Nathan’s autobiographical short stories have upset his family, particularly his father, who believes they show American-Jewish family life in a bad light and confirm the worst stereotypes of Jews.  It is 1956 and Nathan is writing in the shadow of the Holocaust.  His family is offended by his telling of their internal feuds, portraying them as “conniving Jews,” confirming the worst stereotypes held by Gentiles.  They enlist a respected member of their community, a judge no less, for his opinion.  Nathan receives a letter from the judge asking him, among other things,  “If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?”  Strong stuff.  Nathan, however, is devoted more than anything to truthfulness and art and refuses to take responsibility for the feelings of his family and to take on the weight of history which they are trying to impose upon him.

Estranged from his father, he seeks out a substitute in one Emanual Lonoff, a successful, middle-aged Jewish-American writer.  Citing his published stories and his magazine profile, he writes to Lonoff,  inviting himself because he happens to be in the neighborhood staying at a writer’s colony in upstate New York.  His girlfriend has left him, his family questioning his morals, he seeks the approval from a spiritual father, a fellow writer.  He gets far more than he bargained for.

Lonoff lives a quiet life in The Berkshires with his wife of thirty-five years, Hope.  Also visiting on the same weekend as Nathan is is the beautiful but mysterious Amy Bellette, Lonoff’s former student.  There is tension in the house.  While never explicitly stated, it is more than hinted at that Bellette is a former lover of Lonoff’s.  There are no doubts about in long suffering Hope’s mind.

Lonoff receives Nathan warmly, but still holds him at arm’s length.  The wisdom and affirmation that Nathan is seeking is meted out in tiny doses.  Like the writing that Nathan admires, Lonoff’s words are spare and while as an artist he reveals truths fearlessly, in life he is guarded.  He describes his approach to writing:

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning.

Given Nathan’s romantic notions at the time about the noble cause of literature and art, that’s a little disappointing.  And yet, that’s pretty much what writing is.  For Hope, however, this describes her life with Lonoff as one of enforced solitude, and she’s had about enough of it.  That, along with the presence of Amy, brings about a crisis in the marriage and a confrontation that Nathan gets to witness.

Nathan, in the meantime, has fallen in love with Miss Ballette, or at least who he imagines her to be, none other than Anne Frank.  Her age is right, her look is right, and her background is unknown.  If only she would marry him, he could take revenge on his critics who attack his anti-Semitism.  Sadly, she is only Amy, not Anne, and well he tells her she looks like Anne Frank, she reacts with indifference.

The life Lonoff lives, devoted to his art, just as Nathan desires for himself, is not without its costs. The costs are paid not just by the writer, but also by the people in his life.  In the end, at the end of the tumultuous weekend, Lonoff’s knowing evaluation of Nathan is both praising of his talent but also a warning about the life he is choosing for himself:

“I’ll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You’re not so nice and polite in your fiction. . . . You’re a different person.”

It’s impossible to read The Ghost Writer without thinking of Roth himself.  The setting of the story is in the same timeframe as when Roth’s career was beginning, at it was Roth’s unflinching portrayal, the the good and the not so good, of Jewish-American life that brought him both fame and controversy, first with Goodbye, Columbus, and then Portnoy’s Complaint.  The Ghost Writer was written on the other side of the fame and controversy and is imbued with the wisdom of a life having been lived.  The tone is genuinely wistful and, as a truth teller, Roth is willing to own up to the flaws, vanity, and shallowness of his twenty-three year-old self.  Among the larger themes of all of Roth’s work is the two-edged sword of heritage.   We are a nation of immigrants and while we attempt to purge ourselves from whatever identity that defines our ancestors, there are also times when the heritage that haunts is also the heritage that comforts us.  In The Ghost Writer, Roth shows us the birth of that dichotomy.

The Ghost Writer was selected by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the prize in 1980, but the Pulitzer committee overrode the decision and instead gave the award to Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.  It’s hard to imagine two books more different in style, subject and sheer heft.  Thirty years later, it’s hard to say anything about the comparative merits of the two books other than, “Wow, what year that was.”

The Ghost Writer

Philip Roth. Vintage 1995, Paperback, 192 pages, $7.01

Tamkin’s council and Wilhelm’s inability to shed his burdens only serve to heighten Wilhelm’s sense of failure.  Wherever he seeks sympathy, whether it be his estranged wife who continues to make financial demands on him while refusing to divorce him or his father, a comfortably retired doctor, finds nothing but reminders of his failures.

Born Wilhelm Adler, he changes his name to Tommy Wilhelm to further his acting career.  His career never takes off and so he fails in his attempt to actually become Tommy Wilhelm, a failure he is constantly reminded of by his father who insists on addressing him as “Wilky,” his childhood name.

