apartment with a young girl when until then he had lived alone—this excited the curiosity and inevitably the indignation of his neighbors. Murphy could sense how the womenfolk were whispering and complaining. That this man, this still-young man, should have a girl in his apartment with him, and a young girl, too young for decent folks simply not to notice! Murphy liked to be left alone; now the minds of his neighbors seemed to crowd after him, like a pack of vultures, wherever he went.
A month passed; two. The neighborly invasion of his privacy gnawed at Murphy until he finally reached a decision. That night at dinner, he had a talk with Solitude. She was now dining at the table with him, having emerged long since from her corner. Cleaned up, she looked like a normal, healthy girl, except for that persistently untamable expression in her eyes.
“Solitude,” said Murphy, “we’re going to have to go.”
She was eating her soup, and she continued to do so without looking up at him.
“People are talking. They’re making assumptions.”
Solitude put her spoon into the soup and looked up at Murphy, poised in perfect stillness and infinite in her silence, Solitude with her wild strange eyes.
“I think we should move out of the city,” Murphy said. “Go somewhere else. Start fresh.” She said nothing, only watched him. “We’ll say my wife has died, that I’m a widower. You’re my daughter now.”
There was silence between them for a moment. Then she stood up, came around the table to him, sat down in his lap, and hugged him. It was the first time she had touched him. Murphy sat there awkwardly, not knowing what to do with his arms, a whirlwind of unfamiliar emotions rushing through him.
The new home they found was in the country, in upstate New York, in a farm community where Murphy’s skills as a carpenter and jack-of-all-trades assured him of regular employment. No questions were asked; the public explanation was a credible explanation, and neither Murphy nor Solitude behaved in a way to attract attention. She resumed her schooling, albeit half-heartedly, and Murphy now, when he came home from his days on the job, had a companion there waiting for him. She was as silent as ever, and in her own way as watchful, but her loyalty and devotion were now, it seemed, absolute. She was present, deeply present, and as she ripened into a woman Murphy came to feel as if her presence made him complete.
Later, Murphy would look back on this as an idyllic period in his life; but idylls are brief, all too easily swept away by the imperatives of change. Four years had passed and Solitude was seventeen when she fell in love. The object of her passion was a young man two years her senior from a town a few hours’ carriage ride away. Murphy didn’t like him from the first; a burly fellow named Morris with thick hands and stubby fingers, he struck Murphy as too coarse and unimaginative for a woman of Solitude’s passionate disposition. But Murphy was also aware that he was sadly ill-equipped to judge: For what did he know of love?
He could feel the inevitable coming, but could only sit there and stew in rage and frustration at his powerlessness to change his destiny. One time, Morris came to call, and Murphy had to hold himself back from physically striking him; Murphy was still a relatively young man, and hardened from years of physical labor, and he might well have been more than a match for the young man, who in any event would have had mixed feelings about brawling with the father of his beloved. But Murphy restrained himself, not out of a sense of social impropriety so much as at the futility of railing at the gods.
Two months, then three, then half a year. Solitude returned from evenings with Morris with her cheeks flushed and the heat flowing from her body.
And then it happened. One night, just before dinner, Solitude appeared in the kitchen carrying a suitcase.
“I’ll be going now,” she said.
Murphy turned to her from the stove where he had been boiling some potatoes, and nodded. A terrible sadness filled his heart. She looked at him, and something like sadness came into her eyes, too, and she put the suitcase down and went up to him and put her arms around him and hugged him. They held each other for a long moment, and then Murphy did something he had never done before and took his hands and put them on her temples and stared into her eyes. He stared into her eyes and wondered if she would be leaving him if he had ever said yes to what, he now realized, had been a standing invitation. But as soon as he had asked himself the question, he released it. “Good luck to you,” he said, and turned back to the stove. He heard her feet go to the door, and he heard the door open, and he tried not to listen to the sounds of the carriage. And then she was gone.
