Bridge Work

In 1963, a supremely silly movie called It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World had a group of comically competitive treasure-hunters searching for a cache of $350,000 that they all knew lay buried under a “big W”. What was that “W”? We, in the audience, saw long before the characters that the letter was formed (totally inane spoiler alert) by four very tall, conveniently slanted, palm trees.

Giggles were meant to be induced by this in-your-face dramatic irony. The characters run around a town and repeatedly fail to see what we, the viewers, can see plainly.

Happens all the time.

As visitors from the website may know, I am currently working on a book of medieval history. The action takes place in and around the year 1300, in Carcassonne, France. Now, the primary duty of a writer, long before anything else, is to produce something readable. Duh. And for a writer of non-fiction for a general readership, it’s got to be somehow compelling, to keep the reader interested even as she or he is being informed.

You can’t just list the facts, memo style, and expect anyone to stay awake.

I recently went back to an early chapter of the draft manuscript and saw that I had done just that. It was awful. A succession of snoring paragraphs.

My humiliation was heightened by the fact that the material was interesting. What I needed to convey was that my hero, a fellow named Bernard Délicieux, had to contend with three types of people who would not have been around, say, 100 years earlier. He had, in other words, to deal with the changed circumstances of the year 1300.

These people were: i) obstreperous, literate, seditious, take-no-shit townspeople and traders ii) fanatical, ferociously intelligent inquisitors drawn from the Dominican and Franciscan orders of friars iii) unscrupulous, hyperliterate, anticlerical, litigious, Karl-Rovian operatives of the French king.

What I had done resembled the paragraph above (with slightly more formal language, of course). I’d dutifully taken each group in its turn, talked about the year of such-and-such being founded, given names of particular famous individuals with brief bio squibs, recited facts and factoids, quoted a few primary and secondary sources… the usual.

And it read like a shopping list. I am interested enough in the subject to write a book about it, but even I couldn’t stomach it.

I spent a few days staring at my fish tank, cooking a little, reading books for other chapters, looking at notes, talking to myself, drinking beer, going on very long bike rides.

The rides at least got me away from the apartment. I leave my building then cross a bridge spanning an expressway. A brief moment in a park, then over another bridge, adjacent to an noisy interstate bridge crossing an estuary. The trail continues along the east side of a bay. There are different stretches to which I have given my own private names – Hill of Death, Riverside Drive, Fallopian Straightaway, Voldemort’s Cottage, Milf Alley, etc. – but my favorite part of the ride is The Bridges of Hungover Fishermen. This is in Warren, Rhode Island – two broad, successive pedestrian bridges over the two mouths of a divided inlet. There is always a congregation of all types of people with their fishing poles (and some of them are definitely hungover) on these bridges, casually chatting as out in the bay about a zillion sailboats lie at anchor.

I usually stop there and take in the scene. Man, I like those bridges.

There’s movement, there’s life.

It feels like a narrative, I thought, even though it isn’t one.

Bing! The big W.

Back at the books, I reread about the great come-together event of the year 1300: the Jubilee held in Rome. People from all over Europe came to it. Hundreds of thousands.

And if they came from the north, as my French friends of Bernard had to have done, on arriving in Rome they would have crossed… a bridge.

The Ponte St. Angelo.

Several chroniclers mention it -- the crowds and the very unmedieval traffic cops making everyone coming and going keep to the correct side of the bridge.

Dante, for god’s sake, satirizes it in the Inferno, having pimps and whores imitate the pilgrims to Rome by keeping up pedestrian discipline on a bridge… in Hell.

Jubilee, Dante, everyone there, the year 1300, traders, friars, king’s men, movement, life, a narrative that is not a narrative…

I tore up the chapter and made everyone cross that bridge. The same serial introductions are made, but they are now placed in a context, a historical true-to-life context where there are sights and smells and sounds. With the feeling of a narrative.

And I have Dante to back me up.

You don’t get that in a memo.

(Now, let's just hope it works.)