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, $7.40

In honor of Snowmageddon and Snowmageddon Part Deux, here are some books to read while snowbound:

Alive

Piers Paul Read. Harper Perennial 2005, Paperback, 398 pages, $8.34

Stranded in the Andes, cannibalism ensues.

Desperate Passage

Ethan Rarick. Oxford University Press, USA 2009, Paperback, 304 pages, $10.16

Stranded in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, cannibalism ensues.

The Shining

Stephen King. Pocket 2002, Paperback, 528 pages, $5.00

A struggling writer, snowed in with his family, chews aspirin and slowly goes nuts.  Redrum ensues.

Ethan Frome (Penguin Classics)

Elizabeth Ammons (Editor). Penguin Classics 2005, Paperback, 128 pages, $3.69

No cannibalism or murder in this one, but if there’s a part of this novel that happens during the summer, I can’t remember it.  One of the coldest reads ever.  Also, proof that a Flexible Flyer is a very unreliable instrument of suicide.

When Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City was published in 1984, it took the publishing world by storm and ushered in a new era of edgy young writers.  Bright Lights, Big City chronicles the emotional, psychological, and spiritual downward spiral of a young would-be writer in the fast-lane of the mid 1980’s Manhattan club scene.  His wife has left him, his job oppresses him, and he lives in a cocaine-addled twilight zone.  The first chapter, entitled “It’s 6 AM, Do You Know Where You Are?” begins:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.  But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.  You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head.  The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge.  All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder.  Then again, it might not.  A small voice in side you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already.

Confessional stories about people on the descent, whether into madness, depression, dissipation, alcoholism, or any other form of self-destruction are a genre unto themselves that was not invented by McInerney.  In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield tells us about his own drive toward that cliff he hopes to protect all the children. In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood descends into suicidal depression.  In John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas, Ben Sanderson literally drinks himself to death.

What makes McInerney’s novel so unique both then and now is that it is entirely written in second person.  “You,” the reader, are character in the story.  It is a testament to McInerney’s talent that he wrote a whole book in this unusual still and managed to pull it off.  I am as amazed by it now as I was when I first read it.

Present tense, in your face…

The book is also written in present tense, which although is nowhere near as unusual as writing in second person, is still fairly uncommon.  Present tense gives a piece of writing a sense of immediacy and places the reader in the middle of the action.

Point-of-view is probably the most critical choice that a writer will make in telling a story.  It not only determines how the writer will envision the story – what parts of the narrative are known and what have to remain hidden – but also how the reader experiences the story.  A first person story told in past tense, as most are, can be more contemplative and reflective.  The “I” in the story is not only the narrator as a character, but also the voice of the narrator at some point in the future, after all of the events in the story have occurred.  Presumably, the narrator has been changed in some way by the story he or she is telling, so we are hearing the story from that changed perspective.  When Nick Caraway, begins The Great Gatsby with “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since,”  he has already witnessed and participated that riotous and tragic Long Island summer.  He knows everything that will happen and can tell the story with an objectivity that can only come with reflection.

In a first person present tense narrative, there is no reflection, no contemplation.  Everything is immediate and there is no second voice, wiser by having gained the experience of the story we are reading.  It’s a very constrained mode of storytelling, nearly as constrained as play, but it is very effective in telling certain kinds of stories.  We live our lives not knowing what will come next and the only wisdom we have in the present is what we already have, not what we will gain in the future.  There is no possibility for objectivity at all.  That lack of insight and wisdom can make present tense narratives uncomfortable for both writer and the reader alike.  It is that discomfort in the storyteller’s voice at not knowing what’s coming next in the storyteller’s voice keeps the reader on edge.

“Natural Selection,” my story in the current issue of Cantaraville is written in first-person, present tense for that very reason.  It’s a dark, downward spiral kind of story that was in part inspired by Bright Lights, Big City.  I wanted the reader to be on edge, knowing that my narrator is headed for bottom simply by what’s going on in the story, but not knowing what’s going to happen next.  I cheated a few times and told some back-story in past tense flashbacks, but the driving force of the story is meant to be immediate and in your face.

“Natural Selection” is about a corporate layoff that has ironically become more timely now than when I first started writing it four years ago. Even when I finally completed, last fall’s economic meltdown that has thrown millions out of work was still unimaginable.  Given long submission-rejection cycles and long lead times, some stories take years to get published.  Stories written before “Natural Selection” are still on their journey out into the world.

