Fox on the Shore

182 July 31, 1997 Acouple of days ago I became completely fed up with the novel I’ve been trying to write and decided to cut trees instead. This I have been doing with much greater satisfaction. Landscaping on the large scale. I do like and need physical labor, more than I get at home by far. When I am crawling into a thicket on Prince Edward Island with loppers and saw in hand, and twigs are scratching my face and spruce needles are going down my neck and mosquitoes are whining in my ears, I remind myself that this is fun, this is the kind of situation I get my characters into, and then it is fun. It reminds me of childhood, the sorts of games I would play with myself, about exploration, secret places, and so on. Have done a good deal of clearing (creating view of the Northumberland Strait in a direction not facing the damn nine-milelong bridge to New Brunswick) and have thrown a very respectable quantity of brush over the bank into a giant pile on the shore, where we will burn it when the wind is right. Spruce trees, green or not, make a hell of a bonfire. As for my book, I continue to say Screw it. If even I am not motivated to write it, who would read it? I know certain scenes are worth reading, and there are certain good lines, but maybe this thing was not destined to be a novel and I am just trying to make it into one out of habit. And even if it is one, you can’t make a novel out of good lines. So I put away all the visible pieces of paper connected to the book, took down all the passages from Hélène Cixous pushpinned to the shed walls, even took away the smartest phrase up there, which was a line that I think was about Proust: “the time between habits.” When seeing “the time between habits” has become a habit, it’s time to take it down. Fox on the Shore Lowry Pei @ 183 Lowry Pei There must be a certain kind of erotic attraction to writing a book, or it won’t be any good. In my experience. Forestry continues. Cutting spruces small enough to be cut off with a pair of loppers, so that I won’t have to cut them in the future with a chain saw. It makes a lot of sense. Throwing them, once cut, into high stands of bayberry or into woods or clumps of trees to get them out of the way. After I did this long enough to get hot and tired, you couldn’t tell I had done anything—unless you knew—but it will make a difference one day. Then hauled off more brush from previous days’ efforts, also put in some shelves in Vaughn’s shed, soon to be her studio. Hot and still today, unusual for Prince Edward Island, a very sweaty day to haul brush. As my big pile on the shore sits and dries in the sun, the bonfire promises to be spectacular. I would say I have about enough cut brush and trees to fill a small swimming pool. August 3 On Friday I got a phone call telling me that my brother, Landis, died. He was my mother’s first child by her first marriage, so he was my halfbrother to be exact. He was partly the model for Aaron, the mentally retarded brother, in my aborted book, but there were a lot of unappetizing aspects of Aaron that weren’t based on Landis. Landis was simultaneously like a boy—from the back he looked like a boy of about ten—and a little old man, and he acted like both depending on the context. He was retarded but he wasn’t stupid, which sounds strange but is the most accurate way to describe him. He had a virtually perfect memory for directions, could find almost any place he’d been to before (not that you’d want him to drive the car), and possessed a good deal of social intelligence of...