After a time the pain lessened and he began to view their time together as a curious and, on the whole, gratifying chapter in his life. Solitude had come into his life wild, and she had changed his life but her wildness had remained unchanged. Like a cat coming in from the cold, she had fed at his table and warmed herself in his love. But wild is wild and, refreshed, she had gone again, out into the mysteries of her own unique destiny, out into the infinite spaces of her own true life. He could accept this; he could live with this; it was a view that allowed him to think of her with deep fondness; yet sometimes, from the depths of his heart, there came a clamorous outcry, a demand that was unyielding in its insistence. A surge of desperate, impossible longing it was, and when this came over him another truth became clear: What had been his home had become a hole. This solitude was new, and it would never leave him.
© Carl Frankel 2019
Terrence Murphy was a carpenter, still young but with middle age bearing down on him, and the prospect did not please him. He was a bachelor, not through choice so much as bad fortune; he had not met that special woman, that love of his life, to grace him with a home and children. And so he lived, or rather subsisted, in a routine that was tinged with melancholy, colored by declining hope for a hearth and, more precisely, for membership in a family and community.
Manhattan, the Manhattan of the early 20th century, was a community in a sense but it was a community that was anarchic in its essence, one that encouraged wildness and anonymity rather than loyalty and tranquility. The streets were in a constant bustle, the life was fast paced and tawdry. Manhattan life had its own rhythms and they were not the ones that Murphy, growing up, had dreamed of. And yet they offered their own grim satisfactions. Going out into the street from his fourth floor walk-up each morning, and returning every evening, Murphy had a sense of being part of something that was bigger than he, that caught him up in its flow and swept him along, no matter how routinized his life might be. In a sense he did belong, but it was not to this or that person specifically, but to the great broad sweep of humanity.
His life on the whole was uneventful. Not inclined toward drink or swagger, he did his job in silence and then, in silence, came home; not a dour man by nature so much as laconic, not comfortable with speech. This lack of verbal dexterity cast a wall between him and others. It was not a wall he minded. He was comfortable behind it; he had his own life, he had his own thoughts, he had his own routine, and by and large, although he might have dreamed of other things, that was enough for him.
One day he came home from the job and unlocked the door to his modest two-room apartment to find, huddled in a corner, a young woman. A girl, actually: She was just at the point where a girl begins to become a woman, twelve or thirteen. A quick glance at the window told Murphy how she’d entered—by the fire escape. She was wearing a cheap dress and a torn shawl was pulled tightly around her. Murphy looked at her, paused, and then continued into his apartment and removed his coat. Only then did he turn to her again.
“What can I do for you?” he said.
She didn’t reply, only stared at him from the corner of the room with wild eyes peering out from matted, filthy hair.
Murphy pulled a chair out from under the kitchen table, turned it around so that the back was facing him, and sat down on it, leaning forward with his forearms resting across its back. From across the room, he addressed her: “Are you hungry?”
She said nothing, only continued to stare at him with her round, watchful eyes. Murphy contemplated her and then said, “I don’t know why you’re here or what you’re after but I’m surely not going to ask you to go. I’m going to make myself some dinner. I’ll make enough for you.”
She didn’t eat; not that night and not the following morning, either. She remained in the corner, staring out at Murphy, watching him as he went about his life, a perfect, impenetrable mystery.
As he was about to leave the apartment for work, Murphy turned to the girl and said, “I’m leaving now. Will you be here when I return?”
She said nothing, and so Murphy opened the door and left, closing it gently behind him, as if not to disturb her.
She was still there when he returned that evening. And this time she ate; voraciously, like a person who hasn’t eaten for days. Still she did not speak, only ate, consumed by the desire for the food, and when the meal was finished she returned to her corner and sat there, watching him.
This went on for several days; she watched him warily but showed no inclination to leave, and happily accepted the food and drink that he offered her. She was a strange, wild creature; a runaway, Murphy decided, a girl perhaps beaten or worse by her father; and here she was, alone and lost in the city. He had no inclination to seek out her family or report her to the authorities; no inclination to do anything except feed her.
On the fourth night after she had appeared, Murphy was sitting at the kitchen table, cutting himself a piece of bread, and looking at the girl as she sat in her corner. He felt almost barred from entering that section of the room, as if she had staked out her own turf and it would be a violation for him to intrude. Suddenly Murphy smacked a palm onto the table and stood up.
