9.
In grad school I had grown suspicious of conventional literary beauty, wary of what I thought of as, for example, the literary triple descriptor: “Todd sat at the black table, the ebony plane, the dark-hued bearer of various glasses and plates, whose white, disk-shaped, saucer-like presences mocking his futility, his impotence, his inability to act.”
Christ, I had come to feel, just say it: “Todd sat at the table.”
Or better yet, cut that, too. Why do we need to know that Todd is sitting at a table? Let me know when Todd actually does something. And it better not be “raising a cup to his lips” or “pausing thoughtfully to let Randy’s insight fully inform him.”
I was feeling a little cranky back then, re prose.
10.
One of the new stories, “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror,” was accepted by Quarterly West. Paula and I went out for a celebratory dinner that cost us twice what the magazine paid. I sent “The Wavemaker Falters,” over the transom, to The New Yorker, which rejected it with a nice (signed!) letter that I, in a surfeit of enthusiasm, showed around proudly at work, even to one of our more straitlaced managers, who said, “Uh, yeah, Georgeman? We’ve been noticing that you’ve been producing your … literary thingies using corporate resources. And that’s going to need to stop.”
That’s what you think, I thought.
The new stories kept getting accepted. Finally The New Yorker took one of them, “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz.” I heard the news at a Microtel in Watertown, New York, where we were doing a study of what was called “an historic paint dump.”
Paula went around to several doctors’ and dentists’ office, collecting old New Yorkers, and strung these into a sort of banner, and under the banner the four of us had cake, to celebrate.
11.
I expect that my younger self — the self who wrote this book — would have hated the idea of an author’s note. No explanations necessary, he would have said; all meanings are contained in the stories themselves. Explanation is reductive, reading visceral. The stories are either doing the work or they’re not. Don’t yap it up. And I agree with all of that. And I agree with all of that. But I’m older now and feeling nostalgic and—
I just wrote and deleted this phrase: I really miss those days.
I will forevermore, I expect, be trying to re-create the purity of that time. Having done nothing, I had nothing to lose. Having made a happy life without having achieved anything at all artistically, I found that any artistic achievement was a bonus. Having finally conceded that I wasn’t a prodigy after all, I had the total artistic freedom that is afforded only to the beginner, the doofus, the aspirant.
12.
After the book finally came out, I got a phone call from an old next-door neighbor in Chicago, whom I’ll call “Mrs. L.”
“I read your book,” she said.
“Ah,” I said.
There was a long silence.
“Did you like it?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “It worried me. I’m worried about you. You seem like a very unhappy person. Like the guy who takes out the garbage, late at night, miserable and grumbling.”
I didn’t quite know what to say to this and waited for some sort of softening praise, of the “But still, wow, you published a book” variety.
But no.
“I’m worried,” she said. “That book is not like you. You were always such a happy little guy.”
Wait a minute, I thought once she’d hung up: I’m happy. I’m one of the happiest people I know. My book is not unhappy. My book is funny. My book tells, uh, dark truths. I’m a hopeful person. Writing this book was a happy, hopeful act.
And that was true. I’d been plenty hopeful while writing it. I’d been hopeful that I might finish it, and that it would be published, and that its publication might make life happier for the four of us; I’d been hopeful that Paula and I would stay happy and together over the years to come, hopeful that that our kids would grow up to be wonderful adults.
It was, we did, they are.
But what bothered me at the time was that I could feel that this happy ending wasn’t necessarily so, not for me, and not for other people.
“Every happy man should have an unhappy man in his closet,” wrote Chekhov, “to remind him, by his constant tapping, that not everyone is happy, and that, sooner or later, life will show him its claws.”
Yes, that’s it, I thought after that phone call. My book is — you know what my book is? My book is: the unhappy man in me saying to the happy man: “There but for the grace of God go you.”
That’s a nice idea, but rereading the book, I’m not sure it’s true. The stories are, I think, more cruel, more misshapen then they’d need to be, if that was the book’s simple intention. The stories are mean, in places. They’re occasionally nasty. They are abrupt and telegraphic and odd. Sometimes the author seems to be rooting for the cruel world to go ahead and kick his characters’ asses.
Ah well.
“The writer can chose what he writes about,” Flannery O’Connor once said, “but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.”
I guess that’s what I should have told Mrs. L.
13.
When a young person first decides he wants to write, a number of mountains spring up around him, labeled with the names of his heroes.
Hemingway Mountain, let’s say.
He heads up it, armed with his love for Hemingway.
At some point, he starts to get tired. Tired of imitating. Tired of the low-ceiling feeling of trying to express his reality in someone else’s voice. Tired of the way that, by trying to sound and think like someone else, he is falsifying: selling his own experience of life short, omitting things he knows are true, adding in things he knows aren’t.
If he’s lucky enough to realize this, he trudges back down off Hemingway Mountain and starts over again.
Ah, look: Toni Morrison Mountain. That’s more like it.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
Then one day — maybe age has something to do with it, or something difficult happens that brings him to a boil — he snaps. No more imitation. That’s it. Something breaks. He starts sounding … like himself. Or at least he doesn’t sound like anyone else, exactly. A new mountain has appeared; he can actually see it, his name on it.
But wow, is it ever small.
It’s not even really a mountain. It’s like … it’s like a little dung heap or something.
Okay, okay, he thinks and goes over and stands on it.
The work he does there is not the work of his masters. It is less. It is more modest; it is messier. It is small and minor.
But at least it’s his.
He sent the trained dog that is his talent off in search of a fat glorious pheasant, and it brought back the lower half of a Barbie doll.
So be it.
Better than being stalled out forever.
He’ll make a collection of lower halves of Barbie dolls and call that a book.
And the thing is: it is a book. That’s what a book is: a failed attempt that, its failure notwithstanding, is sincere and hard-worked and expunged of as much falseness as he could manage, given his limited abilities, and has thus been imbued with a sort of purity.
A book doesn’t have to do everything, I remember saying to myself back then, as a form of consolation; it just has to do something.
So, although this book is short and took seven long years to write, and is truncated and halting, and is, yes, dark and maybe even a little sick in places, I remember the years during which it was being written as some of the richest and most magical of my life, full of hope and love and aspiration and the satisfaction of, finally, making something happen.