Chapter 17: In which I Expose Myself in Shameful Ways, as All Writers Must Eventually Do

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archives list on the right sidebar, going from oldest to newest. 

We are, all of us, prejudiced.

There. I’ve said it.

It’s a simple fact, really, yet one that we’re unwilling to admit. The reason for our obstinance, I propose, is that we have falsely conflated the ubiquitous reality of prejudice with the much rarer reality of bigotry. They’re not the same thing. Prejudice is merely the tendency (habit, even) of prejudging, while bigotry is the unwillingness to recognize and overcome prejudice, and then behaving in ways that demonstrate that unwillingness.

Prejudice, in fact, may be built-in, an evolutionary advantage that allows us to create patterns based on previous experience. To “pre-judge” strange sounds or strange people gives us an opportunity to flee, and while that may sound rude (or even racist) in today’s world, it sounds pretty damn smart when judging early man on the African veldt, where strange sounds might just augur something very dangerous indeed, something that might wish to dine on his very bones. A bit of pre-judging—rather than waiting around to find out—might just make the difference as to where he spends the night—at home all comfy with his friends and relatives, or slowly rotting while a buzzard’s beak picks at his remaining entrails.

I’ve encountered this revelation (redux, as you’ll see) after reading two more Pulitzer Prize winners. Neither impressed me terribly, but they certainly impressed upon me. The first was the previously mentioned Advise and Consent (begun but set aside a couple of weeks ago, then finally picked up again) and the second, the more recent Middlesex.

You may recall that I expected Advise and Consent to be something of a “humdinger”; I was mostly right. (The book even used the word “humdinger” on one occasion.) The story—about the political machinations associated with confirming the President’s appointment for Secretary of State—is filled with the detailed inner-workings of the Senate, overlaid with a bit of McCarthy-ish melodrama involving blackmail, communism, and homosexuality. The character that helped feed my prejudicial distaste wasn’t, however (as you might have prejudicially assumed), the Senator with the homosexual history; it was instead Seab Cooley, the aged and stubborn Senator from South Carolina.

When Cooley’s picture is first painted you learn little about him. He’s stubborn. He holds a grudge. He’s powerful. He’s intensely… southern. Without realizing it, though, I filled in other parts of the paint-by-number. I assumed he had gotten somewhat dotty. I assumed he was something of a racist. I assumed he survived through self-interest. I assumed he was Republican.

All of these assumptions were wrong. In fact, by the end of the book, Seab Cooley was a guy I respected. Someone I might even, just a little bit, aspire to be like.

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex was altogether different, and nothing like what I expected when I picked up the book; the cover and title anticipated something English and (possibly) Victorian (the result of yet another prejudice, no doubt). Instead, the novel is the ostensible memoir of Callie/Cal, a hermaphrodite. “Middle sex.” Get it? Callie (I’ll stick with that name for simplicity, and because “she” dominates about 80% of the novel) is of Greek heritage, just a skipped generation removed from a brother—sister marriage, a coupling which provides the genetic narrative necessary to produce her. Pediatrically treated by a kindly but largely incompetent doctor, the condition (which has subtle but clinically obvious physical realities) remains overlooked until her early teens, at which time she makes the decision to personify as Cal (while remaining physically unchanged).

I admit to a subtle queasiness over the topic and the character, the press of a societal button installed when I was very young. It made me think of other reactions I’ve had in the past—particularly those from my teen and college years when I was less self-aware and more visceral. When, Pavlovian-like, I reacted negatively to outward displays of “not normal” behavior.

Sad, isn’t it?

*****

This is an essay that I’ve wanted to write for a long time. The first draft (penciled in a composition book that I can no longer find) first emerged on a Maine shoreline during a years-ago Labor Day weekend. I’d been sitting on some rocks just beyond the back porch of the house we had rented for a week’s vacation, watching the tide slowly ebbing, and a lobster boat circling the bay. A man stood smoking on the deck of the boat, and I watched him take a long, last drag before flicking the butt overboard. He wore overalls and a baseball cap, the former white and the latter grey.

I built a story for that man—as we all often do—giving him a family, friends, childhood memories, political beliefs. I scribed him where he stood. In doing so I built on every stereotype I pretended to know about someone who would grow up and become a Maine lobsterman. I imagined him with barely a high school diploma and a thick accent, someone who rarely read a book but was kind to his wife and three kids. His house, I was sure, needed painting, and he wasn’t above a few beers after a rough day on the water. The overall effect was of someone whom you might just barely see in an old episode of Murder, She Wrote, hazily out of focus at a diner counter, drinking coffee and reading the paper while Angela Lansbury puzzled over some not-quite-right whodunit clue.