Seize the Day is a distinctly American story.  Whereas British fiction from Daniel Defoe on up through today’s Ian McEwan is preoccupied by social and economic class distinctions, American society prides itself on being free from class.  No matter what station we are born into, we believe that through hard work, perseverance, and strength of character we can succeed.  If we do not succeed, it is obviously due to some flaw in our character.  American fiction has always explored the chasm that exists between that Great American Ideal (and mythology) and the stark reality that the Universe has no concept of fairness.  American literary characters, unlike their British counterparts, are therefore imbued with a greater sense of anomie. While British heroes and heroines may struggle to overcome the rigid class distinctions in their society, and usually fail, there is at least the idea that there is a sense of order in the Universe, no matter how harsh it may be. American literary figures, from Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths to Fitzgerald’s James Gatz to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to Miller’s Willy Loman, fight not against society but against nothingness.

Years after writing Seize the Day, Bellow said in interviews that never liked Tommy Wilhelm very much.  Indeed, Wilhelm is not particularly likable and the reader is likely to feel as much sympathy for him as the other characters in the novella.  “Stop whining, be a man, get a job!” we want to say to him.  And yet, the story is compelling and unconsciously reaches those hidden parts of our psyche that fear the stark nothingness, and leads us to the novella’s surprisingly cathartic conclusion.

Seize the Day (Penguin Classics)

Cynthia Ozick (Introduction). Penguin Classics 2003, Paperback, 144 pages, $7.13

American novelist John Gardner (not to be confused with the British author of thrillers by the same name) is probably best known for his novels Grendel, a retelling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, and October Light, a story about a family and a rural community in Vermont, which won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1976. He died at age 49 in 1982 in a motorcycle crash.

In addition to being a novelist, Gardner also wrote literary criticism and taught writing.  He held very strong opinions about just about everything and frequently stirred controversy in literary circles. He made harsh, judgmental statements about his contemporary authors (including some of my idols like John Updike) and never shied away from an argument.  He was also arguably  one of the greatest teachers of creative writing who ever lived.  At the same time that I was a student writer at SUNY Albany, Gardner was to the south of me, teaching at SUNY Binghamton.  From what I’ve read and heard, I think I’m glad that I was in Albany studying with Eugene Mirabelli, a teacher with extraordinary sensitivity for young writers with fragile egos.  Gardiner, while inspiring for some, could also be extremely intimidating.  He either drove one to greatness or made one give up forever.

It was a year or two after I graduated that I finally picked up his Art of Fiction, and it was probably good that I read it after college and not before.  It’s intimidating as hell.  Gardner apparently read every book ever written, in every language, and he’s not shy in citing them in his lessons.  While I was then, and still am, a proponent of literary canon, Gardner left me in the dust.  When I read through the reader reviews of his book at Amazon, they are mostly glowing, but occasionally there are ones that are scathing indictments of his elitism.

Admittedly, his tone can be condescending, pedantic, and elitist.  He does, however, know what he’s talking about.  Once I was able to get over feeling like a complete ignoramus (a word he frequently uses), I found that I agreed with him.  So, I did what I had done in school when I was stuck in a class with a professor who love to hear himself speak, I “took what I could use and let the rest go by,” to paraphrase Ken Kesey.  (There I go, dropping names just like Gardner).

This is not a Writing Crime Fiction for Fun and Profit kind of book.  Gardner’s focus is on creating literary art, and even though the title says “Notes on Craft For Young Writers,” it’s not a book for beginners.  Or at least is not a book for beginners who don’t have the utmost seriousness and willingness to do what they must to become great writers: devote the rest of their lives to studying, learning, and practicing their craft.

The first part of Gardner’s book is a discussion of aesthetic principles and values.  While the reader may be anxious to get to the “Notes on Craft” part, Gardner takes the position that aesthetic principles and craft (the nuts and bolts parts of character, setting, and plot) cannot be separated and unless a writer has a clear understanding of what he or she is trying to achieve artistically, craft is irrelevant.

It is in this section of the book where Gardner is at his most pedantic and I can see where some readers will reject what he says.  Unfortunately, this is a mistake.  I have been in far too many workshops with writers who haven’t studied much great literature and indeed reject the idea that it is even necessary to read in order to be a writer.  Their writing shows it.

In the second part of the book, Gardner gets down to specifics of writing craft, but in the context of the artistic principles that discussed in the first part:

The most important single notion in the theory of fiction I have outlined—essentially the traditional theory of our civilization’s literature—is that of a vivid and continuous fictional dream.  According to this notion, the writer sets up a dramatized action in which we are given the signals that make us “see” the setting, characters and events; that is he does not tell us about them in abstract terms, like an essayist, but gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of the, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths.  In bad or unsatisfying fiction, this fictional dream is interrupted by some mistake or conscious ploy on the part of the artist.  We are abruptly snapped out of the dream, forced to think of the writer or writing.

Gardner then sets out to show all the things that can interrupt that dream: a sudden change in point of view, imprecise use of language, an inappropriate change in narrative tone, etc.

When I first read it, it was that idea of fiction as a vivid and continuous dream that captivated me. It really is the best way to describe what reading is like and anything that disrupts that dream destroys the experience.  One of the reasons why real books, the physical kind made out of paper, have endured as a technology throughout the centuries, is that they “disappear” while we are reading them.  The dream takes hold and we are no longer conscious of the binding, the paper, the appearance of the type on the page.  The biggest challenge to designers of electronic book readers, such as the Kindle, is the ability to make the book disappear and not interrupt the dream.