Computer Guys

In July of 2005, I attended my first writing conference, The New York State Summer Writer’s Institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.  The writing teacher for the second week of my fiction workshop was Gish Jen.  Prior to registering for the workshop, I hadn’t heard of her, so I ordered her collection, Who’s Irish, and read it before attending the conference.  Gish Jen is an amazing writer.  An American of Chinese descent, she writes with wit and sly humor some of the most deeply moving stories I have ever read.  “Birthmates,” the second story in the collection was selected by John Updike for an anthology titled The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and aptly so.  It’s an incredible story and I immediately felt intimidated.  How on earth had my pitiful writing sample gotten me accepted into a class taught by her?

I was still in awe of her the second week of the workshop when Jen took over.  My work, excerpts from my work-in-progress novel, had been reviewed during the first week when we were lead by Elizabeth Benedict. (Liz, if you’re reading this, I was in awe of you too).  Jen began by going around our circle and asking us to introduce ourselves, as we had during the first week.  Most of my fellow students were young graduate students, studying creative writing or literature.  When my turn came, and I said that I was a software engineer, it piqued Jen’s interest and she started asking me all about what I did and where I worked.  I was a road-warrior consultant at the time and Jen said “my husband does that.”

As I said, I was awestruck at the time and it was only later that I made some mental connections to “Birthmates,” a story about a down-on-his-luck computer guy, working for a down-on-it’s-luck software company, attending a tradeshow.  When I first read the story I found it refreshing.  All too many pieces of literary fiction have protagonists who are  editors, or architects, or college professors or any other profession that serves as a substitute for “writer.”  I fall into that trap myself.  Jen’s computer guy was outside the norm for literary fiction.  I was also struck by the accuracy of the depiction of down on his luck computer guy’s life on the road and the mind-numbing reality that is a technology tradeshow.  They aren’t that way at first, but after attending them year after year, they all blend together into a cacophony of bluster, hype, and desperate boredom.  Jen captured it perfectly and after looking at her educational background I wondered how: BA from Harvard, MFA from the Iowa Writer’s workshop, Harvard Faculty.  No visible experience in the software business.  She must have accompanied her husband on a trip to a computer tradeshow or two.  Or three.

It was during a class break one day later in the week that we were talking about this and she told me that given my background, I owed it to myself and my readers to use it in my writing  I was unique, both working in the corporate and technical world and having a literary mind.

My initial reaction was, “God no!” I try to keep my writing life and my professional life as separate as possible.

“Who are you pissed at?”

During the previous week, Elizabeth Benedict and I had been talking about using personal experience as inspiration for fiction.  “Who are you pissed at, Fred. That’s your story.”  I don’t think she meant it to mean writing fiction as a means of revenge, even though that’s sometimes to hard to resist.  But for any any sensitive introspective literary type, there’s only one truthful answer to the question, “who are you pissed at?”

“Me.”

A few weeks later, considering the advice of both my teachers, I began writing a story about a software manager reaching the end of his rope, so to speak, professionally and personally.  Like millions of others, I have had the experience of both laying off employees and being laid off myself.  I can’t say that I’ve learned anything by either experience other than that it’s psychologically and emotionally traumatic and you don’t really ever get over it.  It becomes part of the baggage that you accumulate in the course of living a life.

The story was very hard to write and I tended to avoid working on it in favor of other less intense pieces.  I had chosen first person, present tense for all the reasons outlined above, which contributed to difficulty get through the first draft.  I finally finished the first draft two years later in one all night writing session.  It was due a few days later at Skidmore for that year’s conference.  I was so emotionally drained by it, actually repulsed by it, that I couldn’t read it.  Instead, I just printed it out, stuffed it in the envelope and sent it out without even proof-reading it, thereby subjecting my fellow students and Elizabeth Benedict, who was again my teacher, to thirty pages of raw anger, embarrassing typos, comma splices, and run-on sentences.

I absolutely hated the story.  I despised narrator even more even more than the other characters, most of whom were despicable in their own unique ways.  Nonetheless, it was in the mail and was going to be photocopied and distributed and analyzed a month later in the workshop no matter how I felt about it.  I was just going to have to sit there, grit my teeth, and get through it.

A month later when the story finally came up for discussion, the class saw some things that I hadn’t, which is what I look to a workshop to do for me. It’s kind of like showing a movie to a test audience.  They were hesitant to comment at first, but after I assured them that the ending was complete fiction, they opened up.  My narrator was certainly a bit of a creep, but not a completely unsympathetic one. They found the title, “Natural Selection,” to be a recurring theme in the story in ways that I hadn’t realized.  They picked out some recurring themes about family that I hadn’t noticed.  There was more to the story than I had originally thought.

Now, a year and a half later, the story has been published.  Between then and now, millions have lost their jobs.  For me, it has confirmed that I got at least one thing right in the story.  It’s shattering, it’s traumatic, and it breaks you.  And after you put yourself back together you’re not quite the same and you can’t quite figure out why.  It is one of those demarcation lines in your life defining  a before and an after.