A pleased limner, I re-read the description, changing a couple of words here and there, never once thinking about how I was building my character.

It was later that evening that I thought about exactly what I had done, how I had created a character from a nearly still image and the flick of a cigarette butt, using as material unknown (but obviously learned) habits of prejudice and composition. I had no sudden regret, of course: such construction is what we writers do. It’s our sera, our pulse beat. But I was taking note in a larger way, just for a moment, imagining the many other times I’d done the same thing, and not because I was working creatively, but because I was just reacting. Why, as a twelve-year-old kid a bit on the scrawny side, did I get a lump in my throat when, walking home alone from the park, I saw a trio of black kids about my age, walking towards me? Why, as a teenager (and recently Bar Mitzvah-ed myself), did I snicker behind my hand when approached by several Chassidic Jews asking if I wanted to pray with them? Why as a hormonal high-schooler, did I believe the rumors about Sharon, who wore those loose-fitting halters and walked around without a bra, but always treated me as a friend?

And why was it years later that I first asked myself such questions?

I truly believe that people who argue they have no prejudice are like horses wearing blinders, unaware that they can’t see what they can’t see, blithely moving forward, and that such attitudes are every bit as dangerous to society as outright bigotry. Perhaps even more so. Outright bigotry, you see is… well… outright. It’s seen and heard, and abhorred. But it is also, somehow, managed, in part because it is so obvious. Prejudice is more subtle and therefore more invasive. It is cultural norm, and so must be where the battle is fought. But that battle is in each of us; it’s a fight of self-reflection and self-honesty.

The sad part isn’t that a middle-aged man sat in his leather chair reacting with prejudice at a Southern politician or a Midwestern hermaphrodite. Those reactions, unfortunately, are to be expected. The sadness is that there are so many who won’t admit they have such reactions, and so can never help society to overcome them. 

Read since last post:

• Advise and Consent, Allen Drury (1960)
• Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides (2003)

 

Currently reading:

• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)

Count: 64 read, 23 to go

Photo courtesy of 123RF Stock Photo

Note: for those interested in discussing the intersection of written words, politics, and social issues, Coffee Party USA has re-established the Coffee Party Book Club.

Chapter 16: Interlude and Devastation

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archives list on the right sidebar, going from oldest to newest.

 

I needed a break.

After winding my way through the last of Jean Stafford’s stories I felt exhausted, like a household generator with only ounces of fuel remaining yet desperately trying to warm an iced-in, powerless cabin. Melancholy set in, overlaid with a nagging feeling that I just wasn’t up to the task I’d set myself. Something about the Pulitzer committee must love the deeply depressing, for only a very few of those read so far had brought me anything approaching a smile. And with both Andersonville and Humboldt’s Gift before me, I think that unlikely to change. Oh, there may be some satire and absurdity ahead (there’s a Michael Chabon awaiting, after all, and a Richard Russo), but I’m resigned to a home stretch of frayed electrics, nerves rubbed raw.

So following Stafford I took the break I needed and read books un-Pulitzered.

The laughter I craved came from How About Never… Is Never Good For You? My Life in Cartoons, a memoir by the current cartoon editor of The New Yorker, Bob Mankoff. Mankoff’s book—made up of equal parts words and line drawings (both his and others)—takes us on an interesting journey into what life is like for the crème de la crème of those plying the trade. He likens working for The New Yorker to playing for the Yankees—there is no higher aspiration (at least for a New Yorker). After a brief obligatory trip through his own childhood and subsequent calling, he dives into the real stuff, discussing what it’s like to churn out ten-plus good ideas a week in the hopes that one of them will be great, in the hopes that one of those will be great enough to find its way into the sacred pages. At the same time he reminisces about what it was like to a) disappoint his parents, b) find his own voice and style, and c) remind us that no one—no one—will ever be another James Thurber. (Okay, that last one was mine. But really, you have to admit it. Thurber was something else, the Olivier of magazine cartoonists, working so hard to make it look so easy….)