“I know what I’m going to call you,” he said, pointing a finger at the girl. “Your name is Solitude.”
And that is what he called her; that became her name, and her only name, during the years they spent together. At no time did she show any sign of leaving, nor did she ever express any inclination to discuss what had brought her, so huddled and hungry, into his apartment that night. She simply allowed herself to be taken in by him, and accepted his affection, and in accepting his affection so absolutely she also gave herself, in a way, to him. She spoke even less than he, but she did become, in time, more social. She emerged from out of her corner, she cooked and cleaned with him, and in her own silent way gradually became a companion to him.
Murphy could not keep the girl hidden in his apartment forever; besides, he had no reason to, no shameful secret to hide. But emerging with her, making public the fact that he was sharing a small apartment with a young girl when until then he had lived alone—this excited the curiosity and inevitably the indignation of his neighbors. Murphy could sense how the womenfolk were whispering and complaining. That this man, this still-young man, should have a girl in his apartment with him, and a young girl, too young for decent folks simply not to notice! Murphy liked to be left alone; now the minds of his neighbors seemed to crowd after him, like a pack of vultures, wherever he went.
A month passed; two. The neighborly invasion of his privacy gnawed at Murphy until he finally reached a decision. That night at dinner, he had a talk with Solitude. She was now dining at the table with him, having emerged long since from her corner. Cleaned up, she looked like a normal, healthy girl, except for that persistently untamable expression in her eyes.
“Solitude,” said Murphy, “we’re going to have to go.”
She was eating her soup, and she continued to do so without looking up at him.
“People are talking. They’re making assumptions.”
Solitude put her spoon into the soup and looked up at Murphy, poised in perfect stillness and infinite in her silence, Solitude with her wild strange eyes.
“I think we should move out of the city,” Murphy said. “Go somewhere else. Start fresh.” She said nothing, only watched him. “We’ll say my wife has died, that I’m a widower. You’re my daughter now.”
There was silence between them for a moment. Then she stood up, came around the table to him, sat down in his lap, and hugged him. It was the first time she had touched him. Murphy sat there awkwardly, not knowing what to do with his arms, a whirlwind of unfamiliar emotions rushing through him.
The new home they found was in the country, in upstate New York, in a farm community where Murphy’s skills as a carpenter and jack-of-all-trades assured him of regular employment. No questions were asked; the public explanation was a credible explanation, and neither Murphy nor Solitude behaved in a way to attract attention. She resumed her schooling, albeit half-heartedly, and Murphy now, when he came home from his days on the job, had a companion there waiting for him. She was as silent as ever, and in her own way as watchful, but her loyalty and devotion were now, it seemed, absolute. She was present, deeply present, and as she ripened into a woman Murphy came to feel as if her presence made him complete.
Later, Murphy would look back on this as an idyllic period in his life; but idylls are brief, all too easily swept away by the imperatives of change. Four years had passed and Solitude was seventeen when she fell in love. The object of her passion was a young man two years her senior from a town a few hours’ carriage ride away. Murphy didn’t like him from the first; a burly fellow named Morris with thick hands and stubby fingers, he struck Murphy as too coarse and unimaginative for a woman of Solitude’s passionate disposition. But Murphy was also aware that he was sadly ill-equipped to judge: For what did he know of love?
He could feel the inevitable coming, but could only sit there and stew in rage and frustration at his powerlessness to change his destiny. One time, Morris came to call, and Murphy had to hold himself back from physically striking him; Murphy was still a relatively young man, and hardened from years of physical labor, and he might well have been more than a match for the young man, who in any event would have had mixed feelings about brawling with the father of his beloved. But Murphy restrained himself, not out of a sense of social impropriety so much as at the futility of railing at the gods.
Two months, then three, then half a year. Solitude returned from evenings with Morris with her cheeks flushed and the heat flowing from her body.
And then it happened. One night, just before dinner, Solitude appeared in the kitchen carrying a suitcase.
“I’ll be going now,” she said.