The biggest challenge to the writer is to create a fictional dream and to sustain it.  All the elements of fiction—time, place, character, plot, dialogue—must be mastered to the degree that they become second nature to the writer in order to achieve that goal.

All in a life’s work.

I have to admit that I was put off a bit myself by Gardner’s continual use of the word ignoramus.  It’s a loaded term, and very pejorative, and Gardner, who teaches us to be precise in the use of language is making a point.  In Latin, ignoramus literally means “we do not know.”

Every few years or so, I open up Gardner’s book for a refresher course.  Ignoramus that I am, reading this book never fails to set me back on the right course when my writing has gotten sloppy or lazy.

He also still intimidates the hell out of me.

The Art of Fiction

John Gardner. Vintage 1991, Paperback, 240 pages, $7.94

Grendel

John Gardner. Vintage 1989, Paperback, 192 pages, $6.72

October Light

John Gardner. New Directions 2005, Paperback, 440 pages, $2.00

Seven years later, Mike Nichols turned Charles Webb’s novel The Graduate into a blockbuster movie starring a very young Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock, a young college graduate who is seduced and corrupted by the wife of his father’s law partner, the infamous Mrs. Robinson, played deliciously by Anne Bancroft.  The film captures 1960’s affluent society’s shallowness, best summed up in this memorable exchange:

Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Just how do you mean that, sir?

What one word might a contemporary Mr. McGuire whisper to Benjamin? “Derivatives”?

In the end, Ben finds redemption in the love of Elaine, Mrs. Robinson’s daughter and in the final scene we see them escaping on a city bus.  They may be free, but their future is still uncertain as revealed by the uncomfortable expressions on their faces.  As much as we want them to, I can’t actually picture them staying together.

Novelist Eugene Mirabelli, my college writing teacher, published a novel in 1959, the same year as Roth’s first book, called The Burning Air, which told the story of George and Giula (pronounced “Julia.” It’s Italian and accurate, but I remember Mirabelli using it as an example in class of how to confound your readers by using an an unusual spelling for a common name).  The book is an account of a hot summer weekend after college when the young couple must confront their future.  Complicating matters are the pressures brought to bear by Giulia’s family.  Again, the couple are doomed, and George is left with only a wistful memory.

In Ian McEwan’s 2007 novel On Chesil Beach, the young couple, Edward and Florence, are actually married, but nevertheless still doomed. McEwan sets his story in pre-sexual revolution days of July, 1962.  Edward and Florence are trying to escape the stultifying values of their parents, and to break free of the class distinctions that separate them, but their own insecurities and uniquely sheltered backgrounds lead to a disastrous wedding night.  Again, a young man is left to wonder about what might have been had he been able to discover his adult self just a little bit sooner.

Back when I was a twenty-something, I attempted to write a story in this genre called “A Couple.”  I have to admit that I was very much “influenced” by both Goodbye, Columbus and The Burning Air. The doomed lovers in my story are on their final spring break in college, with graduation and their adult lives steadfastly approaching.  Of course, like Roth and Mirabelli before me, I attempted to blame everything on her family.  I could never really figure out the ending or what the story meant, so I put the first draft manuscript in a box, put the box in a basement, and forgot about it for twenty years.

When I started writing again, my wife found the box in the basement and I rediscovered the story.  I read it again, and although I felt embarrassed by some of the writing, I found something compelling about it.  I remembered writing on my old smith-corona in the apartment my wife and I lived in when we were first married.  It was the last thing I wrote before getting caught up in career pursuits and starting a family caused me to stop writing.

The story still didn’t have a decent ending, but I started typing it into my computer cleaning up the embarrassingly bad parts and crappy dialogue.  I reworked the story over and over again, trying about seven or eight different endings.  Finally, when I got tired of working on it, I started sending it out.  Fifty rejections and several more rewrites later, it was accepted by two journals on the same day.

It’s hard to know what made the difference between rejection and acceptance, but I believe it was the final small revision I made.  I had been in a workshop with Elizabeth Benedict the previous summer and I remembered her speaking about dialogue in fiction.  “Dialogue in fiction is not like conversation, where people avoid the truth at all costs and don’t reveal what they really think.  That doesn’t work in fiction.  Take a chance, have your character say something they never would in real-life, and see what happens.”

I found the place in my story where I needed to do that and I think it made all the difference.  It also revealed that the breakup was not only her fault, it was also his.

“A Couple” is available in Cantaraville Two and also as a mini-eBook from smashwords.com.

Goodbye, Columbus

Philip Roth. Vintage 1993, Paperback, 320 pages, $7.00

The Graduate

Charles Webb. Washington Square Press 2002, Paperback, 272 pages, $2.89

On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan. Anchor 2008, Paperback, 224 pages, $3.40

Mentors, Muses & Monsters

Elizabeth Benedict. Free Press 2009, Hardcover, 278 pages, $0.07

One realization does dawn upon the death of the second parent, namely that you’ve now moved into the green room to the River Styx. You’re next. Another thing about parental mortality: No matter how much you’ve prepared for the moment, when it comes, it comes at you hot, hard and unrehearsed.

