The Present and the Past and the Present

Quick Things Passing

Penobscot, 1999, Alex Katz. © Alex Katz. Tate.

This winter, I visited the Alex Katz exhibit at the Guggenheim. I had known Katz’s work, of course, but this was the first time I had seen an exhibit of his work and learned more about his interests and obsessions. I’m particularly taken with his images from Maine, and I was thrilled to learn that he has long been interested in exploring the present tense in painting.

Across eight decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) has sought to capture visual experience in the present tense. “Eternity exists in minutes of absolute awareness,” Katz stated in 1961. “Painting, when successful, seems to be a synthetic reflection of this condition.” Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of “quick things passing,” compressing the flux of everyday life into a vivid burst of optical perception.

I love this, because I am also fascinated by the present tense. There’s a way that I feel more in the moment as I write, as though everything that happens is happening right then and there, at that very second that the words are hitting the page. There’s no retrospection, there’s no question of memory, there’s no need to consider how much time has passed. The story is unfolding as it is being written. It feels alive. It feels electric.

I often write about the past, and to write about the past in the past tense feels as though it pushes the story even farther back in time, farther away from the present moment. Using the present tense to write about the past, though, helps to bring it closer, to make it more relevant. This thing that happened back then is suddenly taking place right now. It’s fresh and alive but it also makes the connection between the past and the present more visible. Yes, this happened fifty years ago or two hundred years ago but look how it’s connected to the contemporary moment, too. Consider what is different, what has changed, but also see how things have stayed the same. The use of the present tense in writing about the past helps us to see that, I think; it helps us to understand the links between the past and the present.

For my debut novel Beyond That, the Sea, which has eight point-of-view narrators and spans over 30 years, I knew I needed to move quickly, and I needed to be brief.  Present tense felt like the right tool to use in order to accomplish those goals. I began writing in present tense, in pieces that I called “moments.” Rather than chapters, each character is exploring a moment in time. Sometimes these moments are very brief—a few paragraphs—and other times they extend to a few pages. I thought of these moments as memories in the making: in the present tense, they’re not yet memories but one day they will be. They’re not necessarily the big moments either, just as our memories are not always of the things that we think we will remember. We may not remember the vows at the wedding ceremony, but we may recall the way the bottom button on the wedding dress was not entirely secured. We may not remember saying goodbye, but we may still smell the boxwood that lined the front walk as we walked away.

I began writing the novel sequentially, moving from one character to the next, jumping forward in time; the first part of the novel covers 1940 to 1945, and the present tense allowed me to move quickly and easily. Earlier drafts had been written in the past tense and I realized then that using the past tense simply hadn’t worked—there’s a weight, I think, that comes with that choice. Present tense felt more freeing to me, and it was—dare I say it?—fun to write.

But when I got to the middle of the book, I knew something had to change. For years, I had known that the middle of the book would occur in 1951 and focus on two of the characters, who are together for only a few days. I wanted this part to feel very different from the rest of the book and writing in the past tense, rather than the present, was one way of making that happen. The narrative of the few days that these two characters spend together are stories that they will tell themselves for the rest of their lives, and so it made sense to use the past tense. For those characters, this will end up being a story from and about the past.

This part of the novel pings back and forth from one point-of-view to the other. With the past tense, I was able to move through time, to think about how the story was narrated, to consider how their memories might have shaped and altered and reframed the events that happened. How their retrospection becomes part of the story. It was interesting how the use of the past tense was somehow correlated with a difficult part of the novel to write. It felt heavier and more complicated and, I think that was because it needed to be: the form fit the function.

The third and final part of the novel jumps forward in time and covers another five year period (1960-1965) with seven point-of-view characters—and I returned to the present tense. Again, it felt freeing, as though a weight had been lifted. It was exciting to write, to see which character would step forward and pick up the microphone, to see where that person would be in time. The three characters who had been teens in the 1940’s were now adults, and it was fascinating to learn who they had become.

I think the novel benefits from the tense change in the middle. We see that part as different and distinct, and it serves as a hinge between the beginning and the end. Using both the past and the present tense also underscores the way in which this is a novel about time, a novel that moves through time, a novel that considers the ripple effects of a decision made before the book even begins.

A number of readers have commented that they didn’t want the novel to end, and I think that, too, has something to do with the use of the present tense. The characters are alive. They are in the moment. They are still talking and thinking and breathing at the end of the novel. It is a story set in the past, but told in the present, and the present tense allows us to believe that their story continues, even after we have turned that final page.

Ocean View, 1992, Alex Katz. © Alex Katz. Tate.