I followed Mankoff’s book with A Little Lumpen Novelita, another spot of brilliance from the late Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño seizes unceasingly; his work (including the epic 2666 and the poetically challenging The Savage Detectives) never fails to grasp and hold my attention. This brief work, best read in one sitting, is simultaneously depressing and uplifting, telling the story of the older of two orphans who finds herself in a very unusual (and oddly romantic) situation where she seduces someone she plans to rob, but never effectively manages either. (Bolaño’s voice, silenced so early, will be missed, but I’ll continue to look forward to whatever posthumous translations appear.)

At this point I began to feel guilty. I’d set a project for myself, after all, and had allowed this unintended sidetrack. Worse, I was enjoying it. Now and again I’d look toward where a beaten hardback copy of Advise and Consent sat on my end table (I’d already decided Drury’s book was the next stop on the Pulitzer train), and thought about how much I didn’t want to open its pages. Over six hundred of them waited for me, all densely packed with what a cursory flip through suggested would be endlessly boring descriptions of hallways and long passages of mediocre dialog. (In fairness, the plot was supposed to be a humdinger, but then I’d always been wary of anything where the word “humdinger” seemed an appropriate descriptor.)

Guilt and I don’t get along. In particular, self-guilt and I don’t get along. I don’t know where it comes from or why it should be so but, given that I’m in my mid-fifties and it’s merely annoying (rather than debilitating), I’m long past figuring out how to fix it. I just take the ride.

So my break broke down. I cracked open Advise and Consent. Waded through fifty pages or thereabouts. I’m so far unimpressed, but I’m not sure if that prophecy isn’t of the self-fulfilling variety.

Then I had a moment of inspiration, an insight as to how both having and eating might be possible. On the shelf in my office sat a slim volume, Out of the Dark, by the recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Patrick Modiano. Since an earlier reading obsession had led to working my way through all of Alfred's honorees, Modiano’s book gave me the opportunity to continue my brief but much-needed Pulitzer break while still feeling that I was reading something I was “supposed” to read. I’d simply shift lanes, obsession-wise, and knock off a book I knew I had to get to sooner or later, anyway. So that’s what I did.

Modiano—at least based on this one thin example—reminds me a bit of Camus, though with the personality of an arrogant flaneur, someone who writes in the same way that someone taking a stroll looks into every shop window—sometimes twice—then dismisses the window’s contents with a subtle wave of the finger. Those around will notice and take heed, drawn in by the conceit. If the street is interesting enough, attention commands attention. In Modiano’s case it is. He limns his characters just so—giving you enough but not too much—allowing you to observe with just the distance needed to maintain the necessary air of existentialism that runs, Styx-like, beneath the story.

The plot, detailed by an untrustworthy narrator, wanders through the lives of a young, somewhat bohemian couple who are both likeable and unlikeable in equal doses. Our narrator seduces (or finds himself seduced) by the pair’s female half, setting off nothing at all dramatic in any conventional sense, yet proving a watershed moment nonetheless.  The characters, like their reader, experience sans guilt.

A good read, but not a great read. That was yet to come.

*****

I have yet to find a writer who will fully admit to what it is they’re trying to do when they sit down to write. Some will say that they write for themselves, to tell the stories they want told or that they would want to read. Others to share an experience that just might uplift, enlighten, or assist some person “out there.” The slightly more honest among us will talk about compulsion and a hidden desire for widespread readership (and the fame that sometimes comes with it). But none of that is true.

What a writer wants, more than anything, is to devastate, to write just one sentence now and again that stops a reader like a bullet to the heart. A sentence so full of the writer’s soul that the reader can’t help but feel what the writer wants them to feel, a flayed sense of raw immersion that overwhelms, that forces a moment’s pause for breath.

I’ve found a book that does that, and more than once. Listen with your nerves and soul to this sentence:

The membrane between space and time is a sieve; I can be dusted through it and reassembled on the other side.

Or this one:

The second-to-last time he spoke, he was six years old.

Both come from Know the Night, a brilliant memoir from Maria Mutch. The book—and “book” isn’t quite the right word, though I haven’t one better—describes two years of nights she spends—obsessively, passionately, and reluctantly—with her son Gabriel, who has Downs Syndrome combined with autism. With a mother’s sensitivity, Mutch awakens frequently to comfort, console, and coax her son through these darkened hours. She stumbles, like the sleep deprived will, through whatever the darkness casts their way. Simultaneously she becomes engrossed in the stories of Admiral Richard Byrd, whose explorations provide a telling undercurrent of what it feels like to be alone—what she imagines it might be like for Gabriel.

