Chapter 7: In Which I Talk About What We Talk About When We Talk About What We’re Not Supposed To Talk About

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Some books are more uncomfortable to read than they should be, and while I acknowledge the typical therapist’s command to “own my feelings,” I can’t help believing that it’s not just me this time.

The 1930 Pulitzer Prize went to Laughing Boy, a novel set almost entirely in the early 20th century universe of the western Navajo nations. It’s a generally unremarkable coming-of-age story involving the titular young man, a man with a penchant for horses, jewelry making, and the occasional interesting wager. At a days-long tribal event he meets another young Navajo, Slim Girl, and the attraction soon grows. Slim Girl, though, isn’t quite the type one brings home to amá. Having been taken from her tribe as a child and raised in one of the American-run “Indian schools,” she remains ensnared between the proverbial two worlds, a situation which drives the novel’s central conflict. (Such schools, by the way, are historically accurate. Pioneered by Christian missionaries, the idea of removing the “native” from Native Americans soon bore the imprimatur of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and lasted, sadly, until the 1970s.)

Laughing Boy ebbed from the pen of Oliver La Farge, an uppercrust-ian born in New York and raised in Rhode Island. Oliver’s father was an architect, his grandfather claimed fame for stained glass, and the family tree was not without the occasional Commodore, Governor, and Plymouth Colony resident. Oliver unsurprisingly graduated from Harvard. Twice.

When I first picked up Laughing Boy I had what I imagined was a relatively conventional thought: Is this going to be just another pseudo-ethnographic novel written from a decidedly white point of view?  One that, because of the time and culture in which it is set, I might even find slightly embarrassing?

I then did something I can’t imagine ever having done a couple of decades ago: I checked the author’s bona fides. I realized even while checking that it was an odd thing to do, but also realized in the same instant that today’s world demands that we think this way; if a white male wants to write a book about a different culture, we wonder immediately whether he has the right to do so.

And then came the important thought, the one we’re not even supposed to think (though many do), a thought much less conventional: Is it just me, or have we reached a point where a white male can’t discuss anything non-white without his point of view called into question?  

I’m pretty sure it’s not just me. In fact, I’m damned sure of it. I recall having a discussion following George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin. At the time I was part of an online media team that focuses on political and social issues. The team was “diverse” (to use the modern and, to my mind, somewhat cryptic, terminology) and there were a variety of opinions. The part of the discussion that most adheres, however, came from an African-American in the group, who informed me that I “couldn’t possibly understand” what Trayvon Martin had gone through because I “wasn’t black.” While my ability to understand might suffer restriction, in reality his comment wasn’t at all about that; it was a way of shutting down my opinion, a way of telling me that not only were my opinions automatically invalid, but that I should perhaps reconsider even having an opinion in the first place. And If I did, I should at least have the decency to refrain from speaking it aloud.

Where does one take a conversation from there?

Examples abound: Men are routinely chastised for having an opinion on abortion or wages; heterosexuals for not having lived in constant fear of being outed; whites for never knowing what it feels like to be followed around a convenience store. And if someone does attempt a cross-cultural thought? Well, such people may suffer instruction, commanded to “check their privilege at the door.”

Laughing Boy isn’t the only Pulitzer book that’s made me feel this way. I also recently read The Color Purple, Alice Walker’s brilliant epistolary novel. Reading it wasn’t a totally comfortable experience, though, since modern culture has implanted a sadistic homunculus, one that suggests I might not even have the right to enjoy it or, if I do, that I’m probably enjoying it for all the wrong reasons—as if such a thing were possible. In some ways my experience with The Color Purple was even worse than with Laughing Boy because Alice Walker is black, female, and bisexual, a constant meta-reminder that I am so very much not any of those things. So even if I think I understood her book, how can I know if I did, or if she would think I did, or even if my thoughts are any longer valid on this inevitably larger social scale?

I get that I am, inarguably, privileged. I know this. As Pearl Jam once wrote in an otherwise forgettable song about white, male Americans, I “won the lottery" when I was born. But this idea that I need to somehow “check my privilege” (and, no, I’m not making up that phrase), or that my opinions and emotions are irrelevant because of it, strikes me with the greatest irony; those who dismiss me with such simplicity are merely exerting their own privilege, one self-proclaimed and, worse, one that builds walls.

