In 2012 I decamped Los Angeles after nearly three, mostly barbarous and humiliating, decades struggling to find a foothold as a writer and indie filmmaker. I had an opportunity to travel to the country of Chile to research and write a novel. I impetuously decided to give up my apartment in Santa Monica and flee that gridlocked megalopolis that had inflicted so much pain, as well as fleeting moments of great exaltation, and discover some place new. But, I had a problem. I had boxes and boxes of my writings and films and putting them in storage was going to be expensive. My alma mater, the University of California San Diego (UCSD), had once offered to take my archives and now was the opportune time to take them up on their offer. I dashed off an email to the director of Special Collections & Archives.
Aspiring writers and fans of my novel Sideways ask me all the time: “Where do you get your ideas?” I usually inhale deeply and then, exhaling slowly, reply, “Life. Real life.” This, of course, is only part of the abstruse occupation of writing. We all live life, real life, but we don’t all glimpse ideas for a work of fiction in it, and not everyone knows what to extract from experience and what is and isn’t worth mining. There is an unquantifiable mystery to it, something ineffable I have difficulty explaining. But when I’m asked about the inspiration for my new novel The Archivist, a tragic love story swaddled in the shroud of, ultimately, a murder mystery, I have a one word answer: Emotion. Here’s that narrative journey:
In late 2012 I and a friend, caravanning in two cars, drove over fifty boxes of my writings and films to a loading dock at the base of UCSD’s Geisel Library—one of Brutalism’s most iconic monuments!—where it was bound for their Special Collections & Archives. Two facility guys who manhandled the bankers boxes like they couldn’t care less what was in them, lifted and carried all fifty of them to a service elevator and to God knows where. My life’s work was whisked away to some unknown destination. Okay, that’s that, I thought. Free at last. The yoke has been unclamped from my neck.
I returned from Chile and settled into La Jolla for the opening of my Sideways play at La Jolla Playhouse, serendipitously located on the campus of my alma mater. Nine months after I had turned over my papers, the library held a Faculty Club dinner for me to talk about the staging of my play and to honor Special Collections & Archives opening of the Rex Pickett Papers to the public. I was so swept up in all the drama—both on stage, and off!—surrounding my play I hadn’t given much thought to the “Rex Pickett Papers.”
The Faculty Club dinner was sold out, 300 attendees, some recognizable professors of my past. Onstage, I was interviewed by an esteemed professor of Literature. At one point, he asked me how it felt to have my life’s work taken by Special Collections and know it was now preserved and standing alongside other luminaries from various fields and disciplines. In my typically self-deprecating and sarcastic manner I quipped: “Well, it’s cheaper than Public Storage.” There was scattered, nervous, laughter that took me a little off guard. Part of me wasn’t joking. Where were those boxes anyway?
When the event concluded, Sideways fans converged on me at the podium thrusting out their copies of my novel to be autographed, which I, as always, graciously obliged. Moving her way closer to me was this beautiful, honey-haired woman in her late thirties. When she had finally elbowed her way to the front she extended her hand and said bluntly, “Hi, I’m Kate. I’m your archivist.”
At that moment the world stopped. Someone had turned off the volume. I couldn’t see anyone but Kate. Everyone else clamoring for an autograph had suddenly gone out of focus. Her words, for some inexplicable reason, hit me like a curare-tipped dart. I was stunned, nonplussed.
“You’re my archivist?” I stammered.
“Yes. I’m the one who processed your collection.” She fixed me with a steely, blue-eyed gaze and wouldn’t let go.
“And I had thought someone with a black Sharpie had scrawled PICKETT across those fifty boxes I dropped off a year go and stacked them in a repository,” I joked. The nervous laughter of the audience started to make sense.
“No,” she said, smiling wryly, no doubt assuming I knew nothing about what she did, what she had done, what someone in the archival profession even does. “Would you like to come and see your collection?” she asked.
Two days later I met Kate in Special Collections & Archives, on the first floor of an eight-story library I had spent so many lonely hours immured in reading Kafka and the canon of great literature on empty floors gridded with shelves and shelves of books. Now, decades later, the floors were streaming with students. The university had swelled from two colleges and an enrollment of 5,000 to six colleges and 40,000.