Those words introduce Christopher Buckley’s memoir, published yesterday in The New York Times Magazine.  Author Kathryn Harrison has written about traumatic events providing a “before and after” for their victims’ lives.  Most of us will not ever know the traumas she has explored in her books, but we do, all of us, have a before and an after.

Growing Up Buckley

While They Slept

Kathryn Harrison. Ballantine Books 2009, Mass Market Paperback, 288 pages, $3.49

First of all, it’s really hard.  Being blessed with a good ear for everyday conversation, being a “sensitive observer,” doesn’t buy you much.  Conversation is not dialogue.  One of the reasons that today’s so-called Reality Shows are actually scripted (shock!) is that normal everyday conversation, when listened to by an outsider, is unbearably boring.  For all the talking we may do in real life, we really don’t say anything.  We never say what we really think or reveal what we really feel.  Transcribe a normal kitchen table conversation word for word and there it will lie, limp and lifeless on the page.  Nothing is revealed.  Nothing happens.

The purpose of any work of art – a painting, a song, a play, a poem – is to reveal a truth.  It may be a truth that was once known but is now forgotten, a truth that we see every day but fail to recognize, or a truth that we intuitively know but never fully articulate.  When our audience recognizes that truth, we say that it “resonates” with them.  But the sunlight in an Edward Hopper painting is not real sunlight.  It is a mixture of pigments and texture that creates an illusion of sunlight that strikes us as true.  So it is with fiction.  No matter how natural and realistic it may appear, it is not reality, it is an illusion of reality.  If a piece of fiction is compelling, engaging, and emotionally moving, and its dialogue seems realistic, it is only because it has been carefully crafted to appear realistic.

All too often, in classes and in textbooks on creative writing, dialogue has been taught as a distinct discipline, divorced from the other elements of a story.  Instead of developing an understanding of how dialogue relates to all the other elements, we get rules of thumb that, while true, don’t really help much.  “Every line of dialogue must either reveal something that the reader needs to know or serve to move the story along.” Great.  What the hell does “move the story along” mean?  This kind of advice, disconnected from any consideration of the other elements of the art form  leads to stilted, unnatural dialogue, like a paint-by-numbers painting where you can still see the numbers:

“Say Bill, that’s a really big Colt 45 in your holster.  Where did you get it?”

Elsewhere, these same sources will say, “Every character must want something.”  Also true, but never placed in context.

Walk into a creative writing class in the middle of the semester and ask, in drill sergeant fashion, “What does Odysseus want?” and in unison, the class will say (or should say), “To go home!”

One of the fundamental principles of western literary tradition is that it is character-driven as opposed to plot-driven.  Popular, or genre fiction, on the other hand, tends to be plot-driven.  The characters, what they want and what they feel, is less important than the plot.  There are exceptions of course, and the masters of various genres do write character-driven stories.  John Grisham, for example, writes tightly plotted pot-boilers that are nonetheless driven by his characters’ desires (The Rainmaker, The Testament, The Street Lawyer). Tom Clancy, on the other hand, is all plot and no character.  His plots are intricate and we learn some fascinating facts about our nation’s security apparatus, but his characters leak sawdust all over the page, and his dialogue is the most dreadful ever published.  His books make pretty good movies, but that’s because there’s less plot in them and more character.

Great literature, no matter how intricately plotted, is about desire.  The Iliad, which contains some of the most epic and violent battle scenes in all of literature, is not about the Trojan War.  Consider the first words, as translated by Richmond Lattimore:

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus

and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,

hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls

of heroes, but gave their bodies to the delicate feasting

of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished

since that time when first there stood in division of conflict

Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

All that follows is the result of the feud between Achilles and Agamemnon.  As the story unfolds, it is driven by the desires of the characters, and the most memorable scenes, the ones that make us read through to the end, are not the bloody battles, but the scenes where desires are revealed and shown in conflict. It is written as poetry, translated from an ancient language, about an ancient people living in an ancient culture, yet when the characters speak to one another, in as stylized a manner as one can imagine, their desires ring true across the centuries that separate us from them.

So where does that leave the modern fiction writer?  Dialogue, even when it is serving up exposition, must always reveal desire.  Because of that, we need to set aside the goal of trying to sound natural.  Art is artificial.  Elizabethans didn’t break into soliloquy any more than twenty-first century Americans do.

In real life, people don’t say what they think and would rather die than reveal what they really desire.  In fiction, they must do both of these things, or there is no conflict, there is no story, and worst of all, it will not resonate with the reader.  It is that resonance that creates the illusion that the dialogue is realistic.  It is when characters say what they would not say in real-life that creates those dramatic scenes where conflicting desires explode on the page.

This has been a lesson not easily learned, and even in the stories I’ve had published so far, I don’t think I’ve accomplished it completely in all of them, but I’ve gotten better at it.  Many years ago, I wrote the first draft of a story about a young couple on spring break during their last year of college.  I set it aside and forgot about it when I stopped writing for about twenty years.  Finally one day I pulled it out of my box of old manuscripts.  There was a lot of good writing in it, and the passage of time had given me some perspective, so I set to work revising it.  When I finally got it to be the best I thought it could be, I started sending it out.  No one wanted it.  Over the course of a year, it got forty-nine rejections.  During that year, I continued to revise it.  I rewrote the ending.  I added a coda.  I took the coda out, I added it back in.  I had fellow writers read it.  No one could tell me what was wrong with it.  Some of the rejections included complements on the writing, but with the usual, “not right for us.”