There’s another unintended consequence here, one that is subtle yet impactful, one that accepts—in fact, relies upon—that a reading experience exists in the space between the reader and the author. Given that those spaces have changed—culturally, historically, politically—it is fair to say that the book, too, has necessarily changed. Were I Native American (or, perhaps, the even more au courant “First Nation”), the experience of reading Laughing Boy would be different than it is for me now.  Were I living in 1929 and reading the book’s first edition the experience would again be different. 

This has always been true, of course. Anyone who has gone back to a favorite book decades later knows that even personal histories change a book’s meaning. But it feels different, amplified somehow, to enter a reading experience with these changes foisted upon you by others.

I much prefer the days when I could sit down to read a book without having all those ghosts in the room with me, but I fear they’ve settled in for a good long stay….

 

Read since last post:

• The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson (2013)
• Laughing Boy, Oliver La Farge (1930)
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2007)

Currently reading:

• The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk (1952)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, H.L. Davis (1936)

Count: 29 read; 58 to go

 

Chapter 6: In Which I Admit I Never Liked My Name, Provide a Bit of Russian History, and Recall a Certain Ice Cream Store

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The story-cycle is one of the rarer genres, not quite flora nor fauna. It doesn’t require from readers the dedication a novel demands, yet isn’t quite the unconnected series of tales that makes short story collections so easy to pick up and put down.

 

 

Some of our most powerful works are formed in this way: The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, and Dubliners are ones that immediately come to mind. More recent examples include Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place. Perhaps the iconic American example is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Published in 1919, it was eligible for the 1920 Pulitzer Prize but surprisingly failed to make its mark (losing, sadly, to “no award”). Perhaps its non-traditional structure was simply too modern for the still staid Pulitzer committee members. Fortunately, the committee mindset evolved over the years, in plenty of time to recognize Olive Kitteridge, a story cycle from Elizabeth Strout that won in 2009.

*****

Here is one of the stories that formed me:

In 1881, in the Russian city of St. Petersburg, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, (pronounced Ignaty Grinevizky) a member of the People’s Will movement, threw a bomb at the feet of Tsar Aleksandr II. The explosion removed parts of both legs and ripped open the Tsar’s stomach. Later that day, in the confines of the Winter Palace, the leader who had twenty years earlier freed the serfs, died. His heir, Aleksandr III, did what many others had done before him: he blamed the Jews.

My birth name, I should tell you, is not Charney, but Schuchman, a name I never much liked. With its odd yet rhythmic spelling (S-C-H/U-C-H/M-A-N), the obvious opportunity for vulgar rhymes, and the alphabetical guarantee of rear-row seating assignments all through my school years, I always felt the name hung uncomfortably, like a too-large t-shirt.  In my early twenties, when I formed one-half of a musical duo that trudged around the San Francisco Bay area, I decided to change it and, with a sentimental nod to family history, chose “Charney.”

My great-grandfather and his brother were two of the millions of Jews threatened by the new Tsar’s policies, policies that led to a decades-long series of pogroms and the eventual removal of some two million Jews. I don’t know precisely where my great-grandfather was from, but I do know that the family’s last name was Charney and that it was a time when travel (or escape) for any Jew was exceedingly difficult. Pursuing a tactic more common than history tells, the two brothers acquired the identification of two men from a Russian Orthodox family, men who had recently died, men whose last name was close to the name I was born with. The two brothers somehow made it out of Russia and wound their way through parts of Europe where they managed poor passage to America. They came through Ellis Island, eventually making their way to Jersey City. Both soon married and, by the time of my grandfather’s birth in the 20^th century’s earliest years, had settled into the lives of ethnic Americans.

I thought my name change would be a charming homage. And it might have been, except that the family legend wasn’t true. It was, instead, homemade, something invented to amuse a small child who one night refused to fall asleep. And yet, imagine: with just this simple story comes a changed life.

*****

Story cycles makes us uncomfortable because of their inherent incompleteness, their requirements. They leave wide spaces between the lines and we’re expected to fill them in, sequencing where no sequence exists, finding patterns and hidden pictures and missing pieces like we did all those times as kids while sitting in a doctor’s office with half-torn Highlights magazines. We strive, whether knowingly or not, to make sense of broken narratives.