Kate met me outside Special Collections & Archives. In the foyer she found me bewitched by two large display cases featuring memorabilia pulled from my collection, items which Kate had personally chosen and artfully arranged: faded photos of me and my ex-wife on the set of the two indie feature films we had suffered ten years together making; sample manuscript pages of Sideways and other works of mine; movie posters and other collectables of past glories and ignominies. It hit me suddenly: one day I had moved from San Diego to L.A. to pursue, against my parents’ vehement wishes, a low-percentage dream to realize a career as a writer/filmmaker in tow with five boxes of writing. Three decades later I had returned with fifty boxes, no children, no wife anymore, just a play about to have its opening night and the beginnings of a new novel titled Sideways 3: Chile.
After prying me away from the display cases, Kate escorted me into Special Collections, a kind of inviolable inner chamber to the massive library, and led me to her office. It was a nondescript cubicle with shoulder-high dividers. She opened a hand and invited me to sit down. She could tell I was visibly moved by the display. I tried to explain to her the emotions that were gathering stormily inside me. All the years, all the suffering, all the hours at the typewriter and then the computer, all the loneliness and despair, heartache, hopes, dreams, broken promises … I raised a hand to my mouth to stanch the tears, now beyond assuaging or cautery. All these tumultuous emotions converging on me were pooled in the cavern of my work. They existed nowhere else. No one really knew me. Some knew eras of my various artistic endeavors, but not the totality of what I had lived. And now a light had been shone on them and they were coming back to life, in a rush, all at once, in a great flash flood across a barren plain.
“I have some questions for you about your collection,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, nodding.
“Who’s Irv Tons?”
I looked at her quizzically.
Kate produced a manila folder with an inch or more of typewritten manuscript pages and reached it across the room to me.
I took the manuscript from her and glanced at the first few pages. My face colored red. “Uh, when I was twenty or so,” I hobbled into an explanation, “I wrote a porno novel and Irv Tons was my pseudonym.” I looked up at her, embarrassed by the salacity of what I had written and she had no doubt read. She was smiling. “How deep did you go into those boxes?” I inquired disquietingly, it hitting me all of a sudden what an archivist did, that I had given over all my personal longings and dreams, rantings and ravings, failures and successes, and the deepest inner thoughts to a person, an individual with feelings and thoughts all her own.
“I read everything,” she replied unhesitatingly and unapologetically.
I widened my eyes histrionically. “Everything?” What must she think of me? I wondered in horror.
“Well, not every draft of every screenplay and novel, but all the correspondence, all the journals.”
I nodded, widened my eyes even wider, if that was possible. “How long did you spend working on my collection.”
“Almost half a year.”
My head jolted backward in shock. “Half a year?”
Kate, the archivist, nodded solemnly, and I registered her own emotions at finishing the project, almost as if for her it was like a play closing and the sadness that inevitably ensues.
“You know me better than I do,” I declared, not joking.
She shrugged. “Maybe.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. I didn’t know what an archivist did. I didn’t know an archivist would be assigned to my collection and then invest all this time …” I looked up at her and met her blinking eyes. “You’re like my … eavesdropping angel.”
She smiled at the lyrical compliment.
I was still in a state of shock. To learn that someone, one person, an educated person, with a literary sensibility, had been assigned my collection and combed through those fifty boxes with an assiduous eye to detail, read things I hadn’t read in years, caused me to feel a sudden closeness to her, a deep and ineffable affinity.
“Would you like to see the Rex Pickett Papers now?”
I followed Kate through a security door that had to be opened with the swipe of a special key card. It seemed like we descended down a floor, but Kate later corrected me that we didn’t, but, as a writer, as a tiller of the imagination, I like to imagine that we did. Under dimly-lit fluorescent lights, in a temperature-controlled environment that felt cold in my short-sleeve shirt, Kate led me to the Stacks, a large, windowless room crammed floor-to-ceiling with rows and rows of shelving lined with pewter-gray document boxes.
Kate opened a hand. “This is where the Rex Pickett Papers live. And will live forever,” she said matter-of-factly, though to me it sounded like an epitaph.