I finally noticed, since I kept changing the ending, that there was something missing that was leaving the reader feel unsatisfied at the end.  Indeed, I felt that way myself.  I took a step back, figuratively, and did some simple analysis of the characters, essentially asking myself, “What does he want, what does she want?”  What I began to realize was that although my characters certainly loved one another, their internal desires were sending them in different directions.  Those desires were apparent in the story, but nowhere were they directly and dramatically shown in conflict.  I found the point in the story, a final argument between them, where the dramatic stage had been set, but neither character said what they really felt.  As a result, instead of climax, the story just fizzled out.  As a writer, I had been a coward.  I didn’t know what was missing, so I looked at the argument sentence by sentence  until I found the line where the woman says, “Talk to your family.”  I changed it to “Talk to your father.”   Without getting too Freudian about it, my narrator became unleashed and said everything that he never would have said in real life.

After that revision, I sent it out to three more journals.  About a month later, and on the same day, I got three acceptances, putting me in in the awkward position of telling two journals that the story was no longer available.  For a writer, that’s a good problem to have.

What was interesting was that while readers were left unsatisfied by the story as it had originally been written and rewritten, it wasn’t specifically clear what was causing that dissatisfaction.  The problem wasn’t in what was there, the problem was in what was missing, and the only person who could find out what was missing was me.  I discovered it when I realized I needed to stop being realistic and to tell the truth.

The foundation of Western Literature and a few guilty pleasures from John Grisham.  As for Tom Clancy save some time and just watch “The Hunt for Red October.”  The desires of Sean Connery and Sam Neill drive the story plus you get to hear Fred Thompson, former presidential candidate, say, “The Russians don’t take a dump without a plan, son.”  That kills me.

The Iliad of Homer

Richmond Lattimore (Translator). University Of Chicago Press 1961, Paperback, 528 pages, $9.49

The Rainmaker

John Grisham. Delta 2005, Paperback, 576 pages, $4.85

 

The Testament

John Grisham. Delta 2005, Paperback, 480 pages, $0.02

 

The Street Lawyer

John Grisham. Delta 2005, Paperback, 384 pages, $5.50

It’s interesting how both writers took what was essentially the same material and how differently they used it.  Both writers pierced through the facade of middleclass contentment to show the underlying anomie of our society.  But that’s where the similarity ends.

I remember reading Updike’s Couples for the first time and almost immediately recognizing my parents in his characters, so much so that I started trying to figure out who among Methodist Church’s Couples Club were Mom and Dad screwing around with.  The trials and tribulations of marriages and middle-class family life was Updike’s landscape in almost all of his exquisite short stories and in those novels for which he will be remembered.  As for infidelity, I think Couples was a bit over the top and he did better in his more intimate Marry Me: A Romance.   His nearly career spanning series of short stories chronicling the Maples, collected in Too Far to Go, watches a young couple married in the late fifties, raise children, navigate the tumultuous sixties, and finally break up in the seventies.  Along the way we see the couple gradually grow apart, tentatively cheat on one another, engage in full-grown adultery, and finally reconcile everything by divorcing.  At each point in time, whatever they are doing seems like the right thing to do.

When Updike cracked through the facade, what he found and what he revealed to us was human frailty, and he portrayed it gently and with a tenderness that no matter how exasperated we were with his characters, we still could also have affection for them.  I think this has much to do with Updike himself and how he lived his life.  The Maple’s marriage seems to have lasted about as long as Updike’s first marriage.  I don’t want to insinuate that the Maple’s stories are a thinly disguised autobiography.  I don’t believe they are, but I’m sure that his life and that of his neighbors in Ipswich certainly informed the emotional journeys of his characters.  His suburban landscape was colored by his own fairly gentle and contented life and his continued belief that inner peace was possible, whether it be found in taking the kids to the beach in the summer, having an adulterous affair, or maintaining an active commitment to his Protestant faith.

Cheever, on the other hand, cracked through the facade and found darkness.  One only has to look at his short story, “The Enormous Radio” to see the darkness.  In that story, a young couple buys a radio for their apartment.  The wife discovers that the radio can pick up the conversations of all their neighbors, and listens day after day to the dark secrets of the people in their apartment building.  It’s ugly, it’s prurient, it’s shameful.  It’s not good for our young couple either.

After Cheever died, his daughter’s memoir, Home Before Dark, revealed that Cheever had lived a very haunted life.  An alcoholic, and also bisexual, he inflicted much pain on his family through emotional abuse.  This completes the contrast between Cheever and Updike that shows up in their work.  Where Updike’s white middle-class men are befuddled by life and by aging, Cheever’s become angry and violent.

The beautiful part of art is that we can look at these two very different renderings of the same landscape and see the truth in both of them.

As for me, although I dated a few Gingers, I married a Mary Ann.  And while I listen to the Beatles more than the Stones, at middle-aged guitar jams I can still rock out on “Brown Sugar.”