But isn’t that life?

*****

Here’s another one:

In the summer of 1972 I went steady for a very brief time with an incredibly attractive girl named Stephanie. (“Going steady,” for those too young to remember, was a bit like today’s “friends with benefits,” only you were more than friends and there were almost no benefits.) She and I would meet at the Gardner Park pool a few days a week to swim, meet with friends, and occasionally sneak behind the hot dog stand for a few chaste kisses. It was a time of early exploration but not much more, and five or six weeks later it was over. No drama, no scene. We were just two kids who bounced off each other briefly then went our separate ways.

Then things changed.

Steph’s family, the Geller’s, owned a local Baskin-Robbins store, one that I and my friends frequented and that my step-father patronized at least twice a week in order to replenish our freezer’s ever-diminishing supply of Jamoca® Almond Fudge. I showed up to school on just one more ordinary day to find Evy, Steph’s sister, glaring at me. “Stop calling the store. It’s not funny,” she said. “Calling over and over like that. We don’t like it. So just stop, okay?”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

A couple of days later I stopped for ice cream on the way home from school. Steph wouldn’t even look at me. Her parents refused to serve me. Someone had apparently decided to make prank calls to the store using my name, calling repeatedly, two or three times a day, and for weeks.  Nothing I could say or do would convince them it wasn’t me, and I was never allowed in the store again.  My stepfather asked me about it because the Gellers had asked him about it. I think he believed me only because I pleaded with him, and because he knew I wasn’t a very good liar.

I never found out who had made the calls, and the Gellers—mother, father, and daughters—never returned to my life after high school. I moved away, and the friendships were never close enough to expend any effort. They are a story: setting, plot and characters requiring no resolution. Yet here I am, nearly forty years on, and the story sticks with me. It must have had an effect or why would I remember it? Perhaps, recursively, this incomplete story, this incomplete accusation, drives my compulsive need for completion, for answers, to everything I begin, everything I question. But even if that’s so, is the story remembered because of the way I am, or has the story created the way I am, and so forces its own remembrance?

*****

Our lives are built that way, though, aren’t they? Built like story cycles, with characters arriving and leaving, many without proper exposition, barely threaded into the weave. Many, like Pirandello wrote, in search of an author. With answers lost and found, and resolutions (when we can find them) built from loosely coupled suppositions. If we left those stories alone we would find our lives untidy, and so we build from them the novel we’d prefer we were, the one filled with interesting characters spread over long years of narrative arc, alternating tension, joy, and sorrow in equal amounts. But it isn’t that way. It’s erratic and gap-filled, written in pencil, and with more blank pages than we know.  

We ourselves are story cycles. Our lives. Our friendships. Our careers. Mostly we will be forgotten. Mostly we are the spaces between what’s written. Yet all the meaning we have—of ourselves and of others—comes from those stories and spaces. We attempt narrative, cementing the cracks, filling the holes with whatever we can. We would much prefer the neatly clean and unidirectional, the hero’s tale that, while perhaps not epic, is a tale well-enough told when we tell it to ourselves. And so that’s what we do, but that’s not who we are.

Read since last post:

·         The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983)

·         The Fixer, Bernard Malamud (1967)

·         Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout (2009)

Currently Reading:

·         The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson (2013)

·         The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 26 read, 61 to go

Chapter 5: In Which I Wonder what all Those Words Mean and Find Myself Mulling the Personally Universal

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I think I’ve just read a book, but I can’t be sure. I know I read all the words, and in the right order, but I couldn’t tell you what the book was actually about.

It wasn’t because of the vocabulary, though a few words sent me scrambling for the OED, a tome of miniscule type that still beats Google every time. (I looked up defalcate, for example, which as it turns out has nothing to do with bodily functions.) And it wasn’t because the plot was overly convoluted; it’s not like there were seven kingdoms and an iron throne, after all, or a mobius of characters invented by Keyser Söze. And nothing at all was timey-wimey.

If you've never had this feeling before, then permit me this analogy: Have you ever found yourself behind the wheel of a car having suddenly wondered where you were for the last fifteen minutes or so? You know you’ve been driving, but all you know for sure is that you have a subtle but unimpeachable sense of something passing you by.

