A shorter version of this essay appeared in the New York Times on July 19, 1999
Edited and arranged by Robert Friedman
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think what it might be. In running the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms. Ideally, the runner who's a writer is running through the land- and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting.
There must be some analogue between running and dreaming. The dreaming mind is usually bodiless, has peculiar powers of locomotion and, in my experience at least, often runs or glides or ''flies'' along the ground or in the air. (Leaving aside the blunt, deflating theory that dreams are merely compensatory: you fly in sleep because in life you crawl, barely; you're soaring above others in sleep because in life others soar above you.)
Possibly these fairy-tale feats of locomotion are atavistic remnants, the hallucinatory memory of a distant ancestor for whom the physical being, charged with adrenaline in emergency situations, was indistinguishable from the spiritual or intellectual. In running, ''spirit'' seems to pervade the body; as musicians experience the uncanny phenomenon of tissue memory in their fingertips, so the runner seems to experience in feet, lungs, quickened heartbeat, an extension of the imagining self.
The structural problems I set for myself in writing, in a long, snarled, frustrating and sometimes despairing morning of work, for instance, I can usually unsnarl by running in the afternoon.
On days when for one reason or another I am not able to get out to run (or even walk) I don't feel altogether ''myself''; and whoever the ''self'' is I feel, I don't like nearly so much as the other. And the writing remains tangled in endless revisions.
Writers and poets are famous for loving to be in motion. If not running, hiking; if not hiking, walking.
The English Romantic poets were clearly inspired by their long walks, in all weather: Wordsworth and Coleridge in the idyllic Lake District, for instance; Shelley (''I always go on until I am stopped and I never am stopped'') in his four intense years in Italy.
The New England Transcendentalists, most famously Henry David Thoreau, were ceaseless walkers; Thoreau boasted of having ''traveled a good deal in Concord,'' and in his eloquent essay ''Walking'' acknowledged that he had to spend more than four hours out of doors daily, in motion; otherwise he felt ''as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for.''
My favorite prose on the subject is Charles Dickens's ''Night Walks,'' which he wrote some years after having suffered extreme insomnia that propelled him out into the London streets at night. Written with his usual brilliance, this haunting essay seems to hint at more than its words reveal. Dickens associates his terrible night restlessness with what he calls ''houselessness'': under a compulsion to walk and walk and walk in the darkness and pattering rain. (No one has captured the romance of desolation, the ecstasy of near-madness, more forcibly than Dickens, so wrongly interpreted as a dispenser of popular, softhearted tales.)
It isn't surprising that Walt Whitman should have tramped impressive distances, for you can feel the pulse beat of the walker in his slightly breathless, incantatory poems. But it may be surprising to learn that Henry James, whose prose style more resembles the fussy intricacies of crocheting than the fluidity of movement, also loved to walk for miles in London.
I, too, walked (and ran) for miles in London years ago. Much of it in Hyde Park. Regardless of weather. Living for a sabbatical year with my husband Ray Smith, an English professor, in a corner of Mayfair overlooking Speakers' Corner, I was so afflicted with homesickness for America, and for Detroit, I ran compulsively; not as a respite for the intensity of writing but as a function of writing.
As I ran, I was running in Detroit, envisioning the city's parks and streets, avenues and expressways, with such eidetic clarity I had only to transcribe them when I returned to our flat, recreating Detroit in my novel Do With Me What You Will as I'd recreated Detroit in Them when I was actually living in Detroit.
What a curious experience! Without running I don't believe I could have written the novel; yet how perverse to be living in one of the world's most beautiful cities, London, and to be dreaming of one of the world's most problematic cities, Detroit. But of course, as no one will be surprised to learn, writers are not reasonable persons.
Each of us, we like to think, in their own inimitable way.
Both running and writing are highly addictive activities; both are, for me, inextricably bound up with consciousness. I can't recall a time when I wasn't running, and I can't recall a time when I wasn't writing.
(Before I could write what might be called human words in the English language I eagerly emulated adults' handwriting in pencil scribbles. My first ''novels''—which for decades my loving parents kept in a trunk or a drawer on our old farm property in Millersport, N.Y. to show to journalists who turned up there occasionally—were tablets of inspired scribbles illustrated by line drawings of chickens, horses, cats on their hind legs. For I had not yet mastered the trickier human form, as I was years from mastering human psychology.
(What were those early, pre-literate “novels” of mine about? Even I could not decode them a few years later. Such energies driving childhood creativity suggest that our deepest urges to create are instinctive, not for purposes of career, or to make money, or even to impress our peers. A child writes, draws, sings, dances about thrillingly—just because.)
My earliest outdoor memories have to do with the special solitude of running or hiking in our pear and apple orchards, through fields of wind-rustling corn towering over my head, along farmers' lanes and on bluffs above the Tonawanda Creek; on the banks of the creek were paths made by fishermen, often through dense underbrush whose thorns tore at my clothing and raised bleeding welts on my bare legs. Through childhood and beyond I hiked, roamed, prowled about, tirelessly explored the countryside: neighboring farms, a treasure trove of old barns, abandoned houses and forbidden properties of all kinds, some of them presumably dangerous, like cisterns and wells covered with loose boards lacking the warning signs we would probably see today: DANGER.
These activities are intimately bound up with storytelling, for invariably there was a ghost-self, a ''fictitious'' self, waiting in such settings. That someone had once lived in an abandoned house intrigued me immensely—I was fascinated to imagine who this might have been, walking on a rotted staircase, staring out a second-floor window. I would come to realize that any form of art is a kind of exploration and transgression. (I never saw a DANGER: NO TRESPASSING sign that wasn’t a summons to me, to hurry right in; such signs dotting the countryside, on trees, fences, barns might as well have been WELCOME!)