“Natural Selection” is available in Cantaraville Eight.

Bright Lights, Big City

Jay McInerney. Vintage 1984, Paperback, 208 pages, $5.00

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger. Back Bay Books 2001, Paperback, 288 pages, $5.82

The Bell Jar (P.S.)

Sylvia Plath. Harper Perennial 2009, Paperback, 336 pages, $7.29

Leaving Las Vegas

John O’Brien. Grove Press 1995, Paperback, 189 pages, $4.64

Who’s Irish?

Gish Jen. Vintage 2000, Paperback, 224 pages, $5.00

The Best American Short Stories of the Century

John Updike (Editor). Mariner Books 2000, Paperback, 864 pages, $9.39

Mentors, Muses & Monsters

Elizabeth Benedict. Free Press 2009, Hardcover, 278 pages, $0.19

F. Scott Fitzgerald

These words of F. Scott Fitzgerald from The Great Gatsby, are the ultimate judgment of the beautiful and  rich by Nick Carraway, and presumably Fitzgerald himself.  Today’s bankers, stock traders, car company executives, and hedge fund managers prove that nothing much has changed.  Gene Mirabelli at Critical Pages offers this brief profile of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Crack-Up (Reissue)

Edmund Wilson (Editor). New Directions 2009, Paperback, 352 pages, $9.27

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald. Scribner 1999, Paperback, 180 pages, $4.51

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, $6.35

The Graduate

Charles Webb. Washington Square Press 2002, Paperback, 272 pages, $1.94

On Chesil Beach

Ian McEwan. Anchor 2008, Paperback, 224 pages, $2.95

Mentors, Muses & Monsters

Elizabeth Benedict. Free Press 2009, Hardcover, 278 pages, $0.19

These experiences stimulated all my city-boy senses senses and whenever I read a piece of writing that effectively captures them, I am transported back to those places in my memory.  Some of these places have shown up in my writing.  My young couple in “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” spend a night camping in Acadia National Park. Another couple hike up to Indian Cliffs in Ten Mile River Boy Scout Camp, near Narrowsburg, New York in my story “Indian Summer.”  How I end up mixing fictional couples with boy scout memories in stories with romantic themes is perhaps a topic for psycho-analysis.  As my late father might have said, “Boy Scout camp was never like this!”

I wrote “Indian Summer” in a hotel room in Bellevue, Washington.  It was early spring and I was inspired by the bluest sky I’ve ever seen, the towering evergreens and the sight of Mount Rainer’s face glistening in the late afternoon sun.  I sat down at the computer and challenged myself to write something that captured the natural world.  I imagined a couple walking alone in the woods.  My first attempt was to write it as a narrative poem.  I’m not really much of a poet, so after about an hour of fumbling around, I switched to prose, and it started working for me.  After about three sentences, I realized that I was aping Hemingway, but decided to press on anyway.

Although I was in Washington State at the time, my mind went back to memories of hiking with my boy scout troop.  A favorite destination for a hike in summer camp at Ten Mile River in New York, was Indian Cliffs.  The view at the top is of a bend in the Delaware River.

I imagined my couple hiking to Indian Cliffs on the trail that starts near Camp Kunatah in the Rock Lake section of the reservation.  Old memories of the sights, the smell of the pines, the feel of the earth and rock beneath my feet came back to me.

After I finished the first draft a few hours later, I read what I had written.  While I was proud that it was quite a lovely account of couple walking through the woods, it really wasn’t much of a story.  While it seems that I had captured one of those all to rarely “perfect days” that we experience and remember forever, there was no plot, no conflict.

I set it aside for a week and thought about it.  The piece did indeed capture a perfect day in the lives of the couple in the story.  Like any other perfect, idyllic day, it cannot last for ever.  However blissful they may be, the real world eventually intrudes and that perfect day must come to an end.

The Hemingway-like style of the story also made me think about Hemingway’s early stories, themselves sensuous trips into the natural world.  “The Big Two Hearted River” came to my mind along with its protagonist, Hemingway stand-in Nick Adams.  The “soldier’s home” theme got me thinking about what was different now from when Hemingway’s time.

The war in Iraq was about two years old at the time.  I live in a part of the country where there are a lot of service families.  In some of them, both the husband and wife were in some branch of the military or members of the reserve.  I guitar-playing acquaintance of my was a lieutenant colonel in the army and his wife was in the reserve.  She had recently been called up and deployed to Iraq.

Another friend of mine teaches English at a community college in upstate New York and had been writing to me about some of her students, some just returned, some on their way to Iraq.