Murphy turned to her from the stove where he had been boiling some potatoes, and nodded. A terrible sadness filled his heart. She looked at him, and something like sadness came into her eyes, too, and she put the suitcase down and went up to him and put her arms around him and hugged him. They held each other for a long moment, and then Murphy did something he had never done before and took his hands and put them on her temples and stared into her eyes. He stared into her eyes and wondered if she would be leaving him if he had ever said yes to what, he now realized, had been a standing invitation. But as soon as he had asked himself the question, he released it. “Good luck to you,” he said, and turned back to the stove. He heard her feet go to the door, and he heard the door open, and he tried not to listen to the sounds of the carriage. And then she was gone.
After a time the pain lessened and he began to view their time together as a curious and, on the whole, gratifying chapter in his life. Solitude had come into his life wild, and she had changed his life but her wildness had remained unchanged. Like a cat coming in from the cold, she had fed at his table and warmed herself in his love. But wild is wild and, refreshed, she had gone again, out into the mysteries of her own unique destiny, out into the infinite spaces of her own true life. He could accept this; he could live with this; it was a view that allowed him to think of her with deep fondness; yet sometimes, from the depths of his heart, there came a clamorous outcry, a demand that was unyielding in its insistence. A surge of desperate, impossible longing it was, and when this came over him another truth became clear: What had been his home had become a hole. This solitude was new, and it would never leave him.
© Carl Frankel 2019
Narrated by Carl Frankel.
Narrated by Carl Frankel.
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Carl, thanks for making the journey from uptown Kingston into the forests of Woodstock to talk to us today. I think you may be a little outside your comfort zone.
CF: Well it's mighty full o' nature up here so it's a different world for me for sure.
TN: Tell us a bit about yourself.
CF: Yeah, I've been a writer for too many decades to count. And an entrepreneur. Late in my life I've decided that I have more skill as a writer than an entrepreneur, so I'm focusing on that much more these days.
TN: What were you entrepreneuring about?
CF: Well I spent much of my life working in socially responsible business and trying to come up with ways for business to care for the planet and people as much as for profits. And I started a community business about that and since then I've been working with my life partner on a business that teaches people how to have a healthy relationship with sex and pleasure.
TN: But you threw it all away for writing?
CF: Well the sex and pleasure is like... is very much integrated with my writing, as it happens these days, so not all thrown away.
BR: In your story, Terrence Murphy was a carpenter but might we say here that "carpenter" is a euphemism for "writer?" That is, a builder of sentences, paragraphs, stories, for whom solitude is an absolute requirement?
CF: It's a lovely metaphor. And I think one can certainly do it and I certainly get it -- why you're doing it. I wrote this story thirty years ago. I do not remember the circumstances of writing it. I pulled this out of a file folder, but my intuition tells me that I did not write this as a meditation on being a writer. I don't even know how much writing I was doing then. It's much more of a meditation about solitude as part of the human condition and the various textures and nuances of solitude and perhaps ultimately the fact that when you cut through all the social interactions that happen, we are alone with ourselves and we have to figure out how to deal with that. And that can be a bracing situation or it can be a painful one depending on our circumstances.
BR: Yeah.
TN: I like solitude well enough.
CF: I think it's sort of a prerequisite for people who go into the arts because ultimately everything else is kind of gloss and glitz. It's being alone with yourself that provides the juice.
TN: True, you know, but I do a lot of writing in the middle of a workday or on a film set, short breaks, writing on my phone, so maybe the writer's need for solitude is a myth.
BR: Well okay, I need it though. But I do write in cafés sometimes so...
CF: I write in cafés too.
BR: Well I think I may be a victim...
TN: I drink coffee in cafés.
BR: Yeah, I think I'm a victim of all those romantic myths about writers -- you know, lonely, suffering, substance abusers. Or maybe we shouldn't go there.
TN: Let's not. So Carl, I'm curious why you set the story in the early 20th century.
CF: I wish I knew. For one thing, as I said, it's thirty years ago and for another, this to the extent that I remember anything about it at all, came to me kind of as a conceit, as a dream. And I really haven't unpacked it but I do think that if you sort of reread the story and let it settle in, it's about the relationship between a kind of universal participation in the river of humanity and the personal intensity that comes from a deep personal connection, and the kinds of solitude that are present in each one. And I think intuitively I saw early 20th century Manhattan as a representation of the river of humanity sailing along and I kinda suspect that that's why I put it there.