Live forever. My eyes traveled along two shelves of four-inch thick document boxes identified by meticulously typewritten labels affixed to their spines. They were uniformly beautiful. I drew a hand to my mouth and blinked back tears. “Everything I’ve ever done,” I murmured in a quavering voice. Next to some of the boxes were stacked cannisters of my films—a lot of heartbreak there! I circled my fingertips around their edges, the memories rising up through the fissures in my unconscious. Did she know the suffering these works had engendered? Of course she did. She had read all my journals where I had poured out my heart and soul in diaristic chronicles of that selfsame suffering!
If I have learned one thing from the people I have come across in my life is that they all share a similar desire: they want to be known; they want to be remembered; they don’t want this life of theirs to be something ephemeral and forgotten. Who on their deathbed doesn’t want someone there holding their hand and looking into their fading, rheumy eyes and not know you, an impersonal moment before you wave goodbye to the known world? But to have someone who knows you, deep down in the entrails of your soul, knows you through and through even better than you can know yourself because you’ve lost all objectivity on who you are, who you have become, this has to be the dream goodbye. And this archivist Kate, with her penetrating sapphire-blue eyes, knew me, and knew what I was feeling. She hadn’t lived my life, but she had charted its course, organized it chronologically and project-specifically. What I immaturely presumed to be the lost continent of my life’s sole output stored in a dark repository had been brought back to life by this woman standing next to me. This is what an archive is to the naïve donor: an ocean of pure feeling, a sorrow beyond dreams.
“This is just so overwhelming,” I finally said in a voice battling back tears. “I didn’t know …” I broke off, overcome by another wave of emotion.
“As archivists we don’t often get to meet the donor,” Kate confided, keeping her tone professionally out of reach of my tumultuous emotions. “Often they’re dead. Or don’t much care what it is we do, just so long as we get it done.”
“Are you kidding me?” I shook my head in bewilderment. “This is incontrovertibly one of the greatest moments of my life, this work that you’ve done, so lovingly, so painstakingly, immortalized in these boxes, and to think … to think you know me better than anyone in the world …” I squeezed my eyes shut and could feel tears leech in rivulets down both sides of my face, astonishment at the rows of boxes of my writings foundering any attempt to regain composure.
*
Thus was born, in that powerfully profound moment, The Archivist. An emotion so formidable had gripped me and I knew then and there I had no choice but to plumb its fictional world and the fictional characters to bring it to life. In that moment my character fell deeply in love with the fictional archivist who had processed my collection. It’s a man, a writer, like me, who meets someone who knows him to the core of his being and rekindles a fire in his jaded soul, I started ideating madly. Their love hoists him to cloud-obscured heights of creative expression. But, of course, something has to go tragically wrong. And, of course, someone has to right those wrongs, and thus was born the young project archivist Emily Snow who becomes the driving protagonist who stumbles upon this great, tragic love.
In the writing of The Archivist, Kate collaborated with me on a big, sprawling novel whose seed was sown in that moment in the Stacks. I offered her a co-credit for her invaluable contribution, but she wouldn’t take it. Had she not come to the Faculty Club dinner—and she only found out about it at the last moment!—had she not had the nerve to invite me to her office and vouchsafe me a personal guided tour of where my papers were kept, The Archivist never would have been born. I never would have even had the idea, an idea that pullulated and grew and became something deeper, psychologically and emotionally, than anything I had ever written before. Unwittingly, Kate, the seemingly anonymous archivist who processed my work, and who got to know me intimately through my work, gave me the coruscation of an idea that began with being so emotionally overwhelmed that I knew if I did not find its fictional equivalent I would be forever haunted by its absence. Kate is no longer anonymous, and I now can say I know what an archivist does.
To be known and loved and cared for in that way, no matter how much I may be embellishing and exaggerating now, is the genesis, in my opinion, of all enduringly great fiction. That emotion becomes the narrative spine, and with it you’re in freefall to its inexorability. Like a stretch of river at night, all you have to do, as a writer, in thrall to the emotion, is set your innertube into the waters and float downstream to the delta where it must, also inevitably, end. But, unlike that river, a book immortalizes that emotion. And now The Archivist, the book and all its drafts, will be in The Rex Pickett Papers, too, an alchemical distillation, if you will, of everything that had come before it, a meta-item of the archive itself, that still powerful emotion resonating in me as I write this, a creature preserved in amber, impervious to the ravages of time.
***