I had found the element of the real world that intrudes into that idyllic perfect day where my couple are the only two people in the world.  I went through the story and carefully dropped in little bits of narration and dialogue that just hinted of my newfound theme.  After that I took a few more passes through the story, ruthlessly cutting as much as I could to make every single word that was left the essence of the the piece.  Although I didn’t quite make it, my goal was to cut it to exactly 1000 words.

The story is now four year old and as time has passed, and the war drags on, I’ve this story has grown on me and I consider it one of my finest pieces.

“Indian Summer” is available in Cantaraville Four.

Captains Courageous

Rudyard Kipling. Echo Library 2007, Paperback, 108 pages, $2.94

Nick Adams Stories

Ernest Hemingway. Scribner 1981, Paperback, 272 pages, $7.00

Sculpture by Rodin, Photograph by Caroline Bubbers

Does this work for you:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou are more lovely and more temperate
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

How about this:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

Finally, how about this:

I could digress and say that you have the ability to give magnificent gentle kisses, or that I love your tan lines or that I love the curve of your hips, the erotic beauty of you holding yourself (or two magnificent parts of yourself) in the faded glow of the night’s light – but hey, that would be going into sexual details …

Ouch.  It starts out pretty good, but soon turns awkward, and, well, nerdy.  Since we know that unlike Shakespeare and Browning’s words, which were written for the world to see, we  don’t get uncomfortable reading them as we do with Mark Sanford’s love letters to Maria, his Argentinean paramour.  And if it weren’t for his holier than thou past, we might feel some sympathy for his predicament.  In this private email, the Governor, ran into a common problem that writers face when they attempt to capture romantic love in its physical incarnation: language.  It’s hard to find the right words that evoke the emotion and sensation without being either crude or giggle-inducing.  “Breasts,” Governor.  You can say that word and not burn in hell for eternity.  “Breasts” works because it’s neither too pornographic nor to clinical.  If you still want to maintain your biblical piousness, I suppose you could use “Bosom,” but I can’t promise I won’t giggle.  The intended recipient of your email may giggle at bosom, but she would still be touched by your sensitivity and vulnerability in expressing yourself.  In love letters written by pious amateurs, surely it’s the thought that counts.

For the past several years I have been working sporadically on a novel.  Ironically, while I have never been a fan of metafiction, Winslow falls into that self-conscious category.  Even more ironically, a major portion of it is in the form of an historical novel, a genre I have never highly regarded.  Finally, this historical novel-within-a-novel is written in epistolary form.  The layers of artifice seem never ending.

How did this come about?  As near as I can tell, it was a kind of psychosis brought on by interrupted circadian rhythms, sleep deprivation, and oxygen-poor airliner air.  I had been working in Seattle for about six months on a consulting contract, each week flying out on early Monday morning and returning home to Baltimore on Thursday night/Friday morning red-eyes.  Over time, this schedule took its toll on me.  The three hour difference in time zones doesn’t seem like that much, but after a while, switching twice a week left me settled into my own time zone.  My home was Eastern Time, my job was Pacific Time, and I existed in an alternate dimension called “Fred Time.”  My client, who shall remain nameless, would probably agree that I was in an alternate dimension.

While working in Seattle, I tried as much as possible to keep myself on eastern time.  This meant getting up before dawn and going to sleep early.  Over time, however, that was difficult to maintain, so while I continued to get up early, I was going to sleep on Seattle time.  I did manage to get quite a bit of writing done during that time.  I wrote in the mornings and evenings in my hotel room and during thirteen hours I spent each week on airplanes.  My story “Indian Summer” was written while watching the golden sunlight fade away on the face of Mount Rainier.

I also began working on what I thought might be a long short story or a novella.  I had been haunted for many years by a short story I had written that I could never get right.  Finally, I realized that my whole approach to it had be wrong and decided to start over, this time writing in first person rather than third.  The story was about a beleaguered young teacher at a fictional private school in a fictional upstate New York town named Winslow.  The writing was going well and I decided to enlarge the story even more with a bit of the history of this school and town that I had invented.  Trying to imagine what the town might have been like a hundred years ago got me within range of the civil war.  It was then that “Fred Time” and that alternate universe took over.  One morning, I got up as the sun was rising and wrote:

The Battle of Antietam was the single bloodiest day in American combat history. The events of that day are documented and the numbers of the dead and wounded have been counted and re-counted. Those numbers include the twenty-seven sons of the town of Winslow, New York. The numbers of the spiritually wounded include eight widows and nineteen children. The sorrow that enveloped Winslow lasted generations and is still recalled by the statue that stands in the square in front of the post office.

