Lying at the Top of the Mark

[Paul Madonna, the well-known San Francisco artist who beautifully illustrated my book A Writer’s San Francisco, was recently seriously injured in a car accident. I am wishing him a very speedy recovery and wanted to share with you a few pieces from that book that he enriched so much.]

The Mark Hopkins is a fancy hotel at the crest of Nob Hill and the intersection of three cable car lines. At the hotel’s summit is a celebrated bar where, during World War II, soldiers would drink before embarking and soldiers’ wives would come to watch their husbands sail off toward Japan. Because of these wives, many of whom would soon become widows, the northwest corner of the room, with its views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific Ocean, became known as Weepers’ Corner.

One afternoon in 1996, it should have been renamed Liar’s Corner. I was meeting with Jeremy Tarcher, my publisher, and Irene Prokop, his editor in chief. They were in town for some reason, he from Los Angeles, she from New York, and found time to have drinks and dinner with me. None of us had an agenda—I wasn’t trying to sell them a book, and they had no good or bad news to deliver. So it might have been a pleasant few hours, except for all the lies I was telling.

I had just signed on to do my fourth book with Tarcher, a book called Lighting the Way, an ambitious book about, well, everything. Don’t look for Lighting the Way in bookstores. You won’t find it. It was never published. The book’s conceit, that it would do the best job ever of explicating human psychology and human meaning, wasn’t the problem. The problem was in the execution. I couldn’t get my hands around the material, so I busied myself taking illegitimate dodges and shortcuts. Then I lied to myself, along the following lines: “Hey, maybe nobody will notice!”

Irene, Jeremy, and I were chatting about one thing and another, and then Irene asked, innocently enough, since she had no suspicions, “How’s the book going?”

“Great!” I replied. “Just great.”

I have never told a bigger lie. I quickly changed the subject. They were none the wiser. We left the Top of the Mark and took a cab to a fancy Japanese restaurant, where we had an expense-account dinner. Some months later I turned in Lighting the Way. It was awful; naturally enough, they refused to publish it. It was not even in the kind of shape that would allow anyone at Tarcher to suggest a feasible rewrite. In another setting it would have been Ishtar or Heaven’s Gate, only never released.

Of course writers will turn out clunkers. Some percentage of our books will stink. And sometimes we won’t know that we have produced a stinker. What interests me is that defensive attitude, commonly called denial, that allows a writer who knows that his current book is flawed and who has no intention of owning up to that truth to continue writing, month in and month out, throwing bad words after bad. Why do we do that? It is such a waste of our essence, our spirit, our good ideas, our capital. Why do we do it?

Since I have done just that, with Lighting the Way and with some other books, let me see if I can explain what was going on for me. In each case part of me actually liked the book, or rather, liked the parts I liked. I was giving the book a pass because of its good parts. Part of me was unsure that anyone would notice, with so many bad books regularly being published. I was giving the book a pass because I felt smug and superior. Part of me hoped that, at some point, I would take the bull by the horns and do a real rewrite. I was giving the book a pass because I felt that I would yet rise to the occasion.

Part of me wondered if a miracle might happen, a gestalt miracle with the proper image suddenly emerging out of a murky background. Part of me was simply going through the motions, carried on by the momentum of getting up, writing the book, and going to bed, robot-like. Part of me didn’t know what to do to make the book better and didn’t want to admit that. Most tellingly, part of me just didn’t care—one way or the other—and really didn’t want to admit that.

To summarize: I lied to myself about how miserable Lighting the Way was turning out because I liked its good parts, felt smug and superior, imagined that I would yet rise to the occasion, was hoping for a miracle, was going through the motions, didn’t know how to make it better, and didn’t care, as in rhymes with despair. Do you ever do such things? Do you ever spend years on a book trying to ignore its smell? If you’ve never had this experience, you haven’t written enough.

Do not leave a good book too soon or a bad book too late. The question naturally becomes: Which book is which? Maybe it’s impossible to know. You are working on a book, you have your doubts, you have your hopes, and you just can’t decide whether to go with hope or go with doubt. I understand. I find no easy solution wanting to come out of my pen. Maybe the closest I can come is the following: honorably rewrite. It is the honorably that makes the phrase so poignant.

I have never gone back to the Top of the Mark. For me it remains the scene of the crime. If you are currently lying about the book in front of you, the one you know is dead as a doornail and not worth two figs of your time, I understand. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It is the way we keep up-to-the-minute news from pounding us like sledgehammer blows. In case you would like to tell yourself the truth and take your medicine, take a deep breath first. A lot of pain will follow, but also a better book, either this one or the next.