Mentored by Writers

Not uncommonly, I think, for a young person who moved around a lot, I chose books and their writers as my chief window on the outside world. Narrative writers to begin with, though these writers were profoundly involved with reality. Later they were poets, essayists, those who told their own story. Using strict criteria, including having read most of their books, being involved with each over a long period of time and continuing interest in their work, I’ve come up with a very odd list of six writers. It surprises even me! Each of them commands my continuing attention, though there is little about their lives I do not already know.

From the time I was seven and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books were coming out with the Garth Williams illustrations, her prose has sounded in my head. The family she described closely mirrored my own, with a father and mother and four girls (soon to be more), as did their life on the plains, though Wilder described a pioneer girlhood 80 years previous to mine. Pa’s quest for a life lived in nature and Ma’s desire for education and civilization have been the twin sides of my own family’s values. The Ingalls family, even now, is as real to me as any I knew.

When I became aware of Ernest Hemingway’s direct, sensuous prose, I read as much of it as I could get my hands on. Even during the long period after his death when he was denigrated and I understood some of the damage he had caused, I never wholly let go of my fascination with Hemingway’s writing, his desire to be great. Lately this has been somewhat vindicated by reading the comic True At First Light, the book his son Patrick was able to carve from the “Africa book” Hemingway was working on. And, in the wonderful Hemingway’s Boat, Paul Henrickson quotes Archibald MacLeish as saying Hemingway was “the most profoundly human and spiritually powerful creature I have ever known.”

I read Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in the summer of 1966 in the very first room I ever had of my own. I was struggling to get past Christianity, and this story of a poet at odds with Russia’s Bolshevik revolution helped. He wrote to his cousin in 1946, “The atmosphere of the work is my Christianity, slightly different in its breadth from Quaker or Tolstoyan belief, deriving from other aspects of the Gospel in addition to the moral.” I spent years reading everything Pasternak had ever written, as well as many biographies. As John Bayley writes, “Pasternak shares with Tolstoy the power of transforming and humanizing the actual and the terrible, not by shutting himself away from it but by remaining unexcited by it.” I have still not penetrated all that Pasternak was able to say about 20^th century life.

Woolf by Gisele Freund, 1939

In the 1970’s, biographies, diaries and letters began to come out by and about Virginia Woolf. I have not read all of them, but I read a great deal, and was especially moved by her great novels To the Lighthouse and The Years. I loved learning how The Pargiters, an attempt to set social history essays against a narrative, became, finally, The Years. Her life, the gritty details of it, is no less interesting than the novels. Records of Woolf’s unusual family, her partnership with her husband Leonard, the creation of the Hogarth Press and the lively life she lived among her Bloomsbury contemporaries are all chronicled and published by this time. In March 1941, having retreated to the house she shared with Leonard in East Sussex as their London house had been bombed, she wrote: “And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.” Of course I agree with her.

James Salter by Joe Tabacca, 1997

I must have picked James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime off a bookstore’s shelves some time in the early 1980’s. Quickly reading the other novels I could find, especially Light Years, he is a mentor for me in insisting on the beauty in real life. In 1990 he said, “My ideal is a book that is perfect on every page, that gives you tremendous aesthetic joy.” Somewhat hampered by his class (in my eyes), I don’t find his work consistently wonderful but I understand him and re-read him often. When I saw him speak (at least twice), I was impressed by his reserve and his dignity, though I believe, to a California audience, it looked like pretension. He died in June this year. I look forward to the biographies that will follow.

Gary Snyder is the most important living writer I know. I read all of his early collections of essays, took a workshop with him and enjoyed his attempts in poetry to put down “the flat, concrete surface of things, without bringing anything of imagination or intellect to bear on it.” Like Salter, he has never been at the center of the American stage, perhaps because he has never seen people as the epitome of creation. But wherever his words or his presence appear, the authority of his life and work is in no doubt. Peter Coyote quotes Snyder in The Rainman’s Third Cure: “Today the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.”

I have had many other mentors along the way. It is hard to know where to draw the lines, but the influence of these writers continues.

Reality Hunger

In a press release which I put out about the publication of The Pastor’s Kids (to which I got no response; apparently newspapers are inundated by this kind of thing), I contrasted people’s desire to read fantasy fiction with the opening to wonder that good realistic fiction can bring. I have always preferred realism and have not taken the time to read many of the great fantasy classics.

Perhaps there are truths suggested by fantasy, or magical realism in its many forms, and certainly every writer of fiction embellishes his perception, to make his work even more ‘true.’ But the work I am trying to do is realistic, describing a world which loosely holds my characters together, while showing how their perceptions of it interlace and enrich each other’s evolution into the adults they seek to become.