Time has forgotten, however, the wounded that are never counted. They were not widows; they were not orphans. They were the young women of the town of Winslow, who had tearfully posted their perfumed letters at that very same post office. Some of those letters were later found, muddy and blood-soaked on the battlefield. Their sorrow was private and they carried it for the remainder of their days. Their betrothed had left the earth, leaving no tangible sign that they had ever existed. These women would never see their lovers smile in a child’s face.

Instead, they were left to mourn their whole lives, driven from joy to sorrow and then back again by memories of lives they had only imagined.

I had no idea where it came from.  I didn’t even know what it had to do with the story I had been working on the night before.  I had no idea where Antietam was, whether it was a Union or Confederate Victory and why I even cared.

As it turns out, The Battle of Antietam was fought near Sharpsburg, Maryland, about fifty miles from where I live.  My excuse for not knowing that is that I grew up in New York and only moved here in 2000, so my knowledge of the state’s history is limited.

Since the story that I was working on was a contemporary one, I realized that I was now working on something much larger than a short story or a novella, and considerably more complex.  I wasn’t sure how to proceed.  I set it aside for a few weeks, occasionally rereading what I had decided would be the epilogue of my unexpected epic.  Those “perfumed letters” kept coming back to me.  And that is how we return to the original topic of this post: love letters.

One Sunday afternoon, in the comfort of my home office, I sat down at the computer and challenged myself to write one of those “perfumed letters.”  I imagined a seventeen year-old girl, perhaps the minister’s daughter, writing to her eighteen year-old beau, the young prince of the town that bears his family’s name.  It was very early in the war, too early for anyone to comprehend the devastation would would occur.  Both of my lovers had heretofore lived idyllic, somewhat sheltered lives, and they are idealistic.

Sarah Davison, of Winslow, New York writes:

Dearest Joshua,

Once again, I hope this letter finds you safe and in good health.

I can scarcely believe that it has only been a fortnight since you and the others are gone and already I am writing my fourth letter to you. I have no way of knowing where or when this letter may find you, but I am sure that wherever you are, you are smiling and saying, “stop using those fancy English words, Mrs. Shakespeare.” I’m sorry my darling Sweet Boy, but someone must bring some refinement and culture into your life. I have always wanted to use the word “fortnight” and now that I have the opportunity, I am going to write it as often as I can in this letter. I hope that each time you read it, it makes you smile and laugh and that it makes you miss your beloved “Mrs. Shakespeare” as much as she misses you.

Since that day, a fortnight ago, when you and the other young men disappeared down the road to Albany, I have been willing myself to be strong. The other women in town are looking to me, the daughter of their minister, for strength and courage. I hardly know what to say to them. I smile and stand straight, with the posture expected of the young lady I am supposed to be, but in my heart, I feel an emptiness that I know will only be filled when the Good Lord sees fit to return you safely home. I have promised myself that I would not burden you with my girlish lamentations, for you surely have many more pressing things to think about, but my darling, I cannot keep from you what I must hide from everyone else. Even my mother seems to be looking to me for some sort of solace. On the night after you and Daniel left and after the house had fallen silent, I heard my mother in the parlor downstairs, quietly weeping for my brother and praying that he would come home. Please do not tell Daniel of this. Just tell him that we all miss him and pray for his safe return.

Had you not been gone for this past fortnight, I don’t think I would have seen you more than three or four times. There would have been Sundays in church, of course, and then your weekly visits to the parsonage to deliver The Crier. I might have made an excuse to come to your father’s store for some contrived purchase, just so that I could see you. Now that you have left town, however, I don’t know how I could have taken so little care to see you as often as I could. I have no idea where you might be at this moment, but I am certain that you must be marching somewhere. Whether you are fifty miles away or five hundred, it really makes no difference since I cannot see you in either case, but my heart feels every mile farther you march away from me. Is it not strange how the heart can so accurately measure distance?

Your father has begun publishing The Crier twice weekly since the whole town is now anxious for any news of the war. If you were here, of course, that would have given you one more chance each week to see me! He has also hired little Samuel to deliver the paper to the shops and houses closest to town. You should have seen him on his first day! He so looks up to you and he was proud to be huffing and puffing his way up Main Street with your canvas bag slung over his shoulder. The bag is almost as big as he is and, when you see him from behind, there is no little boy, just a canvas bag filled with newspapers waddling up the street on two little feet.

Abby has moved in with us for a time. With Daniel gone, she is by herself, so it is good that she has a family to live with. She has been very quiet lately and seems to be feeling unwell. Yesterday morning at breakfast, she became sick but thankfully, this morning she ate well. Don’t tell Daniel of this as it will only trouble him and there is nothing he can do. Although she has no family of her own, she is now a part of our family and I finally have that sister I’ve always wanted. I will try to keep her spirits up.