Cheever

Blake Bailey. Knopf 2009, Hardcover, 784 pages, $11.75

Too Far to Go

John Updike. Fawcett 1982, Mass Market Paperback, 256 pages, $4.02

Marry Me

John Updike. Ballantine Books 1996, Paperback, 320 pages, $8.22

The Stories of John Cheever

John Cheever. Vintage 2000, Paperback, 704 pages, $10.91

Home Before Dark (Contemporary Classics (Washington Square Press))

Susan Cheever. Washington Square Press 1999, Paperback, 256 pages, $9.50

That’s how it was for children then.  If the soundtrack of my childhood was provided by the Beatles, the quiet rumbling counterpoint was Vietnam.  I was far too young to truly understand or to be directly affected by the war, but there was no doubt that it mattered to the adults and near-adults around me.  It mattered to the neighbor’s son who got drafted and the other neighbor’s son who volunteered.  It mattered to the older brothers of my and my sister’s playmates who were old enough to be facing the draft.  It mattered to the Methodist church youth group and boy scout troop whose young leaders considered their options, some choosing to serve, some choosing Canada.  They were boys I looked up to, who carried the flag in the Queens Anniversary Day parade, who organized volleyball games at church picnics, who taught me how to hold a baseball bat, and who taught me how to tie a square knot.

Although I was too young to get drafted and both my older siblings were girls, there wasn’t one circle of relationships in my young life – family, school, neighborhood, church – that was left untouched by the war.  And not one adult in my life was left unaffected.  In the stoic silence of a friend’s father when a name was mentioned, in the joy in that same father’s voice when talking about his son’s imminent transfer stateside, in the funereal mood in another family’s living room presided over by a framed eight by ten on the mantelpiece, in my parents’ dinner table conversations about this or that person’s son, the war affected me in ways I am only coming to understand now.

These wars that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are not ours the way Vietnam was.    The men and woman who fight, and  their families, are but a small segment of our society.  They come from the rural regions, and from inner cities where military service offered a way out.  They come from families with patriotic traditions of service.  As of now, there are 140,000 troops in Iraq and over 32,000 in Afghanistan.  At the end of 1968, in contrast, there were of half a million troops in Vietnam.  During the Vietnam era, the draft raised over 2 million men for service.  As unfair as the process was, with deferments less easy to obtain by the poor and minorities, it still reached deeper into our society.  Today, most of us remain untouched by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

These wars of today are given perfunctory coverage in the evening news, if they are covered at all.  The stories of the soldiers, their anguish and their terror suffered in our names, while we keep up with Angelina and Brad and Jennifer, are never heard.  The scars, physical and emotional, are invisible to most of us.

Ryan Smithson is a soldier in the Army Reserves from upstate New York who served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005.  Upon returning home, he began writing personal essays, recounting his time in Iraq and what it was like returning home.  Several of his essays have been published on the web and next month, his book, Ghosts of War: The True Story of a 19-Year-Old GI, will be published by Harper-Collins.

Ryan’s essay “A Little Taste of Death” appeared in the Summer/Fall 2007 issue of the Oregon Literary Review, his essay “Silence and Silhouettes” appeared in Shattercolors Literary Review, and his essay “Hard Canvas” appeared in Identity Theory.

Ghosts of War

Ryan Smithson. Collins 2009, Hardcover, 336 pages, $5.75

Coming from a liberal northeastern background this sudden discovery piqued my interest.  There were no biographies of O’Connor at the time, but in the summer of that year, her collected letters had been published.  I spent a significant amount of time that semester in the university library reading The Habit of Being, to the detriment of my other studies, I might add. Her letters were fascinating.

Her stories had been shocking in several ways.  First, they were violent.  “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is about a pair of escaped convicts who murder an entire family.  Just because.  It’s the literary equivalent of the film “Natural Born Killers,” terrifying to watch but impossible to stop watching.

The other shocking element, especially for the time (the late seventies) where moral relativism was still somewhat in vogue, was her sense of moral clarity revealed in her ironic twists.  One of the classic forms of the short story, which we learn in middle school from O. Henry and Maupassant, is the story that has an ironic twist at the very end.  There is no literary genre that is more eclectic in style and form than the short story, and the classic dramatic structure of O. Henry is not the only way to write a short story, and indeed it was out of style long before O’Connor was writing.  O’Connor, however, took this structure and raised the stakes.  A character in an O’Connor story who faced a story-ending ironic twist did not have to confront the fact that, for example, he sold his prized watch and his wife sold her beautiful hair to buy presents for one another (“The Gift of the Magi”), or a husband and wife had brought financial ruin upon themselves through vanity (“The Necklace”).  Instead, at the end of an O’Connor story, a character might find that he is damned for all time.  It’s clear to most critics that O’Connor’s faith, probably more than her “southern-ness” influenced her world view and her fiction, but it was her artistry that allowed her to write these powerful stories with no hint of preachiness  and barely mention of religion.  She wasn’t an evangelist, she was a seeker of truth.