That’s how I felt after turning the last pages of Faulkner’s A Fable.

Faulkner is a tough read, certainly, but not James-Joyce tough; he doesn’t just string letters together and pretend they’re words and, while some passages are riveted with run-ons and semicolons, there’s nothing like, say, the “Penelope” section that closes Ulysses. It also wasn’t my first foray into Faulknerian territory; I had read, though many years earlier, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom, all of which, if memory serves, I understood.

Admittedly I began handicapped. My copy wore no jacket, and therefore no inside flap’s brief summary. Nor was there an erudite introduction scribed by some English professor fighting for tenure at a mid-list Iowa university. None of that bothered me much, though. I knew a Faulkner novel required easing into.

After about twenty pages I re-checked the book see if I’d missed something, a blurb on the frontispiece perhaps, or a brief afterword—anything that might give me some hint at a plot. Other than knowing the book was set in France during World War II, I had nothing.

I cheated, heading to Wikipedia (the twenty-first century version of Cliffs Notes) and read the brief description: The book takes place in France during World War I and stretches through the course of one week, it began. Ah… so I didn’t even have the right World War. And there were only two to choose from. Not an auspicious beginning.  I continued reading:

It tells the stories of "Corporal Stefan", who is representative of Jesus. The Corporal orders 3,000 troops to disobey orders to attack in the brutally repetitive trench warfare. In return, the Germans do not attack, and the war is simply stopped when the soldiers realize that it takes two sides to fight a war. The Generalissimo has the corporal arrested and executed; he is representative of leaders who use war solely to make themselves stronger (he invites the German general over to discuss how to start the war again). Before he has him shot, the Generalissimo tries to convince the Corporal that war can never be stopped because it is the essence of humanity.

Not the cleanest summary. In fact, it feels like this particular Wikipedian had some trouble with the book, too.

At least I now had some idea about what was going on and, given the book’s title, I could at least watch for any relevant metaphors. Several soon emerged: Corporal Stefan had a team of twelve, one of whom is later paid thirty coins for information; Stefan also seems to have some relationship with an ex-prostitute named Mary who just happens to hang out with a woman named Marthe.

But what do I do with the seventy-odd pages used to describe the world’s fastest three-legged horse as it parades around the southern United States? Or the corpse-hunting widow who can’t decide whether to eat her only piece of bread or wield it uselessly as a weapon?

At this point I was hoping for any kind of…wait for it…epiphany. Something to open the skies, light the burning bush afire, part the seas. Instead I’m left with a gnawing concern, the strangest feeling that a part of my mind has peeled away like sunburnt skin. I wonder if it’s me, after all, that’s the problem, that if, somehow, having entered the tail end of my fifties, I no longer have the ability to comprehend a novel so dense. I imagine that if I’d read A Fable back when I’d read those other Faulkner novels I would have had a much easier time of it, might have experienced the sudden flash of understanding and awareness that all difficult but wonderfully written books give. It never came, though, not this time, and thinking that years ago it might have, gives me the eeriest feeling, one of those small quivers that often generate larger quakes.

We all know that as we get older some faculties necessarily fade. My eyes struggle both near and far now, and my ears, battered by years of heavy metal and progressive rock, aren’t what they used to be. It takes me longer to do a crossword puzzle than it used to, and the witty riposte is too often now slightly out of reach. And as I age, so do those around me, and what seems self-evident surprisingly strikes: a father, an uncle, a friend from high school, each a little grayer, each one step slower. You notice first the additional wrinkles, then the occasional misspeak or a need to repeat what is no longer clearly heard. Then you look into your own mirror in the morning and wonder at the gap between the face before you and the ageless adolescent internally (and eternally) embraced. But the mirror is accurate and the memory is only that; you realize that the greying and the slower step describe you, too. The person inside you wants only to take the many, many steps remaining, and more, but you, the real you, aren’t just taking steps, but counting them, an unwelcome admission that there are only so many left.