I have imagined that on your way south that you have traveled through Manhattan. My father took Daniel and me there once when we were children. I remember seeing the girls in their pretty fashions. Tell me darling sweet boy, did they smile and wave to you in your uniform and did you return their smiles and get an extra spring in your step?

Oh, forgive me. You know I have such a jealous nature when it comes to you. I remember how you teased me at the church dance last fall. You had told me that you don’t like to dance, but you promised you would dance with me when we sat in church the week before. Then at the dance, you went right ahead and danced three times with that Ruth Campbell. I know you did that just to make me jealous. I saw you looking over to me all the time to see if I saw you. I’m sure you remember the pain of my boot heal on your toe when you finally did allow yourself to dance with me. My temper is now well known to all. My father tells me that there must be some Irish blood in the family stock, but I’ll have none of that. You deserved it, Joshua Winslow! In educating you, didn’t your father teach you not to trifle with a girl’s affections?

Now that you are gone and I miss you so, I forgive you for all your ill manners and I apologize for my very wicked behavior. All I pray for now is for your safe return.

In spite that brave mask I am forced to wear for others, my father knows of my anxiety. He scolds me less for the gossip I like to talk about at the dinner table and for my strange interpretations of his sermons. He knows of my love of the written word and has asked me to compose a new benediction for him that mentions the brave twenty-seven of Winslow:

“May the Good Lord and his son, Jesus, bless each and every one of you with courage, wisdom and charity, and may he watch over our beloved sons, every day and every night until they are delivered safely home again.”

My darling Joshua, be well and be safe and know that I am praying for you and dreaming of you. My letters will continue to flow over the fortnights to come.

All my love,

Sarah

PS – We have acquired a new peacock and I have decided to name him Jefferson Davis, since he loves to puff himself up and strut his way around the pen all with the pomp and arrogance that I imagine a Southern Gentleman to have. He is no match for me and my broomstick as I am sure that rebel scoundrel is no match for the brave twenty-seven of Winslow.

By the time I was done, needless to say, I was hopelessly in love.  I was enraptured.  I was overcome with that blissful sense that everything on earth and in heaven is in harmony.  I sat at my desk and sighed.

Then I came to my senses and realized I needed a second opinion.  As proud and as touched by what I had written, I realized that it may just be a case of literary…self gratification. I printed it out and then nervously gave the letter to my wife. “Tell me,” I asked, “is this a letter that a seventeen year-old girl would write or is it just a letter I would like to receive from a seventeen year-old girl?”

“That’s good,” was the verdict.

I needed more.  “Is it believable, or is it a creepy middle-aged man’s fantasy?”

“No,” she said. “It’s good. Write more.”

“Write more” is a ringing endorsement to me, especially from my wife.

That was a couple of years ago.  Since then I have occasionally worked on the various parts of the novel: a present time narrative line, a narrative line from the early 1980’s and the epistolary novel set in 1861 and 1862.  I haven’t decided whether the letters are “true” or are just imagined by one of the characters in the other two story lines.  Making them imaginary frees me from having to be historically accurate and helps justify the idealized relationship between Sarah and Joshua.  I’ve written Sarah letters and Joshua letters sporadically since then.  Each of them tries to explore some aspect of love, be it emotional, psychological, physical, or spiritual. Collectively they also tell two stories: life in Winslow during the Civil War as told by Sarah, and the life of a Union soldier as told by Joshua.

When all is said and done, however, they are, quite simply love letters.  One of the things I discovered as I was writing these letters, is that to a large extent, I’m able to throw away all the rules that I normally live by when dealing with emotion in writing fiction.  In general, the more intense the emotion, the more controlled your language needs to be.  To make emotions real for your reader you need to show, not tell.  Emotion isn’t verbal, so it cannot be directly described.  Instead you need to record the effects of emotions.  Physical sensations, descriptions of body language and movement, tone of voice, and dramatic structure evoke the emotion in your reader.  Emoting uncontrollably on the page doesn’t work.

Except in love letters.  Writers of love letters, whether they be literary writers creating fiction, or confused Governors writing emails never meant for anyone other than his lover to read, can throw caution to the wind, have no fear of appearing silly or foolish and simply let go.

Whether or not I ever finish this novel, let alone publish it, writing these letters has been a learning experience for me as a writer.  The fate of my characters is known from the beginning.  Sarah never sees Joshua again because five days after writing his last letter he is killed in the Battle of Antietam.  As the narrative content – the stories Sarah and Joshua tell each other – evolved, so did the characters.  During the course of the year and a half that this correspondence takes place, both Sarah and Joshua are changed by both the words they write to each other and their separate experiences.