Jean Renoir, the great humanist filmmaker and son of Pierre Renoir, in the Christmas issue of Cahiers du cinema in 1957, wrote: “I love reality, and I’m happy to love it because it brings me infinite joy. But it happens that many people hate it, and most human beings, whether or not they make films, whether they’re workers, store owners, or dramatists, create a kind of veil between reality and themselves. … If we live simply and make our living in any profession – say as an employee in a business – we can still try to break through the kinds of veils that surround us and to see things as they are, since they’re so beautiful, so enchanting. People say, ‘If only film brought us more enchantment and put us in a pleasant dream!’ But instead, it’s reality that’s the pleasant dream.”

I will admit that representations of reality in the current culture are degraded beyond any recognition. In a highly acclaimed recent television series, the hero is a high school chemistry teacher who produces and sells crystal meth to make money before he dies of cancer. Really? In politics, the right and the left struggle to tell a story about our country which includes a majority of the people, while insisting that the other side is “totally out of touch with reality.” Who wins in this scenario? Don tells the story of the Kendrick Lamar video he shot at Christmas in Compton in which an angelic chorus of six to ten-year-olds behind him sang along with the lyrics: “Pussy and Patron will make you feel alright, Pussy and Patron, that’s some great advice.”

Lately, I’ve been looking backward to nonfiction and biography, in which reality is the aim, though recreated from historical papers and documents. I just finished Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961, the wonderful work of Paul Hendrickson. It’s a biography in which Hendrickson participates, reporting and imagining how it was for Hemingway in his real life, especially as it was in Key West, Cuba and on the Gulf Stream. Hendrickson doesn’t stint on the cruelty of the man, but sees him in his complexity with his own large heart. Hendrickson cuts through some of the veils which have obscured Hemingway, who sat down almost every day and tried to put down one 'true' sentence, followed by another.

Jesse Starnes at the Roosevelt Apartments

Don and I drove to Spokane, Washington, last week. We rolled through gorgeous spring landscapes, full of mists and rain, while listening to an audio book: The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin. In almost 2,000 miles, we didn’t finish the book! We loved the story of how Teddy Roosevelt developed a progressive agenda, using the unique collection of journalists at McClure’s Magazine to connect to the American people. It is also the story of Roosevelt’s friendship with his successor, William Howard Taft, and how it ran aground. So many details were wrapped into these chapters, including the stories of wives, daughters and sons, giving us a picture of a time quite unlike ours. We arrived to find Jesse, Don’s son, living in his first-ever apartment! Now that’s an awesome reality!

First Draft

This week I finished a first draft of “The Pastor’s Kids”. It feels rather pedestrian at the moment, quite far from what I hope it will be. But I will wait until September to read it and see what it looks like as a whole. I do feel I have gotten into it most of what I hoped. The editing process will involve paring away the inessential, making it more “visible” to others and sharpening the characters and events.

This means that my musings here will be less about the times and places of the novel, perhaps, and more about narrative prose and writing. I picked up my old friend Hemingway this week, a book which came out recently, his “Africa book” which was cut in half, edited and published by his son Patrick as True at First Light. I loved it! I’m not sure he was always so funny, but reading this book I often found myself laughing!

Hemingway chose a two month period, November and December 1953, a time when his wife Mary was hunting a particular black-maned lion in Kenya. The ceremony of the safari had changed a great deal from his experience of twenty years before in 1933. Much of his amusement comes from looking at these changes in both Africa and himself. Hemingway relished his relationships to the Wakamba, who worked on this safari, and felt as though he were becoming one of them. Though some of them kept up the forms and ceremonies established earlier, when the term “Bwana” was used in 1953, he realized it was sarcastic, a form of abuse! Another source of comedy was his banter with the Brit in charge of Game Control (otherwise known as G.C., or Gin Crazed), who came out from Nairobi to help.

The relationship of fiction to non-fiction in Hemingway’s memoirs was always complex. I’ve heard he regarded A Moveable Feast, which many people take as gospel truth about his years in Paris, as fiction! Neither A Moveable Feast nor True at First Light had been published when he died. But, as he says, “there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” In both of these books, Hemingway’s narrative precision is inspiring, as is his reproduction of dialogue with all of the flavor and spice of life.

The Life magazines I pored over in the late 1950’s were full of stories of Hemingway’s life and his writing. I doubt if I read the full text of his essay “The Dangerous Summer” about bull fighting, but his powerful persona as a living writer certainly influenced me.