Books are meant to make us think, but when I picked up this one I never expected to mull my own fading senses.  What my difficulty with A Fable has surfaced in me is a sense of mortality and of time—Time and how much of it remains. Time and how best to enjoy it. Time and the one-way stream of it in which we live. I find myself clawing at the embankments of memory now, wondering what happened to people I almost knew decades ago, people I’ve imagined into importance; or trying to recall the poems and lyrics that moved me once; or what it felt like to enjoy mowing the lawn.  Wondering when I’ll trade Faulkner for obituaries. I spend more time holding hands with my wife these days. More time petting my remaining dog. More time attempting to understand, hoping that, like any good fable, the moral waiting at the end makes it all worthwhile.                                                       

Read since last post:

·         A Fable, William Faulkner (1955)

·         Death in the Family, James Agee (1958)

·         Tales of the South Pacific, James Michener (1948)

Currently Reading:

·         The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983)

·         The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 23 read, 64 to go

Chapter 4: For Those Who Have Loved and Lost a Pet: Requiescat in Pace

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Writing through tears is every bit the cliché, but there you go: the truth will out, bard-like, whether clichéd or no.

We humans are sense-making creatures, lovers of pattern. Coincidental occurrences once easily ignored seem suddenly connected when propelled by just one overwhelmingly impactful event. For me, just this last week, that event was the loss of a dear pet, Kayda, a sometimes-stubborn yet always-loving standard poodle raised from a pup and who, in many ways, remained pup-like for all of her twelve-plus years, right up until Canine Degenerative Myelopathy (the Lou Gehrig’s Disease of her world) caught up with her.

Kayda was a wonderful dog, unique in many ways. I know that every pet owner says the same thing, but in her case it was true. This was a dog that taught herself how to retrieve, singly. She would grab her Kong (a hard-rubber toy that resembles a small, headless Michelin Man), walk over to the edge of our deck, drop it at her feet, and then knock it through the five-inch space between the bottom railing and the deck’s surface, propelling it over the side. Then she would run down the stairs, hunt out the toy, and bring it back up only to launch it over the edge again. And again. For a dog owner this was wonderful. I didn’t have to stand outside and throw it for her if I didn’t feel like it, something I rarely wanted to do when, say, the mosquitoes had grown duskly thick.

Her game stopped, sadly, a couple of months ago, at about the point where one of her back legs began to drag a bit and her breathing became more labored. That’s what happens with this particular disease: the nerves and muscles fail to converse effectively, and both autonomic and somatic functions quickly degrade. On what was to be her last day she had already gone some time without food, having first decided she no longer wanted her own food, and then progressively losing interest in rice, pasta, chicken, hamburger, and tomatoes—all previous favorites. No coaxing would get her to eat anything but some cheese, bits of hot dog, and her own favorite dog treats. When even these, too, failed to stir her, we knew what she was telling us. A mere walk across the room left her panting and she could no longer stand with surety. Her naps grew deeper and longer. It was time. 

I was with her at the end.

Grief is a drunkard’s walk, pretending direction yet guiding you toward one inevitable fall after another until, slowly, the effects wear off and you’re left with, first, mild sorrow and then, later (sometimes much later), ripe memory. Despite such predictability it surprises us every time, a last call when you need just a few moments more. There’s always something left to say or do, yet those things remain unsaid, undone, headlight-caught in the sudden helplessness of an unwanted ending. Diversion is sought, and soon. A meal out (for who wants to be home with memories?), or a movie (though not a comedy). A book.

And what Pulitzer-Prize winning book would require reading at just this time, if only to provide one of those narrative coincidences that so often strike us as clichéd?

The Yearling.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ coming-of-age story lives in two worlds, both literally and metaphorically. Coming in at over 400 pages yet often shelved in a library’s Juvenile section (where I found my copy), it is a challenging read thus categorized. Still, with various versions peppered with illustrations (N.C. Wyeth’s being the most famous), and with language and story firmly centered on a young boy just coming into his own, the tale’s pendulum swings undoubtedly to the small.

The book, until this project, had been one of those long-avoided; the story of a backwoods Florida family and a young fawn echoed too strongly of the horse stories that girls of my generation grew up adoring. I knew, as a child, that if caught out with such a book I would suffer endless taunting. Better, I knew, to stick with The Hardy Boys and The Hobbit.

