Anatomy of a Novel #12

Sometimes choosing which stories NOT to tell is the key to writing a compelling book

Takes away your breath. This tree was planted at Sho Fu Den over a 100 years ago.

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This picture was taken a few days ago. That tree was planted by Jokichi Takamine (actually, more likely by one of his many gardeners) almost 120 years ago. It was barely visible until we cleared away the dozens of pines and saplings that had sprouted up in a mad frenzy around it.

We killed a lot of growing things in order to give this beauty some space to breathe.

Sometimes you have to clear away perfectly “adequate” stuff to get at the hidden treasures beneath. This is how I’m thinking about my story this week: What needs to be trimmed away?

A fascination with how things used to be

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more and more fascinated by history. Writing my second novel, This Terrible Beauty, I spent hours upon hours on historical research, over many years: listening to the unusual sounds of Doodlebugs (V-1 bombs), studying pictures of Prora (the holiday camp Hitler was building on the Baltic Sea in the 1930s), looking up propaganda archives, analyzing women’s shoes.

Most of that never made it into the book, of course, but I loved sinking into the archives, trying to feel what it would have been like to live in that specific moment in time, in that specific place.

Now, with my novel about Sho Fu Den, there’s an embarrassment of riches in terms of actual history to draw upon. There are so many interesting stories about the house and the various people that owned it, the dramas and tragedies and joys that were experienced in that specific place over the last century.

But anecdotes and incidents and vignettes do not a novel make!

An embarrassment of riches

Sho Fu Den was turned into a stunning gilded palace by Takamine in 1905. When he died in 1922, no one wanted to buy it - it was far too expensive to maintain and the Depression was about to blow apart life in the US.

The famous theater director George Abbott (who owned a modest house in the neighborhood) declined to buy it. His niece, the choreographer Agnes de Mille played at Sho Fu Den when she was a child; she wrote about the Takamines and life at the house in her memoir, Where the Wings Grow.

John Moody (who founded Moody’s Investor Services) owned it for more than two decades. Moody was a multi-millionaire who threw fantastical fancy dress parties… he ended up converting to Catholicism and retreating to a remote cabin to study world history and religions, economics and literature.

This summer we were given what remains of his library!

Everyone has been looking for happiness, forever!

After the war, a local businessman named Melvin Osborn headed off to New York City to see Moody about some land… and instead, he came back with the deed to Sho Fu Den. When visiting us this summer his son Chet told us his father simply announced one day that the family now owned a “palace.”

Osborn had an organ installed on the balcony over the Main Hall and played it thunderously. According to the caretaker at the time, dozens of extension cords snaked across the floorboards, ready to spark fires at any moment. A “gun room” was full of mounted animal heads and lockboxes. Once a year the deck boards and the roof tiles were repainted “Chinese red.”

When Osborn tried to monetize Sho Fu Den by turning it into a restaurant, he was hit with a devastating lawsuit. He built tennis courts and trout ponds, but over the years the house and the land got to be too much to handle. The place was slowly rotting away and always freezing cold… and he adored it.

After he died, the first thing his wife did was get rid of the organ.

For the next few summers she lived alone in a single room in this gigantic, moldering place. Her only son, Chet, lived far away. It was the 1970s and she had never learned to drive.

There is no real arc to that history, is there? Each episode is fascinating, but it fails to tell a coherent story.

A documentary on cold fusion

Last night I watched the first episode of a Netflix documentary that had me riveted - “Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War.” It told the story of the race to develop the atom bomb and the decision to drop it - twice - on Japan.

Earlier I mentioned the years I spent researching East Germany and the Cold War. The protagonist of This Terrible Beauty - an ordinary German woman living on an island in the Baltic - finds her life forever changed after WWII when the Russians take control of part of her homeland.

What happens to “ordinary” people in circumstances like that? Do they just give up? How do you - as one unexceptional human being - fight against an inexorable tide of evil (especially evil which was initially well meaning)?

So I suppose it’s not surprising that I’m finding it hard to let go of my interest in Takamine and how his family’s story reflects or defies the complex relationship between the Japanese and Americans.

I mean, can you imagine what it was like living as a Japanese person in New York when there was almost no one who looked like you anywhere? When the anti-immigration act - specifically targeting Asians - was enacted in 1924? And then imagine trying to manage a Japanese villa in 1945 after Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Japan!

There are many such stories of course - of being othered, and of surviving the experience or succumbing to it. The struggle is current.

I am simply fascinated by how people with little or no agency attempt to assert themselves against all odds as human beings who are worthy of freedom and respect.

Sometimes it’s about what you leave out

John Moody; a train ticket; George Abbott; the Catskills in the 1950s; Agnes De Mille and her memoir

Theoretically it shouldn’t be so very hard to shift my plot away from the Japanese angle. There are so many avenues from which I can approach a story about this extraordinary place.

AND YET…

I’m not writing a nonfiction book. I have ideas about how I could pull that off, but that’s not what I want to do.

I want to write a book in which this house has a voice. A house that has Japanese bones and American blood.

What I’m looking for now is how to create a new imaginary narrative that fits my conception of my protagonist, Bea. For me, she is so real - too real - and her story is already tied up with the Takamine twin boys. To change that in my mind is remarkably hard.

What is her new destiny? Is it the same destiny but a different path toward it?