TN: You know it's funny because at the beginning of this story before I heard the word 'carriages' I assumed it was maybe late 70s early 80s and then I heard 'carriages' and I thought What the... fuck. Can I say that? What the fuck is a carriage doing in Manhattan in the early 80s and then I realized, you know, that it's...
BR: … Early 20th century.
TN: Yeah.
CF: It's sort of fun to unpack a story as if it were somebody else's because as I say I haven't looked at this for years but I think one of the themes in this is sort of the regression, or departure if you will, from urban environment to country, which is ultimately into pure wildness. So this in its own dream way has a sequencing from full of activity and a lack of physical solitude but much emotional solitude inside it, to a country life where it is quieter and more community-oriented, and ultimately she goes off into the vast silences of her future that contain her wildness and her solitude.
BR: Yeah, and I had the thought that here we are a hundred years later, in the age of social media, maybe there's no such thing as solitude anymore at all.
CF: It's a really interesting thought, Brent, and I think solitude is part of the human condition and I think it shows up in different ways. If anything, my take on it would be that social media is like a flock of screaming birds, but underneath it there is always solitude and if anything it's more intense and possibly has a more agonized quality because of the nature of social media.
TN: Going back to your story, when he first encounters the girl she's a child. He makes no attempt to return her to her family but he nurtures her and protects her. So we see that his solitude is his and no one else's. And it, or she, becomes a driving force in his life -- his obsession perhaps. It seems to be the thing that prevents him from forming any other relationships.
CF: I think that's a fair point. I think his primary relationship is with his solitude and that's kind of one of the messages, perhaps, in this story -- one of the mood messages if you will -- that that may be what is the condition of most of us, which we try to mask by social interactions. One of the things that struck me as I reread the story was how little they say to each other. They inhabit solitude alongside each other. And it's very refreshing for them to do so until such time as you realize he could have been physically intimate with her and they could have been lovers, at which point his solitude shifts from the solitude of connection and completion to the solitude of the broken heart.
BR: Yeah. Tom and I both have daughters, so Murphy's response to Solitude's suitor, that stubby- fingered Morris was certainly understandable to me.
TN: Yeah, but at the same time we can't control young love can we?
BR: Well, we can try dammit.
CF: Oldsters can try but we will not win.
TN: Well, Murphy realizes at this point that he knows nothing of love. I mean, I can relate. It's a word fraught with vagueness and misinterpretation. It has many different meanings, so many meanings all in just a single word. Would you agree, Carl?
CF: I agree totally and in fact I'd say the same thing about solitude. A friend of mine many years ago said if people understood what the words they were using meant, no one would argue anymore. And I think there's some truth in that. So this is a meditation on what is solitude -- on the flavors and textures of solitude, and I think love has as many. He loves Solitude very deeply in the story but there is a quality to erotic love and intimacy that is totally transformative and really merits a different word really.
BR: Yeah, yeah, Murphy's relationship with Solitude is parental in the beginning, which essentially means temporary but then he has that realization that as she matured, their relationship could have developed into a different kind of love, something more adult and permanent. But it's too late. So at the very end I really found it interesting that his loss of his daughter Solitude plunged him into that darker more desolate form of solitude -- something he never wanted.
CF: I agree that it is kind of a provocative moment and as I see it now the setup is for a story that is liminal. It's between categories. This isn't his daughter. It's not his lover. It is a kind of quantum moment ripe with opportunity. And he doesn't seize the moment. That's how he operates in this quantum environment. And in retrospect he regrets it, although it was totally suitable while it happened. It's like, life happens while you're making plans. Life happened to him and he could have played it differently, it would have been a happier ending, but life goes on.
TN: I gather you're writing a new novel, almost finished. Could you tell us about that a bit?
CF: Well it's funny you say that because as of today I'm sending it to my designer so I can officially announce it as finished.
BR: Excellent. Congratulations.