I had as an adult seen the movie, largely because of the common guilt many feel when they know a story only as cultural gravitas but have never actually experienced it in any real form. One lazy solitary evening I noticed its pending appearance on TCM and, feeling somewhat Gregory Peckish, settled in to watch. I already knew, of course, how it all ended, how the fawn, grown, becomes an unintending burden and that the boy, also grown, becomes an intending man. Still, at the end, tears fell.

So, too, upon finishing the book, an admittedly uneven affair told moralistically, though with a fair balance of grey tucked between the black and white. Some characters remain flat, either kindly settled or aggressively tempered; others grow and change, learning or giving lessons as required by the narrative. In the end the book satisfies what early Pulitzer committees were looking for: not necessarily the best book, but a book with moral value, with an American catechism deeply etched.

I wonder, though only slightly given a long-standing agnosticism, what brought The Yearling before me at just this time. Was it a story I needed just now? A comfortable companion, something on which to project emotion? Perhaps. More likely, though, it was just a pattern I found in coincidence, a call heard because listened for. In either case (and with a heavy sigh) I admit it’s impact on me, one no doubt greater for my own experiences and, therefore, one more likely remembered, a focus, perhaps, as I stumble through grief, as I write through tears.

Read since last post:

• The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1939)
• The Town, Conrad Richter (1951)

Currently Reading:

• A Fable, William Faulkner (1955)
• The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
• Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936

COUNT: 20 read, 67 to go

Chapter 3: In Which I Deplore the Use of Certain Words, Offer my Opinions on Coffee Party USA, and Compare my Father to a Notable Hemingway Character

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

 

As a writer there are words I don’t much like to use, and not just the ones you might expect. I loathe, for example, the word “prestidigitation,” largely because it hides the magic it portends, and because “magic” is, by itself, both simpler and more beautiful. “Euphony” is another I don’t much like (because it’s not) and “logorrhea” sets my teeth on edge. “Eschew” pops to mind, ironically, as well.

And “futility.” Because it sounds as sad as it is.

Today is Father’s Day, coincidentally trailing by two days my father’s birthday. He would have been 79, a calculation quickly performed when I automatically thought to call him and, while reaching for the phone, found those thoughts redirected instead toward that oft-avoided word. Futility.

Over the years (and the many miles that separate one coast from another) we talked far less often than either of us wanted to. I have a tendency to live too easily without the touch of family, and he had a stubborn streak that insisted on outreach as a son’s responsibility. There were times when more than a year went by with only greeting cards exchanged.  It’s more than a year this time, too, and will continue to be.

The memories that come most to mind are, as expected I suppose, the early ones. In particular I remember sailing with my father, how he’d rent a small single-mast for a few hours and we’d head out onto the Pacific. Though never far from shore we seemed a world away, cresting what I realize now were tiny waves, tacking first right and then left, taming a taunting wind that there, on the water, held a personality never possessed on land.

Throughout his life my father almost-struggled his way from day to day, never quite the business success he wanted to be, or the salesman he imagined himself, or the father and husband that limned his desires. He was loved, and loved back—always and excessively—and he often seemed happy. But still he seemed pitted against a series of unseen forces—economic, emotional, perhaps even karmic—that forced futility, forced a sense of “nearly,” of “not quite.” Like Hemingway’s Old Man, who finally captures his life’s dream only to have it disappear one bite at a time, my father, too, watched the inexorability of metaphorical sharks take small but steady pieces from his life, right up to the last, the skeleton remains. A series of careers, some more successful than others. Three wives. Six children, one lost much, much too early. Constant struggles later in life to repair a roof, to help with college tuition, sometimes even to pay the mortgage. Still, my father had a wistful optimism, one that manifested itself in wanting to live bigger, stronger, louder than he knew he really could. Or should.

Yet from futility can come the small essence of success.  Children and grandchildren. Friends.

My father’s futility grew from the personal and so, despite the long odds, he always knew that the proper amount of self-sacrifice and hard work could win out. It didn’t, often, and certainly not at the end, but sometimes it did. Then there’d be steak dinners and premium beer. A new flat screen. A new car perhaps, with an upgraded hand-me-down to the son or daughter needing it most. Not so these days for many, for me. Not so the futility I feel. The futility I feel is larger, wider, more subsuming. It comes tinged with melancholy and is fueled by an anomie so self-supporting that one wonders if it will ever lift. We live, you see, in different times than my father, in times colored and flavored by hatred that travels at light speed. It is a futility not of the lost opportunity, but of the never found. We find ourselves now surrounded not only by friends, but by those who desire us hurt. Sometimes they even wear the same names, the same faces.