It was an era in America that ended, for many, in the later years of the 20th century when parents grew more protective of their children; in some quarters sensibly, in others somewhat excessively. Yet I am sure that in many parts of the United States, beyond cities and suburbs, there are rural children and teenagers who continue to explore without dire consequences.
To write is to invade another's space, to trespass, if only to memorialize it. To write is to invite angry censure from those who don't write, or who don't write in quite the way you do, for whom you may seem a threat. Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it—at least certain sorts of artists, at certain times. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.
If writing involves punishment, at least for some of us, the act of running even in adulthood can evoke painful memories of having been, long ago, as children, chased by tormentors. (Is there any adult who hasn't such memories? Are there any adult women who have not been, in one way or another, sexually threatened or molested?) That adrenaline rush, like an injection to the heart!
I attended a one-room country schoolhouse in which eight very disparate grades were taught by a single overworked woman. The teasing, pummeling, pinching, punching, mauling, kicking and verbal abuse that surrounded the relative sanctuary of the schoolhouse simply had to be endured, for in those days there were no protective laws against such mistreatment. This was a laissez-faire era in which a man might beat his wife and children with impunity, as long as his actions were restricted to the interior of his house; except in cases of serious injury or death, police officers would rarely intervene in what is now called “domestic violence.”
Often when I'm running in the most idyllic landscapes—in Berkeley or even in Princeton/Hopewell/Rocky Hill where I am most likely to run/walk today—I am reminded of the panicked childhood running of decades ago. Not a joyful running toward but a desperate running away. I was one of those luckless children without older brothers or sisters to protect them against the systematic cruelty of older classmates, thus fair game. I don't believe I was singled out (because my grades were high, for instance), and I came to see years later that such abuse is generic, not personal. It must prevail through the species; it allows us insight into the experiences of others, a sense of what a more enduring panic, entrapment, suffering and despair must be truly like.
Between the lines of printed words in my books are the settings in which the books were imagined and without which the books could not exist. Sometime in 1985, for instance, running along the Delaware River south of Yardley, Pa., I glanced up and saw the ruins of a railroad bridge and experienced in a flash such a vivid, visceral memory of crossing a footbridge beside a similar railroad trestle high above the Erie Canal in Lockport, N.Y., when I was 12 to 14 years old, that I saw the possibility of a novel. This would become You Must Remember This, originally titled The Green Island, set in a mythical upstate New York town very like the original.
Yet often the reverse occurs: I find myself running in a place so intriguing to me, amid houses, or the backs of houses, so mysterious, I'm drawn to write about these sights, to bring them to life (as it's said) in fiction. I am mesmerized by places in which people have lived. Nothing is so fascinating to me as gardens tended by homeowners—the less cultivated, the more fascinating. Much of my writing is an effort to combat homesickness for I am often—through my adult life, to this very moment—susceptible to the half-pleasurable melancholy of nostalgia, which is a kind of homesickness. The settings my characters inhabit are as crucial to me as the characters themselves. I am not capable of writing even a very short story without vividly ''seeing'' what its characters see, though I may not include these descriptions in my writing.
Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments. Running seems to allow me an expanded consciousness in which I can envision what I'm writing as a film or a dream. I rarely invent at the typewriter but only just recall what I've experienced while in motion. My early drafts are quickly scribbled notes in what is quaintly called “longhand”—often entire stories or chapters sketched out on vertically folded sheets of paper. After a while, I take these notes to my laptop and begin the process of transcribing, impossible for me without the handwritten notes.
I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on a page but as the embodiment of a vision beyond language: a complex of emotions, raw experience, difficult to capture as a dream is difficult to capture in words.
The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort. Running is a meditation; more practicably it allows me to scroll through, in my mind's eye, the pages I've just written, proofreading for errors and improvements.
My method is one of continuous revision. While writing a long novel, every day I loop back to earlier sections to rewrite, in order to maintain a consistent, fluid voice. When I write the final two or three chapters of a novel I write them simultaneously with the rewriting of the opening, so that, ideally at least, the novel is like a river uniformly flowing, each passage concurrent with all the others. Tone is all.
My longest novel is Blonde (2000), originally more than 1,200 typed pages. How many miles of running this represents! In the last year or two of the 20th century, at a time when my beloved father Frederic Oates was terminally ill, his real-life ordeal was parallel with the “historic” ordeal of my fated Blond Actress, Marilyn Monroe.
My novel Breathe (2021) was written soon after the death of my second husband Charlie Gross, in 2019, and contains many episodes of running, hiking, breathless motion. Like many an individual tormented by life as by enraged hornets while writing these novels in particular I ran, ran, ran.
Dreams may be temporary flights into madness that, by some law of neurophysiology unclear to us, keep us from actual madness. So, too, the twin activities of running and writing keep the writer reasonably sane and with the hope, however illusory and temporary, of control.
Whatever is in motion comes to a halt—eventually. But it’s to be hoped that the products of such motion endure for a while longer.
Life we’ve loved fleet-
ing bleeding rush-
ing away caught
safe, embraced &
embalmed in the art
of the book.
thank you, Bernard! a marathon at any age is quite a challenge-- beyond most of us. this is very inspiring. my late husband (Charlie Gross) also took up marathon running at 60 & ran & completed two NYC marathons. he spoke of the camaraderie of the runners & the encouragement of bystanders in every neighborhood the runners ran through. it was a thrilling accomplishment though he ran at no more than the average speed. everyone who finished was accorded respect & applause. good luck-- Joyce
very interesting. thank you,
Joyce