Happy Holidays. I hope you buy the biggest tree and hang it with the most ornaments. I hope you’re able to be of good cheer and find generosity in your heart. Especially if like us you’ve had to cancel plans to travel over the holidays because of the resurgent pandemic.
Don’t be a Scrooge by keeping your ideas to yourself. Many of my writing clients come to me as unhappy Ebeneezers. As a ghost(of-Christmas-present?)-writer and coach, though, I’ve got some Dickensian news for you. Life is short, and good champagne doesn’t keep. It’s an apt metaphor for why we should get on with this writing thing together before the ghost of Christmas future catches up. If you don’t open the bubbly bottle of your ideas, it’ll go stale. People will think you have nothing to say. Or, worse yet, in the end, you won’t have said the things you wished you’d said. Nobody will have heard them. I bring this up because it’s Christmas, but also, because I’m re-reading a lovely book. It’s by the late New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling, a man of enormous appetites. It’s called Between Meals, An Appetite for Paris, and on page 23, Mr. Liebling finds out that:
“In the matter of age, champagne is a capricious wine. As a general rule it has passed its best between 15 and 20.”
It reminds me of an old lady who helped raise me in South London. She kept a bottle of champagne from the year I was born until she died many years later. We ended up opening it after her death. But the thing had gone rancid, and I wished she’d drunk it earlier. I felt grief for her unexpressed joy, for her lack of enjoyment. When I was in journalism school I got her a record player to play her old 78s. She listened to Frank Sinatra and started crying because her life had been so hard, she said. Her late husband died in her early 50s just before I was born, and she never remarried, dying some 30-odd years later. Even writing this I find myself thinking she chose not to go on living, in some way, after being widowed. Not that remarrying necessarily means living. But one sensed she let the tragedy make her timid. We all tend to do that with hurt. It’s not that I blame her so much as I’m sad we all lost out as a result. There was a different person we didn’t get to meet. As a young woman after World War Two she had worked in textiles and gone on photoshoots around Europe. She showed me the picture spreads when she babysat. I was inspired and ultimately it steeled my determination not to spend my life working for a bank after college graduation. It’s part of what spurred me to scrap my way into the good graces of a talented photographer, persuade him to take me on as his assistant, and quit the bank. I didn’t look back. A good friend of mine also died in my early twenties, but that’s another story for another time.
I learned a lesson from my Aunty Kathleen, to grab life and live it. Even when one has been through hurt. Also I learned that the English are mostly too reserved for our own good. It is one of the reasons I love living in New York, for the riotous expression of energy we feel here on a daily basis like an eruption from the high-pressure steam pipes under the city’s streets. Writing like living and loving is the result of a decision to express joy. Or at the very least, it is the result of your decision to express something. In that regard it’s deadly serious. No joke. No wonder it makes some of us so nervous.
Liebling, meanwhile, did not suffer from writer’s block. My friend Stuart knew the families of a couple of writers who worked with him at the New Yorker. Stuart told me about them as we ate a fine meal at the Grand Central oyster bar a few weeks ago. These New Yorker writers agonized over their work, Stuart said, while Liebling gleefully read his drafts to them aloud. It was very much “not done” and frowned upon, by his colleagues. Then he’d go off for an unapologetic long lunch. His belly was so protuberant he could balance a wine glass on it. And good for him. As a Jewish guy writing as the deepest horrors of the holocaust were emerging, he was expressing defiant joy. At least that’s how I imagine him seeing it. The book encapsulates the value of the written word.
I find myself having less energy as I see more of existence for holding things in reserve. That’s what this comes down to. So, whether it’s on the page or if you’re trying to decide whether to live large this Christmas? I insist. You deserve an extra helping. And as Dickens wrote for Tiny Tim and his reformed miser to conclude… “God bless us, everyone.”