So who was this southern woman who wrote about the grotesque?  Her letters revealed that she was both incredibly normal and grounded, but also driven and passionate about her writing.  In her letters, she wrote to friends about the stories she was writing at the time, the finished versions of which I was reading.  Along with John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, I can’t think of any better guide for beginning writers than her letters.

O’Connor had a long battle with lupus before she died, and wrote frankly and honestly to her friends about her daily struggles, but with no hint of self-pity and it never seemed to influence her work.  She had very strong opinions about her art and what she had to say in her fiction, so she eschewed the confessional style that was coming into favor at the time.  I wonder what she would think about the current celebrity culture where we are constantly bombarded with Too Much Information about the personal lives of everybody.

It was during that time when I made my first serious attempts at writing, and I tried several times to write O’Connor-like stories.  They were all miserable failures and I learned that what we write is as much a product of who we are and where we come from as it is of who we admire.  As a protestant white male from Queens, NY, it’s impossible for me to write as if I were a Catholic woman from Georgia (although I might want to create such a character, but that’s characterization, not theme).  Subsequent attempts to write like John Updike  and John Cheever didn’t work out either.  I eventually figured out that I needed to learn how to write like me, and O’Connor would have probably agreed.

Still, those letters stayed with me, the way she interspersed serious serious literary discussions with brief glimpses into her daily life.  Part of my novel, Winslow, is composed of letters written by a seventeen year-old old girl to her young man who has gone off to war.  I didn’t realize when I first started writing them that their style, combining both serious thematic content and interesting glimpses of daily life that revealed character, was unconsciously influenced by those letters that I read over twenty-five years ago. (We don’t write letters like that these days, we Tweet).  That is until, completely on her own, Sarah started providing Josh with updates about the peafowl she was raising.

Flannery

Brad Gooch. Little, Brown and Company 2009, Hardcover, 464 pages, $5.75

The Habit of Being

Sally Fitzgerald (Editor). Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1988, Paperback, 624 pages, $14.71

The Art of Fiction

John Gardner. Vintage 1991, Paperback, 240 pages, $7.94

And I think of John Updike, who illuminated private lives and wrote so lovingly of the world, who called snowfall "an immense whispering" and compared a brilliant snowy day to overdeveloped film. Who re-created the backyards and clotheslines of small-town 1940s Pennsylvania and described the way a girl walked in the hall of high school carrying her books against her body, and in a great story, "My Father’s Tears," three years ago in the New Yorker, he gave us his father bidding him goodbye on a train platform. Nothing was beneath his careful attention.

"Bereft" at Salon.com

I have always been amazed when conservatives rail against the idea of “wealth redistribution.”  They seem to be completely ignorant of history and that one of the fundamental purposes of government is to redistribute wealth.  This has been true since the beginning of civilization.  Sometimes wealth is distributed less inequitably than others, but make no mistake, wealth has always been redistributed.  When we consider the wealth of the entire nation, the profits that are produced by all of the people, it has always been redistributed.

In his book, Pizzigati, traces the history of that redistribution, from times where most of the income flowed into a tiny percentage sitting at the top of the pyramid, the so-called gilded age, to the golden age of the middle class, the 50′s and 60′s when tax rates for the rich were the highest, labor unions were strong, and government intrusion into business was at it’s height.  It was during that time that CEO’s of major companies, although well paid, were low-key figures, and who’s homes were modest compared to today’s royal standards.  And it was not that long ago.

Pizzigati specifically takes on some of today’s CEO’s and their unbelievable compensations and asks several questions.  First, are they, is anybody, worth that much money?  Given what many of them actually did to the companies they led, the answer is no.  Second, is the growing chasm separating the tiny group at the top of our society that owns ninety percent of the wealth from the vast majority who create that wealth god for us as a nation, and as a society?  How has it poisoned our culture?

Pizzigati’s remedies may come across as radical and could be labeled by the right as socialist, or even communist, but they are not.  He is simply arguing for a return to a set of national and social values that flourished during a significant portion of the twentieth century and created the richest, and for a time, the one of most equitable of nations.

Updated 2/1/2009:

Too Much: Sam Pizzigati’s web column.

Greed and Good

Sam Pizzigati. Apex Press 2004, Hardcover, 659 pages, $14.95

John Updike (1932-2009)

John Updike’s Life and Work from Salon

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

“I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.  It’s awful.  If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera.  It’s terrible.

“Take most people, they’re crazy about cars.  They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they’re always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that’s even newer.  I don’t even like old cars.  I mean they don’t even interest me.  I’d rather have a goddamn horse.  A horse is at least human, for God’s sake.”

“It’s funny.  All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.”

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.  Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me.  And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.  That’s all I do all day.  I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.  I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

Still Paging Mr. Salinger by Charles McGrath at The New York Times.

The essay was another example of a skill the Benedict showed in her novel Almost.One reads a story about a person completely different than oneself — different age, different gender, different background — and yet when the time for the emotional epiphany comes, you suddenly become aware of something personal that you’ve been carrying around with you.  If there is one single goal that I have in my owning writing, it’s to have my readers experience the same thing.

Benedict’s essay was finally published by Daedalus this past summer.  Rick Green of the Hartford Courant has posted a reprint on his blog (hopefully with all the appropriate permissions).