CF: As I mentioned before I've been running a business with my life partner for ten years about how to help people have a healthy relationship with sex and pleasure. And this is the first volume of an excessively ambitious three-volume novel about life on a planet where people have a healthy relationship with sex and pleasure.
TN: Well we'll have to do that on The Strange Recital.
CF: (laughter) On the strange and bawdy recital, it will be at that point.
BR: Okay, well guys this has been a good conversation but I feel a need to get back to my solitary dark little room with my typewriter and a bottle of whiskey to continue torturing myself into producing brilliant prose, or at least moderately shiny prose maybe.
TN: Well good luck with that. You and Rimbaud. Carl, thanks for joining us today.
CF: It's been a total pleasure.
BR: Carl, thanks for making the journey from uptown Kingston into the forests of Woodstock to talk to us today. I think you may be a little outside your comfort zone.
CF: Well it's mighty full o' nature up here so it's a different world for me for sure.
TN: Tell us a bit about yourself.
CF: Yeah, I've been a writer for too many decades to count. And an entrepreneur. Late in my life I've decided that I have more skill as a writer than an entrepreneur, so I'm focusing on that much more these days.
TN: What were you entrepreneuring about?
CF: Well I spent much of my life working in socially responsible business and trying to come up with ways for business to care for the planet and people as much as for profits. And I started a community business about that and since then I've been working with my life partner on a business that teaches people how to have a healthy relationship with sex and pleasure.
TN: But you threw it all away for writing?
CF: Well the sex and pleasure is like... is very much integrated with my writing, as it happens these days, so not all thrown away.
BR: In your story, Terrence Murphy was a carpenter but might we say here that "carpenter" is a euphemism for "writer?" That is, a builder of sentences, paragraphs, stories, for whom solitude is an absolute requirement?
CF: It's a lovely metaphor. And I think one can certainly do it and I certainly get it -- why you're doing it. I wrote this story thirty years ago. I do not remember the circumstances of writing it. I pulled this out of a file folder, but my intuition tells me that I did not write this as a meditation on being a writer. I don't even know how much writing I was doing then. It's much more of a meditation about solitude as part of the human condition and the various textures and nuances of solitude and perhaps ultimately the fact that when you cut through all the social interactions that happen, we are alone with ourselves and we have to figure out how to deal with that. And that can be a bracing situation or it can be a painful one depending on our circumstances.
BR: Yeah.
TN: I like solitude well enough.
CF: I think it's sort of a prerequisite for people who go into the arts because ultimately everything else is kind of gloss and glitz. It's being alone with yourself that provides the juice.
TN: True, you know, but I do a lot of writing in the middle of a workday or on a film set, short breaks, writing on my phone, so maybe the writer's need for solitude is a myth.
BR: Well okay, I need it though. But I do write in cafés sometimes so...
CF: I write in cafés too.
BR: Well I think I may be a victim...
TN: I drink coffee in cafés.
BR: Yeah, I think I'm a victim of all those romantic myths about writers -- you know, lonely, suffering, substance abusers. Or maybe we shouldn't go there.
TN: Let's not. So Carl, I'm curious why you set the story in the early 20th century.
CF: I wish I knew. For one thing, as I said, it's thirty years ago and for another, this to the extent that I remember anything about it at all, came to me kind of as a conceit, as a dream. And I really haven't unpacked it but I do think that if you sort of reread the story and let it settle in, it's about the relationship between a kind of universal participation in the river of humanity and the personal intensity that comes from a deep personal connection, and the kinds of solitude that are present in each one. And I think intuitively I saw early 20th century Manhattan as a representation of the river of humanity sailing along and I kinda suspect that that's why I put it there.
TN: You know it's funny because at the beginning of this story before I heard the word 'carriages' I assumed it was maybe late 70s early 80s and then I heard 'carriages' and I thought What the... fuck. Can I say that? What the fuck is a carriage doing in Manhattan in the early 80s and then I realized, you know, that it's...
BR: … Early 20th century.
TN: Yeah.
CF: It's sort of fun to unpack a story as if it were somebody else's because as I say I haven't looked at this for years but I think one of the themes in this is sort of the regression, or departure if you will, from urban environment to country, which is ultimately into pure wildness. So this in its own dream way has a sequencing from full of activity and a lack of physical solitude but much emotional solitude inside it, to a country life where it is quieter and more community-oriented, and ultimately she goes off into the vast silences of her future that contain her wildness and her solitude.