Recently a few dozen friends and colleagues, people who had worked together and whom I had worked with for the last couple of years, fell victim. Members, regular and board, of the Coffee Party USA are currently at war over the future of the organization, a non-profit ostensibly dedicated to fact-based, civil dialog on “transpartisan” issues: money in politics, the need for cooperation rather than conflict, the willingness to not just sit with those across the aisle, but to ignore the aisle all together.

In a desolate display of groupthinked mismanagement, the board embarked on an unconventional fund-raising plan, one poorly vetted and containing multiple conflicts of interest. When discovered by the members-at-large, they grew justifiably outraged. Given the principles of the Coffee Party (and, in theory, the brand of person attracted to the movement) the next steps should have been predictable: the differing opinions would seek reconciliation in a way that protected the organization, made the necessary changes to prevent such things from happening again, and moved positively forward.

It didn’t happen. Instead, the modus operandi of the age set in; futility, writ large, rang its Pavlovian bell and dozens responded. People with a history of calm, civil, and rational interactions turned rabid. The good-intentioned were vilified. Entire groups were demonized, declared “less than.” Lawyers engaged. Harassment, first threatened, arrived. Documents were leaked, then counter-leaked. Innuendo become the raison d’etre of those involved. Had it not all become so vile, so mean, the irony might have proved funny. But it wasn’t. Real people are being damaged. And others—also real people—gleefully inflict that damage. I’ve watched the hatred set in, hatred so hardened that many former associates will never be friends again, will likely never even speak to each other again. Attempts to end it have been nothing but a clichéd exercise in futility, as if futility is something actively exercised rather than something now merely inevitable.

And so I turn, further from the hatred, from the futility, and back to my own small world. Perhaps I’m the lesser for it. I don’t know, and right now I don’t care.

Today I wait for my own son’s visit. He’ll arrive late tonight, unable to depart until finished with work. While not a coast away, he lives far enough from me that any visit requires planning and an overnight stay. We see each other more often than I saw my own father, but still not often enough. I go there and he comes here once or twice annually now. He calls with more regularity than I ever phoned my dad, and we chat about work, music, or physics (a hobby of his). Sometimes he’ll tell me about something he saw on The History Channel, particularly if it has to do with one of the many modern-day enigmas that fascinate him, like JFK’s assassination or how the Fed controls the money supply. It’s fortunate that he calls, since I have somehow absorbed my own father’s practice of waiting rather than initiating, a habit I fight against when I remember to. A day goes by, then a week, then sometimes another before I realize that I don’t want him looking back, wondering rather than knowing about my life’s little futilities. These are the ones, it turns out, that matter to me, the ones I have energy for, the ones of importance. These small-f futilities, I now realize, are simply life.

The sadness I still feel, though, comes from wondering why everyone doesn’t just focus on the small, on ourselves and those around us, those things that are, in the end, the most important. We need only to realize that the small can become the large when repeated often enough, and by enough people. Why must we respond when given our lines on a larger stage? Whose ends do we serve? Whose words do we speak, words that—given choice, we would ourselves loathe for the hurt they give? If we would all just think about those small relationships, and the value of their simple reality, then perhaps the words we would hear would not be those we abhor, but instead those that matter. Friend. Ally. Companion.

Person.

 

Read since last post:

·         The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1953)

·         The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron (1968)

Currently Reading:

·         The Town, Conrad Richter (1951)

Still Hanging Around:

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 19 read, 68 to go

Chapter 2: In Which I Muse over the Greatness of Literature, Pay Harold Bloom a Compliment, and Wonder if I’m Lonely

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

 

Debates over what makes “great” literature are as predictable as ants drawn to a sugar cube, attracting pundits, reviewers, critics, and a ton of I’ve-read-a-lot-of-books people to the sweet yet empty calories of armchair literary criticism. To see what I mean, (and for a bit of fun) just head on over to Yahoo! Answers and find the thread on “What makes great literature?” where a young avatar is looking for help in writing a “5 page paper on the topic.” The thread includes some interesting observations (I like, in particular, the notion that the consensus of the professorial elite has much to do with what is and isn’t considered great), but quickly devolves into pithy responses like this one: “I like to read certain books because they make me angry or sad or feel cheated with shitty writing…. That being said, I read mostly cookbooks and watch South Park almost daily.”