At the same time Gabriel loves jazz, and the book emphasizes this connection through its free-form (yet still organized) structure, counterpointing stories of Gabriel with those of Byrd, and again with those of Mutch herself, and her husband and second son. The book reads like the jazz clubs it describes, and I felt Gabriel’s connection to the music as surely as if I were there myself.

But, finally, it is the sentences.

Here she artfully juxtaposes Byrd’s contemplation of his reflection ...

But at the moment, he [Byrd] is suspended in his little mirror, watching himself watching himself; he is turning in the vortices that layer Antarctica, a witness to being consumed.

...with the way Gabriel avoids his own:

Gabriel rarely watches himself. He only catches glimpses. Like our cat, he’ll often smoothly avert his gaze when he’s standing in front of a mirror, not as if he’s afraid to see himself but as if he has no curiosity about how he appears in the glass nor interest that there is a glass at all. Then again, maybe he understands the power of the other self, and like Byrd would prefer not to see the one that is darker and harder to grasp.

And here, near the end, when Mutch describes listening to “Flamenco Sketches,” from Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue sessions:

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the tune before, it would be many, but I don’t know that I have ever really listened, or listened in the way that Gabriel is listening. He opens a door for me, and I step inside. Is this what it’s like to be him? Or what it’s like to be him at least some of the time? I am never ready, I am never ready. I am ready.

The beauty and power of a story well told come not from singularity, but from the telling. Mutch is not the first mother with a special-needs child, nor the first to write about it; bookstores have entire sections devoted to such works. But Mutch is the first I’ve read who writes with such pure devastation, a devastation that is not about destruction, but about awe. When the best sentences and stories devastate, it is as if Sisyphus, in reaching the top, finds that the rock remains, that he is finished and yet feels entirely alone, unable to conceive of what comes next. It is both fullness and emptiness.

Few authors have made me feel this way. Annie Dillard. Joan Didion. Orhan Pamuk. Dario Fo. Alice Walker. Paul Auster.

Reading Mutch’s memoir has washed away the guilt I’ve been feeling, the nagging ache that it’s somehow wrong to read anything other than those books I’ve set as tasks. The experience reminds me that this project shouldn’t be thought of as a project at all. It should simply be reading. Reading for joy. For insight. For feeling. And for devastation. 

Read since last post:

• Collected Stories, Jean Stafford (1970)
• Know the Night, Maria Mutch
• A Little Lumpen Novelita, Roberto Bolaño
• Out of the Dark, Patrick Modiano
• How About never… Is Never Good For You? My Life in Cartoons, Bob Mankoff

 

Currently reading:

• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
• Advise and Consent, Allen Drury (1960)

 

Count: 62 read; 25 to go.

Chapter 15: In Which 34 Words Remind me of a Thief I Can’t Quite Revile

First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow the Chapters in the Archives list on the right sidebar, going from oldest to newest.

 

For someone who anticipates epiphany with each author newly encountered, nothing matches the sun-flare of excitement as when first discovering language that transports, when just the right, the ideal, combination of words and letters and pauses and starts combine to make me feel, just for a few seconds, that nothing else I’ve ever read—or ever will read—can touch me in quite this particular way. On the rare occasions when this happens it’s not because the words are perfect or the phrases unique, but that they unfailingly cooperate with me, triggering memory and feeling in sudden, energetic bursts. Such bursts are passing strange, as Othello might say, both rare and teasingly diaphanous, but when it happens it feels like, for just that one moment, I am alone with beauty in the universe.

It happened to me just this morning, emerging from the opening of an otherwise non-descript story buried in a set of such stories by Pulitzer winner Jean Stafford: “One of the great hardships of my childhood,” she writes, “—and there were many, as many, I suppose, as have every plagued a living creature—was that I could never find a decent place to read.”

With these few words Stafford—as I do—elevates the act of reading to sepulchral heights, a need, a pain too often unassuaged, a preference few around me understand.

These words do not describe me, yet they are me. My childhood shared no such hardships, and locating reading’s Eden was never terribly difficult. I had my own room, and headphones. I had a quiet backyard, and school stairwells. Anywhere and everywhere served as a reading room when I wanted.

Yet these 34 words ignite.

Reading has always been for me just as it is for Stafford’s young narrator: important, prioritized, invaluable. And so I’m now living in a memory, intensely strong, that echoes Stafford’s fiction, a memory that reminds, viscerally, that reading is everything….