BR: Yeah, and I had the thought that here we are a hundred years later, in the age of social media, maybe there's no such thing as solitude anymore at all.
CF: It's a really interesting thought, Brent, and I think solitude is part of the human condition and I think it shows up in different ways. If anything, my take on it would be that social media is like a flock of screaming birds, but underneath it there is always solitude and if anything it's more intense and possibly has a more agonized quality because of the nature of social media.
TN: Going back to your story, when he first encounters the girl she's a child. He makes no attempt to return her to her family but he nurtures her and protects her. So we see that his solitude is his and no one else's. And it, or she, becomes a driving force in his life -- his obsession perhaps. It seems to be the thing that prevents him from forming any other relationships.
CF: I think that's a fair point. I think his primary relationship is with his solitude and that's kind of one of the messages, perhaps, in this story -- one of the mood messages if you will -- that that may be what is the condition of most of us, which we try to mask by social interactions. One of the things that struck me as I reread the story was how little they say to each other. They inhabit solitude alongside each other. And it's very refreshing for them to do so until such time as you realize he could have been physically intimate with her and they could have been lovers, at which point his solitude shifts from the solitude of connection and completion to the solitude of the broken heart.
BR: Yeah. Tom and I both have daughters, so Murphy's response to Solitude's suitor, that stubby- fingered Morris was certainly understandable to me.
TN: Yeah, but at the same time we can't control young love can we?
BR: Well, we can try dammit.
CF: Oldsters can try but we will not win.
TN: Well, Murphy realizes at this point that he knows nothing of love. I mean, I can relate. It's a word fraught with vagueness and misinterpretation. It has many different meanings, so many meanings all in just a single word. Would you agree, Carl?
CF: I agree totally and in fact I'd say the same thing about solitude. A friend of mine many years ago said if people understood what the words they were using meant, no one would argue anymore. And I think there's some truth in that. So this is a meditation on what is solitude -- on the flavors and textures of solitude, and I think love has as many. He loves Solitude very deeply in the story but there is a quality to erotic love and intimacy that is totally transformative and really merits a different word really.
BR: Yeah, yeah, Murphy's relationship with Solitude is parental in the beginning, which essentially means temporary but then he has that realization that as she matured, their relationship could have developed into a different kind of love, something more adult and permanent. But it's too late. So at the very end I really found it interesting that his loss of his daughter Solitude plunged him into that darker more desolate form of solitude -- something he never wanted.
CF: I agree that it is kind of a provocative moment and as I see it now the setup is for a story that is liminal. It's between categories. This isn't his daughter. It's not his lover. It is a kind of quantum moment ripe with opportunity. And he doesn't seize the moment. That's how he operates in this quantum environment. And in retrospect he regrets it, although it was totally suitable while it happened. It's like, life happens while you're making plans. Life happened to him and he could have played it differently, it would have been a happier ending, but life goes on.
TN: I gather you're writing a new novel, almost finished. Could you tell us about that a bit?
CF: Well it's funny you say that because as of today I'm sending it to my designer so I can officially announce it as finished.
BR: Excellent. Congratulations.
CF: As I mentioned before I've been running a business with my life partner for ten years about how to help people have a healthy relationship with sex and pleasure. And this is the first volume of an excessively ambitious three-volume novel about life on a planet where people have a healthy relationship with sex and pleasure.
TN: Well we'll have to do that on The Strange Recital.
CF: (laughter) On the strange and bawdy recital, it will be at that point.
BR: Okay, well guys this has been a good conversation but I feel a need to get back to my solitary dark little room with my typewriter and a bottle of whiskey to continue torturing myself into producing brilliant prose, or at least moderately shiny prose maybe.
TN: Well good luck with that. You and Rimbaud. Carl, thanks for joining us today.
CF: It's been a total pleasure.
Music on this episode:
The Streets of New York by Billy Murray
License CC PD
Sound Effects used under license:
License CC BY 3.0