Interestingly, the professorial elite fare only slightly better (though with dramatically improved grammar). James Averill of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says that “I do not pretend to have an answer to this question” of what makes literature great, but then goes on to write that “great literature appeals to the emotions.” (So I guess he does have an answer!) That response isn’t all that different from the one given by our cookbook reader, even if it does win on style points.

David Foster Wallace, late and great, put it more simply: “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”  I like that. Simpler and to the point.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the mannered spectrum, Harold Bloom, the well-respected if rather stuffy literary critic, will tell you that “[w]hat matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering,” a roundabout way, as I read it, of saying that pain is perhaps the key component of truly great literature. 

*****

There are many types of pain, some incredibly subtle.

Last weekend my wife capitalized on a spur-of-the-moment invitation and traveled down to New Jersey for a mini-family reunion of sorts, hosted by her son (my stepson). Due to various factors (including a rapidly aging pet we prefer not to kennel) we couldn’t both attend, so I stayed behind. I’m not unused to such solitude; my wife travels five or six times a year for periods that range from a few days to sometimes two weeks and I, being an introvert (or “hermit,” as she styles it) quite look forward to the time alone. This time, though, felt different.

There wasn’t much I had to “do” (in the “Honey-do” sense). The lawn had just been mowed (she does that) and the kitchen recently cleaned (me). I needed to pick up a couple of cans of dog food, and there was load of laundry basketed and waiting, but other than that I was on my own and, with a pile of praised Pulitzers before me, seemed all set to enjoy a wonderful couple of days. Nestled in family-room leather, I settled in.

Great books do have the flavor, the color of human suffering, Harold. You’re right.

I hit four books this week; all of them were wonderful, and all of them held an overpowering sense of loneliness. They spread across nearly three-quarters of a century, varied in style, plot, and theme, yet each weighed on me so deeply that, at times, I wasn’t sure I even wanted to move. The fates of the characters in Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey left me feeling like I wanted to reach through the pages and provide solace, warmth, and caring, to give each of them a kind word, a sense that fate was not merely fate, but that their lives had purpose, gave meaning to others. The simple tour driver in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Interpreter of Maladies,” seemed pathetically lonely and sad; as I ended the story I felt a heaviness in my legs and arms that I hadn’t noticed before. And Scarlet Sister Mary, ultimately broken down by herself and her community, broke me down as well; tears muddied my view of the last few pages.

I wanted to share this feeling, this experience, with my wife, but she was in New Jersey, and for the first time in a long while I was less bewitched by solitude. Instead, I was lonely.

I read somewhere that the true definition of a successful marriage is when two people can be alone together. The occasional smile passes between them, along with a quickly shared story. Beneath it all is a wondrous love built on appreciation and flaws, on hands held and words exchanged, on glances and touches and quiet and noise and children and parents and time. And time. These books had made me feel that I wanted to be alone together, and not alone alone. I wanted the weekend to be over. Literature and absence combined into an isolating womb. I missed her, and was glad when the dogs’ barking signaled her car coming up the driveway, coming home.

*****

Right about now I’m wishing to read one of the funny books on this list. Unfortunately they don’t come with indicative titles. Is Tinkers funny? Or A Summons to Memphis? I can’t be sure. I do know to stay away from The Edge of Sadness or The Old Man and the Sea. Or anything by Faulkner. If I hadn’t already read it, I’d probably go right for A Confederacy of Dunces; that title seems somewhat amusing. And it is funny. It really is. Only Ignatius J. Reilly really is quite lonely, after all. 

Read since last post:

·         The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty (1973)

·         The Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)

·         Scarlet Sister Mary, Julia Peterkin (1929)

·         The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder (1928)

Currently Reading, Despite Wanting to Read Something Funny:

·         The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1953)

Just Realized I Hadn’t Read, but Only Saw the Movie:

·         The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1983)

Currently Causing Hallucinations:

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 17 read, 71 to go