Also recommended:

Almost

Elizabeth Benedict. Mariner Books 2002, Paperback, 272 pages, $0.01

As my interest awakened, I started feeling a need to be around other writers and artists. I fondly remembered my college days where my circle of friends included not only writers, but also poets, actors, painters, anarchists, Marxists, vegetarians, and various other misfits. I had spent my final two years in college with at least one writing workshop each semester. I wasn’t about to abandon a successful and fulfilling career to give in to a midlife crisis, much to the relief of my family, but I still needed to feel some connection to other people who view the world from an artistic (“odd”) point of view. I decided that a two week immersion at a writers conference would be enough to satisfy this need without causing too much disruption.

I decided on the New York State Writers Institute conference for several reasons. First, the conference was in Saratoga Springs, of which I had fond memories. I went to school at SUNY Albany and I had spent some time in Saratoga Springs. It’s a beautiful place, especially in summer. Second, I had a somewhat remote connection with the Writers Institute. The New York State Writers Institute was founded in 1984, two years after I graduated from college by William Kennedy, who had taught at SUNY Albany. Although I hadn’t studied with Kennedy, I had known him slightly from just hanging around the English Department. Finally, it was the writers who taught and read at the institute. Many years earlier, I had read Mary Gordon’s Final Payments and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Having recently returned to reading literary fiction, I was now captivated by Robinson’s gorgeous prose in Gilead. Both were teaching at the institute that summer, as they have for many years. I sent in a writing sample, an early draft of a story called “A Couple,” and was utterly surprised when I was accepted into the intermediate writing workshop. I was far too intimidated to even apply for the master class taught by Gordon and Robinson.

And so, with the blessing of my wife and daughter, I packed up my car and drove up to Saratoga that first summer, with the first two chapters of my still unfinished novel, Winslow. Needless to say, since I returned for the next two summers, it was a wonderful experience. There were a few things that were a little unsettling at first. Age, for one. Although the students of all ages attend the conference, and while I was far from being the oldest one there, I certainly wasn’t the youngest one. Most of the students were undergraduates or graduate students. There were times that first summer where I felt a bit like Roy Hobbs from Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. Also, as an undergraduate, I’d always gotten a queasy feeling whenever my work was coming up for discussion in a workshop and that hadn’t changed, but the workshop and the entire environment was so supportive that I never felt like I didn’t belong there.

During the three years I have attended, I’ve had the privilege to participate in workshops conducted by some wonderful teachers: Elizabeth Benedict, Kathryn Harrison, and Gish Jen. The most enjoyable parts of going to these conferences, however, have been the evening readings (which are followed by equally enjoyable beer and wine receptions). I’ll never forget the inspiring creative buzz I felt on those leaving the lecture halls on those moonlight summer nights. Many of the writers who read at the conference read new work before it has been published. Some moments that stand out in my mind are Elizabeth Benedict reading a very moving personal essay called “Mad Dog Taborsky & Me,” one year and another year reading a hilarious and adult-rated essay on internet porn. Yes, she is indeed, “wickedly entertaining.” Another experience that I’ll never forget is Joyce Carol Oates reading from her novella, “Papa at Ketchum, 1961,” before it was published in her book Wild Nights. More than simply mimicking Papa’s writing style, she captured his desperation at the end of his life. Sentences rang out like gunshots and the only way I can describe the experience is shattering.

The most inspiring performances at the readings, however, were the poets. Invariably, they were the ones who sent me off in the night ready to try anything as a writer. The purity of their focus on language, words and words alone, helped to see all over again that every single word matters. I’m not really a poet myself, but the few poems I have written were written in the days and weeks that followed these readings. As poor as they are, my poems owe their existence to Carolyn Forche, Robert Pinsky, Charles Simic, and Campbell McGrath.

I’m hoping to begin a low-residency MFA program next year, so I won’t have enough vacation time to be able to attend both the conference and my on-campus residencies. so this year was probably my last trip to Saratoga. When I left Saratoga for the last time this past July, it was with a bittersweet feeling for many reasons, but it was also with a conference inspired poem called, “Compartments,” which has been published in Mississippi Crow.

Writers and poets mentioned:

Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis. Vintage 1998, Paperback, 208 pages, $6.74

Almost

Elizabeth Benedict. Mariner Books 2002, Paperback, 272 pages, $0.01

While They Slept

Kathryn Harrison. Ballantine Books 2009, Mass Market Paperback, 288 pages, $3.49

Who’s Irish?

Gish Jen. Vintage 2000, Paperback, 224 pages, $5.88

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson. Picador 2006, Paperback, 247 pages, $2.67

Final Payments

Mary Gordon. Anchor 2006, Paperback, 304 pages, $8.17

Blue Hour

Carolyn Forche. Harper Perennial 2004, Paperback, 96 pages, $4.69

The Figured Wheel

Robert Pinsky. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1997, Paperback, 320 pages, $1.97

Sixty Poems

Charles Simic. Mariner Books 2008, Paperback, 108 pages, $0.47

Seven Notebooks

Campbell Mcgrath. Ecco 2009, Paperback, 240 pages, $3.39