*****

Every child has a sad-sacked side, a reason for feeling that luck never leans leeward. Even, I’m sure, the tough guy, the wisecracker, the quarterback, have moments when they feel nothing ever goes quite right.  For me, that feeling came with paired wheels.

Every bike I’ve ever had, save one, was stolen. (The one that didn’t suffered Goodyear's nasty kiss when I inadvertently left it in the driveway and my mother, on a dusky late autumn evening, pulled into said driveway rather quickly, resulting in metal remains so warped that I literally threw the bike into a dumpster.)

First stolen was a plain-vanilla bike, the kind with foot brakes and a barely adjustable seat. This was followed by my first sting-ray (a 3-speed Huffy given for Christmas by a father who meant well but had no idea that Huffy’s weren’t at all cool). My first ten-speed (the highest number of speeds you could get back then), a brown Schwinn Varsity, disappeared from the bike rack at school. Right up through college, where my high-end French racing bike joined a dozen others as victims in a massive theft at a dorm party, they all took flight.

 The one that sticks with me the most, though, is the yellow 5-speed stingray that Schwinn called a “Lemon Peeler.”

 

 

Mine had a basket on the front.

As a boy, I wasn’t supposed to have a basket on the front of my bike. It was less cool, even, than owning a Huffy. But this was a time before backpacks, and if you had stuff to carry around, you either bungeed it somehow to the back of your bike, or you had a basket. The bungee-cord method worked fine for most people, but I needed the basket because, well, I went to the library. A lot. And took out books. A lot.

On one particular summer Saturday I was heading to the Gardner Park Library, my bike basket weighed down by five or six books all approaching their due dates. I can’t recall what they were (I’m no savant, after all), but I can guess that at least one of the books was by Madeleine L’Engle (whose wrinkles in time I found endlessly fascinating), and another probably had something to do with sports. Perhaps it was a biography of Willie Mays.

Between home and the library sat Hancock Park Elementary School, the very place from which I'd graduated just a couple of years earlier, and on this Saturday there were a handful of same-aged boys playing softball on the painted concrete playground. (Back then safety and security were generally assumed, and lawsuits were not. Besides, the fence was low and easily climbed.) Tim’s and David’s waved hands brought me closer, and I decided to join them for a bit, continuing on to the library later on. It was Saturday, after all, and I could ignore any clocks. I de-biked, using my lock and chain to secure the Lemon Peeler to the bike rack at the end of the playground, even taking care to wind the chain through and around the basket of books.

You know what happens next, of course, and to this day I have no idea how someone could have cut the lock and ridden away with none of us seeing it happen. But it did.

I freaked—not at the loss of the bike (which had sadly become routine by then)—but at the loss of the books. These were library books! I was responsible for them!

Only much later did I realize what an odd, odd reaction I’d had.

I walked home, despondent, knowing that I would have to face my parents not only with the loss of another bike (“How could you NOT see someone stealing it from the playground?” “Better start saving your allowance, mister!”) but would also need to let the library know what had happened.

The first of these—parental reaction—came later that evening; the second I delayed several days. I’d written down the names of the stolen books, but hadn’t yet managed to get myself to the library; at that age my fear of authority ran deep.

Finally I couldn’t delay any longer (my stepfather having decided to hold the current week’s allowance as hostage), and I headed off—this time on foot—to the library. There was no one at the schoolyard to distract me this time, not that I was in the mood anyway. When I got to the library I slinked up to the desk where one of several interchangeably frightening librarians greeted me. I explained what had happened, handed her the list I’d made, and waited while she shuffled off to check. She came back just a few moments later, a puzzled look on her face.

“All the books are here,” she said. “They’ve been returned.”

I would have been flabbergasted if flabbergasted had then been a word in my vocabulary. Who steals a bike but returns library books? How in the world did L’Engle and company not end up in some alleyway trashcan?

I’ll tell you how: that thief was a reader. Someone with a passion for words, who feels, now and again, that passing strange feeling, that sense of transport, that ephemeral tingle that somewhere between any of those pages someone might be writing just for him.

An odd kinship to admit, certainly, with someone who stole my bike. As it turns out, though, that was all he stole. He left me this memory and I find it much, much more valuable.

Read since last post:

• Independence Day, Richard Ford (1996)
• The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O'Connor (1962)

Currently reading:

• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
• Collected Stories, Jean Stafford (1970)

 

Count: 61 read; 26 to go.