Along with the, well, mushy parts of each letter, I also have each character write about their current circumstances and experiences, much in the same way Governor Sanford tells his beloved Maria little tidbits from his political life.  The experiences that I describe are not planned, they are complete improvisations created in the moment.  The historical accuracy of these improvisations is extremely questionable, so I’m leaning toward the view that they are figments of another character’s imagination.  It also helps me continue to tell myself that I am not writing an historical novel.

Governor Sanford’s love letters show great potential.  The emotions seem genuine but he still seems self conscious expressing himself.  He also seems to be unsure of his lover’s devotion to him and tries to impress her with his political credentials.  Relax, Governor. You had her at “hola.”   It’s private, just between you and her, light the fuse and let loose your passion.

While Sarah and Joshua’s letters never come close to the eroticism that Governor Sanford attempts, here’s one of Joshua’s letters that the Governor might use as a guide to how to lay it on the line. It’s not erotic, but it’s about as sensuous as two teenagers from religious families can be in a nineteenth century small town.  In place of Sarah and Joshua, I have substituted the names of Governor Sanford and his beloved:

My Dearest Maria,

Your father may understand the ways of the Lord and the hearts of men, but he has no understanding of the ways of the Union Army. We have not reached the Blue Mountains of Virginia. We have not reached Virginia. It appears that we’ll not see Virginia or even Maryland this year. We’ve marched some, we trained some more, but mostly what we do is wait.

After mustering in Albany, we traveled down to Manhattan Island by boat. We camped there for two weeks while we waited for some more boats to carry us across the very river we came down. Every day we could see ferryboats crossing the river, but we had to wait for the Army’s boats which were being built in Delaware.

After we landed in New Jersey, we marched some, and then we stopped and set up camp on the plains near Trenton. It was a long march and we were glad for the rest, but we have now been here for close to three months. We train on most days and are now very disciplined and sharp, but we have yet to see a rebel flag, see a rebel soldier, or hear a rebel gunshot. There may be a war being fought somewhere, but it’s definitely not in Trenton New Jersey.

We’ve met some boys from other parts of the Union. Having spent all my life in Winslow, I only know farming, farming ways and farming people. I have made friends with a boy named Pete Shotten, from Deer Island, Maine, whose father is a fisherman. There are some other boys as well from his town and they are all sons of fisherman. There’s also a boy named Johnnie Woodbine from Port Jefferson on Long Island. His father is a fisherman. I have to say that after listening to them talk about how much they miss their lives on the water and their homes, I think that I would someday like to live near the sea, at least for a little while. We’ve also got a boy named Boucher who comes from far north in New York, near Canada. His name is pronounced “Boo-shay.” Before he joined the army, he trapped furs with his father and brothers. He speaks English, but we call him “Frenchy” because of his name.

While we have been camped here, there haven’t been too many hardships. The training is hard, but the New Jersey farmland would make all of the farmers in Winslow jealous and the growing season is longer here, so we are well supplied right now. The camp has a still, a laundry, a chapel and a post office. The officers order us to visit the laundry. They don’t have to order us to visit the still or the chapel or the post office.

On the day when that last batch of letters from Winslow arrived at the post office tent, the tent and the whole area around it for at least twenty yards was filled with lavender scent. You and your friends sure mixed up a potent batch of lavender water. The other men have been teasing us about it and they have taken to calling us Winslow boys, the “Perfume Brigade.” They tease us but I think they are also a little jealous that we are all together and come from a home where all the girls would send fragrant letters to their men.

For all of us, those letters remind us all of how much we miss home and to thank the Lord for what we have waiting for us.

For me, that scent brought back a memory of a very special day. It was that day this past June when you and I had our first picnic alone, down by the stream at the edge of Jeb Wilson’s property. I hope you remember it. You had worked so hard to make sure everything was just right, and then everything seemed to go wrong. The ants got into the peach cobbler, you dropped the plate of fried chicken on the ground and I kicked over the jug of cider. All we had left of our picnic were some cherries. You were so upset after all the work you had done, but I didn’t mind it at all. Having that time alone with you in that beautiful place was all that mattered. Finally, you laughed.

That was the day you let me kiss you. We were sitting beneath that old oak tree at the end of Wilson’s rock wall. My ears were filled with the sound of swollen stream and the songs of your laughter. The golden sun was flashing off the pretty yellow dress you wore.

When I hold your scented letter to my nose now, I remember how, after seeing you home and continuing on home myself, I held my hand up to my nose, which had touched your hair, your shoulder and your hip. The scent of lavender reminds me of the taste of cherries and the touch of your lips on mine.

My dear, sweet Maria, please don’t fret because you didn’t say the words to me before I left. You have told them to me now. Paper may get old and crumble, ink may run and fade, but those words are immortal.

You asked me about what I dream and about how will I know that you will love me forever. Let me tell you about a dream that I have. I have it every night. I have had it every night since leaving home. Every time I dream this dream, liking a painting slowly coming into being, it has more form, more detail, and becomes more real. Every morning when I awake now, I believe I am in Winslow and you are beside me. Please tell me if you can imagine this dream:

It is early June. We are in that spot by the stream where we had our picnic. My love for you could never be contained in any church, any structure built by man, and your love for me is a wonderful gift from God, no less then all of his other gifts: the trees and flowers, the birds, his gift of beautiful summer days, the gift of life itself, and so we have asked your father that it be here in this sacred place among all the things that you and I love and cherish. The small roses in your modest bouquet were clipped from your grandmother’s rose garden. Your simple white dress was sewn by your mother who added piece of lace from her own wedding dress. Your beautiful brown hair was braided by your closest girlfriend and decorated with wildflowers gathered by the young girls in your Sunday school class. You are a vision of Nature.

After our vows and our meal, Callie Shaw’s violin plays that old Irish waltz that you love. In that golden afternoon moment, my hand on your hip, your hand on my shoulder, our two hands clasped, we begin our lives together.

If you tell me that you can dream this dream too, then that is all I need to know that you will love me forever.

All my love,

Mark

Well, okay, maybe asking his lover to marry him is a little more complicated for a married 21st century governor than it is for Joshua.  But again, it’s the thought that counts.

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, $8.00

The Rainmaker

John Grisham. Delta 2005, Paperback, 576 pages, $7.00

 

The Testament

John Grisham. Delta 2005, Paperback, 480 pages, $7.15

 

The Street Lawyer

John Grisham. Delta 2005, Paperback, 384 pages, $6.09

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, $15.95

Too Far to Go

John Updike. Fawcett 1982, Mass Market Paperback, 256 pages, $4.00

Marry Me

John Updike. Ballantine Books 1996, Paperback, 320 pages, $8.26

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, 274 pages, $1.90

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, $15.41

The Art of Fiction

John Gardner. Vintage 1991, Paperback, 240 pages, $7.92

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

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.

Fiction

• “A Couple” – Cantaraville Two (also available in the eBook Store)
• “Absolutely Fourth Street” – The Square Table
• “Bonnifer” – Lily (also available in the eBook Store)
• “Calvin’s Monster” – Word Riot
• “Indian Summer” -  Cantaraville Four
• “Truths” – The Square Table
• “Natural Selection” – Cantaraville Eight (also available in the eBook Store)
• Short Story Cycle – in progress
  • “Brothers” – The Square Table
  • “Come Together” – Cantaraville Six

Memoir

• “After the Fire” – Oregon Literary Review (also available in the eBook Store)
• “Gifts” – Seeker Magazine
• “The Persistence of Gravy” – Static Movement

Poetry

• “On The Beach” – The Green Silk Journal
• “Compartments” – Mississippi Crow, Issue 7, available in print and download here.
• “The Clouds, A Highway…and Joni” – The Shine Journal
• “A Victorian in 1990″ – Loch Raven Review. Also anthologized in the annual edition:
  
  

  Loch Raven Review – Four

  Jim Doss. Loch Raven Press 2009, Paperback, 316 pages, $14.95

Early Fiction

My first published stories appeared in Tangent, the student literary journal at SUNY Albany in 1981 and 1982.  They were my only published stories until 2005 when I started writing again.  During that long silence I always intended to write again, and I made a point of transcribing all my early writings from typed manuscripts to electronic format, beginning with Wordstar on my first computer a Kaypro II.  Over the years I converted the files as word processing technology advanced.  Here they are, with a couple of vintage cover scans in adobe pdf: Early Stories.

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, $7.93

Almost

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

While They Slept

Kathryn Harrison. Ballantine Books 2009, Mass Market Paperback, 288 pages, $4.11

Who’s Irish?

Gish Jen. Vintage 2000, Paperback, 224 pages, $5.00

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson. Picador 2006, Paperback, 247 pages, $2.75

Final Payments

Mary Gordon. Anchor 2006, Paperback, 304 pages, $8.43

Blue Hour

Carolyn Forche. Harper Perennial 2004, Paperback, 96 pages, $5.35

The Figured Wheel

Robert Pinsky. Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1997, Paperback, 320 pages, $1.60

Sixty Poems

Charles Simic. Mariner Books 2008, Paperback, 108 pages, $1.00

Seven Notebooks

Campbell Mcgrath. Ecco 2009, Paperback, 240 pages, $3.38